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> From: “Greg Swann” <gswann@presenceofmind.net>
> To: “Barb Vogel” <vogel@anti-slavery.org> > CC: “Arizona Education Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan” <lkeegan@mail1.ade.state.az.us>, > BCC: <suppressed> > Subject: Guerrilla Schooling #5: This teacher really is a slave driver... > Date: Sun, Aug 29, 1999, 6:08 AM |
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This teacher really is a slave driver...A moment’s thought would have shown him. We love that quotation. It has that measured snottiness we so obviously admire. And yet, as amusing as it might be, it is a tragic statement, too. It reminds us of how common is thoughtlessness, and how easily avoided. Americans are a charitable people, as a rule, particularly with regard to the less-than-ideal efforts of the well-intentioned. If sweet old Mr. Flugelman shows up to give a little talk about his European travels wearing mismatched socks, we might smile behind our hand, but we would not be so rude as to point out the error. And even if he confuses Florence with Venice, we still might keep silent. But there must be some level of error at which our silence becomes uncharitable, where to fail to speak is to injure by omission. Surely the same sort of logic ought to apply to our schools. Do they fail to teach our children to read? Should we say, “Well, their hearts are in the right place.” Do they teach our children a math that has nothing to do with math? Should we reply, “Well, it’s the thought that counts.” Do they becloud the waters of thought, so that our children enter school ignorant—the natural state—and emerge stupid—which is learned behavior? Should we answer, “Well, you know...” Alas, we do know. The ‘professionals’ of education are themselves very often stupid, themselves the victims of educationism. Their errors are worse—much worse—than mismatched socks, but it could seem churlish to submit their astoundingly uninformed enthusiasms to the scrutiny of reason. It might hurt their feelings, after all. And that’s absurd on a couple of grounds. First, it is cruel to treat them as though they are not responsible adults but rather larger versions of the Special Education and Learning Disabled students they unearth in such abundance; it is cruel not to hold anyone accountable for his actions, and educationists lack even the lame excuse of disability. Second, it is vicious to submit our children to people who are in fact professionals of retardation—decelerators, incapacitators, disassemblers. We spare their tender feelings by the sacrifice our children. This is no kindness. But carry things a little farther. Posit a teacher who refrains from teaching in order to put her young charges into some loathsome black market. Is it drugs? Outrageous! Is it prostitution? Insufferable! Is it illegal gun dealing? Unconscionable! No, it is even worse: A fifth-grade teacher in Colorado has converted her class of innocents into the financiers of human slavery. Yes, you read that correctly. A teacher has indoctrinated her students into being slavers. This was not their intent, of course. They thought they were freeing slaves. Instead they were rewarding slave-dealers and encouraging them to rob more people of their freedom. They worked with all their hearts and none of their minds to make an awful situation better and they succeeded only in making it horribly worse. Silence your mind, the better to hear the roars of condemnation... O, deafening silence. Are you saying, “Well...”? Well nothing. You can argue that the teacher, Barb Vogel, made a thoughtless error, but it is her job to use her mind in the service of teaching her young charges to use their minds. A moment’s thought would have shown her her error, but she forbore to think and in consequence irreparably corrupted the lives of innocent children. If you are willing to say “Well...” to this, you will say it to anything. Sadly, you won’t lack for company. We have followed this story for some while. Its predictable denouement was brought to us by Bruce Finley of the Denver Post, who is much to be commended. But the self-same Denver Post had this to say in an editorial: Nonetheless, we’re proud of the children of the Aurora school for embarking on the program. They saw human suffering, and they tried to ease it. They saw sorrow, and they tried to spread joy. And they did all these things with the very best American idealism and the most devoted efforts. That is, even though the supposed beneficiaries are worse off than they were before, and even though a group of young innocents have become unwitting promoters of human slavery, still we must excuse them and Ms. Vogel their thoughtlessness. Their hearts were in the right place—even though their minds were in the wrong place. It is unfortunate that Ms. Vogel was not a thoughtless advocate of drugs or prostitution or gun-running instead of a thoughtless financier of slavery. Maybe then people would not so thoughtlessly excuse her awful error. They may excuse her. We do not. We like for our special guests to be more comical and less tragic, but this is not sufficient grounds to deprive Ms. Vogel of what she has earned. And thus she is honored as the honorary baboon for the new issue of Guerrilla Schooling, the web-based magazine concerned with practical strategies for wresting a rigorous academic education for our children from an education establishment stoutly committed to doing everything but providing rigorous academic education. We are guerrillas, not reformers, and what we seek is a real education, not any of the many unreasonable, unreasoning facsimiles. For our children, not all children everywhere. Now, while they’re still children. Even now we should like to find something funny to say about Ms. Vogel, about her thoughtlessness, about her indoctrination of thoughtlessness in her students, about the thoughtless reactions to her thoughtlessness. But we cannot. We might weep, were we of that kind. But we are the kind that spits, which is vulgar and a detestable habit in any case. The ugly appetite that hides under cover of the name ‘justice’—which it is not—might scream for revenge. But we don’t want revenge. All we want—all I want—is for children to be so well schooled in the use of the mind that they can never be gulled into doing something vicious because it seems right, because it feels right, because some large number of the gulled say it is right. All I want is for children to learn to use their minds so well that they can never be gulled, so they do only what they know is right. Thoughtlessness is simply the failure to have thought, and we school our children so that they may learn never to fail to think. Every ugly consequence resulting from Ms. Vogel’s thoughtlessness resulted from her failure to practice the habits of thoughtful reason and from her failure to teach her students those habits. This is what she ought to be held to account for, she and all the other ‘professionals’ of education. We don’t wish for Ms. Vogel to have her mind in the wrong place, but it’s her mind; she can do with it as she pleases. But we don’t want our children to have their minds in the wrong place, and our children are not the property of the ‘professionals’ of education to do with as they please. A moment’s thought should have told us all of this long ago. But thought is a painful process. And a moment is a long, long time...
So that Ms. Vogel may ruminate on what has befallen her, we cough up cud-like the usual caveats: If you should someday find your name in the ‘To:’ line, take heart. It’s a rare honor, and you can only claim it by taking and failing to earn tax-dollars for the work of the mind. And you can always strive to do better in the future, although we won’t be reserving any breaths awaiting that outcome. If you’re in the ‘CC:’ line, it’s because you are presumed to have an interest in education. Fair warning: Being in the ‘CC:’ line will not keep you out of the ‘To:’ line. The guerrillas are in the ‘BCC:’ line, the line you can’t see. If you think we are laughing at you, you could be as much as half right. And while well-begun is half-done, this time the worm is surely done to a turn. We have more to say about Ms. Vogel of course; we could fill a book with thoughts about thoughtlessness, and the dogma we elaborate is devout anti-indoctrinationism. Plus which, we actually have something nice to say about a newspaper reporter. We tread again the paths of Richard Mitchell, so well proved. We dance a while with a pair of very classy classicists, an honor we do not deserve but revel in nonetheless. And we witness—wide-eyed and incredulous—as Wayne Lutz carries the schooling back to the schooler. Doubt it never, we are smokin’. Feast upon our mesquite-grilled goodness at: http://www.presenceofmind.net/Guerrilla/ When you’re picking your teeth, give some thought to the slavery of ignorance and what we can do to eradicate it. Surely this is the necessary first step to eliminating the slavery of the body. If our minds are in the right place, our hearts will be also. The one must follow the other, as any thoughtful mind can discover. Until next time, Greg Swann
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