Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Sending Kids to War

I just talked to a co-worker of mine about the current teacher's union in Japan.

After World War II, the country was so traumatized by the poverty and despair that had gripped the nation that the forced propagandizing of students by teachers, one of the main catalysts that brought about violent Japanese nationalism, was banned. The current motto of the teacher's union today translates to, "Never again will we teach our children to go off to war."

Has America not lost enough of its citizens yet to assume this mentality? Granted, we don't promote the same type of nationalism in schools, but why haven't our politicians stepped up and started preaching this message? What is the death/pain threshold that must be crossed before a country changes its course of action in regards to its foreign policy?

If, as history suggests, a country's future survival is partly related to its ability to reflect on its behavior, its ability to change when its current methods of operation fail, America is facing a dismal future.

Fresh to Death

left: Street art, Kyoto

Sorry, I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy.

Today I had my kiddies write on the following prompt:

Imagine you are writing a letter that will be sent into outer space. Your letter must introduce Earth to aliens (aliens speak English, of course). What will you say?

As we walked to class, I asked my Japanese co-worker how to say "creative writing" in Japanese. She said, "Uhhhh, I don't know. I don't think there is a word for that."

After I explained to the class what creative writing is, I took a survey. I said, "Raise your hand if you have ever done any creative writing for school before."

Not a single hand went up. 30 kids. No hands.

Until we ask them to write to aliens, to dream about frog conversations ribbited during downpours, to flesh out the words creaked and ground out during the marital break-up of an iceberg and an ice sheet, to write conversations they'll have with their future selves, and to flirt with Shakespeare in a love note that will never be read by the master himself, we can't expect them to do anything other than what's already been done. We can't expect them to be fresh, to cut a path from the towering elephant grass. We can't hope as much.

left: Kids and Wonder in Kyoto

Making your kids fresh to death. That should be the motto of every school.

I'd love to slaughter the motherfucker who invented standardized testing. Those tests have soiled the soil. Our plants are reaching not toward the sun and sky, but toward the nearest bank, safe job, or car dealership. We've managed to fuck up education to a point in which kids worry about points and acceptance instead of their true intellectual worth. Passing smoothly, ripple-free, through the educational seas as a fool is valued over making waves and nearly drowning as a creative individual.

I think I know why creativity is down-played in schools here and everywhere else:

If you're creative, you're harder to grade.

If you're creative, you're more likely to ask "Why" questions, as creativity is intrinsically linked to curiosity.

If you're a creative kid, you don't buy as much shit as an adult, and you don't buy the Buy-shit-or-else life cycle pitch made by societies far and wide. It's all too silly and simple if you're creative because buying lots of useless shit requires a deficiency in critical thinking, that stubborn type of questioning stabilized by the buttresses of creative problem solving, curious doubting.

Creative people are dangerous in their ability to find boredom and blahhhness in the things non-creative people love and find interesting.

Creative people smell bullshit the second it leaves the asshole of government.

Creative people are the cowlicks of society that refuse to be greased down by the hand of banality.

If we ain't fresh to death, we ain't.