The shape of learning comes in all sizes, all forms. We know what not learning is — texting, emailing, You Tube videos, a world of Teletubbies, from birth to death.
I know what education planners are not — hedge fund billionaires, charter school profiteers, down home religious bigotry and stupidity ignoramuses, the lady from McDonald’s funding all these looped back and forth non-profits and shell NGOs and their two-year-in-the-making white papers after reports after white papers.
The fourth graders I taught Friday have a sponge for a brain, and they want something better than what they get — bells and announcements blaring throughout the day, rote memory assignments, the same old tired little book stories, little math problems, red-orange-yellow drills, lock-downs, health warnings, and on and on and on. They know that’s not real life, though — in compliant and nanny-state and rule-making America, hmm, maybe school is the launching pad.
They need mentors in the school, not just the poor flagging teachers who have taken these silly classes in college taught by even more silly professors who actually know squat about children struggling, and less about the roots of the struggle: mass culture which is mass incarceration set loose by the Capitalists, the very people who should be denigrated and egged daily (as in chicken ovum in their faces), everywhere and anywhere they pollute the world. They need schools that are of the world — beaches to clean up…