Last night I realized that in French "I am" and "I follow" are the same words--Je suis. The thought just popped into my mind during dance therapy class. I was moving, not thinking about French language or the meaning of being or following, but once the idea came to me, I realized it summed up nicely some other thoughts I'd been having earlier in the day.
I observed two storytellers in a school Thursday morning, and one of the storytellers dressed up like a colonial school teacher and pretended with the 4th graders that everyone was at a colonial school. The kids were separated by gender and lined up to represent the grades in a one-room schoolhouse. The children had to stand and address the teacher as "School Master Jonathan" before saying anything. They learned about the hickory stick punishment and sitting in the dunce seat. And he had them all recite the golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The storyteller also went over the subjects that were taught, and he shared how "history" back then was memorizing kings and not called "social studies." And "mathematics" was different because it was all memorization and recitation, not word problems.
After acting out a day in the life of colonial school children, the storyteller left and returned as the storyteller to do a Q & A session with the kids. In the last class, one of the kids pointed out, "the golden rule says to treat others nicely so they will treat you nicely, but the teacher didn't have to treat the kids nicely." That astute observation and the constant reminder of how much colonial school was about recitation and perfect penmanship got me thinking about the evolution of what gets taught in school. Today many specialists argue that school is too rote, we aren't doing enough to foster kids' creativity. Leaders today want workers who can adapt to ever-changing demands in business and society and find creative solutions to problems. And that kind of training asks for evermore equality. You can't tell a kid to obey your every word and "be seen and not heard" and then expect them to grow up to be a super creative thinker. And I think it's interesting that we now want and need creative thinkers and that we respect a certain level of challenging authority because that's where much innovation comes from. It made me want to really study what societies teach their children as an insight into cultural values.
Continuing on this vein of thought, though, I came home and had a short break before I went into class. I watched a tivoed (is that a word?) rerun of Scrubs in which the older doctors are bemoaning the fact that there's no respect for doctors anymore. Now, the show claimed, people think they know everything because they can read the medical information on Google. I thought it was funny to think that doctors feel that same loss respect as teachers. (assuming the show is reflecting something real in the medical world, of course) Teachers are often complaining about how difficult it is to do their job because there's no respect for the position anymore. I think those comments say more about the fact that school hasn't evolved as fast as society. I think kids would be hungry to follow a great teacher and would show her a lot of respect, but kids won't tolerate much of the boredom that comes with school. And we no longer tell them they have to--that they just have to tolerate things they hate and suck it up. As a society, I think we are starting to tell our kids, "if you aren't happy, change it. Speak up. We want to hear you." Don't follow, be. It can create a certain level of chaos--all of that being. We certainly need following for any society to work, but I think it's interesting to think about how much and in what situations.
And then I closed the day with a conversation with Marti about some big changes that I'm feeling inside of myself. A shift internally in how I perceive my relationship with my mother. I'm feeling a greater sense of separation, a greater freedom to be and not to follow her ways. And so it seems very appropriate that my mind made that silly connection between the French words yesterday.
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7 comments:
this was great, kirsten! i loved all of it!
Kirsten, the fact that you won't let the general public see the comments folks write until you approve them makes me feel like I need to meet a certain comment criteria so you will post them. Then, I look later to see you posted them and I feel like I've won. I made it! Yay!
Now....will you post this one? ;)
LOL. :) You passed.
Actually, I hate this feature, but I can't figure out how to turn it off. I guess I choose to not moderate comments, but then it looks like I can't moderate at all, so I'm confused.
Robyn, I do the same thing! I didn't know you hated it, Loba! Sometimes I delete my comments because I get too nervous "What if it won't make it in?" And here it's all a fluke.
This post is really interesting. I am not as hopeful as you are by the changes I see in how youth relate to teachers or other leaders. When I note the relative lack of respect for authority I see in many of the kids in my life, it intuitively disturbes me. Its origin doesn't seem to me to be in discernment between good leaders and bad leaders, nor does it seem correlated to an increase in independent thinking. I'm not so sure that kids would be willing to follow a teacher if the teacher was good enough. I've seen a lot of poor teachers who have charisma in spades and a lot of terrific teachers who don't. I just don't think kids are always capable of recognizing the value of knowledge/experience because they haven't had sufficient exposure to the world to do so. For one thing, I think the media/technology driven world we live in elevates youth culture in an artificial way that encourages kids to think of themselves as more knowledgeable and autonomous than they really are. I heard a speaker recently who talked about a group of kids were surveyed about their experience of nature. The kids believed they knew more about nature than their parents, even when the kids had considerably less exposure to it than their parents. The reason for this, it turned out, was because the kids were watching nature shows on TV and they felt they had acquired more sophisticated knowledge than their parents had. They didn't consider direct experience to hold as much value--to the point that they didn't see it as necessary. The second example that comes to my mind is in the child of a friend who, when I met her at about 10 years old, was refusing to continue to go to dance class because the dance teacher was forcing her to do his moves. She only wanted to do her own moves and was offended that the teacher would try to impose on her creativity by forcing her to do any moves she hadn't come up with on her own. Her parents admired her independence. However, the reality is that the authority of the teacher lies in his ability to transfer the experience of a bigger chunk of culture than can be contained in any one person. Claiming independence from that authority means that my ten-year old friend is unlikely to be able to go very far with her dancing. I don't just mean that in the external sense. I mean that by dismissing the forms, she has limited the range of her creative expression to what her own little mind can come up with. I think it is a shame that so many young people I know admire this kind of stance. I think so much potential goodness is lost in the bargain. I place a very high value on discipline and forms and I think this is related to my capacity to respect authority even when I am not immediately interested.
Along those lines of devaluing authority/expertise, my mom and I were talking about being disabled, and she said it's similar to getting old in that you have to adjust to being perceived as not useful to society. Without much thought, I responded, "Unless you're Asian," because of my experience with Cuong's family. She wondered out loud what that would be like, almost unbelieving that it could be possible to be valued for being old.
Hey! Am I too late to get in on this?
I was watching Bette Midler be interviewed on tv the other night and she seemed to almost hide from the camera...I assume because of her age, though I might be off here. THen I thought, hmmm....I think we will spend more of our lives thinking we are old than thinking we are young. Then I wished our culture was all for gettin' grey. My mom hates her ago and being old and always says terrible things about herself regarding that. But I think she has hit her prime. She is so much happier than she used to be.
Hey guys, let's get old and LOVE IT!!!
I agree! Let's get old and love it.
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