Schools within Society within Citizenship

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...He (Ayama) believed a mistake of historical proportions may have been made as Japan prepared to deal with its future. The nation, he suggested, was producing workers rather than full citizens, and he once told me in passing, almost as a throwaway, that it was a great deal easier to produce a good car than it was to produce a good human being.

The Next Century, 126 hardcover pages, by David Halberstam, referenced in my essay archived June 2015

Hello Reader,

Notice how things are embedded in society?

Utah passed a law recently stating that children are allowed to play outside alone as well as walk or bike to school without parental supervision. It is the first law in the US of its kind. And the fact that it’s even needed in the first place kind of freaks me out.

From Mark Manson in his only 2018 April blog essay for non-subscribers. (link)

How grim. Manson goes on to explain that baby boomers, as part of their bizarre entitlement, see their kids as trophies to be shown off. Part of this means having their children well rounded and sent to enriching activities, even if this happens too much, even if natural “child’s play” must be “scheduled.” As must “play dates,” too. 

My formative years were of the 1950’s. A time when an “only child” was unusual. Our vocabulary did not include “play dates” or “helicopter parents.”

Back in my day children all attended their neighborhood school together. Maybe a city would have one vocationally oriented school, a school that would then usually turn out to surprise the teachers by garnering a bad reputation for having troubled youth. That was then. 

Now, in my own city, we have evolved a spaghetti snarl of bus routes as so many kids are crisscrossing the city going to special classes. This in perhaps the biggest city, by square miles, in the whole country. (And the fourth largest by population) The school bus costs are proving to be unsustainable for the taxpayers. The experts have no solutions.

…Easy for me to say it’s hopeless to give schools any thought; hard for me to think around the subject from an angle of ancient history. But I feel I have to try…

Meanwhile, over in sunny Greece, everybody knew that well rounded schools were the way to go. The children would be outside dancing and tumbling, reciting poetry, running relay races, singing, learning to strum the lyre, tackling geometry and rhetoric. The ancient Greeks had no problem doing all of this and the three R’s too: Reading, “Riting” and “‘Rithmatic”. Of course, our knowledge of Greek society comes from idealistic writing. 

Maybe, off the page, Greeks shared with each other ignoble, petty reasons for having their well rounded schools, like the reasons Mark Manson notes of our baby boomers; just as Americans, without saying the word hubris, had verbal reasons for keeping troops in the Republic of South Vietnam that didn’t get into history books. (Americans wrote of reasons such as honoring their word, saving the world from the spread of evil Godless communism and believing in South Vietnamese self determination)

I said “maybe.” In the end, if we want to be inspired by our Greco-Roman heritage (as well as our other two heritages, Christian and Hebrew) then we would do well to take the Greeks at their word. Greek parents would have been influenced by what adults told each other: “Not life, but a good life, is expected of every citizen.” As for that alien idea of having schools do nothing but specialize all day, every day, in the three Rs, Greek slogans included “moderation in all things” and “nothing in excess.”

As I see it, the Greeks understood in their very bones that the best way to maintain their freedom was with democracy, and the best way to maintain democracy was with good schools producing good human capital. The mighty Persian Empire, so close by, would have been instructive. Mighty, with a huge armed forces, but also with a vast unschooled public unused to freedom, unused to thinking for themselves. If once conquered, the downtrodden Persians would never rise up again. As Alexander the Great easily proved. Persians were like a giant chessboard where, if the king became resigned to his fate, all the pawns would surrender. Not like checkers. Not like in Greece, where every “citizen,” by definition, felt himself a king. For every new Greek generation the land would have to be re-conquered, or at least “occupied”—a word NOT in the (non-democratic) ancient world’s vocabulary.

Today Persia (Iran) and the adjoining Arab nations are rich in oil but very poor in people. Partly because their society has only a timid connection between merit and success—because of corruption and entitlement. A Canadian in the British army reports, in his recent memoirs, of being on manoeuvres with Arab soldiers. He looked over at an Arab mortar crew: The arabs didn’t even know how to aim their weapon properly… This makes sense: How could it possibly be otherwise? Armed forces are always embedded in the surrounding civil society.

I grew up poor and working class. Many years ago, back when I still thought university students knew a lot, and dreamed of being one myself, I stood outside the door of a classroom in the physical education building. I lost my innocence about white collar students when I heard a professor asking her class, like a mother talking to her simple children, “Why do you think the Spartan girls were encouraged to run to school?” Sparta, of course, fielded the best warriors of all the Greek city-states, being organized as the only "warrior-state" in Greece. She asked again. As I recall, with no answers forthcoming, at last she had to spell it out for her students: The women were to be strong, to raise strong warriors… Again the concept of the army reflecting the surrounding society.

So why, today, do certain Arabs and Muslims believe a girl should not even attend school? To me, one of the reasons is obvious: Surely so she won’t learn to think, and therefore won’t set an example in thinking for her children. So she won’t raise boys and girls who will question the king or dictator or ayatollah. 

From 1983, during the first decade of suicide bombers, is Memoir From the Women’s Prison (translated by Marilyn Booth) by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian Muslim medical doctor and writer. She was politically imprisoned. On page 124, a guard is talking with a prisoner:

“I don’t know anything,” she said in a loud voice. “Not even how to read and write.”

“Why do you cover your face with a veil?” he asked.

“Because God commanded me to do so in his Noble Book.”

“How did you find that out? Have you read God’s book?”

She was silent for a moment. “I don’t read, but I heard it on the radio over at the neighbours….and I heard the Shaykh say that God has commanded all women to cover their faces.” 

On the cover of her book, old white haired Saadawi poses with an uncovered head.

To an Arab or Pakistani Muslim extremist it makes sense: Better to shoot an uppity fifteen year old schoolgirl in the head, like they did poor Malala, than to risk someday having a Greek-style entire generation of housewives who could think over new ideas and, say, ponder head coverings. The lands of Islam are fine already, say the gunmen, especially if we can return to older, purer Islam, so there’s no need to for Islamic people to take any chances of maybe, eventually, getting the separation of church and state, let alone (spits on the ground) democracy!

As I type this, dear reader, I feel a tad foolish, pointing out the obvious. But it’s not obvious to our Muslim teenagers who claim that Islam is under attack worldwide, or who would run off to join the Arab bombers and be-headers in their dark caliphate. And I won’t forget those university students needing to be mothered: Things aren’t obvious to them, either.

Our pioneer ancestors would take a day off from farming to raise a neigbor’s barn, or erect a community school. As our ancestors in Africa might say: It takes a village to raise a child, a society to raise a school. 

Schools: Not off in a bubble, not magically hopeless. We built them. We staff them. Surely we can open their windows to the light. 

Needless to say, no matter how many schools we have in our sad sorry world, there will always, for every time and space, be extremists. When my dad was much younger than I am now, he fought an army in which were embedded Hitler Youth. Because his army was “first in, first out,” Dad didn’t have to stick around for the occupation of Germany. But if he had, he could have told the Germans: “Whatever schools you choose to have, will mean the citizens you deserve.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

North of Utah

June

2018

Postscript: 

“I am starting to think. Thank you.” A student

Considering my opening quote from Ayama, on producing good human beings, and then seeking for proof that schooling could be effective, I found a standing-ovation Ted Talk by a man from Microsoft. 

Without using the word citizen, he represents the ideal of responsibility beyond oneself. He cofounded a postsecondary school that effectively trains the leaders (that is, the nation’s educated) to look beyond themselves, to feel less entitled and more responsible. (Link)

Footnote: For schools today, for a criticism of the newest new math, espoused by people who don't know why there was an older "new math," see my essay archived March 2014.

Literary Musings: I have been thinking of the young adult science fiction novels from the 1950’s of Robert Heinlein. 

In one, a beggar suddenly surprises his son by showing that he can juggle. The son, who as a member of the beggar class will never need algebra, gets tutored in math by his father, and discovers that algebra is worthwhile for it’s own sake.

In another, a mid-west high school boy takes extra classes to get into engineering school, including taking Latin. (Which comes in handy when he meets a time traveling legionary) In another, an old asteroid belt prospector complains to two brothers about uneducated kids these days: “Quote a bit of Latin at them, and they look at you like you’re funny in the head.”

I think Heinlein and his generation must have been raised to be aware of the ancient Greeks believing in well-rounded schools, and well rounded citizens.