My father and I didn't see eye to eye on most things, and in my scholastic endeavors we really hit hard snags. After he retired from the army he taught middle school in the Washington, DC area (Silver Spring, Maryland) and my mother became a school secretary near our home in Annandale, Virginia. They both loved school in their younger days, regarded teachers as demigods, principals as awesome creatures of near legend, almost too powerful and awful to be gazed directly upon. That changed some when they actually got into the system. More than some, actually. They were willing to concede that I may have had a scintilla, a micron, just a glimmer of a reason for my hatred of school.
As a "military brat" I was always an outsider, had no real way to be an insider like others, in fact no desire to be one. You get an objective look at things from that position. It's not all bad. During my scholastic trials I labored under certain difficulties: dyslexia and another two I can't even pronounce, but in those high and far off times I was merely stupid, thick, and uncooperative. Well, they had me pegged on that last one, as an honest man I don't say "no". Thing was, I grew up among people who were really under a form of confinement, and some had been POWs. My experiences were very similar every day in school.
Whether it came about intentionally I don't know, but the years spent in that situation are a determination of who is going to be who. I remember very clearly my first week in first grade. I didn't like it, but it was tolerable, there was some fun, we had paste, clay, sang songs, heard stories, then on a Friday we were given a picture of Humpty Dumpty to color. We were told that we had to do it very carefully, stay in the lines, use the RIGHT colors, because we were going to be "graded" with very good, good, fair, or poor. Monday we came in, and we had certain tables to sit at, we could sit at only that one with those kids, and we got our pictures back. Mine, of course, was poor. That was the first cutting of that particular herd, the first screen of the filter on who would be "educated" and who would be "schooled". Big difference between the two, when I worked with horses I didn't educate them, I trained and "schooled" them. And so it went. In fifth grade I refused to take the Iowa test. They took me out of the class I was in and put me in the "brain" class. The kids there were glad to see me, liked me. Why not? The teacher graded on a curve, so I was really welcome. What I had been doing well now got me nothing. I quit it all, why bother? My father went to find out why my grades were poor in spite of rather high percentages, and the teacher explained the curve, and said someone has to flunk. It's the way the system works. Since a demigod said it, he nodded his head and encouraged me to get with it, and compete. As a hard head, I wouldn't.
My father found out when he started teaching that once you're "tracked", that's where you stay, and woe betide the student or even teacher who tried to do anything to get out of it. One year he was asked to take some of the "bad" kids and ease the burden on the other teachers. He did this for about seven years, but his principal stopped it then. He was TOO successful. He was actually hurting these kids by telling them they had worth, by getting them to work, and by giving them expectations. This was not for such as they.
Sorry if I bent your ear, uh, make that eye?
Bob
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Dear Bob,
Oh testify brother!
Not many Americans, even critics of American education, truly understand that the school system is the first state-created cut in a classist society. I am a stone cold believer in education, but not as it is currently practiced. For the most part, American teachers come from the bottom 15% of all college applicants and are the mediocre products of a mediocre system. This is not to disrespect teachers, for I have known and do know good ones. I taught part-time in two schools in Idaho, one Indian and one white, and saw some great teachers trying to make learning really happen. And the thing most in their way was the system, the sorting machine that was unbeatable (and I might add, of which they were all products, rendering them blind to its operation, thus frustrated.) They all eventually quit. Interestingly, in the Indian school, EVERYBODY eventually quit, teachers and students alike. It that way, it was somewhat more honest in that nobody liked school, except of course, the career administrators.
I myself was in the "dumbbell class" in the fifth grade. I had just moved from over in West Virginia, a place regarded then much as it is today, as an ignorant, poverty stricken redneck backwater. I had to work my way out of the dumbbell room just to get into regular class. I did it, and went on to make good grades. Then went on to make terrible grades as I go more depressed about school, my poverty compared to the city kids, teachers who would mock me in front of the class, etc. (I was by no means alone in suffering this, but the others were pretty rough and my parents made it very hard for me to associate with them after school. Which was good because some went to prison, some fell to drugs, some fell in Nam and a few succeeded in having a normal lower class life of debt and sports. Anyway, after a while I discovered the city library, and spent the rest of my teenaged intellectual life (yes, it is possible) learning there.
On the other hand, the children of doctors and professionals conformed and did well, were fawned over and given special attention and went on to become the regular assortment of thieving lawyers, business and finance shysters and well paid medial bullshit artists the empire sponsors to conduct its administration and daily workings.
And in my working life I find myself working under these people today -- silly babbling middle class minions of the empire, ever so convinced they are important individuals in their respective settings, making important decisions about which meaningless picture to put on the cover of their meaningless magazines and where to dock their new boat, utterly convinced that readers and everyone who works under them are mere sheeple, which to a certain extent, they really are. But at least they know how to work. The system just rolls on, stamping out the same mediocre widgets, both as products and as people.
Hell to watch, ain't it?
In art and labor,
Joe
