Community and Abundance

Poem:

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; 
A kind old nun in a white hood replies; 
The children learn to cipher and to sing, 
To study reading-books and history, 
To cut and sew, be neat in everything 
In the best modern way—the children's eyes 
In momentary wonder stare upon 
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

Among School Children
By William Butler Yeats

Test:

What is the attitude of the poet toward the children in the classroom?

A) Bemused
B) Tolerant
C) Sorrowful
D) Hopeful

What are we doing?

How is it that we take what could be a life-altering experience—the reading of a great poem—and package it for consumption? What does the multiple-choice question do when it is put aside the poem? What would an essay question do to the poem? How about a discussion among friends, over tea or a beer?

What is our primary vision of schooling? The test, the essay, or the discussion?

The test is inherently competitive. It attempts to situate the child in relationship to her peers, or in relationship to a standard. It reduces the child to a score, a score that can then be used to compare what is never really comparable—a human life.

An essay is an individualist project. In its root, it means “to attempt or try.” It’s hard to compare one essay to another along any single scale. This one uses language very well, but its reasoning is loose. This one has air-tight logic, but is dry as a bone. This one is concise and makes great points, while this one is expansive and makes great points. As a reader, my response is predicated on what I like in a text. Each essay is its own creation and should be judged by those standards that the essay itself suggests.

A conversation among friends—my companions, those with whom I share (com-) bread (-pan)—is a cooperative affair. It requires two people. Plato says, however, that a true conversation is always (at least) a three-way affair: me, the other, and the subject that engrosses us and brings us together. A true conversation, among deep friends or lovers, lapses into satisfied silence, as we exhaust ourselves in all that we have to say. We think thoughts that we could never think by ourselves in a conversation—we are sometimes surprised at where our thinking takes us.

Schooling promotes community to the degree that it promotes abundance. David Jardine writes about the way in which something as profound and mystical as the Pythagorean theorem becomes a source of scarcity as soon as we turn it into a school subject that we seek to package, deliver and accumulate. Abundance is what unites us in common work, as we see that the insight of one person can literally generate new and further insights without end.

Yeats and Pythagoras are sites of abundance, should we let them be. There is no exhausting their limits. Children are invited into a conversation that is, viewed one way, thousands of years old. We truly don’t know where it will take us, if we are willing to approach it with an open heart each time.

One of my projects is a new journal that invites teachers to write about their classroom experiences. Named after Dewey’s classic text, the Journal of School & Society, is currently seeking teachers to write about their efforts to combat consumption, competition and scarcity in their classrooms and schools. If you are interested in expanding one of your blog posts into an article for the journal, I hope you will let me know!

And so, to end our course, Yeats:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, 
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? 
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, 
How can we know the dancer from the dance?