Swing Low

It was Martin Luther King Day, and I sat in the veterinarian's office watching CNN. As the vet tech gently coaxed Henry into letting her take a little blood (he's fine, by the way), a red suited Atlanta mayor leafed through the papers of Martin Luther King. Then a smaller story came up about how the "I Have a Dream" speech almost had a different title. Passages were shown to us in a similar vein -- apparently King was reading several books at the time. It all seemed interesting in an "Edutainment" sense. I'm academic in sensibility, so I enjoyed the footnote. But, what did it tell me? That Martin Luther King Jr. had influences -- that his speeches had sources! Is this supposed to be news because we expected his words to come out of the ether, like those of an angel.

Still later, a friend sent me an email intimating that King may have forged part of his dissertation. I respect the friend enormously. I don't believe this, however, and I am willing to forgive it if it is true. Martin Luther King's greatest achievement was not his dissertation or his ability to cite his sources. It was his ability to apply what he knew to the world in front of him and to take useful action. All great writers are great thieves. Martin Luther King was 26 years old when he began his major work as a civil rights leader. He was a young man looking for the right thing to do to help end centuries of injustice. I don't care if he quoted Aristotle or misquoted him. I care that he understood him.

This is the problem with the public schools in general. They expect a kind of fussy allegiance to paperwork and don't engage with the larger principles behind it. Some of our toughest high schools work their students to death just because they feel that WORKING THEM is itself the goal. We weigh our students' work rather than read it. Why?

Teaching students how to think is almost impossible. Teaching students to work is very easy. Most of my classes YEARN to work. Labor feels like it will yield something, although it doesn't always. That's why so many students are shocked when they fail anyway. "But I did all the work?"

The work towards what?

For that matter, what do you think is the goal of our contemporary public schools? What would you like them to teach?

A lot of people will answer:
1) Schools should teach our students to be good citizens

How does one do this? My uncle is an excellent citizen. He votes, takes care of his family, never steals. But, he votes Republican which usually means against social programs and many private liberties. He idealizes people who make fun of cripples (Rush Limbaugh) and do phoney reporting (Bill O'Riley). He has an eerie certainty that they're right. Angela Davis, in a recent speech in New Orleans and aired on Democracy Now, suggested that certainty in some situations is the new cloak of racism. She gave the example of the certainty that a bellhop had that a Nigerian writer did not belong in his hotel. The employee couldn't say "Why?" He was just certain. I think my uncle is grasping for another kind of certainty -- a trust that he has peers with similar education who can make good judgements. The trouble is that he has no idea that these men are not his peers. What might shake him up is if he were to go to a hotel wearing his Jewish star and casually bump into O'Riley or Limbaugh. But, he's a good citizen. What misguides him is a desire to find someone who will understand him.

I vote Democrat. I'm often broke. I live on borrowed money (often from the aforementioned uncle). I am excellently informed and I spend all of my free moments listening to Air America, Democracy Now, Nova and Head on Radio Networks. Most of the people I idolize don't have a lot of money either. I love my family, my cats and am fairly good to my students above and beyond the call of duty. I'm a good citizen who misguidedly believed that brains without bucks was enough to get by.

None of this had much to do with schooling -- frighteningly, my uncle's and my schooling was somewhat the same, down to high schools.

Except -- we both like to "cut to the chase" and we try not to be untruthful or to waste anyone's time. That we definitely got from schooling.

Maybe that's why we can both, at least, live in mostly the manner we choose (not economic, but personal).

Isn't that what, Martin Luther King wanted for everyone? Didn't he fight for everyone to have that basic freedom and to be able to make choices? That's an amazing principle to stand up for and one which we've been trying to, as a people, understand and embody for over two hundred years now. So, maybe his aim wasn't to have an original idea, but to get all of us to COMMIT to those American ideals we all hold so dear.