It was a difficult day on campus today. After my writing class, an Iranian woman spent nearly fifteen minutes talking with me about the things that happen to women in her country. When she was done, I felt like I was gasping for breath. Imagine how she must feel.
Immediately after that, I found myself in a conversation with a former student who had just come from a sociology class, in which they watched a Frontline documentary about Air Force pilots who leave their suburban homes in the morning, go to their base, and sit in an air-conditioned room all day at a console, where they pilot remote drones that, half the globe away, drop bombs in battle zones - real bombs that kill real people, and then they go home and have dinner with their kids and help with the homework. This student was upset, in tears, about the reactions of her classmates, who saw this as a good thing - keeping our pilots out of danger. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but if you kill someone, it SHOULD hurt you.”
My chest literally ached when I left the campus. I drove home in a daze.
What was I to say to either of these women? How could I even presume that anything I do could help them?
And then I realized that I - that we, those of us who teach - already have. Education should be, MUST be, was designed to be, a place for the thoughts that are hard to speak, the ideas that are not welcome, the voice that demands to be heard even when it hurts. This is what education should be, a place to give voice to those thoughts, and an environment that encourages thinking about the meaning, about finding ways to change that which most around us embrace, but which may not be good for us.
This is what the Iranian woman wants - to change those things that cause her fellow countrywomen to suffer. It is what my former student wants - a way to change thinking that she believes is dangerous to us all - is contrary to who we say we are. It is what education should be, and, more and more, what it struggles to be.
For decades, the model of education that has trickled down to us (those of us on the front lines) from our states and from the federal government has been influenced by the need for well trained workers in a variety of industries - those with pull and influence on the politicians. We have been struggling to fit the curriculum into a model not designed to create learning in the minds of our citizens, but to train them.
We should not be training minds, we should be liberating them. It is why those of us who find ways to really teach know and understand in our hearts that we are subversives, and must stay subversive if our goal is learning and not training.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with writing? In the current market, everything. We believe, (because we are told), that the best way to become a writer is to write for the market. No one suggests, in supporting that notion, that the market may, in fact, be promoting writing, stories, and literature, that serve only to make us more compliant, to teach us nothing, to validate mediocrity.
I saw a saying recently that went, “it is better to write for yourself, and not have a market, than it is to write for the market, and not have a self.”
If you can’t see the parallel, find a teacher who will teach you.
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ReplyDeletenicely said, well put, and many more phrases of the same sentiment.
ReplyDelete(i've actually experienced the change from being in a training mind situation to liberating. i attended junior high in Medford (OR). the social studies/history curriculum appeared to be a long established training ground for ensuring that we would grow up to hate our world enemies (the communists in particular), being spoon fed propaganda by the same people who were teaching us about the evils of propaganda and controlling the minds of the young. it didn't feel right to me at all. due to other circumstances, i found myself suddenly whisked to Eugene in the middle of the second half of my eighth grade. the change in education (from more open minds) was astounding. it saddens me to find that things haven't changed as much as i'd hoped, though...)
stay subversive and fight the good fight!
It's hard to do - staying honest within that system, and gets harder as time goes on. But the pendulum swings - in recent years, I'm finding more and more students having moments of awareness like you describe - they have, as Hemingway put it, shit detectors, and they're increasingly not buying it. THAT is hopeful.
Delete“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if you kill someone, it SHOULD hurt you.”
ReplyDeleteas if it doesn't really. these kids need to get off campus and meet some actual soldiers.
Mike - while I understand (and sympathize with) your position - you're making some assumptions. First, that these are kids - and neither of them are. Second, that they don't know about the experience of soldiers. In any given term, 1/3 of my students - sometimes as much as half - are vets. And not kids at all. Including this woman. What horrified her was the drones-at-a-distance. The Iranian woman, too, had had plenty of experience with soldiers. Neither of them were clueless young college kids - both had seen plenty on their own before coming to my classes. Of *course* she knows it hurts - she was responding to the reaction of her (younger) classmates who seemed to think a sterile approach to killing was somehow better, and that it was ok to not have an emotional reaction to it.
DeleteIf the drone pilots were dropping bombs on innocent people, this might matter. Given that they are bombing al Qaeda murderers, ISIS rapists, or the kind of people that burn Jordanian air force pilots alive in cages while filming it, I can't get all sniffy that they get to go home afterwards and see their families. Not every life matters.
ReplyDelete