No damnedcat; no damned cradle

Jim Vandergriff

December 8, 1993

        I found the final puzzle piece (the notion of job opportunity structure) that was offered up last Wednesday (12/1/93) wonderfully astonishing -- and, I think, right.  It is rather like those 1950s joke machines:  one pushes a button to start the machine, a hand comes out and shuts the machine off.  Definitely a Vonnegut-style joke.  And it seems a good metaphor for a discussion of the current relationship between public schooling and democracy.

         Schooling is billed as the route to success in America --as the  access mechanism, the sine qua non:   "to get a good job, get a good education"; "college graduates earn [$xxxx.00] more in a lifetime than those who don't graduate."  But a closer look suggests that might not be exactly true.  Undoubtedly, those with diplomas do earn more.  But what of cause/effect?  Perhaps those who get diplomas are those who are already targeted to get he better jobs.  The diploma, like the higher earnings, is an effect of something else, not the cause of the higher earnings.

         When we were first establishing the list of topics for study groups, I wanted to look into, as I phrased it then, "delivery of higher education to non-traditional students."  I wanted to find ways to make higher education more accessible to people like myself.  I didn't grow up expecting to go to college, so I didn't take "college prep" courses (not that my schools even offered them), didn't learn about financial aid, etc.  In fact, I dropped out of high school.  It was only later in my life that I even began to consider college a possibility. So, I wanted to find ways to help such kids, of whom there are great numbers, get into college.

         As I was thinking about the topic then, I believed, of course, that college was the route to economic success and that it was being denied to kids such as I was.  (Savage Inequalities reflects thousands of them.)  The kinds of educations offered such kids -- curricula, facilities, services, even public attitudes -- I thought, were keeping them from going to college and, therefore, from successfully competing for jobs.  I wanted to, perhaps, find ways to turn that around.

         It came as a real shock to me to have to entertain the "cat's cradle" idea.  But it certainly makes a lot of sense to me.  Early in the semester, I wrote a long journal entry about the people who-- purely out of the goodness of their hearts -- helped me complete high school and enroll in college.  One of the sustaining drives in my life has always been to help others in the same way in order to repay those two guys for what they did for me.  I have always felt that it was sheer undeserved luck that permitted me to go beyond my socioeconomic roots.  And I have always felt that to be an almost criminal flaw in American culture.

         There are probably millions like me, whose lives would be immeasurably better if they could experience the kind of intellectual blossoming I was accidentally permitted to experience.  One of my favorite lines in Vonnegut’s work, this from Sirens of Titan , is the words Malachi Constant says when he steps off the spaceship, and around which a new religion forms:  "I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."  Those words have been my theme song, and I am a teacher because I don't think the quality of one's life should be the result of accident.

         When I think about Vonnegut's other novels, too, the relationship between schooling and democracy becomes clearer.  I've always been troubled by how to fit Player Piano in with his other works.  Why, for instance, the paraphrase of the Gallic Wars as an opening?  ("Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts." "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est" -- "All of Gaul is divided into three parts.")  Why, at the end, are the workers reassembling the very machines that had made them unnecessary and led to the revolution?  The former I have attributed to Vonnegut's need to point out, with his characteristic dark irony, how far human culture is from its own ideal.  The latter I have attributed to his cynicism -- his apparent belief that we are our own worst enemies.

         But it also makes sense to think of the novels in another way, one that lets me see his canon as a whole -- and within which I can image schooling in America.  That, simply put, is that things are not what they seem, which is also the theme of Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and Slapstick .  In other words, Vonnegut is preaching the same sermon in Player Piano that he preaches in his other works:  life is a series of "orchestrated" accidents, not real accidents.  Just as Bokonon and Honniker set up the oppositions in Cat's Cradle   and Rosewater structures the series of accidents in Sirens of Titan,  just as Vonnegut himself structures the "accidents" in Breakfast of Champions,  etc., etc., so does the American social structure set up the oppositions for us.  And just as Vonnegut's prove to be smoke screens, so do ours.  That is, the ads about the connections between education and income, education and job quality, are smoke screens to obscure the fact that we are not living in a democracy, that schooling does not provide access to the "job opportunity structure."  It is all a huge deception that works to keep the existing Have/Have-not structure in place.

         Just as the workers in Player Piano voluntarily re-enslave themselves at the end of that novel, so must we continue to enslave ourselves:  if we do not believe that we control our destinies -- or at least that our life conditions are capable of being improved -- we might rise up and throw off our chains, overturn the social structure.  That is Vonnegut's point; that is why the Shah of Bratpuhr, who can never grasp the difference between the words "citizen" and "slave," which translate with the same word in his language, is even in Player Piano (something I had never been able to pinpoint).  We lock our own shackles by accepting the myths that we live in a democracy and that education is democracy's handmaiden.

         And, though I seem to have taken the long way around, that is where it seems to rest:  we don't live in a democracy; schooling serves only to keep us enslaved.

         If, then, schooling does not serve democracy, what would school have to be like if it were to serve it?  

         Illich offers, in Deschooling America, an alternative that is attractive to me -- that is, leaving it up to the individual to decide what education he/she wants, and when.  What is attractive about this model is that it shares with Giroux's suggestion the element of individualization, or individual empowerment.  If one is directing one's own education, finding one's own voice, as it were, there would be less opportunity for education to be used as an instrument of oppression.  The drawback, of course, is that many people might seek no education.  That, I think, is dangerous to democracy.  (I still believe Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson-- that an educated electorate is necessary to democracy.)  And there is also the issue of the basics-- math facts, reading, writing.  It seems necessary to have some kind of institutionalized basic education for children so they will be able to fulfill later desires for more detailed education and to participate at least minimally in the democracy.

         Thus, the model Benjamin Barber offers, which seems to me especially compatible with Paolo Freire, but also with Giroux and Illich, is perhaps the most workable.  The danger in his model is that it is perhaps not far enough removed from the current system.  His vision is essentially of a revised version of what is currently in place.  As I understand him, he would alter the current system to remove, for instance, the elements of the American "story" that disempower and silence minorities.  He would keep the focus on educating the individual and on educating for democracy.  Thus, I think curriculum would have to change in some serious ways.  A recent national report on science education calls, for instance, for less breadth and more depth in Biology teaching, with the focus on how professional biologists do Biology -- more hands-on, more experiment-oriented, less focus on memorizing, more focus on problem-solving.  This approach is, of course, susceptible to subversion to marketplace purposes, to many of the same problems the current system has, but a continued, careful focus on the democratic purpose eof education might be able to forestall that.

         Spread across a whole curriculum, then, what we would have would be a different focus altogether.  Instead of designing curricula around the idea of what society wants students to know in order to take their places (preordained)in the system, they would have to be designed around what children need to know in order to direct their own lives and educations.  At the elementary level, the curricular content might be quite similar to what it is now, but at the higher levels there would be considerable difference.  In high school, for instance, instead of learning "History," students might study how to read and research history-- skills they might later use if they wanted to learn about some particular aspect of history.

         This, though different, is, I think, compatible with Illich’s view of education as well:  don’t try to teach the content; teach the means  to education.  It is also compatible with the rather sketchy idea Giroux outlines in Border Crossings:  students decide where they want to go intellectually; teachers are expediters, facilitators, people who help them learn how to get where they want to go, not people who tell them what to learn or decide for them where they can go.

         Barber focuses, in his final chapter, on public service as a necessary part of education for democracy.  That seems "right" to me -- it makes learning democracy also a "hands-on" experience, especially if the service experiences are brought back into the classrooms for discussion and analysis.  These experiences must not become just "internships" that reflect the work-world; they need to be contextualized as elements of democratic responsibility.

         The video Liberating America's Schools and Theodore Sizer's Horace's School suggest some workable ideas.  The video emphasizes smaller and therefore more personal schools.  In such settings, education that is negotiated among students, teachers, parents and the community at large --to combine with them Illich, Freire and Giroux's ideas – becomes practicable.  Sizer, who also calls for smaller schools, focuses on the individualized direction of learning -- students work toward "exhibitions" that demonstrate mastery of curricular areas.

         The kind of education that is necessary to democracy seems to me to lie somewhere in that range.  Kids need the kinds of basic learning that is the academic focus in elementary schools.  In the secondary schools, though, the focus needs to be shifted considerably so that individual kids learn the kinds of skills and thought processes that will make it possible for them to direct their own lives, to participate fully and responsibly in a democracy.  With schools that emphasize that, we might actually establish a democracy.