A legitimacy crisis for the American Founding Myth

I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Its thesis is essentially that success is not something that springs from one person's drive, grit, determination and intelligence (and certainly not from her genius). All those things are important, and play a role, but there are arbitrary circumstances and a colossal amount of luck involved in the most famous "success" stories of our era, and even the past eras. 

Gladwell is taking a whack at the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, anyone can make it" myth upon which the American Dream relies. Even though I agree with everything he's saying, and have had an understanding for a long time of the incomplete recipe for success we like to hold up as an example (mostly because of my program of study for economics at Utah) it still makes me vaguely uncomfortable to listen to his book, because it is so destabilizing to think about America without this idea that we can all make it through hard work.

This weekend I read an article in the New Yorker about how the super rich are preparing for some kind of DoomsDay. One of the wealthy Silicon Valley titans who has a basement full of food and shotguns is quoted as saying “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos.” 

Our healthy founding myth seems to be fraying. Gladwell uses the example of a Jewish law student who, after attending a good high school in New York, could have gone to City University for free, but chose to spend $450 to go to Michigan State, and took the money he'd earned over the summer and hitch hiked to ANn Arbor to start school. He got a job at a factory on the side to pay for expenses.

It was possible, heck, even easy, to be in control of your own path in the 70's for this man, socially marginalized as he was. That is so different from what my students face today in terms of the availability of free higher education and the promise of jobs to help them through school, and then to pay them after school. 

The Matthew Effect

On Friday night, I remembered at 9:56 that I had an interlibrary loan book that had arrived for me at Earlham's library. I called the switchboard while frantically pulling out my computer to see when the library closes on Fridays. As someone answered, I read: 10 pm. I asked to be put through to the library, and a calm student voice answered, "Lily Library, how can I help?"

This friendly voice said it would wait for me until I got there, and I took off running across Earlham's unseasonably warm campus (48 degrees) to get The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child, recommended to me by a teacher friend.

Author Donalyn Miller argues in favor of an independent reading program in English Language Arts classes in this book. She proposes a workshop model for a classroom, in which a teacher is a master and students learn tricks of the trade. 

In the classroom, the trade is reading and the teacher is the most literate person in the room, charged with teaching children how to make sense of whatever they read, long after they've left the classroom. The goal is to create readers; this is the only goal, as far as Miller is concerned. '

Miller refers fairly early on to a phenomenon at many schools. Remedial reading classrooms read less and less, while the more proficient readers read more and more. Those who are good at reading become better, and those who struggle keep struggling, never making significant strides, and certainly never developing a love of reading on their own. She links this to the Matthew Effect, a phenomenon described in the gospel of Matthew thus:

Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.

She argues in favor of having all students pick books at the beginning of the year and that a significant chunk of class time, between 15 and 30 minutes (on her 90 minute block schedule) be dedicated to independent reading each day. 

I have not finished the book so I don't know what her suggestions are for engaging students around a single text in a class that also has an independent reading program. I love the idea of independent reading, and absolutely am compelled by her argument that it builds students' desire to read after they leave the classroom, but I also want to read things together, to have a common source for discussion and thinking about specific, more challenging ideas that would certainly not occur to the students were they only reading their own young adult fiction, or whatever they chose to be reading.

I had never heard of the Matthew Effect before. I have no idea what is being discussed in that part of the Bible, and as we were cautioned last week at Meeting, "Context is everything" when reading a Bible verse, so I'll withhold judgment on what seems a very unjust principle in that verse. 

Apparently that's not the only verse which supports the Matthew Effect. 

Later in the day I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and heard this verse: 

For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matthew 25:29)

Sounds familiar. 

Gladwell is making a similar point to Miller, but speaking about success more broadly. Those who have certain conditions at birth and during childhood, are exponentially more likely to succeed, regardless of their merit or their inherent talent. This is not surprising to those people who know that where you were born, and how educated your parents are, matters, but his examples are no less compelling. 

Earlier in the day I had been speaking to a mother and teacher about the level of vocabulary among my students in Richmond. They are unfamiliar with far more words in English than my students in Ramallah were, even though those were ESL students. I told my friend yesterday that the difference seems to be a) how much they read and b) the education level of their parents. 

Gladwell's example confirm my suspicions. The people who do well are those whose parents were highly involved in their development as learners, and importantly, as actors. I do not mean actors in the theater sense, I mean people who exercise agency. Higher class parents teach their children how to advocate for themselves, how to ask for what they want, and how to question people in authority. 

Lower class parents allow their children to develop naturally and mostly independently. The research Gladwell cites shows that lower class children grow up being well-behaved, creative and collaborative, but they don't know how to speak up as well. They do not develop a necessary sense of entitlement. 

Reflecting on my own youth I see what solid training I got in advocacy for myself. My mother taught me how to assert myself from a very early age, to ask for what I need, and to work with people in a way that helps me get it while building a relationship with them. Those are the skills that allow people to be successful. How can I teach that in my class?

OK I've strayed significantly from developing independent readers to fostering a sense of entitlement in students. I wonder if the classroom can be a place for learning both? I'm not sure. It seems it would be difficult to train assertiveness in the classroom successfully if it were not modelled and appreciated at home too. 

Mere Christianity: The natural self

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about the natural self. He says that what reveals our true selves is the way we react to situations before we have time to organize ourselves. How do I respond to something unpleasant, or inconvenient to me, if I don't have time to arrange my face and settle my own emotions on the matter? This reaction, this unfiltered reaction, is the real us. 

For me this is a rather frightful idea, since I work pretty hard to curate my responses to things that are inconvenient or unpleasant to me. I can tolerate most of them, but it takes me a moment to figure out how to arrange my reaction. When I am truly caught off guard, I'm afraid I don't respond very charitably. My knee jerks pretty violently. 

In this weekend's listening to the book on audio, two points about the self have come up which I think are interesting. 

The first is the idea that most of us take religion or Christianity as a way to control this natural self of ours - some sort of straight jacket we can put on our natural selves to tame its impulses. "I go to church in order to fill me with charity and love towards others, so that during the week I can respond with love to my sister or brother." That sort of understanding of religion's role. 

Lewis says that this is the wrong way to go about it. We should not consider how Christianity adjusts us in order to make us better. It positively transforms us into different beings. 

Here is how he puts it: 

Christ says "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours."

I nearly laughed when I heard the line "I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it." Lewis calls Christianity both harder and easier than the version of religion where we try to maintain our old selves while allowing Christ to torment us about our wrongs, and deny us the things we desire. This is so frank! And it provides a strange sense of relief - my old self is irrelevant to the new project! Now, allowing yourself to be killed seems hard. Indeed, for me, this is the sticking point of Christianity. I do not want to give myself up to God. I like to be in control, and I'm afraid of what he will do with me if I actually give myself over in the complete sense described above. 

Another part of the book is helpful here, however. Lewis says that the "self" we are keen to maintain is not truly as much our original creation as we like to think. We are created by society. 

Here is how he puts it:

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

... 

Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

I guess I agree. The things that I don't want to relinquish about me - my tastes, the way I look and talk and walk and work and relate to others - are all results of things outside of me. I have capitulated to their control without much thought. I have already given myself over, essentially, to the ideals that govern my daily life and my long term ambitions. Do I feel a sense of control over these? Yes. I do feel as though at least among these, I have free will to choose. If I saw an ambition I didn't like, I would steer clear of it. But that is not even true. I find myself captive of certain ideals and beliefs which I would rather dispense with. But I can't. 

At the end of the book, which I reached today, Lewis mentions the way we can tell when we are in the presence of people who seem to have a real sense of the divine. They are different. Their faces and countenances are different. They have a peace which others don't; which we don't. I am grateful to know some people like this. They have all given themselves over to something larger than themselves, and are not concerned with the small machinations which provoke my anxieties. 

I am glad for their example, and I hope to catch what they have!

Teacher shortages in California

There is a website called edjoin.org where prospective teachers can see job postings for school districts. I've looked at different districts in California. This is the page which greets searchers: 

Look at the number of postings in CA versus the other states! It's crazy! There are 1,000 school districts in CA. That's a lot of teacher positions to fill, and apparently it's getting harder each year. 

The city latest on my list has been Chico, where at least some members of the school administration are willing to hire as many people as there are open positions, thanks to waves of retirements expected to deplete teacher ranks in the next few years. 

I don't know what schools are going to do. Even Richmond High School is strapped for hiring - there just aren't teachers coming out of the credential programs. My program at Earlham has been in existence for fifteen years. Cohort 7 was 25 students. Mine (cohort 15) is 10 students. And none of us is getting certified in math. 

Math teachers, and science, are always what the newspaper articles say are the hardest to find. I really don't know what districts are going to do. We need to reinvent the image and the pay scale for teachers to draw more highly qualified candidates into the field. This will not do for our next generations.

MLK Weekend

So many converging forces. A powerful weekend service at WRF showed clips of King's speeches that I'd never seen before, including this moving talk given at Montgomery, with a powerful refrain: "How long? Not long! Because no lie can live forever." I was in tears in the Meetinghouse, both of grief and of simply being moved by his faith. 

That night I watched the second episode of John Adams, the HBO series on the life of the founding father. It was the episode when the delegates to the first Continental Congress decide to declare independence from King George. Jefferson, an unassuming man with a ponytail, writes the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." 

That line was evoked by tonight's speaker at Earlham, Michael Eric Dyson. He spoke of how the all-inclusive term which really favors one segment of the population in our history and our present, must be expanded to include all those who would challenge it: women, blacks, LGBTQ+ individuals. He talked about the error or innocent whiteness, that knows nothing about its own heinousness. He talked about the discomfort that America feels with a black president that succeeds at all the challenges our society puts to white individuals: we can't stand his swagger while he deplanes from AirForce 1 and gives a chillaxed wave or throw of the dice. (The speaker was very, very funny and had the auditorium in hysterics many times, not least when he imitated Obama fulfilling the speaker's personal fantasy of getting angry and going off on all the nonsense he's had to put up with these 8 years. Dyson said, "It'd just be great, you know, on the last day.")

He evoked the period of slavery when black people had to learn everything about white people in order to survive, and white people knew nothing about blacks. It was the lack of understanding from whites about blacks, that led to such massive discomfort around King's ministry. White America felt uncomfortable with the upswell of black voices because they didn't understand what was going on. 

Both Dr King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Dr Dyson in his talk tonight referenced Reinhold Neibuhr, the theologian and political scientist whom I studied closely in my last year at Utah. Incidentally, Obama also draws on Niebuhr's wisdom, as we learn from this enjoyable article, the beginning of which I'll share with students tomorrow: "How Obama Survived the White House Years: Books". It's helpful that this article came out while we are studying Shakespeare in both grades, since Obama says that it was the Bard whose plays were “foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.”

Now, school resumes tomorrow, and I will be returning to the social movement that Quakers and thousands of others carry out each day: teaching, preaching, nursing, ministering, administering, doing the quiet work of witnessing God's world and returning our gift of life by offering love and justice.

C.S. Lewis's theology/map analogy, and teaching

I am currently listening to an audiobook of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I started reading this in the summer, and didn't finish it. It proved too dense for me to be able to pick up in the evening or in the early morning. I couldn't follow, while reading, Lewis's logic as he made his arguments. I needed to hear it. 

That makes sense, since he initially delivered the contents of the book on BBC radio in 1942. Lewis read the chapters to his audience in a way similar to what I imagine FDR to have done with his fireside chats. Hearing it helps. The Indiana Digital Library has it on audiobook- perhaps your local library ebook section does too. 

I find myself nodding fervently at points, and shaking my head in repulsion at other points (like this "The idea of the knight - the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause - is one of the great Christian ideas.") One part that I listened to today and which reminded me of the classroom was this section. It is long, and perhaps will be hard to read without hearing it. At any rate, it's the part I want to quote, and the whole thing pertains.

Lewis is talking in this chapter about Theology, a topic that many apparently attempted to dissuade him from including in his work. He did not listen to them.

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the RA.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real.

In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together.

In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God - experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map.

You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that is just why a vague religion - all about feeling God in nature, and so on - is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression - like believing the earth is fiat.

For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical importance at all.

It is quite true that if we took Christ's advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him.

If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that means).

There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult - at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.

There are certainly claims here that I do not agree with, but I like the comparison between theology and a map. Let me explain why. I've been thinking this week, since I've become the lead teacher in the classroom, "What is the value that I add here?" Aside from providing the authority and the supervision that essentially forces the students to read what I give them, and answer what questions I have them answer, what do I add? Aside from synthesizing the comments that they make in discussion, what do I actually add to the discussion? Aside from guiding them through the experience of reading valuable literature, how am I helping them link that personal experience (like that of experiencing God on a mountaintop, or the ocean from the beach) to the larger picture of the reality of the world? 

I would like to think that in addition to providing the excitement of the "I just felt God!" moments, which in the classroom I think must happen when we feel the impact of something powerfully written, or we write something powerful ourselves, or we talk about an important topic, or hear a new perspective on a universal theme, 

in addition to creating those moments, I would like to think that the classroom also provides a map, that allows us to bring our personal experience into conversation with the larger truths that others have charted. We can see how our individual experiences are really reflected in the map of human experience as expressed in the literature. I guess I see this as happening on two levels. 

1. We experience something in our lives. For example, we experience ambition and decide to do something shady to achieve a higher position than we have. Then, we come into the classroom and read Macbeth. We read about his ambition, and his having done the same thing. We acknowledge that, if this appears in a work of literature, it must reflect the experience not just of myself and the author, but of others too. We locate, in a way, our experience in alignment with others'. 

2. We read Macbeth in the classroom and become aware of the power of ambition, the power of suggestion, and the power of persuasion. But these we are aware of in the fictional world. We have yet to identify these waypoints on the map of human history. For even if we ourselves feel them, we can't really see our own experience as having affected history. However, if we see how global leaders are affected by ambition and greed and persuasion, then we locate this literary experience on a grander map of world consequence. 

Those, I think, are the two levels that I want to provide in the classroom. That would be my value added: we must go beyond the thrill of reading something beautiful. The pleasures of Shakespeare's language are worth experiencing, but they don't, by themselves, prepare us to live in a different way to the extent that seeing his truths reflected in the real world does. 

I am still very much engaged in the first level of mapping - living my experience and seeing it reflected in literature, and having Hallelujah moments each time I resonate with a text. It is indeed "exciting," as Lewis describes experiencing God in the wilderness. I have precious little understanding, relatively, of the actual power of literature, of the role it's played in the formation of our race and of our society, and of the way privilege and power has been shaped by those who controlled it. I have a great deal more map studying to do before I understand the theories that help us map individual experiences of literature alongside the experiences of others who have looked at the subject longer, harder and more critically than I have. 

I felt as though I experienced God many times while working in Glacier National Park. I was in the mountains, and felt the unmistakable majesty of God's creation every day. But I didn't come down from the mountain feeling or behaving any differently. Since then I have done a lot more reading, a lot more talking, and a lot more thinking about God, and that has indeed influenced the way I act. 

One of my periods of tenth graders is struggling with Macbeth. In fact, they are struggling with their own mindset - they feel like throwing the towel in on a challenge, rather than rolling up their sleeves. I am going to try to find ways for them to map the story of Macbeth onto the world map that they are already aware of. 

Reading the Grapes of Wrath

If I move west to California, I will participate in the American tradition of migrating to California to seek happiness and a fortune. My fortune will be metaphorical, since I don't ever expect to make a literal fortune as a literature teacher. Despite my relative poverty in a state where the cost of living can be daunting, I will be moving to California in terms considerably better than most of my migrant predecessors, including the Joads, the Oklahoma family that makes the trek to California during the Dust Bowl in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

I read the Grapes of Wrath over this Christmas break. I was immediately drawn in by Steinbeck's archetypal characters, particularly Ma and Tom who hold together the gang of 13 who start out from Oklahoma (the family is considerably depleted by the end of the book).

I have never experienced poverty, and this book added significantly to my imagination's collection of images, tastes, and sensations related to poverty. One is exhaustion from being on the move. The family were tired so much of the time, simply because they were never allowed to properly settle down. "I just wan' ta set awhile" was an oft repeated phrase and sentiment.

My experiences in California:
The beautiful lake path around Lake Merritt in Oakland.
Lyft rides from people of all races and origins.
A Burmese lunch occasion, at a table next to two men talking about the plight of Palestine.
Flights that arrived on time and left on time from Oakland's airport.
Courteous Amtrak employees
A public bus to the airport on which people very actively helped me get to the right stop
A spiffy Trader Joe's
A lively breakfast cafe serving smoked salmon

These a far cry from  what the Joads experienced:

Roads which they traveled in a jalopy truck loaded with pans and mattresses
Harassment from cops and locals who cried "Okies!" and burned them out of the Hoovervilles where they set up camp
No lunch. Coffee for breakfast, maybe some biscuits fried in lard, and anything from cornmeal mush to pork chops for dinner, depending on how much money had been earned that day.
Flights in the night from cops, camp proprietors, ruthless employers, strike breakers.
Sassy orchard owners who exploited the flooded labor market by setting prices at rock bottom levels, telling the Joads and others that thousands of other workers would fill their shoes if they chose to pass up the picking jobs (true in every situation).
Company stores which charged higher prices than town stores for sub-par products like fatty hamburger full of gristle.
A sodden fireplace in a boxcar, threatened (and eventually overtaken) by flood waters.

I am grateful that my transition to California, if it happens, will be smoother than the Joads. I am sure though, that many an introduction to California in this age is similarly fraught. Hopefully I can, through being involved with Quaker Meetings and school systems there, help make it easier for some.

This is a picture of Olivia's Christmas tree, with real candles in the style of Germany.