Sunday, October 1
A while back, I promised to respond to Brent
on a couple of points, so here goes.
Our culture has codes of conduct. Note that I don't mean arbitrary cultural
beliefs; I'm talking about the standards embodied by the idea of dressing
nicely when meeting with a customer. It's a matter of good culture. We
encourage kids to avoid swearing just like we encourage them to comb their
hair.
Why? Because these things are important. Culture is important.
When you belong to a group, it's important to respect the cultural norms of
that group.
Cultural norms of groups I
still, in some sense, belong to include racism, homophobia, sexism,
nationalism, strongly dogmatic religion, censorship, corporal punishment, a
deep-seated respect for authority, a misplaced emphasis on organized athletics,
contempt for scholarship, an aversion to rational thought, routine denial of
empirical reality, and a highly developed hypocrisy of language. I generally
don't respect these norms. The language thing may seem relatively minor, but I
don't actually see any reason to encourage it.
Certainly hypocrisy is useful and sometimes necessary in the real world, and
becoming an adult probably means realizing this.
Anyway, maybe all I needed to say is that I disagree: "Don't
swear" is an arbitrary cultural belief, and simply lacks
sufficient moral force to justify its imposition on free speech.
I like the Rule of St. Benedict, because Benedict addresses these sorts of
issues in a beautifully practical way: Societies need simple rules, and humans
in those societies needs to humble themselves to obey those rules (unless
harmful). The best societies mute power, and this is one of the ways in which
they do that.
(Similarly, allowing any and all language unleashes those who use language
to abuse others, both directly and indirectly. We all know people who, if
given the chance, won't shut up, abusing this power. Children have a
particularly strong tendency towards this behavior.)
I have my issues with the first point, but it's the parenthetical statement
that really interests me. I think it highlights something fundamental: If the
educational environment is built on the assumption that things have to run
smoothly, it follows that children should simply be constrained in that
environment in order to prevent the behaviors you don't want. Strict, top-down
rulesets and rigid, mandatory-minimums sorts of punishments should be in place
to enforce the mechanics of the system, because the system and its correct
functioning are the highest value.
As to behavior outside the system and its rules, we've always been given to
understand that when you force kids to stop doing stuff, they'll forever
afterwards Know Better. I think this last is demonstrably false, and the whole
paradigm sort of falls apart on closer examination.
If you start out believing that education is a process wherein things work
themselves out, with some help, and that it is usually messy and time
consuming, then you can dispense with a lot of this.
At any rate, though I can't speak to other schools from personal experience,
the system at Tamariki doesn't allow "any and all
language", in the sense of personal abuse. This is not because it
prohibits the right List of Bad Words. It is because the rules say that you
can't use language to hurt other people - and the rules, unlike the forms of
censorship most schools rely on, are subject to student input and enforcement,
and apply as well to teachers.
Brent's final points are about the scalability of democratic ed:
Seriously, I think that education of the sort Brennen is advocating does not scale.
Note that this can be okay, depending on the type of education you want. If
you want a holistic education that prepares a child ethically and
philosophically, you can't find it in public education. That sort of thing
simply doesn't scale up, from what I can see.
This is why I'd like to see public education become much more focused on
skills. In my opinion, public education works best when it's teaching
something relatively straightforward, rather than coaching a child in concepts
of freedom, personal responsibility, etc.
I sort of think that it's not so much the concepts of freedom and
personal responsibility we ought to be concerned about as it is their
practice. They may not be straightforward, but I think there probably
are not many skills more important than being free and taking personal
responsibility. That said, I guess I would far rather see a school environment
that focused purely on conveying useful skills than one full of mislabeled
ethical content - is grading really about
"accountability"?
Brent alludes to something important here: There is probably a
long-term trend of expecting schools to fill more and more functions formerly
left to family members or delegated to other social institutions (largely
religious ones, I suppose).
(Put another way, asking why public education can't be like Tamariki is akin
to asking why McDonald's can't serve six-course French meals. French cuisine
works on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis, but not when you're trying to serve
fifty million customers a
day.)
I can't directly challenge the scalability thing. It's my biggest single
problem with advocating any alternative educational program. Simply scaling
Tamariki and applying it to the U.S. would require more (and different)
teachers, a drastically different approach to facilities, the strong support of
most parents for a system that would challenge their basic beliefs... In fact,
it would require a radical shift in most of American society on a completely
unprecedented scale. This is not going to happen.
Which I don't think changes the basic question: Why would you want to serve
borderline-toxic shit to fifty million customers a day?
And on that note, I am going to sleep. More (if not more coherent) thoughts
tomorrow.
2005
October
1
