It was a beautifully sunny April day, and most of the seniors in my humanities seminar were giving our discussion of Plato’s Crito no love, preferring instead to fixate on the bucolic scene outside. I was losing them; senioritis was trumping Socrates. Time for a Hail Mary.
“You know, kids, Socrates died for what you’re looking at right now,” I said.
Silence and a great deal of confused blinking as heads turned toward me from the window. Then one student from the back of the class perked up. “He died for the traffic on Peoria?” Some snarky congratulatory laughter ensued.
“Actually, Beavis,” I smiled, “you’re pretty close. He died for the orderly flow of traffic that we take for granted every day. He died for the completely orderly boring ordinariness you see out there. He died for all the chaos and mayhem you don’t see happening out there.”
More silence and blinking. I appeared to be serious. What to do? Ah, geez, he wants us to think. Then, a tentative squeak from the brilliant but excruciatingly uncertain girl in the front row:
“You mean, like, the law?”
“No, I don’t mean like the law, I mean precisely the law. I mean the law that we all enjoy every day of our lives without realizing how precious it is, and how precious it was to Socrates even though it was perverted to falsely accuse, convict, and sentence him to death. Now, who hates the cops? Let’s see those hands!”
The class discussion that followed was a deep and spirited exploration of law and why Socrates valued it more than his own life. Plus, I was able to convince a few of the males that life without the cops would be inestimably worse than with them. Debate was still raging after the bell . . . after the bell! With seniors . . . three weeks from graduation!
Sadly, discussions like this will never happen again at my high school. No it’s not the students: They’re always anxious to discuss ideas, given a framework that engages them. It’s the class itself: It’s gone, eliminated along with several other senior electives, a victim of the test-mania gripping education. You see, seniors don’t take any tests that will be part of a school’s rating; the lower classes do. So, the thinking goes, if you narrow the senior electives, then that will mean more teachers available for the years when students are tested, which will mean smaller classes and thus higher test scores. I guess that’s the thinking. If so, maybe we need to start a class in thinking — for administrators.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against testing, especially if it improves the teaching and learning of the foundation skills necessary for higher levels of comprehension, analysis and expression. But to me, that seems to beg the question: What good are those skills as an end in themselves, as a score to be cheered and paraded, if students stop there, thinking themselves educated?
Isn’t that the message we send if we winnow curricula in favor of classes that can be quantified in the form of test scores?
Maybe you’re thinking I’m a snob, an elitist. I hope so. As much as I admire competence, I prefer elitism, a word that has been subject recently to hideous pejoration by, of course, the proudly non-elite. Grisham may be great for a weekend, but Hemingway lasts a lifetime. And even if our students aren’t going to be elite writers or philosophers, they can gain immeasurably by studying them. What can they learn? Higher-level skills such as critical, creative, and global thinking, not to mention that old-fashioned virtue currently being buried under the midden of standardized tests: wisdom. To Socrates, wisdom began in wonder, a state of mind CSAPs and their ilk neither encourage nor measure.
So, in our haste to race to the top leaving no child behind, let’s also consider that, as W.B. Yeats put it, “Education is not the filling of a pail; it is the lighting of a fire.” The educational zeitgeist notwithstanding, we need to keep that fire alive.
Mark Moe (brktrt_80231@yahoo.com) is a former English teacher.
