Having Your Cake

In the common proverb, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

To which my response has always been: why not?

When I hear this phrase, it is often to accuse someone of living by a double standard. Of wanting to exempt themselves from living by the same rules as everyone else is supposedly living by.

For example, I was reading yesterday about the Tim Tebow laws that are being proposed around the country--laws that would make it legal for homeschooled children to participate in district-sponsored varsity athletics.

For me, such laws make perfect sense. If our job as public educators is to help educate the public, shouldn’t we make every effort to provide services and programs that are of interest to all families--and not get offended if certain families decide to opt-out of some functions and not others? (Controversial, I know!)

But, that said, why do we have this all-or-nothing mentality?

Richard Rodriguez was someone who, on the face of it, did not think he could have his cake and eat it too: he and his family gave up Spanish as the language of intimacy and familiarity and turned instead to the language of power and access: English. Once they turned their backs on Spanish, as a family, they never went back--or at least that’s how Richard tells the story.

This seems sad, especially in a day and age where school immersion programs are growing and many in our country rightly understand the economic, cultural and personal advantages of bi-lingualism for everyone.

On the other hand, it is clear that Richard Rodriguez, in his most romantic and nostalgic moments, maintained a belief in both having and eating his cake. For isn’t it abundantly clear from reading Hunger for Memory that Richard believes it is possible to maintain a purely private language of intimacy and love? That it is possible to create a cooperative and loving refuge from the hard and competitive public world? That our home can be our castle?

But this is wrong, at least in my view. Humanity’s natural state is a social one. No home is a castle, no person is an island. When bad things are afoot, there is no place to hide, no shelter from the storm. Our language can never be divorced from such facts, nor can our relationships.

One of the many questions we face at this moment in our history is which forms of sociality and conviviality will dominate our lives. Will they be meritocratic and competitive? Or will they be pedagogical and cooperative?

Will they require everyone to act by the same rules or will we come to believe that what is just for each is the rule!

These are questions that intimately touch teachers.

For too long, we have sold our classrooms as cooperative families but held up the public practices of grades, meritocracy, and evaluation. But these things--standards, grades, and meritocracy--only make sense if everyone is competing to be the best at the same thing. If our job is to produce exact carbon copies of the same model citizen.

Richard Rodriguez, to his young self’s credit, sensed that this was the game. He played it well and was rewarded. But when the time came to cash the check, he realized that something was wrong.

Seeing and naming that moment of injustice seems to me the great lesson of his book. I will always treasure Hunger for Memory. In naming what “it” was that Richard rejected when he came out against bi-lingual education and affirmative action, I do not see a person “selling out” his own people.

Rather, I see a person confirming his own right to his own forms of desire. To hunger in whatever ways he wanted. To figure out how to put that hunger to work in ways that did not destroy him or those he loved.

Sometimes, that’s the best any teacher, any parent, or any child can do.