What It Means to Know

Suggestion (January 2012, M.A. Reilly, Greenwood Lake)

The view suggests a horizon rather than a boundary for knowing, toward which we are always walking. --- Barry Lopez

1.

I have been thinking about what it means to know. One of the challenges in adhering to state and/or national standards is that they often appear to be so definitive, as if knowing was simply a matter of saying so.

All children will know x.  
All children will be able to do y... 

These lists of "things to know and be able to do" tend to obfuscate a more difficult matter: What does it mean to know? How tentative is our initial knowing? What does it mean to learn deeply? How do we privilege ways of knowing that resist codification?

2.

Barry Lopez in "The Naturalist" opens the essay talking about the habit he has of visiting the McKenzie River in western Oregon on a daily basis.  Lopez writes:

Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.

If it’s a man’s intent to spend thirty years staring at a river’s environs in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can’t be known, does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a brown bear can’t be completely known. The reason this is true is because the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing. It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it—the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it timbre and tone.

3.

With the certainty of PARCC and SMARTER tests arriving at your public school soon and with them a truckload of other things for the savvy educator to buy and dispense: frameworks, professional development modules, curriculum maps (15.8 million additional $$$ awarded to both organizations to help school systems transition to the Common Core Standards)--I wonder a lot about what it means to actually know something and more importantly--to know something across time through field experiences.  Empirical immersion cannot be forgotten in lieu of cramming more and more partial bits of reading, writing and math things to know into children's heads.

Folks, that stuff rarely sticks and for good reason.

The River Flowing Toward Us (November, 2011, M.A. Reilly)

4.

When I am by the river, therefore, I am simply there. (Barry Lopez)

I like to think of schools as places or occasions where you are intentional,  all the while feeling that there is more than you could ever encode.  In a response to an earlier post, John T. Spencer wrote:

If you believe you receive an education or that you compose an education, are the aims potentially different?

I wrestle with this question, because it feels even more elusive. Is it an acquisition? Is it a creation? Or is it about who you become? Or perhaps, even more dangerously, who you are finally allowed to be?

Call me simplistic, but it's why I end up going back to garden metaphors. Balance. Roots and rhizomes. Perennials and annuals. Aesthetic and edible. Not achievement, but still noticeable. Based upon growth, perhaps, but also looking dormant and dead at times.

I so appreciate what he wrote, especially when he said: Not achievement, but still noticeable.  Would love for that to become a national mantra.  See, it isn't one or the other.  We are always composing ourselves. It's the stuff you 'kind of know' right on the edge of language. You can almost follow it--almost name it, but then you lose the idea and you resurface a bit later somewhere else and at best, you wonder.

It is in the made connections between intentionality and tacit knowing that what it means to know becomes far less certain and far more nomadic.  This knowing about cannot easily be reduced to a list. It is something that can't be readily recorded and handed out as standards.  Rather, such knowing is nomadic, isn't it?

You will need to wander off course, to stare at a span of river across 30 years.

5.

While out walking, I recently found an abandoned house that I would love to refurbish and establish the school of empirical immersion.  (Yes, a catchy name is still needed). The building is at the Skylands Botanical Gardens in Ringwood, NJ and it's backyard is the Ringwood State Forest--woods I hike in most days.  I imagine this school as a place that any young person could attend and the curriculum would be determined by those who were actually present.  At the school, learners would have come to understand different types of things alongside a few commonalities such as methods of observation, expression and problem framing.

Everything else one might learn would likely be more idiosyncratic.

There would be no mandatory subjects. No mandatory courses.  Rather, pathways would be designed, enacted, and at times abandoned.  We might be a kind of 'Robert Frost' school in so much as we know and perhaps even appreciate that way leads on to way. 

6.

Anyone know how to finance such a school?

An Alternative to High School: Humanities High School

Special thanks to the many people who read, edited, commented on a draft of this that had been posted on Google docs.  Deeply appreciative of your insights and commentary.

I. Introduction

…And the ultimate critical and empirical test of any educational reforms in a semiotic society is not limited to changes in students’ or systems’ statements, discourses and capacity to critique same – but, as it was in Dewey’s time, the capacity to contribute to the building of democratic institutions, civic spaces, public dialogue and indeed, the capacity of such reforms to have material consequences in the distribution of resources of all types.

    - Allan Luke, “Two Takes on the Critical” (from 2002. Education in Semiotic Democracies: Teaching and Learning Beyond the Nation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.)

There are three concepts that frame the thinking in the development of Humanities High School (HHS): equity, leveraging learning everywhere,and  rhizomatic learning.

1. Equity


In conceptualizing an alternative to traditional forms of secondary schools, Allan Luke’s synopsis of what educational reforms might engender is critical and (in)forms our sensibilities about learning outcomes privileged at Humanities High School.  We want learners to be able “to contribute to the building of democratic institutions, civic spaces, public dialogue.”  Lost in the current rhetoric about schooling as preparation for workers is the more important objective to develop and inspire global citizens who are critical, creative and recognize “the capacity of such reforms to have material consequences in the distribution of resources of all types.” HHS is dedicated to developing learners who are passionate, responsible and proactive in matters related to social and economic equity.

2. Learning Everywhere: Leveraging Social Media and Community


The second consideration that informs decisions about HHS is encompassed in the Academy’s vision statement: Learning Everywhere.  We understand, even appreciate, that learning is not confined (nor has it ever been) to school.  Rather, learning takes place within and beyond the school. To that end,  HHS stretches the understanding of “school” by deliberately leveraging Web 2.0 tools to connect students, teachers, and mentors with one another and with those beyond our formal system. Through social networking services like BuddyPress, Diaspora*Alpha, and media sharing sites like Vimeo or YouTube, social bookmarking services like Diigo, research tools like Zotero, EasyBib, Citeulike, online games such as Minecraft, as well as microblogging services like Twitter, Identi.ca or Tumblr--learners are able and encouraged to access others and resources. Whereas HHS is not a “high tech” school, it does require students and faculty to employ technologies as a learning method. In keeping with the policies of the XXX School District, students may bring to school and use any Internet ready device responsibly.
 
3. Rhizomatic Schooling: Where Knowledge is Collaborative

The third consideration informing HHS is an understanding of learning based on rhizomes and knowledge making that is collaborative. In contrast to the traditional view of education in which schooling is understood as a function of transference of expert-determined content from teacher to student, HHS will be developed as a rhizomatic community.  A rhizome is the horizontal stem of a plant, usually found underground. From the plant's nodes, it sends out roots and shoots, each of which can be self sustaining.  The rhizome is all about middles. Marcy Driscoll (2004) writes:

The rhizome is a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point (p. 389).

In conceiving of HHS, the idea of connectivity is central to the design. In defining the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari (2002) write that it:

has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and' (pp.24-25).

At HHS, we imagine learners (students, teachers, librarians, and mentors) resembling a sea of "middles,” a continuous forming and reforming of alliances based on need, interest, direction, redirection, assessment, and commitment.  Unlike the design of many traditional high schools, the rhizomatic school is based on joining and rejoining as opposed to a hierarchical structure where the teacher dispenses content often determined by an external "expert" to the student who receives the content. 

The rhizomatic school understands knowing as a generative process and requires a shift in teacher talk from telling to inquiring alongside students; from talking often to listening and conversing.  Such shifts reveal the uncertainty present in dynamic learning and destablalizes the belief in an expert based curriculum.In this manner it is most significant how the rhizomatic school reveals the fallacy of content-driven teaching as the method that better ensures there are no w/holes in students' knowledge.A rhizomatic perspective not only expects "holes" in knowing but understands and appreciates these opportunities for new learning. Knowledge is not situated as a knowable list of objectives.  One concern educators voice about student-centered classrooms, is the worry that students won't learn as much as teachers will not be determining all of the content, nor sharing their insights and knowledge with the class.  They worry that although they might teach students A and B concepts x and y, neither will learn concept z as only student C will have occasion to learn that.

In the rhizomatic school, thinking resembles the tangle of roots and shoots, both broken and whole.  Problem framing and decision-making rest with all learners: teachers, students, mentors, local community and global partners. Again, Driscoll’s description of rhizomatic learning is important. She writes:

Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization (p. 389).

It is expected at HHS, that as learners work solo, in pairs, small groups, with the teachers, and mentors--new alliances will be formed and broken leading to the potential of new connections being learned/unlearned/relearned. Further curricular and programmatic decisions at HHS are based on an understanding of knowledge as collaboration (Cormier, 2008).  Dave Cormier (2008) in "Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum,"  clarifies an important shift in what "counts" as knowledge from the prior century to contemporary times. The expert-centered pedagogy where content was defined as a list of knowable objectives is problematized by a sociocultural perspective (Heath, 1983, Gee, 2008) as well as the presence of the Internet. Cormier (2008) writes:

The existing educational model with its expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle is too static and prescribed to accommodate the kind of fluid, transitory conception of knowledge that is necessary to understand the simplest of Web-based concepts. The ephemeral nature of the Web and the rate at which cutting-edge knowledge about it and on it becomes obsolete disrupts the painstaking process by which knowledge has traditionally been codified. (np)

In contrast to the expert-based curriculum, Cormier writes that the "rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predetermined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process" (np). This understanding of knowledge is ahead of the belief in standards that still is informing national, state, and local curriculum decisions.  We understand this to be a tension worth exploring with students as we are obligated as a public system to adhere to Standards. 

II. Humanities High School

At HHS, learners, teachers, and community-based mentors work collaboratively to provide students with the occasion to compose a cohesive liberal arts education that privileges the arts, humanities, problem solving and problem finding. HHS is committed to preparing students to be global citizens positioned for career and college choices.  

In year one we anticipate enrolling 80 students who previously earned none to 30 high school credits.  From year two on we will annually enroll 80 students, creating a fully functioning high school with about 240 students by year three and about 300 students by year four. We anticipate that students will complete graduation requirements at varied rates and therefore we will determine entry into the gateway experience, internships and capstone project by the number of credits earned.  To be awarded a high school diploma, students will successfully earn 120 credits, including coursework specified by New Jersey Department of Education, and complete a high school project.

1. Design Principles

Five design principles exemplify the core values of HHS:

1. Academic Excellence: Academic excellence is achieved by leveraging learners’ passions and curiosities in the development of  multi-disciplinary units of study. HHS core curricula are problem-based, relevant, foundational, inspirational, and intentional. The curricula are designed to develop learners’ critical and creative thinking dispositions, embed 21st century multi-literacies, and privilege the arts.

2. Personalization: Every student is known well by HHS educators. Personalization is achieved through advisory, personal and communal learning plans, shared ownership of curriculum, mentorship, full inclusion, dynamic assessment, problem-based learning, internship, e-portfolios, community based learning, and public exhibitions.
3. Active and Experiential Learning:  Learning takes place at school and in the larger community. The HHS community empowers learners to compose minds-on and hands-on work that is beautiful and subject to private and public critique. Everyone teaches and everyone learns. Faculty learning is privileged in the design of the school term and day.

4. Problem Framing: HHS is committed to guiding learners to be “problem finders” who know how to determine problems, frame critical questions, and apply creative and critical thinking to develop additional questions and solutions.  Curricula are framed as compelling questions and negotiated with students, and understood as complicated conversations (Pinar, 2008).

5. Purposeful Design: Governance is shared among faculty, students, administrator, and central office liaison. Learning at HHS is a combination of school time, virtual time, and community-based. HHS collaborates with civic, arts-based, and community groups.  The physical learning space had been designed with the understanding that learning is embedded in practice, collaborative, must allow for teachers, mentors and peers to be responsive to “just in time” needs, and fosters creativity.

2. Academic Preparation

The core curriculum at HHS is multi-disciplinary, problem-based, relevant, foundational, inspirational, and intentional. It is designed to leverage faculty and students’ interests and passions, develop critical and creative thinking dispositions, embed 21st century multi-literacies, and privilege the arts. Faculty and students work in multi-disciplinary teams to design curricula that are aligned to the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards and based on compelling questions.

Designed to inspire greater levels of academic achievement by linking student interests, passions, and curiosities to educational experience, the HHS curricula are based on posing and answering questions, and finding, framing, and solving problems.  As a result, multiple disciplines are often combined.  For example, incoming students might address the questions: “What does it mean to see? How are seeing and observing similar and different?” through different disciplinary lenses.

By leveraging teachers’ and students’ passions, learners become practiced at critically and creatively thinking about issues that impact society. In traditional high schools, discrete courses, marking period, midterms, and finals are often the method through which students earn credits applicable for graduation. At these schools, course work is tied to a traditional 180-day calendar.  In contrast, HHS students do not take traditional courses tied to seat time or discrete disciplines and are encouraged to work virtually, as well as in person. Utilizing Option 2 (N.J.A.C. 6A:8-5.1(a)1ii), personalized learning plans are developed with students and their parents/guardians that fulfill the Morris School District graduation requirements while emphasizing students’ interests, emerging as well as established. These experiences can result in: project-based courses, virtual offerings, community-based internships, college courses, and capstone projects.  

At HHS, there are no AP offerings or separate honors track. Courses are suitably rigorous and tailored to students’ zones of proximal development (ZPD). Whereas we anticipate a range of experiences learners will bring to the school, we also anticipate that learners may well need academic support, especially our learners who may be newly arrived to the United States or in need of special services.  No remedial model is used at HHS. Instead, mediated learning experiences, such as dynamic assessment based on Lev Vygotsky’s (1986) concept of ZPD and Reuven Feurstein’s (1980, 2006) theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability are employed. Dynamic assessment embeds intervention within the assessment procedure.

Students are awarded high school credit tied to satisfying the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content standards via a pass/fail evaluation system that includes public exhibition, the development of an e-portfolio, and the capstone project. State assessments are issued at HHS as required. Assessment is ongoing, seamless, and is a shared responsibility between students and their teachers and mentors. Students compose e-portfolios that are reviewed by learners, teachers, and community mentors, and that exemplify mastery of New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards.  Report cards are narrative in nature, coauthored by students and teachers. Student transcripts indicate successful completion of core subjects and credits earned.

3. Governance and Faculty

HHS privileges the arts and humanities. Educators with experience and credentials related to the fine and practical arts, humanities and design/technology compose the majority of faculty positions.  These educators are joined by mathematics and science specialists with deep disciplinary knowledge who are able to situate their studies within a problem framing curriculum. Discrete subjects such as English IV, Biology, Geometry are not offered, as an integrated approach is stressed.

At HHS, teaching is shared among faculty which consists of certificated teachers and administrators.  Every educator teaches. Additionally, community partners also teach, not in place of certificated staff, but in addition to. Governance is shared through a visionary planning board (VPB). The VPB is composed of faculty, students, partners, parents/guardians, and other community stakeholders. Membership on the VPB is determined by election (for teachers and students) and appointment (administrators, community members). 
 
4. Acceptance Process

Maintaining the racial balance presently found at XXXXX  High School will guide the acceptance process of students into HHS.  Parents/guardians of students interested in attending HHS will indicate their interest via a form the District will provide and a lottery will be used to determine who is admitted. 

III. A Year in the Life: Close Up Look at Learners at HHS

During the time students earn the first 60 high school credits, they work within a Learning Commons concept--a dynamic, collaborative environment, combining individual space, group space, lab space, in-depth research service, with access to a librarian and ESL/bilingual services. Students at HHS are issued an Internet ready device such as Mac Book or iPad3 and work within a wireless environment.  Organized by trimesters, students work in teams, individually, and with teachers and mentors as they explore a common set of initiating questions designed to help them frame and respond to community based problems.

It is expected that most students will complete 30 credits during a school year, although we recognize that students may need more or less time to do so.  A first year then usually consists of students working to successfully complete several projects (usually three) in succession, interspersed with expeditions, community-based mentorship, and reflection.

1. Symposium

The Symposium emphasizes student inquiry, critical thinking and craftsmanship and is taken by all entering students. Students conduct original research and share results in team presentations that are expected to be multimodal.  Learning expeditions—deep investigations of rich academic and civic topics—enrich the multi-disciplinary work students while earning their first 30 credits.  Students maintain an e-portfolio of their achievements in academics, service, fitness and the arts, and present them in formal review. The e-portfolios and public exhibition of work form the core of student assessment.

2. Gateway Experience

After students have earned 30 credits they are able to enroll in the Gateway Experience. As community based learning is privileged at HHS, the gateway experience bridges school and community, affording students the opportunity and responsibility to work for 10 hours a trimester in a community-based enterprise such as a business, non-profit organization, or with a professional group.  The community-based work may be conducted in person, virtually or a hybrid version of the two.

3. Internship

Students are expected to participate in community-based learning through internships. It is expected that students (having earned at least 60 credits) will participate in community-based internships of 4 to 8 hours per week that are related to their studies. Internships are arranged with businesses, nonprofit organizations, and professional groups. Related academic course requirements are often embedded into the Internship experience. Additionally, students may opt for a multi-week internship (up to 3 week period) during their last year at HHS.

4. Capstone Project

After completing 80 credits, students are ready to design and complete a capstone project. Students complete a project (graduation requirement) with an external mentor and are supervised by a core faculty member. These internships may be conducted virtually and will include connecting each student with a community mentor and a sustained internship. Internships may be conducted throughout the world and will not be limited to the United States. Fourth year internships are arranged with each student and may extend the third year Internship or be developed newly. They may be conducted across the calendar year and are not limited to the notion of a “school” year.

5. Exhibition

In spring of each school year, HHS students and faculty are expected to present aspects of their work via public exhibitions.  The exhibitions are a combination of:

• Maker Faires, featuring innovations
• Art and Design Shows
• Performances
• Research Symposium
• Film Festival
• Culinary Arts

Works Cited

Cormier, Dave. 2008.Rhizomatic education: community as curriculum. Innovate 4 (5). Donwloaded from here on 6.10.11.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 2002. A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, UK: Continuum.

Driscoll, Marcy P. 2004. Psychology of learning and instruction, 3rd edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Allyn & Bacon.

Feuerstein, Reuven; Falik, Louis; Rand, Yaakov & Raphael Feuerstein. 2006. Creating and enhancing cognitive modifiability: The Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment program . Jerusalem: ICELP Press.

Feuerstein, Reuven; Rand, Yaakov; Hoffman, M., & R. Miller. 1980. Instrumental Enrichment: An intervention program for cognitive modifiability . Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.

Luke, Allan. 2002. “Two Takes on the Critical.” In Education in semiotic democracies: Teaching and learning beyond the nation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pinar, William F. 2008. What is curriculum theory? Taylor & Francis e-Library.

Vygotsky, L.S. 1986. Thought and language. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.

TwitterArt Collaboration w/ @AndersonGL

On Wednesday night Gary Anderson tweeted a haiku that just captivated me. He wrote:

The smell of lilacs
through the kitchen window now
long after nightfall

With the poem as inspiration, I made the following image, embedding Gary's words.

Visual Haiku (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

A Nation of Employees, not Citizens

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

I find the constant referencing of studies that attempt to show how the arts & the humanities increase students' mathematics and science achievement fairly obscene.  It's as if the full measure of each was limited to what they might do to 'improve' students' achievement in the 'really important' subjects.  In this post-Sputnik world, do poets, painters, photographers, cartoonists, historians, dancers, musicians, singers, actors, sculptors, dramatists, performance artists, film makers, writers, and mixed media artists--to name but a few-- still have no value apart from boosting math & science scores? 

Against the consistent manic attention to mathandscience (they are singular, not plural), we also add the buzz that the US economy (a stand in for securing wealth) will require the participation of "creative" people to "win the race".  Such thinking has led to the retooling of public education shifting attention and funding from preparing learners to be active citizens in participatory democracy to building engineers, doctors, and scientists--as if these professions were the full sum of the people. 

Mark Slouka (Harper's, 09/2009) explained the shift in what is being valued as education when he wrote:

"By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe."

A nation of employees, not citizens. Studying the arts and the humanities require thinkers to not be confined to espousing only government or corporate-sanctioned ideologies. One never quite knows the twists and turns the human mind might take while reading literary works or participating in other aesthetic experiences, including those that might also be considered mathematical or scientific in nature. I am reminded here of the recent push to devalue literature study in schools, replacing The Iliad  or The Bluest Eye with the ubiquitous, non fiction text which seems to be understood as being non-literary--informational.  In "How To Make American Teens Smarter," Dana Goldstein writes:

...children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.

This is wrong for so many reasons, not the least is the unfortunate implication that being poor means your knowledge is not important. Goldstein let's us know what the end game is for education: succeeding in the workplace. Success in the workplace has replaced pursuing life, liberty, and happiness.  Or consider ASCD writer, Grant Wiggins, who in an earlier ASCD post this year (now removed from the site) said we should ban fiction from classrooms (I wrote more about this here). Who needs literature? Well it seems our President agrees. Proposed federal education funding this year for reading, writing and the arts is $0.  It is enough to make one ask, Why study literature? Why participate in the arts? Is the study of history even relevant? It makes one wonder if mathandscience is democratically neutral--indifferent and is not valued in part, because of this indifference. Slouka writes:

I see no contradiction between my respect for science and my humanist’s discomfort with its ever-greater role in American culture, its ever-burgeoning coffers, its often dramatically anti-democratic ways, its symbiotic relationship with government, with industry, with our increasingly corporate institutions of higher learning. Triply protected from criticism by the firewall of their jargon (which immediately excludes the non-specialist and assures a jury of motivated and sympathetic peers), their economic efficacy, and the immunity conferred by conveniently associated terms like “progress” and “advancement,” the sciences march, largely untouched, under the banner of the inherently good. And this troubles me. It troubles me because there are many things “math and science” do well, and some they don’t. And one of the things they don’t do well is democracy. They have no aptitude for it, no connection to it, really.

Democracy

A Room of One's Own (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I think we tend to think of our democracy as a stable thing we have inherited from the "founding fathers" that has been rendered ready-made and requires little of us now. A quick look at US voting records suggests a similar sense of reality. Slightly more than half of us vote during a presidential election and slightly more than a third in off years.  Slouka states that an arts and humanities education is about life. He writes:

"...every aspect of life—every marriage, every job, every parent-teacher meeting—hinges in some way on the ability to understand and empathize with others, to challenge one’s beliefs, to strive for reason and clarity."

Arts and humanities education allows us to live more fully, more aware of how our past informs our present and why such knowledge, even when it is most painful, is critical to understand.  Less we think our democratic rights are stable, consider your right to marry whomever you love. One would think that the freedom to marry would be an example of an inalienable human right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' Not so.

In 1883 in Pace v. Alabama, the US Supreme Court upheld Alabama's right to make interracial marriage a felony.  Nearly 100 years later, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), the US Supreme Court ruled that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. At that time 16 states had such laws. However it was not until the end of the century that all states changed their constitutions. In 1998, South Carolina and in 2000, Alabama amended their states' constitutions prohibiting miscegenation.  More recently in 2011, I read a poll that indicated 46% of Republican lawmakers in Mississippi supported banning interracial marriage. Now consider where we are in securing such rights if we replace interracial marriage with same gender marriage. Democracies require that its citizens be able to participate. Public schools need to value citizenship as evidenced by funding.

Dewey (1916) understood the aims of education in ways our current representatives seemed to not grasp. We must understand that for a democracy to continue, the aims of education are not to make better workers, but rather better citizens. The route to such ends will not be found by over privileging mathandscience. Dewey understood that aesthetic experiences were an important and necessary method for learning deeply--a requisite to developing thinkers, not merely followers.  He explained:

"Tangible scenes of life are made more intelligible in esthetic experience: not, however as reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form but by presenting their meanings as the matter of clarified, coherent, and intensified or 'impassioned experience" (1934, p. 290).

Similarly, Maxine Greene (1995) argued that through aesthetic engagements that invoke imagination learners are positioned to become "otherwise"-- that is to become wise about those who we are not.  Empathy, clarity, reason, living with ambiguity, and being wise about other: Are these not perhaps, the most important dispositions we might hope to teach and learn in this increasingly more global world?

What Felled You is Important (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We Are Too Full with Knowing

A Walk Through the Woods (5.23.11)

I believe in rituals.

For a long time, each spring I would reread Thoreau's Walden.  I found it reconnected me to self and other in ways often necessary after a long winter in the Northeast. Sometime between December and May I had forgotten the most fundamental of things: how to breathe.

I have neglected reading Walden in recent years, hurrying about as if the work at hand might be better shaped through frantic pace.  I was feeling all of this today as I made my way to work, wondering not for the first time, what is it that I do and is it worth what it takes.  It was as if I saw school for the first time, wondering how Richard Elmore might see it: With indifference? With certain clarity?  It caused me to pause, remember what my first years of teaching were like and how privileged in many ways those days were before the advent of external and national Standards and with them all the rush, rush, rush to perfection.

Today I asked a group of senior students which was more beautiful: perfection or imperfection. They were discussing ethical implications of cloning and it had me wondering why we find ever newer ways to shun our humanness, our imperfections. I was thinking of being married, of being a mom and how I have learned that I will never be perfect as either and how hard it is nonetheless to not expect an idealized version of love in return.

I thought about this as I listened to this group of students discuss their views-- their partial understandings.  How can you know at 17 that love will always disappoint and that it is in the disappointment that its beauty will be so clear?  

What do we teach at school and how essential is what we teach?  Much of what I read in the Common Core Standards feels inconsequential to me, quite frankly rather unimportant.  I mean just how important is it for 10- or 11-year-olds to type three pages on a computer "in one sitting"? Is this essential? Is this even worthy of our time, our children's attention? Where in the Standards does it say that students need to know that perfection has been oversold; that imperfection is beautiful?...That the way home is often not direct and that we may be the better for it?

A Bend in the River (5.23.11)

It was with such thinking that I made my way home and was hardly surprised by my sudden decision to pull to the road side and take a walk through the woods.  Yes it was misting, perhaps some might characterize it as drizzle or light rain, but it fell with such aimlessness and I thought there's a message here I need to feel, to hear.  Deep breaths of rain and spring must be good. A restorative perhaps?

The woods were wet, filled with fog and empty of people.  And surely the hour I spent there was a baptism of sorts.

Summer Waits

I walked mostly on paths I had not known before, with my camera in hand and thought is there nothing lovelier than a feeling of being lost? I stopped thinking and lifted the camera to make images and now and then I put the camera down knowing no image could be made.  It was this lovely bit of tension between making and being that steadied me, reminded me that art and living are not separate breaths I take.

Later, I began to read Walden and stopped in the second chapter when I read:

I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet.

It is in what I do not know that I make art.  I have searched the Standards and cannot seem to find this elemental truth.

Sadly, I think, we are too full with knowing.