Borderland

Reading Wendell Berry’s Citizenship Papers, I see that Berry’s “agrarian argument” might also serve to counter the corporate ethos which has dominated the rhetoric of education reform for several decades, and which is now being carried forward by the Obama administration. The agrarian argument asserts the responsibility everyone has to care for that which everyone depends on, including the responsibility to care for human culture. Berry reminds us, “Poverty and starvation also can be cultural products – if the culture is wrong.”

Having spent the past 30 years nurturing the social, emotional, and intellectual capacities of human beings, I want to echo this argument. I want to offer it in opposition to toxic side effects which come from ill-advised efforts to “fix” our schools without also attending to economic injustices afflicting students who are routinely referred to as “disadvantaged.” If people stopped for half a moment to think about what the phrase “disadvantaged students” means, there would be no allowance for further discussions about using test scores to rationalize false notions of equality, since equality without justice is nothing more than an empty promise.

Berry’s essays address problems of sustainability and the destructive influences that industrial agriculture has on rural community values and on the land itself. Likewise, it seems, what flies under the banner of education reform has less to do with curriculum, instruction, and child well-being, and much more to do with economic concerns rooted in measurement and progress, leadership, and finance. An argument in favor of humanizing educational practices is needed to interrupt the drumbeat of commercial interests that promote change as an unqualified “good,” and educational products – which all too often now means “human resource” development – as the inevitable result of educational processes. To what end?

Wendell Berry contextualizes what I see and hear in debates about what should happen with public education these days. “Our situation is both comic and tragic,” he says. Continuing:

On the one hand, the self-styled “realists” of the corporate economy are unable to conform their thinking to any reality except that of selfishness. The utterly dull and humorless “realism” of the self-absorbed has done what it was bound to do: It has brought absurdity, waste, and ruin to an unprecedented magnitude. It has made violence normal, both as war and as “economic growth” (Tuscany, p. 179).

A recent article about hedge fund managers and charter schools serves as an object lesson, as it airbrushes over problems with charter school management organizations, and paints an unnaturally rosy picture of corporate hubris. Read as a companion piece with Geoff Berne’s Barbarians at the Gate we can see what public education, and our society as a whole, is up against:

When the dynamic that drives the system is privatization, gratuitous wars are waged at wantonly padded expense, prisoner remediation vanishes and jails are stuffed to the gills by judges handing down inordinately extended sentences, medical insurers nickel and dime over coverage, and children are marched off to low-budget and non-union charter schools in desolate and abandoned shopping plazas and vacant industrial facilities for the sole purpose of making profit on investment and of maximizing profit yield for corporate investors.

[...]

It’s about opening, ultimately, the whole education sector to for-profit management. However, first the public has to be sold on the need for “turn around.” First the public has to be whipped into a frenzy over a crisis in the schools, that is, the urban schools, a crisis requiring urgent “reform.” And then in the name of reform, the way is paved for business to be brought in on a white horse as reformers.

In the guise of reformers, celebrity tycoons from the world of business, opportunistic social advocacy personalities, and ambitious officials seeking to make a name for themselves as advocates for corporate interests have been the leading players in the new world of investment and career opportunity in privatized education.

I was reintroduced to Wendell Berry from reading Michael Doyle’s excellent Science Teacher blog, where one can find numerous references to Berry’s work. I put together a Wendell Berry reading list of what I found on the internet. He first came to my attention in the ’70’s through the Whole Earth Catalog, as in:

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you to die
or profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
(excerpt from Manifesto: The Mad Cow Liberation Front)

In this often discouraging time of CommonCor(porat)e educational standards, Wendell Berry finds hope in what he calls The Agrarian Standard, which elevates sustainability and community as values that supercede growth and competition:

What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.

I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.

The same could be said of good teaching.