Category: Schools

Saving a remnant: most children left behind?

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If the larger system will not make something similar to the classic trivium its priority--grammar, logic and rhetoric as exemplified in great texts--should parents and students seek other paths of learning? Courtesy Grace College

If the larger system will not make something similar to the classic trivium its priority–the grammar, logic and rhetoric as exemplified in great texts–should parents and students seek other paths of learning? Courtesy Grace College

The idea of a “saving remnant” recurs throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Such remnants are presented as small groups that understand, apply and carry forward the truths and practices of a higher order of community. John in the New Testament quotes Isaiah in the Old Testament: “Though the people of Israel are as numerous as the sand of the seashore, only a remnant will be saved.” The idea suggests that, at times, the most important knowledge will be lost to the world, and most children will be left behind….In our pop culture, the current “big” story that might treat this theme is the Hollywood retelling of the Noah story. It will be interesting to see what they make of it.

The Athens that Socrates and Plato knew was similar to the society Noah left behind. Athens in their lifetimes was on the brink of a destruction that did in fact occur. It was a time and place of political turmoil, corrupt politicians, and a virulent desire for individual gain, an unbridled lust for wealth and power. In that dark time, Plato also turned to the idea of a saving remnant, trying to imagine how correct principles might survive in such an ignorant and nihilistic society:

[Socrates:] . . . the worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant: perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained by exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting influences remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to her. . . .Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts –he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with bright hopes. –-The Republic

In our own time, Alasdair MacIntyre concluded After Virtue, one of the most influential works of moral philosophy in recent decades, with a suggestion that, at this point, the good life might be preserved by small communities that withdraw from the larger society in order to keep alive among themselves the ideals of civility and morality:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.

Needless to say, such visions are anathema to today’s heirs of the revolutionary ideologies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who envision an egalitarian society formed by subjecting everyone to universal principles, as discerned and articulated by a governing elite. One hallmark of their thinking is the idea that everyone needs to ordered into one large and centrally-administered system. Their recurrent attempts to ban and suppress dissent grows out of their sense that their plans won’t work if those outside the inner party are allowed to leave the plantation.

The obvious products of this vision include such laws as “No Child Left Behind,” which moves toward a nationalized and centralized education system and leads to the Common Core State Standards, which begin to put teeth in the vision by instituting a national testing regime, and by “The Affordable Health Care” law which in a similar way brings much of the health care industry under the control of a governing elite. The original founding vision of America, which George Washington and others communicated by citing Micah, is quite distant: “. . .they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”

The standards movement as it has played out in the state where I work, Montana, has communicated a fundamental incoherence: while the law has promoted the belief that literacy and numeracy come first–since they are the subjects that are actually tested and reported–this has been unaccompanied by any clarity about how schools might accomplish significant improvements in these subjects.

In the case of English, this has remained one class among six or seven in each student’s schedule–which amounts to less than an hour a day for most students. Within that hour, teachers are expected to teach the full range of writing, from basic conventions such as pronoun antecedent errors and parallel structure, to proficient writing in several modes–persuasive, narrative, and expository–demonstrating their ability to write essays comparing various works, exhibiting insight into how point of view affect structure and meaning, and so on. That would be quite a lot, but the standards don’t stop there. Students are also expected to gain considerable background in English and American literature from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries in all the major genres, including poetry, fiction, and the varieties of nonfiction.

Where are the serious conversations about how such ideals might be realized? They do not seem to be occurring within the one, big system.

Literature never failed us; we abandoned it

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Destroyed Books

The Detroit Public Schools Book Depository has been abandoned since a fire struck the building. It’s a metaphor.

Mark Bauerlein, English prof at Emory University, makes precisely the point that for me lies at the center of the big, slow-motion cultural conversation about the death of English as an academic discipline. Teachers who could have seen themselves as stewards of a great tradition, who could have served that tradition and young people by learning and passing on the best that has been said and done, instead began to fancy themselves as transformative intellectuals, possessors of precisely the verbal skills needed for success in a hyperpoliticized age. They talk about empowerment and skills and the future. They do not, often, talk in any intimate and profound way about particular works of literature, or what such works reveal about who and where we may be.

After summarizing a few of the many defenses made for the humanities of late, Bauerlein focuses on the important detail:

These statements and others on how the humanities foster critical thinking, cultivate Information Economy skills, help enact social change, resist utilitarianism in human affairs, etc., may be challenged in one aspect or another, but they are all reasonable and they pop up in education discussions all the time. Their commonplace status, however, shouldn’t obscure the fact that they share an extraordinary characteristic. It is a trait so simple and obvious, and so paradoxical, that one easily overlooks it, especially as these voices so earnestly endorse the humanities. The paradox is this: They affirm, extol, and sanctify the humanities, but they hardly ever mention any specific humanities content. The American Academy report terms the humanities “the keeper of the republic,” but the names Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Bernini, Leonardo, Gibbon, Austen, Beethoven, Monet, Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Martha Graham never surface. In the Boston Globe (“Humanities: The Practical Degree,” June 21), Carlo Rotella claims that the humanities instill a “suite of talents” that include “assimilating and organizing large, complex bodies of information,” but he doesn’t tie that installation to any particular works of art. These pro-humanities documents drop a “Proust” and “Dickens” here and there, but little more. The works of the ages that fill actual humanities syllabi barely exist in these heartfelt defenses. Instead of highlighting assigned authors, artists, writings, and artworks, they signal what happens after the class ends: the moral, civic, and workplace outcomes.

Literature has obviously been in decline in schools for years–but there are signs it’s thriving outside the academy through new media such as the large catalog of downloadable audio lectures available from The Great Courses. There is a large audience–though not a universal one–for intelligent discourse about significant literary works.

This is not just bad for literature–it’s been a disaster for the culture, which is now trying to “humanize” young people with dismal programs such as the Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports programs pushed by the USDE and adopted by many states, according to which the purpose of life is “success” understood mainly in materials terms and the method is compliance with authority. Low-level behavioral psychology (used to keep order in prisons and to train puppies) has become the official psychology, in many schools.

A lot has happened to American education in the past five or six decades, and there is no quick turnaround. What is not needed is a new national program, with workshop gurus and posters and buzzwords. The belief that widespread problems must lead to large-scale “solutions” is part of what ails us. What is needed are many individuals, spending time reading–thinking about current difficulties with the best authors of the past and present–and then discussing those particular works with others who are also responding to a troubled world by seeking deeper insight into history and human nature by regular engagement with the best books. It isn’t necessary that everyone do this, but it’s of vital importance that some do.

The third reality: a brief introduction

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Peace is a complex order that can be experienced even in the midst of trouble.

Peace is a complex order that can be experienced even in the midst of trouble.

The way of the teacher

No one can be forced to see higher realities. We all need to be taught to see them, and having been taught, we have to freely choose them.

The third reality is peace–not as a sort of slumber but as an all-consuming engagement possible only through love. The third reality is living in and through love. Though it is based on law, it cannot be established by law, which it both includes and transcends.

Societies of peace necessarily are created and sustained through the methods of teachers: persuasion, patience, and unfeigned care. The economy for those living in the third reality is an order in which gift plays a powerful part. Trade remains but theft does not. The future’s uncertainty is reduced through covenants–promises exchanged with concern about the well-being of the other in mind. What may be given is as important as what will be received as, for those in love, giving and receiving merge into being.

Societies of law struggle to see that justice is done but justice isn’t enough. We all have something to fear from justice. Who has not done that he ought not to have done? We by trespassing and being trespassed. We live here in history, where being wronged is the human condition.

Those who walk the road to peace find at fork after fork forgiveness is one of the choices. If they choose the other way, they find themselves getting more alone as they go. It’s an easy road and many have grown accustomed to it.

Returning becomes the daily work of those who would know peace. Again and again they find it is necessary to turn back and start over. They study mercy, wanting first to receive it as they learn to offer it.

A separate peace

Having recognized that they have made mistakes, they tend to be forgiving. A Separate Peace was popular in high school classrooms for many years, in a past that now seems almost a foreign country. Teenagers are in a stage of life where friendship is first being explored with near adult intelligence. The book clarifies the extent to which our friends–-other people in general–-exist in our consciousness partly as fictions that we’ve created ourselves. We read other people with the same cognitive tools we use to read fiction. We hear scraps of dialogue, note expressions and gestures, overhear gossip–and we make inferences and interpretations.

Sometimes our inferences are wrong. In the course of A Separate Peace, the protagonist, Gene, experiences several versions of his friend, Phineas.

The tragedy occurs when Gene “understands” that Phineas has not been inviting him on adventures out of pure friendship but as part of a strategy to wreck his studies. He isn’t a true friend at all. Gene suddenly sees a pattern in their relationship and makes a meaning of it: He sees all of his friend’s overtures as deceptions intended to cause him harm. “That explained blitzball, that explained the nightly meetings of the Super Suicide Society, that explained his insistence that I share all his diversions. The way I believed that you’re-my-best-friend blabber! The shadow falling across his face if I didn’t want to do something with him!”

Anyone who spends much time with adolescents–or other people–will recognize how close friendship and rivalry often are. The fictive Phineas that exists only in Gene’s mind isn’t his first version of Phineas, and it isn’t the last, but Gene acts upon it as though he knew the truth. When he learns that, however plausible his theory of Finny’s behavior, it was still only a theory, and it was wrong, it is too late. Gene told himself a lie about another person, then believed it, and then acted on it. His accepting a version of reality without sufficient evidence leads to the death of his friend.

In less dramatic ways, we daily harm each other when we accept interpretations about why others are doing what they are doing without good enough reason. Generally, we learn to recognize this common pattern most clearly when we ourselves become the victim of someone else’s false theory about us.

Peace in a world with enemies

Sometimes we lose awareness of the third reality because it’s so easy and somehow gratifying to reading conscious evil intent into the actions of others–especially rivals. When our marvelous intelligence, our power to find patterns and to make meaning of events, is turned toward those who oppose us, it is deliciously easy to discern motive, intent, and ill will. We can see what the rascals are up to.

Everyone speaks in favor of peace as regards how others treat us, but in the midst of conflicts we tend to want peace only if it’s accompanied by victory and triumph. If the cost of peace is failure and humiliation, and it often is, then we easily find ourselves imagining strategies for bringing down those who have wronged us.

Jesus was maybe our most eloquent spokesman for peace: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. . .For if you love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”

This is counterintuitive and unnatural. It is not a sweet little tale for the faint of heart. It is hard counsel. And it is the most clear-eyed and realistic policy ever known. Those who say such an approach is unrealistic see only a thinner and paler reality–a stark place without enough air. The true realist, seeing a reality as deep as the night sky, knows that nothing else will work.

People who have really had enemies understand the difficulty and the seriousness of what is being proposed. Still, when we have had enough of destroying and being destroyed we may see that this is the only, the inescapable route. To act on it, one must have real commitment to something larger than the self, because the self may well find temporal suffering as he lives by such a policy.

All of us move through a world of reciprocal relations, taking our turns at being both a teacher and a learner. When people act badly, the teacher assumes the problem is not evil but ignorance. Since we cannot see into another’s heart, and since from the outside evil and ignorance are indistinguishable, we choose to think that a person acting badly doesn’t understand. A person caught in an evil pattern does not need to be destroyed so much he needs to be rescued. If only he could see, the teacher thinks. And so he teaches.

This isn’t, by the way, an argument against justice or punishment. Sometimes the only way we can teach people is to bring them to justice, to bend their fierce wills by righteous judgement and just punishment. But as every good parent understands, punishment can be delivered in a spirit of love.

Two ways, one road

The peacemaker learns that there really are only two ways: one leads toward greater life–which is greater connection and greater order–and the other leads toward greater disorder–which involves separation and death. What’s more, the two ways are simply different directions on the same road. At any moment, wherever we are, we can turn around.

Though a society ordered by fear can become one ordered by law, and one ordered by law can move toward being ordered by love, this development remains delicate and easily reversed. A nation, or a family, or a person not only can move down the continuum but will tend to do so without steady work to avoid it. This is the work of peace: willing and keeping complex human orders.

Virtually all societies contain some elements of all three realities, just as nearly all persons do. The more ethical person, like the more ethical society, is struggling with the higher concerns.

People who have chosen the way of the teacher understand that authority can have liberating power, and that this grows out of the world’s abundance rather than its scarcity. Descartes had described mankind as a people lost in the woods. Because there are many ways out of the woods, people cannot agree which to pursue. There may be many “correct” ways to play a symphony, but if the musicians each follow individual interpretations, they are deprived of a beautiful music that none can make alone. The authority of the conductor sets them free.

Leadership is necessary and difficult, and people who are not competing for glory tend to be thankful for people who are willing to carry its burdens. Peace is hard work, and a peaceful society is a busy society. We need to tend the garden, caring for all the systems that provide us with basic necessities; we need to bear each other’s burdens, looking around for any who are poorly clothed, poorly fed, or sick who need our help; and we need to work at liberating those who are captive to misfortune, bad habits, inadequate education, or political corruption. Peace slips away, sometimes, simply because it is so demanding, and people begin seeing other things to want that, at first, seem so much easier.

Which stories?

As we find the stories, both in books and in living, that we will pass on, we need to remember that stories that only evoke fear are not as good as those that also teach an understanding of principles, and those that only clarify principles are not as good as those that in addition encourage peace. More specifically, a story that leads me to take delight in caring for my family is better than one that encourages me to look out only for myself, and one that tempts me to care for the welfare of the whole tribe is better than one that suggests my obligations end with my family, and one that shows me how to feel compassion for all of humanity is better than one that leads me to think of outsiders as enemies. One that instills a reverence for all of creation is about as good as stories get.

The best stories allow us to glimpse the largest reality, and they give us courage to work at joining. The right stories help us understand ways of living that respect the meaning and integrity of each part.

We can teach children about peace even in troubled times, because peace is never an absence of trouble. It is, primarily, an order within, a harmony with an order that is always out there. When we understand it, we see that though the things we fear look ferocious, in another sense they are deceptions without ultimate power to harm us.

We teach children peace in the same ways we teach other forms of conversation. To teach children to converse, we have to surround them with conversation and with invitations to join, letting them slowly become part of the order that existed before them. To teach them about peace we surround them to the extent we can with a peace we’ve made, showing them how it works and what the rules are and why they should love it.

For me, the work of peace remains possible without slipping into despair at the magnitude of the work that remains because of a faith, expressed by Desmond Tutu, that “we live in a moral universe, and goodness will prevail.” Such hope that the largest reality is benign and that all of history is working toward a peaceful resolution is intertwined with education because the larger the reality that people can learn to see, the more likely they are to understand peace.

When we begin feeling that the fate of the world depends on us, it becomes difficult to avoid either becoming warlike or falling into despair. But no matter how urgent things appear around us, our first responsibility is to establish peace within ourselves. If we try to solve problems without an inner peace, our energies will most likely be organized into the contention and conflict we had hoped to resolve. We cannot shove others toward peace. We cannot send our youth to peace the way we might send them to the store for milk. Instead, we need to invite them into the peace we have made.

It only seems like a story about hollyhocks

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perry-20130617_DPP-33tQuinn Televan laments the uniformity that inevitably follows standards enforced with standardized tests:

Not only will public schools be made uniform, but private schools, home schools, and religiously-affiliated schools will be pressured to adapt to Common Core. Students at non-public schools won’t be forced to take Common Core assessments but will have to adapt a decent part of their curricula to prepare their students for changes in these tests, which are paramount to students’ entrance into college. Nevertheless, the person credited as the architect of Common Core is David Coleman, current CEO of College Board, the company that administers the SAT test. Coleman officially announced that the SAT would be redesigned to align with Common Core. The designers of the ACT and GED tests followed suit, declaring they would also change to meld with Common Core.

It’s hard to listen day after day to policy debates which have largely replaced talk about teaching and learning. That’s what happens when politicians take over schools–they politicize them. Pity.

To teach, we need to find time to ignore them. We really do need lots of people thinking and doing different things: Love note to a beautiful stranger:

I find myself driving along a ratty looking street in a financially forlorn neighborhood and suddenly, nearly choke with gratitude for the single human soul who silently got down on hands and knees, again and again to plant seeds and pull weeds, to pick up litter and tilt a watering can, effectively saying ‘no’ to all that ‘tit for tat’ soul commerce, making time instead to plant and tend flowers that add such beauty to an otherwise bleak landscape, asking nothing in return.

Beyond good and evil: complying with the Montana Behavioral Initiative

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surveillance camera at school

Monitoring and surveillance is becoming the dominant interest of today’s “evidence-based” school reformers.

Yesterday was spent listening to school reformers against the backdrop of breaking news about the murdered children in Newtown. This was enervating. School reformers do not, by and large, talk about any actual world. They are most comfortable at an abstract level of discourse, where all their dreams seem possible. They had me thinking about how Orwell’s depiction of society governed from the center via propaganda and surveillance was apt.

Montana schools have adopted Montana Behavioral Initiative as the basis of school culture and student discipline. It’s driven by low-level psychology–behaviorism–and it assumes “success” as the main goal driving the choices we make about how to act. We will have lots of little rules (stated “positively” of course) all linked to little rewards and little punishments (now called “consequences”).

The functionaries see their system as the world–they create propaganda, implement programs, collect data, refine their programs. They create a total reality in which the goals of their programs are not questioned, in which data measures the depth and breadth of their program’s penetration into the consciousness of the subjects (us). Interventions are designed to extend the effectiveness of what they are doing. It’s a little circular and self-referential system, which functions as a world. They are somewhat dull-witted when confronted with statements or events that do not fit their ideology.

Schools are “free” to identify their own “core values” around which to organize their “data-driven” systems (monitoring and surveillance). Of course, when such “values” are chosen through the usual consensual models (small groups contribute little tidbits on big sheets of paper which then get “reported out” to the white board at the front of the room to be lopped off to make a list compliant with expectations from on high), one can be sure that the values that survive will be accurate summaries of the conventional wisdom. So since teachers are low- to mid-level bureaucrats, we predictably end up with catalogs of the bureaucratic virtues.

Our new program will be built around the acronym POWER, with P for pride, O for ownership, W for work and R for respect. I can’t at the moment recall what E is for.  Being “positive” and “authentic” are “pluses.” I have not yet heard mention of double pluses, but they can’t be far away.  Such is the nature of our tribe.

If the room had been filled with Spartans, our list might have included ferocity, strength, and loyalty. If we had been in the Catacombs of Rome, faith, hope and charity might have made the list. A gathering of Confucian scholars in ancient China hoping to counter the mad influence of King Zhou would likely have listed benevolence, honesty, loyalty, integrity and propriety.

But we are a tribe of bureaucrats, so our virtues tend to be those which support success in bureaucracies. Aristotle was the great teacher who in Nicomachean Ethics  first helped us understand that every community is formed mainly by which virtues are taught and practiced. Not very long ago, it would have seemed possible to base an education program on Aristotle, with teacher talking about the way such virtues as honesty, courage, generosity and justice link individual happiness and community well-being.

A discussion among educators familiar with Aristotle–or the cultural heritage of western Civ in general–does not any longer seem possible, but it does still seem odd to have education captured by a tribe of little bureaucrats, who imagine they can control everyone with an ever-expanding system of surveillance linked to consistent rewards and punishments, aiming at “success,” as though we need more “successful” people. The focus of the talk was on how to get nearer to 100 percent–all students passing all classes, all students getting a diploma. What was not discussed was what grades or diplomas might mean–or what they should mean.

The very concept of freedom seems outside the thought world of professional educators. In place of freedom as the long-standing goal of liberal education, we have substituted “success” and “compliance.” I take it as the totalizing imagination of little functionaries who imagine their little system is the world, and that when their system is fully implemented, all will be well.

Our central planners have, to a great extent, reduced the economic possibilities in our communities. Not very long ago, a kid who did not love school and the kingdom of abstraction enshrined there could graduate from high school, get a job at one of the local saw mills, and make enough money to provide for a family–a house, two cars and a boat if he so desired.

The saw mills are gone, by design. Our central planners and reformers have for decades been urging us to believe that we only need a “knowledge” economy and that actual production and manufacturing can be left to poor nations. Now, they are “reforming” schools to serve their new economy, where everyone will be fluent enough in literacy and numeracy to collaborate on abstract tasks assigned from above. Schools are being perfected, in the sense of becoming nothing more than adjuncts to a centrally planned economy.

We are far enough into this process to see clearly that this will leave many people unemployable, but that’s not a problem, from the point of view of those who believe we were made for the system. The unemployed will be fully organized into the administrative state, living on the dole and thus submitting to constant surveillance as fully employed bureaucrats monitor their housing, their income, their diets, their health care. In that system, it makes perfect sense for central bureaucrats to monitor the blood glucose levels of citizens–probably more properly described as “subjects” or “patients.” In that system, it might soon seem normal that morning calisthenics mandated from the center and monitored through new technologies makes perfect sense. The potential for tutelary programs to more fully manage the lives of the poor gives a certain sort of heart a flutter.

At our staff meeting, we did not talk about good people and a good society and how the two relate. We have, as our cultural heritage, a vast and profound literature on those topics. But instead of reading some of it, we are referred to the OPI website, which has a lot of information on how to do “it”, but nothing at all on what is worth doing.

Einstein observed quite early in the twentieth century that “perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.”  The ends–the big goals toward which we strive–are left to the central planners and functionaries. We are taught to collaborate and brainstorm about means. The message to teachers yesterday was “You will use behaviorist psychology and more complete monitoring to improve compliance of students with school rules in the classroom, in the halls, in the parking lot, and even in the restrooms. With that goal unquestioned, get in small groups to collaborate and brainstorm suggestions (that the facilitators will revise for compliance with central objectives into documents by which you will be held accountable.)”

Are we really content to teach kids that our main desire is for success, defined as a free cup of coffee for complying with the rules (positively stated, of course)?

I’m probably a little out of step, since my culture continues to teach that pride is not a virtue but a sin, and I think on days when kindergarten children are murdered in school, our discussion would be more truthful and thus more useful if it included those old words: good and evil.

The Search

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Fayler Sculpture

Sculpture by Lila Fayler at the Amphitheater in St. Ignatius, commemorating her lost children and the search to find them.

We weren’t trying to get somewhere, but to look closely every place we went. As we settled into the labor of the hard climb, what we were up against became more and more clear.

Sometimes we could see only a few yards through the heavy timber. If a plane were down, we could walk within thirty yards of it without seeing it. Thirty yards was a tiny distance in the immensity of those mountains. Also, I could imagine vectors through the woods all around me that would allow a plane to reach the ground without being visible from the sky.

To add to the problem, nobody had any idea what direction the plane had been flying. Lila and Bev, preoccupied with their conversation, hadn’t noticed where it left their sight. To the east, the Mission Mountain Wilderness where we were stretched through miles of forest and rugged peaks. Farther south, past the Jocko and Big Knife Drainages, it flowed into the Rattlesnake, where the mountains were gentler but the forests no less thick. The forests of the Ninemile area to the south and west were more heavily logged with many clearcuts, but it was a huge region of rolling hills and patches of timber.

Larry and Bev had flown from Boise into the tiny airport in their private plane to visit Lila Fayler and her four children. When they landed at the airport, Larry agreed to take the three children up for a quick look at the mountain valley from the sky. Bev was his fiance. She got out of the plane to wait on the runway with Lila, his sister. Larry, with his two nieces and his nephew aboard, taxied into the quiet evening, climbed quickly into the air then circled toward the snowcovered peaks east of town.

Lila and Bev chatted on the airport runway, sitting on the hood of the car for a half hour. The plane didn’t return. The engine’s hood cooled. Time dragged on. After an hour they went into town to check on supper, which Lila had put in the oven before leaving for the airport. When they went back to the airport, light was nearly gone over the western hills but the plane hadn’t returned.

They admitted their fears. The drive back to town felt unreal. They called Alan Mikkelsen, a local pilot. He contacted the state aviation agency before rushing to the airport. He prepped his plane then flew into the night sky. Hour after hour all night long he circled over the mountains, looking for any sign.

The next morning, aircraft from the state were in the valley, flying grids over the rugged country, looking for broken trees, oil slicks in lakes. I spent that morning moving lilacs from an abandoned homestead on the southern rim of the valley, planting a two hundred foot long hedge along my drive.

The sun was mild, and I struggled to pay attention only to what I was doing, ignoring the world beyond my gardens as completely as I could. But now that world droned insistently overhead, as plane after plane flew over or cruised along the mountains. Like others, I went about my work, expecting the search planes to find the children soon, waiting for good news.

When nothing had been found by evening, I drove out to the airport, one hangar beside one airstrip, to see if I could help. Though the county search and rescue van was parked beside the runway as a command center, there was nothing to command. “We need a sighting,” the search coordinator said. “We don’t have any idea where to start.” The searchers tried to pick up a signal from the emergency locator transmitter, but since the pilot was just going up for a brief jaunt he may not have turned it on.

I wore shorts and a t-shirt. Lila said the kids had also been dressed lightly. Night came as I waited out at the airport talking to the search and rescue people and people from town who dropped by to see if there was any news. I began to shiver hard from the chilly breeze. Winter had not yet left the nearby peaks. If the kids were alive, and if they were at a higher elevation than the valley, this night, their second in the wild, was going to be long and cold.

When I went home, I sat in my warm living room, and talked a little with my own children, asking them for information about Angela, the ten-year-old, the only one of the three kids I didn’t know. They told me she was a bubbly, happy girl, full of physical affection. She liked to hug people. Sierra was a senior at the school where, until a few months before I’d been principal. She was a beautiful young woman. Everyone noticed her. Jesse was only six, the same age as my youngest boy, and he rode his bike to our house often.

I went outside and stood in the dark, feeling the chill. Somewhere, one plane was still flying, looking for a signal or a fire. If my kids were up those mountains, maybe hurt, maybe waiting, I wouldn’t hang around until I knew where to start looking. It might be rational to depend on the air search, but they’d looked all day and found nothing. It would take outrageous luck to stumble onto the plane on foot in the vastness of the wilderness that surrounded us. But if luck was all we had, then we had to try. When you need a miracle, I believe, you have to step forward and expect one.

I connected with Bill Ferril, a local doctor, and Gary Steele, a professional wilderness guide. They were going to search a quadrant on the map of Mount Harding that a psychic had suggested. I placed no faith in psychics, but since I didn’t have a plan of my own, it didn’t matter to me where I started.

Before dawn the next moring we loaded packs to stay overnight and left. The terrain was rugged and the brush was thick, without trails. We fought through cedar thickets, crawled through deadfall and tore through underbrush. I found an easy logging road and followed it for almost a mile until ten-year-old growth reduced it to a trail, winding through lupine, paintbrush, clematis, wild rose, and gooseberries—all in bloom. The blossoms had attracted thousands of butterflies, and they fluttered among the leaves like delicate confetti. Hundreds of neotropical birds had returned from their migration, and the forest’s winter silence had given way to singing.

I walked slowly, overwhelmed, trying to memorize and to make meaning of finding the aromatic blossoms, the spectacle of butterflies, the chorus of birds. I had not coming looking for this, and I felt ambushed, torn between exhilaration and dismay to have wandered into such beauty on such a grim mission.

Toward dark, we broke out of thick brush onto a rocky outcrop. We made camp, built a small fire and fixed supper. We’d spent the day spread out, trying to see as much ground as possible, so we hadn’t talked much. Though I knew Bill well, I hadn’t met Gary before.

He’d guided groups through the Missions, though most of his business was in Arizona during the winter. “Not many people want hikes this strenuous,” he said, laughing.

He’d built a house up the Jocko Canyon, away from electricity and running water. He’d done all the work with hand tools. During the off season, when he wasn’t hiking and kayaking, he did contract sheetrock work. “I like the world the way it is,” he said.

He had met Edward Abbey, and though he wasn’t an avid reader, he had read all his books. He told personal stories about him, what had gone on among his friends in the desert during the days he was dying. The literary talk was an unexpected treat for me.

He had heard a little about me, and he asked questions about what had gone on at the school. “People told me that after they went to that board meeting they were sick. It made them want to move away,” he said.

Bill laughed. “The guy I rent my office from told me that the real problem was that the principal was trying to make this the best school in America. He said we couldn’t have something like that.” Bill was from out of state, and he enjoyed local eccentricities.

I didn’t want to talk about it, since it was a story and not one that everyone could hear. Throughout the conflict at the school, I had avoided saying much about the superintendent to anyone except the school board trustees. I provided formal documentation for my allegations. If he and I began fighting publicly, the school and community would be completely divided.

It was clear that he intended to fire me, using false allegations as the basis. If the board didn’t fire him, I was finished. It was the board’s decision.

During the weeks the story was unfolding, my job became more and more stressful. Every disagreement and every decision could become ammunition against me. A student swore at a teacher and she kicked him out of class. The kid swore at me and said that I was picking on him because I was a racist. The superintendent pounced on it, taking the student’s side. Such things were happening daily.

In the evenings, I took longer and longer walks, many miles, far into the mountains, into the night. When I was high above the valley in the wintry woods things seemed to fall into place. The town was a shabby little clutter in a huge and beautiful world, and the earth was a tiny planet in a vast cosmos.

I moved through chill wind, the near sounds of owls, coyotes yipping on the ridge above me. I climbed a path through dark to watch the moon rise over Goat Rock. If a person could truly see the big picture, I was sure, he would see that all the news was good. I thought hard about what I really wanted out of the situation. I thought about where I had started and what it had come to. I’d come home from Vietnam an angry young man, unstable and full of questions. I was drawn to classrooms because they are one of the few places that people gather to take life seriously, to ask questions in earnest. I was drawn toward poetry because it helped me live my life. Wallace Steven had taught me that it was the nobility expressed in poems that helped. He said that the poet’s nobility was a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination, pressing back against reality. The sound of it, he said, helps us live our lives.

Unable to make out what lay ahead, I returned to such beginnings.

After a dinner of macaroni, I left Bill and Gary to sit on the rocks beside the small fire, listening to the forest and the incessant drone of aircraft. A National Guard chopper flew directly over us. They were in a different world, in voice contact with the search command post and with state headquarters. I tried to talk to them, but our radio batteries had gone dead. I didn’t think the crew saw me, sitting in a more or less open spot beside a small fire. Their powerful technology kept them too far away. Our primitive hiking and looking was too slow, and the world was too big. The children were lost between two approaches that were not working.

We got up early the next morning, mixed cereal with yogurt for breakfast, tore down camp, and pulled on our packs. We hiked steadily all day. We went places and reached heights we would never have gone just for fun. On that day and the days that followed I became good friends with Gary. We were facing a tragic event, but we kept encountering earth’s many goodnesses.

When we got back to town, tired and footsore, scratched and cut from fighting underbrush, we learned that two dozen possible sightings were being investigated. Aircraft were coming from around the state, and both the Forest Service and the National Guard had loaned helicopters. Eleven fixed wing aircraft and three helicopters flew grids over the area, looking for broken tree tops or other clues. The constant roar of engines overhead droned through the day, gnawing like anxiety.

Psychics who had heard the news reports on television phoned in with suggestions. One flew to town, and friends of the family picked her up and drove her around the foothills as she tried to sense the children’s whereabouts. None of the leads they gave panned out.

The county sheriff said that the search was in the hands of the state aviators until there was a sighting. He said he couldn’t authorize a ground search until there was a place to search. People grumbled about this, and began organizing themselves. The next day, 120 people were in the mountains, hiking without much of a plan, following whims and intuition.

When again the day ended without success, people realized they needed to be more systematic. They gathered huge contour maps, tables and bulletin boards. Others lashed tarps together to form an ad hoc command center. They gathered reports and organized plans. People began marking off areas that had been searched, and others began checking to see what areas were likely. An organization was forming, spontaneously.

A woman who had led a petition drive a few months before, spending hour after hour taking a message of hate door to door through town, now set up a food pantry in the airport hangar. She gave hours to the effort. She cooked casseroles and got contributions. Soon, a field commissary was in full operation. Chile, stew, roast beef, hundreds of sandwiches, cookies, soft drinks were brought in and put on the tables. Searchers going out dropped in and put fruit and sandwiches in their packs. Searchers coming back hung around and ate dinner off paper plates.

The following day, nearly five hundred people were out searching. People called their jobs to say they couldn’t come in, and spent days climbing the rugged mountains.

Leaders arose. People who knew the area began assigning crews to search specific areas, having them check out before they left and report in when they returned. Local horsemen searched areas that horses could reach, and a bicycle club from Missoula arranged rode miles of logging roads. Volunteers directed traffic and established a huge parking lot in the hayfield beside the runway. Delivery trucks stopped on their routes to grocery stores and restaurants and to leave cases of fruit and soda at the hangar commissary. The search gained momentum and organized and reorganized itself quickly as people saw what they could do and did it.

People mentioned repeatedly that in some way this was connected to the mob that the superintendent had brought down upon the school. He had acted quickly. He identified enemies of the current board and offered them a chance to settle old scores. He found former board members whose dreams for the school had failed, and appealed to their resentment at being left out, offered them a way back to power. He found people who were hungry to be taken seriously, and praised them. Those who weren’t motivated by bribes or flattery were simply threatened. There was nothing unusual about his strategy. What was unusual was that he pursued it so wholeheartedly, so shamelessly.

Since people on his side felt their own importance threatened by those who attacked him, and those he attacked felt endangered by his support, the town was quickly polarized. People not involved in what was happening were astonished and perplexed by how suddenly and how passionately various people in town were mobilized to hatred for various other people. The two groups were not seeing the same thing, and they were furious at each other.

An old man who’d lived in town all his life came to me, asking what was happening. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” he said. He mentioned one of the superintendent’s strongest supporters. “That man has never stood up for anybody in his life,” he said. “I’m the only friend he’s ever had. But he kicked me out of his house because I don’t think the superintendent is doing the right things. What’s happening?”

The board chairman went to the superintendent privately and told him he didn’t like it. The superintendent said he was sad for any misunderstandings and promised to fix things. But the chairman had been in office long enough to have enemies, so the superintendent went to them and cultivated their friendship. Soon, he was campaigning underground against his board.

One of the chairman’s old foes, a businessman who had recently been on the school board, bought radio ads and called his own town meeting. Hundreds of people showed up to find out what the hubbub was about. Nobody knew. The businessman accused the chairman of having an agenda. He didn’t say it was a bad agenda, just that he had one. A newcomer to town tried to speak reasonably about the fact that nobody seemed to have any real information. The businessman yelled at him to shut up. The real message was simple: something was going on!

The search was bringing up powerful feelings, like those that at the mass meetings at the school. Everywhere I went, people tried to make connections between what was happening now and what had happened at the school just a few months before. They were heartened that the community could pull itself together to do good things as well as bad things.

“Isn’t this amazing?” a friend commented, gesturing at the crowd buzzing around the airport.
“It’s amazing, yes.” I was still distrustful of the town. But I also knew that if we so often find that what seemed right was, under the respectable clothes, rotten and cankered, it’s tempting to decide that nothing is good. This is the worst deception of all. When we give up on goodness, we are only a small step from hating it when it comes, because when it comes it will restore us to our guilt.

There had been no reports about the kids. It was eerie. They had simply vanished, without a trace.
People couldn’t fight back the realization that it was taking too long. There was hope. It was possible that the kids were out there somewhere still alive, unable to get out. But the odds were getting worse hour by hour.

Each evening when it was too dark to search, folk gathered at Lila’s hotel. The inside was nearly finished. Her art work was everywhere, large paintings of women with children and of buffalo. Her favorite medium was sculpture, and clay figures graced every corner and shelf. Folks brought food, and dozens of people wandered through, talking to each other, telling stories about their day, working out their plans for the next day.

Some folks brought guitars and flutes, and we sang and waited. Overhead the monotonous drone of aircraft went on. People knew that they were experiencing something profound and this was part of the sense of tragedy. One evening I sat on the floor talking to Lila, who was lying on pillows. She was exhausted, physically and emotionally. She hadn’t slept well since the search began, and she was torn continually between hope and grief, since the outcome of the story wasn’t unknown.

She was a beautiful woman, and she held herself through the tragedy with astonishing strength and dignity. People were drawn to her, partly because of her beauty and her gift for intimacy, but partly, I think, because they wanted to touch something real. Whatever was going on, it felt much more real than usual life. Folks crave contact with reality. Always, someone was with her and others were waiting to talk to her. At one point, she reached over and gave me a hug. “Let’s stay together when this is over,” she whispered.

One night I talked with two businessmen outside the hotel. We were all fatigued by the long days of climbing and the short nights of sleep. Most people had been ignoring the daily business of life, neglecting all the routines that ordinarily occupy us. One of the men commented on all the people that were still there, though it was late. “This is incredible,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way to keep this spirit, to keep alive whatever it is that’s happening.”

Over and over folks called what was happening a miracle. People who had lived in the same valley all their lives but hadn’t got to know one another found themselves on search parties together, climbing and struggling through the hard terrain, helping one another, getting to know one another. People who had lived at the foot of the mountains all their lives without hiking into them found themselves spending hour after hour climbing through flowered meadows, reaching vistas from which they could see for miles, finding themselves stunned by the raw beauty they had been too busy to notice. Getting out into nature has a curative effect on most people. People were coming out of their isolating pursuit of wealth, of security, of importance into community, into nature, and in spite of the circumstances they found themselves being made glad.

I received a phone call late at night after I’d got back from hiking all day. A different search party coming out of the mountains at dusk had thought they saw a plane door floating in a lake. Someone knew that I had a canoe and I was asked if I could check the lake in the morning. Before daylight, I had my canoe in the lake, and I spent two hours paddling its perimeter. I wondered why I hadn’t got up before dawn and paddled other lakes. It was lovely and peaceful, watching the sun come up while I was out on the water, the mountains and forests all around. I found debris but none of it was from an airplane.

Over and over, people related what was happening to the vicious passions that had erupted on the fight over the school. Only a few months before, people had put a similar energy into hatred and fighting. They had gathered in cliques on the street outside board meetings, plotting strategies and imagining conspiracies, and then they had retreated into their hatreds and their resentments. The search felt like being let out of prison.

By the time of the board meeting to evaluate the superintendent and to decide whether to hire him for another year, the entire town was in an uproar. So many people showed up that the meeting had to be moved to the gymnasium. Three of the five board members were incensed at him. They could see what he was doing and they were furious.

“He’s attacking the school board!” one of them told me incredulously. They had documented evidence that, among other things, he had ignored board directives and violated board policies. He wasn’t any longer working for them.

The meeting had the atmosphere of a football game or a rowdy church revival meeting. The superintendent’s supporters were out in force and having a good time. Every time the superintendent spoke, no matter how silly or innocuous his comments, the room cheered. Every time one of the board members asked him a hard question, the crowd booed. The crowd quickly hooted down attempts by the chairman to run the meeting, and they wildly cheered the superintendent’s threats against me and the chairman. The lay board faced a gym full of true believers.

The board members easily read the passions of the crowd, and two of them began playing for popularity. Fans of the superintendent stood up and gave testimonials of support. The state senator, who was running for re-election, stood up and gave a speech in favor of democracy. The crowd became more and more hostile, feeling their power.

When I became convinced that I no longer had any formal role in the town’s life, I stood up to leave. I’d been sitting at the bottom of the bleachers in the center of the gym where I could answer questions from the board as needed. As I stood up, a woman came down the bleachers behind me and began beating on me with her fists. I turned to see what was happening, and looked into her face. It was twisted with hatred, and she was yelling something at me that I couldn’t hear over the roar of the crowd. She was too weak to hurt me, but she wanted to. We’d never met.
It was no ending I had imagined for my teaching career.

Most of the people in the gym were strangers. I hadn’t seen them at the school or at school activities. Neither I nor the board members who told me they supported me had tried to lobby people to get to the meeting. Those who had the authority—nobody else could do it—needed to examine the evidence and act on what they honestly found. Only five people would get to vote. I still believe it needs to be that way.

The superintendent spoke in a grand manner, sure now of his support. He was here to save the children. Evil people were trying to stop him. Whenever the chairman tried to address specific actions by the superintendent, the crowd booed him down. He was unable to get his evidence in front of the crowd, who clearly hadn’t come to listen anyway. The question people kept asking was, “What’s your problem with the superintendent?” They left without hearing an answer. They were a righteous mob, out to save the town. It can give pleasure, destroying enemies. The desire to destroy evil is evil’s favored tool.

The board lost its nerve. They voted unanimously to rehire the superintendent. After the meeting one of them told me, “If we’d done anything else, we wouldn’t have gotten out of there alive.”

I thanked each of the five board members for their public service, recognizing that they were in a hard place. I didn’t bother saying that I’d watched, that night in that gym in a little town, almost nowhere, the law vanish, replaced by the will of the people, aimed and focused by a man who, in Auden’s phrase, “knew human folly like the back of his hand.”

It was my turn to make a decision. Every strategy I could think of involved imitating the people whose methods I thought were wrong. I could launch a political campaign against my boss, persuading as many supporters as possible that he was evil. I could join his little war. Or he would fire me.

I thought about the times I’d already lashed out at people who threatened me, passing on a story that I wasn’t sure was true, making accusations that were partly based on suppositions. Driven by fear of defeat or humiliation it becomes easy to spread a little hatred of your enemies. In fact, nobody in town was doing anything that, to some degree, I hadn’t done before. I didn’t want to do it any more.

On the sixth day of the search I left early one morning to search the Mike’s Creek drainage that extended up Sonielem Ridge. Since looking mattered more than covering ground, the hike wasn’t hard though the way was steep. I moved upward through groves and clearings, through pine and fir. Occasionally, I met other hikers and had short conversations. These woods had more people in them than ever in history, but they were still peaceful. The meetings were welcome, not at all intrusions.

I kept going until I reached timberline, thousands of feet above the valley. In the aspen draws below me, I could see search parties fanning out, moving through thickets, stopping for sandwiches beside the alpine creeks. I stayed for a long time, no longer looking, really. When forests reach climax, fire or disease sets the biological clock back. Every five hundred years the giant cedar groves burn, as though the world is designed to remain in a state short of fulfillment, a place of striving toward. But whenever catastrophe strikes, leaving the earth scorched and barren, pioneering plants spring up from the ashes or sand, and slowly at first and then suddenly the barrenness turns green, as though the world is designed to thwart any final failure. Hence the need for hope and also its grounds.

That afternoon, I met Valerie and we loaded our van with kids and drove to a ridge above Twin Lakes, where we assigned each person a swath, moving up the hill in a sweep. Near the end of it, Valerie and I fell in together, walking through the lupines and paint brush. The beautiful woods around us were noisy with the exuberant efforts of our children, who were safe.

After a week, the official air search was called off. In the words of the officials, the resources needed to move on. Aircraft and the crews on loan needed to be returned. Searchers had stopped looking for signal fires and had begun looking for gatherings of bear, ravens, and other scavengers. There was no longer any rational hope that the children were alive, and there was nowhere else to look. The entire area had been flown over repeatedly. It was sensible to give up. The desire to save the children crashed into the raw immensity of the wilderness.

A few nights later a weary band of searchers, heartbroken and out of resources, out of energy, out of time, out of money, gathered hours after sunset to pray and to tell stories: those of us who knew the children told the others stories about our dealings with them. We talked about Sierra’s friendliness and charm, her love of nature, her acceptance of others. We talked about Angela’s enthusiasm, her giggling love of being alive, being with folks. We talked of Jesse’s wide network of friends, and his passion for his bicycle, which let him keep in touch with all the important folk he knew.

The psychics were gone, with their histrionic proclamations. The news people were gone, with their flat-footed questions. Most of the search planes were gone, with their aching roar. But we were still here, and we did not know what to do. So we planned to go on searching and without pride or pretense, together, we prayed.

The next day, the tenth day of the search, Ken Scott spotted the plane from a helicopter. Larry had gone up a broad canyon and far into it found it rising too quickly for the small plane, heavily loaded, to climb out. By the time he tried to turn the canyon walls were too close. His plane crashed into a cliff then fell upside down on a glacier. The craft’s beige underside was nearly invisible on the vast expanse of rugged ice.

All the passengers had died on impact.

We could not help them.

In the world’s terrible way, though, they had helped us, those of us who were looking for help.

That search ended but many of us lived on in this age of emergencies, an age full of commotion. Faith in old orders and old institutions is being eroded by people of words, and after the people of words come people of action to forge the discontent into something new. Our survival requires us to remember that if there are deceptions wrapped in righteous images to gain power, it is because at some level the deceivers know that goodness is the only game in the universe. Bad things are always parodies of good things.

For the space of ten days, folk in the valley moved through a holy place. The work they attempted came to failure, but in the working they glimpsed something else they had lost. In trying to find the lost children—and there are still many out there—a few hundred souls united for a moment in time against their only real enemy, human suffering, and in momentary glimpses and brilliant fragments, they found themselves.

Learning how stories matter

Posted onAuthorumphrey

Both social disintegration and moral relativism lead to the same sorry conclusion: the liberal novel is a novel in which not much is at stake. And if you don’t have much at stake, you can’t have a good story. Santiago Ramos

My interest in the argument on Public Discourse about the decline of literature due to liberalism had more to do with the plight of students than with that of writers–that is to say, my interest has more to do with the narrative environment of young people than with the writer’s prospects for literary success. It no doubt remains true that life is a challenge in which both success and failure are really possible, and therefore it remains the case that our stories matter. But how true is it today that young people believe that novels contain the real stuff of life–the insights that lead to wisdom?

I believe that Solzhenitsyn, to follow up Ramos’ example, does tell a story that matters in, for example, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. If one lives in a regime which tries to suppress life’s chosen meanings, then one way to live well is to refuse to grant moral authority to that regime .  One can live amid meanings and trajectories to which society is indifferent or blind. Society may even set your daily tasks before you, compelling you to assist in the construction of its towers, but it may not dictate any meaning whatsoever.

But I share many assumptions with Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, I see modernism as a moral and intellectual dead end, and the his theme resonates in me–the challenge of living in opposition to a regime which is blind to the most important realities. I came to consciousness in a literary culture, and much of the experience that formed me came in the form of novels.

Bad stories: my tribe is better than your tribe

Posted onAuthorumphrey

salishOne story that is a powerful presence in today’s schools might be called “my tribe is better than your tribe.” Like the story of the market economy, the ethnic pride story is larger than public schools and larger than America. Around the world people cluster around visions of themselves as ethnic warriors: skinheads, I.R.A. soldiers, Serbian militiamen, Palestinian terrorists, Zionist militarists, Hutu or Tutsi warriors and on and on.

These stories are strengthened by the spread of an unconstrained global economy that dislocates and dissolves traditional communities. Frightened people seek shelter in all manner of religious, ethnic and racial identities. People who are making lots of money tend to develop a loyalty to the machinery of wealth, but most people are not making lots of money. Instead, they see that the new economy does not need them, and they know what happens to people who are not needed. They are susceptible to the story of tribal zealotry, which is just as simple as that of market zealotry.

Of course, the tendency to rally together with others like ourselves and to distrust outsiders doesn’t really need to be taught. It comes to us easily, and there are always historical evidences to bolster it. One day I was walking down the hall in the school where I was principal and two scuffling boys didn’t notice me until they bumped into me. I put my hand on one of the boy’s shoulders as I passed and said, “Calm down.” It was a nonevent of the sort that people who work with young people handle without much thought every day.

But this day one of the boys whirled around and glared at me. “You’re just picking on me because you’re a racist,” he said.

I knew the boy’s family, so I knew that his family included Indians, but like many of the families on the Flathead Reservation, including my own, his had intermarried extensively and few people would identify him as Indian based on his physical characteristics. He had sandy hair, green eyes, and fair skin. His family was not poor, and I doubted he had experienced much prejudice because of his race.

Clearly though he had been taught to see white authorities through the lense of racial distrust, if not outright hostility. I think he had also been taught that it’s fun to challenge authority with power words.

I related this story to a school administrator, an African American, from Milwaukee and he shook his head and grinned. “Whooee!” he said, “I’m glad I’m not a white man!”

He was making a joke, of course, the humor of which lay in the role reversal. Role reversals are so common in history that they are one of the basic patterns of the human condition. They are part of how we learn. A good education would help people see the world through the eyes of both kings and beggars, victors and victims, oppressors and the oppressed, and all these experiences exist in the stories of most families, somewhere in their history. It is often the case that we learn the harm we do by the harm we suffer. If we are wise, we can learn this vicariously by reading history and literature, experiencing what our fellows, of all races and nationalities, have experienced. Stories easily cross racial and national boundaries, affirming the essential kinship of all of humanity.

Cultural pluralists believe that the heritage of all peoples can be accessible to all other peoples. One needn’t be Nez Perce to claim Chief Joseph as a cultural ancestor, or Jewish to include Isaiah among one’s spiritual fathers. Cultural pluralists believe that various cultures can work together in some ways to build a larger culture, of which all are a part. Pluralists work toward a future in which many cultures find ways to balance the preservation of what is unique and cherished in each with finding common ground with others on public issues. Cultural pluralists recognize that American culture is a tapestry of many cultures, and they understand that we are free to seek insight, nobility, clarity, wisdom, wit and beauty wherever it may be found, among all religious and ethnic traditions. One might think that America’s wide-ranging success at building a pluralistic society would be a source of tremendous encouragement.

This sort of cultural pluralism is poorly served by ethnic pride that sees history only as a contest between fixed categories of people: Catholic and Protestant, black and white, Muslim and Christian. What are we to make of American history? Many of us want America’s failures to be the important story. They want stories of slavery, of religious persecution and of forceful exclusions of Native Americans to be the main truth about our history.

Of course, such stories are not new. They come close to being business-as-usual in world history. It seems to me that the important story of America is that through all these troubles Americans have built cities where Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and atheists go about their business without pogroms or identification badges or papers, though we need to remain forever vigilant. The hopeful story is that America abolished slavery, and that America extended full citizenship to Native Americans, and enforced at great cost treaty rights negotiated with their ancestors. Though cultural warriors like to focus on the failures of the government to honor treaties, that is far from the entire story. It would have been easy for the powerful to deconstruct the treaties, which were often poorly wrought agreements negotiated under tents in the wilderness between mid-level bureaucrats and small bands of powerless nomads. But the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld many treaty provisions. The only reason for doing so is a sense of honor and justice.

The impulse behind ethnic pride is to define one’s identity by one’s enemies. As Neil Postman points out, “To promote the understanding of diversity is, in fact, the opposite of promoting ethnic pride. Whereas ethnic pride wants one to turn inward, toward the talents and accomplishments of one’s own group, diversity wants one to turn outward, toward the talents and accomplishments of all groups.” Skinheads and white militiamen are strikingly similar in important ways to advocates of Afrocentrism and Native Pride. The impulse to circle the wagons is the same.

One can’t understand moves made by white supremists without understanding moves made by their opponents any more than one can make sense of a chess game if only the white pieces are visible. Extremists of the left and the right inhabit the same story and have become characters in each others’ nightmares. Their enemies are their reality.

Powerlessness and hardship and fear are not the exclusive possessions of any ethnic group. Poorly educated and financially strapped whites who are not powerful people, and there are many of them, are deeply threatened by the political success of groups organized around hostility to whites. In turn, people of color are threatened by skinheads and white militias. As either group advances, it frightens its opposition, leading them to gain recruits and to strengthen their commitments. This is one of the oldest patterns in human affairs, and the stories the different sides tell themselves guarantee the conflict between them will intensify. This plot has no ending except for one group to destroy the other.

We can learn to see a world teeming with varied cultural ways of taking advantage of nature’s offerings and of exploring possibilities for agriculture, government, cuisine, music, dance and worship. But when we focus on a narrow tale of raw power, we are easily intoxicated by self-righteousness and rage. We can believe that weak people are always oppressed by powerful people, which leaves us no choice between being oppressed or being the oppressor. We can study the many forms of oppression and begin to understand all narratives–indeed all discourse–as disguised power stratagems. We can think that everything is political. We can even believe that the collapse of existing power structures will empower the weak.

But this isn’t what happens. The collapse of governments empowers criminals. The plight of the weak gets even worse. Nonetheless, to militants rage is intoxicating, forgiveness is weak and forgetting is an act of disloyalty.

We can become quite emotionally attached to our anger, our most meaningful relationships with others premised on a shared sense of embattlement. We may say we want peace, and even believe it, without quite seeing how we have thought ourselves into a reality in which to lose our enemy or our hatred would be to lose the meaning of our lives along with membership in our community. People who meet for intense sessions to plot strategies against their enemies don’t doubt that their lives have meaning and purpose. To the ideologue, ordinary people are small-minded pawns who don’t see the grand scheme of things. In our desire for a better world, it’s easy to transform our resentment into a moral program, our self-hatred into nobility, our extremism into heroism, our quest for power into a zeal for utopian justice, and our emptiness into a new morality. True believers, Eric Hoffer called such victims of bad stories.

The best that can be hoped for is separatism, often described as “self-determination.”

The desire for separatism, however, is not sated by its victories. It isn’t a principle that leads to any sustainable state of affairs. Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs. McWorld makes the point by focusing on Canada. “If Quebec leaves Canada, why should not the Cree leave Quebec? And why then should not anglophone villages leave Quebec or opt out of a self-determining Cree nation if it is such that they find themselves inhabiting? And if a few francophones reside in the predominantly Cree region of a predominantly French Quebec, what about their status?” The separatist desire leads to Balkanization and strife.

There are several reasons the story of ethnic pride doesn’t motivate students to do well in school.

The main one is that this story teaches that the route to feeling good about oneself is a matter of being part of the “good” group. No authority outside the group, which will likely include not only teachers but most of the voices in a good library, is granted much authority. Militants on the left and on the right are both hostile to school authorities who, they feel, are hostile to their essential identity. Both are indifferent or hostile to what outsiders (such as scientists and historians) have to say. When these attitudes become habit, teaching authority is likely to be felt as dictatorial, as an act of dominance. But without authority there is no teaching.

All this undermines liberal education’s central tenet–that we should seek evidence and follow it–and the ethnic pride folks have little use for liberal education’s caveat to consider questions from many points of view and to ask rigorous questions. When the right answer is already known, or deeply felt, questions may be threats rather than tools. When the right answer is the one that makes us feel most proud, we can believe anything, and we parody the pursuit of knowledge. At the extremes of Afrocentrism, the claim is made that good and evil have biological roots, and that the more skin pigmentation a person has, the more goodness she has. Perhaps this illustrates a common historical pattern: oppressed people imitating their oppressors.

The ethnic pride story retreats from the historical difficulty we now face, abandoning the work of forming common ideals and principles from which we might yet build a world-wide civilization–a true family of all humanity.

Bad stories: high school for careerists

Posted onAuthorumphrey

money

As gods go, money is one of the worst.

The main story of schooling is a simple tale. Students are told implicitly and explicitly over and over that the meaning of school is that they need to work hard so they get good grades, they need to get good grades so they can get into good college, they need to get into good colleges so they can get good jobs, and they need good jobs because otherwise they will have failed.

Like most myths that have staying power, this one has some truth. It’s true that work–effort toward a goal–is the foundation of most people’s lives. How large and how good the order we build for ourselves has much to do with the wisdom and persistence of our effort. The young seldom realize how true this is, so guidance into wise and persistent work should be a foundation of the education we offer them. And, yes, it is a truism that we need things–food, clothing and shelter.

But from this truth it’s a small step into an old error: seeing the economy, which is a means of providing the materials of a good life, as an end in itself, and seeing the jobs it offers as the only work in town. Neil Postman notes that this story “is rarely believed by students and has almost no power to inspire them.” Besides, he says, “any education that is mainly about economic utility is far too limited to be useful, and, in any case, so diminishes the world that it mocks one’s humanity.”

He is correct that this story doesn’t motivate most high school students. After all, competition only motivates those who think they might win. How hard would you practice your basketball skills if someone told you next week you would play Kevin Durant one-on-one and the winner would receive a thousand dollars? You’d have to be a far better player than I am to break a sweat over your chances with that.

By the time they get to high school, students who are below average at schoolish skills know who they are. They know someone else will always have the answer more quickly or in a form the teacher likes better. A cliché among experienced teachers is that threatening such kids with bad grades is like beating a dead horse.

A first-year teacher told me a few weeks ago that she was frustrated with some students in her class who simply refuse to read or write anything. One young man was daydreaming through a test, not bothering to write answers on his paper. “This test is going to have a big impact on your grade,” she told him helpfully. “I know,” he said more in defeat than rebellion. “I never pass English.”

The life-is-a-market-economy story also fails to motivate other kids: those whose families are well off and who expect things to come naturally, those whose parents have never organized their lives around jobs and who have only a vague sense of what that means, and those who see that this story simply has poor answers to the questions that actually drive them-questions about who will love them, how they will matter, and where joy might lie.

I should make it clear that I’m not criticizing capitalism as an economic system. Poor people do better under capitalism than under other socialism, communism and various other economic forms we have tried. Capitalism has increased our wealth, leading to better food, better health and more educational opportunities. I have no desire to see people lose the freedom to start enterprises, to buy and sell or to own property, and I see economic equality arrived at by any means other than the freely given gifts of the wealthy as a mischievous chimera.

What I am criticizing is the belief that profitability provides an adequate guide to how we conduct our lives. Most of us have passed up opportunities to make money that would have required us to do things we thought were wrong. Most of us hold some things too dear to sell-our relationships to loved ones, our honest opinion, our vote. Capitalism does not require that everything be for sale, and it does not require us to allow the love of profit to overcome other values.

As we begin to lose such restraints, the life-is-a-market-economy story encourages people to suppress and sometimes extinguish their concern for what happens to others. The unconstrained pursuit of profit unleashes the demons of history. If the political disquiets that plague the world today are traced back in history, we inevitably find someone placing the acquisition of wealth above the welfare of their neighbors.

To pick one example from thousands, a hundred and fifty years ago, British government policy removed from Ireland millions of dollars worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs and poultry-enough to feed twice the Irish population-while nearly a half million Irish citizens were dying of starvation or famine-related disease. A family with a barrel of grain could not eat it because it was marked for the rent. Tenant farmers were evicted and their thatched huts pulled down as they watched, with no means of survival, so that the absentee owners could use the land to grow food for Englishmen at a profit.

In Skibbereen, monstrous graves called “the pits” were dug in the churchyard of Abbeystrowry, and the dead were dropped in without funeral or ceremony. In more remote areas, bodies ravaged by starving dogs and rats were dragged into ditches and covered with rocks and brambles. People were found dead beside the road with pieces of grass and leaves in their mouths. A traveler in Kenmore, County Kerry, one day met a dog traveling with a child’s head in its mouth.

As this went on British lawmakers continued to argue against any policy that would interfere with the rights of those in power to make a profit, and those in power continued to make money. Irish starved in a bountiful country while land went to weeds because they had no money to rent it. The Irish were victims not of the potato blight so much as of their lords’ love of profit. The needs of profit seem so absolute to believers that to ignore them is to ensure the destruction of society.

What on earth might have happened if poor people were allowed to farm land they did not own and had no legal right to?

People have always sensed that the real powers of the earth are, like gravity, invisible. We see their effects but we do not see them. The earth has never known a people who did not believe in the invisible powers, who did tell stories that promised insight into how to manipulate, appease, or extort power from them. Small societies tend to remember they are never far from starvation, so fear leads readily to attempts to control the world through rituals-ensuring good crops by, for example, slicing the jugulars of young girls.

All societies are religious, worshiping what they understand of power. Stockbrokers are as enamored of invisible forces as any other pagan tribe. In binges of “downsizing”–firing thousands of workers-corporate spokesmen utter the words of their faith with the same cold-blooded certainty that must have accompanied the incantations of Aztec priests performing human sacrifices. What was being done was ordained and required by higher powers: “We need to remain competitive; if we are not competitive the gods of the economy will devour us. Therefore, to save ourselves we need to devour each other.”

People whose first motivation is to grasp the world’s power learn to bow to the dictates of global financial markets, the sanctity of unconstrained competition, and the glory of quarterly profits. Profit is sacred, and what it demands cannot be ignored.

Many people, and not just students, understand quite accurately that the market story is an attack upon them rather than a communal narrative they can join. Many people recognize it as the political ideology of activists whose agenda, if successful, will strip them of dignity and more. In many cities and villages and hamlets around the planet, winners who expect to make a killing-the common slang is revealing-by what’s happening around them are easy to find. But the others are more numerous, trying to stay out of the way, maybe hoping like the D student at the back of the room that they won’t be noticed.

Today millions live in poverty and in the wastelands left behind as an “invisible hand” rakes unimaginably vast treasures into the coffers of the more fortunate. Meanwhile, our children are taught a faith that is much the same as that held by the British during the potato famine. They too worshiped an economy built on certainty that the need for profit comes first. The misery of the underclass created no obligation on the part of traders, speculators and agents whose first duty was to increase their wealth.

Most societies have taught their young to resist the profit-as-religion story, teaching that greed and unbalanced self-interest are bad. Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, resorted to using iron rather than gold and silver for money to put an impediment in the path of those seeking gain. Accumulating vast stores of iron made one a laughingstock in other cities, and transporting enough of the money to make much difference was so difficult that even thieves tended not to bother. Lycurgus did this so that people wouldn’t be distracted by their financial prospects from the pursuit of virtue-as he understood virtue, of course.

If we conduct an education that pushes back against the notion that the main reason for learning is to make money, we needn’t worry that people will suddenly become careless about prosperity. Our concern with money is nothing so flimsy as that. Education has always been concerned with the inculcation of virtues precisely because the vices are so powerfully ingrained in our nature. We do not teach chastity out of hope that people will no longer procreate-there’s scant danger of that-and we do not teach thrift out of hope that people will become misers. Rather, we seek to balance strong natural tendencies with prudent forethought.

The economy is real and those who completely turn their backs on it are punished, as every unmarketable artist learns. Money originated in temples, one of the power strategies of the priestly class. People have always granted it sacred powers. “Like spellbound savages in the presence of the holy,” William H. Desmonde tells us, we endure rituals of high finance, watching “in wonder the solemn proceedings, feeling in a vague, somewhat fearful way that our lives and the happiness of our children are at the mercy of mysterious forces beyond our control.” The wealthy know that money is not primarily about buying things. It is primarily about power. With money we can bend the forces of the earth to serve us. Disease, social turbulence and disaster are held at bay for those with financial might, and those without it are vulnerable and naked.

When we seem to say that winning the money competition is the main project in life, a teenager who knows that within school he will never finish ahead can make only dim sense of his prospects. One intelligent response is to withdraw, disengage, find other stories.

At school, our emphasis on grades and test scores-the coin of the educational realm we have created-leads us to neglect other motivators, some of which have extraordinary power. The desire to join is far stronger in most people than is the desire to win, and teachers doing legacy projects with students have shown that cooperative approaches supported by community recognition for high quality work can energize “at risk” students as well as “honor students.” We live most fully in our attachments to others, and service is the way we express those attachments.

If we were wise, our young people would hear from us often that good food, good housing, comfortable clothing, well-made tools, quality productions of the intellect, moments of ease brought about by work well-done can be sought in a spirit that does not invite selfishness.

And we would show them what we mean. To oppose selfishness is not to choose poverty but to choose relationship. The work we share is not simply making money, which often isolates us from one another. It is Civilization–in the singular–not as an existing state so much as an idea that can be progressively realized. America and what we have called the West is one civilization among perhaps ten in the modern world, and its history and ideals will play a significant role in any universal civilization we might yet construct, but for that to happen we need to believe that America is more than an economy.

We don’t need to believe that America has found the complete or the only truth to believe that its lessons have permanent worth. Serious discussion of such lessons should play a central role in education. For example, one of the ironies of the faith in markets is that markets don’t necessarily create the conditions markets need to thrive. Merchants as a group do best in systems of stable laws, but when the law is for sale in competitive markets, as is increasingly the case as the free market ideology overwhelms those who would moderate and balance it against other goods such as community stability, no one can be sure who will prevail on the morrow. The law becomes more volatile, like the markets, and though some businesses cash in, business in general suffers.

Also, though marketers praise competition, they generally do what they can to eliminate competitors. That’s what competition means. When markets rule, someone eventually wins and monopolies form that undermine the markets. The competitive spirit remains, but new competitors need harder tactics than good ideas and hard work to encroach upon the established merchant kings.

It would be sensible, I think, to deliberately teach and demonstrate to our young people that lasting prosperity is related to good character-the most basic meaning of which is that people hold some values too dear to offer them for sale. We might examine the way people have met hard times in the past, seeing how often the community rather than the individual has been the unit of survival, providing for members through shared action and generosity, doing as a group what no one could do alone. We might suggest that living in an altruistic community is the best security available in this life.

We could also talk about the economy as something that we make to serve purposes we have chosen. We could consider how a well-made economy might help us against our oldest and deadliest enemies: poverty, hunger, superstition, greed, ignorance, pride, selfishness and fear. All these have developed virulent strains that are barely slowed or deterred by the paltry education we now throw against them. As we have abandoned morality to the markets, a world has been forming within which fewer and fewer young people can make sense of old arguments against prostitution, drug deals or pornography. It’s all just business. And beyond these old-fashioned prohibitions lie whole realms of the forbidden that we have barely begun to transgress.

We might talk about the complex ecology of interacting forces that make the global economy the way it is, driving corporate leaders to believe that if they don’t do what is most profitable, their competitors will, and money will flow away from them leaving them unable to survive let alone to accomplish good works. This might lead us to wonder how much of the pressure they feel is not caused by the amorality of their competitors, but by millions of individuals buying goods and services and stocks without wanting to know more than where the best deal is to be found. What if people quit exporting from themselves the blame for greed and began wanting to know more about the ethical practices of the companies they traded with? What institutions to provide that information, which already exist, might grow and flourish?

That so many corporations today invest great sums of money to persuade people that they are good citizens and stewards suggests the power that lies with ordinary people. The great powers of the earth care deeply what you and I think. It has never mattered more what ordinary people think. Because of this, education has never before had the potential to make such dramatic changes to human life.

And the corollary is also true: the disasters that will follow mistakes have never been greater.

adapted from The Power of Community-Centered Education

Intelligent Desire

Posted onAuthorumphrey

wheat

We are created by what we desire.

Eros as the ancients understood it initiates our every act. Both our heroic sacrifices as well as our selfish degradations are undertaken out of desire, and the wisdom and quality of such responses become the main determinants of both our joy and our misery.

Eros is not a physical object, known with the five senses; it is more like gravity–a presence that can be detected by the effects it causes. We can detect it in our consciousness as a movement in the soul, some attraction in the mortal to something beyond. Though Socrates’ teaching dealt mainly with reason, at key moments he augmented reason with consultations with his daimon–his channel of communication with the divine.

To take sensory impressions as the most important news about reality is like being trapped in a cave. Aristotle called the faculty we use to detect such invisible realities as gravity or eros the “intellect.” It was the intellect that, Socrates taught, the philosopher must cultivate to escape the cave of sensory impressions, where people relied on shadows to orient themselves not to reality but to their perception of objects. Beyond the cave we can learn to perceive with the intellect the invisible world. It is comprised of increasingly large and important ideas. Socrates told Glaucon, his young follower, that “the idea of the good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort.”

Odysseus may linger in his own cave, but he does not forget transcendent reality. He remembers from his youth the vision that stirs his eros. Neither the spiritual wasteland nor the natural wilderness is his true home. He was made for a place where the promise of his youth might be commpleted, where he might live in marriage to his beloved, enjoying good food and drink amid friends and kin, and where none could make him afraid. It was the vision of his youth that evoked his soul’s full assent, and now, lost and far from home, his spiritual longing will not be satisfied with lesser things. Near the end of his Allegory of the Cave, Plato quotes Homer on the ignoble life of those who live amid a false reality: “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than to think as they do and live after their manner.” His desire defines him.

It impels him toward action. He’s eager at every moment to back it up with effort and courage, and it moves the cosmos, eliciting support from the slow and mysterious workings of justice. Odysseus chose the hero’s way, drawn forward by inextinguishable desire for home. He was, as Robert Frost put it, undergoing a “trial by existence.”

Frost held on to something vital in the intellectual heritage of the New England Puritans. For them, making sense of daily life was inseparable from regular reflection on the stories in the Old Testament. They saw the Bible as not merely or even mainly a collection of rules. Rather, it was a web of stories which reveals the transcendent patterns through which we can know things as they really are.

When Frost held that “a poem is metaphor or it is nothing,” he put understanding metaphor at the heart of literature. He also put literature at the heart of education. We could not understand what thinking was, he asserted, without understanding metaphor–all the ways we see one thing in terms of another. Such thinking was fundamental to the Puritans. They read the Bible typologically, seeing in the Old Testament a collection of types, or patterns, that prefigured the New Testament. Moses led the Hebrews out of bondage, through the Red Sea, and toward the Promised Land, which was a type for Christ leading sinners out of the bondage of sin, through the waters of baptism, toward the Kingdom of Heaven. This typological mode of thought was extended so that Christians could read all the Biblical stories as types for understanding their own lives and what was expected of them. The Puritans understood their own experience by finding in it a familiar pattern: they understood themselves as being led out of slavery in England, on a perilous journey across the Atlantic Ocean and into the wilderness, on their way to a Promised Land. Mary Rowlandson found the meaning of her afflictions with the Wampanoags in the stories of Daniel in the lions’ den and in the Psalms of the Babylonian Captivity. They recognized the divine order amid the multiplicity of variations they experienced in the lived Creation.

As Puritanism waned their long and highly sophisticated habit of seeing in events patterns of meaning that were portable, and that could be used to understand other events, lost some of its relationship to Creation as Divinely Authored and thus ordered with meanings, but powerfully metaphorical thought persisted in the symbolism of New England literature of such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville–the sense that images and events signified greater and more universal meanings.

They weren’t the only thinkers who understood that events in the physical universe can be understood by human consciousness when they are given form in stories or theories. When Robert Frost encountered Einstein’s theory, he was struck by how similar Einstein’s thought was to his own. Frost incorporated Einstein’s thinking into his conception  ways the natural order is related to the mind of man. Harvard physicist Harvey Brooks said that the poet understood Einstein better than many of his colleagues in physics–specifically because they lacked the poet’s grasp of natural dualism led him to understand that  metaphorical thinking was the way to make nature intelligible. Frost referred to Einstein as a philosopher among scientists who trusted intuited perceptions which transcended the rational-empirical assumptions passed on by Galileo and Newton. Einstein was able to leap from sight to insight, using intuition in the way that an artist uses imagination. He was a convinced theist whose “cosmic religious feeling” was his “strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

After spending much time with Madame Curie, Einstein explained her inability to rise above the mechanistic determinism that followed seeing reality as pure matter by noting “Madame Curie never heard the birds sing.” For Einstein, the pursuit of a simplified view of the world as simply matter which could be understood by science was a catastrophic illusion.

Both Einstein and Frost were dualists who believed that human knowledge of nature was indirect, conveyed through metaphors and symbols, rather than direct, conveyed through empirical experience brought into focus by logic. For Einstein,  metaphors in science reveal “the unknown in terms of the known.” Frost saw that Einstein did for matter the same thing poetry did for spirit. Frost used Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory to deepen his thought about metaphor.  He noted the metaphor involved in describing a thing as being an event. Frost quoted him, saying, “in the neighborhood of matter space is something like curved.” This delighted him. “ Isn’t that a good one!”

Einstein’s theory rejects the monism of matter alone that has become widespread among contemporary scientists. By arguing that moving bodies are perceived “relative to the standpoint of observers,” he made the observer essential to the perception of all reality.

Einstein held that there was no such thing as an objective physical universe as recorded through sensory experience; there was only a conceptual mental world perceived through the “free play” of the mind through conceptual ideas working upon the raw materials provided by the senses. (Robert Frost, The Poet as Philosopher, 166)

In other words, an age’s scientific theories provide the metaphors by which that age perceives itself in relation to the universe. This is analogous to some postmodern writers who eschew metaphor. If the universe lacks a transcendent realm and we do not live in Creation but merely in a material universe governed by chance, then typology is not a true way to grasp reality, for reality does not really have any meaning beyond those we construct for ourselves for our own purposes. When postmodernists see the use of symbols and metaphors as a way of being false to reality–imbuing it with meanings and qualities that it does not possess–they are asserting, in essence, that reality has no meaning. The loss of faith or interest in symbols and metaphors is one consequence of a loss of faith generally.

Walker Percy saw an intimate linkage between Christianity and the main metaphor of most novels–that of a human character acting in time. He suggested that it was Christianity, mainly, with its view of reality as a meaningful story within which each person could find a meaningful life that accounted for the reality of narrative and the idea of the novel. “There is a special kinship between the novel as an art form and Christianity as an ethos…. It is no accident, I think, that the novel is a creature of the Christian West and is virtually nonexistent in the Buddhist, Taoist and Brahmin East, to say nothing of Marxist countries.” Further, he says “Though most current novelists may not be believing Christians or Jews, they are still living in a Judeo-Christian ethos. If, in fact, they are living on the fat of that faith, so to speak, one can’t help but wonder what happens when the fat is consumed. Perhaps there are already signs. Witness the current loss of narrative of character and events in the post-modern novel.”

Does the novel itself survive in the disenchanted world without metanarratives that postmodernists are urging on society? Joseph Epstein has observed that “literature itself has become unimportant: what is being created in contemporary novels, poems, and plays no longer speaks to the heart or mind.” He points out that “greatness of literature cannot be determined, solely by literary standards.” We also bring our “ethical, theological, and moral standards” to bear on such judgments. “Criticism can only be effective where there is agreement on these other standards.” Unfortunately, as Eliot said decades ago, “‘there is no common agreement.'” Certainly, one can see the declining importance of literature in schools, along with a declining ability to say what literature is good for–except reading for reading’s sake. This loss of a trandscendant reality so far as education is concerned may be epitomized by the spread of John Dewey’s ideas.

Dewey was a dedicated monist. He hated talk about transcendence–metaphysics and religion. Science and sensory experience and a social process, he believed, would supercede the authority of the past, including religion but also to a great extent books. As Dewey’s pragmatism metastasized through schools–spreading the supposition that the cave from which Plato and others tried to liberate us, the cave of nontranscendant sensory experience and information, was all that we knew and all that we would ever know.

In Deweyan schools, we do not pass on the great insights of the past so much as we collaborate to resolve “felt difficulties”, with the collaboration very near an end in itself. It’s “social” and “democratic.” It “empowers” people by giving them a “voice.” “Constructed knowledge” is all the knowledge there is. A collaborating group is the purpose of the ideology. There is no truth that we can access ourselves, and there is no order to perceive in the transcendent.

We had little need for the noble intellect. What we needed were endless iterations of experiment and innovation. Ideas of good and evil–evil mainly–interfered with constant experimentation aimed at social redemption which could be ours within the cave. There is only now and our groups and our impulses. We can innovate and choose, and democracy empowered by science would replace noble old ideals concocted by philosophers and prophets.

Though being “student centered” was a useful slogan to shift the emphasis away from teaching the knowledge acquired by traditional academic disciplines, there’s precious little interest in individual students in Dewey. They are but abstractions in the social processes that were his real interest. Dewey sought a social process rather than individual virtue, imagining schools as a means of reconstructing society. The old ideals interfered with people accepting the ideology of social redemption. “Intelligence” and “growth”–never defined or explained clearly–should replace reason and tradition. “The point is that the purpose grow and take shape through the process of social intelligence.” Selves moved by impulse toward an ever receding horizon, unbothered by teachers, who had been replaced by guides and facilitators.

So like the denizens of Plato’s Cave we are governed by debating societies wherein members give each other degrees and awards to make it all seem real. We are slaves to laws promulgated by little emperors to make a name for themselves. What has happened in our progressive liberation from transcendental ideals has been a proliferation of moralistic substitutes. For cave dwellers, the coin of the realm is data.

What advice might Dewey give to Odysseus? The question brings to mind a comic picture. They would have little use for each other. Heros didn’t count for much in Dewey’s universe. For him, democracy was an end in itself, and he had nothing to say about the personal quest that, I think, should lie at the center of the educational journey of every student.

Great literature was long understood as the most important secular resource for awakening young people to who they are, where they are, how things work, and what is necessary for them to be and do. The old questions–Odysseus’s questions and Socrates’–are their questions: What is worth believing? What is worth approving? What is worth choosing?

What we mean by truth, beauty, and justice comprise the traditional answers to those questions, as well as we have for far been able thus far to form them. Such questions lay at the center of education for centuries, until the rise of modernity not long ago. Such questions will survive modernity, which will fail, as did Epicureanism and Hedonism and Stoicism because like them it can construct no satisfying solutions to the problem of despair.

What will also survive is the story that dominates the human past–that of the heroic quest. It’s true in ways we can’t exactly say, but we sense at its core that this is the way reality is structured. To be human is to be on a heroic quest. This is why Odysseus cannot linger on any enchanted isle. He needs to turn his life into a story, which means he needs desire and action even at the cost of death.

Joseph Campbell found versions of this story in human cultures throughout time. It isn’t necessary to understand this pattern, this type, in quite the way Campbell explicated it, as entangled in the Freudian and Jungian concepts that were familiar to him. The pattern doesn’t depend on Freud–it has emerged and been attractive to people throughout human history because of its essential human truth. We needn’t think the caves in which we find ourselves from time to time, even the enchanted ones, are our true home. As long as we are longing our journey is unfulfilled. We may need heroic endurance and courage–often in the form of remembering what we are after and learning better what that means–and we may find ourselves quite hapless without occasional cosmic intervention on our behalf.

What Homer saw was that it was possible to step forward boldly to string one’s own bow, relying on some cosmic justice that might impel the gods to take our side. The pragmatic revolution was premised on giving up that culture–turning from history and philosophy, turning from literature and books–in homage to the quite groundless faith that experience and science would get us, if not to the promised land, then at least to a reasonable adjustment to our plight.

That’s not what Odysseus wants, and it’s not what the best of our students want. His driving desire was to be free to live a fully human life–which meant getting home from the disorders of war and wilderness to a clearing in the light. It was to return to his marriage.

He knew the value of home because he could only have it only by choosing it, and the choice involved the loss of everlasting life with a forever young goddess. To make that choice he needed to desire marriage and home more than pleasure or ease. To speak as those who created this civilization often spoke, he needed to elevate his thoughts from the base to the sublime. The greatness of Homer is glimpsed in those moments when human characters experience, with assistance from the gods, an opening of the soul, a perception that the order in the world has its source in a transcendent order, the order of being.

These decisive realizations in Homer–that we are surrounded by an order that favors some sorts of actions and disfavors others–led to generations of discussion and questioning that formed a culture that, in time, formed the philosophers. Justice was an emotional response echoing the cosmos before it was a philosophical ideal. Existence has an order that extends beyond the senses–that transcends the cave and reaches to the divine.

To desire the higher things, we need to hear something of that. To claim his place and to fulfill the vision of his youth, Odysseus needed to liberate home from those who offended justice. Suitors had moved in, trying to claim his place–trying to steal his world. They abused the claims of hospitality, devouring what was not rightfully theirs. Odysseus purged his home of those who had chosen their doggie little lives–trying to win by deception and threat and flattery the world that Odysseus and Penelope had made.

Odysseus was sustained by memory and vision. Each day he left the cave of Calypso’s delights and stood at shore and gazing beyond the sea toward home. What was he thinking, lost on a somewhat enchanted isle with his back turned on delights that might titillate but could never satisfy him to the depths of his being in ways that he knew were right? Surrounded by a wilderness of wonders and terrors, he knows that the way forward, the direction of hope, is a return, a homecoming. The hero’s journey ends with a return home.

Students have an innate sense of justice, which is an innate sense of universal justice, of cosmic order. “That’s not fair!” is a thought expressed in every language in every culture. What they need, in much the way they need food for their bodies, are the old stories of the births and kings and the coming into the world of justice. What they need are the stories of the virtues we need to move toward our true home–courage, diligence, endurance, patience.

What they need are the compelling visions of who they are, where they, what is worth believing, what is worth admiring, and what is worth choosing. They need an education in desire. Even John Dewey understood that much: “The highest outcome of a sound education is intelligent desire.” It is desire that drives choice, and there a real sense in which every student at every moment exists on the verge of the transcendent moment–the moment of decision when one is “all in”–like a hero. Or not–like a captive.

Moments, though, are not moments until we see them.