Hildegarde

I think it’s interesting who does like Obama and who doesn’t–I like him quite a bit, and I remember the Carter administration too well to think he’s the “most informal” president we’ve ever had–but the part of the VDH article that really strikes me is that part about “coarseness.”

I want to be a little careful here.  Lynne Cheney made me a fan of  Eminem.  She went on and on at some hearing about how he sings about wanting to rape and murder his mother, and it made me crazy, so I sought out the song and the lyrics, and it turns out that he’s quite consciously talking about his reaction to his mother’s Munchausen by proxy.  And we all have fantasies of violence we never will and never will want to carry out.

So I’m not going to have the fit VDH does about rap and hip hop and all the rest of it.  It’s like anything else, more complicated than not, and the fact that a lot of it is full of Anglo  Saxonisms of one sort or another is mostly reflective of the lives these people led before they started making music.

And no, I’m not saying it’s all relative, and a world of non-stop cussing, respect for nothing but money and violence, and crack dealers on every  corner is “just as good” as one of stable intact families and respect of education and manners.   I’m only saying that that world exists.  It is what it is.  I don’t think it’s a bad thing that some of the people in it have found a way to express the reality of it. 

Some of them are more interesting than others–there’s a subset of rappers who seem to have nothing to dalk about but “look, I’ve got a lot of mone now and I can get laid all I want,” but there are others (Eminem among them) who are actually commenting on that world and what it means to live in it. 

But the thing about the commercials, I definitely get–if I  have to listen to one more  paean to one more cream or pill that promises to increase the size or staying power of the  American penis, I think I’m going to scream.  I mean,  I know that men are supposed to fixate on that organ to the exclusion of common sense, but I really don’t need to hear about it 24/7.  In fact, I don’t really need to hear about it at all.

The same goes for various feminine hygiene products, the various uses of K-Y jelly, and all those laxatives that promise to do precise things to the color, shape and consistency of my stool. 

Sometimes it seems to me that hundreds of people over hundreds of years worked very hard to end censorship, and when they did the culture didn’t talk about politics or art or even real medical problems.  It just hunkered down into obsessing about sex.

Somebody told me once that no matter what it is you can think of, there’s a branch of porn devoted to it.  And it’s all out there, on the Internet.  BDSM, which used to be a kinky, forbidden and slightly yucky topic in my adolescence, is now the fodder of jokes on prime time TV.  Everybody is into spanking now, except parents, who have mostly given it up.

I’m not much for formality.  I don’t really see the point of elaborate rituals of manners, and one of the things I’ve always liked better about the US than the UK is the fact that we do tend to be very informal.  Informality can be, and often is, a way of expressing lack of deference–you may be a big shot lawyer, or even Secretary of the Interior, but you don’t know how to fix your own God damned plumbing, and I do.

Well, I don’t.  But you know what I mean.

It’s not the informality, but something else that is often lumped in with it that I think is the problem–the utter, relentless leveling of everything and everybody to a standard so low that it becomes less and less possible to imagine anything better.

Certainly that is, at least partly, a result of the culture of money–the last twenty years of a world in which money was the only thing that mattered.  It’s been better to be Bernie Madoff lately than to be the local electrician or the single mother with two part time jobs.  Madoff may be going to jail, but he gets respect even from the media that rails against him.  The electrician and the single mom are just losers.  In a culture that values cash above all else, not having it means your life is worthless, no matter what else you do with it.

But it’s not just the culture of money that’s the problem.  It’s the attitude–and I see it in a lot of my kids–that nobody really achieves anything.  It’s all flash and dash, fake and brag–people say they’ve done all this stuff, but it isn’t really true, they’re just making it up, or faking it with mirrors, or something.

The inherent contradiction of this attitude is such that I sometimes try to entangle it.  The bridges and roads and skyscrapers are there.  The plays are there, whether you think Shakespeare wrote them or not.   The “Emperor’s Concerto” is there.

Unless you think those things were put on earth by God or aliens, somebody must have “done” them. 

I would make this argument and see students accept it, at least rationally–and then come back in the next week with the same attitude they had before.  I think that’s because the purpose of the attitude–it’s all flash and dash, it’s all a fake–isn’t to make a statement about the world, but to provide an exculpatory foundation for not doing anything with the lives they have.

And the need for that exculpatory foundation comes from an inner conviction that they themselves are not capable of doing much of anything of significance.

The point needs to be stressed, because I think that one of the differences between the world VDH longs for and the one he has now is that more people felt that they were capable of going out and doing something with their lives.

I don’t mean that more people felt they could go out and be President, or CEO of Ford,  but that they thought they could be instrumental in the world, they could achieve something.

Part of that was that we offered them achievements we respected that were not  CEO of Ford.  We honored work and saving and sacrificing money and time and dreams for our children.  We at least gave lip service to the idea that to be poorish and honest was a better life than to be rich and corrupt.

There are very few things that my kids are capable of doing that the world wil respect them for, and the kids that do the best are the ones who have found a way to focus on levels of achievement that are actually within their grasp.

In a way, my very poorest kids have an advantage here.  For a kid from the projects whose mother was a crack addict, who was in and out of the foster care system, who never knew if she’d be able to sleep indoors even on the coldest nights, a job as a parole officer, an apartment in a neighborhood without gangs, and two kids who stay in school amounts to one big, enormous deal, one she can be and is proud of. 

For my middle class kids, the ones who end up in my classes because they aren’t very bright, the news is all bad.  The world they come from will not respect most of what they are actually capable of doing, and the schools they come from do nothing to explain why the other things (academic success, careers in the professions) is worthy of respect.

In middle class towns where the school system is geared up to provide a real and rigorous education to the top ten percent and to let everybody else slide–it’s either that, or get seriously sued by the parents of that other ninety percent–academics are a joke and success at them not only looks arbitrary, but probably is. 

And, of course, the kids are scared.  They know they don’t “get” a lot of what they’re supposed to get.  They know they’re not capable of doing what their parents do, and that their parents consider them somehow defective for not being capable.

I seem to have strayed far from the point here, but I do think that all this is connected. 

And I’m reading an essay now on Pico della Mirandola and his ideas on the dignity of man, and I think that what’s happened to us is that we’ve deprived human beings of any dignity at all.  

Unlike VDH and a lot of other people who write about this particular thing, I don’t believe dignity requires tea party manners or relatively formal clothing.

I do think it means living with the understanding that being a human being is something you have an obligation to live up to.

Maybe what VDH really misses is the feeling that was prevalent even in the early 1960s–that being an American is something Americans have an obligation to live up to.

I don’t know if other countries had that same sense of themselves.   I remember when we had it, though, and I think itls largely gone.

Yesterday, I wrote a post so lame I ddn’t bother to publish it.  I know I tend to blither, but by the time I got finished with Luther, Calvin, the doctrine of predestination and all the rest of it, even  I didn’t know what I was trying to say.

I’ve had a bit to sleep on it, though, and I think  I can finally get to the point.

When did we decide that “I meant well” was an excuse for practically anything at all?

Okay, we don’t always put it that way.  The formulation I’m most used to is, “But  I was doing it because I was concerned!”  or “But  I was doing it because I care about you!”

Honestly, there are times when I really, really wish some people would being “concerned” about me and mine.

Somebody posted a note about something else that indicated that he thought that the problem with the therapeautic culture was that it thought it could rely on reason by itself–without,  I presume, God–but the truth is that there is nothing particularly rational about the therapeutic mind.

In fact, if religion were to be defined as the acceptance on faith of a set of unproven and unprovable dogma, the culture of therapy would qualify as a religion far more thoroughly than the Catholic Church would.

But at the base of that culture is that formulation, the underlying assumption that is taken as self-evidently exculpatory no matter how one behaves–“I’m concerned!”  “I care!” 

Let me leave off here the fact that this formulation is almost always a lie.  From what I can see of the forced ministrations of the therapeutic culture, “caring” counts a whole lot less in the motives of its practictioners than power.

My problem is that I don’t understand how we got to the place where intentions were all that matters.

It’s not that intentions are negligible.  If you run over a dog with your car, it really does matter whether you did it deliberately or accidentally because you couldn’t see the do out your rearview mirror when you were backing up.

And our criminal justice system makes allowances for intention, too–that’s why there’s something called “involuntary manslaughter.’ 

I know I’ve gone on about this before, but it’s the one thing that keeps striking me about  The  Situation,  and about some of our contemporary politics, too.

People keep justifying the most outrageous behavior by saying, “But what other motive could I have?  I was just concerned!”

The issue this seems to cling to most closely these days is definitely “assisted suicide,” by which almost nobody actually means assisted suicide.  I’m sure there are cases out there where some guy desperately wants to end his battle with cancer but can’t get a doctor to prescribe enough pain medication for him to take an overdose, but those aren’t the cases that make the news, and for good reason.

For one thing, there aren’t a lot of them.  If there’s one thing a doctor knows, it’s that patient who truly want to get hold of a lethal dose of drugs will usually find a way to do it–by going to multiple doctors, by hoarding pills, by stealing stuff out of other people’s medicine cabinets and sometimes even doctor’s offices.

The cases that usually hit the news aren’t assisted anything, they’re outright euthanasia–the patient who’s been in the coma a long time, the spouse with a debilitating disease.

These cases didn’t used to be difficult to adjudicate–no matter how much you “couldn’t stand to see her suffer” anymore,  you didn’t get to kill her.  Nor were vague assertions that “she’d always said she’d rather die than end up like this” accepted as exculpatory.  We didn’t kill off our old and our sick, period.  No matter what your reason for doing it, you went to jail.

In a way, this sort of thing mirrors a lot of contemporary thinking about God and religion, at least that by people who aren’t really committed to any particular religion in any particular way.

Ask the American public if they think they’re going to Heaven when they die, and almost everybody is just plain sure they are.  All that matters is being “a good person” and “a good person” is “somebody who cares.”  The idea that there are things they can do–lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, murder–that their good motives will not absolve them from engenders first incredulity and then resentment.  Who are you to judge them, anyway?  You don’t know what they feel!

Maybe this is what drives me so crazy about the word “inappropriate.”  The implication is that actions are not right or wrong, but only right or wrong for the situation we’re in at the moment.

And there are certainly areas in which this is true enough.  My husband’s Italian family tended to live emotionally large–fights were noisy and physical, upsets led to screaming and crying. they behave in a way that would be considered outright nuts at Yale.  There is, in general, nothing right or wrong about emotional expressiveness or emotional restraint, only arenas in which each is appropriate or inappropriate.

But lying to someone or manipulating him, especially someone who has reason to believe he can trust you, isn’t “appropriate” or “inappropriate,” it’s wrong.  It doesn’t matter what your intentions are.   It doesn’t matter what your motives are.  It doesn’t matter how much you care. Even if you really do care, and you’re not using “caring” as a mask for a naked grasp for power, what you’re doing is still wrong.

And that,  I think, is the basic assumption at the back of the detective novel.   The genre does recognize the fact that many people do wrong out of what they think are the best of motives, and sometimes out of even genuinely good motives.   It upholds the truth that the wrongness of some actions inheres in the action, not in the intention with which we commit it.

Okay, that was a truly terrible sentence.

And I have to go off and teach.

Having regained some of my equilibrium over the last couple of weeks, I’m back to reading the kind of thing that makes some of you claim that I read the way people eat spinach–because it’s good for me, not because I enjoy it.

But I do enjoy the stuff I read.  It makes me very happy, often, and even better it sets off series of thoughts in my head that sometimes make me happier, and that’s in spite of the fact that I never seem to come to any firm conclusions.

Today, though, I’ve been thinking about the nature of the detective story, as we were talking about it before–and specifically about the fact that the detective story assumes a world in which people are in control of their actions and responsible for what they do.

That is, a world in which people are fully capable of choosing to do evil or choosing to do good.

The reason this has stuck in my head at the moment is that I decided to follow a long month of reading my way through various novels by  Martha Grimes by pulling a thing called Renaissance Thought and the Arts off my TBR pile.  Renaissance Thought and the  Arts is an old book, published originally in the early 1960s, by a famous and widely respected intellectual historian named Paul Oskar Kristeller.

The book is actually a compilation of several scholarly papers published elsewhere, including a two new to the edition released in 1990, and it’s one of those things I have lying around without any clear idea of how it got here.  Sometimes I buy books I don’t read for years.  Sometimes people send them to me.  Who knows?   A couple of years ago, I went through a phase of reading a lot about Florence, Italy, including a couple of really nice histories that show that the Mafia wasn’t invented in Sicily in modern times.

Except, of course, they didn’t call it the Mafia, they called it the government of Renaissance  Florence.

Whatever.  Somehow, I ended up with this book, which is almost entirely about the Italian Renaissance, and yesterday I decided it would make a nice change from  Melrose Plant, Richard Jury and Sergeant Wiggins.

This morning, I reached the essay about the moral thought of the Italian Renaissance, and what struck me was this:

One of the biggest controversies of the time was that between those who believed that the will was the tool of the reason (or the passions) as the individual willed it, and those who thought that the will, having been corrupted by the Fall, could not do good without the grace of  God.

The first thing that struck me is that the roles of changed–if we had a modern discussion of this issue, the people defending the idea that people can choose to do good or evil would include most contemporary  Western Christians, while the people defending the idea that man is not capable of so choosing, that his “decisions” are actually determined by forces outside his control, would be largely composed of people who do not believe, or whose religious commitments are at least not traditionally Christian.

In our modern day argument, the deciding-isn’t-definitive people would cite things like poverty, or child abuse, or the influence of the media instead of the devil to explain why the individual can’t make the choice, but the agents of helplessness matter less here than the assumptions of helplessness. 

In the Renaissance, though, the battle lines were clear.  It was the pagan philosophers who insisted on the primacy of reason over will, who believed that once we know what is right, we are fully capable of acting on that knowledge.   It was the  Christian Church and its philosophers and theologians who insisted, with St. Paul, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  Man can know the right and find himself incapable of acting on that knowledge.  He can know what that an act is wrong and still find himself compelled to commit it.

I’ve always thought that the Christian account of the relationship between reason and will made a lot more sense, and was in a lot more agreement with the world as I’ve seen it, than the pagan one did–but it’s the pagan one that gives us the  Enlightenment, and it’s the pagan one that underlies the classic detective story.

The classic detective story assumes that the murder knows that murder is wrong and can stop himself from committing it, but gives in to his irratoinal passions (greed, lust, pride) instead.  The narrative arc precludes any acceptance or assumption that the perpetrator needed help from outside himself in order to control himself.  If he needed that, then his culpability for the crime is diminished, and it would not be justice to send him to jail for life or see him hanged. 

I know a fair number of detective novels at least nominally based on Christian principles–their detectives are priests or nuns, for instance–and yet, in none of them, even the explicitly Christian ones published by  Christian publishing houses, is this matter of the weakness of the will after the Fall even approached.  

What’s more, I know that a fair number of the people on this blog who defend the idea that men and women can be held accountable for their actions because they are capable of controlling them are committed Christians, too, and none of them has ever brought up the problem of the Fall for any such assumption.

I’m not saying that an acceptance of the idea of Original Sin, literal or metaphorical, requires you to absolve men and women of rape, murder and embezzlement, only that it seems odd to me that the modern positions are where they are.  

It does seem true to me that there is a kind of mind body problem going on within each and every one of us all the time–that Paul was right, and so was Augustine, when they cautioned that even the strictest and most serious resolve to do good and not evil might not be enough to compel our actions all the time.

I’m also sure that a society that assumes that people can control themselves and a moral system that makes the same assumptions is more likely to produce people who control themselves most of the time than a society that assumes the opposites of these things–but then, that, too, is an indication of the effect of outside forces on internal decisions.

In case you’re wondering, I have no idea where to go from here, or what any of this is supposed to mean.   It just feels to me like an interesting problem, and one of the ones we’re in the middle of trying to solve while pretending we’re not.

If civilization is not something we have, but something we do–than  I’m having a hard time figuring out what we should be doing.

First, let me start off this post by saying I’m really beginning to feel that I have to go out and read Silas Marner.  I never have, and it was never assigned in any school I went to, or in any school my sons went to, but it seems to be such an excruciatingly awful experience it’s put a lot of you off the Great Tradition as a matter of principle–and I’m not even sure it properly belongs in the Canon.

That said, there are a couple of differences between me–and Janet, and, I think, Raphael–on the subject of what to assign in elementary and secondary schools, and the first one has to do with why we assign reading at all.

I don’t think it’s the job of the schools to “instill a love of reading,” and in fact I don’t think they can do it in any but the most exceptional cases.   Instructional situations are not meant to instill love, they’re meant to instill information–and in elementary and high school, I  mean information, not knowledge.

The first kind of information such reading is meant to instill is an understanding of how the  process is done–enough in the way of knowledge of form, vocabulary, and cultural context to make it possible for you to read a New ork Times op ed, or an Agatha  Christie mystery, and know what it said.

The second kind of information such reading is meant to instill is a glancing acquaintance with the fact that there is a great tradition, and that some writers and some works are importnt in it. 

I really mean a glancing acquaintance.   I don’t expect your average college sophomore to be able to analyze, dissect, or even fully appreciate “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” or King Lear, but I do expect him to know that there were writers names Geoffrey Chaucer and  William Shakespeare who wrote the works in question, that the first came earlier in time than the last, that the first wrote poetry and the second plays in poetic form as well as poetry, etc. 

Right down to the twentieth century and George Orwell. 

It should not be necessary for an entire college composition class to be stopped dead in its tracks because no student in the room knows what Nadine Strossen means when she says that the new surveillance systems being installed in malls are reminiscent of 1984.

This is, really, a very basic and undemanding level of information I’m asking for here, and it doesn’t require any high school student, in a traditional classroom or out of it, to truly understand Shakespeare, or even William Blake.   It is only necessary that such students know that these people existed and that they are important and maybe a little about why.

On the elementary school level, I’m asking for even less–in American venues, I’d say that a thorough acquaintance with things like “Paul Revere’s Ride” and the stories of Washington  Irving, placed in the context of “these are the things people wrote because they wanted to assert their new identity as Americans” would do.   Other countries would of course have their own literary works of that kind, ones that everyone calling themselves “Italian” or “french” or “swedish” should know. 

Often such works are not canonical at all (over the river and through the woods…), and they’re rarely difficult to read and to understand.

But although  I don’t think elementary and secondary education should be about “instilling a love of reading,” if that was what I was going for, the last thing I’d give them is the kind of work by a contemporary author that “asks interesting questions.”

Okay, I must apologize to Janet here before I start, because I may be misunderstanding her.  She didn’t give any examples of writers in that vein, so I may have assumed something I shouldn’t.

But when  I hear things phrased like that–contemporary writers who ask interesting questions–what I think of is Judy Blume and those endless “young adult” problem novels about  sex, drugs, rock and roll, divorce, sexual identity, high school outcasts, yada yada yada yada yada.

If that was all  I knew of reading when I was in school, I’d have walked out the doors after graduation and never bohered to read anything else again.  Lots of people here think Silas Marner is the ultimate literary turn off.  I think it’s The Outsiders, and all its cousins.

The problem with these books for me is that they are just one more reflection of the therapeutic culture promoted by the school, by parents, by teachers, by almost everybody, until we’re damned near drowning in it.  They ask questions, yes, but they’re always the same questions, and they’re always the wrong questions.

Romeo and Juliet has more to say about the experience of teen-agers in love–the full experience–than any Judy Blume novel ever could, because Shakespeare understood that such love is violent and destructive and only worthwhile at all because it is both. 

Judy Blume and her sister authors would cluck and sigh over all this “inappropriate” behavior and try to urge the lovers to mature “choices,” but none of that is true to the experience involved, and none of it will stop the next suicide pact in your local high school.  Shakespeare might, because anybody who reads that play (or sees it) sees just those emotions they really do feel, instead of being told (tacitly, but bluntly) that they aren’t real emotions at all, or that they’re so out of left feild that they need to be fixed.

People are what they are.  They are not what the therapeautic culture tells them they are.

Don’t get too fixated on individual suggestions–I’m not demanding any one book in particular. What I’m saying is that if you want to instill a love of reading, then you have to give kids real books, books that mirror and even celebrate all that “inappropriate” behavior.

Yes, of course, a lot of The Iliad is men behaving badly, but that’s because men–and especially young men–do behave badly.  It’s perfectly natural, and has as much to do with evolution and hormones as it has to do with “choices”–hell, a lot more to do with evolution and hormones.

In modern society, of course, we expect men to control themselves better than they would have been expected to in the world of the Trojan War, but that doesn’t change their nature, nor does it make pious little problem novels that define such behavior as “understandable acting out” that can be made right by more of those “good choices” true to life.

What good literature presents us with is the full range of human experience, good and bad, moderate and extreme, and insists that it is all legitimate, all of it.  It is all part of being human. 

What the therapeutic culture and all those problem novels present us with is a vision of the “normal” human being that is not normal to human beings, or at least not to most of us.

The first books I loved were defintely the stories about Nancy Drew, but the first books I couldn’t stop reading were by Dickens, and Dostoyevski, and, yes, Hemingway.  The people in them did not have problems, and the books did not ask questions, interesting or otherwise.

What they did do was present me with people, lots of people, different people, served up raw and identified as fully and legitimately human, with “choices” just as valid as the ones made by the people who made the “right” ones.

I had a good friend for many years who had a history of clinical depression, the really awful kind that makes you just sit for hours on end and makes it impossible for you to do anything.  She spent years going to doctors who gave her antidepressant drugs.  Some of them did nothing.  Others did, but left her blank, with no sex drive, and not much ambition.

And then she discovered something: smoking cigarettes not only temporarily lifted the depression, they did so without impairing her in any way.  They were relatively cheap, she could self-dose any time she needed to, and the result was a career on a jet-speed track and a life she really loved.

In a contemporary problem novel, all these benefits of smoking would have been illusions, and our heroine would learn that they were, find the perfect antidepressant drug, and start making “good” and “approproate””choices” in her life.

And anyone with my friend’s particular set of circumstances would, on reading that novel, know that it was a load of crap.  And if that was all she knew of novels, she’d conclude–with reason–that all novels were just loads of crap, just one more delivery system for the Official Version.

If you have to insist on trying to instill a love of reading, keep kids as far away from those contemporary writers who ask interesting questions as you possibly can.

And now, of course, Janet will tell me she eas really talking about Umberto Eco and Joses Saramago.

John says that teaching somebody to recognize whether an op-ed is in favor of abortion or against it, for instance, isn’t teaching how to read but teaching how to think.

And I’ve thought about it, and I don’t agree. 

Teaching someone to disset the op-ed’s argument and decide whether it’s valid or not is teaching how to think, but simply teaching students to recognize WHAT is being said–with that WHAT defined very broadly, so far–is a mechanical process that requires less thinking than it does information.

It requires first expanding vocabularies–it’s remarkable how few words my students know, but it’s even more remarkable how few works even good students know.  What’s even more frustrating is how unwilling they are to ask anyone what a word means, or to look it  up, even on a computer with Internet access.  If they don’t know what a word means, they glide over it and try to “get” it from context, which almost never works, especially when they’re faced with an unfamiliar idea, opinion or subject. 

Nor or these words necessarily difficult or esoteric–I’ve run into brick walls on words that appear nearly every day in any newspaper, even theones aimed at not very educated audiences.

What’s more, vocabulary has to include not just individual words but at least some idiomatic phrases, and some cultural touchstones–not being able to decipher ‘the tower of Babel” or “the ant and the grasshopper” will make it difficult to read in any meaningful sense, which is why the E.D. Hirsch cultural literacy approach works as well as it does.

After vocabulary, in the broadest sense, you have to teach forms and structures.

It’s not that it’s so important to know specifically what English and Italian sonnets are and how they differ, and that McLuhan was, to an extent, right–the medium is at least partially the message, and form frames and informs content.  An essay entitled “A Modest Proposal to Solve Global Warming” is different than an essay entitled “What We Need To Do About Global Warming”–if you can’t recognize that the first title signals satire and that satire does not advocate the things it seems to be advocating, you’re going to get yourself in a lot of trouble.

My students invariably read Katha Pollitt’s “It Takes Two:  A Modest Proposal for Holding Fathers Equally Accountable” as if she meant every word of a set of completely outrageous and unlikely proposals, and respond to essays by Dave Barry with, “Sometimes I thought this writer was trying to be funny.”

Literary form is not simply “nice to know.”  If you want to understand what you’re reading, it’s essential that you be able to recognize what it is you are reading. 

But most of all, I think what students need to learn to read is a wide range of experience in works of the imagination and ideas.

So much of K-12 education has become handing out bromides–hate and elitism are bad!  tolerance is good!  everything is an opinion!–that it can be almost impossible for a college freshman to recognize the fact that they’re looking at a different opinion.

And it’s not that they can’t learn.  When they’ve been presented with alternatives by their schools or by the culture at large, they’ve got no problem hearing what that side wants to say.  On Big Issues, like abortion or gay marriage, where the culture is full of debate, they can figure out whether Author A is for or against, almost entirely because they’re aware that there is a for and against.

Take something a little subtler, however, and you’ll see my problem.  Every term, I pass out a set of short pieces to be rendered into paraphrase, and one of these was a short article for a midwestern newspaper in praise of elitism.

The piece was not difficult in terms of vocabulary, and the woman who wrote it was not shy about coming out and saying what she meant:  there is good art and bad art, the difference between the two is fact and not opinion, and you are a better and more worthwhile person if you can recognize and appreciate the first instead of the second.

Now, you can agree with the sentiment or not, but the fact is that my students can’t even identify it.  Their most common resopnse to this piece is to declare that they didn’t  understand a word of it.  Their second most common response is to say it says that “everybody has different opinons about what is good or bad art, so it’s up to you to decide what you like.”  In other words, exactly the opposite of what the article actually says.

The discussions that follow this reading are fascinating–it sometimes takes me an entire class to convince some students that the writer is saying what she is actually saying.  When they find out that there is an entire tradition in the same vein, hundreds of years of people saying this same thing, and lots of people in the same institution they are thinking it, they’re literally stupefied.

If there is one thing that students do not get in their education before college, it is an acquaintance with contending ideas and traditions.  Rather, back to that therapeutic culture again, we have decided what is “healthy” for them to have, and we push it in a way that implies that nobody anywhere ever thought anything else–or, if they did, it was a long time ago, when people were ignorant.

In other words, I think s tudents, to learn to read well, need to read some things that are not the Official Version of events.  People used to smoke, a lot.  They knew it was bad–no, they weren’t being duped by the tobacco companies; they were calling them “coffin nails” even in the Twenties–but they liked it, and lots of admirable people did it.  Lots of people think that the Warrior Ethic is a good thing, not a bad one, and that war sometimes is the answer.  There are people who reject equality and do no believe it is a good thing.  They have reasons, and arguments, that are coherent.

What I’m getting at, I think, is that we need to provide students with an acquaintance with a broad range of nonfiction, including nonfiction whose ideas we find morally wrong or hateful, and that we REALLY need to provide students with an acquaintance with imaginative literature that rejects the conventional wisdom of the therapeutic ethic–a pciture of men and women behaving throughout the full range of human possibility, almost none of it “sick” just because we don’t like it.

Which goes to indicate that I saw Janet’s post just a few seconds ago, and not only won’t I throw her off the blog–I don’t actually know how to throw anybody off the blog, and I don’t want to–I’ll devote all of tomorrow’s post to why I think she’s wrong.

As for The Iliad and men behaving badly–yes, of course  Exactly.

So–John thinks it’s impossible to teach anybody to think, and Lymaree thinks it can be done, but I  was really asking for a lot lesst–I want to teach people to read.

You can, in fact, teach some levels of analysis–literary and logical–even to students with very little in the way of intellectual talent, but what I want is to teach them how to figure out if the author of the op-ed is in favor of abortion or against it, and whether the article on autism and vaccinations says that vaccinations cause autism or not.

The simple truth of the matter is that even reading simple informative work like this is a matter of decoding not only the individual words, but the form they’re structured in and the allusions they make.

And every writer makes allusions.   It’s not possible to write much of anything without offhand references to something or the other, usually things the writer thinks all her readers will automaticaly understand.  If we couldn’t do that, we would have a hard time expressing much of anything in a short form. 

Noah and the ark.  A stitch in time saves nine.   One if by land, two if by sea–almost everything we read is full of references of this kind, and if they mean nothing to you, the chances are good that you’re not going to understand what’s in front of you.

What’s more, if you don’t know how to recognize satire, if you don’t know what a hypothetical is, if you can’t tell the difference between a presented point of view and the narrative voice–you’re not going to be able to understand much, either.

All these things can be taught, and they’re not just nice to know, they’re need to know.   Most people will have, in daily life, far more use for this information than they will for any but the most rudimentary forms of algebra, if that.  

I could make a similar case for basic history.

As things go now, we teach virtually nobody any of these things.  Our top ten percent, coming to the process naturally, gets practice, the rest get nothing but one more round of socially concerned young adult novels.

As for psychology and the various witch hunts and moral panics we’re prone to–I agree we’re prone to them, which is why  I think we need to be very careful about who we empower to enforce them.

At the moment, in the United States, we have sent out a vast army of “mandatory reporters” armed with think training in anything, little experience with real life, and endless “checklists” purporting to help even the uninitiated identify children and adults with “mental health issues.”

If you’ve never seen such a checklist, you could try this one:

http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/adhd/l/bl_adhd_quiz.htm

or, almost better yet, this one:

http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/c/childhood_onset_schizophrenia/symptoms.htm

The first is a checklist for ADHD, and includes such things as disliking homework and interrupting when people are talking.  The second is for childhood onset schizophrenia, and although it’s better–hallucinations!–it includes things like “poor attention span” and “inappropriate expression of emotions.”  Practically every kid has a poor attention span for stuff he doesn’t like, and “inappropriate” is in the eye of the beholder, even when the mismatch between environment and expression is very large.

I wonder what a kid from a large, largely immigrant Italian family like Bill’s would do when, thrust into a buttoned-down WASP school environment, he gets upset–do you think he’d act “appropriately” as the school would define it, or in the way he sees every day at home?

The symptom I like best from the second list, though is, “talking to yourself.”  You’d better lock me up.  I do it all the time, and have, ever since I was a child.  I talk out loud, with emotion, and with hand gestures.  I rehearse arguments I’m about to have with people, I rehearse class presentations, I rehearse stuff I’m about to write, and sometimes I  just fantasize, yes, even at my age. 

Of course, the difference between me and a schixophrenic talking to himself is that, if you stop me mid-talk, I’m usually a little embarrassed, but I’m not disoriented, I can tell you what I was doing and I can go right in to a sensible conversation about it or something else.

But–it’s all well and good to say that “professionals” will be able to tell the difference between cultural dislocations and “real” mental illness, but in clincial psychologists are notoriously bad at this, and the people we have empowered to spot such “disorders” in our children aren’t even clinical psychologists.  They’re teachers, nurses and social workers, often  provincial as hell in terms of their acquaintance with the behavior of cultural groups other than their own, who not only rely on the checklists to tell them when something is wrong, but who are often primed to find “disorders” whether they’re there or not.

After all, if T.S. Eliot was right, and all the evil in the world is caused by people trying to be important, then the school nurse who wishes she was  doctor or the teacher who finds her classroom life boring and meaningless are primed to get their personal significance from the heroic effort to identify and save children with “disorders.”  If parents complain, or people who know the child in other contests protest–well, that’s all just denial, and the child needs to be saved from the other people in his life as well as from his disorder.

If a kid is accused of stealing, or running away, or anything else that can be called a crime, he’s got fewer rights than adults, but he’s got rights–to confront his accusers, to present evidence in his behalf, to go before a judge and in some cases to go before a jury.

A kid accused of having a “disorder” has no rights.  The “diagnosis” can be pasted on him at any time and he can be forced to take drugs, spend time in a “secure” mental health facility, or simply to carry the label for the rest of his life on a record that will follow him to every school, college and job he wants.  Never mind making it untrue of him that “anyone” can grow up to be President.

And any attempt at self defense becomes yet another set of symptoms.  A child who claims to have been sexually abused is showing a symptom of sexual abuse–but a child who claims not to have been sexually abused is also showing a symptom of sexual abuse.   It’s a box that, once entered, cannot be escaped.  

We complain, on this blog and elsewhere, of the stubborness of belief in the face of contrary evidence–the checklists are the biggest and most powerful examples of that that we have in our society today.   Once one of these people decides tha the kid has a “disorder,” there’s no way to disprove it, or protest it, or defend against it.   The kid’s very impulse to reject the diagnosis becomes yet another proof that the diagnosis is true.

Moral panics will come and go, but this is more than the operation of a moral panic.   It’s an institutionalized form of injustice that harms hundreds of children and families every year, and that is going to become increasingly dysfunctional as the society around us becomes more culturally diverse. 

If psychology is science, then it ought to be able to  provide evidence of its efficacy at the same level as any other kind of medicine.

If it’s not science–and I don’t thin kit is–then it should not be allowed to wield this kind of power over children.  

Or anybody.

Well,  I could start this off by arguing with  John about what we need to know–if “reading” is one of those things every student needs, then the great classics of the tradition and understanding how to recognize and decode literary forms are also “need to know” items, for the simple reason that people who cannot do those things cannot really read.  Oh, they’ll decipher the instructions on their TV dinners well enough, but they’ll run into brick walls of misunderstanding every time they try to read a newspaper or understand a political commentator on television, never mind trying to read a mystery novel in third personal multiple viewpoint and being able to figure out the difference between what the character believes and what the writer advocates.

And, trust me, if you don’t think that this kind of inability to read is a big problem  you’ve yet to meet the average American college student.

But that’s a topic for a different time.  The topic this time  is the therapeutic culture and the centrality of schools.

I didn’t say I wanted to abolish schools.  As far as I’m concerned, the present system of schooling both public and private can go chugging on merrily as it has done–BUT.

And it’s a big  BUT.

Here’s how the system works now:

Happy  College requires all of its entering freshmen to have received three years instruction in a foreign language, two years in history, one year in a laboratory science, four years in English, and up through Algebra I in math.

Presumably, it requires those things because it wants entering freshmen to have a certain basic level of knowledge before they start college work.

Student A has been homeschooled, so in order to satisfy Happy College, she must take AP tests,  SAT-II tests, provide portfolios of her work, etc, so that HC can verify that she knows what she is supposed to know.

Student B has gone to Merry  Valley Senior High  School, “taken” all the proper “courses,” and received a  B or better in each one.  Happy College therefore assumes Student B knows what it wants him to know, and requires no further proof of it than the basic SATs, which are supposed to measure aptitude.

Why, exactly, do classroom “courses” enjoy this kind of privilege?  It would be one thing if the people who “took” such courses and got “good” grades in them actually showed up on their college campuses knowing what the “courses” were supposed to teach–but even the colleges don’t expect that these days.  Even the high level first tier ones offer lots of remedial options in math and English–the very basic stuff the  SAT-I is supposed to take care of–because so many of even their suburban good-suburb admits are completely clueless when it comes to high school level work.

A significant blow to the centrality of schools could be leveled just by ridding the system of the prejudice in their favor.  Let the schools go on doing what they do, but their grades would not be grounds for admission to any college or vocational course and their students would be required, as homeschooled students are now, to demonstrate their knowledge and ability on third party, open to all tests or in processes like portfolios or presentations.

 This was, after all, pretty much the system across the Western world prior to  WWI–whether you prepped or not, you got into Yale or  Columbia by taking the college’s admission test and passing it. 

These days, schools no longer certify even that their students have managed to sit still and hand in work more or less on time for four years, which is what their subsidiary “credentialing” purpose is supposed to be.  In some inner city schools, it takes full-scale long-term absence to get a grade below a C in anything.  Any college teacher who teaches students from schools like these knows that they think–because it’s what they’ve been taught–that they have the right to “make up” anything, including final exams, at any time, for any reason, that they do not believe theyshould be held responsible for work if it was assigned when they weren’t in class, even if they weren’t in class because they were getting high and even if the work itself is on the syllabus or up on Blackboard.

Privileging classroom study in the way we do does not help anybody, and it may even hurt our attempts to make sure that students actually learn things.  The privilege was instituted originally to make it possible for high level private universities and the flagship campuses of state universities to admit students from rural districts where the preparation was poor, on the assumption that talented students from schools such as these could catch up once they got to campus.  

The privilege is no longer needed for that purpose.  It would make more sense to ensure that libraries across the country were equipped with enough really good computer equipment and really fast Internet connections to make it possible for kids to find out what would be required on college entrance tests and to access material that would help make sure they learned it–and if their local schools were providing real instruction in those areas, good, and if not, not. 

Once schools were no longer central to college entrance, students and parents who didn’t like the ethos of a school–all therapy all the time! that kid is a pain in the ass, let’s diagnose him with something!–could pick all knds of alternatives to get them where they wanted to go.

After that, maybe we could start taking psychologists seriously that what they’re doing is “science,” and making them meet the same kind of accountability standards that real sciences do.

Because it’s all well and good to say that psychology is “a science and an art,” but right now it’s an art that can get people locked up indefinitely, brand kids with “disorders” that will follow them throughout their lives and ruin any chances they have of significant success in dozens of fields, and split up families who won’t acquiesce in the “diagnosis.”

If these people want that kind of power, then we’ve got the right to demand that they prove it. 

During the series of  day-care-sex-abuse scandals in the 1980s, one of the “tools” used to “prove” that the children had been sexually abused was to present them with anatomincally correct dolls and see what they did with them.  If the children pulled at the genatalia, this was considered “proof” that sexual abuse had occurred, even if the child denied it and no physical evidence of it existed.

The problem was–no studies had ever been done to see how children who HADN’T been sexually abused responded to these dolls.  Those studies were done eventually, after a dozen people had been sent to jail at least partially on the “science” claimed for them–and it turned out that three to five year olds pull at a doll’s genatalia pretty much universally.

In other words, no double blind studies had been done to establish this tool scientifically, the people using it had no idea what it actually meant when the children pulled at the genatalia, and people went to jail because–well, there MUST have been sexual abuse, the kid pulled at the doll’s penis, and it’s science!

Most of the people who were wrongfully convicted of these crimes that never existed are out of jail now, but their lives are ruined, their families have been destroyed, and in at least two cases the state continues to to brand them as “sex offenders.”

And last I checked, Gerald Amirault is still in jail in Massachusetts.  He’s been offered a free pass out of jail if he’ll just “confess” to the “crimes” he’s supposed to have committed, but he seems disinclined to confess to things he did not do.

If we’re going to let the therapeautic culture have power like this–power that cirumvents the Constitution on a number of issues–then I think it’s time we made these people prove that they know what they’re doing.

It really does seem as if we’re all so entrenched in thinking about education in terms of “courses,” that we can’t seem to get out of it.

To answer some of the questions and comments–no, I don’t think a series of national tests will lead to a national, centralized curriculum, because we already have such tests–the  SATs and ACTs, plus the  AP program–and it hasn’t yet.

And long before such tests existed, colleges and universities devised their own to determine who would be allowed to enter, and that entry did not depend on grades from a school–or even attendance at any school at all.  

A fair number of the men who made the American founding–most of them able to read Latin and some Greek, most of them far more conversant with the classics than any high school senior is expected to be now–never saw the inside of a classroom until they entered college.  

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that knowledge must be arranged in “courses” that people are supposed to “take.”  John says he would have hated Beowulf, and Robert, if I remember correctly, loves it, but the issue isn’t what a student will love or hate but getting that student to actually learn something.

As far as I can tell, the majority of the content in high school English courses these days is makework without a point, and yet “passing” such a “course” is supposed to certify that the student is capable of going on to higher level work.  In my experience, it certifies no such thing,  Most students arrive, even on “good” college campuses, with little or no understanding that there has been a Western literary tradition, that it has a history and that that history is not random, or even of how to dissect and analyze a work of the imagination.  Most of them know none of the standard literary terms or what they mean, don’t know how to scan a line of a poem or what the basic rhyme schemes are, can’t tell you the difference between a ballad and a narrative, and really can’t tell you the difference between an English and  Italian sonnet.

I once gave a class the assignment to come in with four Italian sonnets for the next class meeting–they came in with reams and reams of sonnets in  Italian.  It would have been funny if it hadn’t given me a headache.

My point is not that English is a special case, but that it isn’t.  There are lacunae like this in every student’s background in every subject.  Colleges and universities have known for a long time that an A in biology, or algebra, or history represents absolutely nothing about what the student knows in any of those subjects.   That’s why they rely so heavily on SATs and  SAT-IIs.   They’re not the best tests in the world, but they give at least a basic idea of what the student can be said to actually know.

But if that’s the case, why bother with the high school course at all for people who don’t want to pursue their education in that way?  Why shouldn’t a fourteen year old who can get a 750 (out of 800–it’s an unusually high score) on his SAT-II in calculus, or biology, or French, simply be acknowledtged as having that particular accomplishment under his belt?  Most of the students who do “take” the “courses” will know less than he does, not more.

My problem is that I don’t see what purpose the schools are serving in these cases.  Yes, certainly, there are people for whom sitting in a classroom is as good as it’s going to get, but there are lots of others–and I increasingly think it’s the majority–for whom it is a waste of time.  

There are, after all, other ways to learn things, and even other ways to acquire a coherent sense of what an educated person should know.  People did it for centuries.   The idea that schools are the “normal” way to learn is relatively new.

I also know one thing.  We’re not going to make inroads against the therapeutic culture as long as we’re funding a huge set of institutions who see their missions as “treating” the “whole child,” and that’s been the rationale in American public and private schools since the Sixties. It’s been as true under Republican presidents as Democratic ones, under liberals as well as under conservatives. 

Of course, what would be even better would be to get some solid information about the efficacy of that therapeutic culture into the culture at large–how good are its predictions about individuals?  (hint:  piss poor)  How effective is it at identifying children with psychological problems (NOT “the children we identify are messed up” but “okay, these are how many children needed therapy or had breakdowns that we DIDN’T identify).

In other words, actual information about whether psychology, as it’s now constituted in clinical practice, is doing good, doing harm, or doing nothing at all.

If you give me a lump of goo and ask me to test it for arsenic, I can run a series of tests that will determine if it has arsenic in it or not.  The results of those tests will not change depending on whether I believe the goo MUST have arsenic in it, or MUST NOT.  My feelings and perceptions do not matter.  That’s science.

In too much psychological testing, however, the perceptions and assumptions of the tester are the whole ball game–the “practictioner” finds whatever he expects to find.

About five years ago, away at boarding school, my older son was sent to the school psycholgist for testing because–well, they “just wanted to know” if he had a learning disability.

And the school psychologist dutifully found a learning disability, bringing me into her office to explain at length how all the tests she’d done “proved” this.

Unfortunately, Matt didn’t have a learning disability.  He had secondary stage Lyme disease, and there were plenty of physical symptoms of it–sitting in class with sweat pouring off him in the middle of winter, literally rivers of it making wet spots on the floor  was one; not exactly easy to ignore–that the school and his teachers blithely ignored.

If he hadn’t come home on vacation where I could see him, and if I hadn’t taken him to h is long-time doctor to get checked out, he could easily have gone into tertiary stage and permanent neurological damage.

But, you know, he must have a learning disability.  That’s the “science” of psychology.

Of course, there’s been no sign of it since we got rid of the Lyme.

One of the fascinating things about writing this blog is the way in which, thinking I’m being perfectly clear, I suddenly realize that I haven’t managed to get my point across at all.

Those of you who posted after the last entry tended to concentrate on things like students who want to be carpenters or plumbers, or students who want to drop out at sixteen.

But I wasn’t talking about students like that.

I was talking about intellectually gifted students who want to go on to be historians, philosophers and lawyers.

I was saying that I  didn’t think the centrality of schools was good for them.

Actually, I more and more believe that it isn’t good for anybody, but we’ll get to that later.

I agree with Cheryl that there are certainly people out there whose behavior is so extreme that it might call for a mental health diagnosis, or even some intervention by professionals, although part of me says that the meaning of freedom is in being allowed to go to hell in you own handbasket.

But the kind of thing I’ve been talking about–the medicalizing of children who don’t “fit” the school’s (or their parents’) perceived notions of what they’re “supposed” to be like–occurs not with kids at the lower end of the intellectual scale, but kids at the upper end.

A kid with an IQ of 140 who thinks his classwork is endless, boring, and stupid and doesn’t bother to do the little make work homework because he’d much rather be playing Grand Theft Auto or writing his own screenplay is the kid who gets hit with Ritalin.

And if he’s writing his own screenplay, he’s likely to get hit as well with worries that he’s “psychotic” or “delusional” or possibly “schizophrenic.”  I don’t know what it is about certain of the “helping professions,” but they seem to attract a remarkably high percentage of people with no imagination at all, people who have never done things like heard music in a woodpecker’s peck or seen an elaborate picture in the way the branches of a tree have fallen to the ground after a storm.

What’s more, I’m more and more at a loss to see how traditional schools benefit intellectually gifted children.  Hell,  I’m more and more at a loss to see how they benefit much of anybody, with the exception of that small gruup that enjoys sucking up to authority.

In  my own field–talking literature as an academic discipline here–I have watched English classes in elementary and high schools disintegrate over the years into…well, I don’t know what it is exactly that these people think they’re doing.

Robert complains about being given Silas Marner, but I would kill to have my sons assigned something like that in “English” class.  What they get instead is one trendy book after another–“adventure” memoirs, stories about contemporary teens taking drugs or getting pregnant, and usually one or two volumes to satisfy “diversity” requirements. 

What’s more, what they’re then expected to do with these books is just silly, if not worse.  There’s some point in asking about Lear’s motivations in giving his estate to his daughters and their husbands.   There’s little point in asking about the “symbolism” of the mountain in some memoir about two guys who decide they’re going to climb a dangerous peak even though they know they are going into avalanche conditions.   Once you get past “I can’t believe they were stupid enough to do that” and “if this guy is so conflicted about his relationship with his father that he’s going to put himself and forty people on a rescue squad in mortal danger, he needs psychotropic drugs,” there really isn’t much to say.

If I was going to design a high school curriculum for English, I’d start by assigning The Iliad, Gilgamesh, Beowulf and a few other things along those lines, and then I’d talk about why poetry was the medium of choice in the ancient world and why it isn’t any more.   Then I’d move on to Chaucer and Dante and Shakespeare. Then I’d give a year of American literature that would include James Fenimore Cooper and Twain’s critique of him, John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth  Longfellow, all the way on up to Hemingway and Faulker and, yes, even Poe.

And I’d make sure the papers I assigned were long, required documentation, and dealth with subjects that made some difference in the reading of the work.

But I’m not much happier with the teaching of history, and I think I could design a better curriculum for that, too–let’s say take A People’s History of the United States AND A Patriot’s History of the United States and read them together, talking about point of view and the biases involved in the inclusion and exclusion of material and in the weight of the analyses.  

At the end of a course like the one above, you’d at least know the basic facts of America history and have been introduced to the dialogue on how to interpret that history, a dialogue that has been going on for as long as we’ve been a country. 

What seems to happen in schools, these days, is that students are assigned a course–“English” or “European History After 1815*–they’re given a smattering of material, graded on whether they do what the teacher wants them to do with that material, and then considered by everybody (including colleges) to have “studied” it and to “know” it.

As far as I know, the only students being held to account for whether or not they actually know this material are the ones being homeschooled, because, lacking the automatic credentialing system provided by schools, they have to produce some proof of what they’re supposed to have learned.

If, therefore, what we want is for students to actually know some particular things by the time they get to university–why is this the system we’re using?  The universities know that the students they admit don’t usually know the things their transcripts say they’re supposed to, but it’s as if we’re all in a dance whose steps were set so long ago nobody dares to question their validity.

I’m not advocating abolishing schools.  Certainly, as Lymaree says, they ones we have now serve other functions that parents might want to avail themselves of.

What I’d suggesting is removing the school as the default mode–the “normal” path–for learning. 

Rather, let’s find a way for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned–English, history, philosophy, math–right up to university level, no matter how they’ve managed to learn it.

When  I was seventeen,  I had never taken a course in medieval literature, but I could read middle English, I’d made y way through The Canterbury Tales in the original, I’d read a ton of stuff on  Christian iconography in the works of Geoffrey  Chaucer, and I could probably have passed a college course in the subject in my sleep.

But since I had never taken a “course,” it was assumed by everybody and anybody that I didn’t really know anything about the “subject,” and of course in college I had to sit through a semester of this stuff just to get a grade to “prove” I knew it.

I want to eliminate the semester.  I want to find a way to render schools just one of many options for ALL  students, maybe especially the ones on their way to university. 

It’s intellectually gifted students who are in the most danger from the therapeutically oriented regime now in place in most schools, both because they just don’t think like other people, and because a certain subset of them just isn’t inclined to put up with too much bullshit.

THERE’S a title calculated to turn off any lurker who might fight his way over here.  Or hers.

But I’m going to try to backtrack a little here.

I agree with Cheryl that there has to be some way to insure that most people at least get the chance at a basic education, and that means that there are going to have to be schools, and probably some version of public schools.

But it seems to me that, as late as when I was growing up, “school” was something people did for a very small part of their lives and then never thought of again.  It was admitted to be an anomalous case–the real world was not like school, and what happened to you in school was not particularly important, because actual life ran on other rules and assumptions.

It further feels to me that, somewhere since the 1960s, that assumption has changed.  Now we tend to think of school as the default mode, the norm for the rest of life, and any problems a kid may have in school, academic or social or otherwise, become crises that must be addressed by aggressive action.

To go back to the example I brought up before somewhere, only a school would think that a teen-aged boy who liked being a slob and hated doing homework had some kind of “disorder” that required “therapy.”  If that same kid has a job at Wal-Mart or Stop ‘n’  Shop, his manager will bitch at him until he looks neat enough for the customers and won’t assign homework at all–and he’ll get paid, giving him something of an incentive to keep his shirt tucked into his pants.

The psychomedicalization of childhood and adolesence requires a set of assumptions that would be perceived as lunatic outside of schools–that it is “normal” for children to be willing and able to sit still for long periods of time at small desks all facing forward; that any “healthy” child wants to be neat and clean at all times and never wants to get dirty, or enjoys it, or doesn’t care;  that faced with adults who order one about and don’t seem to like him, a student’s “rational” response will be to do what they tell him and try to make them have a better opinion of him.

All of those assumptions are, quite frankly, wrong–they describe nothing true about most human beings.   I’m considerably older than a teen-ager, but I know how I respond when people try to order me around–if they’re paying me, I may just put up with it, but even then, I push back.  And I can push really hard. 

Any look at any website purporting to describe the “mental health issues” of children and teenagers will throw up a stunning array of behavior deemed symptomatic of psychiatric distress that the rest of us would call normal–because it is normal.  

“Oppositional defiant disorder” is only a “disorder” if you think it is somehow abnormal for teenagers to rebel against life in general and to resist authority.  I suspect that it exists for one reason only–because the courts have shown little patience with juvenile authorities whose basic attitude is, “it’s a child, so I get to lock it up for any reason I want to.”

Psychology enjoys enormous prestige as “science,” and it has been used successfully to circumvent due process and basic rights protections for children and teenagers.  The SCOTUS  put a stop to jailing teen-aged girls for getting pregnant somewhere in the early Seventies,  I think, so now we have  ODD to “diagnose” them with and then it’s okay to jail them on that, since we’re only trying to help.

When I  say it’s time to ditch the centrality of schools, I mean it’s time to go back to seeing schools for what they are–UNusual environments, whose norms cannot provide a basis for judging behavior in the real world.

And the first thing we need to do to do that is to reduce the power schools have gained over the lives of those children and teen-agers.  At the very least, there should be due process protections for children, teenagers and parents who resist the use of psychotropic drugs, and we should end the practice of allowing such resistance to be “evidence” of the childs disorder or the parents’ incompetence.

The next thing we need to do is to provide alternatives–if the reason for having schools at all is to make sure children learn a certain set of things at a certain level, then it’s not clear that schools are doing all that good a job to begin with.  

In 1930, the large centralized school where everybody did the same thing at the same time made a certain amount of sense.  We had a large population to educated and not a lot of alternatives for how to do it, and what alternatives there were were expensive.

With the Internet, the availability of courses (and good ones) on audiotape and DVD, and a system of standardized tests already in place to judge achievement, it’s unclear to me why we should see “big bunches of kids sitting in small rooms all listening to the same thing at the same time” as the default position here.  

Somebody–it may have been Charles Murray–has suggested that there should be a set of national tests that any student could take at any time–think you already know enough about algebra?  take the algebra test and your score is your grade, whether you’ve ever been in an algebra classroom or not–and colleges and employers could decide which tests passed at which level constitute the prerequisite for getting admitted or getting the job interview.

I know a fair number of kids who would do better under such a system than they do under the one we have now, and at least two who could have taken SAT-II tests in fairly advanced mathematics while they were still in grade school.  My two would almost certainly have aced any test in English or American literature pitched at a high school level, and I think my younger son could probably do fairly well on a literature AP exam even now.  

Why, exactly, are we putting any of these people through year after year of being forced to sit still and be good while even the teacher at the front of the classroom knows less about the subject matter than they do?

In case you think this is an issue that affects only gifted children, I think it would work at the other end of the talent scale, too–what good are we doing the child who can’t grasp the elementary concepts of algebra when we stick him in a room full of kids who can and demand that he “buckle down” and “study”?  Give him an interactive program he can do at his own pace, and he might actually learn something.

The bottom line, for me, is that schools are the wedge for the psychotherapeuticization of everything–I wonder if that word is longer than antidisestablishmentarianism.  Maybe not.

If we’re going to save th is culture from the gross stupidity of that particular approach to human nature, getting rid of the wedge, or marginalizing it, is the place we have to start.