Hildegarde

When I was in graduate school and going through a period where I couldn’t write anything–I do not go through periods like that often, and they don’t usually last long–I decided to keep a journal.

Keeping a journal is the kind of thing writing teachers are always suggesting you do.  Writing magazines like that kind of advice, too.  I’d done my best to stay away from writing courses throughout my academic career, but I’d managed to pick up this thing about keeping a journal, and I decided I’d try it.

What happened next was either a wild success or a complete disaster, depending on how you’re defining each of them. 

On the plus side, I wrote.  I wrote a lot.  I wrote almost compulsively.  I’d often write as much as ten to fifteen pages a day, while taking a full courseload and working as a TA.

On the minus side, it took about a day and a half of that for all my writing to become distinctly suicidal.

I’m not exaggerating here.  I wasn’t writing about suicide, but I was writing things that were increasingly self-abusive:  I was stupid, I was ugly, I was at base a congenital liar, I was never going to be a writer because I didn’t write and what I wrote was bad anyway.

And on and on and on.

It would be funny, except that the more of this kind of thing I wrote the more depressed I got, not in the modern “oh, I’m depressed” sense, but in the sense of no longer being willing to eat or get out of bed.

So one day, I took the notebooks and tore them to pieces and threw them away.

I tried the experiment again a couple of years later, with the same results.

And that was the end of me and journals.

I’m bringing this up at the moment because I’ve noticed myself doing something similar here.

Oh, I don’t get suicidal, and I don’t get obsessive about writing endlessly every day.  It helps to have a life.

But I have noticed that I get very pessimisstic on certain particular subjects, and that I get that way even when I start a post not intending to write about them. 

This is sort of what happened in my last post, when I was having a perfectly good day, and ended the post on the usual whine about anti-intellectualism and schools.

Except that I am, in fact, really depressed about the situation in schools and in colleges. 

But I wasn’t intending to go there.

If you see what I mean.

Anyway, I’ve done all this in preface because I want to go back to schools for a moment, and this time to elementary and secondary schools.

And I’m aware of the fact that we’re at a disadvantage here because I think I’m the only one who has had any actual contact with elementary and secondary schools in the last ten years.  Lots of you remember your own experiences in that range of education, and what you remember is a world that is dead and gone.  Nobody reads Silas Marner any more.  They only read Catcher in the Rye in honors classes.

So, I want to answer a question that’s been put to me very often and that up to now I think I’ve answered sort of in a round about way.

What should students learn in elementary school?

The purpose of elementary school is to

a) impart basic skills necessary to functioning in the school’s society

            AND

b) give children a rudimentary understanding of their culture in order to recruit them to the defense of it.

What is the purpose of secondary education?

Both of the above, on a higher level of complexity and completeness, plus the foundation for college work for those who want to go on to it.

I think that, if I started there, I could manage to construct a decent curriculum for any particular child.  I could even manage to construct a decent curriculum for a school, although I think that would be harder.

But that’s for another day.

There’s a cycle of America’s Next Top Model I’ve nearly missed entirely, and I’ve got to go see if they’re doing an encore marathon today.

Okay, it’s silly, and it’s not Bach.

But sometimes I get silly, and ANTM is my favorite form of idiocy these days.