Some Inquiries

Wittgenstein imagined a language consisting only of questions. Harold Bloom named Yiddish as that language.

For the moment, consider only questions that aren't ironic or exclamatory, or aren't uttered out of politeness. That is, questions not in these forms:

"You call that a wedding ring?"

"What the hell?"

"Could you pass me the potatoes?"

Imagine now a language that excluded questions—a language whose speakers acquired new information in response to demands.

"Tell me your name."

"Give me the price of that doggy in the window."

"Define what truth is."

If statements demand, rather than request, informative responses regarding presumptive unknowns, can they still be considered questions? For the statement to count as a question, must it honor the recipient's freedom to choose whether to answer it? To what extent is the idea of consent implicit in a question? Can an individual seek information from himself using this kind of language?—

"Tell me what I'm going to do with my life."

Imagine now a language in which inquiry honors the idea of consent, but comes indirectly, not in the form of a question:

"I wonder who made the pumpkin pie."

"I did."

"I wonder if you would give me your recipe."

"I'd be glad to."

In this language, a person can plausibly inquire of herself:

"I wonder what I'm going to do with my life."

How are the internal lives of people changed by the structures of inquiry open to them?

Imagine now a language in which it's not possible to make a direct inquiry. Speakers in this language have the habit of constantly offering up new information, and speakers who want to know particular things respond by saying "more about this" or "no more about that" and suchlike. Through a process of trial and error, speakers of this language acquire new information indirectly. Yet, how do they inquire of themselves? How can they constantly offer new information to themselves and respond with "more about this" and "no more about that" when they want to direct the course of their own thoughts?

Inquirers in the language of indirection can only select more of, or no more of, the information they hear from others or themselves. But what mode of inquiry isn't selective? One student today said he couldn't start writing because he had no questions, and another said that he had too many. Everything can't be questioned all at once, and so inquirers must select if they are to inquire. What determines what is and is not asked?

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

There are contexts in which these questions get asked, and contexts in which they don't. The questions may be treated in an English class, but not in a budget meeting. Why? What drives the functions of contexts, and how do they exclude some modes of inquiry but not others?

Imagine a language in which there is no inquiry. This language might be the first words of early humans. Then someone invented the form of the question. The language went from simple descriptions of where the buffalo roamed to inquiries about where the buffaloes were roaming. What changed? Does an awareness of the structures of inquiry increase an awareness of variables and unknowns?

Suppose that the capacity to inquire were located in one particular language center in the brain and a person suffered a brain injury that destroyed only the inquiry language center. What could that person learn?

Suppose that a discrete brain injury destroyed a person's capacity for feeling or recognizing uncertainty. When would this person ask questions? Now suppose that the therapy for this person consisted of asking him questions. This therapy was based on the theory that questions suggest the existence of variables and unknowns.

Now suppose that the therapy didn't work and doctors gave the patient a pill that caused an overreaction. Now the patient regards everything as uncertain. Does the patient now ask questions?

Suppose now that the doctors reduce the medication until the patient reports feeling certain about some things and not certain about other things. Does the patient now ask questions?

Traditions

On a shelf by my desk at school, I keep my old copy of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. I don't often refer to it. There are better sources for the kinds of things I need to look up for my philosophy class. Mostly I keep it there for symbolic reasons, to remind me of something, though I'm not sure exactly what that something is. At some point in high school, I realized, mostly through discussions with an older friend, that there were artistic, literary, and intellectual traditions going back thousands of years—traditions that no adult had ever bothered to tell me about. This was an astonishing discovery to me. After I read the copies of The Last Days of Socrates and The Republic that my friend had given me, I went out and bought Russell's book. I'm not sure where I got the money for it—mowing lawns or dealing drugs, I'm not sure which. In any case, I immediately set out to read the book from cover to cover.

I don't know at which chapter I gave up and turned my attention elsewhere, and it's no longer possible to read it cover to cover because it no longer has a back cover. I do remember my favorite lines, from the chapter on Nietzsche:

His general outlook, however, remained very similar to that of Wagner in the Ring; Nietzsche's superman is very like Siegfried, except that he knows Greek. This may seem odd, but that is not my fault.

The book only goes up to the pragmatists and what Russell calls "The Philosophy of Logical Analysis." I had to attend college before I realized that there were philosophers after, well, Bertrand Russell. When I was in high school, the biases of Russell and the limitations of his account of philosophy didn't really matter to me. Philosophy was just one new sudden interest I'd taken up among many others. I went to a high school where I was the only person I knew who had such interests. It certainly didn't come from home, and while I'd had some exposure to the intellectuals in my extended family, I don't think my hunger to learn about newly discovered traditions is explained by influence alone.

Because I'm a high school teacher, I spend a lot more time contemplating my own years in high school than is probably healthy. It can't be helped. I've been told that it's no coincidence that I've ended up teaching high school. I have a simpler explanation: I couldn't make a full-time, adult living when I taught college, and after years of doing one thing after another I ended up doing what I'm doing now. Every year I think this will be my last year of teaching high school. Oddly enough, I was recently offered a part-time job at a community college, but by then I'd been hired back by my school district, and I couldn't very well walk out on my students for the pittance they would have paid me. Be that as it may be, I still marvel at the lack of intellectual curiosity of the vast majority of the students I encounter. I know the standard response: they have other things on their minds, and some of those things are very difficult.

I want to say this, if I can, without anger. So did I. I did not have the worst of all possible childhoods, and teaching where I do has made that exceedingly clear. However, it was bad enough. I remember, for example, when I developed an interest in studying economics in tenth grade. It was after my mother had been committed to a state mental institution the first time. I'd grown large enough that my father no longer felt sure that I wouldn't hit him back if he took his belt to me. There was a temporary stay against terror in my household—my father was busy with his graduate studies at MIT, and we were left to the care of a college student. Here's a poem I wrote some years ago:

Alexander Hamilton

During one of my mother's stays
In the mental hospital,
My father hired a nanny,
Though we didn't call her that—
We didn't call her anything.
She was just there one day,
A college student, dark hair,
Trying hard to be kind.

The only thing I remember she did
Was type my history paper,
"Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury."
His banking policy was beyond me,
But I wrote as if I knew what I was saying.
I wanted to be an economist then,
Probably because I'd heard about my dad's class
With John Kenneth Galbraith.
The nanny thought I was smart,

Little consolation for a fifteen year old
Who missed his mother and couldn't say so.
I don't remember the grade I received
Or what the paper strained to be about.
A B would have been charitable.
The words weren't right, and I knew
It had nothing to do with Alexander Hamilton.

This is a long way of saying that at least part of the time I tried to escape my considerable troubles by learning about how intelligent people thought about the world. I was desperately trying to make sense of mine, and for years afterward I pursued one artistic and intellectual endeavor after another. My point is that I don't understand why the troubled teenagers I know don't see the course I took as an option. Okay, I can think of one—a student from the alternative school the superintendent closed. This student feels very out of place at my school, something I understand perfectly. Not only do I feel out of place at my school, I feel out of place in my own classroom. I realize that this sense of alienation will eventually go away. Either I will cease to feel it, or I will no longer teach where I am teaching.

One would think that I would be a good teacher for troubled teenagers, and I sometimes I think I am. However, I am faced every day with need that outstrips my capacity for compassion. No teacher I know has it unbounded. To the administrators and policymakers obsessed with "data," I say: quantify that, fuckers.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

John Rawls' A Theory of Justice

Some years ago I tried to read Rawls' A Theory of Justice and only managed to make it about a third of the way through before I gave up. I read past the chapters on the original position and the veil of ignorance, and I figured that was good enough. This year, in odd spare moments and during a few long stretches on weekends, I ground my way through the book in the month of October. Rawls' book, for me, is one of those rare works I will remember for having changed me—or at least for having changed how I see social justice and how I understand what philosophy can do.

I'm not capable of offering a serious critique of his major work or even offering an introductory assessment of it, as Martha Nussbaum has done in The Enduring Significance of John Rawls. However, I will say that I find it remarkable that a theory so generally abstract so readily invites us to apply it concretely. One sees this illustrated in Nussbaum's article where, for example, she refers to same-sex marriage and care for the aged. Indeed, when writing about his failure to address global issues, she seems to recommend that we extend his ideas into areas he couldn't or didn't cover himself.

I think we just have to say that it remains for others to use the core idea of Rawls's views in a way that productively addresses the current global situation.

Yet, as Nussbaum moves toward the end of her article, she moves away from Rawls' "core idea," questioning the usefulness of applying social contract theory in "thinking about choosing basic political principles."

Instead of a Kantian image of people, which stresses rationality and reciprocity, we may need to move more to an Aristotelian image, which sees dignity and need as subtly intertwined.

While Nussbaum thinks she's detected a flaw at the core of his work, she doesn't go so far as to repudiate it, but rather suggests that in

moving away from Rawls, we are fully engaged with him. Surely that is a sign of his work's depth and enduring significance.

It's easy enough to point out where, according to one's own perspective, A Theory of Justice is lacking. For example, I might contend that he doesn't say nearly enough about the role of education in a just society or how we might view education in terms of the difference principle. However, his theory is so systematically, comprehensively and flexibly conceived that it is easily applied to any number of fields.

One of the results of reading his book is that I've realized how contemporary talk of education generally takes place along very narrow epistemological lines. What should children know how to do? What is the best way for them to learn how to do these things? How do we assess whether they know how to do these things? How do we know whether teachers are effectively teaching them how to do these things? These are the kind of questions teachers, administrators, and policymakers ask and attempt to answer. Problems in education that lie outside this framework are left uninvestigated by the people who make and implement policy. As a result, we're not asking, for example, what part education plays in a good life. We're not asking about the nature of education as a primary social good. And we're not asking about the place of education in a theory of justice.

In his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote:

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

I imagine that Rawls would want the same for his books. Perhaps the best that I can say about A Theory of Justice is that it has left me my own thoughts.

Response to "Everybody's Protest Novel"

In my last article, I wrote that before

discussing the book [Uncle Tom's Cabin] with A Reader, I hadn't given the novel any thought since I read James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" about twenty-five years ago. Between me and any consideration of the novel has stood Baldwin's essay . . .

As if in answer to my excuse for not reading the book (no, we didn't plan this), A Reader has responded to Baldwin's essay in his latest article on Uncle Tom's Cabin. He characterizes "Baldwin’s attack on Harriet Beecher Stowe" as "a power essay that is difficult to come to terms with." The word "vehement" could be used to describe any of Baldwin's essays, but "Everybody's Protest Novel" struck me as unusually vehement by the standards of his other essays. As a stylist, Baldwin was already a master by the time he wrote his attack on Richard Wright through the medium of Stowe's novel. However, "Everybody's Protest Novel" is not representative of his mature style, with its leaps of thought and bold juxtapositions, its complex qualifications and distinctions, its biblical undertones and echoes of the black church, its dramatization of personal revelation, its high art of the Jeremiad. "Everybody's Protest Novel" is a whack on the head.

As evidence, I would quote the same passage that A Reader quotes:

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart,; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

Is this an attack on Stowe's novel or the sentimental novel or sentimentality in general? As a reader of Charles Dickens, shouldn't Baldwin have known better? I seem to recall reading somewhere (perhaps some generous reader can jog my failing memory) an accusation that Dickens was cruel in his treatment of his own characters. Perhaps—or perhaps all good novelists are cruel in what they put their characters through. Be that as it may be, Baldwin was not deterred by Dickens' sentimentality when he wrote, in his famous forward to The Fire Next Time in the form of a letter to his nephew, that

these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago.

(And if you think things have gotten better since Baldwin's time, please consider that your grocery shelves may be stocked by and your take-out pizza may be prepared by and your office trash cans may be emptied by and your lumber may be milled by teenagers working full-time jobs and attempting to learn something in my English classes. But that is my Jeremiad.)

The conventional wisdom is now, I believe, that Baldwin the writer needed to destroy his early model and exemplar, Richard Wright, and "Everybody's Protest Novel" is one more means to that end. His subsequent history with Wright lends credibility to that charge, but it's a history I'm not much interested in. Whatever room Baldwin was trying to make for himself as a novelist, I hold with those who regard his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain as his best achievement in fiction. I wonder—and now it is far too late for me to ask him—what he thought of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a very different kind of novel avoiding all of the putative traps of the protest novel.

I had intended to take up Zora Neale Hurston's novel in my English classes, but, once again, I've had to modify my plans to fit the realities of my students. Hurston's book would simply be too difficult for them. I'd already planned to make the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance a part of my unit, and, as it happens, I'm thinking about using "The Rockpile," Baldwin's forerunner to Go Tell It on the Mountain, as my fictional follow-up to the poetry of the era. As I mentioned in my previous article, the Harlem Renaissance unit began ominously, but the last four days my students have been engaged in research and creative projects, and they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They may even have learned something. This is the second time I've done this unit, and I'm impressed all over again with the rich far-reaching influence the arts movement exerted on music, painting, literature and, as A Reader has alluded to, photography.

Will I share my own impressions of James Baldwin with my students? My young students have little interest in what relates to me personally; they're much more interested in what relates to them personally. I may have more to say about this phenomenon in a future article. In the meantime, I note that in an online archive of DeWitt Clinton High School's Depression-era literary magazine, The Magpie, one finds the drawings of James Baldwin and the poetry of Richard Avedon. One also finds Baldwin's interview with his former Junior High teacher, Countee Cullen. It reminds me that we really only see each other in snapshots.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Not Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin

I wonder what my good friend The English Teacher thinks of requiring high school students to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Would he like to see it as part of the core English curriculum, or an AP course? Would he introduce students to the work of Hawthorne’s “scribbling women” and offer a feminist critique of the academy’s rejection of 19th-century sentimental literature? To understand the novel, would students need more than half the class time devoted to Antebellum history? Wouldn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin better be offered as a segment of the school’s American history course?

So A Reader begins his article on Uncle Tom's Cabin. I must admit that not only have I not thought of requiring high school students to read it, I haven't read the book myself. Perhaps I should. Before discussing the book with A Reader, I hadn't given the novel any thought since I read James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel" about twenty-five years ago. Between me and any consideration of the novel has stood Baldwin's essay, which, now that I reread it, seems a kind of protest itself. Be that as it may be, I take A Reader's point that "the distance between the world the novel depicts and us is not quite as great as we would like."

By coincidence, I began my unit on the Harlem Renaissance in class today. In struggling to explain just what is meant by the term "Harlem Renaissance," I relied on this passage from Nikki Giovanni's Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate:

"Renaissance" is actually a very unusual term to use for the flowering of the arts in Harlem between 1917 and 1935. To say there is a renaissance is to say that there is a rebirth or a reflowering, and there would be certainly those who would question, well, where was the original flowering? If you go back to 1619, with Africans landing in Virginia as slaves, and coming through that kind of wilderness, where would the flowering be? . . .

If we are going to be cosmic, we would have to say there were golden ages in Africa. If that was the case, then the Harlem Renaissance was connected to the great kingdoms of Songhay and Mali, and to the kingdoms in Egypt, but it would also be connected to the great kingdoms that came out of the Sudan, that came out of Zimbabwe—all of these great flowerings throughout history. So the Harlem Renaissance was the first American flowering of the black people.

In attempting to explain this passage three different times to classes that contained African immigrants and the descendents of African slaves, I felt that I, a white man, must have been out of my mind to touch on the issues contained in Giovanni's passage. The problem wasn't my intentions. The problem was that I was raising a host of complex issues without any idea of what to do with them in class. My only hope is that this passage meant something to someone in my classes today.

At one point in class, I asked my students, "Is this really boring? No one seems to be paying attention."

Finally one of my students looked up and said, "Huh? What did you say?"

That made me feel better. If my lesson was bombing, at least no one noticed.

Postscript

The Chair of the English department at my school recently cleared out some unused texts from the "book room." I grabbed a couple dozen books for myself, including the quaintly titled 16 Books that Changed the World (1956). I will leave it to you, dear readers, to guess what books one Robert B. Downs thinks changed the course of history. I will merely point out that today, when I perused its contents for the first time, I discovered that one of the sixteen was Uncle Tom's Cabin. The chapter begins:

On a single point only do the pro-and-con critics of Uncle Tom's Cabin agree. Without exception, all recognize the book's tremendous impact on its time, and its immense influence in instigating the American Civil War.

Well, there you go!

"Nigga"

For the second time this year, I've had to talk to a student in the hallway about his use of language in class. And for the second time, the student claimed to make a distinction between the word "nigga" and the word "nigger." The first was a girl of mixed parentage. The second was a boy whose family came from East Africa. The boy considered the word "nigger" to be wrong, but not the word "nigga." I didn't have time to pursue his distinction; I merely let him know, in my soft-spoken way, that both were unacceptable language in class. In the case of the girl, I did explain to her that I understood that students use their own kind of language on the street, but that often street language is not appropriate for the classroom. I think the girl understood what I was saying. There isn't much point in trying to get teenagers to give up their street language; however, things have not deteriorated to the point where the teacher can't enforce the limits of speech in the classroom. At least at our school.

I don't think my students were just trying weasel out of criticism from the teacher. Last year my classroom opened up onto a hallway where, because of the student group that had staked out territory there, I heard the word "nigga" about ten times a day, at least. Mostly I heard American-born black students calling each other "nigga," though I note that its usage is becoming more general. There are white "niggas," too, because the word has come to denote not so much skin color as street smarts. Words don't have much meaning ripped from their contexts. (Wittgenstein argued, correctly I think, that philosophy invents difficulties for itself by pulling words from their working contexts and by using them in peculiar ways.) Rather, they mean according to their functions within contexts. In the case of "nigga," I observe that I've heard it used in two ways: as a greeting between two people, male or female, who mutually recognize each other as having street smarts; and as a come-down meant to remind the person so-named that he or she is no better than anyone else. Thus, sometimes the word is used in friendly way; other times it's meant to deflate a superior attitude on the part of someone who belongs to the street.

I've heard the theory that black people effectively seized possession of the word "nigger"—a word meant to subjugate them cruelly—and undermined its historical meaning by ironizing it. That may be true, but I'm hearing something else at work among the teenagers at my school. The unspoken dichotomy is between those with street smarts and those with school smarts. It would be inaccurate to say that all students fall into these two categories. Urban schools as diverse as ours are very complex socially. However, one more of the many reasons that reform movement after reform movement has failed to close the so-called "achievement gap" between poor students and everyone else—one more of the seemingly innumerable impediments to improving their educations—is the fact of defensive, and ultimately self-limiting, identities. Students who've had long experience with humiliation and failure in school feel that they can't compete with the honors students. However, what they lack in school smarts they more than compensate for in street smarts. By comparison, school-smart students are naive. Street-smart students know the score, and they pride themselves on their knowingness.

Yesterday, in conversation with a colleague, I said that when we ask street-smart students to take on academic aspirations, we are challenging their sense of who they are. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. Rather, I'm saying we ought to be aware of some of the complexities involved in such challenges. We need to think about how we can show them that they don't have to give up their senses of who they are so much as expand them to include intellectual ambitions. Easier said than done, of course. On the whole, I haven't felt very successful at it lately. Think of it as an economic problem: these young people live in a world where their demands for attention and compassion have outstripped our supply of it.

I think of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The adherents of the Ptolemaic system of planetary dynamics and the adherents of the Copernican never did find common ground from which to discuss their competing paradigms. They operated from two different common grounds. The shift to the Copernican system was established as the old followers of Ptolemy died out and were replaced by new followers of Copernicus.

Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus' death. Newton's work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the Principia appeared. Priestly never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on. . . . And Max Planck, surveying his own career in Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

This is a long way of saying that I fear I may be someone's distant memory before a generation of reformers succeed in actually making public education something closer to the great leveler it should be.

Stanley Fish and Theories of Knowledge

Today A Reader asked me if I was using Stanley Fish as a source for my philosophy class and gave me a pointer to this article from his blog. My first response was: Stanley Fish has a blog? But to answer the question: no, I haven't used Stanley Fish as a source. When I teach the first half of the class in the spring, I might have a use for one of his articles on language. Or maybe I'll just have my students read Philosophical Investigations. (Kidding.)

With regard to the article A Reader was kind enough to send me, I've wondered if it was really worthy of the brilliant Stanley Fish. He's on solid ground in challenging the facile assumptions of his readers on science and religion, but his readers—at least the ones he quotes—are easy targets. They might as well be straw men. What would he have to say to Quine and Putnam's views of science as our best theory of knowledge? It's not an argument I would make,—I leave the field entirely to them—but I think if you're going to make epistemological challenges to science in order to shore up the claims of religion, you might as well take on strong arguments rather than weak ones.

So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion—it is an inferior way of knowing—is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism.

I tend to react to these kinds of statements with the shrug of a pragmatist, and then try to change the subject. I don't have a theory of knowledge to defend. I leave those kinds of arguments to others. (Yes, I note the irony that I'm teaching a class on the theory of knowledge.) However, if I were I forced to make an epistemological argument, I would say that I reject the idea that there is some neutral ground from which we can objectively measure the knowledge claims of science and religion against a common set of standards.

What communities of scientists and communities of religious practitioners do is very different. Fish can pull terms like "faith" and "evidence" from their contexts if he wants to, but these terms don't mean much pulled from their contexts. The faith of scientists and the faith of religionists take their meaning within the contexts of communities and their traditions. The counterargument, I suppose, is that historically science and religion have made competing claims of knowledge in particular areas. We can examine the relative success of those competing claims,—for example, in planetary dynamics or evolutionary biology—but that does not make distinctly different communities of practice somehow commensurate.

Mostly I'm going to ignore the knowledge claims of religion because I don't find personal revelation or interpretations of sacred texts to be effective ways of knowing—if, that is, I'm forced to consider ways of knowing at all. I'm willing to start with the standard definition of knowledge as "justified true belief" and say that "belief" is something we think is the case, that "true" is the endorsement of the success of a belief, and "justified" is the thing we ought to be spending our time on.

On Monday, a chemist who was a guest speaker in my class made a distinction between the way science is taught in school and the way it's practiced in the "real world." In school, science is typically taught as if it were a collection of theories and facts—that is, as if it were a body of knowledge. In the "real world," science is an activity in which scientists form hypotheses, test them, and publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. My first thought was that science, as it's practiced, is more like a verb than a noun. But that is too simple. A scientific paradigm is certainly a noun, and, if Kuhn was right, a working paradigm defines what counts as legitimate problems about which scientists form hypotheses. Scientific justification matters within the context of what matters to science. The Co-President of the Muslim Student Association at my school can say, if it makes him feel better, that "science is just guessing," but he betrays (to borrow from Fish) "incredible ignorance."

This student doesn't need a theory of knowledge; he needs instruction in what science does. Likewise, Fish's readers don't need specious grounds for comparisons between science and religion; they need a better understanding of the provisional nature of scientific claims. Otherwise, in matters where science has nothing to say about religious claims of knowledge and religion has nothing to say about scientific claims of knowledge, I say nothing.

Why Public Education Will Continue to Fail the Poor

While studying up on complexity and chaos theories for my philosophy class, I had an epiphany: public education will not get better as long as the system continues to be overly complex. If any district administrator or policy-maker ever bothered to ask any teacher about the complexity of her job, she could tell him that she is constantly overwhelmed by the countless tasks that teachers have to do just to keep up with the requirements of the job. Teachers are so burdened by the these tasks that any new task that is supposed to improve the system only displaces some other task that the teacher should be doing.

An obvious example is district-mandated teacher-training. It sounds like a good idea to require teachers to take classes that will help them to improve their practice. However, every minute I'm in class is a minute that won't go into planning instruction. As it is, I don't spend enough time planning because I'm overwhelmed by having to develop curriculum for three new classes. The reason I'm in this position is that because of unstable funding in my state, I was laid off in the spring and then rehired with new classes just weeks before school started. I'm constantly improvising, and I don't have time for important tasks like contacting parents about the good or bad things their children are doing in class or conferencing with students about how they're succeeding or failing.

The end result of this situation, multiplied many times over in countless ways, is that the system is so complex that it can neither be managed effectively nor improved substantially, unless policy-makers and administrators are willing to undertake the arduous work of simplifying and funding the system. Unfortunately, they will not undertake that work because they are like a bunch of World War I generals so far behind the lines they haven't the slightest clue about the reality of the trenches and battlefield. If the war is going badly, it must be because of the troops. It couldn't possibly be because uninformed generals are managing it badly—or so policy-makers think these days. Everyone—that is to say, teachers—are at fault but them. And if teachers are at fault, why bother to ask them what it would take for them to do their jobs better?

In the meantime, the affluent still manage to get good educations for their children, and so the failures of the system fall most heavily on the poor. When one considers the innumerable ways the system is stacked against the poor, one can only conclude that it's a small miracle that any of them manage to beat the odds at all. Most don't. Is this situation by design?

I think of Rawls' original position behind the veil of ignorance. Suppose the obverse of his thought-experiment. A relatively small group of people who knew they were to be born with extraordinary advantages wanted a system that would sustainably maximize the wealth of a few. In the long run, the system couldn't depend on wealth generated by limited natural resources, as in Saudi Arabia and Russia. In addition, the system would have to be stable enough that it wouldn't be subject to revolts and revolutions. The majority would have to be placated by the illusions of self-determination and a modest share of the wealth. If the system did produce a perpetual underclass, the members of that class would have to be deprived of the tools to change the system: namely, an education that would enable them to question the assumptions of their society, analyze its unspoken features, and organize themselves to challenge its structure. What they would get, instead, is an education that holds up the ideal, whether attainable or not, of liberation as wealth. Teachers would primarily be tasked with teaching the skills most necessary for the current demands of the economy. The disadvantages of having to fund the incarceration of large numbers of unskilled men and women would be outweighed by the presence of a large pool of cheap labor for the service sector. The mechanisms that perpetuated poverty would go unchallenged because they would be to the advantage of the wealthy few. In short, the system our would-be elitists designed behind the veil of ignorance is the one we have.

The huge financial costs of students not getting an education are well known and documented. There is no mystery here. We know what successful high schools look like. We know the return-on-investment of effective intervention programs. We know the majority of us would be wealthier if a much larger portion of our students succeeded in school. But public education is not rational for the majority of us. I do not say this with any pleasure: we are already spending enormous sums on the long-term incarceration of criminally uneducated men and women, and I fear we'll have to spend even more before we begin to see a serious examination of what we're doing to young people in our schools. Real reform in education, if it ever comes, may only come with even more crime—that is, with the imponderable ruination of countless more lives.

Education as Liberation

Now and then something comes to my attention that causes me to reexamine my practices and assumptions as a teacher. Last week I asked my students, in preparation for reading "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, to make a list of both the physical and emotional things they carry with them to school. I made a point of telling them that I would be reading their lists, and if something was too personal for me to read, they shouldn't list it. That, of course, did not stop many of my students, who trust me to degree that always surprises me, from sharing very disturbing concerns they carry around with them. For example, one of my students worries about getting jumped or shot on the way to school. Another feels bad about a friend who was shot. Others, living with relatives or foster parents, are separated from their siblings. Some see themselves as taking care of family members. And so on.

I have taken up the question of questions in a number of articles on this blog. I have stated that I regard the ability to ask incisive questions as the basis of intellectual freedom. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, I've described how torture makes a mockery of the true form of a question. Indeed, Henri Alleg, in naming his book The Question, was referring to the euphemism for torture that was current at the time he was tortured by French paratroopers. I've argued that torture is never intended to elicit information, because torture renders its victims speechless and incoherent. Rather, it's intended as an attempt to legitimize illegitimate power. I've suggested that there is no inborn capacity for asking incisive questions and that students must be taught questioning as an intellectual habit. In this article, I want to add a couple of (for me) new points, starting with this observation from Judith N. Shklar's Ordinary Vices:

Cruelty, to begin with, is often utterly intolerable for liberals, because fear destroys freedom.

I want to couple this idea with the observation that systematic questioning renders the claims of the thing questioned provisional at the least and doubtful at the most. Questioning, in other words, functions to unlock an assertion's certitude. This is a very good thing from an intellectual point of view, but from the point of view of teenagers whose lives are filled with instability, the idea of inducing yet more uncertainty is repellent. Here, it seems, is yet one more example of how poverty and one of its many attendant social ills, corrosive fear, destroys the freedom to get an education. Yet, I would argue that in an English class teenagers can find a safe space in poetry and literature for exploring and interrogating their deepest concerns. We want teenagers "to connect" with what they read, but I would also argue that it's important that what they read be more than just an exercise in projecting personal concerns on to barely understood texts. The distinction I would make is between projection and corroboration. When a teenage reader finds her concerns corroborated by the genuine concerns implicit in a text, she has the opportunity to examine her own concerns in an indirect way.

My original plans to have students write letters to each other about Tim O'Brien's book were derailed by an incident that forced my instruction in a new direction. (I'll use this assignment when we take up Their Eyes Were Watching God in December or thereabouts.) At the end of an introduction to the Vietnam War, I mentioned that when the war ended in 1972, Americans had suffered about 58,000 casualties and the Vietnamese has lost an estimated 3 million civilians and soldiers. One white student blurted out, "Too bad for them. That's their problem." I have students of Vietnamese descent in every class, and with this comment, one of my Vietnamese girls began crying and asked to leave the room. I will spare you, dear reader, the details of how I handled this troubling situation. In the end, however, I decided to limit our reading of O'Brien's book to three stories and to take up Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays dealing, in part, with the experiences of Vietnamese refugees. I am very deliberately introducing this book as, more than anything, corroboration for what some of my students have experienced themselves or have heard from their parents or relatives. This book isn't just for my Vietnamese students. It's for the students who've witnessed civil war in East Africa and who spent too much of their young lives in refugee camps.

At times I've caught myself wondering why students who most need an education sometimes seem to resist it the most. Then I recall that from almost the beginning they have experienced public education as one humiliation after another. No learning can take place without the consent of the student, and my job, first and foremost, is to restore a sense of dignity to the classroom. It shames me to think that I've too often fallen into the trap of thinking that my classroom is for increasing "student achievement" instead of offering students an education. And not just education as a collection of marketable skills—Adorno reminds me that in our drive to make everything a commodity, we have even attempted to make of education a commodity, which can only lead to making commodities of children—but education as the liberation of whole minds and hearts.

What Is Education For?

If I weren't an atheist, I'd thank God for the student sent to my first period class. Instead, I'll thank her mother, a professor of Russian literature who's spending her sabbatical in our fair city. The student is Korean, and she's told me that her Russian is better than her English. That may well be true, but her writing skills in English—her third language, mind you—are far better than those of any other tenth grader I have. And her ability to discuss literature is not far behind. What she has to say in class is conceptually beyond my other students, even if she does speak haltingly. My only problem with her is an ethical one: at what point am I bound to raise the possibility of moving her to an honors English class? I've already lost two of my better students to honors English, and she's smarter than either one of them.

In the meantime, I'm appalled that my tenth graders don't have the slightest clue about how to write an analytical paper. No teacher, apparently, has ever asked them to write one before. They seemed to be trained in what I call the fairy-tale view of literature. First this happens and then that happens and then this happens, and moral to the story is . . . They know how to write summaries and book reviews, but the idea of analyzing theme or character or symbolism or imagery or mood or tone is foreign to them. They don't know how to write a thesis statement, and they don't know how to use evidence from a text to support their ideas. How did they get to be fifteen or sixteen and not know how to analyze literature?

That will change in my class. They will learn a literary vocabulary. They will learn to examine texts closely. They will learn to ask literary questions of a book. They will learn to write something that resembles a critical paper. Or least most of them will. Who decided they couldn't learn this stuff? Who decided it would be too hard for them? A couple of my colleagues—and one university professor who recently visited my class—were surprised that I'd given them a writing assignment this early in the year. One colleague was surprised I'd managed to get them to draft their papers multiple times. They shouldn't be. It's not as hard as it appears to be. I prepared them by having them record their own question as they read, and then they brought these questions to structured small group discussions. Even before they went into the discussions they knew what their writing assignment would be. The discussions were a way of sounding out ideas for paper topics. I then gave them four full days to work on their papers in class. During that time, I taught mini-lessons on various writing problems they were having. Otherwise, I worked with them individually to bring their drafts along. I know that the quality of papers I receive on Monday will greatly vary, but they'll be on their way. I told them in class on Friday that I was encouraged by their progress, and I assured them that in six months they will be amazed at how good they are at writing papers.

Actually, I believe what I'm saying. Last year I had a class of fourteen seniors who had repeatedly failed their graduation exams. My class was their last chance. Almost all of them were working in their second or third language. In one semester I taught them the skills my current students are learning now—and more. I told them that my class would probably be the hardest class they'd ever taken. But when they saw the results, they would be very happy with themselves. And it all came true. Every one of my students passed their graduation exams. A few of them came back in September to visit me and to tell me where they were going to college.

The professor, who'd brought along about ten graduate students to observe my class, asked me what my secret was. "Patience," I said. I will teach the same things, over and over again, in as many ways as I can think of, until even the slowest student finally gets it. Or so I hope. How hard is this for some students? Let me put it this way. My brilliant Korean student wrote a five-page draft over a weekend. My lowest skilled student, after a week, is still struggling to write a paragraph.

In the meantime, I spent a large portion of my Saturday preparing for next week's philosophy class. In the early part of the week, we'll be taking up questions of art and in the latter part of the week we'll discuss a couple thousand years of intellectual history in the philosophy of ethics. Yes, I know, it's absurd. For the discussion on art, I'm planning to spend some time defining a series a questions, and then I'll have them choose which ones to discuss. It's something I've never tried before. Also, because I want some portion of my seminars to be experiential, we'll be doing some finger painting. What fun! Here is my preliminary list of questions:

• What determines what is art? (The intentions of the artist? The quality of the work? The response of an audience?)
• Do artists in each discipline determine what, in the long run, is art?
• Has art improved over time?
• Are there universal objective standards for judging art? Or is it a subjective or cultural thing?
• Do people who know more about art better judges of it? Is it possible to know art too well?
• What is art for? Is it a mirror or a lamp?
• The Roman poet Horace wrote that art was to benefit us and delight us. To what extent is art an education in sensibility? To what extent is it for pure pleasure? Can art be harmful to us?
• When is art discovered? When is it invented?
• When is beauty a sign of truth and when can it mislead us?

I understand that these are not the most brilliant questions ever, but I'm not teaching a seminar on Adorno's theory of aesthetics. I'm teaching high school philosophy class. Of course, I have nineteen of the best students in the school, one of whom is surely among the smartest in the district. At the beginning of the day, I'll find myself trying to help a student write his second sentence of the week, and at the end of the day I'll find myself discussing with a student the paradox of Schrödinger's cat. Only public school teachers understand the immense gap in educations that our most and least successful students are receiving. It is very disturbing to me. It is so disturbing to me I don't even know what questions I should be asking myself.