Sunday, August 13, 2006
When I was in the third grade...
...my best friend Louise and I would meet, at recess, underneath the fire escape at the back of The Laboratory School in Spearfish, SD, which we attended, and "practice laughing like adults". That's what we called what we were doing. We didn't do this every recess. As I think back, we probably did it only when one or both of us had recently suffered being reminded, by adults, that we weren't old enough to indulge in some fascinating activity, we were either too young to learn something we desperately wanted to learn or had to relearn something we already knew because the skill was being taught, yet again, in class and, the gods know, it's much easier for teachers to hold back the racer and ignore the lagger to the purpose of standardizing the class.
It was this last directive that was usually the source of our frustration over which we bonded. Louise and I had been treated, in other states, to second grade classes organized around accelerated learning. We were both well ahead of our grades in reading, spelling and the mechanics of writing (among other subjects). Both of us were writing cursively with pens as we entered the third grade. As luck would have it, we also sat next to each other. A few days into the third grade Miss Opal passed out cursive writing handbooks. Louise and I noticed, as we scanned through the workbooks, that the other was performing the third grade equivalent of shaking her head.
A mistake had been made, I realized. Someone hadn't 'read' us well enough. No matter; easily fixed. I raised my hand and calmly informed Miss Opal that I didn't need this workbook because I already knew how to write cursively and so did Louise. We only needed ball point pens so we could put this skill to the use of learning something else. My effort was completely innocent. I wasn't offended that Miss Opal didn't know this about us. I expected she would be thrilled to learn that we were prepared to go on to something more difficult.
"Imagine [Louise's and my unpleasant] surprise" when Miss Opal, matching my calm demeanor, told us that we were to open our workbooks and follow along with the rest of the class, that "it won't hurt [us]".
I didn't meant to argue. I thought Miss Opal, being very old, from a third grade standpoint, hadn't heard me well. I repeated myself a little louder. In order to underline the point (in a decidedly third grade misunderstanding of how to make points), I added that I had learned, in the second grade, how to spell the names of all the states and capitals. I spelled "Alaska" (the newest state, at that time) and "Pennsylvania" (which I considered to be one of the more difficult state names), figuring this, while not directly related to cursive writing, would convince Miss Opal. Louise nodded her head eagerly in support.
In response, Miss Opal sent Miss Heart, our class teaching intern whom everyone adored, over to "guide" us through accepting the workbooks and beginning what Louise and I considered time wasting exercises. This did the trick. Louise and I would willingly have drunk from a bottle and worn diapers, if these promised direct attention from Miss Heart.
Still, we both understood that something was wrong and the "wrong something" had to do with the fact that we weren't adults and thus were subject to being herded rather than individually recognized and appropriately encouraged (at that time we had no idea that adults usually herd each other, as well as everyone else). That was the day we met under the fire escape and first practiced Laughing Like Adults.
I've been thinking of this instance while considering Dr. Thomas' insistence, in What Are Old People For?, that childhood is primarily "BEING-doing" and, as such, should be protected from society's current mania for over-scheduling and over accessorizing childhood into a mini-adulthood. My recollection of childhood tells me that adults don't have to work hard to co-opt children into imitating adulthood. A child's inherent job is to become an adult. All children, despite anxious periods when one discovers some adult trait that doesn't make sense or appears cruel, are eager to mimic adults until they are finally pronounced adult.
The BEING-doing of childhood that Dr. Thomas extols as primary and laments as disappearing is, in fact, a recent phenomenon. History tells us that children used to be considered family and community employees, pushed to enter the work of survival in the ways of adults as soon as they were capable, sometimes before. Tradition tells us that children have been considered adult upon entering puberty. The idyllic BEING of childhood has probably been supported only through a mere four or five generations, mine being one of the last. It is interesting, too, to contemplate that in 1974 John Holt, in Escape from Childhood was recognizing the fledgling adult status of childhood as an argument against what he considered society's over protection of childhood at that time and was advocating pretty much the opposite of what Dr. Thomas now advocates, against as much resistance as Dr. Thomas now perceives himself to be struggling in favor of a different elderhood.
As well, my experience as an adult tells me that adulthood involves quite a bit of BEING, especially if one is DOING something for which one has an affinity. Abraham Maslow, in fact, glorified BEING as the ultimate state of adult creativity, self-actualization, which further led to the idea of the flow state.
My final understanding is that while I was BEING a child I was also DOING some of the most important work of my life: I was aspiring (sometimes reluctantly, it's true, but still aspiring) to take my place in what I perceived to be "the real world", the world of adults. You don't have to co-opt children into adulthood. We are created to co-opt ourselves and will gratefully take advantage of any help we can get.
Dr. Thomas' other revered era of BEING-doing is elderhood. He laments as do I, often enough, that because we, the products of industrialized society, have made it a practice for as long as we can remember to marginalize old age, none of us really wants to be the kind of old we define as useless and marginal, thus, we either continue to chase after adulthood long after it's 'appropriate' or confront our marginalization, over which we have little power, with bad humor, agitation and longing.
Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. This is the key, Dr. Thomas figures, to straightening out the malaise of industrialized civilization. The catch is, for all humanity's hallmark talents, acceptance has never been one of them. If we are forced to accommodate strafing conditions, once we get past the fear engendered by being bullied and/or killed into submission, we rebel, individually or en masse, overtly, as did Patrick Henry and as do generation after generation of communities pressed into slavery, or slyly, as did Galileo Galilei and Aristophanes. We are little obliged, as humans, to accept anything less that what we perceive to be "better". We are, as well, amazingly short sighted as to the definition of what is "better".
This shouldn't surprise anyone. It is our blanket lack of acceptance as a species that has allowed us to imagine and build ever changing conceptualizations of what it is to exist; of BEING and DOING. It is this very lack that spurs Dr. Thomas on as he reimagines elderhood. And, it is within the Province of Non-acceptance that we learn to deplore and criticize 'the way we're doing it now' and imagine 'better ways to do it'.
Here's the thing: Sometime when I was a teenager and a vociferous reader of everything on which I could lay my hands, I figured out that life is not a question with a correct answer. It's not a test that begs a perfect score. It's an experiment. Even evolution, to which we have appended the doctrine of survival of the fittest, upon closer examination appears to be following a shockingly different doctrine, considering that it manages to create species 99.9% of which become, yes, co-opted and extinguished by another conceptualization. If you look at it from the perspective of "yes" or "no", Evolution appears to favor "no, not quite" over "yes, exactly".
I agree that we need to understand elderhood from a perspective that is less likely to marginalize us in old age, assuming that we give equal weight to what I perceive as a preference for solitude as one journeys through Ancienthood. I agree that reimagining childhood allows us the promise of restructuring adulthood so that living through elderhood is not akin to being incarcerated. I can't agree, though, that the best way to pursue these endeavors is to demonize our present situation. While struggling with the incompetence of childhood, children will always long for adulthood. While reveling in the competence of adulthood, adults will always hope for an active, rather than a static, elderhood. Thus, even as we work tirelessly to carve what we consider to be a prime state of elderhood, each of us will always be surprised, despite our fears and our desires, by our own elderhood, if we should attain it. The child is the parent to the adult. The adult is the parent to the elder. The elder is the parent to...well, that's the problem. Unless we are an elder, we don't know what elders parent and, if we aren't an elder, we only barely believe what elders tell us. It is likely, in fact, that elders, themselves, aren't aware of what it is they parent. Considering the extraordinary diversity of elderhood and the complete mystery of deathhood, perhaps an unimagineable number of "children", death states, that is, are being parented by an unimaginable number of elders. We do know, though, that's almost impossible to believe in something about which one knows or has imagined so little. Which boards us onto another flight of imagination, and off takes human existence, again...
In the meantime, if we breathe fire while attempting to build yet a better bridge to where we think we want to be, we will likely incinerate not only the bank upon which we stand but our fledgling bridge, as well, and never make it to the opposite shore. Then, we will never experience what it is to laugh like an Ancient One.
More thoughts on more of Dr. Thomas' propositions...
....later.
It was this last directive that was usually the source of our frustration over which we bonded. Louise and I had been treated, in other states, to second grade classes organized around accelerated learning. We were both well ahead of our grades in reading, spelling and the mechanics of writing (among other subjects). Both of us were writing cursively with pens as we entered the third grade. As luck would have it, we also sat next to each other. A few days into the third grade Miss Opal passed out cursive writing handbooks. Louise and I noticed, as we scanned through the workbooks, that the other was performing the third grade equivalent of shaking her head.
A mistake had been made, I realized. Someone hadn't 'read' us well enough. No matter; easily fixed. I raised my hand and calmly informed Miss Opal that I didn't need this workbook because I already knew how to write cursively and so did Louise. We only needed ball point pens so we could put this skill to the use of learning something else. My effort was completely innocent. I wasn't offended that Miss Opal didn't know this about us. I expected she would be thrilled to learn that we were prepared to go on to something more difficult.
"Imagine [Louise's and my unpleasant] surprise" when Miss Opal, matching my calm demeanor, told us that we were to open our workbooks and follow along with the rest of the class, that "it won't hurt [us]".
I didn't meant to argue. I thought Miss Opal, being very old, from a third grade standpoint, hadn't heard me well. I repeated myself a little louder. In order to underline the point (in a decidedly third grade misunderstanding of how to make points), I added that I had learned, in the second grade, how to spell the names of all the states and capitals. I spelled "Alaska" (the newest state, at that time) and "Pennsylvania" (which I considered to be one of the more difficult state names), figuring this, while not directly related to cursive writing, would convince Miss Opal. Louise nodded her head eagerly in support.
In response, Miss Opal sent Miss Heart, our class teaching intern whom everyone adored, over to "guide" us through accepting the workbooks and beginning what Louise and I considered time wasting exercises. This did the trick. Louise and I would willingly have drunk from a bottle and worn diapers, if these promised direct attention from Miss Heart.
Still, we both understood that something was wrong and the "wrong something" had to do with the fact that we weren't adults and thus were subject to being herded rather than individually recognized and appropriately encouraged (at that time we had no idea that adults usually herd each other, as well as everyone else). That was the day we met under the fire escape and first practiced Laughing Like Adults.
I've been thinking of this instance while considering Dr. Thomas' insistence, in What Are Old People For?, that childhood is primarily "BEING-doing" and, as such, should be protected from society's current mania for over-scheduling and over accessorizing childhood into a mini-adulthood. My recollection of childhood tells me that adults don't have to work hard to co-opt children into imitating adulthood. A child's inherent job is to become an adult. All children, despite anxious periods when one discovers some adult trait that doesn't make sense or appears cruel, are eager to mimic adults until they are finally pronounced adult.
The BEING-doing of childhood that Dr. Thomas extols as primary and laments as disappearing is, in fact, a recent phenomenon. History tells us that children used to be considered family and community employees, pushed to enter the work of survival in the ways of adults as soon as they were capable, sometimes before. Tradition tells us that children have been considered adult upon entering puberty. The idyllic BEING of childhood has probably been supported only through a mere four or five generations, mine being one of the last. It is interesting, too, to contemplate that in 1974 John Holt, in Escape from Childhood was recognizing the fledgling adult status of childhood as an argument against what he considered society's over protection of childhood at that time and was advocating pretty much the opposite of what Dr. Thomas now advocates, against as much resistance as Dr. Thomas now perceives himself to be struggling in favor of a different elderhood.
As well, my experience as an adult tells me that adulthood involves quite a bit of BEING, especially if one is DOING something for which one has an affinity. Abraham Maslow, in fact, glorified BEING as the ultimate state of adult creativity, self-actualization, which further led to the idea of the flow state.
My final understanding is that while I was BEING a child I was also DOING some of the most important work of my life: I was aspiring (sometimes reluctantly, it's true, but still aspiring) to take my place in what I perceived to be "the real world", the world of adults. You don't have to co-opt children into adulthood. We are created to co-opt ourselves and will gratefully take advantage of any help we can get.
Dr. Thomas' other revered era of BEING-doing is elderhood. He laments as do I, often enough, that because we, the products of industrialized society, have made it a practice for as long as we can remember to marginalize old age, none of us really wants to be the kind of old we define as useless and marginal, thus, we either continue to chase after adulthood long after it's 'appropriate' or confront our marginalization, over which we have little power, with bad humor, agitation and longing.
Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance. This is the key, Dr. Thomas figures, to straightening out the malaise of industrialized civilization. The catch is, for all humanity's hallmark talents, acceptance has never been one of them. If we are forced to accommodate strafing conditions, once we get past the fear engendered by being bullied and/or killed into submission, we rebel, individually or en masse, overtly, as did Patrick Henry and as do generation after generation of communities pressed into slavery, or slyly, as did Galileo Galilei and Aristophanes. We are little obliged, as humans, to accept anything less that what we perceive to be "better". We are, as well, amazingly short sighted as to the definition of what is "better".
This shouldn't surprise anyone. It is our blanket lack of acceptance as a species that has allowed us to imagine and build ever changing conceptualizations of what it is to exist; of BEING and DOING. It is this very lack that spurs Dr. Thomas on as he reimagines elderhood. And, it is within the Province of Non-acceptance that we learn to deplore and criticize 'the way we're doing it now' and imagine 'better ways to do it'.
Here's the thing: Sometime when I was a teenager and a vociferous reader of everything on which I could lay my hands, I figured out that life is not a question with a correct answer. It's not a test that begs a perfect score. It's an experiment. Even evolution, to which we have appended the doctrine of survival of the fittest, upon closer examination appears to be following a shockingly different doctrine, considering that it manages to create species 99.9% of which become, yes, co-opted and extinguished by another conceptualization. If you look at it from the perspective of "yes" or "no", Evolution appears to favor "no, not quite" over "yes, exactly".
I agree that we need to understand elderhood from a perspective that is less likely to marginalize us in old age, assuming that we give equal weight to what I perceive as a preference for solitude as one journeys through Ancienthood. I agree that reimagining childhood allows us the promise of restructuring adulthood so that living through elderhood is not akin to being incarcerated. I can't agree, though, that the best way to pursue these endeavors is to demonize our present situation. While struggling with the incompetence of childhood, children will always long for adulthood. While reveling in the competence of adulthood, adults will always hope for an active, rather than a static, elderhood. Thus, even as we work tirelessly to carve what we consider to be a prime state of elderhood, each of us will always be surprised, despite our fears and our desires, by our own elderhood, if we should attain it. The child is the parent to the adult. The adult is the parent to the elder. The elder is the parent to...well, that's the problem. Unless we are an elder, we don't know what elders parent and, if we aren't an elder, we only barely believe what elders tell us. It is likely, in fact, that elders, themselves, aren't aware of what it is they parent. Considering the extraordinary diversity of elderhood and the complete mystery of deathhood, perhaps an unimagineable number of "children", death states, that is, are being parented by an unimaginable number of elders. We do know, though, that's almost impossible to believe in something about which one knows or has imagined so little. Which boards us onto another flight of imagination, and off takes human existence, again...
In the meantime, if we breathe fire while attempting to build yet a better bridge to where we think we want to be, we will likely incinerate not only the bank upon which we stand but our fledgling bridge, as well, and never make it to the opposite shore. Then, we will never experience what it is to laugh like an Ancient One.
More thoughts on more of Dr. Thomas' propositions...
....later.
