Hallowed Halls

Good, and unfortunately - so desperately
true in education today.... no one is being
educated. Maybe it is a thing we must each
learn to seek ourselves, but what a very
painful beginning it can be.

babsatamelia: Thank you for responding to my lonely poem! The problem was with me, I'm sure. Too much freedom for a preschooler, playing in the woods near my house, climbing trees, dipping moss into water, picking flowers, tasting seeds, trying but never catching turtles, smashing leaves in my fingers. I thought that first day in school would answer all the questions no one at home would bother with. I've heard that school is mostly about learning how to get along in a group. Duh . . . I never learned THAT lesson, however, now I live in the woods on fifty acres and am quite content. Sometimes, our childhood dreams do come true!

Many thanks for reading.

dupre

very good!



PS Fifty acres!....wow, that sounds great.

jjorge: The kids out here seem to enjoy hearing it: childlike wonder and then childlike rage coming from a forty-two-year-old is good for an easy laugh.

Yep, the property is fun. Too bad the house sits right next to a highway. No privacy. Not a smidgeon, unless I hike way back, and then, well, the cows wonder 'sup and I gotta mooooove.

Thank you for reading and commenting. I really appreciate it, jjorge.

dupre
I enjoyed this piece and I hope to encourage you to do more.

Thanks, edgarblythe. I haven't even tried for a few years. The first six poems I wrote were dreadful, I thought I'd quit while I was average. But . . . maybe I'll try again. I do have one idea musing around . . .

Dupre -- I followed your link! This is an excellent poem, it's got a lot of character and is something I feel strongly about. Why is 'education' so darn unpleasant? Thanks for sharing.

Hey, Wow! Hello. Thanks!

Education has more to do with socialization, with following the rules as a group, than actually learning anything.

What a bummer!

I'd had a lot of personal freedom, especially for a little girl.

Not that my parents approved. I paid for those walks in the woods! Ohmigod, did I pay!

I didn't like being boxed in, not one bit.

As if the above wasn't bad enough, from 5th-9th grade I went to a private school. Although I will say I learned more there, and discovered a love of language, talk about trying to make people conform! I was miserable, and quite verbal about it. Always calling them on what seemed to be unreasonable demands.

If they had just taught, that would've been fine, but there was always this underlying, "You are worthless and evil because you are a female. You are designed for the fall of good men."

One teacher would thrust her ugly face into the girls' faces every morning before chapel, inspecting them for way too long, checking--supposedly!--for makeup. (We weren't allowed to wear any.)

It just doesn't take that long to see if someone has makeup on. It was all just designed to make us feel bad about ourselves, to intimidate.

This same teacher used to line up the boys, in front of the girls' room, and swat them once for each word they missed on their definitions test. Right there in the hallway for everyone to see.

Uh . . . isn't punishment like that reserved for behavior, not academics? Uh . . . isn't punishment like that usually done in private? By a person of the same sex? Or . . . Really, not at all?

I hated school!

Loved the libraries and the librarians, though.

Oddly enough, this private school had no library, no overhead projectors and other learning devices.

What in the world were we supposed to get out of our time there?

Jane Erye's (sp?) got nothing on me.

Well, Jane Eyre also received lots of corporal punishment & was denied food... but I get your drift, Dupre.

Checking so closely for forbidden make-up? That was a bid to intimidate. Why would any real teacher want to do that?

Mostly, schools, public, private & parochial, teach conformity and to habituate the students into believing & following authority. For me, they failed, perhaps because I bounced around so much. In that, I think I was lucky. At least once we're reached college or university, a lot of that goes by the wayside... I'm not sure why.

Jane Eyre--or was it her friend?--was made to stand on a chair in the rain.

Big deal.

I was made to kneel on the cement outside in the winter.

As to the food, well, it's another topic, but yes, I went without dinner for much of my life. Developed an eating disorder based solely on the lack of knowledge that all living things must eat. I thought eating was optional just because we didn't eat regularly. When friends went home for dinner, I wondered, "What's that?"

Being perpetually hungry can make for some highly agitated behavior. I'm sure I was not always an ideal classmate or student. Yet, instead of seeing if basic needs were being met, they chose to punish and humiliate. I'm sure they couldn't have seen my emaciated state under all that uniform, anyway.

Um . . . they wouldn't get away with that today in public schools, I'm sure. Private schools offer a lot of protection for parents. Did you see the movie with Robin Williams with the student who commits suicide?

Sometimes I wonder if that teacher was actually checking eyes to see if the girls were doing drugs. Some were. I wasn't. My older sisters were. Maybe she thought I was. I found her behavior offensive and intrusive and threatening and humiliating.

Ironically, she was one of the best teachers I ever had. She taught English. I'm sure the background in Latin and French and Greek we got there as students enhanced her teaching.

In grade school, we're taught what to think, in college, how.

Education has surely changed since I was in school.

This private school taught us that the Judeo-Christian god was God, that Western civilization and Hebrew origins was all there was (I guess Orientals, South Americans, Native American, and Afrikaans never existed!). They taught that male was better than female, that everyone should look and think the same, that adults are always right (even though the band director was sent to prison for child pornography!). They taught that heterosexuality was all there was.

Interesting that during all that Roman and Greek history, the issue of homosexuality just never came up!

Never heard about the Roman god of the garden, either. He sports a huge phallic item which women were encouraged to use.

I just don't see why there should be such a big coverup in education. I was there to learn. I didn't learn much there.

BTW, that English teacher, looking back on it now, I remember her face was puffy, just like, maybe, as if she drank a lot, you know?

These were some miserable people.

You were lucky you got to move around so much!!!! If you had a bizaare teacher, the experience couldn't last too long.

Do you think you are more or less of a conformist because of your education? How did moving around impact who you are today?

I want to add that the now-retired rector--who has been banned from the schools' property--is celebrated among white extremists. The reverend believes that we should return to slavery since it was sanctioned in the bible.

I'm not just ranting to rant. This school should have been outlawed or something. I know things have changed there now, and some people who attended just don't see or remember it the way I do, but some people do.

I'll see if I can find a link to the reverend's published work.

I'm shocked at the treatment you suffered through... did your parents suspect anything was wrong with the school? It sounds like something out of the Victorian age.

As to my own education and non-conformity... my mother freqently said at the time that travel was the best education. She had no truck with teachers who fretted when we would lose school time. I skipped second grade, so it was obviously not too awful that I had refused to attend kindergarten after one bad week and went to two different first grades, leaving early at the last. Wherever we went, we studied the natural history of the area which is often so interesting and entertaining to children. She encouraged me & my sister to read -- I could read when I was three, they say. I think that by not spending the entire time in one school district I had a much lower expectation of who they were and what they could offer. Not that I'd seen it all but I had seen that there was more to life than a single school. It meant that I didn't develop the friendships begun in elementary school, but that was the only drawback. I did go to the same high school for four years; by that time my disdain for public education was fairly solid. Not that I disliked all my teachers, far from it. There are always some who have a passion for education and are sympathetic to their students.

Hey, thanks for expressing your outrage on my behalf. I needed that!

No, my parents, who were too busy to cook dinner, were too busy to consider that maybe all was not right with the school.

My dad had the Old World values that school and teachers deserved the highest respect. Usually true, but not always.

So, if I were in trouble, well, it was all my fault, and to some extent they still feel this way, although I have been able to expose some of the problems with the school to them, and time has done the rest.

After all this was, oh, thirty years ago. Well behind me now. My mom has no trouble with racists, being one herself. What can I say? I don't think she sees herself as one, but she is, and I found white supremacey reading material in her bathroom, opened to a page, published I think in the 1940s. What's with that?

Your mom sounds like a wonderful person. Natural history is a terrific topic, fascinating. I am so happy for you that it all turned out well. Except in very small towns, my guess is that friendships from elementary schools don't survive all our moves and changes anyway, so you lost little and gained enormously!

I looked for that publication I found online years ago. I bet it's been yanked from the web. I wonder if this reverend has either changed his viewpoint or received so much flack he no longer wants to be though of in those lines. He's still out there, making waves, just not as right-winged as before, just barely.

I won't publish his name here, since I can't document my previously posted opinion.

dupre

Your post reminded me of something I read several years ago in a report on public education:

(paraphrasing )

At their worst, public schools are huge 'aging vats' that students are expected to endure, and which reward conformity and a high tolerance for boredom.

Dupre -- I wish I could offer more than outrage. It sounds awful.

Jjorge (Hi Jjorge!!!) is right -- conformity, that's what they want. Luckily, they don't always get it!

jjorge: Thanks for your quote. So true. And I wonder it that's indicative of the trend toward jobs that reflect the same. I heard that jobs in America are increasingly boring and so the goal is to bring less-educated people to the workforce, so they won't become disenchanted.

I'm not sure it that's entirely true. It seems my son received an excellent education in the public schools. I know they covered a lot more information, say, of world cultures. And certainly the science he received was better. Most importantly, the attitude of the schools and his teachers was better.

One elementary school had the motto: "All Children Are Winners." An attempt to minimize competition, although it was still there, certainly, to some degree.

Great quote. What did you think? Is/was there a trend toward dummying down education?

I'm not sure, but I have a few random thoughts:

-Public schools are often underfunded.

- Public schools are too susceptible to local political pressures.

- There should be an escape route for burnt out or disillusioned teachers(eg. better portability of pension benefits/credits, job re-training opportunities, etc) so they don't feel FORCED stay for 15 or 20 years in a job that makes them unhappy and/or after they have ceased to be effective.