Ceci n’est pas une école

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Spin a Web

It’s a fossilized system. An old, industrial, drab, beige, and decaying edifice built on grey and disintegrating “standards.” This is not a school.

What is it then?

It’s whatever we want it to be. But we cannot magically wave our hands. I have this timely vision of the Peanuts kids waving their arms frantically, yet with faces calm as the Buddha’s, transforming a broken, unloved branch into a majestic Christmas tree.

A school can be an oasis of systemic change, of empowerment, of liberation.

Yet in the hands of the egotistical, the insecure, the misguided, it becomes a precursor to prison.

And I’m not talking about the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline,” a harrowing but ultimately lazy and buck-passing trope. I’m talking about the prison of our decaying republic. I’m talking about the prison built from the broken dreams of everyone who has tried valiantly to make this a more perfect union.

Modern school is a relic of the Industrial Revolution viewed through the lens of a capitalist perpetuation of stratified social structures, fortified under threats of bogeymen like socialism, communism, terrorism, drugs, ideology… basically anything hegemony deems a threat to its dominance.

Every campus has its archetypes… They’re universal. Today I focus on the Cerberus of the modern academy: the three-headed threshold guardian, the glorified bouncer who protects the flame from those deemed unworthy.

There is The Performer. The Performer has a map, a script, an ideal. The Performer has watched Dead Poets Society at least 47 times and can recite Robin Williams’s monologues and almost have you convinced. The Performer can wear the Gold Hat if it moves them (the students—who are really secondary in the eyes of The Performer… it’s the performance that matters). The Performer can jump, and jump HIGH at that. But The Performer is only performing. The Performer hits all the right notes and gets impeccable observations.

Then there is The Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper is the auditor who keeps the line between the preterite and the elect. The Gatekeeper has a ledger of everything the student has done, right and wrong, and sees the student as the sum total of that spreadsheet. The Gatekeeper could not care less about a redemption arc if it contradicts the opinion forged in the past. The Gatekeeper speaks only in standardized test scores, SATs, AP Exams, and the Common App. The College Board loves Gatekeepers because they act as extensions of its supremacy. They keep the money flowing in. They keep the ATM in perfect working condition. The Gatekeeper says “a rising tide lifts all boats” and feels proud, while blithely oblivious to the boats with leaking hulls, damaged oars, and tattered sails.

The third archetype is the Ice King or Queen. The Ice Monarch is the cold and calculating engine of Cerberus. The Ice Monarch justifies The Performer and The Gatekeeper by speaking the language of tough love. “You’ve got to be tough on these kids, or they’ll never be ready for a tough world.” The Ice Monarch will gladly pimp a butterfly to prove a point: “HEY! Life is hard. Suck it up. The world hardened me, and I will gleefully harden you while saying with a stone face that this hurts me a lot more than it hurts you…” Yet the students, perceptive beings, see the sadism and hate them for it.

It is easy for me to sit in judgment of Cerberus. Cerberus once devoured me. And when I became a teacher, I spent too much of my time in development seeking Cerberus’s approval. Such a formidable beast… such power… I feared it, I wanted it, I felt like I was too… soft.

Yet when I languished in the single stomach of that three-headed beast, I found my superpower. I picked from the detritus—the scraps the monster misguidedly swallowed whole but failed to digest—and I forged wings of steel powered by a bleeding heart.

Maybe I’m The Promethean. Or maybe I just want to be. Or maybe I am Anansi, the spider who tricked the Sky Gods and won the stories to empower the masses. Fighting through that triple-esophageal digestive system, I see myself uniquely positioned to do the same thing. That’s the peristaltic wave I’ve been surfing as of late.

Energy is everything. Cerberus sees energy as some touchy-feely, new-age tripe. Cerberus outsmarts itself because it misses the fact that Carl Gustav Jung spoke of psychic energy as a scientific metaphor for the human mind. He mapped the psyche… and psyche means soul. Imagine teaching the character Dysart without a healthy respect for the unconscious. At that point, no deep-dive into literary devices will convey the powerful transformation in that character’s hippocampus.

But when you talk of energy to these cross-bred Echthroi/Vulcan wolves, they dismiss you as some hippie. The depth frightens them. So they dismiss it. But energy is real. I dare anyone to walk into the classroom of the Ice Monarch and not feel the cortisol chill their chest. See the stone-cold gaze flicker before the fake smile says, “Good morning, class.”

I’ve been drawn to comparative mythology. And while I’m no Joseph Campbell, I’ve learned a bit on my journey. I remember being inspired by the story of Anansi through the vehicle of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. In the adaptation, Orlando Jones played him like a cross between Prince, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, and Loki. He was mesmerizing. He stole the narrative because he owned the story.

The Sky Gods have controlled the narrative for too long.

If I had my way (and I probably never will in this regard), I wouldn’t burn books—knowledge is sacred. But I would take every piece of bureaucratic, gatekeeping, money-making crap from the College Board industrial complex, pile it in the center of an empty field, and surround it with sage. I would light the sage, perform the biggest ritual cleansing history has ever seen, and let the smoke liberate thousands of lost souls, if not millions, from the standardized void.

From the ashes, we would create the materials to write our new story. College Board pushes “AP For ALL”… a laughable justification for their predatory existence. An unconvincing feint toward their perceived exclusivity. “Hey, look at us raising the tide…” they marvel, as 50% drown.

Those who drown? I’ve seen them all. I’ve watched their pleading eyes before they drift under the sea. I’ve always felt I could do more. I should do more. “He reads at a third-grade level” is not a convincing excuse. When I’ve watched those eyes slip below the surface in my deepest nightmares, I’ve seen cures for cancer, loving hands, and creative inspiration sink to be devoured by the pressures of the deep.

No more.

Education is liberation, and “hardening” is no excuse for abuse. Saying that “this is the world they live in” is lazy, ignorant, short-sighted, and irresponsible. It is educational malpractice, and I will not be a part of it. If we constantly excuse poor teaching and cold social Darwinism behind the mask of “fortifying,” we are perpetuating the downward trajectory of our republic.

Turn on the news. Prove me wrong.

An unusually perceptive student asked me recently, “Mister, what do you want your legacy to be?”

The question stopped me cold. His eyes, the tone in his voice—all stopped me cold.

“Well… wow… that’s… that’s an amazing question… let me think… I guess I want to be remembered as kind. I want people to feel better for having known me, or at least not worse… but most of all, I want my students to remember me for helping them see how brilliant they are. You are brilliant. You will change the world. You already are. I am no brighter than you. I only shine my light so you can find the switch for your own.”

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_{Note: This article was the indictment. But judgment relies on the illusion that the observer is separate from the observed. When that distance collapses, the heat fades, and only the light remains.}

[Read the follow-up: Dissolving the line between the judge and the accused. ☯]