I’m going to be a little poetic here. By which I mean turning my attention to that which is not tangible.
I have the opportunity right now to work one-on-one with several children. It’s a chance to go back to basics: children want love, acceptance, security. They want to find out about the world, while being respected as valuable. Cliches. And so easy to lose sight of when you are engaging with big issues of school reform, achievement gaps and standardized testing.
I live across the street from an elementary school. Every school day starting about 7:30 the cars start jamming the road. Right next door to our building is a large, usually empty parking lot with signs posted everywhere: No School Parking. People park there anyway, hurry their children out of the car, shepherd them through the tangle of behemoth SUV’s driven by people who patiently or impatiently seek to thread their way through the obstacles of cars and human bodies. By the time the school bell rings at 7:50, things have quieted down, a few stragglers, and by 8:00 all is quiet again until the loudspeaker starts blaring announcements.
I remember announcements; it was an unremarkable feature of school life, just like standing in lines. Socializing children to being managed, to take their places as bodies in the machine where everything is monetized.
What would it take, I wonder, to educate (in the original meaning of the word, “to draw out”) the mass of children? They are, in fact, not the mass, but individuals looking for love. Any good teacher knows this, which is why there is so much resistance to standardization of education. The goal of education is to engage with children in the kinds of relationships that will draw out the beauty of the human soul.