This article is a response to the anti-military protest staged by two teachers at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, during a commemorative assembly on June 11, 2010.  It argues that the demonstration of Marybeth Verani and Adeline Koscher was (1) misguided on the basis of a naive understanding of the function of a national military, and (2) simply disrespectful towards the students being honored.

Forgive me if this one seems a little more “political” than “educational,” but then again, what is education if not political?  Last Friday, June 11, two teachers, Marybeth Verani and Adeline Koscher, of Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School in Massachusetts, decided that a high school assembly honoring graduates entering the military would be the best place to stage an anti-military protest.  Needless to say, backlash has already hit the media, and factions are demanding the teachers be terminated.  I won’t spend much energy on what should or should not happen to these teachers in terms of discipline.  Termination may or may not be the appropriate response; certainly they should be reprimanded at the very least.  From the standpoint of public education, the legality of their actions may be questionable, on the basis that theirs was what is called a “captive audience,” on which they are not permitted to impose ideas that are outside the curriculum or involve touchy issues of free speech, expression, and religion.  There are plenty of other cases just like this one that have climbed all the way to the Supreme Court, and this case may or may not follow suit.  Almost invariably in these cases, the teachers lose, and well they should, for public schooling is already too much in danger of becoming an institute of indoctrination and acculturation rather than responsible inquiry.  However, the real problem here is not the legality of their actions.  The real problem is with the unrealistic pacifist naivety on which their actions were based, and with the blatant disrespect they showed their students.

To start with the naivety: U.S. citizens seem to have trouble differentiating between certain things when it comes to politics.  I blame England – particularly King George III and friends.  Those guys made the so-called Founding Fathers so absolutely paranoid of centralized power that the very thought of any system even remotely resembling a monarchy – even a constitutionally limited monarchy – was absolutely verboten to them.  So the Founding Fathers went ahead and fused the head of state with the head of government, and since that day, we haven’t been able to figure out the difference.  If you don’t know the difference, you should learn it.  Let a few things be made perfectly clear: First, the President of the United States is not the entire United States government and armed forces.  The War in Iraq is not the War in Vietnam.  A quarterback is not a football team, and being “anti-war” does not mean one must be “anti-military.”  War is not the soldiers’ fault.

One could fall back on the old chicken-and-egg argument that without the soldiers to wage a war, war couldn’t be possible, and therefore it is indeed the soldiers’ fault.  And perhaps in some kind of Greco-Buddhist semantic fantasy world, this would be true, but in reality, it isn’t.  War and violence are intrinsic to our nature.   Human beings are not the only animals that wage war; we’re just the best at it.  And no matter how many people go around touting pacifist ideas and singing Hare Krishna to their neighbors, someone, somewhere, will want war, and he will find others who want it, too.

In justifying her behavior, Mrs. Verani claims that she and her confederate were trying to address the expansion of military recruitment in schools.  Sadly, Verani also claims to be a history teacher.  Though she may be credentialed to regurgitate historical facts, her behavior reveals she is a poor history student, else she would have known the simple truth that a nation needs a standing army.  It has nothing to do with patriotism, nationalism, glory, freedom, democracy, imperialism, consumerism, love, hate, or any number of other dubious abstract ideas that have been thrown into the meat grinder and processed as jus ad bellum.  Of course these ideas have muddled things, and of course standing armies have been used for unscrupulous acts against unsuspecting and helpless populations.  But at the heart of it all, a nation needs a standing army for one reason and one reason alone: order.  We needn’t pull at people’s heart strings with appeals to “the memory of our fallen soldiers” or “their great sacrifice” or anything like that.  While those ideas should not be overlooked, the fact of the matter is: we don’t need pathos to justify militarism; we have logos.

Standing armies provide hegemony.  Some call it “empire,” which is fine, if we remember to divorce ourselves from much of the negative connotation associated with that word.  Hegemony creates stability and relative peace in the world order.  Not “world peace,” mind, but relative peace as compared to a world order without a hegemon, which is probably about as close to “world peace” as we’re ever going to get.  Consider the Pax Sinica, the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica, and the current Pax Americana, not to mention dozens of others.  It’s no coincidence that scholars decided to go with the Latin pax (peace) when labeling these empires.  Standing armies provide hegemony, and hegemony provides relative peace.

Standing armies also provide protection.  Readers need hardly be reminded of the Nazi menace that ravaged the world in the first half of the 20^th Century – arguably the most formidable enemy in the history of mankind.  What hope would there have been for society had there not been the tremendous military strength of the Allied Powers to stop it?  A nation does not simply rally an ad hoc militia at a moment’s notice with the kind of training and sophistication needed to stop a sudden global threat like the Nazis.  This kind of readiness can only come from a regular standing army, particularly one in which the government has invested billions of dollars.  A nation needs a standing army.

Verani and Koscher sat while the rest of the audience respectfully stood for the introduction of six students entering various branches of the armed services.  According to Verani, “standing and applauding is a sign of support for the decision these people have made.”  Again, bear in mind that their display and their comments are not “anti-war” (which might even have been somewhat more acceptable), but they are in fact “anti-military.” These two believe that people should not join the military; ergo there should not be a military.  That stated, it is the humble opinion of this author that since Verani and Koscher do not support the existence of an armed service, it would be appreciated if they surrendered or abandoned all the advantages they enjoy as a result of that service.  Perhaps the government could set up a fascist reservation where these objectors could live out their lives in a little colony where Nazism is alive and kicking (and by the way, isn’t Koscher a Jewish name…?).  Perhaps these objectors wouldn’t mind surrendering their fuel-combustion engines and everything they own that is made of plastic, since at least some percentage of the petroleum required for these products was gotten by such militaristic belligerence.

Enough with the rant.  On to the point of respect.  Constant readers will already know the highest esteem in which this author holds respect for the students.  Let us examine how Verani and Koscher failed their students.  As explained in Not Everyone Is an Alpha, not all students are going to leave high school to become Rhodes scholars.  Thankfully, many of them will go on to provide useful services to our society, including agriculture, plumbing, engineering, and waste management.  On this list of useful services should also be included defense.  Every year, thousands of young men and women decide that they are going to serve our society by joining the standing army.  They see that they will contribute to a stable world order, and they will be ready to defend that world order should there ever arise some madman at the head of a sociopathic Armageddon.  Might they be mistreated by their government?  Yes, maybe.  Might they be sent to fight some unpopular, political cesspool of a war?  Perhaps.  Nevertheless, these citizens believe more in the ideals on which this nation and its armed forces were founded than they do in the political nonsense that is part and parcel to it.  For lack of a better term, they have faith in their nation.  And when their teachers – people who were supposed to have been role models and supporting adult figures during the formative years of their lives – insult the integrity of a ceremony that commemorates the armed forces they are proudly joining, these teachers might as well be telling the students their religion is stupid and their cultural traditions are foolish.  In this way, Verani and Koscher showed tremendous disrespect for their students.

So teachers, do right by your students: debate the pros and cons of militarism to your heart’s content, but do it in the classroom, where it belongs.  Give them everything you can: all of your guidance, all of yourself, for as long as they are with you.  And then, like any good mentor, shut up.  Let them take what you have taught them and become independent thinkers.  After all, isn’t that the very point of education?  Most of all, when it comes time to honor your students, by all means, honor them, and keep your opinions to yourself.

This article argues that certain methods of mass indoctrination and control typically associated with totalitarian regimes, when implemented properly, do not have to be used for acts of hate or aggression.  Such methods would in fact be highly effective in generating a strong sense of school pride, thereby increasing the students’ commitment to abstract ideas of loyalty, and to school- and state-wide initiatives in which they do not necessarily have a personal vested interest.

I spent most of March and April articulating the ways in which totalitarian methods are destroying education.  I’m not about to rescind any of that, but in using fascism as a model for an institution of any kind, there are certain components that should not be entirely dismissed.  Consider this: how did a small minority of national-socialists in Germany not only unify an entire nation around a single set of ideas, but did so to such an extent that the average citizens were willing to either participate in or at least turn a blind eye to the most horrible atrocities in human history?  The answer is propaganda.  It is the deliberate, systematic method of getting people to subscribe to an abstract idea like “nationalism.”  The Nazis did not just write some nifty mission purpose statement and then wait around, hoping people would buy-in to the notion on the basis of its idealistic merit.  Mission statements don’t work.  In point of fact, Hitler’s tedious two-volume mission statement, Mein Kampf, was a literary embarrassment and one of the few smudges he could not erase from his fabricated résumé.  But this was of no consequence to the party.  As much as they believed in their own idea, they knew it wouldn’t sell itself.  Therefore, they implemented a program of calculated measures designed around a single goal: to foster nationalism, because once your citizens have nationalism, you have their have obedience, and they will sacrifice their individual aspirations for the Cause – whatever it is you tell them the Cause is supposed to be.

The Nazi Cause was bent, twisted, and corrupt.  But this does not mean that the methodology did not work.  In fact, it worked extremely well, and it can be applied to any Cause you want.

In education, we replace the idea of “nationalism” with that of “school pride.”  Our Cause is to facilitate a popular mindset wherein the individual students actually care not only about their own grades, but also how the school itself is faring on a state-wide or even national scale.  We want them, to a certain extent, to sacrifice some of their personal aspirations (such as socializing and gaming) and their personal interests (such as culturally relevant or contemporary curriculum), in favor of conforming to a loftier ideal – an ideal that is bigger than they are and whose full ramifications they will not understand until years later.  To be blunt (and whether it is right or wrong is not the issue here), we want mass conformity to a set of ideas in which the populous does not generally believe.  We want school pride.  And there is a tested methodology to generating such feelings of widespread, superficial allegiance – a methodology that does not have to be used to support atrocity, injustice, or hate.  Granted: there is a thin line between rivalry and hate, between pride and fanaticism.  This is where the strength of leadership comes in from the faculty and administration.  Given strong leadership, what follows are the actual measures that must be deliberately implemented to foster school spirit.  The list will not be exhaustive.

The Leader Must Be Visible

How many students know who the principal is?  When they see him, does he have a commanding presence?  Is he in their academic lives on a regular basis?  Does he represent the ideals that the institution is trying to instill in the students?  He should.  A principal has a difficult political position, having to divide his time and attendance between so many competing forces, but when the principal is on campus, everyone should know.  From the most senior vice principal to the lowliest groundskeeper, the presence of the principal should be paramount.  And even if he is not on campus, he can still reach the students through media.  Students are not the only ones changing the educational landscape with their technology.  The principal can now be present in every class, every day, by using the somewhat outdated P.A. system, or better yet, by recording a video-message to the students that will be broadcast during regular announcements.  Think of Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,” if you will.  These broadcasts are used to promote solidarity and to reinforce the institutional ideals.

The Students Must Be Galvanized Against a Constructivist “Other”

It worked for Bismarck.  It worked for Hitler.  It even worked for George W. Bush.  People love to otherize.  It’s part of our nature.  Perhaps it isn’t a healthy part of our nature, but there it is.  And it can be used to strengthen the sense of collective unity and allegiance to the abstract.  A school rivalry is the perfect focus for otherizing.  Look for a top-tier rival.  We’re talking about Cal-Stanford caliber.  Ole Miss-Louisiana.  Harvard-Yale.   Catholic-Protestant.  All other rivals should be de-prioritized.  Faculty and administration should encourage and promote the rivalry with the other school, regularly referring to “them” not by their school name, but by their mascot or some other trivializing label.  Examples: “Those Rebs,” “Those Tigers,” “Those Elis.”  Conversely, faculty and staff should encourage students to think of themselves as members of a collective.  Use collective pronouns like “we” and “us.”  Use the mascot as a symbol of the self, and never forget the (imagined) injustices at the hands of “those [rivals].”  All competitions against the rivals, whether academic or athletic, must be highly publicized, especially student favorites, whether that means football, baseball, soccer, debate team, or chess club.

The Facility Must Be Beautiful

If this seems superficial, it isn’t.  Students cannot be proud of a campus that is trashy, unkempt, or even badly painted.  Cleanliness begets cleanliness.  Ever notice how much harder you work to keep your house clean once it’s been cleaned?  Or how you casually throw your laundry on the floor when the toilet is dirty?  The facility must not only be clean and sterile, but extra steps must be taken towards to beautification.  Money must be spent on cosmetic enhancements, and as many as possible.  The school mascot and associated emblems must be prevalent everywhere.  It must be bold, bright, printed and painted with aesthetically pleasing color schemes in every classroom, on every building, on flags, banners, pendants, and school gear and materials.  Posters should be slapped on every wall promoting desirable behavior, discouraging undesirable behavior, and touting clever slogans and mnemonic devices that plant the ideas deep in the students’ brains and fertilize them through constant repetition.  Comedian Eddie Izzard jokes that the British Empire ruled the world “through the cunning use of flags.”  It isn’t far from the truth.  How many United States flags do you see on a school campus?  Why do you think that is?  They are breeding loyalty to the image, to the brand, and therefore to the abstract ideas behind that brand.

A Sense of Tradition and Heritage Must Be Fostered

The faculty and administration need to speak of the school always within the context of its long history.  They must connect – and encourage the students to connect – the school’s present circumstances with those of its glorious early years.  And an important detail: even if the school’s early years weren’t very glorious, THEY WERE.  Reminisce on the school’s successes, and if you can’t find some way to ignore or downplay the school’s failures, then try to blame those failures on the rival school.  Students and staff should know the history of their campus and its leaders.  How many students know the school’s alma mater?  How many staff members know the school’s alma mater?  It should be taught, and it should be recited every day, sung at every school event, as faithfully as the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star-Spangled Banner, if not more so.

These methods may seem contrived, artificial, or superficial.  That doesn’t matter.  These methods WORK.  Of course, there will always be a percentage of the populous who simply goes through the motions, lacking that fervor, that emotional response we’re really looking for.  Again, that doesn’t matter.  We will have already won over a large enough faction who unconditionally believe to achieve our goals, and as for those who are simply going through the motions, we mustn’t overlook the importance of the fact that they are still going through the motions.  They conform.  They are indoctrinated.  They are obedient to an idea or a behavior without questioning it or resisting it.  In some ways, that’s even better than true loyalty.  And if we combine these contrived methods with some actual, meaningful goals, and if we provide the students with meaningful curriculum and experiences, then the school pride we seek will be that much more easily won, and the power of the educational institution will be astonishing.

Daniel Pink, 17 April 2008. Photo by Guy Holden.

Click the link below for a 10-minute animation sequence of part of an outstanding speech by Daniel Pink about motivation in the workplace.  This is a fantastic speech in itself, and the animation makes it that much more fun to sit through.  I am definitely going to be following up more on this speaker.  There are some real classroom applications here as well.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Please also pay your respects to photographer Guy Holden, whose piece serves as the beautiful accompaniment to this post.

This article recounts two incidents of student brushes with extreme violence in their community.  Then it proceeds to argue that a single list of educational goals imposed upon an entire state (i.e. Content Standards) is an inefficient method for educating a society with diverse socio-economic backgrounds, especially in low-income, crime-ridden sectors.

My worst year of school was the seventh grade.  I attended a low-income junior high school in a crime-ridden community, and it was one of those rare but sobering experiences for me when I was a member of the racial minority.  I was not affiliated with any gangs, but I should have been if I had wanted any protection whatsoever, and I made the stupid mistake of getting reasonably good grades, which in that type of environment is tantamount to painting a bull’s eye on one’s back.  I got in fistfights at least once a week, whether on the way to school, while at school, or coming home from school, and on the crowded bus I was stabbed with pencils, pinched, and slapped by seemingly invisible assailants.  The conflicts never escalated to the level of guns, but I’m confident they would have, had I tracked with those students into high school and not transferred districts as I did.

That’s my “poor me” story.  But I’ve got nothing on my students today.  I was a wimp.  My students are hard core.

One of the great perks of this career is the relationships I get to forge with my students.  After trust is established, they start to let me in.  I get to share their music and pop culture (though I’ll never again be cool), their jokes, their successes, their failures, and every now and then, I get to share in their personal lives.  Several times this year, just in casual conversation after class or during some down time, I’ve had the privilege of learning some things about my students’ lives that have made me realize that my issues in the seventh grade were a breeze.  I’d like to share two of those stories here.  The names aren’t going to be real, but the stories are.

First there’s Julio.  Julio is fifteen now, but he’s got an older brother in his twenties or thirties.  Julio hasn’t seen his brother in ten years, because he’s in hiding.  In his youth, Julio’s brother was in a gang of some sort, but after some years, he made the choice to get out.  The problem is, “getting out” is not a freedom that gangsters are afforded by their confederates.  His only choice was to disappear.  He moved out of state and went into hiding, concealing his whereabouts even from his own family.  Julio recounts the story of when he was five years old, playing in the front yard.  These former confederates of his brother’s pulled up to the curb and stormed the property.  They demanded his family reveal his brother’s whereabouts, and they were waving guns.

They pointed a gun at him, a five-year-old child.  He still remembers this.  I am certain he will never forget this.  And he tells me, this wasn’t the only time they were visited by these thugs.

Then there’s Reggie.  Just the other day, Reggie was telling me a little bit about what he did over the weekend.  He and a few friends went to see an evening matinee, after which they walked home.  It seems that there are two possible routes from the theater to his house, and they chose one over the other specifically because they knew it to be the safer of the two – less frequently patrolled by gangs.  Unfortunately on this night, it was to no avail.  They were mugged along the way, held up at gunpoint, and robbed of their iPods, cell phones, etc.  Then they were told to turn around and walk away, and Reggie tells me he was certain he was going to be shot in the back.  He and his friends walked a considerable distance before daring to turn around, and the assailants were gone.

The most amazing thing about both these stories to me was my students’ tone.  They’re telling me about having pistols thrust in their face, one at five years old.  They’re telling me they’re certain they’re going to be shot in the back.  They’re telling me that this is so common an occurrence that it informs a decision as simple as turning left, and because of this commonality, they’re telling me these stories with no more excitement in their voice than if they were telling me some rude person passed gas in front of them in the grocery line.  They’re not terrified.  They’re not angry.  They’re just annoyed.

I am humbled by my students.  I was floored by these stories, and I am continually floored by others just like them.  They remind me of what a privileged life I’ve led as an accidental member of the domineering ethnic group.  Hearing them, and with such regularity, I cannot help but think how useless and trivial our educational goals are here.  These thoughts are a kind of extension to those I wrote in Diversity v. Acculturation, but they go beyond the simple disconnect between curriculum and culture.  They even go beyond the naivety of trying to simply mass produce scholars, which I described in Not Everyone Is an Alpha.  These kids are having guns pointed at them, and we’re trying to teach them iambic pentameter.  We want them to learn from the struggles of long-long-ago in far-far-away, but they can barely survive the struggle of here-and-now.  Fights are pandemic on campus, symptomatic of the violence and social instability that is rampant in their community, and we’re prodding them to fight the good fight against impossible planetary issues like global warming and oil consumption.  We want them to learn a language where pi is a number and numbers are imaginary.  These kids live in homes where pie is a delicacy and they haven’t the finances to buy it.  They live in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty, and here we are, sitting with our accolades on our walls and our heads filled with trivial information about dead people, tedious literature, and metaphysical theory, insisting that these are their keys to liberation.

Education is one path to freedom.  But it isn’t exclusive, and it isn’t effective if the content has utterly no relevance to the students.  Students who live in a crime-ridden community, a poverty stricken community, need money.  They need jobs, in the immediate sense, not ambitious, long-term career goals or whimsical fantasies about dorm life in the foothills beneath the Ivory Tower.  Those come later.  For now, they need escape.  My school is in Riverside.  It’s predominantly Hispanic.  We should be teaching them about their cultural heritage, but we can’t, because the United States government is in love with itself, and its narcissism shows in the Content Standards.  We should be teaching them about their own community, but we can’t, because we don’t know anything about it, and too often, we don’t want to.  We’re convinced that Eurocentric, classical academics are such a universally recognized beacon of enlightenment that the children should just be swarming the schools like moths to a flame.  In this type of community, economics class shouldn’t be about Keynesian theory and the NASDAQ; it should be about how to balance a checkbook and avoid credit card debt.  Mathematics shouldn’t be about abstract practices; it should be about grocery shopping and labor wages.  Science shouldn’t be about cell reproduction, it should be about sexually transmitted diseases, narcotics, and alcoholism.

A single, universal list of educational goals for an entire state is simply inefficient and pointless.  The purpose of institutionalized education is to improve the society as a whole, but not everyone begins the process at the same place.  Education must provide the community with the knowledge and skills it requires to better itself, based on its current socio-economic circumstances, not on some arbitrarily constructed model of a “well-rounded” citizen.

Several weeks ago, I had a student ask me why there was so little graffiti in the textbooks of my class set.  I argued that there certainly was graffiti, as he could see here and there.  He assured me: this was nothing compared to what the textbooks look like in other classes.  What I told him at the time was this: in general, my students are happy.  I do not oppress them, and it is oppression that leads to passive forms of resistance like vandalism in the first place.  But the truth is, I’m as surprised as he is.  When they can’t go outside for fear of having criminals shove guns in their faces, then they come to school to listen to some ass hole like me prattle on about Marie Antoinette, not only would I expect them to destroy the textbooks, I would almost encourage them to.  With their silly little stories and inconsequential musings, they can’t protect the students from their violent communities.  They can’t teach the students how to succeed within this type of community.  They can’t teach the students how to improve their community.  They can’t even teach them how to escape the community.  The students might as well scribble all over the pages of their textbooks; they have little more value than coloring books anyway.

This article springboards off recent allegations of academic fraud levied against late historian Stephen E. Ambrose to form the basis of an argument against the infallibility of traditional academic sources of information and in favor of the digital proliferation of knowledge and creativity, especially via the free on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org.

There is tremendous disdain for, even hostility towards, Wikipedia in the academic community.  At both the secondary and post-secondary levels, instructors not only forbid citations from the site, but they fiercely admonish their students for even considering the site as a possible source of information, and they treat it as though even browsing the site is tantamount to indulging in internet pornography.  In general, Minions of the Ivory Tower work diligently to discredit the site as disreputable, based solely on the fact that it is not “peer reviewed” (by their peers, of course) and that it is susceptible to infiltration by absolutely any person, regardless of that person’s academic qualifications.  Clearly, the Minions do not share Rousseau’s faith in the general will, and their complaints are sufficient evidence that Wikipedia’s information is not only unreliable, but is in fact blatantly false.  They would have us instead rely strictly on traditional publications, exclusively from the Ivory Tower Press, New York, New York.

Every once in a while, something wonderful comes along that corrodes the Tower’s pristine enamel.  This time, it has recently come to light that the highly-acclaimed, late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, who in 2002 was accused of plagiarism in his book The Wild Blue, now posthumously faces accusations of having completely fabricated “hundreds of hours” of personal interview time with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Rest assured, minions, this comes not from some “bogus” Wikipedia article, nor from some dubious Deep Throat.  It’s hot off the presses from the New Yorker and the Guardian, among others.  Paul Harris of the Guardian writes, “Given that the lives of former presidents are meticulously detailed by their staff, there is almost no chance Ambrose could have held interviews with Eisenhower that went unrecorded” (Harris, 2010).  Meanwhile, Tim Rives, deputy director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, confessed that this new evidence “should be something that would be a concern for scholars” (Harris, 2010).  Of course it should be.  After all, one of their own has demonstrated that their sacred covenant with research is not incorruptible.  And suddenly, the impenetrable armor of academic authority, infallibility, and most of all, accuracy, brandished so smugly by the Ivory Legions seems riddled with holes, while digital democracy gains subtle credibility.

Wikipedia is one of the greatest public services – one of the single greatest technological developments – in the history of mankind.  It embodies the promise that rests at the heart of internet technology: namely, that all the knowledge of the universe now lies at the tips of our fingers.  Never before has so much information about so many topics been so readily available to the general population of the earth.  This level of intellectual proliferation is unprecedented in human history, and it will only contribute to the most profound event of cultural diffusion our species has ever known, thereby increasing not only the general education of mankind but also, by consequence, raising the global standard of living.  If these sentiments weren’t enough, the site’s very premise is founded on altruism, and it relies on the general good and a core sense of community that exists in our better natures.  Put simply, Wikipedia takes the best side of humanity, and makes it better.

So why do scholars hate it so much?  Any attempt to claim that they alone possess “reliability” is refuted by Mr. Ambrose’s example (and certainly he isn’t the only scholar who has ever “fudged” his notes a little).  Any attempt to claim that, despite their own shortcomings, Wikipedia is nonetheless unreliable because of its democratic design is likewise refuted for two reasons.  First, any factual errors or discrepancies the site may contain are no more grievous than what might be found and contradicted in any so-called “scholarly” publication.  Furthermore, Wikipedia holds the advantage in that such discrepancies can be immediately addressed, while scholarly publications can only eventually be replaced by subsequent editions – editions which may contradict but which actually fail to eradicate the errors of their predecessors.  Second, and derived from the first, those who would attempt to tamper with the accuracy of the site’s information, or who simply abuse the site for purposes of advertisement or petty digital vandalism, are fiercely regulated by a faction of society for whom no better name applies than Wikipolice.  These are laudable citizens who may or may not hold some academic degree, but nonetheless persevere to ensure the integrity of the free, public site by flagging and/or simply deleting dubious posts on a minute-by-minute basis.  Any Ph.D. who felt defending his dissertation was the most grueling experience of his life has not had to contend with the vicious scrutiny of the Wikipolice.

These are not the reasons scholars hate Wikipedia.  Scholars hate Wikipedia for the same reason that music executives hate mp3s.  The same reason that motion picture companies hate video pirates.  The same reason that traditional book publishers hate print-on-demand houses.  It’s quite simple.  Digital technology is breaking the intellectual and artistic monopolies that have dominated the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Digital technology is proving that the monopolists don’t have the final word in what is fit to publish, and making it so that average citizens can access the intellectual and artistic markets as fully as any full-fledged scholar or executive, and without the expensive degree on their wall or the indignity of being judged by the semi-qualified.  For centuries these people have hoarded their knowledge or products (and the money that goes with them), and dangled these things before the public like carrots on sticks.  Digital technology is changing the world and the way people live as dramatically as the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution once did.  We are living the transitional period right now, and one day, historians like Ambrose will look back and heuristically choose some arbitrary date to mark the beginning of the Technological Revolution (and they’ll fabricate “interviews” they held with our grandchildren).  As we enter the 21^st century, digital technology has given us access to the halls of power and to the stairs of the Ivory Tower, and the monopolists are realizing something that terrifies them:

We don’t need them anymore.

This touches on ideas previously explored in Not Everyone Is an Alpha and in imperative #6 of End Totalitarian Teaching.  First of all, academic knowledge is not the most precious commodity in the world; there are far more practical ventures than academia.  Second, for what benefits academic knowledge does provide, we as teachers do not “own” knowledge.  Knowledge is free and easy to come by, and it is only becoming more so.  The role of a teacher is not to provide knowledge.  It is only to package the knowledge in the kind of dressing that will make it appealing to the students, for once the students are engaged, they will seek the knowledge on their own, and that is when we have succeeded.  In the past, the practice of hoarding knowledge has given the Ivory Legions a kind of power over people, and now, that power is being undermined.  What’s worse: they’re losing money in the process.  So of course they’re going to discredit these new technologies.  They’re in their death throes.  And those who do not or will not adapt to both the technological and ideological changes of the 21^st century will go the same way as every other dinosaur in history.  When is the last time the Remington Typewriter Company made a killing on the NASDAQ?

Should Wikipedia be used exclusively as a source of information?  Of course not, but when does any reputable research rely only on a single source?  Can Wikipedia be disputed?  Of course it can, but no more than any other source.  And are the more than 12 million (as of this writing) Wikipedians credible authors?  Well, they’re certainly no less credible than the esteemed Stephen E. Ambrose.  So thank you, Mr. Ambrose, for all your decades of hard work in the field of U.S. History.  And thank you… for proving my point.

This article is an endorsement for Richard Hawksworth and his company, Media Rich Learning, which specializes in producing documentary films that align with national and state teaching standards.

I’d like to introduce you to Richard Hawksworth of Chicago, Illinois, and his company, Media Rich Learning.  Media Rich Learning is a company that specializes in producing high-quality, comprehensive documentary films that align with national and state teaching standards.  They also strive to supplement their film productions with instructional materials for use in the classroom.

About a month ago, I was on the hunt for a documentary on the subject of the Cold War.  The problem I was running into was that most Cold War-era docs tend to focus exclusively on a single crisis; i.e. two hours on the Korean War or 90-minutes on the Cuban Missile Crisis.  As good as any of these films might be, I needed something that was more comprehensive without being more than a couple hours in length.  I needed an overview, not an in-depth exploration.

I came across Mr. Hawksworth’s production of America in the 20th Century: the Cold War on Amazon.com.  Based on the product description, it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.  The only problem was the prohibitive price.  I took a shot and tried to contact Mr. Hawksworth through Twitter.

I was pleasantly surprised when, not only did Mr. Hawksworth contact me directly a day later, but his first words were: “Geoffrey, I want to make the Cold War series affordable for you.  What’s your budget?  This is for educational purposes, right?”  After a few rounds of correspondence, we came to an amiable agreement for both of us.

Here is a man and a company whose first priority is education.  The quality of their film production is top-notch, and the depth of research and craftsmanship that have gone into each film is apparent.  The material is clean and to the point, not needlessly complicated as would be something from Ken Burns.  (No offense intended to Mr. Burns; it’s just that the intensity of his films is a bit much for the novice student).  Also absent are the ridiculous attempts at impersonated “voices” and “accents” attributed to historical figures as has ruined many an attempt by the History Channel or other self-indulgent filmmakers (which, incidentally, come across less as historical reenactment and more as a prepubescent session of Dungeons & Dragons).  Meanwhile, Media Rich’s end product beautifully reinforces the national and state content standards, and the narration is scripted in plain language the students can understand, making these films the perfect complement to standards-based classroom instruction.  The supplemental materials the company offers are a nice, added feature for an already high-quality film.

I was impressed with the quality of the film I purchased and with Mr. Hawksworth’s willingness to help me in the interest of providing the best possible instruction for my students.  If you should ever find yourself in the market for an informative, no-nonsense, and sensibly-timed documentary on any of the great topics in U.S. history, I strongly encourage you to visit Media Rich Learning.

Imperative #7:  Never Forget: Hostility Begets Hostility

Although I didn’t intend it from the start, it has become apparent to me over the course of writing this series that these imperatives are all the things I resented as a student.  I can articulate them now much better than I could then (and with far less profanity), and I enjoy a vantage point now that allows me to see not only what the problem is, but also from where it comes.  On an individual basis, totalitarian teachers are insecure and short-sighted.  They do not trust their students’ abilities, and they do not trust themselves to be able to maintain order without also attempting to have control.  On a more universal scale, totalitarian teaching exists when we simply fail to observe the Golden Rule.  This is all the more the tragic when we consider nostalgic images and descriptions of school as the very place where we are supposed to learn this Golden Rule.  We have lost sight of this.  Or perhaps, this is fanciful revisionism, and the Golden Rule never actually existed in the master-pupil setting.  And perhaps, even without the Golden Rule, the heavy-handed, master-pupil methodology worked reasonably well for a time.  What is certain is that it does not work now.

I have encountered too many teachers, both as their student and as their colleague, who set the tone on the first day of school as one of hostility.  They introduce themselves, perhaps try to impress upon their youths the so-called significance of their academic degrees, then they follow the Reading of the Rules and Consequences with some sort of sermon of which there are many variations but only one thesis.  It goes something like this:

You are young, and I am old.

You’d better do what you are told.

If you try to fuck with me,

we’ll step outside, and then we’ll see

how little you know, and where I’ve been,

and you will learn that I will win.

Unfortunately for these sermonizers, hostility does not equal learning. In all their efforts to strike the fear of God into their students and establish their authoritarian position from Day One, totalitarian teachers do not realize that all they are establishing is the contest.  Adolescents do not care who will win.  They do not even care if they are certain to lose.  What they care about is the contest.  They thrive on the challenge.  The joy is in the journey, not the destination, and when teachers introduce themselves by throwing down the gauntlet, the students are more than happy to take it up.  The teacher has not established respect or even fear.  He has, however, established the adversarial relationship.  He may then proceed through the entire school year with the absolute certainty that the students will learn very little, but that they will take great pleasure in challenging his authority in all ways both passive and aggressive.  This is all because civility begets civility, and hostility begets hostility.

On a similar note, threats are not nearly as impressive as actions.  In fact, threats are insulting.  So long as the cause-effect relationship is made clear, the recipient of any disciplinary or retaliatory action is far more likely to respect the impetus of that action, as well as the arbiter, if the action is preceded with as few warnings as possible.  Simply by virtue of our positions, we have power.  We don’t need to display it.  Displays of power are for apes.  The students are not impressed by such displays, and displaying is entirely unnecessary for true power to be meaningful or effective.  True power is wielded only when it is timely, and only with responsibility, humility, and compassion.  But let us not worry about when to wield power, as it is just this sort of preoccupation that leads to totalitarian thinking in the first place.  If we are doing everything correctly in our classrooms and observing all the imperatives of Anti-Totalitarian Teaching, we will find that we very rarely have to wield our power at all.

Totalitarian teaching is failing us.  It is failing our students, and therefore, it is failing our society.  In our schools, we preach democracy but practice fascism.  Demanding blind obedience, we attempt to mass-produce focused, uniformed, industrious academics.  Instead, we breed narrow-sighted, resentful, exhausted servants who lack the variety of knowledge and skills necessary to maintain an advanced society.  If we want our nation to continue to grow and improve through the 21^st Century, we must abandon our attachment to outdated, oppressive, and arbitrary controls and harbor a more positive, more understanding, more cooperative learning environment.  End hostility.  End invulnerability.  End servitude.  End conformity.  End forced adulthood.  End imprisonment.

End totalitarian teaching.

Imperative #6:  Make Yourself Vulnerable

Totalitarians want to appear invulnerable.  They exaggerate their strengths; they attempt to conceal their weaknesses; they lie about their past.  When they get caught in a mistake, they do everything in their power to redirect blame and attention onto someone else, and they never, ever apologize.  This is no less true of inconspicuous totalitarian teachers than it is of notorious totalitarian politicians.  They take great measures to hide their vulnerabilities, sometimes at tremendous emotional cost, and often at the expense of others, and the worst part is: they always, always fail.  People can see right through them.  And their vulnerabilities are made all the more blaring for their efforts at concealment.

When I was a freshman in high school, we had a totalitarian social studies teacher.  It didn’t help her case that she was of German descent and insisted on our pronouncing her name with the proper German inflections.  There came one morning when the teacher asked of a student where her homework was, and the student replied that she had placed it on the teacher’s desk upon entering the classroom.  Sifting aimlessly – and rather dramatically – through the disarray of paperwork that concealed her desk, the teacher, feigning exasperation, claimed it wasn’t there.  The student, worried, insisted that it was, and a few brief rounds of this drove the teacher to the most vicious tirade one could possibly imagine.  She screamed and belittled the student in a violent physical and verbal outburst that would have rivaled der Führer himself, calling the student a liar and enlightening her to the fact that “it didn’t just get up and walk away.”  The display was public, exhibited before the entire class, and the student was brought to the verge of tears before simply resigning the argument.

Ten minutes later, after the class had fallen silent and was immersed in some grueling assignment, the teacher simply stated, “Oh.  Here it is.”

That’s it.  They never, ever apologize.

Like all totalitarians, die Lehrer did not understand that invulnerability does not equal learning.

It may come as a surprise to some, but teachers are human beings.  We are flawed, foolish, slowly evolving creatures.  We make mistakes.  We do stupid things.  We say the wrong thing.  We don’t know everything.  I am belaboring the point not to enlighten the majority of the readers, but to remind the totalitarians among us, who I pray will hear me.  And what’s most important about all these truths is this: It’s okay.

In our classrooms, teachers usually have superior knowledge, but we are not superior people.  We didn’t get to the positions we have because we’re better than our students.  We’re there because we have more practice.  We are nothing more than seasoned students with more experience.  We mustn’t let the master-pupil relationship go to our heads.  Students are not slaves, and they are not stupid.  They are novices.  They are young people who are practicing many things at which they are not very good and often do not enjoy doing.  They are nervous, ashamed, insecure, helpless, tired, and lost.  They have awesome potential, but they need a guide.  Someone in whom they can trust and confide.  Someone with whom they could possibly relate.  They need role-models, not task-masters.  The invulnerability act doesn’t work.  They can see right through it, and the longer we insist on keeping up the façade, the greater the schism between master and pupils, as they come to understand that we want to be separate from them.  This intentional separation only contributes to the development of an adversarial relationship between teachers and students, as discussed in parts 2 and 3.

This is not to say we should go out of our way to try and be “cool.”  Such attempts generally fail and can generate even more resentment on the part of the students.  This is a fact: we are not “cool.”  We never will be, and the longer we remain in this profession, the further from “cool” we will get.  The students already know this.  They don’t want us to be “cool.”  They want us to be “real.”  And real people screw things up, trip, fall, smell bad, look stupid, and generally “don’t get it.”  Students appreciate honesty.  Their lives are filled with enough hogwash already.  Students respect teachers who embrace their flaws and make fun of themselves.  They don’t respect invulnerability, because there’s no such thing.  They respect teachers who do the best they can, and who apologize when they don’t.  They can trust people like this, and isn’t trust the very first thing we require if we are to teach them anything at all?

Students are real people.  Therefore, teachers should be real people.  And if teachers have any superior knowledge whatsoever, they know that they should never cease to be students as well.  Make yourself vulnerable.  Make your students a part of your life, not apart from it.

Imperative #5: Abolish Homework

This imperative could have been encapsulated within the discussion of the previous article, but the subject of homework is such a critical one that it deserves its own piece.  I have thought long and hard about this one, and did not actually come to a decision until quite recently, having spent my first three years as an educator seriously weighing the pros and cons of homework.  Emulating the model I had been shown as a student, and lacking the necessary experience to make an informed decision, I assigned regular homework assignments during my first year in the classroom, and I struggled with the students to get them not only to complete them on time, but to complete them at all.  Meanwhile, I researched the history of homework and its purpose, and I spoke to several teachers at several different grade levels to learn their opinions and how homework served them and their students.  Gradually, I phased homework out of my approach, and with the exception of my Advanced Placement class (which is structured more like a college course than a high school course), the only homework I now assign are extra-credit opportunities.  I have determined that “homework,” as such, is only moderately useful and is entirely unfair.

Here’s a worst-case scenario: The Friday before Spring Break, I had given all of my students a “free period,” also euphemistically known as a “study hall.”  I had completed all the material I wanted before the break, and did not want to start anything new until after we returned, refreshed.  I had encouraged the students to use the time to socialize, to play, to essentially have time and space to breathe, to absorb what we’d learned, and to appreciate it.  Sadly, more than half my students spent this social hour bogged down in research and pre-writing activities, frantically trying to accomplish some new assignment they had received that very day.  What was sad was not that they were working so hard (a rare enough phenomenon), but that they were doing so because every minute of work finished in that hour was a minute of their Spring Break they would essentially “win back.”  They had been given an assignment to complete over the break.  Somewhat shocked, I asked one student, “Your teacher gave you a homework assignment over Spring Break?”  And he replied, “Yeah, and (s)he also gave us one over Winter Break, which was pretty much supposed to take exactly as long as Winter Break was.”  This is totalitarian teaching at its worst.  The purpose of holiday breaks is to take a break.

Totalitarian teachers do not understand – and it took me some time to understand this as well: homework does not equal learning.

At its root, the purpose of homework is to give the students additional practice in concepts they have recently learned in school.  To best serve this end, homework cannot be comprised of new material or material the student must learn independently.  It is supposed to reinforce concepts, not introduce them.  Given this, homework assignments are not all that important to begin with, as effective time management during instructional hours will provide the necessary time for reinforcement.  In effect, homework becomes a kind of “busy work,” especially for those bright students who don’t require the additional reinforcement.  Nevertheless, all too often do we find a brilliant student with tremendous potential whose grades are abysmal – not because he’s failing tests, not because he doesn’t understand the material, not because he’s disruptive in class, but because he isn’t completing homework.

Furthermore, homework as an institution has diverged from its purpose.  It has mutated into some kind of cruel drudgery for students and their families.  At the primary levels, students bring home assignments that cannot possibly be completed without their parents’ involvement, and the parents either cannot spare the time at all, or they will too often commandeer the project entirely in order to safeguard their child’s grade.  Either way, it is a mystery why parents are doing homework at all, when they have typically already completed the primary grades.  Perhaps they are making up (albeit against their will) for their own youth, when their homework was completed by their parents…

At the secondary level, homework is an imposition on the students’ personal lives, as well as those of their families.  A typical secondary student has at least six classes.  If each teacher gives but thirty minutes of homework (a very conservative estimate), the student is expected to spend a minimum of three hours completing assignments at home, after having already spent seven to eight hours in the academic setting.  We often hear adults telling students that school is for all intents and purposes their “job,” but any laborer who spends ten hours or more at his job will enjoy a much wider range of financial benefits and personal liberties than a typical secondary student will ever see.  This is to say nothing of the students who come home from their academic “jobs” and have to work real jobs or have to baby-sit siblings to help support their families.

Homework is just one more way that totalitarian teachers encroach upon and attempt to claim every single minute of a student’s day.  It is a method by which teachers attempt to exert their ownership over the student’s time, and to enforce the flawed argument that academics are and should be the most important priority in the student’s life.

Is there any place for homework at all?  The answer is yes, but it should be minimized.  We should abolish “homework.”  We should allow “working at home.”  The difference is subtle but important.  Nothing should be assigned strictly as homework, especially nothing that is new to the student.  Work that is completed at home should either be extra credit opportunities or simply work that the student did not have a chance (or chose not) to finish at school.  Bearing this in mind, students should be given a reasonable amount of time during school hours in which to finish their work.  Some students prefer to work at home, while using school hours to socialize.  Similarly, some of them find they cannot work at school because the environment is too distracting, while their home setting is much more conducive to study.  We should allow them this freedom of choice.  It is, after all, an important exercise in time management, a skill they will certainly need as adults with actual jobs.  Advanced Placement and Honors classes will provide some exception to this, as they are intended to more closely simulate collegiate studying.  These are the students for whom academics will matter more than vocational skills or personal time, and the expectations for independent study should be necessarily higher.  But for the average student, “homework” as such should rarely if ever be assigned, and it should certainly never be assigned over a vacation.

Abolish homework.  The school is our domain.  The home belongs to them.



Imperative #4: Give Them Time and Space to Breathe

We ask them to wake before sunrise, report to a place they generally loathe, to do work that doesn’t interest them, and to spend what little money they have on things they don’t want.  It sounds very much like a job.  Unfortunately for students, it’s a job for which they did not apply, and from which they are not allowed to take breaks.  From approximately 7:00am to 3:00pm or beyond, totalitarian teachers and administrators expect students to be punctual, productive, and proud.  They also expect students to refrain from socializing, to avoid contact with the outside world, and to denounce any aspect of culture that has not been deemed “classical.”  And they wonder why students are so recalcitrant.

At our school we have a twenty-five minute interim period between second and third that is interchangeably referred to as “advisory” or “homeroom.”  We did not have this time slot last year; it was designed to take ASB announcements and general housekeeping issues like letters to parents out of the instructional time on which they constantly encroached.  Overall, I think it’s wonderful.  What isn’t wonderful is how every disparate faction on campus is trying to monopolize that time for its own agenda.  There is increasing pressure on the teachers to use the time after announcements are concluded (rarely more than fifteen minutes) to “do” something, whether it is an assignment, some test prep activities, college prep activities, or sustained silent reading.  To that end, the administrators have seen fit to give the advisory period “pass/no-pass” status – with a “no-pass” mark having negative effects on students’ eligibility for extra-curricular activities.  The intent, of course, is to compel the students to complete whatever menial busy work the teacher is attempting to force into this ten- or fifteen-minute remainder.  God forbid the students get ten minutes out of their eight-hour day to freely socialize and simply take a break.

We need to accept that commandeering every single minute of a student’s day at school does not equal learning.

The structure of the six-period day is problematic in itself.  Students are expected to work feverishly for fifty straight minutes on sometimes very difficult concepts, many of which have no practical or cultural relevance to them.  Then they must hustle from one subject to the next, as though a demon is on their tail, with scarcely a moment to comprehend what they have just been taught before something new and entirely unrelated is forced upon them.  They need processing time.  They need down time, even if it is not to “digest” the material, but simply to stop thinking about it, to let the subconscious work while the conscious rests.

One might argue that passing period satisfies this.  It is five to seven minutes where socializing is permitted.  However, those five to seven minutes must be consumed walking from one class to the next, for if the student is late to class, the totalitarian teacher will deny him access, send him to the office for a tardy pass (wasting even more instructional time), and follow with disciplinary measures.  Even as the passing period winds down into its last two minutes, proctors stand around and scream at the students to disband and get to class, as though any assembly of three or more students is cause for riot police and rubber bullets.  Then of course there is the restroom issue.  Students are told to use the passing period for this purpose, although the window is hardly sufficient to tend to one’s necessities and still report to class on time.  There is no processing taking place during passing period.  There is only panic.

Perhaps this panic could be mitigated by letting students use the restroom during instructional time.  Unfortunately, totalitarian teachers arbitrarily and inhumanely deny restroom visits during class.  They claim that the student will be missing some valuable instruction.  They claim that the student doesn’t “really” need to go to the bathroom, and will simply waste time.  I myself have walked out of class – against the posted classroom rules – to relieve myself, because the teacher refused to excuse me, and I’ve had to face disciplinary measures as a result.  I wondered what the consequences would have been had I shat on the floor.  (I wasn’t sure, as such consequences were not conspicuously posted.)

It is not the teacher’s place to determine whether or not a student “really” has to use the restroom.  Will the student miss some instructional time?  Yes, a little, but nothing that can’t be made up.  Might the student waste time?  Probably, but a student who is either preoccupied with the urge to pee or simply bored in class is going to waste time wherever he is.  Incidentally, if the classroom is so boring that droves of students are absconding under the false pretense of using the restroom, then the problem isn’t the students…  Whether a student really needs to use the restroom or not, and whether or not he dilly-dallies while he’s in there, one thing is certain: the student is not learning when he is denied a restroom visit.  He has already tuned the teacher out.  He is resentful, and probably in physical discomfort.

This leaves only lunchtime.  It is thirty minutes where socializing is permitted.  However, because students can rarely leave one class to visit another teacher during his or her prep period, this often leaves lunchtime as the only time a student can seek private assistance.  Worse: totalitarian teachers will mandate that students surrender their lunch, because the teacher is unwilling or unable to give students time during prep periods or after school.  On top of that, students are constantly summoned during lunch by the office for all variety of issues – issues that could be resolved at any other time.  The bottom line is: not even lunch is not sacred.

We claim that we are preparing students for adulthood.  We claim that we are teaching them the kind of discipline and rigor that will be expected of them when they join the workforce.  This is not true.  At minimum, a laborer is entitled to two ten-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch for an eight-hour day.  For some reason this does not apply to students.  We demand that every minute of their time belongs to us.  We take from them every precious moment that might enliven the work day, that might make the unbearable somewhat bearable.  We aren’t teaching them responsibility.  What we are doing is creating a hostile work environment.  And like an adversarial environment, a hostile work environment is not a learning environment.  It is a place where the supplicants do as they are told out of fear rather than willingness, and where infractions of the rules are made worse because they are not the result of carelessness or laziness, but rather the symptoms of passive resistance.  So long as we continue to lay claim to students’ every academic minute, so long as we claim that they somehow “owe us” the hours between 7:00am and 3:00pm (and beyond), students are not spending time in school.  They are serving time.

Give them time and space to breath.  Give them time and space to process what we’ve taught them, and to appreciate it.