PAT Teacher Strike Day 7+ : The Arc of Knowledge
7 years ago this week, on Wednesday morning, I had to get up early and fly across the country, leaving my sleeping children behind. As a parent who has traveled regularly but not frequently since my children were born, I always have a sensation of discomfort when I depart as the invisible tether in my heart stretches and adjusts to the physical distance. That day in November 2016 it was harder than it had ever been, because the world had become overnight less safe for them, particularly the ones born with a uterus. I remember the feeling of numbness, and the wondering as I took my shoes off for TSA, rode in a taxi, and ate mediocre conference pastries, how the world could still seem so normal.
In the seven years since, the sensation that the world is less safe for me and my children has ebbed and flowed. The 2018 election was not too bad. Of course that was also the year of Brett Kavanaugh. There have been wildfires and catastrophic heat waves. There was 2020, bringing both global health crisis and an election that at least stemmed the hemorrhaging from our federal government of justice, competence, and ethics. 2022 brought the Dobbs decision, the devastating, foreseeable consequence of 2016. Some days I wonder if I will ever feel safe again (or as safe as my pre 11/2016 baseline for a middle aged woman with a chronic mood disorder who is also a person of color in the United States).
Moreover, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being angry that stupid won: infuriated that meanness —in its most primal, bigoted incarnation — won, and deeply pissed off that ignorance won. Every year I get more angry and disappointed that people chose and are still choosing to avoid and devalue knowledge, even if they are capable of learning. Hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens are not only avidly seeking out the paths of knowing *less*, they are trying to impair others in becoming informed.
2016 was both the chicken and egg of counterfactual beliefs. We couldn’t have gotten to where we were without a groundswell of people who didn’t just hate people unlike themselves, but also hated science, history, math, and anything that reeks of “cause and effect”. But since then the willingness of people to be preening, unapologetic pricks about their own ignorance — in public — seems to be steadily increasing. And it’s more than just alternative facts, or antivaxxer blowhards.
The antipathy towards accurate depiction of history, the denial of science, and the substitution of personal religious belief for public policy seem like they are in the press every day. Someone is always out there proclaiming that children shouldn’t read about slavery, the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, or Jim Crow. People are laying siege to public libraries, school boards, and legislatures demanding that no one’s children be allowed to know that queer people fall in love and raise families, that people outside the gender binary exist at all, or that young people of any gender or orientation have sexual feelings and sometimes act on them.
Recognizing that I’m not necessarily typical, I’ve always experienced the world as a constant source of more knowledge. And for most of my life I’ve been surrounded by people or in environments where I was expected to learn stuff and do things with what I learned whether I liked it or not. School was a river of knowing: Michigan’s state flower is the apple blossom, George Washington was the first president, long division, Henry Hudson, Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry, Midsummer Night’s Dream, cricket dissection, the periodic table, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the Iliad, jazz, Dvorak, Bangladesh, the UN Security Counsel, the Pythagorean theorem.
I didn’t want to know everything I learned, and some things were harder to learn than others but I never questioned that knowing stuff was useful and generally it was better to be informed that ignorant. And more than that, it was also better if *other* people knew stuff too. And when possible I should help other people to know stuff: how to balance a check book, the Bill of Rights, how get from one place to another, the Reformation, the definition of “ichor”, how to conjugate, recite, diagram, grow, build, or combine whatever it was that we were doing. I helped other people do their homework when I barely knew how to do it myself (and I was a judgy little asshole about people who didn’t want to do it). In college I tutored high school kids and incarcerated youth, as a young professional I tutored kids and volunteered in classrooms. I probably subscribed to a lot of old fashioned propaganda about education curing most social ills because it did pretty well for a couple generations of my family.
As I’ve gotten older, studied history, politics, law, religion, social work, and a few other things, I’ve gotten slightly more nuanced and forgiving in terms of wanting everybody to know everything. But I’ve never stopped believing that both facts and imagination make the world a better place. Imaginary facts make it worse. And less safe.
At the same time, the ability of people to get an education is getting harder. Public school funding is going down, college is getting more expensive as degrees get less remunerative, compensation of teachers at all levels from pre school to college is declining, job security in higher education has gone to hell, curricula are becoming less flexible, and electives are becoming fewer. Across the board the incentives of educators and those they educate to engage and rejoice in the process of learning and knowing are being burdened by everything from standardized testing, poor pay, lead and mold in buildings, to systemic trauma from the opioid crisis.
I want to believe that knowledge makes the world a more just place: knowing the horrors of the Middle Passage encourages us to acknowledge and uplift the humanity of others, and against dispiriting evidence to the contrary knowing who Anne Frank was should mean “never forget” leads to “never again”. I want my children and everyone’s children to have the chance to know, and both the joys and burdens of knowing. And in so knowing, have the will and tools to bend the arc of history towards justice.
Without schools knowledge is less accessible. Without public schools class privilege distorts knowledge, information, and discernment. Without educators to teach about gerrymandering, haiku, benthic fish, small engine repair, 1984, algebra, Ollie North, the Berlin Wall and Stonewall, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Brown v Board of Education we will keep sliding back to 2016, or 1954. (Apparently it’s also important to keep teaching SE Hinton’s The Outsiders, continuously since 1984).
This is hard. I am making my way home to my children from this year’s conference. My friend whose 11/10/2016 daily haiku burst with grief and frustration didn’t live to see Joe Biden elected. My children have lost every school day this month. Public education has been fighting off the death of a thousand cuts steadily since at least the 1980s. But we have to do whatever it takes. We have to make it possible to teach, so it is possible to be less ignorant.
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