I am prompted by this
ridiculous story about a young woman training to become a teacher.
She had once posted a picture of herself drinking, wearing a pirate hat, at
a party, on her Myspace page. later in life, while in placement
as a prospective teacher, her supervisor googled her and spotted the
picture and expressed his deep, solemn, disapproval. He and the dean
of Millersville University School of Education, in their ultimate,
beneficent, instructional piety and wisdom, decided that Ms. Stacy Snyder
was thereby not worthy of a teaching job, and denied her a teaching degree.
Ms. Snyder went to court and, stunningly-- to me-- lost. (Of course,
this was a U.S. court, where judges are elected by the same people who made
Britney Spears a household name). The ruling was that this was not an
infringement of her right to "free speech". Is that what they thought
the issue was?
How dare they? How dare those puritanical, self-righteous, stupid
zealots deprive this young woman of her dreamed-of career because she didn't
meet their fanatical standards of purity and innocence?
I'll bet those gentleman are patriotic. I'll bet they are pious.
I'll bet they are believers. I'll bet they would feel far more
comfortable living with a bunch of Islamic extremists than they could ever
imagine. I'll bet that deep down in their tiny, crispy,
blackened little hearts, they would love to force Ms. Snyder to wear a burka.
* * *
One thing I've always liked about the Dutch-- and one reason a lot of people
don't like them-- is this kind of
pragmatism that was apparently too rational and sensible for the
delicate Americans.
We appear to have quietly entered an era of
Neo-Puritanism in North America. While you can show any kind of
violence, blood-letting, torture, cruelty, dismemberment, and murder on
television or movies at any time or place, we have become extremely
weak-minded and hysterical at the idea of sex.
Part of this is due to the
unfortunate, unholy alliance between feminist psychology and Christian
fundamentalism in the 1980's. Off-hand, you might think these two
cultural streams had very little in common. They did. But there
was one thing they shared: an almost frantic paranoia about sexuality.
The result: a kindergarten student is suspended for kissing a classmate on
the cheek. Another student is taken away in handcuffs are drawing
pictures of weapons. And another student is busted for waving a
chicken-finger like a gun.
But the most egregious sins of this ilk are
committed by middling managers-- people who have some authority because they
are astute suck-ups with a bit of education who can fill in forms and
transfer money to consultants. They are afraid to make real decision
and, therefore, not really smart enough to evaluate advice either.
They always tell you, "the consultant said...", or "the expert said..."
So they see the 6-year-old kissing a
classmate and they are too crumblingly stupid to realize that this was
not ever what was intended by the term "sexual harassment". * * *
What if your school day consisted of playing guitar, making papier-mâché "aliens" for your Mars project, dropping eggs from the
roof to see how they splattered, and learning how to create puppets?
Insanity, right? That's how St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights
operates.
I don't know why it's taken me 54 years, but I have finally begun to
realize just how arbitrary so many of our social and cultural institutions
are. In the 60's and 70's, we often talked about how schools basically
train us to be mindless consumer drones, but, only a few years later, we
began to "realize" how impractical it would have been do things otherwise.
And here is St. Ann's, a towering affront to conventional wisdom.
St. Ann's does not award grades. There are few rules. Students
are encouraged to explore their creative sides. And the kids are all
right-- they go on to good colleges and universities. The sky does not
fall in on them.
I have no problem believing that a school like this would be quite
successful, and that the students who spend all of their high school years
in this institution would be capable, accomplished, and competent, and ready
to take on the world.
I think thirty years ago I would have believed the products of this
system would be nearly illiterate. Just as I would have believed that
someone without access to surgery would die young. Or that a nation
without a military (like Costa Rica) would be invaded by its neighbors.
At the same time, the Obama Administration is pushing the Bush
educational program: teaching to the tests. Firing teachers and
principals if a school does not meet the minimum average. Not an iota
of effort made in the direction of teaching children how to actually think:
we've gone back to the 1950's where we only want them to read, write, and
show up at the assembly line-- or, more likely, Walmart, for their minimum
wage jobs-- and consume, consume, consume. Go into dept -- the modern
form of indentured servitude-- signing contracts they don't remotely
understand. And then voting for the candidate with the flag pin in his
lapel.
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© Bill Van Dyk
2010 All Rights Reserved
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