Viewing the world through the eyes of an eighth grader is a fascinating and nostalgic exercise, an empathetic practice that allows me to have a frame of reference for the world that Violet is navigating so deftly. It requires rewinding my brain thirty years and attempting to conjure equivalent memories, making sure to account for the inherent imperfection of these mental souvenirs and for the evolution/devolution of society in the interim. Educational philosophies have shifted, but the basic idea of schooling remains a constant. One must tread the halls of academia in order to matriculate to the next phase of one’s life.
This pathway has been well-trodden over the past century: school then work then death. Surely, this is an improvement over the horrors of child labor (work –> death), but it is still merely a forestalling of the eventual requirement to earn a living. Zooming out on this trajectory reveals its pitfall, a literal trap in which we are brainwashed into believing that our highest and best use is to obtain just enough knowledge to become another cog in the larger machine. In classrooms across the country, kids are being groomed into tiny capitalists or, depending on the geography, into bigots that are prevented from learning anything considered “woke” by the powers that be.
I do not pretend to know the meaning of this life, but I am fairly confident that our purpose is not to create value for shareholders. A large percentage of our existence should be devoted to loving each other – to elevate the mood of those around us, to help those in need, to accept help when we are struggling, to be a community in the most true and literal sense. In this endeavor, our mission is to gain understanding. We cannot love people the way we want to love them if we do not comprehend ways to make them happy – sociology and psychology and their literary embodiments are an education in peoplehood.
We seem to have forgotten that we are a product of our physical environment, not separate from the animal kingdom, but squarely in the middle of its taxonomy. The universe that surrounds us, from the quantum to the unquantifiable, is a source of endless wonder and more than a life’s work to even begin to truly understand. As we sit in the classroom as kids, we should be enraptured by the magic of physics and chemistry and biology, rather than learning just enough to pass the class and focus on getting that gig at a private equity or accounting or consulting firm.
Education is posited as a prerequisite to work and we allegedly need to work because we allegedly need funds in order to function as humans. Yet, money is a construct, a way to organize and separate, a means to create economic strata, a simulacrum of worth but not inherently valuable. I tend to prefer the company of the monetarily poor to those dripping in traditional markers of wealth. Undoubtedly, I would rather be counseled by the wise rather than the rich. Any overlap between the two is often incidental or accidental – it would be even more so if our highest value was assigned to education and not accumulation.
Learning is a complete process in and of itself, not a means to an end, but the end all, be all. Erudition is the goal, not the mechanism. Entering a classroom should be a source of excitement, not dread. By imposing a ranking structure on school performance, we create competition when we should champion collaboration, we elevate the outcome over the journey and therefore remove the enjoyment and glory of the simple act of learning something new. The dopamine hit of unlocking an intellectual puzzlement is as strong as any ingested drug – and like an addict, we should always be seeking more.
As parents, it should be our highest goal to instill this ethos in our children, imparting our own guidance as they continue on their lifelong pursuit for understanding of their fellow humans, of the spectacular planet and galaxies from which they sprung, and of themselves. It is a nonlinear quest, perhaps even circular, which will create a world more ripe for compassion than subjugation, for kindness than greed, for peace than conflict.