by TJ Price
Saying “I don’t know” is one of the great joys of my adult life. I revel in the phrase. I freely and openly admit honest ignorance, in the service of learning more, hungrily, with an avid—and, perhaps, slightly obsessive—need. It was not always this way.
For most of my early life, in fact, I was uncomfortable saying it. It was as if I would be admitting to a lack of some critical function, for which I could be judged and dismissed—or, worse, taught—accordingly. Confronted with the new or unfamiliar, I might fake familiarity, bluffing my way through or fleeing from proof of my ignorance, but the dread of challenge to my knowledge dogged my every step. This was perhaps the first flickers of so-called “imposter syndrome”—I was terrified that every moment could prove the moment when everyone discovered I was a fraud, all along. That I wasn’t as smart as they thought I was, which would then prove to me that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.
Idyll:
Despite this fear of inadequacy, I have secretly always wanted to be a professional student. I had dreams of vaulted ceilings and cloistered libraries. Of chalkboards and dust and long hours turning pages. The actual schools I did attend held no real value to me—I had ideals of education, from the very beginning, which eluded me and continue to elude, I think, most in this country. These ideals may have been touched by a young romanticism, but the core of them remains the same—
Credo:
I believe education should not be a gauntlet, should not be cheerless. It should be gentle, inquisitive. It should be sets of questions to which answers are hard-won, but not in the way of contest or grade. I still, to this day, believe fully that one of the great evils in the world is that there is something that every single person is curious about, and that—often enough, for one reason or another—they just don’t get to follow that thread. Instead of being encouraging, there is a rigor involved, a stern hand-slap, a sharp return to inculcation by rote.
Hypothesis:
Education is less an instilling of foreign elements, treating knowledge as immigrant to our brain, but more a revealing—a guided perambulation via neuronal paths—lighting associations one by one as we go.
Parenthetical Query:
Why do we think that “drills” are an appropriate tool to use for education? A drill is something which bites into another material, which chips away at it, which reduces something through sheer repetition and pressure. “Tests”—there’s another one. A test is something which strains us, which bends us to our limit to determine performance. Our patience is often “tested.” Our faith. The waters. The etymology of the word in its current usage comes from metallurgy, in which metals were melted in a pot. “Exams,” yet another—obviously a shortened form of “examination,” which has its etymological roots in Latin—examen, ultimately from exigere, literally “to drive or force out.” “School,” on the other hand, derives from the Greek, skholē, referring to “leisure place,” or “spare time.” Since then, the word has evolved past description of an educational building even further, into idiom—if we “school” someone, we show dominance over another; we best them, as if in some kind of combat.
Still, it wasn’t academic rigor I disliked. Quite to the contrary. It was the boredom. I was bored because the teacher was bored. The boredom was so thick in the air that I almost needed an inhaler, some days. The endless shuffle from classroom to classroom through the hallways—a far more interesting interstice to most than the material being taught in each. In one room, math—language of numbers, equations so elegant they seem magic—is droned out in a series of unintelligible formulas in what looks like hieroglyphics on the whiteboard. (The marker squeaks. No one does anything about it.) In another, a history teacher lays another transparency on the overhead projector. It is an exact copy of what is written in every textbook, now open on every student’s desk. The teacher reads the chapter out loud, and refuses to answer any questions until the end of the reading.
I was lucky enough to have a few teachers that recognized my particular interests, and who even encouraged them. (Mine, I would surmise, is an outlier experience.) Despite this, most of the time, I did terribly in school. The constant refrain was “you just need to apply yourself,” and I never knew what that meant, really. I still don’t think I do, even though the bit spoken in italics was meant to impress upon me the urgency of this mysterious task. If I didn’t apply myself, dire things would happen. I look back from my pulpit of decades. Did dire things happen? Did I end up applying myself? Why didn’t school want to apply itself to me?
At one point in middle school, I received an in-house suspension. I can’t remember why, though I think it had something to do with my burgeoning career as a poet. You see, the principal was a large man with an unfortunate surname that just happened to rhyme with a more vulgar, four-letter synonym of fornication. I was supposed to sit in a room for the entire school day as punishment, alone, but they had no available space for me on that day. In the end, the put-upon secretary deposited me in a small room with yellowish wallpaper and a huge bookshelf, filled with copies of the books to be read in classes. Books like The Butterfly Revolution and The Chocolate War, The Whipping Boy, Island of the Blue Dolphins, even Little Women and Elizabeth of Blackbird Pond. When I’d done my time, I’d read all the books I’d need to—far, far in advance.
The rest of the kids thought I was some kind of mutant. Maybe I was. I had a stigma, a dark shadow, attached to me like static cling. I was weird. Awkward. I remember at one point, I told the whole class I had psychic powers. I don’t know how, but they believed me. I went about telling each of them what they were going to be “when they grew up.” Astronaut. Firefighter. Ballerina. Then I got to one girl, and I proclaimed she would be a “hooker.” I don’t know why. She was, of course, very upset by this proclamation, and I feel horrible when I think about it today. I tried to walk it back, explain that it wasn’t what she thought it was, that it meant she would be beautiful and tempting, that artists would want to paint her. “More like a muse,” I remember saying, which mollified her.
It was a small town, population maybe five thousand, and I had a surname that stood out in the crowd—not just because of its lack of vowels (if you don’t count “y”)—but because of my father, incarcerated after a shock arrest a few years prior, and whose actions had tarred me by dint of genetic association. This disgust (and, often, fear) was a kind of education: it taught me that I was different from other kids, and not in a good way, even if I didn’t know how. That, too, was something I felt I had known all along which had been affirmed, now, by the rest of the world—so I leaned into it, feeling a sense of resignment. Dutifully, I performed what was expected of me—to be unexpected, erratic, different.
Though it happened in the classroom, it had not been taught to me by a teacher. Nevertheless, I had learned a lesson: that we all have our roles to play—and, most often, it is the role thrust upon you which becomes the role you are forced to act, not the role you might have wished for.
Definition:
In pedagogy, the term “null curriculum” is used to refer to what is not taught. This is typically not a lack due to oversight or accident, however—it is what is excluded, purposefully. What is considered unnecessary, or irrelevant—deemed unworthy of being taught. This invisible coursing of information, this absence of knowledge (from the Latin currere, meaning “to run”) flows around most schools like a phantom river, eddying past staunch bulwarks and gates kept by indefatigable sentinels. (Most of these sentinels, being, of course, of the conservative variety.)
Then there is the “hidden” or “implicit” curriculum, which is the term for what is learned, but not openly intended to be taught. In his seminal book on critical pedagogy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes at length regarding how education has been—essentially—oppressed by capitalism, and discusses ways in which we can emancipate from it both teacher and student, as well as society. Freire then introduces his theory of this oppression came to be, essentially corruption by ideological hegemony—wherein learning bodies are viewed as empty vessels, repositories into which a teacher doles out identical amounts of filtered information. As Freire observes: “The more completely [the teacher] fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” Freire calls this the “banking concept” of education, in which the student is viewed as an object and thus, cannot truly be considered human. In it is only ever stimulated credulity, and never creativity.
Perhaps this is purposeful. Freire goes on to say that this so-called “banking concept” promotes inhuman activity, because a learning body—a human, a child—is alive, with a will of its own; not a mindless, passive thing. They are, in the words of Fromm, ideally a “biophilous” person, wishing to grow and change, to work with and alongside the agents of those changes. The opposite of this, however, is a “necrophilous” person, which Fromm (via Freire) defines as “driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, as if all living persons were things … Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts .. He loves control, and in the act of controlling, he kills life.”
Concerns over politicizing education are not new. Children, after all, are our most precious resource—they are living pieces of the future. They learn even when we are not teaching—even if they themselves aren’t aware of it.
They unwittingly record our every move.
*
Just before noon on the twentieth of April in 1999, in the space of less than an hour, sixteen people were shot and killed in a place that had seemed inviolate earlier that morning; when bells rang to summon the children to their classrooms.
Columbine High School was about as far away as one could get from Connecticut, where I grew up, and was serving the later half of my sentence at high school, but the effects of the massacre had a Tambora-like effect on the rest of the country.
All was thrown into question.
What are they teaching those kids?
The schools aren’t safe?
It wasn’t enough that we were forced to regard our classmates with new suspicion—suddenly, all the doors to the building, aside from the front entrance, were locked and alarmed. There would be no more coming and going as we pleased. The news media gorged themselves on any tiny crumbs of further information coming out of Colorado. Anything that told us more about the motives behind these killings, perpetrated by demons wearing the masks of children.
What the world needed—and wanted—more than anything, was answers. Answers would provide us with motive, which could then be traced backward to cause, which could then, of course, be guarded against in the future. But no such thing was forthcoming—despite an overwhelming presence of evidence left behind by the perpetrators, there was still only “why?” Even the testimonies of survivors would morph and become vague; trauma torquing memory into chimerical shapes. One eyewitness’ recollection contradicted another’s, despite being mere feet away from them at the time of the shooting.
At that point, it was all anyone wanted to read about, talk about, write about. We were scared, but we were also angry. High schools were no longer a place of potential—albeit somewhat skewed, a nurturing ground for adolescents—they were places that needed lockdown security, metal detectors at every exit. Suddenly, the barest hint of deviant tendency was met with the shrillest of alarms. (God forbid you were someone who liked to wear a trenchcoat, like one of my friends—who, even in the wake of the massacre, sported the long jacket every day, and bragged about it.)
Narrative was everything. The story behind the story. What wasn’t being reported, what we couldn’t possibly know—it infuriated the world that they didn’t understand what they were learning: that kids could be teachers too, and of an entirely different, horrific curriculum.
Anecdote:
Our local newspaper decided that it, too, wanted in on this reporting extravanganza. Somebody had the bright idea to publish an article that outlined the different kinds of stereotypes at our high school. There was even an accompanying infographic, with a list of different “types” and their traits. I don’t remember them all anymore, but one that stuck out was labeled “Artsy,” and included a predilection for … you guessed it, the arts. This “type” was sometimes unhappy or morbid, explained the helpful graphic, succinctly, prone to lots of reading and sometimes artistic expression of their feelings.
At that point, anger boiled over. How dare they pigeonhole us! The rallying cry swept through the majority of the student body. I remember being particularly incensed by it, perhaps a foreshadowing of my later tendency to rail mightily against labels of any variety. This revulsion extended even as far as my little exclave of social misfits, and we prided ourselves on knowing better than the rest of our easily-led classmates. This, it seemed, could unify us, and though none of us ever voiced that desire, there was a strong undercurrent of conformity in the face of such ludicrous, insulting “journalism.”
And then came the day that the student council announced their plan to fight back against this libelous assault on our very being. They had plied the rival newspaper with the promise of exclusive interviews—including thoughts and reactions from local students—on the recent tragedy, and to which degree it had transfigured our society. These interviews, of course, were limited to those students deemed acceptable—too bad they didn’t have a column on the infographic for that category—and, as such, were treacle-laced sobs of sympathy for the victims alongside venomous words for the perpetrators. These were gobbled up by the reporter, whom I never met, and the article was printed a few days later.
However, in the days prior to the journalist’s arrival, the student council had printed T-shirts, to signal our collective disgust with the article that had dared to stereotype us as a group of conglomerates, denying us our individuality. On the day the paper showed up, there was an announcement over the public address system—everyone was to get their T-shirt on and go outside, where there was going to be a group picture taken, to run alongside the article.
I could already see the photograph in my mind—a host of students, teeth bared in smiles to the camera, individual bodies bearing identical shirts, each with the name of our school printed on the front, and two words beneath:
BE DIFFERENT.
It was a bit of a shock to see it manifest in the paper, once it did. Somehow, no one involved had realized the photograph would render a group of people intent on proclaiming their differences . . . only in uniform, and in unison.
When the photograph ran in the newspaper, it was captioned with a list of each and every one of the names of the students—needless to say, my name was appended by a cheeky [not shown].
In this case, what I learned is that invisibility was better than conspicuity. If they could see you, they could put you in a box, and then—from a distance—shoot you. It could be with a gun, it could be with a camera. Either way, its gaze was to be avoided.
All this, learned, but not taught in classrooms—another tributary of the hidden curriculum.
Apology:
Here I have set the pen down, stopped typing for a moment, in an effort to find an adequate conclusion.
I have realized this cannot have a satisfactory ending. My research on the subject is ongoing, and—I imagine—will continue to be so, for the rest of my life. After all, if I’ve learned anything, education should not be solely built on the principle of being taught—it’s about nurturing how to learn, and one of the best ways to begin that process is by admitting “I don’t know.”
I will let this imperfect document serve as my lesson plan, then. I will allow my past self, with all of its mistakes, to serve in the role of teacher, but I will grace my present self with an allowance of wonder—all in order for my future self to continue learning how best to learn.
***
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