Stealing Dreams: International Women's Day

Looking Out the School Window (NYC, 2/2012)

I. Girls' Dreams

Today was International Women's Day 2012 and I spent a portion of the day reading young teenage girls' dreams--texts they were authoring that described how they imagined their near futures (early 20s). One girl imagined she would be a part time teacher and have twins. The remainder described their futures in terms of:

• having two to five children
• having twins
  
• driving a Hummer
• being married to an attorney, clown, rapper, or current boyfriend
  
• getting paid a lot of money
• living outside of New York City
• no longer "living horribly"

The girls I spoke with hailed from the south end of the Bronx. Here poverty is persistent.  The public middle school they attend has an "A rating" from NYC DOE.  I have found the school to be an intriguing place, populated with professionals who daily make critical differences in young people's lives.

II. Talking Back to Seth Godin

In section 15 of Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin reports findings from a survey done by Jake Halpern of 750 high school students from the Rochester, NY region. Halpern asked the teens, "When you grow up which of the following jobs would you most like to have?" The choices were limited to:

• Chief of a major company like General Motors
• a Navy SEAL
• a United States Senator
• the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale
• the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star

Godin reports that the girls surveyed made the following choices: 

• 9.5% of girls selected: Chief of a major company like General Motors
• 9.8% of girls selected: a Navy SEAL
• 13.6% of girls selected: a United States Senator
• 23.7% of girls selected: the president of a great university like Harvard or Yale
• 43.4% of girls selected: the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star

Role models in our lives matter. What we experience informs our choices and may well limit our choices. With that in mind, I wondered how many women role models are available for the careers Halpern cited as choices.

• There are currently 12 women who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. That represents 2%. (Source)
  
• There are 0 women who are Navy Seals as they are prohibited to serve by law. There are between 2000 and 2400 Navy Seals currently. 0%. (Source)
• There are currently 17 women in the US Senate. 17% (Source)
• There are currently 3 women who are presidents of Ivy League colleges (Brown, Univ of Penn, Princeton) 37% (Source)
• There are no conclusive data about the number of women who are personal assistants.

There are currently 2, 576 to 2,976 men working in the positions listed above. In comparison there are 32 women.  Are we really so surprised that girls would gravitate to the one job in the list where women might actually be employed?

III. Snuffing Out Dreams
Godin writes:

Is this the best we can do? Have we created a trillion-dollar, multimillion-student, sixteen-year schooling cycle to take our best and our brightest and snuff out their dreams—sometimes when they’re so nascent that they haven’t even been articulated? Is the product of our massive schooling industry an endless legion of assistants?

The century of dream-snuffing has to end. We’re facing a significant emergency, one that’s not just economic but cultural as well. The time to act is right now, and the person to do it is you. (Section 15)

How many of the few actual female role models do you think live in the South Bronx? How many have ever visited the South Bronx?  I want to say here that it isn't the school or the professional staff who have stolen the girls' dreams of the school I was visiting today.  The assumption that schools are singularly responsible for "dream-snuffing" is faulty and dangerous as it shifts our attention away from other forces that influence girls' dreams.  

Those Kids Could Dream

Stop Stealing Dreams (by M.A. Reilly, 2.29.2012)

 “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”  

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

I.
My father was a dreamer. You know the type. Distracted. Black socks with sandals. A man who studied flowers, represented labor, deeply loved my mother. One summer we trekked across the country and slept each night in a tent.

Each stop was a story. Each stop was an occasion to meet someone we did not know and to listen to them tell a piece of their life.

II.
That summer, my father passed along the capacity to dream to my brothers and me.  It would be his finest gift to us.  He did so by dreaming out loud: finding the wonder in the ordinary and laying it down with words we could follow. My brothers and I were born at the tail end of that generation that Seth Godin writes about:

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.
 
A generation dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move.

We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream. - Section 59. Seth Godin.

III.

Garrowby Hill

I can still remember the night when men first walked on the moon.  I was 10 and it was summer and we were driving home from visiting friends, up and down winding hills with all of us tucked into the Country Squire, passing house after house, one after the next, each lit with the soft glow of a television screen.  Years later I would see David Hockney's Garrowby Hill, and think, "Yes, this is like the road we traveled that night."

It would be the first time I heard Walt Whitman's homage to the perfect silence of stars and the first time I

looked up at the moon and saw it as something not made of cheese and myth. 

"Mary, up there men are walking. Anything is possible," my father would tell me.

IV.
In the basement of the house where I grew up, thousands of miles from the Dublin orphanage where I first lived, was an elaborate chemistry set that sat on top of several large sheets of green spray-painted plywood.  It was a complicated concoction that grew year to year as we each took our turn as alchemist.  It was a time when all things could be reused, reimagined, reinvented.

The discarded appliance box was a fort, a carriage, a rocket.
Sheets drying on a line were spirits to dance with, a tent to crawl beneath, a passageway to the East.
Bottle caps were the currency in a game you newly invented.
A stick of chalk and a sidewalk were the opening to possible worlds.

We were bricoleurs, making do with what was at hand. As such, a thing could not be limited by what another had intended. And perhaps that was the deepest secret I was to learn: Do not limit what you imagine by another's definition. 

V.
Tonight, I want to take solace in the moon.  Hoping for full and settling for what is: first quarter. Looking up, I see that we have traveled so very far from that night when we all walked on the moon, from when kids dreamed big dreams and schools, like home, were wonderfully imperfect. Then there was time for getting lost, for wandering about, for doing nothing.

VI.
Now we are told that bigger and better and more precise reckonings of what children need to know and be able to do have been defined.  Each age is the age of the unimaginable and yet now we have the list of things to know. Everything has been defined for us.

We can purchase the list, the clever frameworks, the myriad of tests, the packaged PD, the scientifically-proven research, the white paper, and with all of it, the secret promise to not be left behind.

But know this: beneath those endless products, we purchase certainty at a cost for we have been given a recipe with the intention that we follow it, precisely.

VII.
I think my father would be sad tonight beneath this quarter moon. A man, such as he, who dreamed would find it hard to breathe in this sterile place that we are forever perfecting, where the stuff of school is a möbius strip of endless intent.

There's no way out, the children whisper.

My father would see that with all the perfection and the rushing about that there is no time for dreaming, no time to wear cardigans, to meet the unexpected traveler, to wonder. 

VIII.
In schools, our children practice being very fast, very first, very certain.  They know there will be a test and then another for they are a möbius strip.  And these tests will tell them their worth, their true measure, and fear not--they will tell us our measure as well.

IX.
"We will measure," the new bards tell us.
They mouth this song without sound.
"Nothing else is possible," they sing.

X.
We are without stories. Instead, we have data.

XI.
The distance between the window in my son's room and the moon feels far tonight. It is late when I lean down and whisper, "You must not forget how to dream. When you dream you open a small hidden door."  I whisper it as he sleeps, an incantation of hope from a mother to her son.  A hope that he might hold up to shield himself from the certainty that frames his waking life.

XII.
Long ago men walked on the moon. Beneath them a daughter held her father's hand and knew all things were possible.  The same light that found me then, finds me tonight.