It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence.

wendell berry on education... from "the long-legged house"... 1969

there are moments in this essay... early on... when wb seems to be flying off on wonderful tangents... sidetracks that comment, as above, on education or marriage ("a perilous and fearful effort, it seems to me")... but by essay's end i see how central these matters are to his business here... this is an essay about learning to be in a place... and how that being in a place is central to being alive... i'm not so sure our school(s) educate in that direction... out here in the distracted suburbs...

but this business about education being "overtheorized and overvalued" resonates with my own doubtful soul... students are (in my case) young people who come to school and find themselves in my classroom... but they are not "my" students... they are young people who find themselves deciding to do or not to do what i ask of them... i don't believe i am "giving" them anything other than a loose chain of opportunities... chances to read and think about some writing that (each in its own way) challenges a reader's "common sense" about social relations, about being alive and having to die, about reading and writing... about whatever any art can do to wake us up from the comfortable sleep of the daily grind...

ach... a short one here... talk about the comfortable sleep... an inarticulate brain is an unhappy brain... grrr...

and yet... for teacher appreciation day this past week i received two letters... from current students... who see and say... more clearly than i can... some of what goes on in the class and even in my own mind... freaky... and encouraging... thanks, kids...

School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.

Ivan Illich

talk to me

brtom.org