We were driving through one of the eastern suburbs the other day when one of my friends pointed out the size of the homes that we were passing.
“What do people do for a living to afford such a home?,” one asked.
I immediately countered with the brilliant statement, “I wouldn’t want so much space. I would have no time to do anything but clean.”
Whereupon my car mates laughed … no, guffawed at my seeming naivety.
“Don’t be ridiculous. If you own a home like these, you have ‘help.’”
Now all of this was said with that difficult-to-describe edge that underscores the duality of thinking that permeates a society without classes that builds phantom classes in our minds. We are proud to be a culture where it is possible to succeed professionally and with some marked financial success. We measure success as income. Chasing that success sometimes follows accepted paths, paths that involve specific career choices. Other career choices do not give those who choose them the same kind of crack at wealth. While we acknowledge that we all have, at least theoretically, a chance to do well, to make any of a wide variety of choices in how we make a living, we, and I qualify that to include those who eschew financial success for any reason, do not accept the success of others with equanimity.
The same thing is true of education. Every child in our country has access to an education. Granted the quality of that education varies, but, even without the disparity of that quality, are the cultural taboos that preclude becoming too educated. Like those who decry the demonstrations of accumulated wealth, there are those who find the trappings of a good education to be anathema. Education then, like wealth, delineates the phantom classes in a classless society.
Thinking of education, there is history, which it is true, is written by the victors in curricula that focuses on what is called the “war-cycle.” The history of a people is laid out as the result of the causes and effects of conflict. While conflict does effect significant changes in the way that people live their lives, it is not the only way to remember what a people experienced in the past, is living with currently or is projected into the future.
In the United States, we are basically teaching history as the nation unfolded from war to war – the French and Indian War to Afghanistan and Iraq and all the conflicts between, those that we know about and those we don’t.
People who determine what we should know about who we were, are and can be write curricula and text books. And today’s news media tells us that now there are vested interest groups that want our already carefully written “so-that-nobody-will-be-offended” texts and curricula changed to eliminate some of the realities of our history that are troublesome, that cause students to dig deeper into how the who we are was created from those we were or continue to be.
Along with those who fear any kind of education beyond minimum are the polarities that want to hide the truth of slavery, business practices, local mores and such, to ban books that contain ideas that they don’t like, facts that crash into their ideas of history and that deny the truth of science.
We have the pitchfork-carrying groups who want to turn the system that draws us together as Americans into a vehicle for political ends. Rewriting those parts of our history doesn’t eliminate the fallout from the seedy, immoral, unjustified parts of our history. Denying climate change and the role that burning fossil fuels has played will not prevent the catastrophic results that climate scientists are predicting. Did your eyes burn when the smoke from Canadian fires came here?
Sit down and talk to some people about teaching the truth in history and science and you may be called names that I won’t type onto this page. There are two paths to take. History and science that serve political ends and special interests or the truth. Truth is the path that has the best results. Truth, by the way, can be challenged, is not afraid of challenge, doesn’t deny opposition.
I am getting too old to worry about this. But I do, and I pray that those younger than I are worrying about it too. The lives we live are human constructs.
Billy Joel said it this way: “We didn’t start the fire / It was always burning, since the world’s been turning / We didn’t start the fire / No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”
Humans created our world. Humans can fix it.
I am going to take a nap now.
