Francie, from Brooklyn, and Veblen, from Wisconsin

I was glad to see this week that the economics textbook used in Richmond High School's classes includes mention of my oft-cited, favorite political economist, Thorstein Veblen. I've been thinking of Veblen's ideas this morning as I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie, the young protagonist, lives with her family in Williamsburg in 1908. Very little happens in the first 150 pages (and, I've heard, in the entire book, but I haven't read it all), but the reader is treated to pleasing accounts of daily life for poor, working class families of various immigrant backgrounds in Williamsburg. One notably absent minority is yuppie.

Veblen says that we only ever feel badly about our own lack of wealth when we are able to look next door and see evidence of someone else's more substantial wealth. When everyone's poor, everyone can feel OK - when I see that there are rich among us, I feel crummy about being poor.

Perhaps this is part of the justification behind the Early College program at Richmond High School, where students considered at-risk for not attending college, because of their level of wealth, or the fact that their parents didn't go to college, take class together. Not that we teach the "poor kids' class" - it's not that stark, and never phrased in anything that approaches that implication. But I wonder if they gain some comfort from knowing that they are surrounded by peers who at least come from a similar background as they do.



Consider Francie, who has never been made to feel badly about her poverty, though she is well aware of the state of need in which she lives (her stomach won't let her forget it). She eagerly anticipates school and its sensory delights: clean paper, fresh pencils, chalkboards, books, socializing with peers, drinks from sparkling water fountains. On the first day of school, however, her expectations are set straight:

Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy. She was puzzled and hurt by teacher's attitude. Obviously the teacher hated her and others like her for no other reason than that they were what they were. Teacher acted as though they had no right to be in the school but that she was forced to accept them and was doing so with as little grace as possible. She begrudged them the few crumbs of learning she threw at them. Like the doctor at the health center, she too acted as though they had no right to live.

The doctor she refers to commented crudely to the nurse that Francie, who had rolled up her sleeve at a free clinic to get the vaccination required for enrolment in school, was a disgrace because of her dirtiness.

I was surprised when I read about Francie's anticipation of school - I had not realized she wasn't going to school, probably because she was learning so much through daily life. She learned how to buy meat, and how to stand up for herself when the vendor tried to sell her old or low-quality cuts; she watched the neighborhood horse hand brush and care for his horse; she saw her aunt use her attractive appearance to win privileged treatment from men; she had examples of several kinds of morality demonstrated for her, and several brands of work ethic, from neighbors and family members; she learned how the Chinaman at the laundromat counted on his abacus; she saw how her mother saved money for a piece of land in a tin can nailed to the floor; she learned about English through her mother's reading of two pages of literature a night: one from the complete works of William Shakespeare, one from the Bible.

When Francie goes to school, she learns about the class system, a necessary lesson, I suppose. I have struggled with the apparent difficulty of defining why children need to be in school when there can be so little learning happening. The challenge of understanding why bright children must be shut in a building with poor conditions and often unsafe social conditions is echoed in Francie's mother's justification of both the vaccination and school attendance:

Katie was home for lunch when the children got back. She looked at their bandaged arms with misery in her eyes. Francie spoke out passionately.

"Why, Mama, why? Why do they have to ... to ... say things and then stick a needle in your arm?"

"Vaccination," said mama firmly, now that it was all over, "is a very good thing. It makes you tell your left hand from your right. You have to write with your right hand when you go to school and that sore will be there to say, uh-uh, not this hand. Use the other hand."

This explanation satisfied Francie because she had never been able to tell her left hand from her right. She ate, and drew pictures with her left hand. Katie was always correcting her and transferring the chalk or the needle from her left hand to her right. After mama explained about vaccination, Francie began to think that maybe it was a wonderful thing. It was a small price to pay if it simplified such a great problem and let you know which hand was which. Francie began using her right hand instead of the left after the vaccination and never had trouble afterwards.

Certainly we make up rationales for the tasks that children have to do, and with reason, at Francie's age. But what am I supposed to tell my students about the tests we're perpetually supposed to be preparing them for? Why do they need to take arbitrary tests in order to graduate? Beyond that, why do they need to graduate? I know this is pushing a bit, but it is by no means obvious, during the school day, why high school is a better alternative than not-high-school, except that, like vaccination for Francie, it's required by law.

Yes, high school grads have higher earning power, but isn't there some way for us to make high school feel worthwhile while students are sitting there? I hope and believe so.

Modern philosophy

One of the reasons I like working with high schoolers in the English classroom is that they are beginning to figure out their world view. Indeed, they are only at the front end of this process. Sometimes it can seem as though this is a tumultuous process: parents who were once paragons are now fallible; friends that seemed destined to last forever fray; a faith that has been simple becomes complex as we meet people with no faith or a different faith who have good hearts even though they don't believe in God the same way we do.

This week I read an article in the New Yorker called "Are we really so modern?"

Today, the article posits, we like to think that we live in ways unimaginably different from our predecessors. True, concedes the journalist, but so did our predecessors live in ways inconceivable to their predecessors. This continuation of generations who considered themselves modernists goes back to those who could legitimately claim to have leapt ahead in human understanding from those who came before them: the thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Isn't that wild to think about? Imagine being one of the minds during these centuries who was charged with rethinking everything about the way life was structured, and what it meant?

What structures would we like to see rethought today? If we could suddenly have several central ideas of our age proven wrong by science, what would you like them to be?

Today was the first day of the high school youth group. I picked up bagels and Swiss Miss on the way to meeting, and after Meeting for Worship, I went with six high school students, three boys and three girls, to Virginia Cottage on Earlham's campus.

First of all, my key didn't work. I knew I should have checked it before the hour of need. I decided to try a few other doors with the same key, though my heart of hearts knew that my mind of minds needed to be coming up with a contingency plan. I was on the patio looking into the kitchen where I wanted to badly to be, and I tried what has gotten me into my own home many times this summer when I've locked myself out: opening the window. It was unlocked, and didn't have those burglar latches that my house does, so we climbed on in and set about our meeting.

We toasted, spread, and chatted around a small table (I think spaces that are slightly too small for the group in question are essential for real fellowship, whether over scripture or dinner).

After a period of talking, during which everyone had a chance to share about what had been on their mind that week, we looked at the Palladium Item Sunday paper. I asked them to look at sections and to see what was going on in our world. They reported the headlines of their section, and we distilled some of the topics on our society's mind, among them the following:

The appropriate punishment for criminals
Local employers' difficulty filling job openings
College students trying to improve their image within a community
9/11 memories and grief and fear
Politicians' words on abortion
An airstrike in Syria
Presidential candidates' opinions on education reform



We talked about the slew of issues facing our society, and how, in order to be a good citizen, we need to have thought carefully about a lot of topics. I said we would be able to think about and talk about these kinds of topics when we got together each week. I also said we would pick our own issues to try to make a difference on. We would be able to organize our own fundraisers, lobby our own issues, start our own dialogues.

I've never led a group like this before, so I'm feeling out the temperature of the group as we go, and trying not to be too serious about it and cut out the fun, as I am prone to do. I have to remember that, unlike when they're in English class, these students are not required by law to be in a youth group. It has to be something they want to return to each week. Maybe, if I can present it as a place where we can dismantle the modes of thinking that hold our society back from progress, they'll be as excited to take part in our philosophical experiment as the thinkers of the 18 and 1900s were.

Copernicus told us the Earth revolved around the sun. Are there equivalently thought-altering realizations that should rock our world today?

1. "Women are things for us to look at" must be replaced with "Women are."
I am amazed how many images of women my students see every day. The other day at the beginning of a video watched in a biology class, students watched a 30-second ad for H&M during which a long, thin model climbed, bare legged and bare armed, over oversized blocks, advertising scanty denim, flawless skin and straight, blond hair. I thought, "Is anyone in the room questioning our need to watch something like this before we learn the difference between biotic and abiotic?" A reorientation of our view of women as objects would fundamentally shift the way we see half of the population. To me, it represents an almost unfathomable shift in perspective.

2. "People who don't look like me are less human than I am" must be replaced by "All people are."
The white tendency to privilege the dignity and lives of other white skinned people holds our society back from progress. This tendency is deeply engrained in human nature, but I wish science would somehow prove that we are equally worthy of freedom and respect. Again, the ways in which this would change our ways of relating to one another are hard to imagine now.

3. "Money is the most important thing," must be replaced with "Value is not something that we can measure in units, like flour."
Our desire to measure progress and our own worth, things that cannot be quantified, lead us to use money as a benchmark for any good. Until the profit motive becomes less powerful than the desire to produce real, human value (goodness), our economy will continue to shorten our future. Until we embrace a more reasonable understanding of what is worth working for, we will short-change much of the population, and exploit another great swath of it.

4. "Faith is weak" must be replaced with "Faith is essential".
Faith is not the way of weakness. Believing in what you cannot see, but have a deep sense of, is not something to be laughed at and brushed off. Those who have faith have something to hold onto when the things we can see, or can measure, crumble. Until we understand that we are not the most powerful players, we will continue practicing an arrogant belief that we are the captains of history, directors of the universe, instead of recognizing that we are the products of history, mere moving pieces in the functioning of a large and grand universe.