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What Really Matters Going to the moon didn't
really matter, it turned out. I say that from the
vantage point of my six decades living on Planet Earth, but also because of
something I saw not so long ago. It was at Booker T. Washington High School
where I watched an official astronaut a handsome, well-built man in his
prime, dressed in a silver space suit with an air of authentic command try
to get the attention of an auditorium full of This man for all his
excellence was only some other man's agent. The kids sensed that his talk,
too, had been written by someone else that he was part of what the
Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called the non-thought of received
ideas. It was irrelevant whether this astronaut understood the significance
of his experiments or not. He was only an agent, not a principal in the
same way many school teachers are only agents retailing someone else's
orders. This astronaut wasn't walking his own talk but someone else's. A
machine can do that. It seems likely that my
Harlem kids considered going to the moon a dumb game; obviously I didn't
verify their feelings scientifically but I knew a lot of them didn't have
fathers or much dignity in their lives, and about half had never eaten off a
tablecloth. What was going to the moon supposed to mean to them? If you asked
me that question I couldn't answer it with confidence, and I had a father
once upon a time...and a tablecloth, too. If the truth were told, in
my 30 years teaching in New York City, sometimes teaching prosperous white
kids instead of Harlem kids, sometimes a mixed bag of middle class kids, I
never hear a single student white or black speak spontaneously of the
U.S. space program. When the Challenger space shuttle blew up there was a
momentary flicker of curiosity, but even that passed in an instant. Going to the moon didn't matter, it
turned out, though the government threw 100 billion dollars into the effort.
A lot of things don't
matter that are supposed to; one of them is well-funded government schools.
Saying that may be considered irresponsible by people who don't know the
difference between schooling and education, but over 100 academic studies
have tried to show any compelling connection between money and learning and
not one has succeeded. Right from the beginning schoolmen told us that money
would buy results and we all believed it. So, between 1960 and 1992 the After 12,000 hours of
compulsory training at the hands of nearly 100 government-certified men and
women, many high school graduates have no skills to trade for an income or
even any skills with which to talk to each other. They can't change a flat,
read a book, repair a faucet, install a light, follow directions for the use
of a word processor, build a wall, make change reliably, be alone with
themselves or keep their marriages together. The situation is considerably
worse than journalists have discerned. I know, because I lived in it for 30
years as a teacher. Last year at Southern
Illinois University I gave a workshop in what the basic skills of a good life
are as I understand them. Toward the end of it a young man rose in back and
shouted at me: I'm 25 years old, I've lived a quarter of a century, and I
don't know how to do anything except pass tests. If the fan belt on my car
broke on a lonely road in a snowstorm I'd freeze to death. Why have you done
this to me? He was right. I was the
one who did it just as much as any other teacher who takes up the time young
people need to find out what really matters. I did it innocently and
desperately, trying to make a living and keep my dignity, but nevertheless I
did it by being an agent of a system whose purpose has little to do with what
kids need to grow up right. My critic had two college degrees it turned out,
and his two degrees were shrieking at me that going to school doesn't matter
very much even if it gets you a good job. People who do very well in
schools as we've conceived them have much more than their share of suicides,
bad marriages, family problems, unstable friendships, feelings of
meaninglessness, addictions, failures, heart by-passes that don't work and
general bad health. These things are very well documented but most of us can
intuit them without any need for verification. If school is something that
hurts you, what on earth are we allowing it for? Does going to school
matter if it uses up all the time you need to learn to build a house? If a
15-year-old kid was allowed to go to the Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine, he
would be taught to build a beautiful post-and-beam Cape Cod home in three
weeks, with all the math and calculations that entails; and if he stayed
another three weeks he'd learn how to install a sewer system, water, heat and
electric. If any American dream is universal, owning a home is it but few
government schools bother teaching you how to build one. Why is that?
Everyone thinks a home matters. Does going to school
matter if it uses up the time you need to start a business, to learn to grow
vegetables, to explore the world or make a dress? Or if it takes away time to
love your family? What matters in a good life? The things that matter in
a bad life, we know, are: gaining power over others, accumulating as much
stuff as you can, getting revenge on your enemies (who are everywhere), and
drugging yourself one way or another to forget the pain of not quite being
human. School teaches most kids how to strive for a bad life and succeeds at
this so well that most of our government machinery eventually falls into the
hands of people who themselves are living bad lives. We're all in deep
trouble because of that. It's the best reason I know to keep the machinery of
government just as weak and as primitive as possible as soon as we figure out
how. It surprises me how many
graduates leave college assuming they know what matters because they got
straight As. If we can believe advertisements, what matters to these people
most is the personal ownership of machinery: blending machines, cooking
machines, driving machines, picture machines, sound machines, tooth-brushing
machines, computing machines, machines to kill insects, deliver intimacy,
send messages through wires or the naked air, entertainment machines,
shooting machines, and many more mechanical extensions of our physical self.
Indirect control over even more ambitious machine seems to matter a lot, too:
flying machines, bombing machines, heart and lung machines, voting machines,
and a great variety of other mechanical creations. All these devices are
meant to defeat what otherwise would occur naturally if they didn't exist.
They are all machines to beat human destiny and confer on human beings
magical powers and the reach and longevity of gods. Do they deliver what they
promise? Is human life in a net sense better since their advent? I can't
answer that for you, of course, but you can look into your heart and answer
the question for yourself. Someone has apparently convinced us that what
occurs naturally cannot be the way to a good life, hence these battalions of
machinery. What percentage of your life is spent talking to machines? Buying
them, mastering them, ministering to their needs, then betraying them with
ever newer and newer machine loves? It takes a lot of time,
but what does it take a lot of time away from? Television has cost the
average 21-year-old about 18,000 hours of time. What would that time have
gone toward otherwise? learning to build a house? Going to government-run
school takes another 15,000 hours from the young life, 21,000 if you count
going and coming and homework. What might this time have gone toward
otherwise? From the very small amount of time remaining, machinery other than
television gobbles a great deal. What does it give back in return?
Hearts-ease? Love? Courage? Self-reliance? Friends? Dreams? Here we are, at the end of
the 20th century, well-machined yet lost in a tunnel of loneliness, cut off
from each other, disliking ourselves, envying those with superior machines,
looking for self-respect and significance. We have fewer and worse human ties
than seems possible if machines justified all the time and money spent on
them. I include, of course, the social
machinery of school in this critique. From age five to age 21 there are
exactly 140,160 hours. We spend 46,720 of them in sleep and of the remaining
93,000 odd hours, 42 percent are spent watching TV from a chair or sitting in
a school seat. Something is wrong here. What is going on? How much do these
seemingly essential machines matter? What are they essential for? Each one
taken separately can easily be justified, but taken altogether: what are they
doing to us? By mid-century we had
reached a point in this machine civilization where we could so little bear
intimate contact with the messy reality of living things as compared to the
clean simplicity of machines that we became willing to lock up our mothers
and fathers wholesale. To create a new investment opportunity in warehousing
the old. What a strange thing to do with our unprecedented wealth, using it,
that is, to divest ourselves of our closest human ties, getting rid of our
history. In doing so a complex circle begun a century earlier when we first
locked our young people away in school warehouses is completed. Warehousing the young;
warehousing the aged good business, I know, but good for what? Does it really matter or
not that our parents die among strangers and our children live penned up by
strangers? Does that possibly have an effect on the quality of the lives
neither old nor young who are left theoretically free of entanglements?
Entanglements are, after all, the core of complete human lives; good lives
are all about being entangled with each other. The assertion that isolation
chambers for the young and old are an advance in human society doesn't square
with any observable reality; it, too, is part of the great non-thought of
received ideas - like pretending a positive significance to the idiotic space
program. After you fall into a
habit of accepting what other people tell you to think you lose the power to
think for yourself. I suspect that's why so few of us challenge the premises
of old-age homes, television, day-care centers and schools. Talking to machines as we
have come to prefer to do does make us intimate with the way machines think;
it also conceals from us the degree to which our own lives are mechanical and
our own thoughts well-controlled like the thoughts of machinery. Have you
noticed that machines don't ever surprise you after you know their habits?
The purpose of market research is to remove surprise from human behavior,
too. When we lose the power to surprise each other, we lose a chunk of what
it means to be human. Would that matter? I want to argue that
talking to machines when you should be talking to people and the natural
world is what has clear-cut the Pacific forests, poisoned the fish in Puget
Sound, weakened the soil up and down America, turned Cape Code Bay into a
dead sea, and burned holes in the stratosphere. Not a single one of those
events would matter at all to machinery, and since machinery is what we have
been most intimate with since early childhood (including social mechanisms
like government schools), they don't matter to us, either, regardless of what
we say. If they mattered we would stop it. At best we're ambivalent.
Who in his right mind would live without an automobile, a computer, a fax
machine, a telephone, a toaster, lifelong schooling, or a gun? Everyone who
winds life around a core of machinery like schools and institutions and
global corporations, is affected profoundly, and comes inexorably, I believe,
to be a servo-mechanism of the machinery he or she excessively associates
with. So far I've asked you to
consider three aspects of modern American life we all have been accustomed to
think really matter: the space program, our well-funded government schooling,
and state-of-the-art technology. On close inspection all seem to me the
obsessions of madmen more than essential parts of a good life or a good
society. How did they come to matter when many things that really matter
(like getting hugged a lot) are overlooked? In recent years I've often
heard that what really matters most is competing successfully in something
called the global economy. Try to pass over the fact that all economies on
earth, every single one of them, including Japan's are overwhelmingly
national economies, or that the economies that seem to make people happiest
and proudest are substantially local ones, and look at what you are being
asked to believe. In effect, it is claimed that America's total
self-sufficiency in food doesn't matter, that our embarrassing abundance of many
fuels, fibers, metals, building materials, roads, technologies, libraries,
colleges, talented labor no longer matters decisively because in some
mysterious way we stand in grave danger of losing these things by becoming
globally non-competitive. I will pass over the fact
that with a standing army, navy, and air force of over two and a half million
men and women, a vast bombing fleet, an enormous arsenal of nuclear missiles
and a worldwide network of spies and saboteurs, it is really impossible to be
non-competitive; and I will pass over our vast ability to manipulate money
markets and currencies which makes being non-competitive quite unlikely for
all the foreseeable future. But I am puzzled by the
rhetoric of global competition because we already possess abundantly all the
essentials of a good material life, in-house as it were. What will this
global economy exist for if not to produce and distribute more material,
develop more skill, more jobs and more satisfaction things out of which
good lives are made? But these things are already here. I'm curious about the
kind of human being who thinks this global economy matters because it's clear
to me they are caught up in a religious vision, a rather peculiar one in
which human nature is disregarded along with the human needs which really
matter all of which needs are overwhelmingly small scale. It's easy to see how a
global economy would matter to the spirit of mass-production machinery or to
international banking, with all the urgencies of those twin mechanisms, but
not clear what the point of it is for flesh and blood. What if you forgot all
about the globe and concentrated instead on finding a place where you could
feel at home for the rest of your life? What if you shaped your own work so
that it served your spirit and the spirits of your loved ones, friends and
neighbors? In 1776 a full 90 percent of Americans not in slavery shaped their
own work, they had independent livelihoods, and in 1840, despite the rise of
industrialization the figure was still 80 percent. It was hard then for any
man to get rich on the labors of others because there wasn't much
free-floating labor to be had; people worked for themselves. That liberty
and independence, not wealth or comfort was the American miracle. You know, machines can be
stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to other machines
they must associate with. But men and women have to build the meanings of
their lives around a few, a very few people to touch and love and care for.
If you're always getting rid of people, trading them off the way you've been
taught to trade-off things, you can't have much of a life. And you fail in
this vital endeavor of linking up with the right people for you it doesn't
matter at all how healthy the space program is or how many machines you own.
You'll still be lonely in the middle of crowds. If what I've said is even
partly true, you'll have to join me in sabotaging the global economy and
sabotaging the government schools, because schools and government and
machinery-makers lie to you about what matters every time. They just can't
help themselves. John Taylor Gatto is
a former |