Star factories

Getting humbled (and inspired) by my local public schools

Have you ever heard the argument about how schools are essentially compliance factories that produce obedient workers for the capitalist machine? It’s pretty dark. The idea is that in school, what’s actually happening underneath the surface of things is that kids are learning how to follow the rules of a system that cares primarily about their productivity, not their humanity.

Like I said, it’s pretty dark. But is it true?

Before I started working with the public schools in my county six months ago, I was a bit more zealous in my intellectual dabblings than I care to be now. A closet iconoclast. I could entertain an argument like this one from a comfortable distance, which is exactly where I preferred to stay when it came to school: as far away as possible.

I would visit schools sometimes, though, as a guest author. When my book came out in 2017, some school’s used it as their all-school read. I would talk from up on stage about my walk across America, and how listening to peoples’ stories changed my life, and how would your school change if you all started listening, really listening to each other? Trustworthy listening, I called it. The kind in which our respective humanities are finally safe to come out, come out, wherever you are, wherever we are, wherever we hide ourselves away from each other. And not without good reason. We learn, most of us, each in our own way, that it’s basically not safe to be open and vulnerable. But what if we were? What if we knew? What if we were real with each other, about how we really feel, about where we really come from, about what we’re really going through? What if the canon included the texts of our own lives? What would happen, what would we become capable of, if we did the work to build the trust that’s required to know one another in a deep way? Why do we relegate our depths to the therapist’s office, or just kind of ignore it altogether, our humanity, that elephant in the room, and carry on about Shakespeare or quadratic equations or the periodic table of elements as if the room isn’t full of elephants, beautiful, precious, suffering, lonely, holy elephants?

Anyway, I had a whole thing, as you can tell. I could get pretty worked up about it at a school meeting in the auditorium, on stage, above the fray of the actual situation-on-the-ground. I would take some questions at the end. Maybe sign a few autographs. Then peace out, STAT.

Once, a school brought me in to run a professional development workshop for the faculty, and just as we were wrapping up a teacher asked me, “It sounds like you think the status quo in schools is totally off and the whole system should be torn down. Do you see any way to change it from within?”

I remember feeling exposed by his question, and surprised. I thought I’d been keeping my revolutionary cards closer to my chest. I stumbled through a response, saying that no, we can’t just tear it all down because where would the kids go, but yes, we do need to start finding ways to value the humanity in our classrooms as much as we value the other subjects we teach, and that starts with listening. How do you teach listening? You start listening. However you can. Wherever you can fit it in. Get creative. Take risks. Et cetera. I doubled-down on my shtick.

But the truth was, I did want to tear it all down.