Correction, and more thoughts...

Just a correction in my last comment to Geoff, concerning the "What is education?" post. Among other things, I said: "If we wait to remove motes from our own eyes, nobody would do anything, for we are never going to achieve a state of motelessness, any of us, individually or culturally." That "culturally" should of course have been "collectively." Sorry. It's been a long, arduous week! I was just visiting jdid's blog, and saw some comments on how much students spend, and how much one "stylist" thought they ought to spend, on clothes. I was heartened to see people agreeing that spending $300.00 on one outfit was ridiculous, and to know that uniforms were being suggested as a great idea. One of the ways that people get to enjoy what they are doing is by paying attention to it. Like, if you don't stop to look at the world, you won't see the good things that are there. If you don't stop to savour your food, you won't enjoy what you are eating. If everybody's preoccupied with what everybody else in class is wearing, it's really difficult to attract anyone's attention. Actually, some very forceful, animated, dramatic teachers may succeed, but not every teacher is going to be forceful, animated, and dramatic – nor should they have to be. In one of today's newspapers, there's a front page article on Islamic schools. The students wear uniforms, and as a matter of religious protocol, boys and girls sit on opposite sides of the classroom, with space (lots) left in between. I'd be interested in observing the dynamics in such a classroom. I went to a girls' school myself, and I know that there is some research that suggests that both boys and girls achieve more in single sex schools. These aren't single sex classrooms, just spaces in which the sexes are segregated. One featured headmaster pointed out that the girls were treated no less well than the boys. I'd be glad to hear from anyone who has taught or observed teaching in such a classroom. Also, I'd be happy to hear any thoughts on the virtues, or otherwise, of keeping the sexes entirely or partially separate – in school, I mean...

So what is education for?

What's education for? Fragano Ledgister, in a recent comment on this blog, says its central purposes are: “(a) the preparing of children and youth for adulthood; (b) their integration into society as active, thoughtful citizens.” Fair enough, but hardly news. He explains, however – and here's the nitty-gritty – that: “the model of education we're using sees 'adulthood' as equivalent to 'employment', and 'citizenship' as identical with 'obedience to constituted authority'.” In other words, as it is presently operated, the primary purpose of education is to ensure that we are employed and law-abiding. Child workers all over the world are both these things. Many women all over the world are both these things as well. Yet of that vast number of working, law-abiding international citizens, one group female, the other not yet of voting age, many, if not most, are illiterate and innumerate, and therefore not educated. So education has to offer us something more than a skill of some sort and the opportunity to cower inside our coffles. (Exaggerating, I know – but cut me some slack here.) It may help to distinguish between process and product, one being the teaching and learning thing that we say goes on in the classroom, and the other being what is achieved by that ongoing process, that is, the gain, the knowledge, the skills, the values and habits – those things reported on in the end-of-term report cards that we dreaded as children. What our conversation on this blog (thanks again, jdid, and Geoff and Fragano, and, indeed, Sir Vidia) highlights is how much these two are related. We seem to be missing the significance of that relatedness. Is school meant to be a pleasure? Geoff says, “Perish the thought!” jdid says he didn’t do History, because he feared that classes at school would lead him to hate a subject he loved. Fragano says he’s glad he met T.S. Eliot elsewhere. My contribution is that if I am a writer – and that’s how I’ve been employed for more than twenty years – it perhaps has less to do with school and more to do with the fact that my father read us a poem every night before we went to bed, and I took part in the All Island Speech and Drama Festival Competitions, and I encountered Louise Bennett’s poetry and her work on stage and on radio very early on in life, and I read lots and lots of story books. So I’m proposing two new purposes for education – in fact, I’m thinking of writing a book about them! Education is to make us happy: whatever we are learning should be a source of pleasure, joy, delight, while we are learning it. Teachers should be certified conjurers of that enjoyment. And education is to help us to become who we were meant to be – simple as that. Some thoughts on how we do these things in posts to come – when I’ll get sex in there, Geoff, I promise.

When the Best Golfer is Black...

When the best golfer is black, the best rapper is white, and a Nobel Laureate in Literature admits that he cannot appreciate poetry, it must be the end of the world. To quote the great man: "English prose was the object of my writing ambition, and such limited feeling as I HAVE NOW FOR THE POETRY came to me later, came through the practice of prose." The Laureate is of course Sir Vidia Naipaul (I use both the 'of course' and the 'Sir' advisedly) and so one should perhaps be on one's guard. There have been various commentators on "Caribbean Odyssey", Naipaul's article in The Guardian of August 25th. (BTW, Kwame, it's Francis Palgrave's GOLDEN TREASURY that PUT Naipaul OFF of his early love of "the rollicking children's verses in the junior reading books at school". Palgrave, a historian and lawyer, not a poet, edited the collection in 1861. It was limited to works by poets who were dead. There have been newer editions since.) It's a sad little piece, and not because of Naipaul's comments on Walcott, who hardly needs defending. I not only write poetry, including poetry for children, and publish poetry (Sandberry Press's Caribbean Poetry Series) but I'm a teacher passionate about how much poetry can do when it is taught well, and how much it can destroy when it is badly taught. QED. I am thinking of sending a copy of the SUNSONG anthologies to Sir Vidia, who imagines that he should be able to "manage" the "argument" of poetry. I fear Sir Vidia, that poems are like sex: abandon is the necessary condition. More on this anon.

Picture or no picture?

I am a fan of detective stories, crime novels, mysteries. Indeed, I enjoy various kinds of "genre fiction" and am at a loss to see why some critics (see Camille Paglia's interview with Margaret Wente in the GLOBE AND MAIL for interesting comment on the state of the art) consider these kinds of writing not quite literature. Ergo, magic realism is in, while speculative fiction is out. (If you don't know the difference, go check your theory book!) Happily, in the hands of writers like Nalo Hopkinson, those boundaries are already giving. I have just read, in pretty quick succession, THE DARLING by Russell Banks (real literature) and Philip Kerr's THE ONE FROM THE OTHER, a detective story, described, not as a Bernie Gunther mystery, Bernie being the protagonist, but as "A Bernie Gunther novel", Mr Kerr's editors being clearly familiar with the runnings. I'm not sure how Kerr, or, say, Mosley, or Simenon end up not being writers of plain old literature – not that they care, for any writers making a living out of scribbling can afford to thumb their noses at the critics. (Stephen King's book, ON WRITING is standard fare in many a writing course. QED) I find the approaches taken by Banks and Kerr by no means dissimilar. Both tales are set in recent historical time, Kerr's novel in Germany, Austria, Palestine and Egypt of the Second World War and the immediate post-war years, and Banks's in the radical underground of the 60s and 70s in the US, and in Liberia in the period of the civil war – "real times" of extraordinary violence. Both tales include characters who are historical figures, central characters who perpetrate the violence. Though Banks is telling Hannah Musgrave's story straightforwardly, so to speak, and Kerr is concerned to have us follow Bernie Gunther as he unravels sinister webs-within-webs, there is considerable converegence in their purposes. Identifying each writer's goal, and considering how successfully each story achieves that goal, and the extent to which these goals overlap, would make for interesting discussion – as literature, in my humble opinion.

Rights

Rights, rights! Who can regard them seriously? Take the right to life. I translate that as the right to food, shelter, clothes, clean water, clean air. No mention of health care or education – I'm staying with the basic five. How many of us have these things? And liberty? How many of us can freely choose our leaders? Our way of life? Move unhindered beyond our borders? To make it worse, eexercising our supposed rights can get mighty complicated. Are you, gentle reader, vigilant for your health, exercising your freedom to betake yourself to the supermarket so that you might purchase bottled water and avoid the deadly microbes in the stuff out of the tap, thus preserving that life to which you imagine you have a right? Well, turns out that the plastic bottle won't leach dioxins into the water as that alarmist e-mail has warned. That's an "urban legend". Rolf Halden of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Centre for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has, however, advised that "city water is much more highly regulated and monitored for quality... [while] Bottled water... can legally contain many things we would not tolerate in municipal drinking water." Stay with me on this. Freedom to choose the water we drink, and our right to clean water are tangled up here, and furthermore, intertwined with a host of other things, like simple literacy, and less simple access to cyberspace. The moral of the story is that lots of us, rich and poor, are drinking lousy water: some, because there are fewer and fewer clean springs, rivers and uncontaminated aquifers; some because where there is water, those whose business it is to see that it's potable fail to do that job (remember Walkerton?), and some because they go off hunting for clean water in a plastic bottle, which may just be a bad place. In sum, it seems to me that too few people throughout history have had the most basic rights, and so few people nowadays exercise even the palest resemblances of them, that I just don't believe. Relative privilege, though, is another matter, and that I'll tackle soon., if God spare life.

Land We Love

I went to Jamaica for my sister-in-law's funeral on the third of September – Election Day, as it happened. I probably made my booking before the date was announced – I can't remember at this point, for it came as a surprise when someone pointed out to me that we went to the polls on 3 September. (Affected by the same blissful unawareness, I made a booking to return to Canada on the 9th of September.) President Carter didn't come to watch the elections this time, nor the Commonwealth Secretariat. They were confident the polls would proceed peacefully and fairly, which, by and large they did. A few people died, but given the mayhem that might have obtained, things proceeded pretty well – except for the fact that only 60% of the electorate turned out to vote! Perhaps we should make it a criminal offense not to exercise one's franchise, as the Australians do. The low turnout is bad enough, but far worse was the silliness put forward by some as an excuse for their failure to vote. There were people who could not bring themselves to go to the polls because they were "born and bred in X party", and if they couldn't vote for that party, they weren't going to vote at all! It makes nonsense of the business of choosing public officials. Voting is a complex business, and in a country with many cultural groups and many languages, it's a challenge to ensure that everyone understands the issues. In a tiny country where people speak the same language, it is easier for them to have a grasp of things. Most candidates are well-known and priorities stare the voter in the face. Whatever the size of the state, there are many bases according to which one can make a choice. Does the candidate have a solid record of work in the constituency, whether as sitting member or caretaker? How good is their attendance record in Parliament? Their participation in debate? If there's a really good candidate running in my neck of the woods, regardless of party, that's a good reason to support the person. Unless there is an overriding big issue – a party soft on the environment, or inclined to wantonly commit the country's troops abroad, or proposing a significant increase in consumption or income tax. These bigger issues may override voting for the better candidate in my constituency, especially if the election looks to be a close one. But where one puts one's vote must be a reasoned business, done after due consideration of what is best for community, country and planet. If one's vote is a way of maintaining membership in a particular political group, then we are back in the business of reichs, and that is a dangerous business indeed.

Peace on Earth

I have to believe in God. Jah. Allah. Nyame Nankopon, according to the Ashanti. Yocahu Vagua Maorocoti, according to the Taino. The Supreme Being of the Hindus. The God of Gods of so many belief systems. Outside of such a Being, things fail to make sense to me. I believe that this Supreme Being is a Personal God, though I am painfully aware as I set this down that my conception of Divine Person does not begin to approach the nature of this God, this "I Am Who Am". I do know some things about I Am Who Am, however, and those things are well summed up in the Rastafarian greeting, "Peace and love". I Am Who Am is a God of Peace and a God of Love. I Am Who Am is not a God of War, nor a God of Hate. People who make war, who kill, maim and murder, and people who inculcate hate, do not do so in the name of, nor with the approval of I Am Who Am. Regardless of the circumstances. I Am Who Am is also a God of Power – not Anybody I, for one, would want to provoke. We were made by this Divinity so we could love one another, and help one another. Earth was made by this Divinity so that we might take care of it, and it might sustain us. None of us have any entitlements. Indeed, I don't believe we really have any rights. (More on this in due course.) What we have are relative privileges and concomitant responsibilities. And there is no way around any of this. As Martin Luther King Jr. so famously said, "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." The slaves sang it for us. The gospel singers and the folk singers have kept it firmly in our face. "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water but the fire next time." Read the news. Seems to me the fires have started. If we don't wake up soon, sell our SUVs, exercise our franchise (more on this soon as well) and choose leaders who know the value of Kyoto, then we all best get accustomed to the smell of roasting human flesh. I'm ending with As-Salāmu `Alaykum (السلام عليكم). It is an Arabic language greeting used by both Muslims and Christians and it means "Peace be upon you." I am reminded of what the angels sang at the birth of Jesus, Jesus being a prophet revered in Islam as well as the Messiah of Christian belief. They didn't sing, "All Hail the Messiah!" They didn't sing, "Behold the Son of God!" THIS is what they sang: "Peace on earth. Good will to human beings." Selah.