Our home is built on a double lot--two acres of woodland,
in a rolling and heavily wooded subdivision that was once the uncultivated back
end of a 300-acre farm. Behind our
house, there is a wide path through
thick, mature woods, leading to a small clearing.
In the clearing, there is an old tree with an odd shape; it's a large tree, but
it was clearly bent--nearly broken--when it was young, and it points in a sharp
angle away from the clearing. I was walking through our woods with a friend who
is an amateur historian once, and she pointed to the tree. Indians used to do
that to trees, she said--they cracked and bent thin new tree trunks in directional patterns,
so when the tree healed, it would become a natural marker, pointing the way
toward water, perhaps, or a safe route. She was sure our tree had been a
signpost at one time. Which might also explain the existing broad path through
the woods.
This made sense to me. We live a couple of miles from the
old Grand River Trail, an ancient Indian transit route running from the
southeast corner of the Michigan mitten, north and west to Lake Michigan. The trail
was well-known for centuries, later becoming a plank road, then Grand River
Avenue, much of which is still in use. Interstate 96 now roughly parallels the old
trail.
This bit of informed speculation was enormously exciting
to me. There were Indians here, a couple hundred years ago--and they changed
the course of my backyard! I spent some time wandering around in the woods,
trying to picture this spot in, say, 1776. It was a difficult task, with lawn
mowers buzzing, the wafting smell of grilled burgers and clearly visible vinyl storage
sheds in two adjacent yards. Still, it was a thrilling exercise of imagination,
much more interesting than the stuff I read in fourth grade about Our Indian
Heritage.
Most human endeavors have a long, layered history.
There's a wonderful passage in Jack Finney's novel Time and Again, where a scientist explains that time is not linear--that what makes today,
February 14, 2009, different from a Valentine's Day in 1922 or 1776 is not the
passage of time, since time, as Einstein explained it, is not extinguished.
What makes today 2009 is literally the millions of details that have accrued
and things that have changed--technologically, physically and in human
knowledge and beliefs.
The bent tree marker is there because we liked the woods
too much to cut them down, but even if we had leveled our tiny forest to match
our neighbors' wide lawns, that tree and its marking function are still there,
metaphysically. There are places on earth, including human settlements and
edifices, that have changed very little. Medieval cathedrals exist as reminders
of timeless human ingenuity in the service of God, even when they're surrounded
by glass and steel boxes. Nothing can ever be destroyed--only changed. That's
the first law of thermodynamics.
And so it is in education. I think about this a lot, as
sputtering over the economic stimulus goes on. Will it be good for education to
get an infusion of cash--or will all the work of the group of people calling
themselves reformers (think about that etymology) be lost if enough money flows
into the system to undo their "efficiencies?" Is the reason that grand
reforms don't often achieve their goals due to the fact that there are
universal, immortal truths that lie under the process of education--and the
rest is just inconsequential layers of change? Are the things we vehemently argue
and agonize over, from the value of charter schools to the right way to prepare
teachers, just ephemera, in the long run?
Here's what I think, on February 14, 2009 (subject to
change, of course):
- Education, the expansion of knowledge and perspective, is a
universal good.
- Every student I ever had, more than 4000 over 30 years, learned
something, which is proof to me that all children can learn, even when they
think they don't want to learn.
- The conceptual cornerstone under education is
that people learn from other people, not from things, programs or policies. This used to be a direct
process but we have put layers of technology, from the printing press to the
idea of "class size," in the way of this simple idea of knowledge
transmission.
- You can never go wrong
when you invest in education.
- And...buried in every policy-maker, researcher, opinion
leader or taxpayer is a student, and what they think about education depends
largely on who they were when they were young and in
school. Some people see education through a haze of fond nostalgia--school as center of learning, important rite of passage, incubator of helpful life alliances. Others are less sanguine--school was not a place of order or intellectual nurture, life's important lessons happening elsewhere. And some people were just trying to fit in, not giving much thought now or then to what education might truly achieve in a free society, what might be learned from the metaphorical bent trees scattered over the educational landscape. Some of us embrace and build on the things we were taught, as children; others push back.
Who were you, as a student? And how has it impacted the
way you see public education today? Even straight-laced conservatives may have been trying out a different persona, when they were young adults. Right, Norm?
Pretty
cosmic questions, I admit. Happy
Valentine's Day.
