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When work and school are one
Tuesday evening, in a rather inexplicable move given that we're only a week and a half away from spring break, our school's headmaster declared Wednesday a free day. It wasn't, however, entirely free for me. Besides have a rehearsal with one of my singing groups and an abbreviated-and-optional tennis practice, I had a meeting with the headmaster.
These meetings are always rather unnerving, because he has a tendency to send you an e-mail that says "Please schedule a meeting time through my secretary" with no explanation as to why you are meeting. This time, however, I asked for the meeting, so I knew perfectly well what was on the agenda while he had no idea. In fact, when the meeting was finished he said "I was afraid you were meeting to tell me that you weren't coming back next year." Ah, the pleasure of turning the tables.
In fact, I was meeting with him to discuss several proposals for my department and programs, as well as one thing for myself (clarification of my duties). I was gratified to find that he liked all of my ideas and also said several nice things about the job that I'm doing. It made me happy. In fact, a little voice inside my head said, perhaps too happy....
You see, a couple days ago, I happened to go and re-read a speech I'd come across a few years ago, given by John Taylor Gatto, called "Why Schools Don't Educate." Not only relevent reading for a teacher, but very challenging, in the sense that it demands a rethinking of what we're doing, how, and why. This was Gatto's acceptance speech in 1990 when he won the New York City Teacher of the Year award, which might not be the source or forum for such a sweeping critique as one might expect, but there it is. (note also that Intern has blogged about this article recently: check out his essay on school as a socializer)
I could probably write several entries just commenting on various aspects of this speech, but the point I was thinking of in this instance was his criticism that schools make students dependent. They set up an environment where the student relies on authority figures to tell them if they're right or wrong, good or bad. It's a pattern for the conformity that's expected in the rest of our lives, where we look to politicians, scientists, religious leaders--a long parade of authority figures--to sort the world out for us, to guide us, to save us, rather than being independent and self-reliant, free-thinking and self-actuated. As a perennial "good student," I had a lot of practice in "getting the right answer" and a lot of reinforcement from authority figures subtly reinforcing the idea that pleasing authorities was the key to everything. Even the little acts of rebellion in high school when I got away with behavior that other students couldn't have probably just reinforced this because I knew on some level that there was a reason that I could get away with these acts of non-conformity, and that was because I pleased the teachers with my academic performance.
So with this essay fresh in my mind, my pleasure from the approval of my boss was tempered by that doubt: how much should it really matter to me whether he approves or not? Shouldn't the reward for good behavior be primarily from within? And yet, there it was... and for that matter, our social world, for better or worse, is organized around heirarchies and our success, at least at work, but also in many other places, does depend on how we're perceived by those who have authority over us. I'm at least fortunate that one of the ways to please my employer--and, I think increasingly, more and more employers--is to be thinking independently, to be generating new ideas and approaches, to rethink the old rather than simply maintaining the status quo. Yet, of course, that only goes so far within such a hierarchy, always there's a certain amount of conformity demanded, even if that conformity is to some form of independent thinking. In as much as that makes any sense at all...
Thoughts? Hope you're all doing well!