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…

Direct Experience

Hola mi gente,
Well, today was my first day of work. I believe I have come across a project I can sink my teeth into and a good team. 

Experience is not what happens, but what we do with what happens.
 -- Aldous Huxley

Someone asked me recently whether books or direct experiences were the best teachers and it reminded me of the following story:

There was once a young scholar who came from a privileged family who spent most of time reading and studying all the great teachings. One day, while traveling, he came upon a wide river and eventually found a boatman to take him across. During the crossing, partly to pass the time and partly to impress the boatman, the young scholar described his life of studies. As he spoke, the boatman listened attentively. Then, after some time, he says to the young scholar, “You have learned much, sir -- but have you learned how to swim?”

“Why no,” he replied. “I have not.”

“Then I am afraid your knowledge is of little use,” said the boatman, “for this boat is sinking.”

LOL!

This is, of course, a funny over simplification, but it is true that direct experience remains the powerful teacher. However, a book can provide a map of the territory that can prepare us and enables us to learn more from our experiences. And while a book can point the way, we still must make the journey. In other words, the map isn’t the territory. So, in my estimation, it is a false choice. We don’t really have to choose between books and direct experience. Instead, the wisest course is to choose both.

It may be that it will take years of experience in order to integrate fully what we learn from books. Our perspectives change over time as life teaches and humbles us. It is the nature of life that, no matter how much we may have learned from books, we sometimes have to experience humiliation before we find wisdom. If we are receptive and open-minded, everything we encounter is a potential lesson. We succeed by failing, learn from our mistakes, and we rise up to our potential through a long and winding staircase.

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

On Education

Hola Everybody,
Almost all my thinking on education owes a huge debt to Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy. If you ever read anything on education, read him. Most of the following is shamelessly glommed from Freire. 

Critical Thinking

Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man... It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
 -- Paulo Freire

As one teacher put it to me: Thinking is an action. Critical thinking is a subversive action. For all aspiring lovers of knowledge, thoughts are the laboratory where one poses questions in the search for answers; it is the intersection where visionary thinking and theory and external action meet. For me education is about freedom, it is the practice of freedom. At the very core of critical thinking lies the longing to know -- to understand how life works. 

Children are naturally predisposed to be critical thinkers. Children arrive into the world of wonder and language literally consumed with the thirst for knowledge. As any parent can attest, sometimes they are so eager for knowledge that they become relentless -- demanding to know the who, what, when, where, and why of life. In their search for answers, they learn almost instinctively how to think.

It’s unfortunate that this natural passion for thinking is often stifled by a world that often confuses education for conformity and obedience. Too often, children are conditioned early on to perceive thinking as dangerous. Tragically, these children cease enjoying the process of thinking and learn instead to fear and loathe the thinking mind. Whether in homes that teach by way of punishment that to obey is more valuable than self-awareness, or in schools where independent thinking is deemed as unacceptable behavior, most of our children are forced to suppress the memory of thinking as a passionate and pleasurable activity.

By the time children pass into adolescence and adulthood, they have come to dread thinking. Those who have escaped the dread of thinking will instead fall prey to the assumption that thinking will not be necessary; that all is needed is to retain information and to regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. Those that enter higher education similarly find themselves confronted by a world where independent thinking isn’t encouraged. Fortunately, there are some classrooms in which individual professors work to educate as a practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking, and more importantly, critical thinking, is what matters.

While thinking is natural (organic), critical thinking isn’t and students do not become critical thinkers through osmosis. First, they must embrace and experience the joy and power of thinking itself. Critical pedagogy (pedagogy being the science of education) is a teaching strategy whose aims are to restore or empower students’ will to think and to become fully self-actualized. Educate comes from the Latin root, educare, which means to bring forth. Hence, the main focus of critical pedagogy is to empower students to realize what the capacities they already have. 

This is an essential point when teaching critical thinking. For me, critical thinking is the ability to see both sides of an issue, of being open to new evidence that challenges previously held notions, of being able to reason and to demand that claims be backed by evidence, and being able to deduce and to infer conclusions from available facts, solving problems, etc.

Simply put, critical thinking involves first discovering the who, what, where, when, and how of things and then using that knowledge in a way that empowers one to make the determination of what matters most. This ability to establish what is important is essential to the practice of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with the aim to improve it.

Most of all, critical thinking is an interactive process demanding participation from all involved. Critical thinking is a way of approaching ideas that aims to understand essential, sometimes hidden truths and not simply the obvious and superficial. Most people will resist critical thinking. After all, they’ve been taught to be more comfortable with passive learning. But it is this demand for initiative that critical thinking calls for that’s most exciting. It invites students and teachers alike to think passionately and to share ideas in a passionate and open manner. When all stakeholders realize that they are responsible for creating a learning community together, learning is at its most meaningful and useful. In such a setting, everyone leaves knowing that critical thinking empowers all of us.

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

The King of Soul and the Palace

Hola mi Gente,
I’m off for another interview today. If you have a free couch… LOL

It’s been several years since James Brown passed away. I wrote this back then...

* * *

The Pitkin Theater

James Brown and the Pitkin Theater

At a crucial point in the award-winning film, Mr. Holland’s Opus, the teacher of the title is fighting to save the high school arts program from budget cuts. The exchange goes something like this:

Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I'm forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division. 

Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.

It is a telling moment in a movie that’s principally about the essence of education. The fact of the matter is that art is indispensable to education. Numerous studies have shown that children who are immersed in arts programs tend to do better in reading, writing, and mathematics, for example. The word educate comes from the Latin root word educare, which means to draw from. The implication being that education is not about filling children’s minds, but drawing out the potential that already exists. It is unfortunate that today we eat our young and then blame them for our own collective narcissism and shortsightedness.

I won’t get into that today, but I mention the arts because it has been such an integral part of my life. Art, or Beauty, or Truth, or whatever you want to call it, literally saved my ass. When I was at the lowest point in my life what saved me was art. What saved me was the knowledge that in this fucked up world, full of petty motherfuckers racing mindlessly to catch/ buy/ sell/ the latest trend/ soundbite/ flavor of the month, there is Beauty.

Even in despair, I could still find sustenance in the intricate beauty of a Faulkner paragraph. I could quench my spiritual thirst with Neruda’s passion; I could listen to John Coltrane’s fearlessness and peer wide-eyed along with him into the void. Knowing and experiencing the beauty of a Monet assured me that there was sanity in this world and that it was worth living. And there were many times I needed reminding of the preciousness of life. Therefore, it is with great sadness that I mark the passing of great artists -- those who sustained me, when I felt I couldn’t do it myself. I feel a profound sense of gratitude for the archetype of The Artist, because they serve to remind us that there’s more to this momentary passage of time on this ball of mud we call Earth. The Artist, sometimes at great personal cost, follows her vision and sometimes points us to what matters most, though we oftentimes don’t pay heed.

And so it was with James Brown. I remember growing up listening and dancing to the sounds of James Brown. As a young teen, I danced the Camel Walk to James Brown. And who can forget his anthem to black pride when he sang, “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” At the time, it was a radical notion for people of color to be proud of their skin color, the texture of their hair, and their culture. We take it for granted now, but there was a hard war fought in order for us to assume that we should be proud.

I was born of Puerto Rican parents and raised in the slums of New York City, rubbing elbows with African-American neighbors who also lived in those ghettos. I remember it was 1967 when we moved to East New York Ave in Brooklyn, right behind the Pitkin Theater. The Pitkin was multi-tiered theatre with Greek statuary adorning the side walls and proscenium area. It had a Robert Morton 3 Manual, 14 Rank theatre organ as well. In those days, movie houses were built to resemble opulent palaces: velvet seats, gilded trimmings, lush carpeting in huge auditoriums facing a great stage where a huge silver screen hung. There was even a balcony and the older kids would go up there to make out.

At the time, we were one of the only Puerto Rican families living on that block embedded in a predominantly African-American community. In the beginning, I had to fight my way to and from school almost every day. Eventually, I would befriend most of my neighbors and the first girl I ever kissed was this beautiful black girl called Gail. Actually, she would kiss me when we stood on line in school and I hated it because I didn’t like girls -- yet.

On Saturdays, my mother would give each of us something like seventy-five cents and send us to the Pitkin Theater across the street on Pitkin Avenue (our apartment faced the back of the Pitkin Theater). The cost of admission was twenty-five cents and for that sum, you would see two new releases, plus the cartoons sandwiched in-between.

But the Pitkin Theater also held live shows and this is where I first experienced live soul music. I remember seeing Little Anthony and the Imperials there, and there were other acts. Many of the then up-and-coming Motown acts used to pass through in those days, part of the circuit and these were hugely popular. I remember the first time I was sitting down at the Pitkin and they were showing, between films, the hottest acts of the day. It was the first time I remember where all the white acts were booed and the Black performers cheered loudly. LMAO!

Now, James Brown, he was no up-and comer. JB was the King -- the Godfather of Soul. I don’t know if he ever played the Pitkin, but whenever I think of JB, I’m reminded of the Pitkin and those long-ago days. JB took the field holler and put it to a fatback backbeat. When JB squealed, screamed, hollered, it was almost as if the collective pain and anguish of the oppressed was concentrated in those musical moments. JB had the nastiest, funkiest rhythm section and if you listened closely, all the West African rhythms were encapsulated in his vocal stylings. To listen to James Brown was to be reminded that you were alive, that you were sensual, sexy, and a bad-assed muthafucka on the dance floor.

Without James Brown, popular music as it exists today would not exist. JB is the most sampled artist, the most emulated, having influenced people from the great Miles Davis to Prince, almost every Hip Hop luminary, and everybody in-between. Our world is a better world because of James Brown, whatever his inner demons were, and today, we’re a lot less richer because of his passing.

And the Pitkin? Unfortunately It closed in the late-1960’s. After, it served for a long time as a church, but the congregation eventually moved out. The entry lobby was converted into retail space (later used as storage), and after over the 40 years of neglect and dereliction the building gradually became a wreck.

In the Summer of 2010, work on the building began and today it has been converted into a school and retail use. So, in a real way both the Pitkin and the Godfather of soul live on.

Rest in peace, JB

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

Sunday Sermon [Knowledge & Education]

Hola mi Gente,

FYI, I will be speaking as a panelist at a conference tomorrow about the importance of education as a policy to address mass incarceration. Feel free to stop by starting at 5:30PM at SUNY Empire at 177 Livingston St., 6^th floor:

On another note, I have three interviews/ meetings coming up this week. Wish me luck.

* * *

Knowledge and Democracy

Thinking is an action; critical thinking is a subversive action.

-- bell hooks

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

 -- James Bovard

When I was in high school, an English teacher drafted me to be on the school’s debating team. I attended a high school that had over 3,000 students packed into a building that was originally built to hold half that number.

The school’s major claim to fame was that a student had been murdered there the year before I went to high school, in 1969. To walk through my school’s staircases and hallways was to navigate situations and dangers most adults, let alone children, would find hard to cope with. 

I was at the top of the Dean’s List, but I had to, by necessity, forge some form of alliance with those hallways and staircases, as well as the streets. And though I was an honor student, I might have known the individual who had taken your lunch money or sold you reefer.

Still, I was tagged as one of the few who would succeed. I was part of a citywide program that was specially funded for gifted inner city students. It was called the “College-Bound” program. And while my extorting and drug-selling friends attended classes packed with 40 or more students, I attended classes composed of the brightest students and, if there were fifteen students in the class, it was a lot. The best teachers, politically committed and passionate young people, became our mentors. Sometimes they were the last obstacle between us and the horrors that lurked just outside our classrooms. Some of the greatest teachers I have ever known were a part of that group.

They believed in the liberal notion that a good and free education was the key to a viable democracy. I began to learn some of the basic tools of intellectual craftsmanship under the tutelage of these men and women. They stressed to us that one of the primary elements of a true, functioning, representative democratic republic was that its citizens be well informed.

The vast majority of my classmates, most of whom were my childhood friends, went on to college and would become professionals. Several went on to become lawyers, a few more ended up on Wall St., and more than a few became teachers themselves.

I enjoyed debating. I saw debate as a gladiatorial arena in which the inequities of injustice could be hashed out. I was informed, passionate, and known for showing no mercy. I saw debate as a blood sport (still do LOL) and I was especially merciless when I came up against students from who had the privilege of attending schools located in wealthier neighborhoods -- schools that received twice the funding my school received. I remember visiting a school once that actually had a small stage in their “performance arts” classroom.

Even in the College Bound program, I was once taught algebra sitting on the bleachers by my school’s swimming pool, with the heat turned up to 90 degrees and people splashing and running around. Yes, I took great pleasure in dismantling the premises of my better off opponents mostly because it was easy to see the inequality behind it all.

Funding for the “College Bound” program was gutted shortly after my high school years. White flight to the suburbs followed by the arrival of conservative political power (which succeeded by pandering to white fear), gutted most social programs and education was the first victim. This first wave of the conservative onslaught against public education was followed by a sustained attack, this time by “Third Way” democratic neoliberals that funded then popular “tough on crime” initiatives that emphasized punishment and prison building at the expense of education.

As a result of these short-sighted and wrong-headed social policies, studies consistently show today that about 14 percent of adults in the U.S. are illiterate, meaning that 32 million people lack the skills to handle many everyday tasks. Some 21 percent of the population, possess “below basic” skills in reading and writing, meaning their reading ability is so limited, they have difficulty making sense of a simple pamphlet, for example. Another 44 percent of the population, have intermediary skills, meaning they can perform moderately challenging activities.

While these figures are certainly concerning, as with most things, there are two Americas when it comes to education. I am sure that we have all come across those articles that compares to the US to other comparatively wealthy democracies, showing how far we lag behind. However, that’s only half the story. The real take away from these studies and what the majority of the articles reporting these findings fail to mention is that public schools from middle class or wealthier communities in the US fare as well or better than schools in other countries. Schools situated in poorer communities, communities beset with lead poisoning, poverty, and addiction for example, don’t fare as well. 

For too long, there has been a two-pronged strategy to this manufactured educational “crisis.” The first has been to accede to the conservative ideal of the market as a solution. Most often, the Trojan Horse of charter schools, a system that uses a combination of padded cells, corruption, lousy instruction and worse results, are used to siphon off already scarce funds from public schools. The second prong has been an endless series of dismantling social safety nets that has resulted in increases in child poverty and child hunger. The rhetoric has been that the school system is too broke to fix. In a way, conservatives correct: the educational system is broken, but it is mostly the result of their social policies. One example in a long list of examples is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which cost states more in property taxes and other taxes than they got out of it.

The solution is not to go in and bulldoze the schools. The answer is not to privatize the schools. The answer lies not in destruction, but in creating the collective will to change and support the way we teach. I doubt I’ll find much disagreement that our schools are melting down. However, too many of the adults reading this are much too quick to blame the children. Don’t be fuckin’ stupid. If our children are failing, then that means we as a society are failing our children. If you’re one of these people, then you’re just a dumb motherfucker. Period.

Others want to blame the parents. While it is true that parental involvement is an important factor in educational achievement, it doesn’t matter how much a parent engages if the schools we entrust our children are in disrepair, offer no access to technology, or teach children in retrofitted bathrooms. Good parenting in a well-funded suburban school equals a good student. On the other hand, good parenting in a poorly funded and demoralized inner city school doesn’t equal a good student.

The answer lies in how we view education. Education (like health care) isn’t a business, it’s an investment. For every dollar spent on education, the economy gains nine dollars. Educational investment results in healthier children who are less likely to end up in the special-education-to-criminal-justice-system pipeline, and are more likely to go to college.

Conservatives, however, seem hell-bent in pursuing an agenda that has resulted in a de facto caste system. They are channeling people who believed we should have a literate ruling class and a working class that should know just enough to make change when they buy something.

We are there.

They have done their best to destroy public education. The undermine teachers unions and starve schools. In other words, they set public education to fail and when it does, they point fingers and yell, “See! Government doesn’t work!”

Historically, we have understood education as an essential, organic part of our democracy and considered access to higher education -- regardless of income or criminal justice status -- to be, using neoliberal terms, one of the keys to building a strong middle class, a strong economy, and a strong, united nation.

Conservatives, however, see education as another commodity, like shoes or X-Boxes. Because they see it as a commodity, they operate under the false assumption that it’s easy to measure. Standardized tests lead only to standardized minds. Standardized tests do not and cannot measure if our kids know the difference between the worldviews of Thomas Paine versus Edmund Burke or the differences in the vision of democracy between Robbespierre and Jefferson. Standardized minds don’t result in critical thinking skills and the ability to think “outside the box” -- skills essential to a democracy. 

If you want to know the consequences of 40 years of conservative educational policies, you have to look no further than the current election season. One study shows that Donald Trump, the GOP frontrunner for their presidential nominee, speaks at a fourth-grade level and the chattering class then feigns surprise. Considering our expressed values regarding the importance of education, why should we be surprised? In any other country, the way we treat our children would be considered child abuse.

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