Is Unhappiness Endemic to Learning? Or Can We Rebuild the System?

We are people who have always viewed schools, and schooling, as the main developmental incubator of our children's minds. We have claimed that one can't possess too much knowledge. The more a person knows the more creative he or she will be. Likewise, greater knowledge equals the greater probability that one will be all he or she can be. And all we've ever asked of our children is to maximize their potential.

In fact, the Renaissance Man,
that person who has a knowledge of everything, has always been an ideal
in America. And our public school curricula have historically been
geared to producing minds that have a broad knowledge of subject matter. Is the process of learning painful?

I suspect it can be. Especially if one is taught to the tune of the hickory stick, as the old jingle notes. But that doesn't account for our contemporary dilemma. There
has always been a significant degree of discipline in the schooling
process, as there usually is in teaching children to be good human
beings in general. But before settling on the unhappiness
derived from discipline as our culprit, we need to ask why there is so
much agitation over schooling throughout the nation.

One doesn't have to follows the
media very closely or for too long to become aware of a wide spread
concern felt by most Americans over our present day educational system. Neither
does one have to be an education expert to conclude that schooling in
America seems to have derailed somewhere along the line. Many
citizens are unhappy, if not panicky, because they see signs that many
graduates can't seem to read, write, or manage basic math; those most
fundamental skills of literacy.

The major targets for improvement as reported in the media and community conversations are: (1) the need for more modern and hi-tech buildings, (2)
higher teacher's salaries, (3) lower teacher-student ratios, and (4)
replacing incompetent teachers with more competent teachers. And there are others. But these big four are usually seen as culprits in our children's less than sterling educational performance on a national basis. Is this the reason many view schools as places of unhappiness?

Maybe, maybe not. Nonetheless, we may be willing to finance multi-million dollar sports pavilions, but whoa,
not schools. Besides, as costs and needs increase every state governor,
legislature, and school board in America scrambles to find a painless
way to pay the bills. And increased tax proposals trigger angry taxpayers.

And angrier! While
improved facilities, increased teacher salaries, better-trained
teachers and such, may be critical needs, taxpayers want assurance that
if they pony-up and pay for all these expensive items that all the
problems will be fixed. In other words, once we spend
jillions of dollars and have state-of-the-art facilities, highly paid
master teachers in every classroom, and a teacher-student ratio of one
to twenty, will every graduate be able to read, write, and speak good English, handle math efficiently, and think critically? Will we then think of schools as happy places? Probably not. Well,
will all graduates be well grounded in American and world history,
geography, literature, social, behavioral and natural sciences
(including higher math), music, art, philosophy, and so forth? Probably not. Will each be bilingual? Probably not. Will schools be seen as happy places? Probably not. But don't read that as an excuse for refusing to provide the very best school facilities and teacher corps we can. Why is it we can afford the best military apparatus in the world and can't afford the best educational system for our children?

Yeah, why not? But, let's not go down that road yet. I've got more questions. For example, if these costly remedies won't produce something we view as a happy learning environment while cranking out intelligent and successful citizens, then taxpayers are really going to be irate. And justifiable so. But I think there is a piece of the puzzle that never gets any attention.

Is there ever. We assume the crux of the problem lies in the school system. Maybe it's in our society at large. In other words, the overwhelming majority of people believe schools are failing, and thus, unhappy places, because of sorry teachers and, I suspect, sorry, overpaid administrators. And some claim that the problem is often compounded by obese educational administrations.

How true is all this? Are these really the causes behind our unhappy schools and why they fail to graduate people who can read, write, do basic math, and so forth? Or … is it yours and mine?

Although
there's enough truth to these commonly-held assumptions to keep these
notions alive and well for years to come, I propose that the basic,
underlying structural fault is not teacher's salaries, not
teacher-student ratios, not the facilities, not the curriculum, and not
in any administration. Nope, the most serious fault is in our laps.
Yours and mine. We are the ones that responsible for programming our
children for failure!

Why Us?

Yes, indeed, why us? We've generally given the school system what they asked for. We've paid the bills, for crying-out-loud. So
why would any ninny dare suggest that we, the mammas and the pappas,
uncles and aunts, grandmas and grandpas, and caring friends, are the
big problem?

Well, if one listens carefully
to all the public and private verbiage regarding schools and schooling
it's not hard to understand how we dummy-down our children's schooling. If you take such messages as relayed in the TV ad I mentioned in the beginning, and add that to the countless, so-called humorous, denigrating remarks about
teachers, schools, and book-learning in-general, it is obvious that
most Americans have a low opinion of schools and schooling In fact, I
suspect most think it's a waste of time. The bottom-line is that when
these comments are transmitted to a child on a regular basis,
consciously or unconsciously, that child is programmed for failure.

Anti-intellectualism is afoot in the country.

I suspect many will think my charge that Americans possess a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism is almost un-American! And
it does seem like a strange accusation given our public posture in
support of education. But we should have learned by now that we can be
for something at a national level and against it at the local. For
example, we spent our first hundred years paying lip-service to the
notion that all men were created equal, but it took a war to end
slavery and the socio-political jolt of the Civil Rights Movement
before we really put that ideal into practice for all Americans. Then
feminist hittest with a second jolt by demanding equality also. And I
suppose if we were able to peel back the blanket of our social façade
we would find that (a) the ideal of human equality is still not totally
implemented, and (b) there are many conservatives who would like to
roll back the clock to a simpler day when racial minorities and women knew their proper place. This is precisely our schooling's predicament.

It is. Education's great as a general ideal, but we can't seem to communicate that ideal as an exhilarating venture to our children. Every child in America receives the message that schools are unhappy places. Studying is not fun. Formal learning is painful and, in many cases, a waste of time.

Where did this anti-intellectual notion come from? Obviously it's impossible to locate the first person to infect us with the anti-intellectual bug. It
was certainly rampant on the Western frontier, as so-called self-made
men and women scoffed at sissified Eastern-educated intellectuals who
couldn't ride a horse, kill a bear, skin a mountain-lion, or handle
themselves in a good brawl. Those who had read a lot of books but couldn't do anything useful with their hands were laughed at. While
there is validity to developing the physical skills for surviving any
wilderness frontier and a hunting-trapping-farming-ranching industry,
these is no reason to view intellectual pursuits as inconsistent with
any of those pursuits.

In fact, my grandmother (1879-1923) loved to read the classics. She especially loved Homer's works. And she loved her life on a Nebraska farm. She probably had no more than six or eight years of schooling. And that took place in a rural, one-room facility. She
had seven kids, four boys and three girls, and she made sure all
appreciated schools, schooling, and the need for continuous learning.

So, although we can trace our
country's anti-intellectual inclinations back to the frontier, that
does not mean that rural or agrarian people were ignorant or that all
lacked good schooling. In fact, in the light of the
present educational debate over the need for better facilities, doesn't
it make you wonder how our founding fathers got so smart? It's impossible to read the Federalist's Papers, or any of the early national documents, without a feeling of awe. Ole Abe Lincoln is said to have studied by candlelight. Given
our contemporary anti-intellectual bias most kids, I suspect, probably
wonder why Abe studied so hard. Could he have secretly been reading a
comic book? Or a dirty novel?

I don't know what Abe was reading. It
seems as though we have to take the historian's word that he was so
hungry for knowledge that he read every book he could get his hands on. That's a virus every child in America ought to catch! But I've also wondered why Asian students do so well in our poor, dilapidated school system. So
many come to this country unable to speak or read English and end up
taking the highest scholastic honors as they graduate from our high
schools and universities. The schools worked for them, why isn't it working for our own children? Could it be we've programmed our children for failure?

Yes, it could be. And
that historically endowed streak of anti-intellectualism is far more
difficult to fix than buildings, teacher's salaries, and so forth. We are going to have difficulty exorcising the nasty brute from our psyches because,

• we generally won't admit to sharing such a cultural trait;

• the trait so permeates all
  other aspects of our culture as to be unrecognizable (It's like a dirty
  cancer that snuck in and made itself at home in every cell of our
  social body); and,
  
• anti-intellectualism is
  embarrassing to all of us because it flies-in-the-face of an historic
  American ideal about the virtue of education.

Summarily, we have become very adept at preventing our children from maximizing their mental abilities. We program most children for failure before they enter school. Their minds are already shut down. Anti-intellectualism
is so pervasive and psychologically corrosive that the majority of our
children can easily fend off the effect of the most modern facilities
and even the best teachers. So how did we infect them with this terrible virus?

Seven Basic Rules for Maintaining America's Anti-Intellectualism

We snuck up on our children before they knew what had happened. We
start the process of dummying-down our children as soon as they are
born and it continues to be reinforced until the day they go out the
front door to first grade. No matter what happens at
school we continue passing on the message that formal schooling is just
something one has to put up with, so just hold your nose and get by. Get the credentials, but don't pay any attention to the meaty content. If you have to learn some stuff to spit back and pass a test, then do it. Learn how to play the game. Just don't get bogged down in the intellectual crap and become some nerd or egg-head. (I
believe we had a Vice President of the U.S. that referred to
intellectuals as pointy-headed and/or egg-heads. It resonated with
millions of people who share the same virulent strain of
anti-intellectualism.)

Nonetheless, far be it for me to stand in the way of such a great societal trait! No,
sir. I don't want people to think I'm not a true, macho, independent,
self-made, died-in-the-wool, anti-intellectual American. I don't want to be seen as a nerd, sissy, or wussy. Not me. Therefore, since we are still waiting for the first "Handbook on Anti-Intellectualism For Dummies," I
thought I would offer some basic rules to help us all continue to
support anti-intellectualism in this great country of ours. You can
probably add to the list. Oh, you might want to cut it out and pass it
around to your neighbors. It always helps to be neighborly in America.

Rule No. 1: Do not read to your children!
You don't want to promote books and all the egg-headed pursuits they bring, so don't read to your children at any age. Besides, they may pick up some foreign ideas! It's
far more productive to tell them stories of how members of the family
have worked with their hands and made all that money without wasting
time in intellectual pursuits.

Rule No. 2: Don't keep books around the house!
You can never be too cautious. It would be shattering to come home from work and find your child reading. That can lead to a lot of trouble for any child. They may pick it up as a habit. And you know how addictions can be.

Rule No. 3: Make sure any books that you feel you just have to have are not great classics or of a substantive nature.
You certainly don't want to entice your child to read great literature and get any weird ideas. You never know, he or she may turn out to be one of those brainy geeks that we all make fun of. Or an artist. Or teacher. Or physicist. Or philosopher, great writer, or some such nut..

Rule No. 4: Handling Reading Disobedience
If all fails and you come home from work and find your child reading a good book, don't burn the book or spank the kid, just pooh-pooh the reading activity and gently, but firmly, divert his or her attention to more productive pursuits. For example, you may want to encourage him or her to get a part time job or mow the lawn, wash the car. You know … do something useful. Get him or her into sports, that's where the money is.

There was a recent TV ad that showed a dad and his six or seven year old son fishing. The dad asked the son if he had learned to read, write and do basic math. The son said he had. The
father then said something to the effect, "I think it's time you went
out and got a job now. You need to start supporting the family."

Most people probably thought the ad funny. Unfortunately, I suspect many didn't, if only because the child was a few years too young. The underlying message is clear, "Go get a job and quit wasting time sitting in classrooms."

Rule No. 5: Find every opportunity to denigrate schooling.
This is not difficult. I am sure everyone knows the drills. For example, in late summer keep reminding a child that the fun is about over. School will start soon. And speak with as much sadness in your voice as possible. You don't want a child to view schooling as pleasurable. Oh, no. That won't do. We can't have children viewing schools and schooling as fun. Schooling and happiness are contradictory.

We can all remember our own youth and how adults that would look at us, smile, then say, "I'll bet you are glad school is out for the summer. Or, "Aren't you happy the holidays are here?" There's a whole litany of ways to get this message across on a weekly basis. In America we especially raise boys to hate school. No boy wants to be labeled a sissy. And everyone knows that sissies like school. .

Rule No. 6: Find every opportunity to denigrate teachers.
Humor can be a real system killer. We've all heard the saying, "Those who can, do … those who can't, teach." We have also heard the admonition: "When all else fails you can always go teach." Keep
saying those kinds of things and even the slowest learner will finally
realize that schooling and all that education drivel is for weakling,
sissies, and dummies.

Rule No. 7 putting THE new high school grad in his or her place
If
your child graduates with a high school diploma (as anyone can because
of our social promotion principle) and insists going to college, do
what you can to discourage him or her. College costs a great deal and
their time can be more productively used by getting a good start on a
career. (McDonald's is probably hiring.)

However, if your kid insists on going to college, make sure they major in something that will pay off upon graduation. As
a former college professor it was normal to hear students tell how
their parents encouraged them to major in a field that would pay off after graduation. Parents
were happy when their son or daughter majored in business, economics,
chemistry, pre-law, or pre-medicine. But fields such as fine arts,
dance, theater, history, American literature, sociology, psychology,
linguistics, and other areas were forboten. If one
decided to major in one of these artsy fields parents would inevitably
frown and ask, "What in the world can you do with that?"

What indeed!

The Alternative

There is another alternative to the prevailing anti-intellectualism.

We can stop making fun of intellectual pursuits.

We could stop engaging in what is generally regarded as trivial humor.

No more kidding children about school, reading, and artistic endeavors!