I have not written for a long time now, but not because I am not interested, I think about how to educate in a sustainable manner all the time, but because I have been thinking. Oh no! say those who know me. Oh no! What I have been thinking about is: becoming what others may term a bitch. We cannot coddle our students any more if we really want them to succeed in their lives, and when I say success it is not all money, though they need to be self-sufficient, but in ways that have become out of fashion - to care, to seek the best on a personal level.
When did being humane go out of fashion? I have my guesses, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is that this has happened. We have lost touch with what makes us tick, with our caring. Working to awaken that which makes it worthwhile to live. Take for example getting a job and what it has turned into. It has become an impersonal procedure where people in human resources (so now humans are no more than another commodity - a resource that we exploit just like the Earth's resources)take your resume, assign you a number and then match you (or not) to a matrix that has nothing to do with WHO YOU ARE!!! Impersonal.
Getting a job should not be about what is on a piece of paper, but about reading the landscape, the human landscape AND that piece of paper we call a resume or CV. It is acting on all levels to the best of our abilities. It is also about thinking and then acting. We don't teach about thinking any more, but about how to follow rules and regulations that are there because we have lost our common sense of ethics, our interior voices that tell us what is right and wrong. We see others getting something for nothing, and feel we deserve ours too. That it is wrong on all levels gets lost in the mix. We try at amend the egregious actions of the immoral by making rules and regulations that do not apply to them (they will use them or the loopholes to further the deceit). We have established so much bureaucracy and have so little honesty and trust that those who are honest, those who act with integrity, are lost in the maze (here I am talking about me and many others who I have met who give all with little or no recognition, but instead people asking even more from them).
And so I am becoming a bitch to my students. Well, that might be what they call me, I already hear that I ask too much from them, but that has only just begun. IF THEY WANT TO COMPETE IN WHAT HAS BECOME A VERY SLIPPERY AND HIGH TENSION JOB MARKET THEY MUST GIVE THEIR BEST!!! And if they are to give their best they must learn how to do that now. Coddling our students by giving them grades to make them feel good is not doing them any favors.
So last semester I began to follow the Henry Kissinger way of instilling the best work of your life. Whether he did this or not, I have no idea, but I hope he did. We need this story now more than ever. We need to have students push so hard that when they get a job they think!!! They innovate, they are curious about getting something done in a more efficient (and humanizing) manner. They need to be able to fail, get up and go at it again with the knowledge they learned from the failure. THIS IS WHAT SCHOOL IS FOR! Here is the Kissinger story:
Dr. Henry Kissinger was the U.S. Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon. He was involved in all the high-level decisions regarding the Vietnam War. Well, after Nixon resigned the Presidency in disgrace, Kissinger taught some Political Science courses at a highly-respected Washington university.
In one of those courses, he assigned a major term paper. On the due date, one woman turned in her term paper, and then made an appointment to discuss it with her professor a week later, as was the custom at that university. At the appointed time, she went to Dr. Kissinger's office and knocked. He opened the door, but, instead of asking her in, he stood in the doorway, holding her term paper.
"Is this the best you can do?", he asked the astonished student.
She apologized profusely, explaining that a number of her other assignments had taken much of her time, and that, in fact, she had not done her best job on the term paper.
Dr. Kissinger offered her the opportunity to redo the assignment, and she gratefully accepted it. She worked on it for several days more and then resubmitted it, making another appointment to meet with her professor the following week.
Once again, her monotone mentor greeted her at his office door, holding her redone assignment in his hand.
"Are you sure this is the best you can do?"
And once again, the student explained that, though she had spent an entire week reworking her term paper, there were a couple of references that she hadn't read, a couple of avenues she hadn't explored, and a couple of theories she hadn't expounded on as much as she could have.
Again, he offered her the opportunity to redo the assignment, and again she gratefully accepted it. Again, she worked on it for several more days and then resubmitted it, making a third appointment to meet with her professor the following week.
You guessed it -- for the third time, the sullen sophisticate greeted her at his office door, holding her term paper in his hand.
"Are you absolutely sure this is the best you can do?"
This time, she explained to him that she had lived and breathed her term paper for the past month; that she had lost sleep over it, missed meals while she worked on it, and she was confident that there wasn't a reference, a theory, or an avenue that she hadn't explored, described, and analyzed. She concluded by telling him that she couldn't possibly do a better job on it if she had a year to work on it.
Dr. Kissinger's response was brief.
"Very well. Now I will read it."
The bitch is born. What use am I if I let the students off? Their boss will not, he/she will lay them off. Such is the beginning to sustainable education.
