The problem with that question on the board was not that it wasn’t excellent; it was that it was the teacher’s question, and not our own.
We were not asking it; she was.
The lesson plan had said it was the day for the answer to be rolled out, and it didn’t matter that we weren’t already asking the associated question ourselves; the teacher would ask it for us―as usual.
And from that, it was hoped―hypothetically, perhaps―that we would seize upon it voraciously, loosing the powers of our young minds upon the task of understanding its intricacies and import alike. But we and the teacher both had long since settled into quite a different routine, for we all knew that we did not have to wonder her question for ourselves, but only to remain silent for a minute or two as one or two of our own were prodded with the question and its cousins, until such time as the teacher had judged the whole charade sufficient preparation for the pièce de résistance―the answer that we all knew, from our years’ of conditioning, was as sure to follow as the school was to be open on a Monday morning.
And there it came―the answer. And now we had them both (question and answer) and would attempt to commit them to memory, if not to understanding. But for now, it would do simply to commit them to our notes, for we knew the test wouldn’t be for a week or two, and we had time to prepare.
And that’s how school seemed to go. Teacher asks the question, and gives the answer, and when a sufficient number of question/answer pairs have accumulated, gives a test on the lot―and then starts the process over. And if we can regurgitate the answer on demand, we are considered educated on the subject―even if we ourselves didn’t consider the subject worthy of our interest or our understanding―even if we had not lifted a finger to turn the idea over in our own minds even once, or even to wonder for ourselves whether it were true!
And this suited us OK. It was what it was, and most of us learned to cope with it well enough to get through. It was a necessary evil, we had accepted, so we made the best of our school experience, while attempting to run some sort of meaningful life on the side. Well, on second thought, I must admit that some of us learned that we could run our meaningful lives as the priority, while satisfying the requirements of school on the side!
But let’s get back to that question on the board, and why it was not ours but hers. Let’s talk about why we were incurious about it. Let’s talk about why it did not pique our interest, and why we could not entertain ourselves with it, even in some aloof and academic manner, as with some novelty or puzzle. Let’s talk about why we were dying to know “Who shotJ.R.?“, and why we would have loved to know the real story behind why Mr. Peterson stormed out of the biology lab yesterday, but why we were not in the least interested in that question on the board, except for the utilitarian necessity of its inclusion on the upcoming test.
It was because the whole system had worn us out. The machine had sucked the life out of us, Dementor that it is. They had dumped us in the hopper when we were Kindergartners―back when we still wondered about the world, and why butterflies do like they do, and why the sky is blue, and what the clouds are, and why magnets work, and how dreams can seem so real, and how other people can still see us when we have our eyes closed―they had dumped us in that hopper, and switched the machine on. And they would put us in those little chairs, and tell us not to look out the windows at the trees, and tell us not to talk to our friends beside us, and tell us not to ask about the butterflies, because now it was time to let the teacher ask us her own questions, and to give us her answers―if they were hers at all.
And the questions had been predetermined. And the answers had been predetermined. And it was all approved by the State. And the tests were approved. And if we passed, the State could feel good about itself. And as for us,we just wanted recess to get here, so we could decompress from the process.
They wouldn’t take the time for our questions, because we were big boys and girls now, and it was time for school. So, for all those hours, five days a week, we learned to sit still and be quiet best we could, and to save our own questions until later. And we acquiesced. And it became our habit more and more to be mentally passive―at least while we were sitting in the seats. And had it stopped there, that might have been one thing, but it didn’t stop there for most of us, for we learned that this passivity appeared to be a viable way of life in its own right. And a great many of us would transition from making up our own games in the yard to going along with whatever the TV wanted to show us, and wanted us to think about. And most would even learn to be fairly passive in agreeing with the conclusions the TV seemed to want us to accept. It was not all that much unlike having a second shift of school in the day, and it had become a comfort and a pastime to us. And the mentally-passive life was fairly agreeable to us, for the most part, as long as there was some diversion from it from time to time.
So here we were in this 13-year cycle, knowing full well it was a 13-year cycle. 2,340 days, minus whatever inclement-weather school closures with which the gods might bless us. And most of us went gentle into that good night, as it were, sleepwalking our way through school, to the lull of the test cycles washing in and out like the surf. And it’s a Tuesday, I think, as Mrs. Swanson writes her question on the board, and having already copied it into my notebook, I wonder what will happen on Guiding Light this afternoon, and it’s too bad we don’t have cable like Danny does, because I can’t watch Gilligan’s Island on the antenna. And I wonder if I can walk with Rita and Beth out to the practice field during band class. Oh, good, Mrs. Swanson didn’t ask me anything today. Sorry, Larry. Wait, here comes the answer; let me write this down. OK, so where was I? Oh, yeah, I can’t wait to go fishing with Uncle Bill this Saturday. I’m going to organize my tackle box tonight while we watch TV.
Mrs. Swanson’s question and its answer were mere trivia to me, mostly. The machine had long-since taught me to switch off that internal curiosity more and more―even though everyone would tell you I was still one of the more curious and engaged students. But I was not wondering nearly like I had done in my earlier years, before school started.
How did e.e. cummings put it? Oh yeah: “…down they forgot as up they grew…” And Einstein―that wonder of a mind, who could run in his mind thought experiments I can’t even keep up with on paper―was known at Princeton, Mrs. Harsanyi would tell me, for being an hour late to a meeting because he had stopped on his way across campus to look at a butterfly move its wings. Yet here I was with Uncle Bill, Saturday having finally come, and a live speckled trout in my hand―recently unhooked and on its way to the cooler―and me letting the curiosity of the moment slip away after no more than a second or two of considering its form and design and its beauty and the wonder of its very existence, and how it is that humans eat animals, and just what is the difference between the fish’s soul and my own―and being happy enough for such things to be trite to me. And I don’t think I’ve recovered all my curiosity, even still, at 58 years old―even as I myself am frustrated with the relative incuriosity of the world around me.
Ironic, isn’t it?
We were taught that our curiosity no longer mattered, because now that we were in school, it was time to become educated.
And look what this did to us!
As I’m still trying to shake off the drowsiness all these years later, it seems I must have since asked a million questions of my own, trying to inspire wondering discussions with those around me. But nobody’s even taking notes, so far as I’m aware―much less jumping in on the discussion. And perhaps it figures, for unlike in Mrs. Swanson’s class, there’s no official test to follow, and there’s no reinforcement coming from the authority of State or parent, to prompt people to participate.
Ours is an incurious culture, indeed, quite content to keep other people’s questions at bay, as opposed to wondering them for ourselves. What was once considered (at least by one) a standard skill and habit of an educated mind is no longer part of our educational target:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Attributed to Aristotle. (From Wikiquote.ORG: Attributed to Aristotle in Lowell L. Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth, Deseret Book Company, 1959, p. 52, and in American Opinion, Volume 24, Robert Welch, Inc., 1981, p. 23. Possibly a discombobulation of the Nicomachean Ethics Book I, 1094b.24 quote above.)
Our target now is simply to make note of the teacher’s question, and her answer, so as to memorize it for the test. We have learned to do this without entertaining Mrs. Swanson’s question in our own minds―whether we like it or not, or count it important or not. We’ve learned to do this without even caring to vet the thing for ourselves. We’ve learned to whittle the thing’s importance down to the utilitarian necessity of passing enough tests to achieve a satisfactory grade point average, so as to satisfy the State, along with whomever else may matter.
This is the system to which we generally hand over our kids even to this day―even after so many decades of undeniable decline and failure. And even though we mostly all graduate out of it by the time we’re 18 or so, we’re still steeped in it as we live in a whole culture that’s been educated in this way. We graduates (as well as the drop-outs) are each littered among the carnage on a spectrum ranging from still-somewhat-screwed-up-but-trying to permanently-stupefied-and-not-interested-in-the-least.
As I have learned more and more about Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education, and seen the stark differences between that and how schooling is done in our society (including how it was done to me), I have much regret over what might have been. Surely, I would be considerable different as a person had I not been stultified. One of the reasons I would be quite different is that I was one of those kids who was so precocious that the schools had to shut me down, for it would have been extra-unmanageable to wrangle a classroom with an unbridled little Jack in it, asking all his own questions (including the “what if?” question for which I was notorious), and expecting answers―no, let me clarify―expecting satisfying answers. That just wouldn’t have worked in the school machine, with 20-something kids to a class, and expecting them to occupy themselves only with the teacher’s questions, and not with their own. So, they had to shut me down.
And I suppose they managed that.
My second-grade teacher put it tactfully on the report card, “Jack sure keeps me on my toes.” And my fourth-grade teacher suggested to my Dad that I ought to be put in a private school (because she couldn’t keep up with me). My Dad told her, quite unapologetically, I might add, that she needed to learn how to do her job. But while I get Dad’s point, I get hers, too, for her job was an impossible one already, and especially if little Jack and those like him could not be squelched.
And only God will know the true measure of how much squelching they managed to do to me, and how much of it I managed to escape―as well as how much of that squelching I’ve been able to heal from since.
The State built a machine, aimed mostly at providing a one-size-fits-all education. This means that the outliers―both the underachievers and the overachievers―have to be managed somehow. And the more of them who end up dropping out of the system, the bigger the public relations nightmare is for them. So they aim at keeping the students entertained however they may, while focusing on writing tests that the kids can pass, even as those kids neglect to give their own consideration and care to the questions Mrs. Swanson writes on the board.
Let’s just get through this. Let’s get it checked off the list. And if it goes well, we’ll watch a movie in class on Friday.
Meanwhile, though, some other kids, somewhere else in this world, are not being assailed by the memorization machine, with its worksheets and its other mnemonic strategies, and its tests, but are allowed to ask their own questions, and to find satisfying answers, such that they would freely ask the next round of their own questions―finding those answers, too, and learning for themselves what a Mrs. Swanson could never manage to convey by her method in a hundred years.
This convention of education is one of the great errors of our times. And as with so many other errors, it falls to us to work ourselves out of it―that is, if we haven’t had all the questions worn out of us already, and if we still have the will to entertain the problem I’m pointing out here. But as it is, we are hardly the right people, few as we are, to reform the machine―this self-aware juggernaut of public policy. We will need to raise and educate our own kids well, and to keep reforming our own minds best we can in the process, until there should be enough of them to tackle the system one day―if ever that day would come. And perhaps it is possible, and especially if the central control of all our schools should crumble, leaving each locality to govern its own education.
But more likely than that is this scenario: that we each do our best to keep recovering from our own miseducation, and to help those around us to avoid the pitfalls of how we learned to learn in the machine.
To make matters worse, it seems that the proponents of the machine have now managed a massive invasion even of the homeschooling world, so as to bring those same stultifying methods conveniently to homeschooling families, just as they have done to as many private schools and colleges and corporations and churches as will accept it.
It may well be that the world is hellbent on this sort of teaching-to-the-test education, and that only a relative few are interested in keeping our minds fully awake. Or alternately, it may prove that surprising numbers are quite willing to wake up if someone shows them how. And either way, I’m fairly convinced that no matter how well or how poorly each of us have done with this, if we should get to see a glimpse of Heaven when we are done here, we will behold myriad wonders that stir the soul with more questions still, and that make us long for an eternity in which to search it all out. And it is my privilege even now to know a few souls who seem already the sort to thrive in such a world as that, having not lost, or fully lost, the wonder of childhood, and fanning it into flame even in these dark times.
The problem with that question on the board was not that the system was generally incapable of getting us to wonder that question for ourselves. It was generally incapable, mind, but that wasn’t the problem. Indeed, we could have brought our own curiosity to bear upon the questions. So the problem had to do with why we did not. And as I have said, our own curiosity had been worn out of us already by the tedium of the process, and we had been trained to shut it down. And we know that at its heart, school wasn’t even about wondering it for ourselves, anyway, but merely about passing the test, so as to satisfy somebody or other that it had all been worth it. But it had not been worth it―not nearly like it could have been otherwise. But I say this as one who is not incurious about his own incuriosity. I say this as one who is still thinking about his own thinking, and still wondering about his own wondering, and still able to think about things like principles and systems and outcomes, and how things ought to be.
And I can’t vouch for how well I do this thinking―and wouldn’t I like to know?! What is very plain, however, is that it makes quite the misfit in a culture that would generally rather not. And like Mrs. Swanson, the culture itself, now having graduated, still tries to squelch the things that curious people ask. I see it happen every day, I suppose. And this is what you get, it seems, from a machine like that.
How I wish we could turn it off.
