My husband is a High School drama teacher. When we first met, I’d never been to a single play, but I was excited to learn about his world and he was very willing and patient to show it to me. His kids have become our kids. Several of them were in our wedding, and several others helped make sure our wedding happened. I instantly bonded with these kids because they were the same as I was in High School. The nerds, the geeks, the ones that were often left behind and ignored by the jocks and the A-listers.
For us, 20 years ago, the factor that brought us all together was band. The music building somehow belonged to us band kids. We’d sit in the lobby on the tile floor at lunch and play D&D. We all dated each other, slept with each other, broke up with each other (I dated the tuba player, a saxophonist and two drummers during my four years in High School). The thing was … we didn’t belong anywhere else. We were told that every day by the other students in the school. We were the weird ones.
“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
It’s a stupid truth, but it is a truth, that education is severely undervalued in this country. Creativity and artistic ability are even more undervalued, and the right looks at them with outright suspicion. There’s a reason why artists make comics like this. It’s hard to be an artist in this world, especially if you’re not becoming an artist so that you can sell more car insurance or corn flakes or take more portraits of families faking being perfectly happy. People tell you always that it’s not worth it to become an artist. You’ll starve, they say. I know many artists who are now software engineers or MBAs, people who relegated their artistic talent to the status of ‘hobby’, or worse, who left it behind all together.
I have a 30 minute drive to work every day and every day as I’m driving I look around at the other cars and I wonder… ‘Could that janitor have been another Tolkien?’, ‘What pieces of art could that administrative assistant given to the world?’, ‘What joyous music did that Dental Technician never get to create?’. One after another, the lights dim in the cars, each one turning into another faceless drone, going about and fulfilling the corporate needs of America. Write this. Design that. Do this. All so we can sell overpriced things to people who don’t need those things. All so we can put more money in someone else’s pocket and possibly get enough out of it in order to feed our families.
Yesterday was the closing performance of this year’s fall play: Fahrenheit 451. The play is hefty, just like the book, and Bradbury is fond of the boards, himself, so he wrote the script. It’s a thinking person’s play. You have to follow the dialog closely to understand it. You can’t slack off. You can’t not pay attention. Not for a second. It was perfect, and there were times when I very nearly wept. “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re playing out the very same thing happening in this world.
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.”
It makes perfect sense for conservatives to bleed the educational system dry. Perfect sense. The conservative ideology has no room for intellectuals. Or artists. Or critical thinkers. The conservative ideology is all about trusting big brother, trusting the state, trusting some giant father-figure-type to make everything alright. It does not serve conservatives well to have people discovering that they can think for themselves. It doesn’t do them good to have people asking the hard questions, asking the ‘why’ questions. There was a time when teachers told children that they should be asking ‘why’, and frequently. No more. Now they should only be stuffed with facts and taught how to take tests. That’s all we need. No more thinkers, no more dreamers, no more questioners. Just trust in the father figure. Just trust in Big Brother.
I pity the person who truly wants to lead that life. That is choosing to live your entire life failing to use one of the most powerful muscles in your entire body. Your brain.
Last year, the teachers in my husband’s district faced an overall 11% pay cut. CUT. They haven’t received a cost-of-living increase in the last few years, and, in fact, they’ve been taking cuts. Last year it was around 3%, this year another 3%. When the district proposed the 11% cut, the union balked. There was no strike, but there were a few planned protests. While protesting, they were regaled with people driving by and telling them things like, “Get a Real Job”. This past spring, in Wisconsin, we saw this same attitude at work on a national level. Oh, it’s always been there, but the Wisconsin protests brought the dialog to the forefront.
What conservatives would like in place of the Department of Education is terrifying. Privately run schools where parents can determine what sort of education their children get based on their beliefs. Don’t want your kids to be taught evolution? There’s a school for that! Don’t want them to learn critical thinking skills? Bingo! Without any form of public education, this will all be EASY. We can create a whole generation of people who only think what other people want them to think, who only say what other people tell them to say … a whole generation of ‘dittoheads’.
“Remember the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but its a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. Can you dance faster than the White Clown, shout louder than ‘Mr. Gimmick’ and the parlor ‘families’? If you can, you’ll win your way, Montag. In any event, you’re a fool. People are having fun.”
Can you talk louder than the talking heads on Fox News? Can you make art, life, culture, politics, history, critical thinking, science and nature more interesting, more lively, more over-the-top than Fox News? Even books are becoming another distraction, another way to forget to critically think. Can you possibly make Shakespeare more interesting to the masses than Twilight? Can you? Should you? These people all appear to be happy … should you take that way from them? Their lives are quiet and despairing, and they live, day to day, with the hope that tonight’s television program’s or tomorrow’s new book release will take them away from that quiet, despairing reality. The public stopped thinking of its own accord long ago. Books may never actually go up in flames, but thoughts already have.
It makes me weep, but it should make all of us weep. We should not strive not to think. We should not strive not to discover. For humanity to continue, we MUST think. We MUST discover. I spent time talking about the conservatives, but only because they are the most obvious, most egregious of offenders. To be a conservative, to buy into that ideology, you MUST, absolutely MUST, buy into the belief that we don’t need critical thinking, that we need only more ignorance. No conservative will couch it in such basic and bald terms, but there it is, black and white, and you can easily find it in such bald terms … if you take the time to read the works of those who founded the conservative ideology … which most people won’t. But, it is not just the conservatives who are at fault here, not just the conservatives who are drowning generation after generation in a lack of understanding and a lack of critical thinking … the progressive that we elect are doing the same things.
The progressives in this country … if we can even call them progressives … spend too much time pandering to actually do anything that real progressives actually want them to do. They’re too afraid of the masses, too afraid of the majority that will and can take them out of office if they dare ask them to think too much … and at it’s worst, the progressive machine can be an army of censors, out to sanitize the world and make it ‘politically correct’, and at it’s deepest worst, pushing toward a world more like Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’. Take away video games that are too bloody, music that has swear words in it (oh no! words, how dare we ever be afraid of words!), shelter our children and grow them so that they don’t know the real world, don’t know the harsh realities of what being a thinking person entails.
No, neither party in this country has an answer, and both parties are destructive to education. One outright, the other in it’s apathy.
The only way we’re ever going to take back education is if we do it ourselves. If we become the rebels. If we displace the talking heads, the entitled bankers, the uber-rich elite that control our world. Take them down, take them all down. Let them eat cake until frosting is running out of their ears. Let them drown in their own false rhetoric, die by their own lies, fail by their own lack of intellectual good. Drown them in critical thinking, hang them with a thousand, a million, a billion, a trillion ‘Whys’.
“The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
A common thing that we say in our household is that you may not be able to change the world, but you can do your best with your corner of it. So don’t let critical thinking die. The politicians won’t lead this charge. Neither will the rich or the majority. The fat and lazy majority. Eating Doritos by the pound and drinking Coca-Cola by the gallon while watching American Idol so they can experience Schadenfreude when the judges mock the performers. Parroting the shit fed into their brains by the talking heads at Fox News and looking like deer caught in headlights the moment you ask ‘why’. The disgusting majority. I’ll take the cast-offs, the rejects, the ones who don’t fit in. The minority. They are the rebels. If there is a future, they are it.
We may not succeed, we may not prevail … but at least we’ll die knowing we were headed for shore.
Stacysaurus Rex Destroys the World 