Clinging to Sanity

I’m writing because I have to, fully aware that no one will read it, and that the words will hardly comfort me. Writing is held to be therapeutic, but at this point it feels neurotic.

 

The idea was simple: my grandmother had written, sometime in the 1970’s, an account of her (our / my) family. She touched on the subject of the Salem Witch Trials, spoke of her ardent-abolitionist mother and grandmother, told the story of her uncle’s death in a Civil War prison and of how her grandfather had to retrieve the body. The same grandfather “deserted” the family to find gold in a place and a time where there didn’t seem to be much gold—or indeed any gold—at all. She wrote Me and Mine in the 70's, to tell us who we are and who we had been. My job, writing in the last year, has been to update the story--as we lived through the most traumatic upheavals in American history.

 

In her childhood, my grandmother had lived with “Prince,” the horse that pulled the family carriage. In the last years of her life, she watched as men stepped foot on the moon for the first time. She had lived, she felt, through remarkable times.

 

I was with her, the night we watched that moon landing. It was astonishing to her, as it was to me, and we both went outside, during a commercial break, and gazed up at the moon. There were guys up there—Americans, of course.

 

Our guys.

 

She had seen the March on Washington and had heard the crowds singing, “We Shall Overcome.” She had seen women first get the vote and then become lawmakers, judges, doctors. She had seen (and been horrified by) the “sexual revolution,” of the sixties. She marveled at how vastly her country had changed.

 

Had it?

 

If she were to see it, today—what would she see?

 

Worse—what would I say to her, in the afterlife? 

 

How would I account for myself? She would be horrified, I think, to know that I was gay (her word would be “homosexual.”) Even worse, I suspect, that I had spent years of my life as a drunk—and my ten years of subsequent sobriety would count for something, but by no means get me off the hook.  

 

And how would I account for what had happened to her country—about which she was deeply proud, in a matter-of-fact way. She exemplified American Exceptionalism—the belief that we were special because we were sensible, hardworking, and fulfilling inevitably God’s plan for us. God’s plan for us was to be the best nation on earth and in history—and thus a beacon for all the rest of the beleaguered world.

 

I would have to tell her that her fellow citizens, nowadays, are the fattest, most addicted, least educated people on earth.

 

She learned Latin in High School, and assumed that translating ten lines of Virgil daily would always be a part of every student’s life. Now, her great grand-daughter (my niece) has no idea what the perfect tenses are. No big deal—except that my niece’s job is to train other people to be English teachers. The fact that my niece knows no grammar bothers no one but me.

 

Nobody knows much of anything, really, but presumably they feel good about themselves, which is the point of modern education. 

 

Am I being unfair?

 

Probably, but the underlying assumption about education of my grandmother’s generation was that children are savages, though correctible. A child’s mind was to be filled up as much and as quickly with information and ways of thinking that would serve them and the society around them for the rest of their lives. Of course Virgil would be forgotten—that wasn’t the point. Running a 10 KM race is just as pointless—if all you wanted was to go from one point to another. The race challenges the mind, spirit, and body of the runner. Virgil does just the same.

 

My son had no idea who won the Civil War, until I met him and told him. Even worse, he voted for Trump, whom everyone in my grandmother’s generation would have known was fit only for an orange jumpsuit and heavily supervised settings. The guy lost an election and started an insurrection—of course he should be behind bars.

 

How did he ever get there in the first place?

 

What in the world have our schools been doing?

 

I am a product of the “stuff the savage’s mind full of information until it bursts” method of education. I cannot tell you, now, what the five principal exports of Brazil are, or when Simón Bolívar’s date of birth is. I am as ignorant of this stuff as is my son or my niece—and what possible benefit was it to have learned it all up and forgotten it after the test?

 

I can Google, and I do.

 

But at times I wonder if I am one of the few people left who can use Google right. It’s a tool, and a powerful tool. My telephone can recite Virgil in Latin, then translate it into English, if I like, or Swahili, if needed. Google can answer every question, but not the meta-questions:

 

1.    What do I know?

2.    What do I need to know?

3.    Why do I think I need to know it?

4.    What source can I trust, and why have I decided to trust it?

5.    What are my biases?

6.    What do I not know, and is it important?

 

To which might be added….

 

7.    Who’s Virgil, anyway? 

 

My darkest suspicion has been that school’s have gone from fact-stuffing factories to instruments of social change and validation of the students’ lifestyle and personal experience. My niece has no knowledge of the pluperfect, but she is an expert and finding and exposing students to text that will illuminate and delineate the student’s world and views of life. When she hears “Black English,” she hears this, since I have now Googled “Black English…..”

 

  

 

Yeah?

 

My grandmother heard double negatives, incorrect usage of archaic words, jumbled tenses, prepositions stranded at the end of sentences, and split infinitives. All of which might be really appropriate, in a brawl following a night of pubs and drinking. But definitely not the language you want to employ, if you have to argue in front of the Supreme Court, the next day.

 

My grandmother, as well, would have been horrified at the idea of “home schooling,” since she would have seen the split it inevitably would produce that the rest of us could not. Her “intrusive” method of education was to banish superstition (the wrong sort) and to impose an accepted version of reality. We were products of an assembly line, she might freely have admitted. But by the time we had been pushed off the assembly line and deposited at graduation, we had the same information, the same beliefs, the same ways of thinking and seeing the world as everyone else. We had been ”prepared” for life, not validated.

 

We made value judgments that very easily could descend to prejudice. Pop music was fine for the beach or the car—serious people listened to Bach and Mozart. Doctors were gods, and if they put drops of silver nitrate into your newborn’s eyes—well, they must know what they’re doing. Politicians lied if they could, but it was unthinkable for them to swear in public.

 

Things have gone to hell in that handbasket, I would have to tell my grandmother. American education is now the joke of the world.

 

And that’s just the beginning!