Leaving Room for Hunger

If you believe the critics, public schools can’t teach the ABC’s because of the Killer B’s: bullies, bureaucrats, and broken-down buildings.
I worry more about efficiency.
Today’s public school is a marvel of modern organization: a beehive of activity.
But where are they hiding the honey?
In my elementary days, things weren’t nearly as neat and tidy.
I remember, as a child, arriving at school everyday with a delicious sense of dread. I remember hushed accounts of spanking machines, and teachers that were odd, unusual, even spooky – at least to my literally untutored eyes. I will never forget one particularly sweet matron – a third grade teacher who honestly, earnestly believed in elves. So maybe I am romanticizing a time that was not exactly the golden age of education.
Perhaps.
Certainly today’s teachers are better educated than ever before, and deserve to be considered ‘professionals’, and paid accordingly.
But I am worried that we are squandering their skill, and surrendering our children to – heaven forbid, the statisticians!

A week ago Wednesday was my son’s first experience with that sausage-maker known in Massachusetts as the THE MCAS – and, coincidentally, was also the last day of his first journey through The Lord of the Rings.
Mary read the entire Lord of the Rings to him, out loud, every night (for the most part) over more than 100 days.
Nothing, I think, could be more stimulating to his brain, and important to his ‘development’, than to go along on that Journey with Tolkien.
At times he was exhilarated.
At times he was in tears.
There were occasions when he was angry, with the author and the world.
Who was this man called Strider?
Who were those dark riders?
Why did Sam choose to stay in the shire, while Bilbo and Sam and Gandalf, sailed away to the Havens?
But then, you may never have had the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings. Certainly though, you have felt the thrill that great writing, or travel, or a chance encounter can produce: that jolt of current down your spine?
It is the intensity of our experiences, I believe, that forge our character – not the accumulation of information.
You want facts, try a phone book.
A phone book is an efficient transmitter of facts.
A phone book however, does not have complexity, and is short on emotion. A phone book offers little in the way of adventure, and requires absolutely no imagination.
Like the MCAS.
I’m concerned that the MCAS getting in the way of our children’s education.
Are we forgetting about the joy of learning because the focus is on developing the skill of testing?
Is the entire educational experience being slowly boiled down to a series of rubbery, tasteless, tests?
Try and imagine your favorite book, reduced to a list of names of characters, incidents of plot, and other abstract facts. That would be like coming home from a cross-country trip, with nothing but snapshots of highway signs to tell the story.
Exit 3, Tom Bombadil.
Exit 7, The Orcs
Exit 17: The Eye of Sauron.
That is what I fear our focus on testing, our obsession with grades, and our panic about college admissions, is attempting to do: reduce the educational experience to its least common denominator.
I don’t fault the teachers.
The teachers I know are valiantly trying to fight the power. If they had their way their classrooms would be colorful, vibrant places full of mystery and magic, and adventure.
But they are up against a society that is content to feed their children, calorie-free canned experiences – and then expects teachers to somehow fill in the blanks.
It’s impossible.
I think we need to choose. Either school should be an enriching experience that awakens young minds to the possibilities of the world – and trusts them to choose their own path in their own time, or it can be a training camp – a rehearsal for the drudgery that awaits them.
I am, of course, using a thick, broad brush to make a point.
Drudgery doesn’t necessarily await all those who attend public schools – far from it.
The MCAS is not the Eye of Sauron, keeping an unblinking watch on the slaves of public education.
But at the very least the eye of the student is being jaundiced by our focus on what we like to call ‘results’.
If we train their minds, but fail to exercise their emotional musculature, we should not be surprised when they perform well on the standardized tests, but collapse at their first encounter with the unpredictable world that awaits them.

When the last words of The Lord of the Rings were left dangling in the air, Patrick was not happy. He couldn’t understand why the ‘Fellowship’ could not stay together. He yearned for a sugary ending but was given - even in this epic fantasy, something bittersweet instead.
Evil was defeated, for now, but the Shire did not escape unscathed.
Lives were lost, and even for those that survived there were scars, aches, and remorse that would not fade with time.
In the end Patrick didn’t have pictures.
In the end, he didn’t have any so-called facts.
When the story was over, he didn’t even receive a fancy certificate.
After 1100 pages all Patrick had was an unrecognized hunger: an emptiness in his gut that could not be satisfied by any standard fare.
I just hope that all of this testing, leaves some room for that.