“I write to understand as much as to be understood.” In Grand Rapids; where Covell Ave. crosses Lake Michigan Dr., there is a little strip mall where Big Apple Bagels brews really good coffee. When in GR, this is my office. Today I have business to do and people to see. I’ve finished my breakfast sandwich but still working on the hazelnut/decaf refill. It’s gray outside; rained last night but forecast is for cool and clear this afternoon. While I wait, I have time to reflect and ruminate on things that hang around in the back of my mind. It’s like noticing a felt tip marker or a pair of gloves that are out in plain sight on a table or counter top, needing to be put away. So I feel the need to put some things away.
I drop in on conversations that have passionate points of view but usually they involve friends where we share the same beliefs and it’s preaching to the choir rather than actually weighing and measuring. The other kind of encounters are infrequent and almost always unanticipated. Last night a friend opened the door to where we seldom go, to confrontation. He is ultra conservative and obviously, to no one’s surprise, I am not. He was upset with the alternative high school in the district where he works. Doug believes it’s all a waste of money and the students are molly-coddled to the extent, when they transition into the real world, they have been set up to fail. He advocates treating all children like adults. Treating troubled, often abused and neglected children the same way we treat experienced adults is his idea of ‘School of Hard Knocks.’ Conform, obey, make good decisions instead of bad ones or else you fail and you’re on your own. Everybody gets the same chance to do right or do wrong and it’s on them. That’s how the real world works.
I responded: All they have is their experience and that’s what they bring to school. If it hasn’t prepared them to recognize, much less make good decisions then they don’t have the same chance. I couldn’t speak to his school in particular but I have strong experience with inner-city and alternative schools. We treat kids different than we do adults; they get second and third chances to re-do and get better, 4th and 5th chances. Nobody fails intentionally at what they think they need. At the root of every personality is the need to pursue what is good, even if you don't know what that is. I reminded Doug, if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, then you keep getting what you’ve got. As an educator, if your students, any of them, fail because they either can’t or don’t flourish in the system, you can keep doing what you’ve been doing or you can change the way you approach the problem. That’s what educators do. Pounding square pegs into runs holes is not our job. Certainly you have to hold people accountable for their behavior and for the work but the old authoritarian, punish first-console later model is what didn’t work in the first place. Changing long entrenched behaviors is no easy task and expecting a dysfunctional teenager to remedy his own dysfunction is simply passing the buck. Lawyers do it all the time; blame the victim. If doing what they had been told to do had led them to succeed in the first place, they wouldn’t be failing now. If a child doesn’t trust or believe the system or the authority in place, why would they conform now? If it were easy, everyone would want to work in an alternative school.
Oncologists work with cancer patients, many of whom will die regardless. But they don’t tell patients to make better decisions, that they chose to abuse their bodies with alcohol or tobacco and now it’s come back on them. People who need help are treated differently, according to their need rather than some iron clad morality. Doug thought that medical parallels were not good analogies but I think they are. Behavior is after all regulated by a particular set of body functions. I went on to note that as a culture we don’t kick kids out into the work force simply because they don’t fit or they have failed in the traditional school setting. Our responsibility to provide education for all children, regardless of their complications is understood and accepted universally. For people who truly believe that there is one right way, that every other way to deliver education is wrong; blame the victim. He believes there is something inherent in everyone that recognizes right and wrong, good and bad. It’s the same right and wrong, good and bad that he learned and those who chose a wrong/bad path are simply guilty of their sins. I don’t know how to make them understand, much less change their mind.
Doug thinks attrition is natural like back in the old days when dropouts could work on the farm. They should suffer the burden of ignorance and flawed reality because they had their chance and failed. We are still friends. What we share is too important to poison with ideology. But the conversation made me think about defending a reasonable position, you’d better be able to reconnect the dots without struggling inside the argument. If it’s true that we are what we eat, then we are also the collective of our experience and more succinctly, the meaning we attribute to that mosaic. Nobody experiences the world exactly the same way as someone else. For me it all boils down to the feeling that the real world is either, Us versus Them or, there is no ‘Them.’ We’re all in this together.
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