School Randomness

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Goethe (If indeed it really was his quote-which is still being debated).

Nice quote. A weird place to deliver it though -at a high-school 'Salute to Excellence' where, lets be honest, you are getting an award because you jumped through the hoops.
Not exactly a measure of genius and boldness and all that brilliant stuff.


I was at this school at the awful hour of 8.30 am to see my daughter receive her award of excellence along with at least 300 other kids.

"You're good at school. You hand in your work on time. But will you be good at life? "

This was a question asked by a trustee of the Hamilton- Wentworth District School board at the opening ceremony  to the grades 9, 10 ,11 students receiving their awards.

It was a good question to ask but to me at least, ironic in many ways. It sounded like the case of "those who have put out their eyes now blame them for their blindness."

What can we understand by that?  Only that the school doesn't prepare you to be good at life-but to be good at school.

What an exercise in contradiction because seriously, who believes that school prepares you to be good in life? Nobody, even the school people. So why ask? 

She went on to ask that they "question society, ask the bigger ideas." And I thought, why not start by questioning the institution of schooling?

On the stage stood the banner of the school, awkward, archaic, Alius Alia Via Ad Astra Ascendit- Each Reach For The Stars In Their Own Way (but we only honour the ones who have 80% or higher).

All the time, "our talented school orchestra" (comprised of mostly kids that can afford private strings lessons) played Handel and in the aisles the students, sweating and standing waiting to receive their bits of paper, cursed and swore, and as my daughter reported, called one another 'fag' and 'homo.'

These uninterested, bored, teenagers were told by principal, school trustee and other school folks alike that they "will change the world to a world of equality, equity, tolerance, love" and what have you.

  Ironic that an a salute to excellence where the emphasis is as usual placed on the academic who are still lets face it, considered better and smarter than so called 'non academics' that they kept talking about a place of excellence "where you know who you are and have a strong sense of self-a place that speaks to your inner self."

What were they trying to say? That you've got school smarts-but that you need to use these smarts to make a better place.

Did I need to wake up early to hear this?

And really, is it only the ones with school smarts who can make this world a better place?

Real Work

John Holt often spoke to high school assemblies mostly in rich suburbs of big cities. He talked about the difference between jobs, careers, and work. In the Growing Without School issue #3 1978 he writes the following:
A job as I defined it was something you did for money, something that someone else told you to do and paid you to do. Probably not something you would have done otherwise, but you need the money so you did it.
A career was a kind of step ladder of jobs. If you did your first job for a while, did what you were told and didn't cause any trouble, whoever gave you that job might give you a new job. This job might be slightly more interesting, or at least no so hard-dirty-dangerous. You might not have to take orders from so many people, might even be able to give orders to a few, You might be able to make a few more choices. Then if you did that job OK for a while your boss might then give you a still better job until you had gone up the job ladder. This adds up to a career.
By 'work' I meant (and mean) something altogether different, what people used to call a 'vocation' or 'calling'-something which seemed so worth doing for its own sake that they would have gladly chosen to do it even if they don't need money and the work didn't pay.
I went on to say that to find our work , in this sense, is one of the most difficult tasks that we have in life, that unless we are very lucky we cannot expect to find it quickly, and indeed, that we may never find it once and for all, since work that is right for us at one stage of our life many not be right for use at the next..I added that the vital question, "What do I really want to do?"

What do I think is most worth doing?" is not one that the schools will often urge us or help us to ask of ourselves; on the whole, they feel it is their business only to prepare us for employment-jobs or careers, high or low. So we are going to have to find out for ourselves what work needs to be done and is being done out there and which of that work we most want to take part in.

As I said these things, I looked closely ..at the faces of my listeners...What I saw and what I usually heard in the question periods that followed, made me feel that most of those students were thinking "this guy must have just stepped off the space ship from Mars."

Work for nothing? For most of them it was not just impossible, but unimaginable. They did not know, hardly even knew of any people who felt that way about their work. Work was something you did for external rewards-..
I found myself thinking often about something Paul Goodman had written: Ours is the first civilization in history that has imposed on the elite of its younger generation a morale fit for slaves."
To which I would add soemthing that Hannah Arendt once wrote about slaves in ancient Greece. Slaves could earn money, own property,even get rich. What they could not do was work for anything but themselves;in other words, they could not fight, or vote,or hold office. They were only allowed to be what in our time most people choose to be-what economists call Economic Man, people who work only for their own personal gain.
Of course, in saying this about the young people I talked to, I am to some degree guessing (and therefore perhaps projecting). Of one thing I am certain. There was never, anywhere, a hopeful, positive, enthusiastic response to what I said. I cannot remember even one among all those students, the most favoured young people of the most favoured nation in the world , who said "Mr Holt, here's what I am interested in care about, how can I find a way to work at it?"

To be continued in the next post.