The Macro-Cosmic Trickle Down in Education
“Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
Gabor Mate, the Canadian physician and best-selling author, describes his own Holocaust survival as a Jewish baby in Eastern Europe by recounting a story that he repeats often in his talks around the world. He says that his mother went to a doctor and asked why her baby would not stop crying. The doctor said that all Jewish babies were crying. Dr. Mate now theorizes that this was due to their mother’s stress and with the pervasive stress within the entire Jewish community at that time. Newborn babies obviously didn’t know who Hitler was or that the war was taking aim at them and all around them, but they did feel the extreme stress. This was causing deep emotional trauma and distress that would impact the rest of their lives.
There are interesting cases being made all the time that says stress, violence, and emotional disturbances are being caused by what’s around us, that neurologically we’re deeply affected by violent thoughts, violent behaviors, and violent intentions – even when we’re not directly involved.
I’m neither a doctor, a neurologist, nor do I myself know any of this as verifiable truth, but on some level it seems contrary to common sense to dismiss the things around us as having no emotional impact on us. If gunshots and bombs are raining down upon your community and people are dying and screaming in terror – how can that NOT affect you? I don’t think anybody can question that kind of impact. The subtler examples are, to me, the most interesting. Can a weapons manufacturer in your general vicinity really have an impact on that community’s gun violence just by being there? Can a baby feel its mother’s stress in the womb? Can children growing up during the Cold War be guided by dreams of nuclear annihilation? Are children born to incarcerated parents more likely to be incarcerated themselves?
If any of these examples have an inkling of possibility attached to them, they would then point to a bigger question of whether pervasive violence – both physical and institutional – are molding who we are as a people and leading to entrenched behaviors and lasting imprinting. I think we have to put the question into historical context and ask ourselves how history serves as our current paradigm, and as our entrenched way of thinking and behaving.
What’s this got to do with education?
When I talk to most high school students, they overwhelmingly believe that human beings are predisposed to violence, that it’s a given. They regard war as inevitable. They casually dismiss homicide as a “natural” way of life, that it’s just something we have to live with. I believe their thinking is not so different from their parents. And I don’t know how many generations we would have to go back to find a different way of thinking. But is it? Is violence just a given? Are human beings naturally prone to violence? Are some people, some races, some geographical locations more violent than others? Or are these myths that we’ve grown to accept, circular debates without conclusions?
Every new school shooting seems to raise the same questions about gun control, media influence, antidepressants, etc. But it seems that the original context has been lost altogether and the issue has been entirely re-framed. I’m old enough to remember what I recall to be the first school yard shooting of its kind in San Diego in 1979 when a 16-year-old girl shot up a school playground and when asked why she did it she stated that she didn’t like Mondays. That was shocking, of course, but it’s led to a generation that expects to hear about such incidents in the news every few months. The sheer predictability of it speaks volumes. We don’t even have to speculate on why they happen; they’ve become a given in our culture. What other things affect us in this way? How is our culture being shaped by shocking events becoming blasé news stories, inevitable indicators of our “true nature” as humans?
Is where we are born just another “given” to how we will inevitably grow up? Is acceptance of electronic gadgetry a dull act of submission to how the world is nowadays? Are these just things that we have deal with, just because?
The pattern that we know occurs is that we are given bits of information in repeatable soundbites that become memes. This superficial information is then, for the most part, unquestioned and taken as fact, repeated for a while through social media, discussed in various settings and on yet more media outlets, then largely forgotten. Then it’s on to the next similar story which follows the same pattern ad infinitum. That, of course, is the all-too-familiar way of how news is currently disseminated. This is one example of how entrenched behaviors may be formed, but it still doesn’t look at the more pervasive problem, the one that affects us most deeply: the fact that critical thinking is by and large taken out of the equation. If we we were truly able to think critically and discuss things critically, we would have the ability to see beyond the lies, the inconsistencies, and we could conclude for ourselves what is really worthy to pay attention to. But that’s not happening. Facebook is full of one-line soundbites, shared little snippets of news between individuals all commenting on them with more one-line replies. And all of this being watched over by a huge monolithic corporation that in turn watches over our interactions with it. How bizarre. How chilling.
And then we get into the classroom. The move toward “Standardized Education” – that nifty term that is supposed to make us uniformly better educated people by raising the standards on everyone – has nullified the need for critical thinking to be taught and practiced. Questioning established norms does not show up on the tests, it won’t get you a job, and it is not appreciated by the current system of education. Therefore, it is removed from the curriculum and left unaccounted for. Because critical thinking shows up in “messy” ways like protests and challenges to authority, it is easily dismissed as unacceptable anti-social behavior.
More than simply not being accepted, however, it is now being severely punished. Last year I wrote an article on how schools resemble prisons, and how the behaviors of both mirror each other (not that prisons are becoming institutions for learning, but rather how schools are becoming more like prisons. I even gave the example of Monroe, Washington, a small town in Eastern Washington that has a maximum security prison sharing the same hillside as the the local high school, and how local residents joke about it, but don’t seem to give it much further thought). This is nothing new, but there have been increasingly drastic moves in that direction since last year’s article, and every year the examples continue to grow. The more recent school shootings – whether real or manufactured (taken into account the many false flag accusations that proliferate after each new example) – successively up the ante on furthering police presence on campuses, even calls for militarization such as the National Guard to become a common fixture on them. There is a also a drastic rise in criminal prosecutions of minors who would have otherwise, in previous years, been given detention or a warning for doing the things that would nowadays earn them jail time and a criminal record. This trend is becoming more established and has given rise to the phrase, “the school-to-prison pipeline.” It is a fear-based reaction (extreme overreaction in my opinion) to the perception that schools are now dangerous places and children are a serious threat to peace. But is this real or perceived? Is it self-fulfilling? Is it justified?
The reason I used the very famous quote from The Little Prince to begin this article is to challenge us to communicate from the heart on such matters. To militarize schools and treat them as war zones would horrify and shock our culture 100 years ago. The concept would seem bizarre. We can rationalize about how much things have changed in the last century, but if we do that we’re only confirming our own bizarre behaviors in how we are reacting to a bizarre world that is by and large of our own creation. If we have come so far as to tackle every problem as a “war” ( a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on terror, and now a war on education), we are admitting not just to the perception that violent tendencies are a given, but we are admitting to our own limitations for coming up with humane solutions. We are not speaking or acting from the heart because the heart does not permit – nor does the law – a war on children. We can say that we are protecting them, but that’s the excuse for every society that conducts war. It is always justified as a defensive act. But rarely is that ever the case. War is extreme violence and both sides want to win, with the overwhelming deaths belonging to innocent people who wanted nothing to do with it in the first place.
I don’t go along with the notion that minors are any more violent now than they were 100 years ago. I remember Luc Sante’s book, Low Life, dispelled similar myths about New York becoming an increasingly violent place. His book was based on the idea that if you think New York is violent now, you should’ve seen it 100 years ago. The old examples of violence were far more extreme. I would wager that if we did the same thing with regular school behaviors and compared them historically we would arrive at the same conclusion. Human behavior doesn’t change all that much, but human perception and the way that we frame it does.
I would also wager to guess that any changes in human behaviors are connected with those changes in perception. The more fearful we are, the more extreme we react to those fears. It’s not even a matter of how big the guns are or how many rounds they can shoot as much as it’s tied with the perceived threat. My Chihuahua doesn’t care how big the dog is, when he’s scared he charges it. It’s instinctual unless I find a way to quell his fears and lower his reaction. Humans do the same thing. We are far more apt to attack out of fear than when we feel strong.
To conclude, I never want to leave a subject on a note of hopelessness. Just because trends are moving in one direction doesn’t mean that they will continue that way forever. I really do feel an overwhelming sense of hope because of the powerful possibilities at hand. Working with teenagers always gives me hope. I don’t sense that there is any let up in their overall ability to adapt and to be reinvigorated by an idea. When I usually ask my students what they want to do, their typical answer is to have a discussion. They want to talk about things, things that really matter. At that point, the earbuds come out, the body language shifts, and they become engaged. I don’t blame them for their boredom in most classroom settings. Most classes are boring. Most teachers are boring. Let’s face it, that’s they way it’s been for a very long time. This repeatable pattern becomes entrenched and the perceptions follow. But that doesn’t negate the possibility for change.
The one element that absolutely needs to come to the forefront is real critical thinking – not just saying that it’s there, but seeing truthful evidence that it exists. And this is where most educators get a little uncomfortable, because most truthful evidence that I’ve seen comes in the form of students rising up and taking back the power in their classes and at their schools. They challenge irrational and traditional norms that show a lack of relevancy and fairness, they ask for and sometimes demand changes to be made, and they are notoriously at the helm of radical social upheavals. It’s not just up to the students, but to the truly progressive educators and parents who have given them power to think for themselves in the first place. And there are definitely situations happening in certain quarters of our country that point to people waking up and getting active. I’m speaking most directly about the teachers in Seattle who have rejected standardized testing and about the teachers, students, and parents who are protesting school closures in Chicago. There seems to be a reawakening afoot, but how far it goes and to what end, will of course need to be seen.
What we don’t need, as far as I’m concerned, is any more trickle down of anything. Whenever I hear that phrase I just feel like I’m being pissed on, and it’s coming slow and tortuously.