Thanks to the Flu

The current flu pandemic has many positive aspects about it and might leave our world a better place. Of course, it has its tragic side. We should remember those who died before their time because of it.

But there are ways in which the flu might inject new life into our lives. Some commentators have mentioned how this period of self-isolation might bring families closer together. Instead of scattering in all directions each day, with children going to different schools, then off to different soccer fields and socials, and the adults rushing off to separate high-rise jobs as admen, madmen – families are forced to gather close together around that old metaphoric home-fire. It’s possible that each family member will retreat to his or her own room to tweet and watch separate TV shows. But it’s also possible that this enforced togetherness might spark a few conversations between family members. Children and adults might get to know each other a little better, and for the first time find out, for better or worse, who is really aboard those other ships that previously just passed in the night.

Some people might get cabin fever with this enforced isolation. But that was never my problem. I always found the times I had to stay quietly at home to be delicious reprieves from social obligation. When the Great Snowstorm of 1967 hit Chicago, I was a teenager and the surrounding piles of snow cast me as Queen of my own Ice Castle. I iglooed in place; I cocooned in the wonderland of my thoughts. I could quietly metamorphize into my own fated maturity.

Not that I wasn’t generally able to be more unto myself than most people my age. I was largely homeschooled, (or more accurately, I was a learner-at-home) in a time before there was a word or a movement for that practice. Almost invariably, when people who are imbued with the necessity of going to school hear about that philosophy, they ask, “But what about socialization? Don’t you miss out on learning how to interact with other people?”

Well, one could observe how most teens interact, and see that their social skills haven’t really improved as they’ve advanced from first grade through high school. In reality, it seems as if, during that time, many of them have only honed their techniques of cruelty to others – and to themselves. If anything, I would argue that the world is suffering from too much socialization. What people need, especially young people, is more time away from social pressures, more time to be themselves, or rather, to become their best selves. They need time away from bullying, peer pressure, and pressure to conform.

To interject a somewhat sadder, more world-weary note of wisdom into these considerations, I think of what a handyman once surprisingly said to me – or rather, to my dog. After my father died, my mother and I went through a difficult series of handymen enlisted to do odd jobs around the house. Most of these catch-as-catch-can itinerants proved to be rather incompetent or unreliable. Some proved to have positively sinister ulterior motives for coming into our house, motives other than repairing the leaking faucet. However, for a while, there was one capable stalwart of a fellow we could count on. He had the weathered, raw look of a ship’s figurehead. He generally concentrated on his work, not seeking to engage in any small talk.

I’d just acquired a new puppy then, a little mutt who was proving to be an incessant yapper, a little bundle of uncontrollable energy who wanted to dart into any household activity she saw going. Our handyman was remarkably tolerant of this noisy interference most of the time. But one day, he paused to address this fur-ball cavorting around him. “You have to go off by yourself and be quiet now, little one,” he said. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

And so this period of sequestration that the flu is bringing upon us might be an opportunity to practice that larger lesson. Maybe we can all grow up a little.

But simply considering the cozier, more down-to-earth aspect of this enforced enclosure - English writer J. B. Priestley expressed it well in his essay “Not Going” in his collection of delights. When he was young, he said it was horrible not to get an invitation – to the party, the dance, the excursion. But as he got older, he realized he wasn’t missing anything by being at home. As he would ensconce himself in his favorite chair, people would ask him, “But don’t you like to enjoy yourself?” To which he’d reply, “On the contrary, by Not Going, that is just what I am trying to do.”

However, there’s another boon this period of stoppage can confer, a boon that I oddly haven’t heard any news commentators remark on so far. This widespread slowdown in industry can give the environment a brief respite, a brief time of healing. I’m surprised that this advantage to the earth’s ecology hasn’t been widely heralded as something positive that can come out of this epidemic.

A couple of decades ago, there was a lot of regret about the loss of our Sundays. Environmentalists noted how Sundays used to be a time of rest, a time when people didn’t go to work. They stayed home and slept late, then read the Sunday newspaper over a second cup of coffee. Scientists noted how CO2 levels in the atmosphere sharply dropped on Sundays. There wasn’t the dredging, the drilling, the extracting, the in-putting. The levels of all kinds of pollutants in the atmosphere declined – on Sundays. Our atmosphere got a breather.

But then Sundays stopped being so sharply marked by cessation. With flex-work schedules and with a more general ambition to get the job done around-the-clock, Sundays weren’t as quiet as they used to be. They stopped being Kris Kristofferson’s “sleeping city sidewalk.” People were almost as much up-and-at-it on Sundays as they were on other days. So the earth hasn’t had quite that same one-day-a-week to recuperate and rejuvenate.

But now with the shutdowns the flu has enforced, the earth might be getting a whole swatch of time to recover, perhaps its first since the industrial revolution really got rolling. Again, when scientists look back at this time, they will probably record a steep down-turn in effluents being dumped into the atmosphere. It probably won’t be enough to allow the glaciers to start to accumulate inches of ice again, and not enough to make our next winter noticeably colder again, like Victorian winters used to be. But it will probably make some difference, however small.

What’s more, mortality rates from a variety of usual causes will be seen to have declined during this period. The police in big cities have already been noting the decline in crime. One report said there were 30% fewer street murders in Chicago this month than there were in the same month last year. Although, some worry that for every street crime prevented by our encouragements against congregating – there might be a domestic crime committed in the created hothouse of indoor togetherness. But so far at least, that kind of offset doesn’t seem to have happened.

Meanwhile, the reduction in sheer levels of activity must surely have a net positive effect in other areas. With sporting events postponed, there will be fewer sports injuries. With fewer people rushing to get to and from their jobs on time, there will be fewer car crashes, fewer highway fatalities.

And then there are the animals. I know I should be more concerned about humans than animals, and yet, the life and death of animals has been made so much a matter of human whim that their injury can be so much more guilt-producing and heart-breaking. I feel somehow complicit in each such death, with my presumption of need to go somewhere or consume something. So when I see a deer hit on the road, left to limp off bleeding and broken to almost certain torturous death, I feel a more piercing sadness than I feel over the death of many humans.

But with the slowdown of the world in the wake of this Covid pandemic, there will be fewer such killings. The world will be less splattered with dogs, cats, raccoons, squirrels… If it’s true that “not a sparrow falls but that our Father sees,” there will be a lot less carnage for Him to see.

When this is over and the scientists go back and calculate the decrease in pollution and bloodshed that marked this period, I wouldn’t be surprised if some leaders don’t consider making a regular event of such cessation. Let one week out of every eight be a “Faux Flu” week – a week in which everyone whose job isn’t absolutely essential for life support stays home. For that week, stop the “getting and spending” and coming and going, and simply abide in quiet appreciation of what we all already have.

Be a Face, Not a Facilitator

A friend of mine, committed to homeschooling her son, recently brought me up short when she summarized her role by saying, “I’m only a facilitator. I believe that’s all parents should be – facilitators of their child’s learning.”

That general idea is often voiced in one form or another by both parents and teachers, but in homeschooling circles in particular. However, I’d rarely heard the attitude so bluntly stated. Usually it remains as a more tacit understanding of the ideal approach an adult should take toward children. When expressed that explicitly though, it hit me like a slap in the face. Despite my having been raised as a “life-learner” and my eagerness to advocate in favor of that philosophy - I realized that was one common interpretation of the parental role that I couldn’t support. It crystallized a disagreement I’ve probably had all along with any such completely hands-off approach to the parental/teaching role.

I don’t think parents and teachers should diminish themselves to the role of mere facilitators - for several reasons. First of all, the word “facilitator” is itself objectionable. It belongs with “finalizing,” utilizing,” maximizing outcomes,” and all the other empty box phrases that characterize business reports and totalitarian governments. No good writer would ever use such colorless word-cubes to tell a story, and no good parent should paint herself into a corner with such words.

Second, adopting the role of facilitator actually runs counter to what homeschooling is all about in a larger sense. By demoting themselves to the passive role of facilitators and elevating the child to the status of recipient of all this facilitation - parents once again make a special preserve out of the state of childhood. Childhood and adolescence become distinct phases which command special treatment. A divide is created with the facilitators on one side, and the facilitated on the other. The child is seen as the one whose needs must be served, whose interests must be catered to by adults. The adult becomes the server. Family life becomes all about the child. It forces the flow of attention in one direction only.

Being designated facilitators does indeed cast parents in a self-effacing role in one sense. However, at the same time, it grants parents a subtle foundation of self-importance. Parents now have a commanding platform of priorities. They can slip into a kind of busy-ness that their role authorizes. As appointed facilitators, they are officials. As such, they can officiously proceed to shape the world around them. They can swing into championing all sorts of causes and promoting all sorts of projects designed to “make sure my son is safe and able to realize his full potential.” They can work to enforce leash laws; check-up on the activities of all registered sex offenders in the area; put in speed bumps; keep the park basketball courts open extended hours; set up a food co-op; maintain a book exchange…” Any one of these projects may in and of itself have some merit, but taken together, they can add up to a mighty wind of pre-occupation.

Meanwhile, the adults’ preemptive role of facilitators seems to relieve the children themselves of ever having to be the guardians of other people’s hopes and dreams. The children aren’t encouraged to take any interest in adults’ lives. The job of facilitating steers the family away from simply, quietly facing each other, and from facing the anguish and wonder of the world together.

The main reason though that I object to defining the parental role as one of “facilitator” is that such a reduction is so awfully impersonal and downright dull. It sounds robotic and in fact is robotic. Perhaps it’s part of a jargon that many homeschooling parents automatically mouth without really meaning to reduce themselves to that status. It’s hard to believe that parents can actually be satisfied turning themselves into blanks under the mistaken belief that they are thereby doing the best for their children. More to the point, it’s impossible to believe that that’s what most children want of the adults around them.

If most children are anything like I was, they would choose the company of a joyously, bounteously self-proclaiming, madcap parent over the company of a passively facilitating parent any day. Most children would prefer an Auntie Mame to some stereotypical reference librarian. Children want to be taken along for the ride. They want an instigator. They want to tag along with the uncle who asserts his own enthusiasm for gathering mushrooms by moonlight, for building birdhouses, for restoring Edsels - rather than the uncle who would simply suggest reference materials in response to their passing interest in dinosaurs.

In the book and movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the child prefers her irresponsible, irrepressible father to her endlessly workaday mother. Even though her father too often reels off tipsily, unable to hold a steady job - he loves music and has a beautiful Irish tenor voice. By showcasing his own gift, he is lovingly able to inspire a lyric spirit in the girl. The girl finds this more valuable than her mother’s diligence at trying to keep food on the table and some semblance of respectability in their home.

That lesson about what children really want and need is actually almost a dramatic cliché. It pops up over and over again. In Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Sook brings her little cousin along on her magically charged adventures gathering the ingredients for her annual fruitcakes.

The adult who forges a rebel right-of-way for herself and her child always has more appeal than the dutiful, managerial parent. Not only does the rebel win more of the child’s affection, but, more crucially, provides more of what’s essential for the child. Sometimes the eccentric has to be reined in a bit – but the lesson of these dramas is that such adult assertion should never be completely eliminated from a child’s life. The lesson is that everyone needs both bread AND circuses – if you define “circuses” not as simple sensationalism, but as a free-wheeling show that includes surrounding adults’ most extravagant, extraordinary talents and interests.

Of course I don’t mean to depreciate the value of holding a family together with responsible planning. I certainly don’t mean that any children should be left in the care of an unbalanced, potentially harmful adult with corrosive interests. I somewhat overstated my case in the above paragraphs in order to highlight the difference between a vivid, self-expressive individual and a shadowy, faceless facilitator. To some extent, one needs both personalities to foster a child into maturity. But a parent should never be “only” a facilitator.

Few children are Mozarts with a very specific, early genius that simply requires other people to get out of its way. Most people find their life’s work along some unintended path down which they were randomly propelled. So it helps to have some positive beacon of a person leading the way. Children want just such a person whose light they can merrily follow for some of the journey into new adventures. Children thrive on having such a trailblazer. They want someone who will chart an unpredictable, highly individual course through all the herding pressures that they’ll face. Children want someone with a capability and an enthusiasm they can respect. In short, they want a real live person to love.

This all has practical implications for how children might avoid compromising themselves even if they are compelled to attend school and be “taught.” This is important because, despite the growing number of homeschoolers, there seems to be so much more countervailing pressure from governments, politicians, and liberal reformers alike, to corral children into schools for longer and longer periods. Canadian officials have announced their intention to crack down on the parents of truants and to make homeschooling much more difficult. U.S. officials are everywhere advocating longer school hours and shorter summer vacations. Many are pushing for the elimination of summer vacations altogether. Every politician’s platform seems to include some pronouncement in favor of better schooling and much, much more schooling,

However, if children aren’t imbued with the idea that only their own interests should be facilitated, they can still find some value in attending school if that becomes an absolute requirement. Indeed, some of the features of schools that homeschoolers most often object to, might in fact become some of the most rewarding aspects of the enforced experience.

Take tests for example. I know that to most homeschoolers, tests are anathema. However, looked at another way, without any parental pressure to rank or reward children, tests can be a way of getting to know teachers better. Tests can bring children out of themselves and provide encouragement to them to look for the individuality of their teachers.

I was largely homeschooled in the decades before there was even such a word or a concept. I only went to school enough to keep the truant officers away from our door. My parents encouraged me not to take the tests seriously, not to spend too much time studying for them. In fact, they encouraged me to get “D’s,” or to outright fail as often as possible. They pointed out that either way, at the age of 16, I could quit school (the limits of compulsory schooling at that time in my State) and be done with the farce. But I wanted to do well on the tests, not as a way of proving and flaunting superiority over my classmates, but for a host of other reasons. I believe these reasons were legitimate, and strike at the heart of my objections to the parent/teacher-as-facilitator model.

Of course there usually is a fugitive impulse to see how well one might do on a test in comparison with others. Who can resist the questions on TV game shows such as “Jeopardy,” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” You pass through a room where one of these shows is playing, and you have to stop to see if you know the answer to the next question – and if the contestant knows the answer.

One speaker at a recent homeschooling conference said that, in his experience raising both boys and girls, the boys in particular looked for occasions where they could compete, where they could jockey for position, be ranked, and test themselves against the capabilities of others. He noticed how this interest carries over for many men into an abiding interest in sports statistics. Who made the most RBI’s in 1952? Who has the highest batting average over all? So possibly not all occasions for testing oneself and for seeing where one fits in a ranking of “best” and “most” are uninvited.

However, that ratings impulse wasn’t a large part of my reason for wanting to do well on tests. I viewed tests more like fitted sheets on a bed. They gave me a sense of completion and accomplishment. I wanted something that would let me know when I’d sufficiently completed a certain step and could move on to the next step. Fitted sheets are fun, whereas the top sheets always leave you with a vaguely unsettled feeling. It always seems as if those open-ended sheets could be re-positioned to better effect. So tests are a way of rounding off a chapter of study.

More than that though, I felt that by exceling at tests, I demonstrated respect for the subject matter my teachers had chosen to dedicate their lives to, and I thereby demonstrated respect for the teachers themselves. It would have been contemptuous to blow off a geography test just because I felt somewhat more interested in studying caterpillar metamorphosis at the moment.

Of course, it was a matter of striking a balance. I didn’t want a school’s curriculum to monopolize all my time and dictate all my priorities. But neither did I feel it would be right for me to always put my immediate interests ahead of my teachers’ interests. It did me no harm to at least occasionally lend myself to the interests of others, rather than always insisting that they simply facilitate my interests.

However, my motives were larger than merely wanting to be dutifully polite and considerate of others. A college anthropology professor summed up my feelings beautifully in his introductory lecture. As ever, the controversy over evolution was simmering. A significant minority of students at the university were religious fundamentalists who thought it was wrong to believe that humans were in any way related to apes, or to believe that the history of our species extended back millions of years.

This professor flatly said that he wasn’t going to devote any class time to a consideration of religious doctrine though. He said he would only lecture on classic Darwinian evolution, and that’s what we would be tested on. He would expect us to answer those test questions accordingly. But he reminded us that being required to answer the test questions according to the information presented in his lectures did NOT mean that we had to agree with those answers. Answering “correctly” on the test would not enforce conformity or compliance within us. The test was merely designed to prompt us to listen. Whatever our private beliefs might continue to be, all this teacher asked was that we demonstrate we had listened.

That was it! That summed up the real value of tests. They ask that we listen. That’s the point that so many opponents of all tests miss. Those in the homeschooling movement tend to be especially critical of tests because they say they require students to “regurgitate” answers. But it isn’t regurgitating. It’s listening!

That’s a legitimate requirement or expectation to at least occasionally have of young people. It could only be a good thing to encourage a habit of listening. And that expectation shouldn’t be limited to young people. It would probably be a better world if adults knew that after every cocktail party, after every conference – they’d be tested on some of the more heartfelt things that people had said to them. Such a requirement wouldn’t force people to change their opinions; but it would encourage them to listen so that they’d be accessible to broadening their outlook. Again, I’m drawing a bit of a cartoonish caricature of my argument in order to make my point that being asked to listen doesn’t necessarily involve a curtailment of one’s own creativity or freedom.

This was why I couldn’t sympathize with my classmates when, after any test, many of them would predictably complain, “What did he expect us to be? Mind-readers?”

My private answer to that question was, “Yes! Exactly! If schools and teachers have any value at all – it’s to give us a chance to exercise our talents as mind-readers!”

I felt that was the ultimate reason for giving and taking tests - those tests personally written by the teacher or those which the teacher at least had a hand in writing. Taking tests and doing well on them could be a way of honoring a parent/teacher by listening to him, and more than that, by understanding him. If it’s worthwhile to walk through a nature preserve and become acquainted with the plants and animals there, then it’s equally worthwhile to walk into a classroom and become acquainted with the other people there, especially with the teacher who makes the classroom his or her natural preserve. If it’s good to commune with nature, it’s just as good to commune with human beings in a classroom. The challenge of the in-house test was to know the teacher or teachers in the department so thoroughly, that you knew their particular interests and priorities, and therefore could in fact predict what questions they might put on the test. Doing this sort of mind-reading wasn’t a matter of making oneself a teacher’s pet. It was a matter of demonstrating how earnestly one had gotten in touch with another person.

That’s why I didn’t mind lectures either. Lectures are generally another anathema for homeschoolers and in fact for most educational reformers. For a long time now, there’s been constant pressure for teachers to get away from lecturing and toward making their classrooms more interactive, more child-centered. But I only met one or two teachers who were able to pull off that high-sounding theory and make it worthwhile in practice. For the rest, their attempts at turning the classroom into a conversation open to all ended in a sort of cacophony of voices and the teachers soon drifted back into constrained and disguised forms of lecturing. But I had never minded out-and-out lectures in the first place. I relished them.

Again, because I had never bought into the teacher/parent-as facilitator model, I came to school to learn the person, with the presumption that each individual teacher would have something novel of their personality to present. I came to class as I would read a book or look at a painting. I saw it as an expression of the teacher’s personality. So I looked forward to these crafted presentations, just as I would look forward to opening the pages of a book.

Some teachers’ lectures veered in the direction of being sensational tell-all autobiographies. They dragged in all their obsessions, prejudices, and cruelties, and put them on display. Other teachers stuck more strictly to the subject matter at hand, and only gave more personal glimpses of themselves through tantalizing keyholes in the course material. One such college physics professor I knew stood back looking with a strange sort of sadness at the number pi he had written on the board, with its many places after the period and with the possibility of stretching that series of digits into infinity, without resolution. Looking at that number and its endless expandability, he said, more softly to himself than to us, “To me, the messiness of pi is the greatest proof that there is no God.”

I had always liked this teacher for his stoic reserve. After I caught that cast-off insight into his mind, I liked him even more. After that, I came with special eagerness to his lectures every morning. The following year, I learned that he had died during the summer of Hodgkin’s disease. They said he had been suffering from the disease for some time and knew, what was in those days, its fatal prognosis. Then I understood the sadness in his voice when he’d considered the messiness of pi.

So from kindergarten on all the way through the years of compulsory schooling - while I hated the confining concept of school, I liked lectures. They were the only chance I got to concertedly get to know people outside my family circle. Most other social venues were no good at all for that. Most social events just afforded a milling-around chance to catch snatches of insight into other people. At parties, I gleaned only fragments of opinion and personality heard through the background blare of TV and stereo. I never got a satisfactory sense of who another person was amid the myriad of distractions. I never felt I’d been allowed a concerted insight into the mind of another human being there.

So for all its oppressive elements, school provided the only entree I had into the minds of different people,, and that came mostly through the lectures the teachers gave and the way they presented the course material. That’s why I never had the complaint against the school curriculum and teacher lectures that many of my classmates and their parents had. I’d hear those complaints over and over again. So many parents would protest that since their Johnny was exceptionally bright, the class work just wasn’t challenging enough for him. (As is the case in Garrison Keillor’s mythic town of Lake Woebegone, it seemed that everyone’s children were always above average.) The parents (and Johnny himself) would protest that Johnny already knew “all that stuff.” He already knew the alphabet; he already knew long division. So he was being bored to the brink of juvenile delinquency by having to sit through it again. He was wasting his time unless the teachers moved him along to more advanced material.

That was never my problem because I never viewed school as existing for the purpose of teaching me subject matter. If I wanted to learn subject matter, I could go to the library and read a book. No, to the extent I attended school at all, I attended in order to learn people, not subjects. Hearing about long division for the third time would never have bored me, because I came to learn, not the subject matter, but the person presenting it. And every teacher had a special way of bringing the subject forward.

Would I have refused to listen to Tony Bennett sing a song because I’d already heard Barbra Streisand sing that song? Would it be a waste of time to hear Beethoven’s Fifth performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra just because I’d already heard a recording of the Symphony with Leonard Bernstein conducting? Would I have been right to dismiss a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers just because I’d seen a floral painting by Monet? Obviously not. The value of each such presentation lies in the unique interpretation given it by the different individual artists.

And so, the ideal parent/teacher is not a passive facilitator of a child’s interests. Just the opposite. The ideal parent/teacher is an artist - someone who can express himself vividly and humanely through his command of his medium – whether that medium is music, paint – or a presentation of the facts about long division. It’s someone who can expand the child beyond his own self-interest.

The movie No Country for Old Men ends with a sort of solemn soliloquy delivered by Tommy Lee Jones in the character of the local sheriff. Jones talks about a dream he had, a dream in which he and his father are riding together on horseback through a rough and cold country. After a little distance, the father rides on ahead through a pass. But Jones doesn’t feel abandoned. He knows his father is riding ahead to start a fire somewhere in the distance. He knows that when he catches up, the warmth and comfort and light of the fire will be there, waiting for him. And his father will be there, waiting for their togetherness.

Jones’ character was probably meant to project this dream as a metaphor for death. But I equally interpret it as an expression of that longing after someone who is the ideal parent/teacher. I was lucky enough to have parents like that. They were not faceless facilitators. They didn’t see their role as a scramble to accommodate and to cater to my every passing proclivity. Instead, they were individuals secure in their own knowledge and interests. They rode ahead and lit a fire – a fire that drew me forward – forward into an understanding of them and of the landscape we inhabited together.