Hildegarde

I finished the course of antibiotics for the tooth problem yesterday, and I woke up this morning expecting to be less tired and floaty than I’ve been since I hit the emergency room last week.

Instead, I woke up just as washed out as I have been for days, and with more to do, and it’s interfering with the one thing I can’t have it interfere with:  proofreading.  I’m not good at proofreading at any time, but today I’ve been a positive menance.

What I was going to do today was put up the June reading list, but I find I can’t concentrate on it at the moment. 

So let me go into some details instead.

1) My students don’t learn that  not everybody is in it for the money by seeing people around them choose professions like teaching or social work, because they think people who choose professions like teaching and social work are in it for the money.

Given the socioeconomic status that most of my students come from–especially  my deep remedial students–these are “good jobs” that are stable, pay more than anybody they know of has ever earned, and promise both stability and benefits.

Even those of my students from slightly better off families–often families in which the parents are teachers and cops themselves–look on these jobs this way.

Of course, nobody is going to make a million dollars doing that kind of thing, but–

2) My students also tend to consider these the best of the options they’re going to have. 

If their luck had been different–and they do think it’s mostly luck–and they’d been able to go to Harvard instead of Little Noprestige U–they’d definitely have chosen to be a doctor or a lawyer or something that raked in a lot of cash.

But it’s not this kind of thing that’s the real problem.

The real problem is

3) They truly believe that everyone, everywhere, make decisions maximizing their immediate and obvious self-interest and nothing else.

Last year, we had a number of scandals, including one in the small city where the university is located, involving teachers and principals in public schools falsifying answers on the state and federal competency tests.

They do–or say they do–understand that this is “wrong,” but at the same time they assume that anybody stuck in the situation (jobs and funding depend on test scores, school not going to make minimum) would do what the teachers and principals in the scandals did, and that it is somehow “not fair” for  people to get upset about it and punish the perpetrators.

But the real kicker comes when I give them stories like the one about Jonas Salk refusing to make money on a polio vaccine because it was more important to him that all children in the country could have access to it. 

This kind of thing doesn’t shock them so much as it puzzle them.  If they were in Salk’s position, they’d have sold the formula to a big drug company and made a pile they could live on without working much for the rest of their lives.

To them, that only makes sense.  Why else would you do all the work to invent such a vaccine if not to make money from it?  And why would you live the rest of your life in relative poverty if you didn’t absolutely have to?

The whole thing is even more confusing to them because there don’t seem to be the kinds of possible off-explanations that would cover it.

Most of them haven’t  heard of Mother Teresa, but when I explain her to them they brush it off with “oh, that’s religion,” in much the same way they would explain somebody else (Adam Lanza, maybe) as “mentally ill.”

4) If I gave the impression that they don’t like stories or can’t get into them, I was wrong.

They love stories, and spend most of their time pursuing them–in television and movies, admittedly, but still.

What they don’t do is see stories as in any way saying anything true about real life.

A story is, by definition, made up.

You can have unicorns in stories, and creatures from black lagoons, but those things don’t appear in the world they live in, because they don’t exist.

Give them a character that is, say, Jonas Salk, and they just assume the writer made him  up–like unicorns, such a person does not exist in the real world. 

The very fact that the character has appeared in a story is proof positive for them that he doesn’t exist outside of stories. 

And it doesn’t matter what kind of story the character appears in. Science fiction, fantasy, romance, mainstream,  literary–it’s all the same to them.

It’s “just stories.”

 I do think there’s a lot of value, at this point, to introducing them to real people who have lived by principles they have seen nowhere around them, on the (very optimistic) assumption that such examples will result in at least a couple of them realizing that there is another way to be in the world than the one they’re used to.

But–

5) They won’t get introduced to different ways of living and thinking by things like Jersey Shore.

Snooki and friends provide them no alternative to the way they live, because Snooki and friends operate on exactly the same assumptions they do.

They may be  more in  your face, or less well organized, or seemingly outside the day to day grind, but they still inhabit a world in which money and stuff are the only standards of value.

They also present a world in which it doesn’t matter how you get your money and stuff–curing cancer and dropping the F bomb 40 times in 30 minutes on national television are all the same thing.

In fact

6) If you’re not really working at it, the chances are that you can grow up in this country these days without being aware that any other standard of value has ever existed anywhere at any time for any reason.

You can certainly miss the fact that there are  people in the world around  you right now who are actually living out other standards of value.

I think that is partially due to the fact that there are fewer people around these days who do live by other standards of value.

But it’s more than that.

7) Since no society anywhere could exist in this kind of moral void, we get more and more pseudo-moralities and irreligious religions to fill in the gaps.

Morality becomes that bullying Puritanism from the post on Paula Deen I gave a link to yesterday, where  no redemption is to be had, because we are all stained with an original sin that can never be washed away.

We are to be judged decent only by living our entire lives in agonizing and unrelievable guilt, apologizing for our very existence.

They don’t actually swallow that sort of thing, of course, but it’s all they know of “morality,” so they’re fairly sure they don’t want any part of “morality” no matter who’s talking about it.

The meaning of life is, to them, unmistakeable.

He who dies with the most toys wins.