Category Archives: Essays

November 5, 2011 · 9:04 am

Midas had no Regrets on the Day When Poetry and Family Died

by Thomas Davis

The unemployment rate during this time of the Great Recession is haltingly going downward. It is acting like a rusted pair of gears that have been unused for years, but now someone has decided to make them do their old work again. They turn, but so slowly they barely seem to move. A little oil might help the economy’s gears, but that, coagulated in the veins of political discourse, seems to be in short supply. Republicans are into magical thinking: Motivate the rich, and they will invest the new money they get, even though they are not investing the piles they have piled up now, and the gears will not be only oiled, but greased. They seem to be incapable of understanding that money is not the central reason for living and therefore not the Great Motivator they would make it seem.

Of course, maybe they have not learned what Midas learned. If all you care about is gold you run the risk of turning into a Midas-shaped gold bar. Maybe they are so tuned into the vibrations of the wealthy’s economic machinery that they have forgotten to feel how sharp wind is as snow pelts out of the dark skies of early morning. Maybe they can no longer see the beauty in a mountain chickadee braving the storm for the last seeds left in bird feeders in the pinyon tree outside the kitchen window. Eyes made of gold have trouble seeing out of their golden pupils.

The Democrats are a little better. They seem to understand that when people buy and use the goods and services of commerce, the gears work a little better, but they seem caught in a spider’s web of Republican actions and words and their own dreams of golden sunrises pouring lucre in their pockets from the Great Wealthy. Even Obama, who I once thought was the Great Hope, does not seem to be able to maneuver even modest amounts of oil onto the gears. You can sense he is trying when the great Golden Powers That Be are not yanking his chain toward the magical thinking they espouse, but the gears are moving slowly.

As I sit my cluttered home office in Continental Divide, New Mexico touching my keyboard’s keys, I am haunted by so many things I can hardly visualize them. They flit in and out of existence as if thoughts are more miasma than words.

If I am motivated by anything, it is poetry: The words, thoughts, visualization of a graceful pinyon growing out of a crack in a sandstone slope so steep it is almost a cliff, ideas, symbols and metaphors echoing back into the history of human writing and thought, deepness of my love for Ethel, my wife for going-on 44 years. To sit down and write a sonnet is a joy that has always, even in grief’s entrails, made life worth living. But, of course, poetry is not enough. Not really.

Family, wives, sons, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons, all the relationships that make us who we are as humans, is more important than poetry, or the words that sound endlessly in our human heads, or anything else that comes solely from ourselves. Neither our selves nor those who make up our relationships will last forever, but while we are here, flailing about in the noise and contemporary world’s tumult, they provide a place where joy and happiness can exist. The people in the family have to be strong and gentle in their relationship to you and each other. Love true and generous can lift you past the humdrum of everyday while living through the everyday, but a good family and good relationships are much more important than even poetry, though God knows I love poetry and sometimes (if they are not too full of themselves and what they do) poets.

But inside these goodnesses is the canker of how to make a living, how to be part of the middle class always striving to make ends meet and go out on the town by buying a meal at a restaurant. Poets can starve. That’s the poet’s old image. Families can struggle. Relationships always take work and struggle. But if a nation has a purpose, its purpose is to take care of its people, to make both poetry and family possible in a way that does not force poets to starve and struggle does not wholly define and mar relationships in a family.

The Great Recession is not a blessing for either poetry or families or much of anything else. Ethel and I have been lucky. As an educator, working hard to make the future better for students and the Navajo Nation, I have been joyfully employed during this difficult time. But my students and their families are struggling even more than they struggled with poverty during better economic times, and as the middle class my parents struggled so hard to find their way into thrashes like a blind, caught beast in the trap it finds itself in, feeling like it is dying a slow death if not actually dying that death, I despair. What is going on? What is the answer?

Is technology the culprit underlying the foolish and miasmic words and actions of the political elite? Does it eat jobs as if they are a great crocodile’s prey, threatening the livelihoods people all over the world need in order to have the chance to live good lives? I have embraced technology and the future it promises all my life, but maybe I was wrong. Will innovation, the panacea offered by political speeches and my instincts, truly be the savior? Does one profession really die only to be replaced by another that spins human society on down the road to an improving future?

Has education, the deepest of my passions after poetry and family, become obsolete?

I reject that notion with every fiber in who I am, but I also know that a teacher, trying to teach with thirty-five students anything in a classroom, is just a talking head, and all over the nation Governors of the Great State Of are forcing more and more students into classrooms that cannot effectively act as places where learning can occur. Accountability! the pundits cry out. Accountability! All the while saying you can’t throw good money at problems. You have to solve the problem, forgetting that once this country had the greatest education system and greatest economy that ever existed until their wisdom started tinkering with it. The day Accountability! became the mantra and Those Who Raised Themselves By Their Bootstraps after inheriting their Daddy’s money began wanting the education system to increase their personal wealth by training students in a way that took the burden of training workers off them and their business, the performance of public schools began spiraling downward. Charter schools, tax breaks for property owners, especially for the elderly (meaning, of course, for the guy who owned the factory in the center of town and the rich Cadillac dealer on the corner), databased outcomes, and testing, testing, testing! followed the creation of an issue that has now become a crisis. The education system is broken, they say. Teachers are freeloaders living off the fat cats’ largesse that they have to give out in taxes their tax breaks fail to save them from, and it is wrong.

In the end Midas had no regrets. He was a golden statue looking out with sightless eyes at the universe’s beauty around him. Hopefully the Occupy and 99% movement, flaring in cities around the world, will wake up politicians and get them to provide at least a little grease for the economy’s rusted gears. May God grant that there is still room in the universe for poetry and families that have a chance of living the American dream inside a cocoon of the middle class. May the Education Reform movement choke on its numbers so that teachers can teach again and awake the genius of innovation and art in our wonderful children. May poets and teachers both celebrate the honors that they deserve.

And, as I move into the twilight of my life, may I be at peace, believing that the arrow of time is not carrying us toward a dead statue standing in a pool of greed that shines as golden as an indifferent sun.

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October 5, 2011 · 5:41 pm

Occupy Wall Street!, but Don’t Run your New Model T into a Gully in the Middle of Nowhere

My mother, at eighty-five, tells the story of when she was a young ten year old girl in Oklahoma. Her grandfather, a farmer with a wonderful old barn he had built with his neighbors, bought a Model T. He had driven a team of horses his whole life, but finally broke down after his neighbors all started buying into the newfangled form of transportation. After teaching himself to drive, he often went to town and took his granddaughter with him.

However, his driving skills were never perfect. He could not get used to an engine that could not understand the English language. He kept telling the car to “Whoa!” and “Hurry up!” Sometimes he remembered about gears and brakes and sometimes that was beyond a lifetime of habit.

One day he decided to go visit my mother’s uncle in an Oklahoma town far enough away that the only option, if it was a day visit, was the car. My great grandmother had farm work to do, so my Mom and great grandfather got into the dust-covered black Ford. Everything went well at first, but then “Grandpa,” as my mother called him, got to mumbling to himself the way he did when driving the team of horses that lived in the barn. Pretty soon the car was wandering out of the dirt road toward the gullies that ran beside the road.

Then, suddenly, Grandpa came out of his reverie, terrifying the ten year old in the seat beside him, and started saying, “Whoa you son of a bitch! Whoa!” as the car headed toward the deepest gully they had come across since leaving the farm.

“Hit the brakes, Grandpa!” my mother said. “Hit the brakes!”

“Tell the goddamned son of a bitch to stop!” Grandpa roared.

Miles from nowhere, during a time when there was no guarantee another car would pass that day, the car jolted into the gully. Neither Grandpa nor granddaughter were hurt, but Grandpa put his forehead on the black steering wheel and said, “son of a bitch.”

Telling the story my mother never uses the exact language she heard my grandfather use. Ladies still do not use that language in public, according to her lights. Yet, she has a way of making sure you understand exactly what my great grandfather said.

What is important about this story, at least to me, is that it illustrates just how mutable time is and how difficult a time we humans have adjusting. We get comfortable with our lives, especially as we get older, and then some newfangled technology comes along, our neighbors and friends grab onto it, and suddenly the “son of a bitch,” useful as it may be, is a team of work horses who refuse to obey our commands. Our habits and past conflict with present realities, and we suddenly find ourselves in a gully in the middle of nowhere with a steaming carburetor and responsibility for not only ourselves, but our grandchildren.

My mother has no memory of how her grandfather got them out of the predicament he had gotten them into, but she remembers his red face, banging on the black steering wheel, and his frustration. Life had gotten out of his control–at least for that moment.

Change has been speeding up for most of my lifetime. I remember a moment on the playground of my school in Delta Colorado when one of the sixth graders mastered an impression of Elvis Presley, who was the newest rage among teenagers. The school principal was not amused by his hip grinding and wild rock n’ roll gyrations, so different from the church choir music he liked, so the sixth grader was hauled into the office. This caused an explosion caused by the sixth grader’s friends. Pretty soon the school yard was filled with elementary school kids chanting, “We want Elvis! We want Elvis!” I had no idea why we were all chanting until I got home from school and had to face my Mom, but I chanted anyway.

This pop culture change has kept going from Elvis to now. The other day at Navajo Technical College I had a young woman in my office that had metal studs arced across the top of her forehead in rainbow colors. She was not in my office because I was upset by the rainbow embedded in her forehead. If I was upset by that I could not be a Dean of Instruction at a contemporary college. But the point is that I thought it was normal, a part of the pop culture scene that changes every few months as young people reach out for actions and decorations guaranteed to upset their elders.

Whether the change is large, the replacement of a culture built around horses with a culture built around automobiles, or small, embedded metal studs in a beautiful face, change creates a change in each of our individual and group landscapes. Change outside of us creates change in us.

I watched Ken Burns’s Prohibition mini-series on television during the last several nights. One thesis of the show was that the growth of immigrant population from Eastern Europe created part of the undercurrent in convincing enough of American citizens to pass the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Other currents were present in the movement as Progressives of the era tried to protect the family from ravages of alcohol and envisioned a world where decency and the American way were the norm. But if the movement had progressive elements, it was, at the same time, deeply conservative. If the evangelists of the prohibition movement were progressive, trying to protect women and children, they were also reacting against the change in the American population. America was a great place if its character could be protected from the Irish, Polish, and other undesirables coming through Ellis Island to the mainland U.S. in droves.

In the end the unintended consequences of Prohibition were huge and, more often than not, undesirable: The organization of organized crime, the flouting of Constitutional law by millions of Americans, a jump in political corruption, and even a sharp increase in the consumption of alcohol by a dedicated group of anti-prohibitionists. Both the changes occasioned by immigration (sound like a familiar theme in today’s politics?) and prohibition moved masses of people as battles for the American soul were fought with passion and, sometimes, ruthlessness. Those who believed in prohibition stirred up those who believed a drink a day (plus a few) kept the doctor away, and event after event unfolded until suddenly the Great Depression created an environment where the Twenty-first Amendment repealing prohibition became inevitable.

Today we are seeing similar currents and cross-currents sweeping across the nation. The Tea Party clamors to return to an era that did not work while prohibition was in full swing, threatening to send the country into yet another Great Recession or Great Depression. Reacting to that young people are shouting out, “Occupy Wall Street,” while the media, which, after all, is owned by the conservatives who claim the media has a liberal bias, calls for the young people to clarify what they want even though anyone with two cents worth of brains can easily tell what they want. They want the wealthiest one percent of the country to have less wealth and the bottom 99% to improve their collective futures by a transfer of wealth from the top 1% to the middle and lower classes.

The Tea Party wants America to be America without changing another iota, letting wealth grow even more wealth, letting conservative religions dominate the political and social landscape, and letting Americans be Americans without the taint of illegal immigration mixing an “undesirable” strain into the American melting pot.

I will admit that I agree wholeheartedly with the Occupy Wall Streeters in New York. I believe the my-way-or-the-highway Tea Partiers are another version of the true believers Eric Hoffer once warned the world about. I do not believe they are so venous they will lead us into a Night of the Broken Glass as the radical conservatives of Hitler’s day did, giving power to the evils of Nazism, but in their pursuit of freedom they seem to be perfectly willing to attack anyone who disagrees with any item of their ever-more-radical agenda, refusing dialog and compromise, and ignoring facts in pursuit of conservative purity.

Change is never easy for individuals or groups. My mother loves telling the story of her grandpa, but grandpa inevitably was not as amused as she has become over time. The unintended consequences of prohibition should act as a cautionary tale, even to those who believe as passionately as I do that the rich, who Scott Fitzgerald said were different from the rest of us, need to become more like the rest of us for the good of us, including them. If I did not live so far away from New York City I would consider joining the Occupy Wall Streeters.

As I look at the struggles of Americans without work and without prospects, I am willing to take a chance, to chant “We want Elvis!” on the playground of life even though I understand, as an aging adult, that the action and reaction of humanity never creates a straight line toward ultimate good, but mazes into a pattern that might improve things if the force of history is toward progress rather than regression.

May what I believe end up as good as I intend it to.

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September 17, 2011 · 6:25 pm

The Zuni Mountain Poets and the Gotcha Society of the Angry and Uber Rich

What participation in the Zuni Mountain Poets has taught me is that education works best when strengths, rather than weaknesses, are emphasized. Under Jack Carter North’s tutelage, learned while he was a teacher for the Zuni School District, no one is ever corrected during the Sunday poets’ meetings. All the poets who bring poems read them, and then those who wish to comment discourse on the poem, trying to deal with the poem and not the sideways and byways of human discourse. The system is simple and direct, but the results are extraordinary. Poets that begin coming to the meetings hesitant become, over time, sure footed, strengths began to develop into a characteristic style that is almost always recognizable, and the result is a music larger than any single poet or voice.

To say that I am deeply troubled about today’s educational system is an understatement. The educational system has clearly become a reflection of the larger society, and that society, with its growing number of families in poverty, shrinking middle class, and destructive politics, is sick. The philosophy that inspires the Zuni Mountain poets is largely absent as the Gotcha Society of the Angry and Uber Rich rail against the elements of American society that once made it exceptional: Its social safety net, growing middle class that believed their children would be better off than they were, its extraordinary ability to invent and make things, its fabulous arts and architecture, and an education system that was something new under the sun: It served everyone and not just those pre-destined by their parents and the elite to become society’s elite. The movement away from the charter schools of early American history, the Latin Schools, was a signature accomplishment

This morning my daughter called from Green Bay, Wisconsin. She was telling me that teachers in the Green Bay School District, a district she fought to find a job in because of what she believed was its overall excellence, were shocked and so upset that some were in a daze. Last week they received their first checks since the Great Scott Walker and his Republican minions began to gleefully declare open war on Wisconsin teachers. Most of Green Bay’s teachers had received a pay cut that amounted to hundreds of dollars per pay period. Some of the older teachers, according to my daughter, were wondering how they were going to make their mortgages while keeping their children in college. All the teachers were afraid that even though they had worked hard to become teachers, they were now going to be challenged to live the American dream of owning a house, sending their kids to college, and having a two car garage. My daughter then went on to say, “And Dad! They still have a deficit in the tens of millions of dollars! The school board is going to have to cut the budget some more!”

Scott Walker gave the uber rich a big tax cut in Wisconsin and believes in his gut of guts that progressive taxation is wrong, wrong, wrong. He is against class warfare where the poor and middle class defend themselves against those who are taking the spirit out of the country. He is sure that the job creators will create more jobs if only they are given more incentives so they can have more fancy toga parties beside their swimming pools and on their yachts. He is convinced that if you eliminate unions, cut out the social safety net, and generally lord it over the middle class, the wealthier classes will be better off. Let’s do charter schools, he says. Let’s privatize education and let the private sector fix what is broken.

After all, look how good the private sector, after its great accomplishment of eliminating government regulations, did when the build-up to the Great Recession we are now living through happened. They increased poverty, shrunk the middle class, started the War on Obama in an effort to ensure the election of their champions, foreclosed on millions of homes, destroyed millions of lives, and ate at the finest five star restaurants in the country. In the process they created the Tea Party and negative energy that rages like a bull in the china closet of life, crashing into the country’s precious artifacts, such as the Constitution they claim to love, and leaving the government as well as everyday lives of everyday people in shards.

The Zuni Mountain poets, though they face ups and downs, are a metaphor for a different path. In education a child who is down on themselves can be lifted up through praise and a belief in abilities hidden from themselves and their friends. When I was a young teacher at Menominee County Community School on the Menominee Reservation, I remember my first day there during a snowy December. We had young people standing by the school’s heaters staring out into space. If you tried to talk to them, they did not respond. They acted like traumatized victims with PSTD.

In the early days there were a lot of problems with Menominee County Community School. As an early experiment in Indian Controlled Education, its efforts to approach education from a different direction did not always work, but there is one thing to be said about the teachers and staff at the school. They cared about those students standing along the walls and acting up in the classrooms. They tried to do something about self concepts and attitudes that had no place in society, no less a school. They worked at finding the good in those students, and sometimes, though not always, a turnaround occurred. There are students who eventually earned a college degree because of teachers who saw good in students that they did not see in themselves until it was nurtured into consciousness.

If a school or country is building a dream so strong it vibrates the bones, that school, or country, will succeed. Verna Fowler, President of the College of the Menominee Nation, which, once upon a time a long time ago, I helped found while working with her, liked to say that if you strengthen a strength you weaken a weakness. Positive thought, positive emotions, dedication to building something good and lasting reverberates toward success. Constant criticism, harping, divisive games in the dark of night, bitter sarcasm, hatred, anger, belief that an individual is part of God’s chosen people while the rest of humankind are scum, fear, messianic zeal that leads to extreme acts of whatever kind, all lead to complications, upset people, confusion, and a downward spiral difficult to turn around. If you believe in a human being, listen to their story, and then do something to help them achieve their dream, even if that something is as small as a cheerful good morning or as significant as a helping hand, then societal growth and success is possible. If you sit in your hundred million dollar mansion and spend your days trying to figure out how you’re going to make 400 million rather than 350 million dollars this year, and forget about the least of us while proclaiming your Christianity, then malaise is the likely result as your greed creates the conditions for general troubles and societal failure.

The world is more complicated than I am expressing here, but also as simple. Saying good morning and building strengths in individuals will not end the malaise the educational system or the country is facing. But, in the end, I believe in the dream of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and all the other founding fathers. I believe in the wisdom of the Zuni Mountain poets even though I doubt my own wisdom. By building for the good of all the people, holding out in front of us ideals worth living for, we can build a citie on a hill, the old American dream. By not serving all the people and pushing for the good of the few, all we can do is create a gulf between the few and the many so large that it can, after a generation of unfairness and injustice, threaten the foundations of the exceptionalism that once was America and is now threatened.

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September 10, 2011 · 5:11 pm

Henry David Thoreau and John Boehner’s Stone Face Sitting Behind President Obama

Watching Speaker Boehner’s stone face during most of President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress on job creation Thursday night, I began to think of Henry David Thoreau and the beginning of his masterpiece, Walden. Thoreau believed he could find the universe in a few acres near the cabin he built for himself by Walden Pond. He thought that most activities pursued by the farmers and shopkeepers in and around Concord, Massachusetts missed the entire purpose of life. From his standpoint too many people lived to labor and complained about the difficulties of their lives. He believed in a businesslike approach to life, but also thought that one good line of poetry, or an understanding of why a common plant that others overlooked was beautiful, was more important in the long range of human and geologic history. “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” he wrote. “But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

Looking at Congressman Boehner on the seat above the President and the well of the Congress, beside the Vice President, I thought that maybe he should heed Thoreau’s words: “Most of the luxuries of life, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind,” and realize that the job creators are not after the good of the common man, but after their own good. It is highly unlikely that their good will lead to either the elevation of mankind or even the U.S. economy’s stabilization.

I do not choose to go to the woods and live like Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, carefully keeping accounts of pennies I have spent on seed and materials while making a partnership with the land that feeds me well enough to let me apply myself to thoughts about universal truths and poetry. Although his attitude attracts me like nectar attracts a honeybee, I cannot, for the life of me, throw myself into poetry, philosophy, and science and ignore the daily news. I cannot even discover the wisdom that tells me how to avoid the desperation that surrounds us in these troubled times. Thursday night, driving home after work from Crownpoint through the canyon to Thoreau to Continental Divide, I listened to President Obama on radio and hoped he would get what he was eloquently pleading for even though I am afraid that an even bolder plan may be needed if I and Ethel are going to be able to retire with even a meager comfort.

Later, when I saw Boehner’s face after I got home and watched CNN and the blathering class blathering, I, along with the rest of the world, knew. The Republicans were not going to embrace the President’s proposals and try to rescue the country from its malaise, but were going to parse, give faint praise, and talk about consensus because the disaster they created for themselves out of the debt ceiling fight made them wary of going the way of the charging rhino into the market square again. They are going to dance the macabre dance of middle class destruction while singing as if they and the uber rich are going to make all right with the world again.

One of the questions that plagues me is this, how do we live in a world that seems to be going downhill without falling into a despair so black that we cannot see the horizon even if it exists? While the uber rich enrich themselves while increasing already too high piles of hindrances to the elevation of humankind, how can we, as individuals, smile when we see a field of wild sunflowers shining yellow in a late afternoon sun or laugh for joy when our grandchild hands us a strawberry he has just picked and looks puckishly at us to see if we get that this is his gift even though we are standing inside acres of fields of strawberries? How do we keep the quiet desperation of the mass of common men at bay long enough to live the lives that we could live if Boehner did not look so stone faced while sitting behind the President?

As far as I know I have written poetry since I was twelve years old, and I married an artist and a poet who still amazes me even after forty-three wondrous years of marriage. When Kevin, our son died so young of cancer, about the only solace I had was to sit in his sickroom and try to think through life by writing sonnets. The good lines of poetry Thoreau valued are hard to come by, but when they do come, there is a moment when peace slips through despair and allows us to understand, if only for a moment, the promises in every moment we take a breath.

In the end, in spite of the difficulties of life, John Boehner, and those that are hindrances to the good of humankind, I am a positive rather than a negative human being. I work everyday as an educator, trying my best to touch lives in positive, rather than negative ways. I look at my wife and marvel that she deigned to marry someone as unpromising as an unpublished poet. I write poetry and sing songs that search for emotions and truth that go to the center of what is good, rather than negative, about human beings. I try to keep my ego in check and realize that every time I honor someone that I know or who crosses my path I create a rhythm that pools outward and helps to make this day a slightly better day.

Henry David Thoreau was right. If we can plant a garden and tend it with our own labor and study the colors of sunset reflected off a small pond as the sun sinks in the west, then the day’s news is not as important as it seems. If we can spend a little bit of time working on moments that can make a difference for ourselves, our families, and those in our lives, then the stone faces of the world are not as important even if they are remembered fifty or a hundred years from now for their foolish arrogance. Let them fume, fuss, gather their loot, and place it in the tombs of their vaults. They cannot truly appreciate a single good line of poetry from any poet worth his or her salt.

Let us give them hell and try to limit the damage they are doing, but let us also remember that they are not the substance or the meaning of our lives.

Tomorrow, with any luck, Ethel and I will get up early, work on poems, and drive to Inscription Rock Trading Post for the every Sunday meeting of the Zuni Poets. We’ll forget, for awhile, about President Obama’s speech, John Boehner’s stone face, and the slow, unconscionable withering away of the middle class, and sit on the outdoor patio where the wind chimes sometimes make it hard to hear as we would like to hear as the other poets read their poems. We’ll store up eternity inside who we are as it is unleashed by poems as good as any being written in the world today, and the demons will snarl their deprecations of sanity away from where we are, and we will feel good as we drive around a bend and see the glory of Mount Taylor towering blue in the distance above the slopes of the Zuni Mountains.

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September 3, 2011 · 9:53 am

Governor Scott Walker, the Uber Rich, and the Destruction of Public Education, or How to Make American Education Great Again

Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin has, in many ways, done more to do harm to the public education system in the United States than almost any other politician. The strange part of this story is that if you read Walker’s statements about education, he says over and over again that a great education system is necessary to the economic future of the state of Wisconsin. He always pairs that statement with one about money, claiming that paying for a great education system is different from operating a great education system. He claims that by reducing the cost of the education system local government officials can spend more money directly on students and actually improve the system as it exists.

Wisconsin traditionally has had one of the best educational systems in the country, which is one of the strangest aspects of Walker’s position. Why try to reform a system that is working? This year it is ranked third among the fifty states. Last year it was second.

Both of my daughters are educators in Wisconsin. Our oldest daughter, Sonja, is in the process of doing her student teaching, earning her teaching certification after working in a Catholic school, a homeless shelter, and other places as a teacher for years, and Mary, our youngest daughter, is not only a wonderful teacher, but a war-tested veteran of the Green Bay public school district. If you pay attention to Wisconsin news on education you will know that Green Bay’s school board is the most teacher-unfriendly board in the state.

Both of our daughters are depressed about their chosen profession. Like teachers I have talked to around the country, they feel the unrelenting attack on the nation’s public school system and on educators make their profession one of the most hated professions in America. Governor Walker, the drum major in front of the band of educational reformers that trumpet the genius of private charter schools and the erosion of America’s leadership in education in the world, deeply depresses them. They wonder how a man who is all about monied interests could possibly become Governor of a state with Wisconsin’s progressive history. They both question their decision to become teachers. Most of the great teachers I know are equally as depressed. They wish they had never become educators.

I do not know how Governor Walker in his heart of hearts thinks about public education. I know he has two sons enrolled in public schools. Maybe he really believes the rhetoric he spews out in aggressive soundbites and expressions of his superior-to-the-common-folk attitude. Maybe he believes magic really exists and that he is the wizard who can speak incantations and make the education system better by eliminating funding that allows teachers to live a middle class lifestyle and feel good about themselves and provides school supplies and books learners need if they are to be taught. Maybe he and Governors and politicians like him really believe that by giving all the wealth to the wealthy the poor will be grateful for their poverty. Maybe he believes that sucking wealth from the middle and poorer classes and giving it to rich business-people and speculators is the way to bring prosperity to the country. After all, if business is rich, will not jobs flow to the under-classes like manna from heaven? Even if the wealthy do not pay middle class wages to those doing those jobs and send endless streams of jobs overseas?

But the truth is that Walker is not a wizard. If he truly believes in the magic his words spew into public airwaves, he is a fool. If you starve the beast, government funded public education, then you weaken the beast and can easily, if you are not careful, destroy its spirit if not its life. I do not believe Governor Walker is a fool. I believe he has chosen to side with the uber rich class because he knows where there is butter for his bread, but I could be wrong. I cannot see into other people’s spirits and hearts.

If Walker really wants to improve Wisconsin’s education system, he needs to take lessons from the best education system in the world in Finland. What strikes scholar after scholar who has studied the Finnish system is that Finland’s educators feel as if they work in the best profession in the world. Politicians in Finland are not continually making idiotic comments about how terrible their system is. They do not require endless standardized tests and benchmarks that guarantee long-term failure, the legacy of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative. They are not obsessed with accountability and making sure Finnish taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.

Instead, the Finnish people and their leaders believe that education is important and that those who deliver learning to their children and college students are among the best, most valuable people in their society. The result is simple. In Finland educators who are honored deliver an educational system that has been among the best educational systems in the world for decades.

When I was young the United States had the best education system in the world. In fact, the educational system was so good it created the largest middle class the world has ever seen and created endless streams of jobs built from innovation, industry, skills, knowledge, and strong values. It was part of the secret to making the United States the wealthiest country in the world. When I was young my parents and parents all over the country would have never dreamed that education would become a system that deserved to be attacked as wasteful and a bad bargain for taxpayers.

Teachers were honored, and if one of my parent’s boys got out of line with a teacher, boy, were you in trouble. Teachers were the knowledge bringers, the deliverers of a good future, the key to making life better for children than it was for their parents, and as such a teacher’s words and judgments were important. They delivered prosperity to all of us.

I am nearing the end of my career as an educator, and I am prejudiced, but I believe that teachers are still the key to the future for Wisconsin, New Mexico, and the rest of the country. I believe education is the key to prosperity for the United States and other countries. I believe wealth comes from knowledge and learning, not information, and the application of knowledge to creating things and getting things done.

Educators are put through endless hoops and a great deal of expense to earn the honor of touching alive the minds and spirits of the young and young adults. Charter schools and for-profit colleges and universities have not outperformed the public school systems in the United States, as crippled as that system has become by constant attacks from the uber rich and their allies who seem to think that if only they could have a little more freedom from regulations and a little more of the country’s wealth (after they control most of it anyway) then the entire country would benefit as they sit on their gold-plated toilets.

Mostly good things come from educators: They show the pathway to the world’s knowledge, whether that knowledge is ancient or new, spark alive imaginations, teach self-discipline, tell a young person who is down that they can reach for the stars, help young people believe in themselves, encourage creative fires in classrooms and society, build reading, writing, and arithmetic skills, and make it possible for individuals to make a society that serves all of us. I chant a chant for teachers everywhere and that chant is much more important than the magic-wishing incantations of a Governor Walker–whether they live in Wisconsin, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, or elsewhere. I sing the intelligence of the Finns.

Teachers are important. They do not deserve angry-eyed parents who storm in their classrooms demanding that their son or daughter is being treated unfairly when their child did not do their homework and is not earning an A. They deserve support, not demands for excellence delivered by angry school boards who cannot see out of the bubble of their own lives and concerns. They deserve recognition rather than ridicule foaming out of business people and politicians. They even deserve a middle class wage, which the uber rich can easily afford and that will serve the interests of the rich in the long-run. A rising tide still lifts all boats while a sinking tide leaves even the fanciest yachts grounded.

If this country wants to become a world leader in education again, it must first get the loudest voices condemning the education system and demanding accountability to shut up. If you want to create value, you must first value what you want to create. If you do not value what is valuable and trash it with words, it can end up in the garbage dump, and recovering what you have thrown away might be impossible.

May all educators in the United States and in every country of the world receive the blessings they deserve. My daughters are extraordinary teachers.

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August 27, 2011 · 11:48 am

Creative fires start small, then build

For most of my life I have been interested in why explosions in creative genius occur. Mostly I have been interested in examples like the Renaissance in Italy in the 1400s, the flowering of Greek art during the classical period, the American Renaissance in New England in the mid 1800s, especially around Concord, and smaller explosions such as that which surrounded the founding of Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the mid 1900s. There are other equally important flowerings, if different in flavor and effect, such as the Silicon Valley technology explosion in California or the development of the Indian Institutes of Technology in India in the 1950s. The question is, why do these explosions of creative work occur? They have an enormous impact on human history, thought, inspiration, and even the rise, fall, and mood of nations, but what causes them to happen?

I have been fortunate in my lifetime to have witnessed three explosions of creativity, if not more. I believe I have witnessed genius brewing if not flowering. The most significant of these has been the formation and growing of the tribal college movement, which started with Navajo Community College in 1968 and is still transforming Indian country from Alaska to Michigan to Kansas and Oklahoma today. I have been privileged to work with people like Helen Maynor Scheirbeck, Lionel Bordeaux, Mike Gross, David Gipp, Carty Monette, Carrie Billy, Carol Davis, Verna Fowler, and so many others whose genius managed to help transform hopelessness on the nation’s American Indian Reservations into hope. In a speech given at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s Spring conference held in Green Bay, Wisconsin a few years back I described the founders of the tribal college movement as “giants that have walked on Mother Earth,” and I will honor them during all of my life.

But what I have been thinking a lot about lately is two different flowerings. One occurred when I was much younger in Shawano, Wisconsin. The other is the Zuni Mountain poets and the flowering around the Old School Gallery near the El Morro National Monument in New Mexico. Ethel and I lived in Shawano, where I helped found both the Menominee Indian School District and College of the Menominee Nation, longer than we have lived anywhere else. This is conservative country, home of the notorious Posse Comitatus, a place where Joseph R. McCarthy’s portrait still hangs in the court chambers of the Shawano Country courthouse.

Still, when the Mielke Theatre was built in Mielke Park in 1976, an arts movement developed in the rural part of Wisconsin that was as active as any in the entire state. The development of the movement was anything but smooth. Fighting over use of the theatre and funding and other issues, mostly inconsequential in the retrospect of years past, marred the short period of time when I was President of the Shawano County Arts Council and most of the years before that, but the point is that artists literally came out of the deep woods surrounding Shawano and began showcasing their work to the local area, inducing other artists of various kinds: Writers, visual artists, photographers, theatre people, and others, to create an atmosphere of intense, if conflicted, excitement.

When Ethel and I became involved in the Zuni Mountain poets, driving from our home in Continental Divide, NM nearly an hour and a half most Sundays, poetry group was already a strongly going concern. Held at Inscription Rock Trading Post and Coffee Company’s outdoor patio in the summer and its loft in winter, the group was already writing poetry that rivaled anything being written by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, a major arts organization that Ethel and I had attended off and on for years. There was a little controversy, in a very minor key, surrounding the Zuni Mountain poets, but Jack Carter North, the unofficial head of the group, allows almost no negative comments about a poet’s work shared during meetings, and the result is astounding. Over the years young and poor poets have joined the group, but over time all of them have improved their work, if they kept coming to the meetings over time, without hearing a negative word during their patio or loft visits. I would be willing to claim that several of the poets writing, including Ethel, have a poetic genius.

My conclusion after seeing these three movements and reading about renaissance after renaissance that has occurred around the world, and visiting places like Taos, New Mexico where the renaissance that included artists like Georgia O’Keefe and the writer D.H. Lawrence, among dozens of others, happened is that renaissance occurs when one, or sometimes two or three, extraordinary presences, an artist or non-artist, creates a spark, often, but not always, with intent. That spark excites others and a renaissance starts building, each artist competing and harmonizing with others, the group building genius out of the desire in individuals to be noticed and to mean something in the world. The spark can have all positive aspects, such as in the Zuni Mountain poets example, or may grow out of competition, or may even grow from one artist trying to get the better of other artists, but the result is the same, creativity becomes a fire, and that fire can change the world.

The trick seems to be, whether in a classroom, a community needing economic development, or in a group of poets or artists, to get the original spark going in one or more individuals, then to build the collaboration/competition by providing an environment where conversation, attention, venture capital, and/or dreams of glory can be obtained. Creative fires start small, then build, irregardless of how rural or small or big a community is, until its light outshines the environs where they were born.

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August 21, 2011 · 7:47 pm

The Failure of Testing in Education–The Challenge of Creating Learners, not the Learned

When I was still young and a college student at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, I had several professors that believed the American university was going downhill. They felt that democratization of higher education, with its demand that students succeed, was leading to lower standards that would eventually hurt the country. I was reading Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman who was one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest philosophers, and I ran across a sentence that made me remember my old professors. Hoffer said that during times of great change, learners were superior to those who were learned because the learned knew about the world as it was, not the world as it was changing.

At the time, of course, the United States still had the best education system in the world. That has changed as the country has changed, and the result is that Finland has the best education system in the world, and the United States has an education system that ranks in the middle of the pack among industrialized nations, falling behind even some countries struggling to become part of the industrialized world. But I do not believe my old professors, stuck in their sense of what learning was important during their lifetimes, were right. Standards are not immutable. They change as the world changes, and boy, is the world changing. What we think is important at this moment in time may be as permanent as the position of a hummingbird’s wings as it sips from a flower’s nectar.

As our education ranking on the college and university level and K-12 levels falls, politicians and those stuck in the myopic past are clamoring for more and more testing for students. At the college and university level the key word is assessment! Prove that students are learning what you believe they are learning. Define the product, or outcome, of your teaching so specifically that you can measure it.

In the twilight of my educational career I am currently the Dean of Instruction at Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. The Aspen Institute recently named Navajo Tech one of the 120 best community colleges in the United States. The truth is that we have worked really, really hard to make a tribally controlled institution of higher learning one of the best colleges in the United States, and I believe we have succeeded. The Aspen Institute’s ranking confirms what I believe.

What I do not believe is that either testing, the definition of outcomes, or assessment has had much to do with Navajo Tech’s success. I do not believe the current concentration on testing and assessment helps improve education or even measures how successful or unsuccessful the education system is doing. I lead the charge to do the assessment expected at Navajo Tech. Fighting city hall and the political class on educational issues is not the way to garner funds necessary to achieve educational success for students. Navajo Tech’s success has had more to do with passionate teachers, a good educational design, students from desperately poor communities who desperately want to succeed, and dedication by the President and the rest of the college to build a success that will serve the Navajo Nation far into the future.

Assessment is not, as an exercise, totally useless. In fact it has limited uses if we understand that those uses are limited. If outcomes are drafted by a new faculty member or teacher, that faculty member is forced to think about what they are trying to teach. Sometimes an old faculty member is shaken out of a passionate belief in the lecture notes they developed twenty or more years ago. That thinking, or shaking, process has value. The problem, however, comes when the assessment process is considered key to education. When thinking about what you are trying to teach becomes ossified into knowledge that is what you are teaching, then learning as a process, not an end, is degraded. Part of what is happening to education in this era is that learning is all about the knowledge being tested rather than about the dynamism that drives individual students toward achievement and success.

Another thing Eric Hoffer once said is that if you order a bunch of men to dig a ditch, they will probably get the ditch dug, but will grumble through the work with all deliberate speed. If you take that same group of men and convince them that they are part of turning a desert into a garden and ask them to dig a ditch, that ditch will not only get dug at record speed, but it will also be one of the finest ditches in the world. The garden will be created, and the desert will bloom.

If you want to build a successful society, make that society about something important to those living in that society. If the society’s major goal is to achieve tax cuts or to protect the social network, there is no oomph in that, no dream. If you teach a student to create a new world, the proverbial “citie on a hill,” however that world is defined, and convince them that bringing that world into existence requires the personal sacrifice inherent in any effort to learn, then they will make that sacrifice and learn. They will choose to play their part in the creation of a garden in the desert. That is part of the secret of Navajo Tech. The students are learning in order to better themselves, their family, their clans, and the Navajo Nation.

When Hoffer said that during times of change learners are superior to the learned, he did not have a testing regime in mind. He was saying something far different. If we want to understand the educational process in a world changing at a rate difficult for any of us to understand, we first have to understand the motivation that drives humans toward accomplishment: Learning, not knowledge, and especially not knowledge confirmed by testing when testing becomes the measure of learning.

Hoffer was intimating that knowledge is not what is important in and of itself. Knowledge, known or still to be discovered, can be learned. What is important are values, attributes, knowledge, and skills that create learners and a learning, not a learned, class. What you know that can be uncovered by a test or an assessment exercise is not as important as your ability to absorb and react to the change in knowledge, skills, attributes, and values around you as the world changes. The world belongs to learners, not simply to the educated, or, for that matter, to the wealthy or political classes–although the evidence they have in their gated communities might lead them to beg to differ.

If this country wants to succeed at education, and it had better want to succeed at education, it needs to start thinking more about learning than about what a test or an assessment process measures–more about human dreams and aspirations as believed in by students than about facts and knowledge that politicians, and even educators, think are important.

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August 15, 2011 · 3:58 pm

How the Political Class is Destroying Education by Reforming It

I have been an educator most of my working life, and now, after turning 65, I look at my profession with dismay. Politicians have filled themselves with the myth that education is a basket filled with failures, and the result is that they are weaving a basket of failure in which to put the public education system. They are probably doing so in order to hand over the money in the public education system to the free enterprise system, which, should be pointed out, is failing the American public in a big way these days, but much of their reasoning seems to me to be as clear as mud.

The only thing that really does seem clear is that they mistake the purpose of education, seeing it as a product that is part of the making, buying, and selling part of the economy. A recent headline even compared higher education to the housing bubble, a famous venture capitalist claiming that the rise in prices for those who pay for becoming educated is a bubble that will in the near future likely collapse, leaving economic ruin in the collapse’s wake.

No one can argue that education does not have an economic aspect. People who become educated tend to make more money over their lifetime than those who do not and drop out of high school or fail to go to college. Still, there are many reasons to become educated. Learning to read well and eagerly can enhance your life in endless ways. An educated citizen, as the founding fathers almost without exception told us, is a good citizen. If you want to lend strength, knowledge, and wisdom to society, become educated. If you want to do good beyond simply making a living, become educated. By becoming educated you can inspire your children and grandchildren to become educated, thus enhancing their lives. An educated person has more interesting things to discuss than an uneducated person. These reasons do not even scratch the surface of the rationale that sees education as central to our future as human beings and a nation.

Those who criticize our educational system tend to be those who also bewail the fact we are no longer number one in the world according to several education benchmarks. They know the future goes to the educated, but they do not want to spend the money on education that could lead to the country becoming number one again. You can’t just throw money at a problem to make it go away, they smugly say. Americans are no longer tough, and we need standards to toughen them up. We need to starve the government beast, Ronald Reagan said, or face bankruptcy.

As they toughen up the education system, they are loud mouthed, opinionated, and arrogant, often spewing lies out that are easily proven untrue. Teachers are overpaid and under-worked! The system is completely broken and has to be completely replaced. Students are not even taught the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic! Every one of these statements is untrue. Teachers are often clinging to the middle class by slender threads. Forty thousand dollars a year in much of the country is achieved only after a teacher becomes a journeyman educator. The education system that built the strongest and wealthiest society on earth is not perfect, but the vast number of students succeed. Every first grader begins with lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

There are problems with the education system right now, but when Wisconsin, the second best education system in the country and one of the best in the world, is torn down by a Governor who mainly wants to privatize it, the bluster and loudness becomes the fangs of a rattlesnake aiming at the education system’s heart. Poison, rather than reason or beauty, drips from the fangs.

The truth is that the education system needs more money and needs back the prestige it deserves. The more politicians treat it like a punching bag filled with maggots, the weaker the system gets. No Child Left Behind left behind the entire education system, weakening its heart while bragging about making it accountable. It degraded the enormous effort put out by teachers and those who help them to help children see the light and learn.

Give me an educated man or woman, and I will give you hope. Give me political rhetoric, and I will point out that it is all bilious hot air. The hot air, unfortunately, is destroying our public education system while pretending to reform it.

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