A White, White Rose

I was back in college within a week of returning from Iraq. I had begun my undergraduate odyssey in 1998 and now, in 2005, I was ready to be done. I was ready to finish a degree, get a big-boy job, get married, and have kids. I was 25 years old, and if all went as planned I figured I’d be able to spend my weekdays working and raising kids and my weekends drinking beer with the vets at the VFW by my 30s or 40s. 

I’m that age now, but I’ve still never been inside a VFW, or even marched in a parade. It wasn’t a conscious decision to avoid connecting with other veterans - I just didn’t do it, no real reason why. Or maybe Iraq was chasing me like an asteroid through space, and I didn’t want to pause long enough for it to catch up. I didn’t want to entertain the notion of PTSD or fear or alcohol addiction. I didn’t want to hear about the suicides. I didn’t want to swap war stories that seem so unreal in Albany, NY, that our truths sound like lies. I didn’t want to face the possibility that the killing and destruction in Iraq had nothing to do with protecting freedom – that I had played a small but exuberant part in manufacturing war for profit.

I was all alone. I did get the degree, big-boy job, wife, and kids, but in the early years of all of that, I felt desperately alone. Nothing seemed particularly important. Even the news – thirty killed in a car bomb in Baghdad – was on a ticker under the main story of Brittany Spears' breakup or some other nonsense. Jesus, I thought, Have any of these people seen thirty destroyed bodies, littering the marketplace, then stacked like firewood before being loaded onto a truck to be brought to the morgue in Tikrit?

I still feel like an extraterrestrial if I try to talk about what “keeping America safe from terror” looks like in real life. Either I’m laughing at things that freak out the civilians or I’m crying over things that were significantly less horrific than storming beaches in Normandy. I’d rather not feel like a baby or worry the neighbors, but sometimes I drink too much just so I can summon the monster, drag him out from under the bed, and give him a kiss. Then I wake up with a headache and pretend it didn’t happen, and the little bastard goes back under the bed where he belongs.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Back in 2010 I was nowhere near this aware of what was going on inside of my heart and soul. My journey took a turn three or four years into public school teaching when the woman who taught the advanced English Language Learners retired. She recommended I take her job because I married an Indian woman and so that somehow made me the logical choice to teach foreigners. I formed a connection with several of the students and one Iraqi girl in particular.

When I see her, I see the boy, bullet scars and burns; I see the son flopping dead in his arms and kids in uniforms walking to school, and I remember how we used their desks for firewood. I see the Spiral Tower and the Golden Mosque. Samarra. Sulfur. I love you. I’m sorry. Now burn. She tells me how her uncle is lost in the Tigris. It will be her mother next if they don't leave soon. I have waking dreams: we blow up her house because that’s where the men who extorted her father kept weapons. She waits for me after school with red inked English and math quizzes to cry over verb tense and mismarked decimals.

She tells me about a song they used to sing about a white, white rose and writes it on my chalkboard in Arabic. When the students go home, I sit in the classroom, pretending to grade papers. I look at the song and start to cry. It’s in Arabic, and I don’t know the words. I don’t know how I got on this road and want off, but I keep going because I need a job but also because I was born with a permanent fuck you attitude. There’s no way I could ever walk away from this much pain. It’s a swamp with beautiful white roses everywhere. You can just see them through the fog and ghosts.

I was with one other soldier at a traffic control point when two Iraqi kids came over to talk to us. They wanted to go buy kebabs for us and charge us triple for them. They also wanted our bullets, so they could scrape the bullet off and light the gun powder. We teased them for a few minutes, haggling over kebabs and lighting matches. The older one tried to get us to give him a grenade for a couple of kebabs. The soldier who was with me pretended to throw the grenade. He didn’t even have it in his hand - it was in good fun - but the younger one stumble-ran into the weeds and started crying. He was bawling. He wouldn’t let anyone near him. I took off my helmet and gave up my gun and brought the kid a Gatorade. He whirled around and hugged me, and we hugged in the weeds for a long time. When I hug my four-year-old I sometimes feel that little Iraqi boy’s ribs. Then he showed me the scars on his leg. He had been burned from his ankle to his thigh. He was covered in scars. He made a machine gun noise, pointed to his leg, and said “Amerikee!” That was eleven years ago. If the kid is still alive, he’d be 18 or so. He’d be in my class.

Like a bad movie, fireworks on the Fourth of July made my heart race, at least the first few years after I came back. Then, with time, it faded, and I moved on. Until Fourth of July, 2014, ten years after Iraq. I was with my family on Montauk beach watching the fireworks, and my youngest, two years old, was terrified. He tried to run away high up on a sand dune. I ran after him, caught him, picked him up, and tried to console him. The kid just went limp. My son didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and just fell asleep, almost instantly. I’m kicking in doors and raiding homes. There’s a man. He has some kind of certificate signed by Saddam Hussein, and he doesn’t look scared. His son, less than five, in the upstairs room. There is shooting and yelling, and the kid just sleeps. I pick him up and brought him to his mother, and although he was unhurt he wouldn’t wake up. My son just goes limp in my arms.

We took over a hospital and, after a day of fighting, a man brought his son in. The son, maybe seven or eight years old, was obviously dead. He was flopping around in his dad’s arms. The father was laughing uncontrollably – maniacally. I’ll never forget it. 

"It happens," says an Iraqi student. "A man was killed a week before his wedding. His mother was laughing, too. She said it will be alright; she said her son is still alive. His fiancé runs home and changes into her wedding dress. His body is in the house, and they both danced around it, laughing, saying he was alive, that he wasn’t dead. Nobody could stop them. The mother didn’t have any other family. She was dead within the month. The fiancé was sent away to the place where they send all the crazy people."

When I see my students, I see the crowds of little kids who begged for pencils and candy; I see the kids who walked to school until they canceled school so we could fight. I break their desks to burn for warmth in December, and our sniper takes a position in an elementary classroom. I see the boy whose leg was burned, and the little limp sleeper who had guns pointed at him, and the laughing dad. I see them in my own kids. It haunts me.

These kids from Iraq, as well as refugees from other places in the Middle East, Africa, Burma, and Nepal, didn’t choose to have war or persecution happen to them. They didn’t choose the actions of their countries or of ours. They all have their own stories, but somehow, they made it here. They have an obligation to make the most out of their lives, and they know it. It’s a second chance many don’t get. What are they going to do with this new life they were given?

I was given a second chance, too. When I first got back from Iraq, I was angry. I wanted to fight “9/11 Truthers,” anyone critical of President Bush (who had blessed us all with the opportunity to go kill bad guys and prove ourselves), anyone critical of the war or invasion, anyone who suggested that terror isn’t real or that American soldiers aren’t the good guys or that they sometimes do bad things. My family has a dozen combat veterans; I saw the rubble from the twin towers; I put my life on the line; I was shot at, blown up, and crashed-up. Have you ever put your life, and the life of everyone around you, both friend and foe, on the line for a belief? Not your career. Not your GPA. Your actual, literal, life. I have. I dare you to challenge that belief.

That’s how I felt, and so I know how people feel when I say things like “teachers aren’t the most important factor in the learning process” and “school resembles prison” and “compulsion is violence.” I get it, just as I didn’t want to look Iraq in the eye and say maybe killing people and breaking their stuff isn’t the best way to spread love, peace, freedom, and democracy, no teacher wants to look their students in the eye and say maybe bribing and threatening you and your parents isn’t the best way to offer education that’s effective, respectful, and caring. Teachers do care, and they do want to help students – there is no doubt in my mind that that is almost always true. However, one definition of culture is “the way we do things around here,” and our culture says to separate your children from yourself…and your dangerous traditions…and your medieval religions…and your attitudes towards sex...and your attitudes towards money…and your other perverted ideals…and have strangers raise them from ages five to 18. Then structure everything to incentivize these young adults to indebt themselves financially to institutions of higher learning. This indentured servitude will last for the majority of their adult life, during which time they will have fleeting moments of wondering who they are and where they fit into society, but most of the time they’ll distract themselves with touchscreens.

One of the most common questions students ask me, when they find out I was in Iraq is are you any different? Are you crazy now? Well, I was a little crazy before I signed up. However, I am different now, though it took a while to sort out exactly how. I learned something they can’t teach in school, something institutions around the globe rather you not learn. I came to terms with my mortality. Like in the poem "The Twa Corbies,"when I die, nobody is going to know where I went, my dog and hawk and lady will move on with their lives, and naught but the wind will blow over my bones for evermore.

Figuratively, of course. I assume somebody will mourn me. With luck, I die somewhere near people, so they’ll know where my corpse is. They’ll do something with that corpse, and so they’ll know where that is, too. (The week before we went to Iraq, the Chaplain said to us, I want to die like my grandfather; peacefully in his sleep. I don’t want to die screaming and on fire, like the passengers in my grandfather’s car. Ha!). Yet the memories of us are finite. In three or four generations there will be no one alive who ever met you. Given enough time, you’ll leave no trace of your existence, in print or memory. It’s not just our bodies that return to the ether.

Most people I know are either scared of dying and avoid thinking and talking about it or they don’t care and have no reason to think about it or talk about it. Those who don’t care shrug it off as something mechanical, something biological and unavoidable and wave it off as a nuisance that doesn’t matter now. What matters now is personally consuming whatever can be accumulated.

Denying your mortality out of fear or indifference is denying your humanity. When you deny your humanity, you deny the humanity of others and the sanctity of all life on the planet. Machines don’t care if they hurt feelings, destroy the environment, skip out on responsibilities, or play on their smart phone all day. When I see students who are physically unable to put their phones away, I can’t help but to picture a tree that’s wrapped itself around a telephone pole. At some point, their hands will grow skin around those damned things, and they’ll have to plug themselves in at night.

It’s not enough to act fearless towards death. You have to acknowledge the deadline. Iraq made me do that. I saw all kinds of people get all sorts of dead. I’m not saying it doesn’t bother me to think about or that I’m personally in a rush to die. What I am saying is that if you don’t accept death as inevitable, then it’s much easier to allow yourself to be controlled by the irrelevant. When you come to terms with being finite, you prioritize. If your doctor told you that you have six weeks to live, then I bet you’d spend less time liking and sharing memes and more time telling grandma you love her. As your unofficial medical counsel, I need to tell you that you have only some number of weeks left. The moment you were born you jumped out of the airplane, and the only thing you don’t know was how high the plane was.

There are humans, and there are machines. Institutions would prefer machines over humans because machines are programmable, predictable, and replaceable. It’s why we teach sex education and not philosophy in school. Better to learn about the plumbing than explore what it means to be human. But students need sex education because there is a danger in them not knowing about AIDS and condoms. There is a greater danger in students not having the opportunity to come to terms with their mortality and the implication that has on their life.

Humans are turned into machines when our work owns us and not us our work. African slaves were machines designed to work the fields. They weren’t given the rights of humanity, namely, personal sovereignty, community, culture, and family. “Property,” while accurate, isn’t a specific enough term. They were machines. Given enough time of having a master and having that master demand tasks of you, you will lose your humanity. There were slaves who lamented the end of slavery and wished things could go back to the good old days, before they were free. This is how institutionalization works. Factory workers on a furniture assembly line are less satisfied with themselves as people than are custom furniture builders, regardless of pay and benefits. On the assembly line, the master assigns the task and the machine performs. The worker is subservient to the apparatus. If you are assigned work and have no option to quit that work without being penalized, you are being co-opted by machinery. You are being prepped for college and career, that is, you are moving down the conveyor belt, assembled by other robots who were assembled long ago in a similar factory who are all being held accountable by an even bigger and colder machine. You are being taught that you have an input and an output and someone can push a button to make you dance. Given enough time, leaving that situation can be painful, but even if the physical conditions of your enslavement are good, giving up your personal sovereignty is never good for your humanity.

In school, nobody ever asked me, Do you think about dying? Where do you think you go when you die? How do you feel about your mortality? To my knowledge, no teacher would ever ask a student that in the district I work, or any other district. It’s not in the curriculum. It took a year in a war zone for me to confront one of the most awesome and overwhelming abilities we have, something no other being on earth can do: the capacity to consider our personal death and what that means for our life. You don’t know what you’re giving up if you ignore that in your humanity.

I don’t separate “education” – a special thing done in a special place by specialized, certified people, during a special period in a person’s life – and life itself. My experience in Iraq in 2004 has made me afraid for my five-year-old son, who feels as deeply as I do and who has as hard a time forgetting the capitals of states as I do the bright white flash and return-fire.

Four years into teaching, I had a Dominican girl in class who was terrified of public speaking, even in front of our class of ten. I more or less forced her, using every coercive teacher trick I knew, because I was always taught to face your fears. I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do. She was trembling even after she was finished, and, although she kept coming to class, she cowered in the last-seat-last-row for the rest of the year. She volunteered for nothing more. I wrote about my experience in Iraq because I’ve always been told to “just talk about it, you’ll feel better.” That advice is shit.

What is education but life itself? Like Tim O’Brien alluded to in The Things They Carried, there is no moral. He writes, “in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh.’” I’d probably use a different word than “oh.” Lessons?

We smashed their schools, burned them, and shot people based on the time of night they were outside. They dressed up like our allies and blew themselves up when they weren’t murdering the families of our actual allies and throwing their headless bodies into the Tigris. Write a five paragraph essay on that. Or write about how we’ve lost more soldiers to suicide than to combat. Your choice. Make sure each paragraph has a topic sentence.

Being lawful and following the rules means allowing their reality to become your reality, and their reality includes you pledging your allegiance to their republic before you’re old enough to wipe your own ass. School is a photocopy of life. It’s a combination of Office Space and the eye of Sauron. It primes you for reliance on others. It has the illusion of a beginning, middle, and end and progress, but then you wake up and realize there is no moral. “Education,” if such a thing even exists. I just call it life. There are tears, laughter, regret, love, and patience. There’s empathy and apathy. There’s living and dying. If you’re going to give a single person a single grade for that, you might as well fail me. I’m not playing, and I’m done running from Iraq.

2

Consent is Sexy

I had a senior, who was very interested in "honest but uncomfortable conversations" with peers, come running into my class, showing off a button that read Consent is Sexy. If I remember, the Gay-Straight Alliance, in collaboration with a health teacher or maybe a school psychologist, had a bunch of these things made and were handing them out at lunch. Apparently the indomitable wave of college campus rapes is a result of a conspicuous lack of gay kids with pins.

But sure. I agree. Consent is “sexy.” I’m just shocked that the irony is lost. First of all, my wife and I homeschool our kids, and usually the first “tough” question friends and family ask is what about socialization, i.e., how will they learn how to interact with peers? Well, here we are, at public school where all the wonderful socialization happens, and we find it necessary to remind 17 and 18-year-olds, in writing, not to have sex with people who don’t agree to have sex. Whatever “socialization” means, it should include the knowledge and ability to not rape (preferably without reminders).

Second of all, Consent is Sexy pins were handed out in a compulsory school where students don’t have the opportunity to consent to anything. They have virtually no say in which classes they take, and they certainly have no say in what is taught or how it is taught once they get in those classes. They don’t get to use the bathroom without written permission; homework isn’t a mutually agreed upon voluntary activity; students eat when they’re told to eat, move when they’re told to move, speak when they’re told to speak, write when they’re told to write, and so on. They are never once asked by anyone for permission to have these things done to them. Compulsion means to be forced to do something; consent means agreeing to do something. There is nothing consensual about school. No wonder we need buttons.

            Compulsory education is an ineffective way to teach and learn, as well as antithetical to the principles of freedom upon which this country was founded. Yes, I know that much of those past freedoms were freedoms for white protestant males. I’m not denying that, but that important fact also isn’t a sufficient reason to deny freedoms to more groups in the future. In fact, the “scientific” reasons given for denying groups rights in the past are similar to the reasons given to deny teenagers rights now: slaves should not be given freedom because they would not be able to handle it – blacks by their nature are lazy, violent, and must be controlled; women should not be allowed to vote because they are ignorant and a woman’s brain can only handle so much complex thought before they become ugly and infertile; teenagers should not direct their own learning because if not pushed to do something then they would choose to do nothing, with the exception of drugs, sex, video games, and fighting (ignorant, violent, and must be controlled).

There are a few assumptions that I’m going to make about teenagers and education:

• A teenager’s nature is not laziness, their preferred state is not ignorance, and it is not necessary for extrinsic motivation to be delivered by trained professionals in order to prevent them from bareknuckle boxing under a bridge in exchange for drugs and money.

• They aren’t broken, and so we don’t need to fix them.

• Just because a student complies doesn’t mean they are engaged; just because they can recite data doesn’t mean they’ve gained knowledge or wisdom.

• A teenager is not a child. They are ready for real responsibility. Suggesting that they, for example, should be required to obtain written permission to use the bathroom is a humiliating affront to their dignity. The same goes with force-feeding Shakespeare and algebra.

• An underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the reason why teenagers are impulsive, is as much a gift as it is a curse, and it is not a reason to lock teenagers up in a series of rooms all day. Either God, evolution, or both made us that way for a reason. Risk-taking is good. Danger is good. Adventure is good. You don’t get to be old and wise unless you are young and dumb. Cutting teens off from adventure produces adults who are timid and neurotic. 

• “Education” is not something that only happens in certain places at certain times with certain well-trained people. Independent thought and action is your birthright, no matter what anyone tries to fill your head with.

• Teachers are not the enemy. They are, for the most part, loving, patient, competent people with a drive to help students achieve. The enemies are not students, school administrators, parents, or school boards. Even politicians aren’t the bad guys in our story (they aren’t the good guys, either). The insidious notion that permeates most of our society that they won’t learn if we don’t force them and the ones who are best equipped to force them are school-people is the enemy. Nothing will change politically until we as a society call out this myth for what it is.  

Even if you resist the notion that schools are prisons or that teenagers aren’t inherently lazy or dangerous, if we could come to agreement on some of these points, then we have some common ground upon which to start our journey.

“I need your help figuring out what these questions are asking,” a fellow teacher said to me. She had fourteen multiple choice questions from the NY common core Regents Exam, which is required for graduation. Next to the questions she had another paper with four main categories – analyze, inference, etc. – and a bunch of subcategories underneath. We dutifully read the poem and the multiple choice questions and began the process of categorizing, so we could later collect data from students’ answers and quietly use the outputs to inform our inputs.

“This is stupid,” I said, but continued doing it.

“I know,” she said half-heartedly. We have known each other for a decade. I think we both knew I was about to rant, and one of us didn’t really want to hear it. When you work at the burger joint and the boss tells you to salt the fries, you salt the fries, I imagined she was thinking. No need to turn fry-salting into a bid for congress.

“What if the poet himself doesn’t know what he is inferring?” I circled author’s purpose for number seven. “What if he doesn’t know his own purpose? What if this is just some deep expression of something he’s feeling but can’t otherwise articulate? Or what if he thinks he knows his purpose for writing, but every single reader takes it differently? What if he is expressing something about his life or his experience that he can never properly understand himself? What if he doesn’t get his own motivations?”

She put down her pencil and smiled politely. “I think you’re overthinking it. Just, on its face, your first instinct – what’s the question asking? We need to know which performance indicator to teach.”

We finished, the work day finished, and I left the school building. On the way home I stopped by the grocery store to pick up something for dinner, and while waiting in line I mindlessly scrolled through my social media. At the top of my timeline was a link shared by a group I follow: "I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems[1]." Sara Holbrook writes:

Did I have a purpose for writing it? Does survival count? Teachers are also trying to survive as they are tasked with teaching kids how to take these tests, which they do by digging through past tests, posted online. Forget joy of language and the fun of discovery in poetry, this is line-by-line dissection, painful and delivered without anesthetic.

The universe speaks to us in coincidence. We can hear it if we listen. When we don’t pay attention or when we hear but don’t heed, then we set ourselves up for failure. The energy of the universe flows around you, and choosing to swim against the current will lead to nothing but exhaustion.

This is why our education system fails to educate. Learning is social and playful. Mammals wrestle and play tag in order to do all the things necessary for survival. They do not take seriously the training they are doing for the most important parts of their lives – catching prey, eluding predators, establishing enough dominance to secure a mate, and raising young. It is meant to be joyful.

How many times have I told students that, when answering essay questions on a test, it doesn’t matter what you think, it matters what you can support using the textual evidence in front of you. You’re not trying to change the world, you’re trying to pass a test. Literature is meant to be playful – but so is physics. If you aren’t on the playground, it’s going to show in whatever you create. You will produce one lifeless piece of cardboard after another before they finally print you a degree, which itself probably won’t even be on cardboard.

Compulsion – non-consensual education -  requires violence; it requires complete control over what students put into their brain, the people they are exposed to, the places they are authorized to be, and oftentimes, with free lunch programs, what food goes into their body. Compulsory systems are resentful of families who do not enforce homework or dress code policies, are reluctant to allow parents into their buildings except once or twice a year on special “open house” days, and fears parents who choose to homeschool. It is damn near the most unnatural way a human of any age can authentically learn. Can you imagine a couple of puppies being forced to wrestle under threat of in school suspension, while a well-trained expert looks on with a clipboard, marking off points?

I’m not interested in “reforming” education. I don’t care about tinkering with the curriculum or bickering over charters and vouchers. I’m interested in revolting against compulsion. Cotton fields and tobacco farms are amoral things. You can be an abolitionist and still see the value in t-shirts and cob pipes. If you’re an abolitionist, then what you are against is slavery and what you are for is freedom – freedom for individuals to live their lives any way they choose, so long as what they choose doesn’t infringe on others to do the same. I’m not calling for the end of public schools. I’m calling for the end of compulsion.

Compulsory education is against the law of nature. There are a number of people who are very upset about the possibility of transgender bathrooms in public schools, and they’ll cite the same reason. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of transgender bathrooms because it goes against the natural order of things, but you see nothing unnatural with using the force of law to separate a child from their family and culture from the ages of five to seventeen to be fed and taught by strangers during the best part of their waking hours, then I’m sorry, but we’re probably not going to have much in common.

  The grading policy is the whip that keeps the whole thing moving. Here’s your homework assignment. Ask a dozen teachers, what is the purpose behind grading students? I don’t know for sure what they’ll tell you, but whatever they say will likely fall into one of three categories: 

(1)Teachers prone to euphemism will say to check for student understanding.

(2) A well-intentioned teacher who gives considerable thought to assessment may say to give feedback to the students and their parents. 

(3) The authoritarians prefer to hold students accountable – these are the same people who will say they’ll have a boss one day, won’t they? (Nothing screams cultivating a love of learning louder than your boss is here to hold you accountable).

The first two categories you could do without an alpha-numeric score. I could tell a student what grade I thought they would receive on an essay based on a rubric and exemplars (but I’d rather not – after all, I’m not writing this book based on a rubric), or the writings overall effectiveness based on peer or public review, or ask them good questions after an oral presentation, or report to their parents how many hours they spent at their internship. Nothing done in typical or radical schools requires a recorded grade on a transcript in order to check student understanding or communicate with parents, and definitely not down to a single percentage point (somebody please tell me the difference between an 86% and an 87%). Furthermore, if grades were an objective and accurate reflection of a student’s knowledge and skill, then why do we have “honors” ceremonies and give kids special diplomas, stickers, pizza, bagels, juice, and other little treats for performing as we wish them to? This isn’t a competition they signed up for. It’s something they are forced into. They are stripped bare to expose their strengths and weaknesses, then they are told they are good and given a treat as if they were a dog that learned to sit.  

Ask a teacher of a non-credit bearing course what their greatest struggle is. Those are the teachers who beg and plead for teeth to their programs; they need some way to grade for accountability purposes. They’ll tell you their daily struggle is attendance and student buy-in. Therein lays your answer. The purpose in grading students is coercion. It works equally as a bribe as it does a threat, with the unfortunate (unintended? I doubt it) consequence of training students to anticipate a stranger’s valuation of an arbitrary and narrow curriculum as a superior indication of worth than intrinsic valuation of a self-directed, limitless curriculum. The result is a system that conditions students for boredom[2]. Nothing worth doing could possibly be boring.

The "but you’ll have a boss one day" people are actually tipping their hand as to what school is really all about. Governments require that the people be dependent on them in order for the government to remain viable – the more independent we are, the less relevant they become. Therefore, government schools would do well to get kids used to having an arbitrarily selected stranger as the authority figure that is necessary in their lives. We could drop the pretense of school and just put students into jobs if we’re worried about their ability to listen to a boss, although the reality is it doesn’t take twelve years of school to figure out what a boss does. That still doesn’t properly address the dangers in treating absolute compliance to a series of strangers as a principle worth living by.

Growing up, I loved John Updike’s story "A&P" about a boy who quits his job after the store manager embarrasses three teenage girls in bikinis. When I was in my early twenties I had a retail job, my boss had me follow a young black man about my same age around the store. I had followed suspicious people before, black and white, but this time seemed different, and by the end of it I realized I had been a participant in something that I was uncomfortable with. I wasn’t as cool as Sammy from "A&P" – I didn’t walk out and quit on the spot - but I started looking for a new job right away and pretty soon after that gave my two weeks notice. A boss isn’t the same as a leader, a leader doesn’t need state-sponsored compulsion or grades for people to follow them, and compliance is a value best reserved for dogs.    

Grading learning will inevitably lead to a corruption of learning. It is not learning at all, but a training in dependence and subservience. We are learning creatures; it’s in our DNA. We aren’t as strong as bears or as sturdy as goats, but we can build a house to live in, a gun to shoot the bear, and a stove to cook him up with a bit of butter from the goat. Nothing else on earth can do that, and it happens through an automatic drive for knowledge. We could wave a wand and make all schools in the world disappear, and learning will still keep on keeping on much as it has for the past ten thousand years. It’s natural and healthy because it is in our instinct to survive.

Our eating habits are distinctly human, too. We sit down with the people we like or love, often give thanks, and go through little rituals like passing dishes around to every member or remaining seated until everyone is finished. We rarely eat with people we dislike, or with strangers, unless absolutely necessary. We eat like that for the same reason we love, empathize, and, synonymous with learn, play. It’s gratifying for us. It strengthens us as individuals, families, and communities. It teaches us about ourselves and those around us. It makes us physically healthy.

The graded versions of these things are hot dog eating contests, spelling bees, matchmaking reality shows, recitals, trivia games, standardized tests, and so on. They are quantifiable because they are specific; you can peg it with a percentage or rate contestants hierarchically. Genuine learning can never be quantified. None of the quantifiable stuff is the natural way of learning things except for when it is done just for fun. If taken too seriously, or for too long, or under threat, none of it is healthy.

Benjamin Franklin said he was the best physician that knows the worthlessness of most medicines. The “medical model” is often used as an analogy for education[3]: your graduation rate is your “survival” rate, thus your students who fail to graduate in four years are your “mortality” rate. Any choice by the school to emphasize social and emotional standards over data-driven-standards is akin to a doctor saying, “I didn’t take your blood pressure, but I feel as though you’re just fine.” It’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard for what learning is; not only for the fear necessary for making such an argument work (you’re killing kids by not using data!), but also for the insidious assumption that kids are “sick” and that we school-people are the only ones with the cure. It’s the way we rationalize the compulsion and ensuing violence: if we don’t make them, they won’t, and it’ll be chaos in the streets. I’m leery of any fear-based argument.

The natural state of kids isn’t “sickness;" or, to put it another way, ignorance, laziness, violence, unmotivated, indifference, evilness, etc. As controversial as this statement may be, kids are not going to revert to savages or drooling vegetables if they don’t get n credits by xth grade.

I’m not against schools if treated as learning centers, but their purpose isn’t to fix kids. Fix them? I didn’t know they were broken! School vision statements often read something like, “We believe all kids can learn” or “life-long learners” or something silly like that. What an absurd thing to put in writing! “We, at Grassy Hill Elementary, believe all Kindergartners can get taller” or “We, the Prospect Junior High cafeteria staff, believe that all kids can and will eat food.” A human being’s natural state is curiosity. I’ve described myself as an advocate of self-directed education, but truth be told, all learning comes from the self, so, in a sense, “self-directed education” is redundant. Students will be life-long learners, of one thing or another; they will deliberately pursue their own dreams, or unconsciously pursue someone else’s. Either way they are learning self-sufficiency, or else they are learning compliance.

Data has become my least favorite four letter word. Felix Baumgartner used data to inform some of his decisions when he jumped out of a frickin’ space pod and plunged the 120,000 feet back to earth, but something tells me the data wasn’t the central thing in his heart and mind throughout the entire process. Neither was what “grade” he was going to get – it was a pass/fail proposition. Data was the central concern of trainers and technicians, not the driving force for the man on the mission to be the first space-jumper in human history. I don’t see great teachers as trainers or technicians. I’m sure if Socrates were alive today and had to sit through even a single meeting discussing how to use data to inform instruction, he’d kill himself all over again.

Benjamin Franklin also said that any fool can complain, and most fools do, so I’ll offer a better metaphor. John Taylor Gatto spoke of education being a “helix" sport:

"Here’s a principle of real education to carry you through the moments of self-doubt. Education is a helix sport, a unique personal project like seatless unicycle riding over trackless wilderness, a sport that avoids rails, rules, and programmed confinement. The familiar versions of this are cross-country skiing, sailing, hang-gliding, skateboarding, surfing, solitary mountain climbing, thousand-mile walks, things like that. I think of education as one, too.

In a helix sport the players search for a new relationship with themselves. They endure pain and risk to achieve this goal. Helix sports are free of expert micromanagement. Experts can’t help you much in that moment of truth when a mistake might leave you dead. Helix sports are a revolt against predestination.

Bringing children up properly is a helix sport forcing you to realize that no boy or girl on earth is just like another. If you do understand this you also understand there can exist no reliable map to tell you all you need to do. Process kids like sardines and don’t be surprised when they come out oily and dead. In the words of the Albany Free School, if you aren’t making it up as you go along, you aren’t doing it right."

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_us_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341

[2] “’I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you are alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored’” ~Louis C.K.

[3] 'Do No Harm': A Hippocratic Oath for Schools http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/09/05/03stewart.h34.html

• Update #7 - A White Rose...final update! Nov. 26, 2017

  Hi everyone!

  
  

  This is what I hope will be the final update. Everything should be set - edits, the cover, the endorsements, etc. I'm ordering …

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• Update #6 - One month later Sept. 1, 2017

  Hi everyone!

  
  

  The book is finished and the editing complete! I've sent it out for blurbs (endorsements), and have received responses from several people in this …

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• Update #5 - Surpassed 100 copies June 5, 2017

  Hi all,

  
  

  Thanks to all of you, 86 people have pre-ordered 103 copies of A White Rose! My deepest and most sincere thank you …

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• Update #4 - Happy Memorial Day + Can We Sell 7 More Books? May 29, 2017

  Hi all!

  
  

  I'm going to be sending a lengthier update in a few days, but I had two important things I wanted to share now: …

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• Update #3 - Some great news May 17, 2017

  Friends and family,

  
  

  There have been a few very positive developments with A White Rose that I'd like to share with you. First, Patrick Farenga, president …

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• Update #2 - Interview with my friend and former student Tethkar May 7, 2017

  Tethkar Ahmad, a friend and former student who many of us know and love, came to my house to ask some tough questions about homeschooling, …

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• Update #1 - A White Rose, Update One April 30, 2017

  Hi everyone,

  Some updates on A White Rose.

  First, some people have asked me when the book ships. The preorder campaign is until the end …

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