Reciprocity in education: Part I

“I spent the summer of 1968 working in an Armour meatpacking plant…It was not pleasant work. Goggles were a necessity, and a rubber apron, but even so it was like standing for eight hours a day under a lukewarm bloodshower. At night I’d go home smelling of pig. It wouldn’t go away. Even after a hot bath, scrubbing hard, the stink was there – like old bacon, or sausage, a dense greasy pig-stink that soaked into my skin and hair. Among other things, I remember, it was tough getting dates that summer. I felt isolated; I spent a lot of time alone. And there was also the draft notice tucked away in my wallet.”

“On the Rainy River” from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

John Dewey argued, “The principle of the social character of the school as the basic factor in the moral education given may be also applied to the question of methods of instruction – not in their details but in their general spirit.” He goes on to elucidate the ways in which the social spirit needs to be properly cultivated as to avoid students’ fears, anxieties, and petty image creation or the “egoistic desire to get ahead.” He contrasts these undesirable or ignoble qualities with a “child’s active powers, to his capacities in construction, production, and creation…[toward that] which is social.” A school should actively engage its pupils in the social conditions that are themselves morally engaged instead of moralistic In so doing pupils believe in their own social agency by actualizing the forces of their own personalities with one another and learn the value of reciprocity and cooperation toward the goal of personal achievement.
Two things come to mind here. The first is A.S. Neill’s Summerhill and the second is sociobiology and contemporary Darwinian philosophy. Let us begin witb Neill.
Neill believed in the inherent wisdom of children. To some extent I agree with him. But in his execution he invited his school’s pupils to actualize their social and moral agency (hard though it may be to see some of those kids as pupils sometimes). Consider that American and British children are expected to become citizens of representative democratic republics in whose governmental we are invited, though not mandated, to participate through our suffrage and our petitioning. Where does one learn this agency? In Neill’s school children must partake in the school’s governance or else it won’t run the way they want it to. If a student wants a rule about bicycle borrowing then s/he must propose one. What about the violation of the rule? One might hope that these little citizens creating their environments might become interested in systems of governance and ethics and politics and much more.
The responsible student and the wise child, which I am placing into the same box for now though we might split that hair at another time, should attempt to expand her/his awareness of human social situations within their own immediate sphere and through comparative studies. Then when they return to the school meeting and participate next they might have some clearer idea of how to endorse an idea, new model of behavior, new means to ends, or some other self-actualization. In this way children’s wisdom could be amplified through a course of academic study that reinforces their democratic state which is itself a smaller (though less corrupt) version of the republics in which they are to become citizens. Neill makes Dewey’s vision a reality. He actualizes Dewey.
Dewey makes something of reciprocity as it is one of the modes by which small groups working together are able to guarantee their own coherence. Peter Singer makes quite a bit of this as have many sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson. Though sociobiology has its detractors, it has taken Darwin’s ideas about morality farther by showing that social animals seem to have innate social grammars and a very strong part of our human social grammar is what we might call a moral grammar.
Peter Singer has adduced that human beings readily and easily engage in a kind of “tit for tat” system of morality. “If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” On the positive side of things we see this all the time in small groups of people. We can barter for things and exchange a favor for a favor. At bars we might buy a pitcher of beer and rightly expect that our friend will buy the next one and then switch back and forth. This kind of reciprocity doesn’t guarantee self-sacrificing altruism as we see in family situations. However, by trading and cooperating with one another as equals we find that we get and give and learn to coordinate our means to accomplish agreed-upon goals.
Why all this talk of reciprocity? If we treat school as a place where children only receive that which teachers give to them from on high then they are not in any way invited to see themselves as free agents. They become mere receptacles for authoritative strictures. Education such as that ensconced in the No Child Left Behind act becomes, in effect, a recipe for the creation of an authoritarian state.
The goals of the state are goals for its self even if the state is headed by those who claim to want to dismantle the state as is the case with our executive branch. But the state as it is presently constituted also demands respect for its authority without any questions asked and no clear answers need to be given. The citizen of such a state needs to be an agent of the Protestant market and not an agent of her/his own critical faculties. The information that the student needs today is information simple enough to be regurgitated on a multiple-choice exam. What Big Brother has determined is good enough should be good enough. Not only does this inhibit children’s critical faculties through its passivity but it makes them believe that what matters is the one and only right answer which has been predetermined by some authority with no sense of the discoveries needed to get to the right answer.
There is little way for a student to understand that we always “stand on the shoulders of giants” when we proceed. Whether those giants are our mothers and fathers or the great minds of Josquin or Darwin or Thich Nhat Hanh or Angelou or our hominid ancestors it hurts us to see only ends and not means. Answers come from concatenations of questions and their investigations. The NCLB and its abominable roots and abhorrent creations in standardized testing have created the worst kind of hierarchical pseudo-knowledge. While I agree that facts are important they mustn’t be ends in themselves but means incorporated into ourselves that we use to assess our world and our place in it. The standardized test teaches us that our place is as a storehouse of facts that Big Brother has determined to be important. And while we will create hierarchies because we are naturally discriminating and hierarchical thinkers and doers, we are also beings who crave meaning and the actualization of our individuality in our communities. The standardized test can offer no such meaning. It can only tell us that we are factually correct and that how we interpret that which we learn is irrelevant. Though we mustn’t ever stray from the facts of the matter – whatever the matter – we cannot subjugate the worth of humans to the value of an authority’s value of a set of facts. To do so is to dehumanize and turn the student into a robot.
But that is exactly the kind of world that Fast Food Nation depicts for us. The self-actualized citizen who has a competent understanding of her/his place in the cosmos, in our Milky Way galaxy, in our solar system, on planet earth, as part of the nation and tribe and community that we are a part of has no place in Fast Food Nation. In fact, the self-actualized moral agent becomes an impediment to the new state: the state of success.
It should come as no surprise that in Fast Food Nation, much of whose success has come from Colorado Springs, has found great hope in the Evangelical Christian movement. Peter Lowe asks Jesus to come into his and other’s hearts while he stages his motivational mumbo-jumbo designed to make him a killing. This Elmer Gantry character forsakes the sick and the poor to turn a quick buck. This is just another snake oil salesman like Ted Haggard and Jimmy Swaggart and too many others to be named. What was that about the meek inheriting the earth?
The meek aren’t to inherit the earth. To pick up on something I wrote last time, this is a Socially Darwinian system. From Ray Kroc we got, “Look, it is ridiculous to this an industry. This is not. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way of the survival of the fittest.” The remainder of the examples, from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the Chicago meatpacking plants to Greeley, Colorado, show this exploitative intent all too clearly. The implications are sinister.
When Mike Coan was interviewed he said that as few as 1/3 of Mofnort employees can read. Arden Walker was interviewed at a federal hearing he said high turnover is good because it doesn’t affect profitability and then IBP doesn’t have to pay for niceties like vacation. These employees can only be understood to be the ideal citizen for they are the citizens selected by the corporations to meet their goals. The ideal citizen is one who needn’t be able to read and should not be able to organize. Really, they should have NO sense of their rights under the Constitution of the United States of America or under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The ideal citizen of this new order doesn’t serve the state as they did in Nazi Germany. They serve the corporate interest and are trained to do so from a young age. All of the advertising placed in schools is like Big Brother’s face shining at them with his big smile and handing down the new corporate governmental newspeak. To make this all too obvious, our dear leader, George Walker Bush encouraged us to shop on 9/12/2007 to show those terrorists that they couldn’t intimidate us out of…what exactly? Our petty materialism? Our entitlement? Our blindness?
This brings me back to the quotation with which I opened this entry. In the chapter “On the Rainy River” from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien begins us in the Armour meatpacking plant. But he has received his draft notice. He was to go to Vietnam and fight a war he had no business fighting. Uncle Sam had called him.
So he fled.
He drives north through his home state of Minnesota almost the whole way to the Canadian border where he finds a motel called Tip Top Lodge owned by a man named Elroy Berdahl. Elroy is the embodiment of a man who has taken care of himself and lived in his community for years and years and has developed a sense of how people are and where they are in their lives. O’Brien wishes to flee to Canada but is tortured by whether or not to go. He is supposed to go to college but he believes that he has a duty to his country if only for the accident of his birth in the U.S. Elroy probably knows all of this and so, after a few days of O’Brien hanging around, they go fishing on the Rainy River and Elroy takes O’Brien really close to Canada without actually putting him on shore. O’Brien doesn’t flee. He goes home and goes to Vietnam.
But he struggled. He fought with himself and wrestled with the weight of his actions and the moral implications of this great question: Must I kill for God and for country? He went and now calls himself a coward for having given up and gone. But he has written one of the great testaments to the moral quandaries that face us as men in the U.S. He has become, through an awful process, an ideal citizen in my world.
But were he the ideal citizen of the new corporations, he would have had no such chance – or, at best, a considerably more limited chance. Limits to your literacy mean that there are limits to your thought. When corporate entities have such interest as keeping us illiterate, we are stepping toward totalitarianism. And this we see all around us as I have argued before. In the new corporate world, “All animals are created equal. Some are just more equal than others.”
Dewey would be appalled. He would wonder how the student in today’s school can hope to become and actualized moral agent if s/he is treated as merely a receptacle – a receptacle for the massive food wastes of our industrial food complex and for the corporately approved knowledge that Schlosser informed us of in “mcteachers and coke dudes.” When we have corporately-leveled educational programs about greenhouse gases coming from the American Coal Foundation and similar programs today coming from Exxon/Mobil on global warming, we have to wonder what sort of moral agency we teach our kids. We teach them complacency and reliance on authority. And authority is not to be trusted itself.
To some the aspersion of arguments from authority equal apostasy, sacrilege, anti-patriotism, or pure disrespect. An argument that someone says is true doesn’t make it so. Texaco saying that global warming is a myth, that creationists say that God (it’s actually gods, the elohim) created the universe about 6,000 years ago, or that Marx had the key to history just doesn’t make it so. An argument built upon fallacious garbage, hearsay, alleged divine revelations, or greed that comes from an “authority” doesn’t make the argument any more true. When people respect authorities simply because they are so-called authorities, it ripens them to stand in the camp that abdicates its responsibility and be picked by those who would profit from their ignorance.
But perhaps, like O’Brien and Neill’s kids, we are inherently wise and will learn from the mistakes that our human oil-dependent social trap practically forces us to choose. Maybe if we pay the least bit of attention we will actualize ourselves and engage one another in a cooperative community. But I am doubtful that the average person is willing to do the work for it if we remain such a huge and impersonal population. Nonetheless, “Vive reciprocity!”