When I was in elementary school, the persistent rumor was that they were going to tear down our school -- that it was condemned, but on a two year extension. The extensions, imaginary or not, seemed to keep the school up for the whole time I was there, but it is true that two years later they built a new school and tore that one down. As happens so often in small towns, that school had served at one time as the high school for the community, which may in part explain why our playground was entirely asphalt -- no soft play areas and no playground equipment either; just lines and circles and boxes painted on asphalt to delineate kickball fields, dodgeball circles, and foursquare courts.
Still, the rumors that they would tear down our school were useful in that eternal grudge all children seem to bear against their schools, at least when they're in them. Hissing radiators, cracked tiles, and leaking fountains were only symptoms of a larger decay that indicated the school could truly turn on us one day and swallow us whole.
Like most things, we remember patches and scraps of our past education -- the function of the school being as much to turn us into socialized well-behaved docile bodies as to fill us up with knowledge* -- such as the bullying we either gave or received or merely witnessed, the occasional fistfight, and of course the idiotic things either our classmates or better yet our teachers did, such as one classmate tripping and breaking the only computer in the entire school (it was 1980 after all), and the highlight of our computer use was to sneak over to the computer and write the following BASIC code:
10 John is an idiotAh the good old days. Of course, these days all of those wonderful awful experiences remain, except there are more computers to break and lawsuits to file. I'm looking forward to the year.
20 Goto 10
*We like to say we educate for "critical thinking skills" etc., but the sad truth is that as a society we don't care much for critical thinking and would much rather have the docile body than the malcontent.
6 comments:
I've always preferred the crankies. They're smarter and more entertaining.
I seriously give you a WHOLE lot of credit for putting your son in DC public schools. I'm scared of the schools we feed into and I'm in Fairfax County. My son is staying in the private school he's been attending since he was an infant. He starts kindergarten next week. Makes it easier having both kids in one place too.
Okay, Foucault... don't think you can slip any "docile body" talk past me. I'm down with the panopticon, and the use of institutions to instill self-surveilling systems of power... :)
I love your BASIC code. HA! That's what I would have been trying to do with my free time.
MG!: But did you catch the undercurrent of Althusser in there as well?
BDA: I think the key to schooling so far is vigilance; DC has some of the worst schools, but also some of the best (according at least to Newsweek or US News and World Report or one of those magazines), so you have to fight to move your child toward those schools while working to improve the entire system.
MA: So you're more of a Dylan over Brandon sort. More Ally Sheedy than Molly Ringwald. OK.
Cuff, aw, man! I don't know Althusser very well.
MG!: About the only thing anyone really reads of his anymore is an essay on the "Ideological State Apparatus," which in short are basically schools, courts, etc. His term "Bad Subject" also gets used a good bit and spawned a listserve that grew into a website that grew into a book contract. The interest note about him is that he went nuts and murdered his wife.
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