The Paradox of Education

Hola Everybody,
It’s been a while since I posted a blog and a lot of that has to do with being busy working my new gig and stressing over finding a place where I can rest my head. Right now, I have no place. I would submit that I’m the Best-Dressed Homeless Person in NYC! LOL It’s ok, I will persevere. Tonight, a friend who’s aware of my situation, let me use the hotel room she wasn’t going to use the last night of her stay here. Hey, I’m grateful. I’ve been sick these past few days and appreciate the chance to rest without worrying about this or that.

Most likely due to the film, I’m Not Your Negro, I’ve been seeing many white liberals express anguish over James Baldwin’s truth. I was lucky, I discovered Baldwin when I was a teen. I love James Baldwin and if you ever get a chance, pick up some of his non-fiction. It’s some of the most powerful socio-political writing evah... The following is an excerpt I try to post at least once a year.

A Talk to Teachers, by James Baldwin

Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child -- His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Hunger

Hola Everybody,
So check this out: I need a J-O-B bad, so I applied for a job as a stock clerk. I was turned down -- twice. LOL! Really?

But I’m still here, still looking for work, still trying to upgrade my online presence. You can support my writing by clicking HERE. Any amount helps. If you can’t donate, please consider sharing the link with your contacts. Thanks.

I’m on an introspection trip these days.

The Hunger

The thirst for knowledge is like a piece of ass you know you shouldn't chase; in the end, you chase it just the same.
 -- George Pelecanos

One day when I was very young, my aunt was called to a store. I was caught stealing books and rather than call the police, the owner wanted an adult to come pick me up. I couldn’t have been more than eleven-twelve years-old. I still remember the books. One was a used copy of The Complete Works of Aristotle. Yeah, while my friends were out there stealing hubcaps, I was stealing books. They thought I was weird.

My aunt was so embarrassed, she couldn’t bring herself to look the store manager in the eye. We walked home in silence. The next day, my aunt, who was a washerwoman, reached into her purse with fingers stripped raw by the harsh chemicals of her work and came out with some crumpled bills. She asked me the cost of the books I attempted to steal. When I tried to rationalize the issue, she suggested I be quiet and patiently asked again in a firm voice, “How much did those books cost?”

When I told her, she gave me the money and instructed me to go buy the books. I went back to the same store and paid for the books. The store manager didn’t know what to say, she seemed confused. Eventually, she would come to know me well.

When I returned with the books, my aunt, with tears in her eyes, told me that there was nothing worse than ignorance. She told me if I ever wanted a book, to just ask and she would try to get the money for me. I’ll be honest and say that I continued to steal books here and there. Not a large amount, but books I thought I needed to read. My goal was to read all the great books. 

In case you haven’t noticed, I am a lover of knowledge. Actually, that’s a pretty good definition of philosophy. And please! We all are naïve philosophers in some form or another. Respect for knowledge, truth, and beauty were values instilled in me during my formative years. 

I was either born with this hunger or it was embedded in me at an early age by my parents and reinforced by the other adults during my formative years. Whatever the case, if I were to turn my back on this gift (as if I could), it would be more than a waste, it would be the only true sin.

Books, as with my other teachers, have always taught me to look for the contradictions -- the paradoxes -- because it is there where the truth can be found. I had hard a hard time figuring that one out. How can one find truth, or even anything useful, in things that seemingly have no connection?

But we don’t have to look too closely to see that our existence is full of contradictions. For every negative, there is a positive: night follows day, there is sadness and happiness, rain and sunshine. If you look still closer, you will observe that the web of life itself is made up of the interconnections and relationships between opposing forces. Like the tai chi symbol of yin yang, we all contain the rhythms reverberating from the play of dark and light, male and female, “good” and “bad,” awareness and ignorance.

I think about this web of connections when looking at and attempting to work with my character defects. Growth is optional and for many people and a critical outlook, or even looking within, is something alien -- something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, we are conditioned to consume that we become our material possessions. Even those of us who profess to be introspective truth seekers (or “truth tellers”!) often fall short because we are too busy defending who we are. Too often we rail on about the defects of others while ignoring our own.

If you look deeper, there is an essential unhappiness, a bitterness, driving this attitude. We all know at least one overly critical insensitive who tramples over people’s feelings under the guise of “truth” or “self-expression.” This kind of shit often backfires. It’s a bitch: when you deny life, it has a funny fuckin’ way of sneaking in through the back door. The baggage you carry will manifest itself through whatever form you consciously or unconsciously choose to express it.

In any case, many of us live our lives shuffling back and forth between two identities that seem to conflict: the rational and the emotional. My rational self, for example, tells me I really shouldn’t act out on an impulse, while my emotional self urges me to say “fuck it.” we all experience these two conflicting identities, and, though many people deny this, it’s how our mind/ brain is wired.

The rational self says “I should,” and the emotional self says, “Even though I know I should, I can’t.” Today, I have a better grasp of this paradox, these conflicting urges within me, but I’m still working on it. It’s a process, not a race. It’s also about practice and not perfection. I have found that I’m a deeply flawed man. So flawed that, by necessity, I need to have a process in place that keeps me moving, at the very least, in a good orderly direction. My path is more of a zig-zag than a straight line, but that too is OK.

The point being is that I (we?) have to find a way to balance these two natures. Some of us take the rational approach which often has the effect of leading to a denial of the emotional self. I see this all the time: people will say things like, “It doesn’t bother me,” as if reason can be used to stifle feelings. However, shit always comes up, somehow. Ultimately, denial is not a good coping mechanism no matter how logically you want to dress it up. Others take the opposite tact, and indulge their emotions. This is just the flip side of the denial coin.

I am at a point in my life where I am comfortable with who I am and how I embody my expressed values. I am comfortable with expressing my anger and confronting actions or behaviors that I find offensive. Is it always nice? No. Life isn’t nice. It is wrought difficulties and it is often within the crucible of conflict and turmoil that true growth happens. Avoiding conflict is like sticking your head in the sand. Conflict is an unavoidable and oftentimes invaluable fact of life.

This makes for many challenges and contradictions, but for one to live relatively happy, we need to find a way toward integration because that is the direction of all life: all life seeks to integrate fully somehow, it does this as surely as there is gravity and the sun sets and rises. Understanding how this all works can help many achieve some integration, some measure of comfortability and acceptance amidst the chaos and mass of contradictions that we all possess within.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…