DocZ's Blog

The current administration and its party loyalists have produced an unhealthy and—as our great 19th century writers would have thought—unAmerican political climate. This climate is a dangerous combination of global imperialism and intellectual isolationism.

The global imperialism has been discussed amply by others and understood by any who were open to seeing its manifestations.

However, the intellectual isolationism has been neglected. Yet, our leaders—especially the Republicans—have marched under its banner in ways that put us at peril.

We have a president whose favorite “philosopher” is Jesus. We have an administration that has blundered into the Middle East with a cultural ignorance that doomed its efforts before they began. We have legislators who excoriated Supreme Court Justices who sought legal enlightenment in the decisions and law codes of other nations.

We have presidential candidates who genuflect before the dogmas of faith that our founders strove so strongly to replace by the reflections of reason.

We have leaders who have gone so far as to suggest that to turn to the wisdom of other nations for guidance is unpatriotic. These leaders have also declared themselves hostile to the fruits of the history of ideas, indeed of history in general.

In a word, we have leaders who embody the principle that we have—and should have—nothing to learn about, or from, other nations, the principle that we have—and should have—nothing to learn about, or from, the insights of creeds and philosophies and events that we regard as alien to us.

It is a small step from this attitude to a general feeling that we have nothing to learn simply. This distresses me because too many of our students have absorbed this attitude from an educational system that supports and nurtures it under the aegis of political leaders whose obstinate ineptness allows it to persist.

I was prompted to these thoughts by a Reuters News Service report that reminded me that we have much to learn from other nations. Indeed, what they have to teach us is not alien at all, but truer to our original national selves and soul than what we do now.

The dateline of the Reuters story was “Nakuru, Kenya, January 13.” The subject of the story was education.

According to the reporters, in the midst of agonizing unrest, “Kenyans’ focus on education has not wavered.”

Although the violent turmoil of the land caused the opening of schools in some areas to be postponed for a week, “for the most part, people are ready to send their children back despite the unrest.”

This contrasts strongly with the softness of our attitudes. In our schools, the least distress is taken as an excuse to cancel school or to allow students to evade classes if they need “counseling” to help them to cope with what by Kenyan standards would seem like a petty annoyance. Our educators—perhaps having learned from our media—tend to treat minor upsets as earth-shaking tragedies.

Our students resist school attendance and school work to a degree that would be unthinkable, even in a developing nation.

On the other hand, “Kenyans, like many Africans, see education as a priority and are willing to spend proportionally large amounts of their earnings to pay for it. It is common for parents to sell family land to pay for school.”

This kind of commitment has vanished from the United States. We had it once. We have it no longer.

Take school supplies. “In the centre of Nakuru…parents queued dozens deep to buy school uniforms, notebooks, pencils and textbooks on Saturday” prior to the Monday opening of school.

In the last two decades of my teaching career, more than half the students came to school the first day without either a writing implement or a notebook. This never ceased to shock me, since my own working-class parents would not have allowed me to appear at school—even through high school—without a full complement of essential school supplies.

It says much about the weakness of our schools that many of our teachers adopt the misguided practice of purchasing school supplies with their own money to remedy this situation—thereby strengthening the bad habit.

We are soft on education, and that has bred slackness in our national character.

I am reminded of Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical film Au revoir les enfants (1987), about a Jesuit school in France during World War II that shelters a few Jewish students to protect them from the Nazis. In one wonderful little scene, the students are in geometry class when the air raid alarm sounds. As the students stand at their desks, the teacher tells them to take their books with them because “The lesson will continue in the shelter.”

This kind of dedication has disappeared from America. We need to resuscitate it. We need to hear more frequently in our classrooms the voice of that French teacher saying, “The lesson will continue.”