Radical

There are only three things certain in this life— death, taxes…and schools. If we stop to think about it, it is remarkable how much of our young life is spent in schools. It is perhaps the one thing that children do more than any other thing—spending some 30 hours a week inside school buildings and more at home doing homework. It is optional to go to church, take piano lessons or play in the soccer league, but school remains a compulsory activity. Hour after hour (around six hours per day), day after day (around 175 days a year), year after year (around thirteen years), we sit in class in that strange mandatory institution we call school. Add daycare, summer school and post-graduate work, and the numbers increase significantly.

                                                                                                                                                                                    

For the lucky ones, it is a grand adventure; for many, a necessary evil to be endured with occasional enjoyment; for some, an interminable prison sentence. It rolls on relentlessly and except for the occasional choice of home schooling, it continues mostly unquestioned. There is a lot of pomp and circumstance around “standards” and “quality,” a lot of hot air about poor test performance, a lot of squabbling for salary, but there is very little energy spent on examining this extraordinary opportunity to change the world as we know it, and create a future—and present— worthy of our children. 

 

 So opens one of my favorite— and least popular— books I’ve written titled The ABC’s of Education: A Primer for Schools to Come. It remains an extraordinary phenomena that something that has the power to transform children’s lives and create the culture the future needs to be a future is so stuck in the old ways of ignoring, repressing, actively shutting down children’s beautiful promise. Every day of business-as-usual teaching kids to pay attention to the things that don’t matter, teaching them that they don’t matter, that it’s perfectly fine for their active bodies to be metaphorically strapped to desks and their curious, active minds to be treated as an annoyance, is a strike against the future and a blow to the present. 

 

I wrote this book with the hope that schools could re-organize themselves around the things that do matter—and I offer 26 of them to consider. I also wrote it to encourage young teachers and seasoned teachers alike to reflect on what attracted them to teaching without having to learn the current edu-babble and to speak in plain talk their passion. One University teacher used this as the textbook for an education class she was teaching and reported how much the students loved it, felt it as a breath of fresh air amidst the stale air of the windowless room with bad lighting that constitutes far too much of training to be a teacher. 

 

Though nevertheless I persist with the hope that schools could be so much better than they are, the real deal is the actual teachers in the school. It’s entirely possible for one such inspired teacher in a school that doesn’t care and a brutal surrounding culture rife with poverty and violence to make an extraordinary difference. So this long preamble to insist that you go to your nearest movie theater or perhaps streaming service and watch the movie Radical.  Any seeds of hope are not to be wasted in the halls of cynical and jaded Congress-people, but must be sown in the garden of children. Best when a whole school community aligns itself to that magnificent and necessary purpose, but we can’t wait around for that to happen. We— meaning every single one of us teachers— can draw inspiration from this film to fight the system by loving the children.

 

Please watch this film. And then get together with fellow parents, teachers, school boards and start talking. If you need additional help, I know a good book to recommend.