Page 1.4: Sections 18-22
18. CHARACTER EXCELLENCE: 106
INTELLIGENT Sex!
Now that I have your attention ... should liberal public schools help students to at least talk intelligently about intelligent sex, and what such respect means in action? In this last section on character excellence we ask: Should teachers and students be free to talk intelligently in class about one of life’s most important character habits – intelligent sex? I mean real intelligently, so they not only begin hearing what respectful sex sounds like, and how freedom is given to a partner to control the pleasures feeling best to them, but equally importantly, about the more than 20 harmful sexually transmitted diseases they might possibly get by practicing unwise and unintelligent sex. Don't our publicly funded schools owe at least that much knowledge to the next generation? Without it, we will keep seeing sexually abusive actions on a wide scale, as we're seeing now in our sexually integrated military branches, as well as child abuse and unregulated prostitution. Why shouldn’t anyone who’s interested in learning such knowledge be free to get it in our public high schools?
Also important and useful is knowing how to love one’s self sexually, as well how to have fun in a sexual relationship. What is wrong with giving such information freely to those high school students who want to more about sexual excellence? In fact, the more such knowledge can be talked about freely, the further the next generation steps away from medieval myths and superstitions. Needless to say, to us liberal Deweyans that’s a good thing; it helps make sex more democratic and equal between partners, rather than merely keeping it male dominated. Such students will also be more willing to keep making our nation and its liberal high schools places where young folks can keep getting intelligent information useful throughout life. In fact, different kinds of sexual relations are helping define our modern world, a world where many still believe all non-heterosexual habits are evil and produce sinful results. Even in our early 21st century world there are probably more superstitious myths about sexuality than any other idea. I don't know about you, but the older I got the more I learned how enjoyable, fun, and respectful sex can be. What’s wrong with such knowledge? It’s only made my life richer and safer as well!
Certainly, I realize many conservatives want to keep such liberal ideas and knowledge away from young folks. They want to keep controlling what young folks learn and also conserve their own sexual habits; many want as much control over the next generation as Church leaders have wanted for thousands of years. They may say there is some evidence teen pregnancy increases as sexual knowledge becomes a more open subject in high school, even though it’s difficult to prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
In any case, however, many people still feel very uneasy when someone suggests students should be free to learn more accurate knowledge about sex even in high school. Many women still feel uncomfortable and embarrassed just talking about it, many men still feel women should merely keep satisfying male sexual needs, such habits should be practiced by everyone, and marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Still, we liberal Deweyans ask, shouldn't young folks be free to begin seeing how sexual needs are satisfied in many different ways, and probably have been for thousands of years. Shouldn't young folks be free to learn how to make a sexual relation more fun, enjoyable, respectful, safe, and rewarding no matter who is involved? Shouldn't fun films like Woody Allen's What You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask, be allowed in high school classrooms where students want to learn more about the funny side of sexuality? After all, isn't learning to have some fun with any subject the best way to learn more about it?
On the positive side, however, many millions of sexually liberated adults now feel what's most important about sex is making it as safe as possible. No doubt, the AIDS epidemic beginning in the early 1980s has been a huge wake-up call to begin questioning all assumptions about intelligent sex. Since then, it’s simply no longer wise and intelligent to keep assuming no harmful results will happen during sex with someone else. If so, then why shouldn't our liberal high schools be allowed to teach more intelligent assumptions about sex, casual or otherwise? After all, doesn't everyone have a right to reliable knowledge about anything, as long as it’s constructive and helpful? Who are conservative educators to say no student should have access to such knowledge in our public high schools? When parents and students don't have such knowledge, then why shouldn't our public high schools be places where they can get such knowledge? After all, they are sexually mature, and so would find such knowledge useful. As millions of adults now know, respectful and enjoyable sex is another sure sign of character excellence, where all the parties involved are respectful of a person's own sexual needs and expressions.
Sad to say, to many people, even talking about respectful and enjoyable sexual ideas shouldn’t be allowed in our public high schools, even though many such students are sexually active! Believe it or not, in some parts of the world men actually remove a woman's clitoris just so she won’t enjoy sex with anyone! It’s the kind of control many conservatives today still want over women. However, all such disrespectful actions go against the entire democratic spirit of people having the equal right to control their own bodies. Here's another example. Merely about 40 years ago professional psychiatric organizations were saying homosexuality was abnormal, and yet today same-sex marriage is becoming more acceptable around the nation, as are gay and lesbian soldiers. Since when is their blood any less red than anyone else’s? In truth then, liberal high schools, homes, and churches can take pride in offering ideas about intelligent, enjoyable, and respectful sex to any student who wants to learn about them. Such ideas are useful long after knowledge about quadratic equations and geometric theorems have faded.
As we saw earlier in the quote from Behaviorism’s founder John Watson, sexually mature teens have a right to know about their newly developing adult bodies, how they work, and how to treat them intelligently and respectfully. If nature hadn’t encouraged intense sexual feelings to grow, they wouldn’t have grown. And with human population already becoming a serious problem in many places, such knowledge would be even more useful; there are still too many unwanted children in the world. So, it’s even more important these days to teach sexually active young folks how to enjoy sex and make it fun, but also how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy as well as make the event physically safe from disease. Such results can not only save people personal pain and expense, but public expense as well. In fact, learning more about respectful, loving, and intelligent sex can make any relationship more rewarding and productive.
No doubt many conservative parents will cringe at all such ideas, but since when is any useful knowledge something to ignore? Isn’t using accurate knowledge wisely and intelligently the very definition of character excellence itself? The fact such knowledge and ideas have been formally ignored in our conservative public schools for so long merely increases the likelihood for deadly sexual diseases to keep growing, like AIDS and some 20 other sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention much unhappiness in life and marriage itself. So, again, we liberals ask why shouldn’t high school students be free to start learning about such ideas, preferably with parental approval.
Some Specifics
So, we can move from such general ideas to more specific ones. Certainly, students themselves can help control the conversation with their own questions. Are sexual habits all learned, or are some people born heterosexual, bi-sexual, or homosexual? What does it mean to respect sexual habits? Is heterosexual marriage natural, or merely another manmade institution? Can 2 men or 2 women really love each other as deeply as a man and a woman can? What’s kinds of fun and enjoyment can people have with sexual events?
No doubt, more than ever before, today feelings about sexual variety and diversity are separating people into 2 very different groups -- heterosexual and LBGT groups (Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Gay, and Transgender). So, just becoming more aware of that fact, and also of what group one feels most comfortable in, will not only help save young folks from wasting their time and energy trying to be something they’re not, but such knowledge will also increase the democratic respect and tolerance for people of different groups! That result in itself would be a great educational improvement over what we now have, which often counsels students to just say no. Judging by election results since 2000, promoting more tolerance for same-sex marriages has become a very important human rights issue. What right does any government have to control who should marry whom? In today’s growing democratic world, any kind of sexual intolerance and irrational fear about law-abiding people is no longer a sign of psychic health and character excellence. Respecting just, fair, and equal laws about sexuality is rapidly replacing obedience to old religious taboos, at least in more democratic countries.
Self-love is definitely another important idea young folks can get more accurate information about. To many religious people especially, self-love is still surrounded with all kinds of myth and misinformation. For centuries conservative religious groups condemned self-love as sinful and wrong; even conservative Plato in ancient times said sex should only be aimed at creating a child. Today, however, such ideas are fading rapidly with some 7 billion people on the planet already. If nothing else, self-love is a very natural and safe way to keep enjoyably relieving dangerous stress, which can be a frequent result of living in industrialized nations. A daily work schedule to merely stay responsible for our economic bills can create many stressful tensions, especially for those who’ve never learned to work in a relaxed way. What's more, self-love creates the opportunity to always maximize one's pleasure, rather than always relying on a partner. But, in any case, no matter what specific sexual ideas students choose to learn more about, the more accurate knowledge they’ll have, the less reason there will be for unreasonable feelings of fear and guilt. And, the more irrational actions of intolerance and hatred that go around, the more likely such actions will come around. In any case, we liberal Deweyans say high school students should be free to get such knowledge if they want to.
Sexual respect is another important specific idea worth talking about. In our growing democratic world, where equal rights is growing, what’s important to know about intelligent sex is not only choosing who to love, but also how to respect and honor their partner, or partners. It’s another very important character habit. It helps define sexual excellence itself. Is someone allowing a partner to control their own body, or merely using them to satisfy their own feelings? Is someone acting selfishly by dominating and controlling the event? In truth, the more young folks learn about what respectful sex means specifically, the less vulnerable they’ll become to sexual kinds of selfishness and disrespect themselves, and such actions are still much alive in today’s world. Are a partner’s sexual actions helping a person to keep growing and learning more about themselves, or not? Whether it’s sex, diet, or any habit, to keep controlling someone else's actions is just as obscene and wrong for heterosexuals as well as non-heterosexuals. Women especially are still very vulnerable to such actions, largely because they’re still not free to even talk intelligently about about respectful sex in high school.
Ending a relationship intelligently is another specific idea about respectful sex. It's an important skill to have. Sometimes people in a relationship just need to back away when they learn more about their partner. And sometimes people discover they don't have the same basic goals and needs, and so grow apart over time, instead of together. Is there one way to intelligently end all such relationships, or are there as many different ways as there are different people? And how important are actions of self-love when one is not in a sexual relationship? For me it was very important, and still is.
Also, many Hollywood films have made some important educational contributions to the art of sexual excellence. For example, if you'd like to see how dangerous sexually possessive actions can be, I recommend Basic Instinct. As it shows, sexually possessive actions can even lead to an early death, no matter what sexual group one belongs to. So again, knowing how to end a relationship and let a partner go, both physically and emotionally, is just as important for sexual character excellence as knowing how to intelligently have some fun with sex. In fact, there are groups helping people with weak, excessive, and unhealthful sexual habits, just as there are groups helping drug and alcohol addicts. So, why shouldn't high school students be allowed to talk about such sexual habits in formal classes, be better able to judge the excellence of their own habits, and also know how to keep improving them with intelligent kinds of practice? If students already have an excessive sexual habit, like disrespecting others, why shouldn't they be able to see its dangerous results, and begin working to improve it? In any case, however, our liberal public high schools should be helping students talk more openly about such habits. How can people learn to live together respectfully and enjoyably unless they're taught such habits? After all, the 2 biggest sources of problems between people are money and sex. So, the more such intelligent knowledge is restricted, the more life becomes a more dangerous case of the blind leading the blind, so to speak.
AIDS Changed Everything
Sexual diseases are another very important specific topic for high school students. Ignorance about them can produce long-lasting painful and even fatal results. For example, the deadly disease known as AIDS seemed to change everything in the sexual world, much of it for the worse but some of it for the better. Of course the worse was the great loss of life from it, but one positive result was to help grow the same-sex marriage movement, helping people stay faithful to one's partner, or partners, at a time, rather than assuming casual sex with anyone would always be healthful and safe. People began realizing casual sex with almost total strangers could be fatal. No doubt, long term sexual fidelity to one partner may be more of a challenge for men. Some research shows most lesbians want a monogamous relationship. But, in any case, the more widespread AIDS became, the more same-sex marriages were seen as a useful idea. As a result, their legalization has kept growing, making it easier for men to keep their long-term relationships growing as well.
The negative and dangerous results of AIDS and all sexually transmitted diseases is now challenging all our educational institutions, homes, and churches as never before. Since the 1980s, AIDS grown into a worldwide tragedy of the very worst kind; it sprang from one of the most basic human needs -- to share loving feelings and actions with someone else. Many millions of people, both hetero and non-heterosexual, will probably die in Africa and Asia alone as a result of public schools not teaching accurate and reliable knowledge about such diseases. In some parts of Africa even political leaders denied the link between sex and AIDS. As a result, vulnerable young folks kept saying ‘yes’ to casual sex all too quickly, even though today’s drugs can better help control the disease. That educational weakness alone promoted a social tragedy of the first rank!
However, many poor people in Africa and Asia simply can’t afford the expensive drugs. Even in the US, with the world’s best medical technology, hundreds of thousands have already died from AIDS, and more are infected each year. Too many young folks now feel it’s not really a danger and can be controlled; in fact it’s still a dangerous and expensive disease. They're also not being educated to ask how long before the virus grows drug resistance? Evidently the virus started growing within the non-heterosexual community, but because life has become so interactive it’s spread into the hetero and drug-taking communities as well, with infected blood and casual sex.
As a result, it's caused more challenges to our public schools. More than ever before, secondary students need to know how to act intelligently to protect one's self from getting such diseases in the first place! Even if the more than 20 sexual diseases had easy cures, who knows how many more deadly incurable sexual diseases will evolve in the future? There's always a possibility. Viruses are continually evolving around the world and thus becoming drug resistant; it’s just another danger of living in a continually changing biological world. Clearly young folks of all ages in both hetero and non-hetero communities need to know more about intelligent sexual practices, and be better educated about what they mean in this still-dangerous day and age.
In any case, however, merely being free just to DISCUSS any and all healthful and accurate sexual knowledge while still in high school would no doubt help make young folks much more intelligent and tolerant about all its different forms and expressions, especially for all those students living in a more or less intolerant sexual environment. In many places around the world today women are still often treated as something to be dominated, controlled, and even abused, and all marriages should be only between a man and a woman or women. In truth, today serious and dangerous population pressures are helping more parents train some children for same-sex relationships; more than 7 billion people on the planet is already probably too many. So, as democratic equal rights and liberal schools continue growing around the world, so too will grow the need for accurate and reliable sexual information, helping promote habits of democratic sexual freedom and tolerance. Growing such habits peacefully can be greatly increased with building of more liberal schools, where accurate knowledge about all bodily functions is celebrated, both physical and psychological functions. The following may help deepen such feelings.
A Little Personal Story
Obviously, many people today already know AIDS has shortened the lives of tens of thousands of very fine people. Many who have died tragically were some of the most talented, most intelligent, kindest, most loving, wisest, and best lovers of justice and fair play the world has ever seen! In fact, I believe if the heterosexual community ever took the time to learn about all the good results produced by the non-heterosexual community, from inner cities, to prisons, to suburbia, and to corporate boardrooms, then all forms of legal discrimination against them would cease immediately. In that respect, many of our TV shows are educational. However, many in the non-heterosexual community prefer to stay ‘underground’, as it were, and not talk about all their social accomplishments and good work. Thus, there's a big information gap between heterosexual and non-heterosexual groups. Again, liberal public schools can do much more to narrow that information gap.
Like many other 'baby boomers', many of my childhood classmates became members of the gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual community while still in junior high, as soon as they became sexually active. In fact, many of them simply had little real choice about such habits; often both parents were non-heterosexual, thus making it even easier to train their kids with habits they thought were the best. As a result, many found same-sex relations satisfying simply because that's the way they were raised at home. And, more importantly, such sexual relationships reduced the chances for getting diseases like syphilis or gonorrhea, not to mention all unwanted pregnancies.
However, those facts, plus a long history of health within such relationships, helped create a very dangerous sexual assumption: same-sex relationships couldn’t become deadly! In short, many young kids I went to school with soon felt confident and assured such relationships were in fact superior to heterosexual ones. They too simply assumed life can't really produce life-threatening results with same-sex habit-arts! In fact, however, as Dewey saw clearly, NATURE IS ALWAYS DANGEROUSLY STABLE! Such habits were so pleasurable and personally rewarding, many young folks felt no harmful results could possibly happen to them. In that respect our conservative book-centered public schools, and non-heterosexual community in general, helped endanger millions of people.
I remember one of my non-heterosexual classmates in particular. By the time he was eighteen his parents helped him build a fine sense of justice, so fine in fact he let himself be drafted and sent to Vietnam to see justice was done. The more brutality US soldiers showed innocent Vietnamese, the more those soldiers deserved to be treated brutally. What goes around should come around, as the saying goes. So-called fragging, or throwing hand grenades near them, became a common occurrence, especially against brutal and vicious officers. The infamous My Lai massacre brought home that reality to the US. Soldiers were being given orders to kill innocent Vietnamese men, women, and children, often so generals could keep claiming higher body counts to their politicians in Washington.
So, knowing this, my classmate didn’t go merely to fight against the Vietnamese; after all, what right did the US have to interfere in this civil war? Instead he volunteered to see even US soldiers got what they deserved; those who arrogantly took innocent life could themselves be killed. That was the kind of man he was raised to be, a lover of justice and a hater of disrespect.
Naturally, after he was discharged he continued practicing his non-heterosexual habits. Like millions of others he assumed unquestioningly they were healthy and completely safe; it was an easy assumption to make. Such habits were the only ones he had ever known, and their results hadn’t been dangerous to health. Thus casual sex with many partners became a routine and propulsive habit. Like millions of others he felt completely safe; never before in history had such a ‘free love’ life-style become life-threatening. In fact, many felt such habits were as sacred as any religious habit.
In fact, in Western civilization religious sexual orgies had existed even in ancient Greece. The ancient Greek version of it was the Dionysian religious orgy. People felt wine-drinking and group intercourse before the planting season somehow united them spiritually with Dionysus’ god-like growing power, helping both new plants to grow and even people to become immortal like the god. Also, ancient Rome too had its share of stress-relieving orgies, especially among the Epicurean upper classes, where pleasure was said to be the highest good. Even in the modern book The Dance of Siva, (1918) it was written: “(free love) has a deep and spiritual significance; (it symbolizes) the mystic union of finite and infinite.” (Hopkins, 270). And no doubt feelings of defiance against society’s intolerant non-heterosexual people made many feel even more justified sexually; such habits liberated them from heterosexual habits. But, as always, results, not feelings of pleasure, superiority, or sacredness, are what keep any habit-art excellent.
As a result of ignoring more accurate sexual knowledge in our public high schools, millions of people still are fearful and threatened by those with different kinds of sexual habits. Thus unjust, unkind, undemocratic, and even hateful actions against them are often the result. Laws against same-sex marriage, for example, are working in many states. However, the good news is intelligent education in our public high schools, homes, and churches are helping increase public tolerance for such habits. It’s yet another reason why public schools are so important to any nation's health, peace, and stability. Even though too many undereducated parents still believe such sexual habits are in fact sinful and always wrong, younger folks in particular are feeling more tolerant than ever before. And the more such accurate and intelligent information is taught, like safe-sex habits, the less chance there is for producing dangerous and unhealthful results. In fact, freely talking about intelligent and respectful sexual habits and ideas in high school is another important part of both personal and social health, as well as character development. How can anyone have an excellent character without having some accurate knowledge of sexual habits, and how to make such events safe, fun, and enjoyable? How can anyone be sexually respectful when they don't know what that means in action? Ignorance is not bliss; far from it. Ignorance can be dangerous and life-threatening.
Talking Rationally About Sex
Not only is it possible, but no doubt for many high school boys it would be highly educational and enjoyable. It would also go a long way to reducing personal actions of disrespect as well as breaking sexual laws. The fact is, smiling or not, the more a subject is talked about rationally, the easier it is to practice it intelligently. Beyond such enjoyment, however, intelligent talk can also help build some very useful habits. In fact, building an excellent and intelligent set of sexual habits might be a life saver. For example, in a democracy based on equality and liberty, not respecting all law-abiding and peaceful people with different sex habits can be dangerous; what goes around often comes around. Even though some TV programs try to educate young folks about such sexual diversity, they often ignore all the finer ideas about making sex enjoyable and fun. Even the few adult films I’ve seen rarely show what respectful and fun sex can be like. As a result, peoples' ignorance and disrespect for a partner is often left in place, as well as unfounded fears and superstitions. Probably the most common one is based on religious ideas: all forms of sex are sinful and morally wrong outside a man-woman marriage. Recently I heard a conservative woman say Democrats are promoting immorality by not campaigning against same-sex marriage. It's a natural feeling for those raised to believe only their own habits reflect some kind of absolute moral Truth. However, as Dewey points out, probably every conceivable action has been celebrated at one time or another, including murder and cannibalism.
Teaching such knowledge is definitely a major challenge. Even in much of the US today, not to mention many conservative countries, it’s still physically dangerous to even mention ideas like equal sexual rights and tolerance, much less making sex fun and enjoyable. Even in supposedly modern and advanced countries like Russia and China I've often redd reports about mean, unkind, and vicious discrimination against non-heterosexuals. Such unreasonable discrimination, however, is being challenged more and more around the world by more liberal people. If so, then why shouldn't our public high schools be helping young folks learn more about sexual reality? Sex can be as much fun as any other habit, so why not learn more about it? Shouldn't high school students be free to intelligently debate different sexual ideas, and learn to defend their ideas only with accurate and reliable knowledge? Such debates are really the essence of democracy and help promote understanding between people, especially when many still believe mythical and superstitious ideas. Shouldn't the next generation be free to debate such ideas, as long as they don't encourage dangerous actions or breaking just and fair laws?
Today, many in the LGBT community and liberals too are working to keep growing such freedoms and liberties in our public high schools for those who want such knowledge. It helps people to both live, let live, and live better and more rewarding lives. What person wouldn't like to hear their partner say it's time to play hide the salami!? Or, it's time for the finger-train to start rolling! No doubt, more accurate and respectful sexual actions are being encouraged with the help of social protests, political referenda, and legal rulings even at the Supreme Court level. They're all helping challenge conservative feelings and assumptions about different sexual habits. As a result, many people around the world are being challenged to build some more intelligent and respectful sexual habits. After all, if such intelligent habits don't hurt me, then why bother denying them to anyone? Even so, why shouldn’t such knowledge be available in our public high schools?
So, for those who value democratic liberty, equal rights, and justice, building liberal high schools where such sexual ideas can be openly and freely talked about becomes another educational challenge. Many of our conservative book-oriented schools could be doing much more to build such intelligent habits of respect and encouragement. The fact is many heterosexuals are still psychologically naïve, believing non-heterosexual habits are somehow unnatural and wrong, are always a matter of choice, and hence can be easily changed, corrected, and made right simply by wanting to stop them. To us liberals, however, such naive ideas reflect a shallow understanding of human nature and habits themselves. Many non-heterosexuals I’ve been around really had no choice about what to desire sexually, and told me so; from the proverbial Day 1, so to speak, they were simply taught to desire one kind of partner, and so they felt completely normal and natural with that lifestyle! Hence, they were no more free to reject them than birds are free to reject flying, animals to reject digesting food, or people to reject their skin color. For millions today around the world, so-called LBGT habits have become propulsive instincts to be judged by their results, just like any other habit.
The Nature of Habits
This might be the time to talk a little more about the nature of habits, like Dewey did in his Human Nature and Conduct (1921). We'll start talking more about them in some later sections about psychology, but a few ideas here might be useful later on. It might also increase feelings of tolerance for those who practice different kinds of sexual habits.
In that book, Dewey talked much about how repeated actions become habits, and the more they're repeated, the stronger and more propulsive they become. In fact, for him they become what's commonly called will power. For example, the more a person eats certain foods, the stronger becomes their diet will power, and the more difficult it becomes to change or improve it. And what’s more, the less desire one has to improve it. Such habits are comfortable and enjoyable, and thus helps make building a better diet habit more challenging and difficult. Those old habits just keep firing away, as it were, and kept people eating the same kinds of foods. What’s more, because our public schools aren’t teaching students how to intelligently change a habit they want changed, most people don't realize it’s best to change it slowly, using rewards to help learn new eating habits. The more a person enjoys eating more healthful foods, the sooner a more healthful diet habit grows. In any case, however, it all depends of a person’s desire. If their habits feel right, then there’s little desire to change them.
So, the more young folks start seeing such reliable psychological facts, the more respect they can have not only for their own habits, but for others’ as well. What's more, a person is responsible for their own habits and the results they produce. If they don't want to change them, then they shouldn't be expected too, unless of course those habits are destructive and dangerous. Thus those with destructive criminal habits, for example, are often jailed, making social life less dangerous.
For us Deweyan liberals, the sooner young folks start learning such important facts about their own body-minds, the sooner they'll be able to more intelligently guide their own growth. Obviously, I'm not suggesting 1st graders start learning about sexual habits, but merely how to change and improve any habit they want changed and improved. After all, people have to live with their own habits all through life, so why shouldn't they know how to change those they want changed? In fact, the sooner young people learn how to use such facts, the easier it’ll be living in the adult world, where intelligent and respectful sexual habits are expected. Again and again history shows us intolerant habits have changed as more accurate knowledge and facts were learned and practiced. For example, for most of US history many people were completely intolerant about equal rights for Africans and women, and many still feel that way even today! Many would simply condemn such ideas as communistic or against god's will, and thus say they're not worth allowing, even though equal protection under the law was a part of our constitution’s amendments after the Civil War. Old racial habits simply continued on. In fact, as history tells us, hundreds of thousands of people were willing to die rather than accept equal rights for Africans; that's how strong master-slave habits were to millions of people. But, the more our schools were de-segregated in the 1950s and '60s, and allowed different races to interact, the weaker those habits became. Without actually practicing more tolerant and democratic actions in schools, and building them into propulsive habit-arts, unreasonable and intolerant feelings and ideas would have been improved much more slowly with the help of lawsuits, fines, jail time, and of course kinder homes and churches.
So if people can learn to look beyond a person's skin color, and focus on their actions instead, then why shouldn't they learn to look beyond their own sexual habits, see different one, and then deal with people as people, rather than being somehow less than human for practicing different habits? Obviously, such liberal habits promoting equal rights can be learned, and learned more quickly with the help of intelligent talk in liberal public schools. Because such talk about racial differences was largely ignored in our public schools, in the early 1900s many innocent Africans were murdered in cold blood for no reason at all, except to make others afraid to vote and demand their equal rights. It was racial warfare between politically powerful whites and Africans! And of course within the past 4 centuries, as people practiced kinder and more tolerant religious habits, Catholic Church officials were forced to become more tolerant of other religions. During the Middle Ages they had the political power to publicly burn alive many heretics, so as to continue making people fear even thinking about different religious ideas. In short, any habit, even powerful religious ones, can be changed and made kinder and more tolerant with the help of intelligent talking and also more intelligent actions. Thus, teaching young folks to judge others by the new liberal test of producing constructive results has become a more intelligent way of building sexual character excellence and a more peaceful society.
For us Deweyan liberals, in today’s world it just doesn’t matter what sexual habits people choose to practice; just as a person's skin color doesn't determine their character excellence. Such excellence is the result of a person's own kind motives, helpful actions and their results, and little else. So what matters most about one's sexual habits are is the constructive results they produce. Do they promote respect, confidence, and enjoyment, or not. Do they promote self-knowledge and esteem, or just selfishness, sadness, and disrespect? If the latter set of results are produced, then they help make a person's life more dangerous, so why shouldn't young folks know about those facts, as well as how to produce the first set of results? So, for both scientific and ethical truth, actual motives and results have become the most objective and intelligent way of judging any action! That's yet another result growing from Dewey's liberal thinking about habits and character excellence. In truth, disrespecting good and equal sexual laws is just as dangerous as disrespecting anyone's equal rights, no matter which sexual tribe one belongs to. Why condemn and work to deny anyone's healthful sexual habits when they produce healthful results? And why deny useful knowledge about sex to even high school students who want to know more about it? Restricting such knowledge is certainly not what liberal democratic schools, homes, and churches are about.
The sad truth is many of our conservative public schools, homes, and churches ignore even formally talking about such intelligent sexual character habits. Thus, they help cause more personal and social stress, like child abuse and unlawful prostitution. It's a shame, especially when teaching such knowledge certainly doesn't hurt students; in fact it would almost certainly increase their respect for their schools and others, as well as their tolerant feelings for different habits. An example of how weak such character habits still are has recently been seen when a majority of people in 11 states voted selfishly not to share equally their marriage rights with same-sex couples, even though it wouldn't hurt them at all. It would simply make the democratic ideal of equal rights stronger and more diverse. It shows we're still a long way from having liberal schools celebrating equal democratic rights. In those states most people still choose to practice their feudal undemocratic habits of sameness and uniformity.
No doubt, more recently in 2009 there have been some positive signs of change in a few eastern states, and on November 6, 2012, 2 states voted to share such rights equally. Enough people saw through 2 of the ideas often used to justify sexual discrimination: children will be corrupted by seeing same-sex couples, and the family institution of one-man one-woman will be weakened. But isn’t that like saying merely living around an ocean will make children want to act like the ocean? Isn't that the same kind of logic? Thus, more and more people are asking themselves: Isn't it most important to raise children in a secure and safe home? Exactly how will a person's own traditional family be weakened merely by allowing same-sex marriages to others? I for one have never really heard a good answer from conservatives to those questions; is it mainly because the logic would be so weak it would be easy to see its flaws? Changing times are calling for new habits, however. The Supreme Court recently ruled the government's denial of federal equal benefit rights to same-sex couples is unconstitutional, as is a California state law prohibiting same-sex marriages; it's against the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th amendment, even though most people voted for it.
Again we can go back to the nature of habits. Routine habits help people feel such behavioral sameness and uniformity should be preserved no matter what. Such habits are celebrated by conservatives everywhere. So, people with different habits are easily labeled as somehow flawed and not worthy of equality, and thus must not be allowed to marry and live together. Doesn't the Bible say god created man and woman for each other? Thus, for many religious conservatives different sexual habits are often seen as the devil’s work, even though they also believe god has planned out everything to happen just as it does, and thus knows all things, past, present, and future. Habits can even overrule logic in many cases, thus making will power stronger than reason itself. How can anything be condemned if god has planned all events and knows everything before it happens? Isn't everything a form of god's will, even different sexual habits? We liberals are simply freer to ask such logical questions, and the situation becomes even stranger when different kinds of families have been living together for decades without even knowing it.
With such intolerant ideas and talk, is it any wonder many conservative churches are losing more and more young people? They feel LBGT people have the same kinds of human needs as everyone else, like for respect, peace, equality, enjoyment, and fun? In ancient Greece, the liberal humanist Protagoras suggested similar ideas when he said people are the measure of all things, not the gods, as Plato and Socrates believed. Peoples' habits are used to judge right or wrong, not absolute Truth. In any case, our public schools can be made to teach much more enlightened kinds of sexual character excellence if enough people simply take the time to build more liberal schools, where high school students are free to learn about different kinds of sexual habits, and about democratic sexual character excellence as well. It's another major liberal educational challenge growing around the world today. What’s to fear? Why not simply learn to live, let live, and treat people as people? In fact the more non-heterosexual my schoolmates became, the less interest they had in this straight guy?
Like science and its art of experimental learning, more tolerant ethical habits are growing in many parts of the world. Because of their routine conservative habits, many people are just now emerging from narrow medieval feelings about sex. They still feel only their own sexual habits should be practiced. That's the natural danger in all routine habits, and Aristotle too saw it long ago. Everyone's habits naturally make them want to see and hear only similar kinds of actions and ideas. They help us want social sameness and conformity, and when they’re challenged with more democratic habits of diversity and difference, life begins feeling strange and wrong. How else can one explain why people go to, say, the same church? Don't we want to hear how only our own ideas are right? But, democracy itself is challenging people to act more humanely towards those with different habits. Merely smiling helps put people at ease, rather than feeling tense and suspicious?
It’s more than a simple challenge. After all, for thousands of years different tribes around the world have been intolerant of others, merely because they're different. Such actions, however, are no longer considered democratically excellent. Building more tolerant habits certainly won't be easy, especially since intolerant conservative habits have been practiced for thousands of years. Even well-educated ancient conservative and moderate Greeks like Plato and Aristotle labeled everyone else as ‘barbarian’, and it wasn’t just them either. Many Orthodox Jews and upper class Romans often felt the same way about those with different habits. Even the New Testament preserves examples of how prejudiced Jesus was against non-Jews, telling his disciples not to go into Gentile houses, and even calling a non-Jewish woman a dog! Such examples show us not only how human he was, but also how powerful and intolerant routine habits can become when they're said to reflect eternal and unchanging Truth. But today we liberals have a potent weapon to make all such habits more tolerant and democratic, namely our own neighborhood schools! The growth of more liberal democratic habits also show us how civilization itself can be defined as the process of learning to respect different people as people! In that process our public schools, homes, and churches all have important roles to play. Since liberal Democritus in the 400s BCE, equal democratic rights for all law-abiding people have been an important liberal value worthy of celebration; they simply help produce a more peaceful, just, equal, and tolerant society.
Another important inconsistency can also be mentioned between a conservative model of political excellence and sexual practices. Conservatives love to talk about reducing the size of government, and getting government off of peoples’ backs, so to speak. Yet, when they have the power, they often use it to pass harsh and unfair sexual laws. For example, they’ve often passed laws against sodomy, even between adults in the privacy of their own homes! Drug laws too are often passed, even for personal use in their own homes. The result often makes it easier to jail people with different habits. Such laws thus violate conservative ideas about keeping the government out of peoples' lives, as well as all the ideals of equality celebrated in our Constitution. If conservatives are the ones wanting most to keep the government out of peoples' lives, then how are such laws against, say, same-sex marriage justified at all? Evidently it's not OK for the government to collect more taxes from the rich to help employ people during an economic recession, but it's OK to jail people for merely doing in their own homes what harms no! To us liberal Deweyans such logical inconsistency is simply no longer tolerated. Even US Supreme Court Justices have been ruling that kind of thinking is unconstitutional. A few years ago they struck down a law outlawing sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes! What right has any government to write such laws, much less enforce them?
And so we liberals continue asking our public schools to become more active in teaching such ideas. Indeed, the more people allow such unequal and unjust laws to exist, the more George Orwell’s controlling and oppressive ‘Big Brother’ government becomes a reality! Shouldn't even high school students begin seeing such laws merely reflect personal habits, often based on conservative medieval ideas of an absolute and eternal ethical Truth? Since 2003, our largely conservative Court has been seeing such intolerant ideas and feelings in a more democratically tolerant and intelligent way. It’s definitely another example of using results to judge laws, rather than merely equating them to old conservative ideas. Nature is a place of diversity, not sameness, and the more peaceful it is, the better and more natural it is for everyone.
19. SPARE THE ROD, IMPROVE A LIFE
If it could be written, people might find it interesting to read a history of violence against children. If nothing else it would no doubt help more people become more aware of a serious problem still plaguing too many children. Even slaves can fight back, but children must submit or suffer painful consequences. With violence against both boys and girls in homes and schools, as well as love and kindness, for thousands of years children have been kept docile and obedient to those with social authority, like parents and teachers, as well as religious, military, and political leaders. Even intelligent children and those from wealthier families were sometimes physically abused. In our modern era of Behavioral psychology, however, where more positive and enjoyable rewards have become much better teaching tools, learning more intelligent democratic habits has become easier. Sadly, that idea is still far from being used everywhere. In many places today children are being made to believe only one version of reality is eternally and unchangingly True, and so feeling a democratic respect and tolerance for other law-abiding habits becomes more difficult. In spite of it, however, such democratic habits seem to be growing and that’s the important point.
No doubt, any kind of unjustified violent actions against children should be a concern for all democrats and independents around the world. Children are just too precious to become psychologically perverted and destructive at an early age, and yet it's still happening far too often around the world, and even in the US. Because unjust physical abuse affects a person’s character habits and feelings, there are now organizations working against cruelty to children, animals, and spouses. For those who aren’t yet convinced of how socially dangerous and wasteful results are produced by violent forms of punishment, this section may help people begin seeing the need for teaching more intelligent ways of helping young folks better learn what they want to learn. After all, we all continue paying the price for such antisocial actions in the form of expensive and wasteful prisons, police forces, and court systems, not to mention mental health and drug abuse programs. So again, we Deweyan liberals ask, why shouldn’t our publicly funded schools help empower children to intelligently defend themselves against abusive people, even parents? After all, such actions are illegal, and they simply make everyone's life more stressful and frustrating. No doubt, our conservative public schools could be better educating students to respond more intelligently in violent situations, just as they now often teach children how to avoid unwanted and dangerous advances by adult strangers.
A Few Facts About Violent Habits
For hundreds of thousands of years violent hunting habits were aimed at animals. Considering mankind has only been living in cities -- civilization -- for less than 10,000 years, and been hunting animals for over a million years, it's a little amazing we haven't wiped out our own species already. Into the 1800s the British countryside regularly echoed with hunting cries of Tally Ho, and of course violence against primitive peoples as well as women too continue being a serious social problem around the world, including the US!
Only recently have kinder and more enjoyable learning tools become more widespread in our public schools, even though physical punishment is still practiced. Who isn’t aware of paddling in public schools, psychological threats of failure and flunking, and other means of physical punishment in private religious schools? Learning to use enjoyable rewards as a much more effective learning tool have only recently become a more intelligent alternative to physical and psychological forms of punishment for not learning what the teacher says they should learn. Again, since Dewey published his ideas of Functional Behaviorism in his Human Nature and Conduct, such negative kinds of punishment have remained in place. With his help, more peaceful and respectful teaching tools and ideas like pleasant encouragement, rewards, and enjoyable practice have grown much stronger in the past century; they’ve helped civilize our public schools even more.
Today more and more people are becoming more aware of the obnoxious results of negative and violent forms of punishment inflicted on children to force their obedience. So, there is still much our public schools could be doing on a formal level to actually teach more positive and intelligent learning habits, and thus empower the next generation to intelligently keep making their own neighborhoods less violent places to live. And the more such habits grow, the easier it’ll be to keep making our world less violent too. As terrible as they are, atomic weapons may have produced at least one good social result: they’ve helped reduce warfare to small local areas rather than world wars. Let’s hope that trend continues, and it will with the growth of more liberal schools where students learn how to intelligent defend themselves against undeserved physical and psychological punishment. Such habits will no doubt help make violence towards other nations less frequent too. As the ancient Greeks learned so well, violent self-destructive war is a terrible teacher. The greatest danger these days seems to be from small terrorist attacks and mentally unbalanced individuals, thus creating the need to keep track of what people are doing in our own neighborhoods. Even widespread and under-regulated government surveillance has become a more serious social problem; who knows what private companies are doing with all the personal data they're collecting?
Meanwhile, in our public schools violent punishment seems to be lessening, even for students who are disruptive in class. Expulsion now seems to be the punishment of choice. But how wise is that? Shouldn't our public schools be the one place students can get some intelligent advice about how to improve their habits?
Unlike centuries ago, today teachers usually just ignore students who don’t work their assignments and instead daydream about being somewhere else. That's definitely an educational improvement. Still physical punishment exists in many private schools and homes. In the Catholic High School I went to for 2 years, followers of Christ often struck students in the face just for smiling and joking around, even outside the classroom, and when I was doing my student teaching in public junior high some students were still occasionally paddled with some force. What’s more, such violent punishment is still a serious social problem in many homes too. Thus, both violent physical and mental abuse remains a large part of school and home life. Besides expulsion, psychological forms of punishment are still the norm in both public and private schools in the form of failure and flunking. And, as some prison statistics keep showing us, continuing forms of home punishment are helping produce psychological feelings of anguish, frustration, resentment, inferiority, revenge, self-punishment, and even hatred. In fact, as children, over 90% of those in prison have suffered excessive, continuing, unhealthful, and psychologically distorting pain. However, simply because liberal homes and public schools are much more concerned to empower children with intelligent and respectful character habits, they’re much more focused on teaching both students and parents more intelligent ways of interacting with each other, especially how to recognize disrespectful actions, and then how to defend themselves against violent forms of punishment. For us liberals, children should be empowered in our public schools with such skills. Why? Well, the harmful social results of such actions affect all people, whether they pay taxes or not.
Both painful and pleasant feelings have been a part of nature probably since life first evolved around 4 Billion years ago, otherwise life itself wouldn’t have lasted very long. Even today single celled animals with no nerve cells still react to some poisons, as if they were painful. And when nerve cells evolved long before the Cambrian Era some 600 million years ago, such reactions became even more deeply felt.
Today, with our own fantastically complex human nerve cells and brains, we probably feel pain more deeply than any other animal. It helps explain why such prolonged and undeserved pain can produce some very destructive psychological and social weaknesses. No doubt, it was also one reason Aristotle said mankind can become the worst, as well as the best, of all other animals. No other animal can become as vicious or as kind as we can, thus creating our still important educational challenge – helping more and more young people in our public schools, homes, and churches learn more enjoyable and pleasant ways of learning what they want to learn. In that process more positive and enjoyable rewards are used, rather than pain and non-productive isolation. The more students learn to enjoy learning, and use enjoyable games as learning tools, the less need there will be for building more inhumane prisons where enjoyable habits of learning aren’t taught.
In short, there's been much growth away from using negative kinds of punishment to teach students, but it's only a beginning; major educational challenges are still in front of us, namely empowering young students to better defend themselves against violent actions. The good news is liberal public schools respond much easier to such challenges. They aren't afraid to formally teach children more enjoyable and pleasant ways of learning, and also what to do if someone keeps using physical kinds of punishment as a learning tool. With their emphasis on character development, and psychological excellence, they're more capable of teaching children what it means to respect all other law-abiding people, and where to simply seek help to better control those who continue painfully abusing others. Even parents and guardians simply do not have a right to keep physically abusing children.
Some History of Educational Pain
Why is pain such still such a widespread educational tool? Perhaps a little history will help show why the problem is still with us. Said simply, not very many people realize how serious the problem is, and also know how to use much more intelligent teaching tools than pain, fear, humiliation and forced obedience. With those kinds of learning tools a feudal and undemocratic world has existed for many thousands of years. It's a popular comedic bit to mention how Jewish parents have used guilt as a non-violent teaching tool. As a result, many Jewish children often feel guilty about even trivial actions; the TV series Seinfeld was often a funny example of it. No doubt, when children act selfishly, disrespectfully, or greedily they should not only be told such actions are socially acceptable, but also what actions are better, like sharing and helping others. In such ways charity has become an important character habit for all civilized religions and philosophies worthy of the name. But in any case, love and affection are much better learning tools to build such habits. So, why should it be any different with learning anything, be it facts or skills?
In fact, habits of linking pain and education are thousands of years old already, and so are still a part of many school systems. They probably began growing even as people began settling into villages and building towns and cities. Even in primitive times pain was used as a teaching tool, especially at puberty; the ceremony signaling the end of childhood and beginning of adulthood was often a very painful affair. In such cultures around the world pain was often caused by circumcision, knocking teeth out, tattooing, fasting, or other ways. Such pain increased the feelings for the knowledge children were often given at that time; they were told these were the most important things to know, like tribal myths and ideas. Traumatic pain made it easier to remember such myths. Also important was learning how to drive away childhood spirits and attract wiser and more helpful adult ones. Other than that, however, inflicting pain at the primitive level of living was for the most part unnecessary. There were already strong emotional bonds of affection between primitive children and adults, and so learning adult skills and knowledge by simple imitation was usually smooth and natural. Thus skills, knowledge, and character habits -- the three pillars of Dewey’s liberal education -- were routinely passed on within the affectionate bonding between adults and children who, naturally, wanted to learn adult habits. In short, children were emotionally connected to the adult world from a very early age, and so pain as a learning tool was often unnecessary.
However, the great weakness in such an imitative learning system was the lack of intelligent and organized experimental testing of ideas, so as to keep finding the knowledge and skills producing much better and more reliable knowledge. In short, routine imitation as an educational tool made it too easy for primitive habits to remain routine, rather than intelligent, experimental, and progressive. It helps explain why some primitive habits and beliefs have lasted to the present day in some places.
As with so many other habits, agricultural arts began changing life in fundamentally new ways, and changing education as well. Crops meant building villages, towns, and then cities as more food allowed more people to grow, social classes to evolve, and so new educational habits were needed to promote feudalistic political and military structures. One result was the building of schools where students were often forced to submit to learn what teachers wanted them to learn, especially to fear those in authority. Such feelings made revolution less likely, even from the slave class, and thus kept feudalistic systems in place for thousands of years. The Egyptian pharaonic system was merely one of many.
With pain as a major teaching tool new skills and obedience were learned and passed on. For peasants to even look at the pharaoh was punishable by death. Other skills, however, were learning in a more enjoyable atmosphere. Metal working and jewelry, for example, were taught as family businesses, usually by a relative, as were weapons-making and pottery. People became freer to learn with enjoyable physical practice different trades and professions. Like today, ancient business and government scribes and tax gatherers needed to keep accurate records; how else could the government know how much to safely skim off the top, so to speak, and use for their own needs? So, writing and calculating skills were often taught to scribe and tax collector children, often with some painful tactics.
Early on, teachers discovered smacking children occasionally with various kinds of tree branches and sticks kept students fearful of those in authority, as well as focused on learning what teachers wanted them to learn. As early as 3,000 BCE teachers in both Iraq and Egypt regularly smacked their students when they didn’t pay attention, or did sloppy work learning how to read and write the more than 700 symbols in their languages. No doubt, it also inspired early Bible writers to recommend the same teaching techniques at home; spare the rod and spoil the child! In ancient Palestine, the Bible mentions pain as an important part of a boy’s education. Many parents even today still justify painfully punishing their children as a sign of love itself. From the Book of Proverbs: He who spares the rod hates his son;... Beat him with a rod ... save his life from sheol; ... a rod for the back of fools; ... the rod and reproof give wisdom. And of course for thousands of years Jews themselves have been heartlessly rounded up and beaten, repeatedly expelled from countries, and even killed in huge numbers.
No doubt, early in civilization the painful flogging of slaves was learned as well. The more warfare spread, the more common slavery became throughout the ancient world, and so pain and humiliation helped keep them passive and obedient, sometimes for generations. Both Plato and Aristotle had slaves working for them. What's more, for many centuries men all over the ancient and medieval worlds were absolute rulers of their families -- a man's home was his castle, complete with dungeon; medieval serfs were legally bound to their work. Thus, early on in civilization, social 'pecking' orders quickly evolved, as efficient as any gorilla, chimpanzee, or pigeon groups. Punishment was just about everyone's main tool for teaching obedience, and we might imagine how some Chinese teachers may have used pain to make their few students learn how to properly write about 100,000 characters in their language. As in many other cities Aztec schools too were anchored to their temples, taught by their priests, and regularly used punishment as a teaching tool even for noble and wealthy boys; their 'commoner' schools, however, supposedly used less physical violence where less knowledge was demanded.
Meanwhile, back in ancient Greece, democratic habits began evolving in the 600s BCE. Greeks loved to talk and debate others about different ideas, and so asking questions, speaking, learning, and education became stronger social habits in many democratic cities. Thus Western civilization’s three basic models of life and nature – liberal, moderate, and conservative – began evolving and growing. The old monopolistic conservative spirit-models of life and nature gave way to new, more naturalistic ones with the help of more intelligent learning habits.
In more conservative city-states like military-obsessed Sparta, however, pain and learning remained linked to each other. There, children were exposed to pain and harsh living conditions at an early age, and Spartan teachers were an equal opportunity employer. Girls were treated just as harshly as boys, being made to go about naked even in winter. Such painful teaching was thought to toughen children and thus increase the production of tough warriors. As a result, even young Spartan men had absolutely no second thoughts about regularly inflicting pain and even death on their Helot-slaves, and in fact were encouraged to do so while still teenagers! Thus pain helped endanger everyone's life. And of course it’s commonly known, in their circuses many Roman citizens enjoyed watching hungry lions and bears kill innocent Christian men and women who refused to obey Roman religious laws. For those of you who think mankind's basic violent nature is the same as it always was, and can't be changed with better kinds of education, you just might want to rethink that idea. Even psychically twisted and vicious Nazis Heinrich Himmler regularly lied to Germans about what they were doing to Jews and other minorities.
No doubt, people still like to see their enemies defeated, but such 'civilized warfare' now relies more on making people break some law and thus hurt themselves, rather than merely murdering them. Life has become less brutal, but there’s still much room for improvement, for example by empowering children to use more enjoyable learning tools, like pleasant rewards. Especially important for us liberal Deweyans are the first three years of schooling, and so neighborhood primary schools remain very important institutions for building a more respectful, peaceful, and democratic world.
Of course, alongside the use of pain as an educational tool, there continued growing the more civilized tools of affectionate and encouragement. Wealthy democratic-minded Greeks, for example, could afford to hire more affectionate tutors for their children, and so enjoyable home-schooling became the preferred educational method for the upper classes. Tutors eager for customers knew the key to their success was to start from what the child was interested in, and from there gently keep expanding those interests to connect with the educated adult world. Both Plato and Aristotle were tutored at home, and years later Aristotle himself became a tutor to teenaged Alexander the Great. Much to his discredit, however, he too encouraged using pain as a learning tool, although he didn’t say exactly how big a piece of lumber should be used. He probably never wacked Alexander; in fact as he was busy conquering the world Alex sent books and biological specimens back to Aristotle for his research. At schools, however, in the morning boys sat on their stone seats or on the floor, kept quiet, and practiced their writing, usually on wax tablets.
Still, the overall objective was to teach children to support the political and military status quo; tribes were on the lookout for more trinkets and slaves. And, the preservation of such conservative habits and feelings was often promoted painfully. Medieval torture tools also show how diabolically creative some people were when it came to inflicting pain on those who dared teach themselves different ways of acting and thinking. I wonder … what new painful habits will be devised for our modern day heretics: liberal economists? These days truthful and plain speaking liberal econs seem to have become an endangered species on more and more university and college campuses often controlled by wealthy conservatives. Fess up; how many liberal econs already know the road to full professorship is paved by not criticizing too many conservative ideas, like economic regulation and publicly owned organizations, like banks, utility companies, and even elections? The more they do, the more they might endanger the flow of grants from wealthy donors.
Pain-Fear Made People Accept Feudalistic Institutions
No doubt, pain on both a personal and social level was used for forcing people to accept a feudalistic social order; even religious fears and superstitions played a large psychological role. Public school educated people today often feel undemocratic feudalistic social systems only existed in the Middle Ages. In fact, however, as we've been seeing, such systems run by a small number of ruling elite have existed for thousands of years, and still exist today most everywhere. In fact, a brutally widespread ancient feudal social order no doubt helped conservatives and moderates like Plato and Aristotle paint their own philosophic pictures of life and nature. They even justified their feudalistic models by saying eternally fixed and unchanging objects control all such systems, so they should be maintained. They said such eternal and unchanging objects were themselves arranged in a feudal hierarchy, with the most powerful object at the highest point in the system. Thus human society too should have its own natural feudalistic pecking order, enforced with pain and violence when necessary. The more they traveled, the more they saw examples of such feudalistic systems where pain was a regular teaching tool.
Even today such systems continue on, with the US Supreme Court being just one example among many; almost all of our economic system is feudalistic too. That’s how new and weak democratic habits of voting and sharing power equally still are. Today's feudal economic, political, and educational systems, by the way, are what give the following saying its truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same. However, the hopeful and encouraging news from liberals like Dewey is this: the more young folks are educated in our public schools to practice more democratic habits, the easier it will be for adults to keep taking a more equal share of such institutions.
In short, the ancient world already had feudalistic fiefdoms. Large, wealthy estate-owners kept growing wealthier by absorbing those farmers who couldn't pay their debts. Earlier we saw how liberals like Solon were elected to democratize such feudal power, so it was shared more equally. Even after the feudalistic Roman Empire collapsed, wealthy families continued using their power to keep increasing it, including barbarian tribes brutally battling each other for more land and trinkets. Thus, little landed fiefdoms continued on. Italy’s Lombard region was just one example.
In Roman times too pain was often used as a normal teaching tool, and it continued right on into the feudalistic Christian era. Roman schools taught Greek subjects like reading, writing, and public speaking, but they had little tolerance for music and games many Greek teachers used as a break from making students memorize Homeric stories about brave and crafty warriors. Such stories were believed to help build important character habits. In such schools, physical punishment often helped naturally curious children to stay quiet and seated on stone chairs, keep writing their letters, and memorizing stories about heroes for their character development. Even in the 300s CE Augustine, in his Confessions, tells how his teachers weren't afraid to wallop him if he dared take an unscheduled mental break from his work; how dare any student actually think some thoughts on his own! And I myself saw such painful actions on a regular basis at parochial high school. Once, a classmate who dared laugh out loud in front of a somber 60-something Brother was promptly slapped across the face, as were some in class as well. Pain thus helped students continue fearing and obeying their teachers, and also continue accepting the work they were given, no questions asked. Learning was serious business and pain was used to build such habits of obedience.
Even in the Roman world liberal thinking was regularly attacked soon after Augustus founded the Empire in 27 BCE. Even as conservative Paul of Tarsus was writing letters of advice to his Christian churches around 50 CE, Augustus, who wanted to become a god, started attacking liberal Atomists. He simply demanded all their books be destroyed, especially the great Atomist poem On Nature by Lucretius, written around that time. As a result, free speech, democratic values, philosophic variety, and naturalistic thinking gradually became rarer as education remained conservative and life remained spirit-based.
Again, however, some progressive educational ideas based on affection as a useful teaching tool continued on, especially for upper class males. As the early Synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke were being written after 70 CE, educators like Marcus Quintillianus (about 35-100 CE) noticed how fewer and fewer young boys were going to schools where punishment was common. Who wants to be painfully punished while trying to learn more about the world? Thus school enrollment was declining. Obviously the word about painful punishment in school was spreading even to the schoolboy level, and so many of them simply chose to do almost anything else besides go to school. So, knowing how valuable education was to a well-run empire, and how enjoyment was a valuable educational tool, Marcus suggested teachers should encourage children with praise and verbal rewards so they would want to be in school and keep learning, rather than use whips and tree branches on them. He too was home-schooled and tutored by a loving father in his native Spain. Still, many teachers themselves felt an uneducated public was best for social stability; uneducated people often simply believed what they were told and so helped feudal systems stay in place, especially political and military ones. After all, the less people knew, the easier it was to control and keep taking advantage of them.
Ancient China, however, was a little more progressive. Like today's world it offered the chance of social advancement to brighter students, and the possibility to become wealthier. And so with Confucius’s help, an education system grew based on ability. Filling their civil service jobs were largely based on academic talent, rather than merely belonging to a powerful family. Intelligent boys from any social class who had good memories could pass tough exams and get well-respected government jobs. It didn’t matter what your religious habits were either.
Other than that, however, most everyone else in China still lived in a feudalistic society; boys and girls from the largest farmer class almost always stayed at home, worked the fields, and paid their taxes to support the rulers. Rulers, nobles, merchants, and slaves all needed to be fed and so the government regularly took much of what farmers grew. Even after Communists took control in 1948, such a feudalistic political system has remained in place.
Only slowly, within the past century or so, have educational punishment tools even begun to be reconstructed and ignored in our public schools. Still used, however, is the psychological tool of fearing to get bad grades and not passing to the next grade. And in many homes today parents still believe children need to feel pain when they don't obey them and quickly do as they're told. Without learning how to intelligently use much better learning tools, like enjoyable and pleasant rewards to better mold young habits, many parents simply continue treating their children the way they were treated, ordering them about day in and day out, keeping them dependent and docile, and playing the role of master rather than friend and helpful guidance counselor. How do I know? Both advertising and over 2 million people in US prisons show us the results of inflicting excessive punishment and threats on children.
Today we still see commercials taking advantage of those raised with the fear of punishment. So-called hard-sell ads simply ORDER viewers to do this, or buy that NOW?! Hurry, hurry, hurry! Pick up the phone and call NOW! Why else do such dictatorial advertisements work unless viewers have already been conditioned, often painfully, to slavishly do this or that and hurry up about it? In truth, such undemocratic and obedient habits are not just a public school problem, but a major social problem as well. Hard-sell ads still reflect that reality, and it's why they continue being made. In fact, as we’ll see in a later section (23), psychologists often go into the advertising business; the money is often much better than teaching, there’s normally lots of work, and it's a way to use all their knowledge about human habits.
As a result, we Deweyan liberal democrats look at such facts a little differently; they're challenging us to build a more intelligent democracy. After all, routine obedient habits simply make it easier for people to keep accepting all the undemocratic feudal systems we still have, like our corporations, banks, government, and armed services. For us liberals then, our schools become an important social tool for building a more democratic society, and where economic, political, and military power is shared more equally, rather than by a small group. And our schools should be helping students learn some useful business skills before they graduate high school, so they can start earning some honest money! The more our public schools encourage students in our elementary schools to choose what to learn, what they'd like to become, and teaching them how to experiment intelligently in any learning process, the more they'll become more powerful democratic engines, rather than the conservative feudalistic servants. Our public schools can become much better at connecting students to their own neighborhoods as well as their improvement.
Remember the Summerhill model of education mentioned earlier? In such schools children are given complete freedom to study or even not. Obviously, for us Deweyans, it’s just not the best kind of education, especially for poor children who haven’t yet learned how to intelligently experiment in any learning process. However, students at such schools often develop a fine sense of democratic independence, respect for others, a sense of how democratic freedom feels, and a dislike for accepting the status quo. Such intelligently independent character habits are, in fact, the biological engines for all healthy and active democracies. In fact, advertisers have already adjusted to that fact. With more independent-minded people who can actually think for themselves, so-called ‘soft-sell’ ads are now a common advertising tool. They’re often the ones using sexy men and women to sell their high-priced goods, like cars and homes. Their subliminal message is more subtle: only people who drive these cars or dress like this get the sex object they want, so be cool and buy this car or this condo. Many people still feel objects of high social status are worth having and working for.
More Affectionate Home Schooling
Thus, for thousands of years wealthy folks have had great educational advantages, and still do to this day; their wealth can be used to make learning more enjoyable and pleasant. Around the world wealth continues giving some students an affectionate learning relationship with teachers in private schools, and thus making the democratic ideal of equal educational rights and opportunities little more than an idea. Such educational advantages began growing in the ancient world. Affectionate one-on-one learning no doubt began with praise and encouragement for teaching children what they wanted to know.
At the lower economic levels, however, education was more practical, less painful, and family oriented. Middle class artisans and merchants often taught their sons at home workshops and on the job, while mothers taught daughters at home; other options for women were almost zero. Even in the small village of Nazareth, for example, Joseph no doubt lovingly taught first-born son Jesus carpentry skills at his home workshop. As a rule, the relationship between a Jewish father and his first born son was a very close one, and the Gospels reflect such feelings. They record how he often talks about a father’s love, but much less so about a mother-son relationship. To him even Mary Magdalene was someone to expel evil spirits from and become a follower, not a friend or disciple.
No doubt, we’re much more creatures of habit -- willpower -- than reasoning or thinking, as Hume and Dewey said, but that fact makes early childhood education about democratic habits even more important than ever. If children aren't educated to know what democratic respect for rules and equal rights feel like, the more it becomes to practice them as adults. And what's more, they're learned much easier with teaching tools other than pain, punishment, and psychological fear. If pain were the only educational tool, life itself would be infinitely more brutal and dangerous than it is now. Our senses also relay feelings of pleasure and joy, and that is indeed modern Behavioral psychology's good education news. Intelligent habits -- intelligent will power -- begin forming after birth with enjoyable feelings, rather than the sudden impact of lumber or lash on flesh, skull, or butt. In any case, a great benefit of Behavioral learning psychology teaches what caring and loving parents and teachers have known for centuries: loving and enjoyable rewards are much better teaching tools than pain. Children naturally want to please parents and adults, and get their approval. So, the sooner they consciously learn to make their studies more enjoyable, pleasant, and entertaining, the easier it'll be to make their home lives more secure and our society more democratic. Shouldn't corporate workers have equal decision-making power with the board of directors? If not, workers continue remaining vulnerable and controlled by other decision-makers.
Again, a Liberal Education Mission
Thus, the liberal public school mission becomes clear: to keep empowering the weakest and most vulnerable among us with more intelligent character habits while teaching what the child wants to learn. What's more, in that model painful and psychological punishment are phased out; they help distort and warp a person's entire psychological inner world. And if practiced too much at home, pain helps create fearful, rebellious, vindictive, and unproductive feelings and actions. Such people often begin seeing others as threatening and harmful. How many veterans returning from years of warfare still feel they need to attack people? And how many young folks, painfully kept powerless and docile, begin stealing and robbing merely because they want what others have? Often, too, the money’s used to buy more illegal drugs. If such drugs were available on a controlled basis, such self-destructive and violent actions would begin withering away. So, naturally, we liberal Deweyans say our public schools should also be formally training more students as psychological councilors, so they too can help build more intelligent character habits in younger students. Why continue making students learn more and more almost completely useless academic facts? These are our schools, folks, so how should they be operating?
We Deweyan liberals today know full well, the earlier children are taught more intelligent habits of learning and acting, the less need there will be to correct unintelligent and disrespectful habits later on in expensive prisons or government programs. Why not simply teach such habits in our public schools, as soon as those schools are freed from conservative laws dictating the book-facts all students must learn to graduate? All such schools are feudalistic, not democratic. So, in more liberal schools, learning more and more academic facts is simply replaced with a more personalized active and experimental learning model, where students can enjoy actually getting out of classrooms and start learning more socially useful democratic skills, like working together and thinking independently about improving our neighborhoods.
Needless to say, such useful habits are learned much more quickly with positive learning tools like encouragement and enjoyment. If not, then students in the inner cities will continue remaining vulnerable to their neighborhood gangs who start offering the security and money they badly want even to teenagers. The more students are taught to see such unlawful gang activity as a social menace, the freer they'll be to start making their own neighborhoods more civilized places to live, play, go to school, and continue learning.
Thus, to neglect improving violent, painful, and fearful parental and educational habit-arts only perpetuates the conditions helping maintain a feudalistic status quo, putting young folks into jail, and helping make our democracy one in name only. In fact, many liberals are now calling our conservative school systems the school-to-jail pipeline, and there's certainly some truth in it. The less children are taught useful character and employment habits, the more vulnerable they remain to criminal actions. So, more liberals and independents are being challenged today to start demanding our politicians and educators first liberate students from our conservative book-centered educational models, and then begin teaching more democratically intelligent habit-arts to the next generation. We Deweyan liberals know what democratic schools should look like, and so we simply want more power to start experimenting with them in all our public schools. We know our conservative book-and-test dominated schools are simply not producing the kinds of personal and social results helping build a healthy democracy, so they need to be improved.
As we’ll see in Section 29, Curiosity and Creativity, what’s most important in today’s schools is not the trivial facts one is punished for not learning, but how quickly students can think creatively about solving neighborhood challenges here and now. For example, how many different ways can we build a better park, community garden, school grounds, or fish farm, and how can we use democratic voting to decide what to do? How many useful experimental workshops can we build on school grounds, and what should they be? Our book-centered public schools are simply keeping students too isolated and disconnected from such creatively intelligent work in their own neighborhoods, and thus keeping children psychically and physically weak and isolated from life itself. One result is around 50% of adults don't even vote in major elections. No doubt, if you’re feeling more challenged to start helping improve a conservative educational system, where students begin learning more healthy habits of democratic power-sharing by actually practicing them, then it makes all my writing thus far worth every single minute of time. Such feelings are the first step to actually improve our schools.
Obviously, not only excessive pain, whether physical or psychological, can be deadly; even too much water causes drowning. However, in our conservative book-oriented public schools today, there are still psychological forms of punishment; grades and promotions are used as a psychological form of punishment. Sometimes even school work is used as a punishment; I know from experience. Before I learned about positive forms of rewarding and praising students for their work, I used school work itself as a punishment. How many students have been similarly punished; write 100 times I will be a good boy? Isn't that the ultimate negative conditioning against learning itself? Why should children want to keep learning to, say, write when it's a form of punishment? That’s how unwise and unloving some TEACHERS are! How can children learn to love learning and to intelligently express their feelings and ideas verbally or in writing unless they’re actually encouraged to do so? It's as if only such academic book-facts are really the best form of education! Both our prisons and our high youth unemployment numbers keep telling us it's not true.
A Common Conservative Objection
No doubt, many conservatives will offer some objections to building more liberal schools. One common objection might sound something like this: our schools really don't have the instructors, money, or responsibility to help children learn to intelligently guide their own studies while learn what they want to learn. Besides, don't parents have a right to treat their children any way they want? If they want to beat them every so often it's really no one's business but their own, right? To us Deweyan liberals, however, such objections merely reflect the feudalistic educational assumptions still being used even in the world's oldest democracy, the United States. In fact, there's a whole educational system in place that demands students keep learning more and more academic trivia, whether it's useful or not. From elementary school to universities, they all demand students keep learning such knowledge, and also creating serious levels of debt as well. So, conservatives might say, to start rebuilding such a system is just too large a job; people should just accept it, deal with it, and send their kids to pre-schools where they're conditioned to accept the system as it is.
Such objections, however, are often meant to scare people from even trying to improve their own neighborhood elementary schools, where all reforms should begin. After all, for thousands of years conservatives have actively worked against growing democratic habits; they would mean the end of all forms of feudalistic power, both religious and secular. Even today, the conservative wealthiest 1% often use their money to keep public schools as book-oriented as possible, and in the process also keep intelligent democratic habits as weak as possible. They often finance the election of conservative school board members. To us liberal Deweyans, however, democratic habits of choice, especially in education, are a good way to help make life more stable, peaceful, and rewarding. Look at the terrible social results we've seen since 2008 in the housing, banking, and auto markets caused by feudalistic institutions run by a small group of directors! And what's more, history teaches us such feudalistic systems keep causing economic breakdowns and serious kinds of social chaos on a regular basis, as well as promoting devastating and brutal wars in the hunt for more and more profits. So, again, what's it going to be folks, feudalistic or democratic schools?
In fact, our democratic system is allowing people to take more control of their own neighborhood public schools, but only if enough people can get organized. In such schools the next generation will start learning the habits of creative problem-solving and how to intelligently test their ideas. And they’ll also begin learning how organized democratic power will give our representatives the power to more intelligently control wealthy corporations, banks, and the military, rather than the other way around. After all, all children will become part of a community, and the more ignorant they are about how it works well, as well as how their own body-minds work well, the more brutal and dangerous life can become, as we see today almost daily in our news shows. And the more expensive too: for more prisons and police, more profit-obsessed bank bailouts, higher insurance rates for crime, expensive medical insurance for health services, more money to stop dangerous and brutal gang activities, accidents due to drug and alcohol abuse, loss of life, and many other expenses. If basically ignorant children are allowed to stay that way, then the results of such an educational model extend way beyond the school and home to the national social life in general! That’s just another fact of civilized life.
Many people who know others are physically abusing their children often don’t report them to their local public health officials, to help improve such painfully abusive situations. They don't feel it's any of their business, simply because they've never learned to build a strong community feeling for defending the weakest and most vulnerable among us. And so our public schools become important places where more intelligent communal habits can be taught, especially in poorer neighborhoods where unhealthful habits seem to be practiced from generation to generation. So, isn’t it obvious? The practice of unhealthful, excessively violent physical abuse of children should be a much more important subject in our public schools; if not, vulnerable children will remain defenseless against abusive pain. Tax supported prisons in the US are already larger than humane conditions can deal with, and thus keep sapping funds for building more healthful and intelligently democratic schools.
As our nightly news broadcasts keep reminding us, young folks often relieve their own frustrating tensions and anxious fears with self-destructive actions, like drug abuse or reckless driving. Such unintelligent actions often start when abused children abuse weaker animals, like dogs and cats. Unless such feelings are remolded, some may go on to abuse younger children, and then later, adults. Murder and mayhem are still serious threats to everyone's safety in many parts of the country, not to mention other countries, and physical abuse and punishment is often a big cause of the problem. So, why shouldn't young folks be free to express any negative feelings they might have of self-worth, powerlessness, fear, and hopelessness? If so, then such punishment, wherever it happens, whether in school or outside of it, can start being dealt with more intelligently; in fact, no one really knows how widespread female abuse still is.
Violent forms of home punishment helps give the US the highest percentage of people in jail; Russia is 3rd on the list. India, on the other hand, has about 3 times as many people as we have and yet they're jailing fewer people. What's going on? It turns out they're experimenting with a more humane system of reeducation as the key to lowering disrespectful criminal actions. People are simply being taught more intelligent money-earning habits, and it’s helping produce better social results, like not wasting tax payer money keeping people locked up. So naturally, in the spirit of helping improve the unhealthful and unwise use of physical punishment as a teaching tool, we Deweyan Humanists ask wouldn’t more liberal schools better teach what both physical and mental health means in action, so young folks can begin growing such intelligent habits? No doubt, more actively intelligent community service work projects in all our public schools would greatly help increase the growth of such habits, and thus lower the need for expensive court-imposed community service work later on.
Some More Commonsense Advice
Kids sense their dependency and powerlessness, so normally they want love and affection from their parents and guardians; it feels much better than being physically punished and enslaved. Also, if children feel loved and they act disrespectfully and selfishly, then withdrawing parental or teacher affection and love becomes a much better teaching tool than using more violent punishment and humiliation. Isolation is another non-violent form of punishment, but it should also be followed by telling the child what actions they should practice, as well as rewarding a child when they practice such actions. Don’t good parents get their children to agree to improve their actions if they misbehave, and then reward them with love and affection when they do act excellently? It’s just another common sense result from using affection as a teaching tool.
No doubt, the more our schools, homes, and churches use such positive non-violent educational tools to grow more intelligent habits, the faster many of our serious social problems will shrink. Why shouldn’t even young children be taught in school to speak up when they feel anyone's unjustly using physical punishment on them? The sooner they learn they deserve to be respected just as much as anyone else, the better off they’ll be, even if it means reporting an abusive parent or guardian. And, also, why shouldn't they start learning about how more positive and enjoyable rewards are much better learning tools?
You’d think our public radio and television stations too would be more involved. No doubt, programs like Sesame Street are good for children; they help them see what respectful actions look like. But they’re weakness lies in their inability to make children actively practice more intelligent habit-arts. It’s one thing to tell a child something, but it’s something entirely different to actually encourage a child to practice more intelligent actions. In short, simple lecturing to a child is not as good a learning tool as actual intelligent practice itself. So, once again, we see how important our homes, public schools, and churches are. They can actually encourage children to role-play and, say, call the police or tell a teacher if they’re being unjustly punished by an adult! In truth, such excellent habits means more than merely watching people have fun singing, dancing, and working together! Knowledge lives in our muscles, not just our eyes and ears.
Parents and teachers can also restrict children from even seeing mindless violence, or better yet, watch such shows together, make sure the child can say what to do in similar situations, and then actively practice those ideas. That way their knowledge sinks into their muscles, rather than just their memories and thoughts. It’s all part of a more liberal educational model, and of actively making our own little corner of the world more peaceful and less dangerous.
Just like learning any other habit-art, for best results children need to enjoy learning and practicing intelligent ideas, so they can see what their useful results are like. There’s no need to wait for politicians to pass a new law, or for abuse to continue on unchallenged. Also, with the growth of our new electronic network and the Internet, children can not only start controlling their own education, but also connecting themselves with children in other cities and even around the world, to learn more about life there. In fact, the more children learn how to connect with other students, the faster new ideas can be experimentally tested, and perhaps improved.
What have we got to lose with such liberal practices in our public schools, I mean besides unnecessary social stress, disrespectful and antisocial abusive violence, and of course higher taxes? We Deweyan liberals say even young students should begin learning to CONSCIOUSLY identify and report those who use fear and punishment to force obedience and slave-like behavior in others. And also begin learning how to use more enjoyable and pleasant actions as the best learning tools. With such habits our present practices of psychological punishment and intimidation with threats of failure and poor grades will soon become ancient history. Such kinds of punishment are necessary when parents allow schools to continue forcing and enslaving children to learn what they often neither want nor need to know.
So, the more children are given the freedom to choose what they want to learn, and learn to reward themselves for intelligently learning those skills and habits, then the stronger our democracy will grow. Students will start realizing their organized democratic power is more powerful than any amount of wealth. With such enjoyable learning skills it’ll also be easier learning how to respect others and how to resolve personal problems peaceful, rather than violently. It's called Conflict Resolution; young children can begin learning about such skills in the first 3 years of school, and they can continue growing until they graduate. In any case, however, the longer we keep students ignorant of such skills by keeping their heads buried in academic textbooks, and merely memorizing more and more book facts, the more such intelligent learning skills will remain weak and unhealthful. Clearly, the growth of such schools is mainly a question of organizing the public’s democratic power, especially in high crime neighborhoods; there such student learning skills and empowerment may be needed most.
In any case, however, there’s really nothing very philosophically profound about any of these ideas. As we've seen, even ancient tutors were aware of such teaching tools. So, they're really just more examples of humane commonsense thinking on Dewey's part. What’s more, they’re not absolute truth; they’re just practical and useful ideas that often produce better personal and social results. No doubt, life will sometimes create situations where violence will need to be used, but who knows how often they will be needed when students learn more intelligent kinds of habit-arts? And learning them will be easier when excessive and inhumane forms of punishment are ignored.
20. ENJOYABLE LEARNING
Humor As a Serious Learning Tool
Learning was made more enjoyable even in ancient democratic Greek city-states with the writing of comic plays, in the Renaissance, and of course in local pubs were alcohol flowed. Laughter was often heard as people swapped their humorous stories. Such theatres and pubs were probably the major places using laughter and enjoyment to help share information and educate people. Ancient Athenians not only laughed at serious people like Socrates when they saw Aristophanes’ comic play The Clouds, but they also learned more about his ideas. Early on liberals too began celebrating humor and enjoyment. The great liberal Atomist Democritus earned his unique nickname as the Laughing Philosopher. He proved to people laughter and secular ideas can exist side by side in one person. Then, two generations after him, his follower Epicurus continued celebrating pleasure, enjoyment, and cheerfulness as useful habits helping make life and learning that much more bearable. No doubt, such habits helped make his health problems more bearable. True, such habits like moderate pleasure and cheerfulness were celebrated by many people, but the Atomists put enjoyment and pleasure at the core of their ethical thinking; to them intelligent pleasure was the only good, with the emphasis on the word intelligent. Dewey too accepted the idea of intelligent enjoyment and pleasure as one goal of ethical actions, so it shows how important the idea of enjoyable learning has been within the liberal tradition. For much of history such habits helped make ordinarily dangerous and stressful daily life feel more bearable and livable.
To liberals like Epicurus, enjoyment and humor helped make building any useful character habit easier, thus helping produce peaceful, untroubled, and enjoyable kinds of feelings. They, in turn, helped keep stressful, painful, annoying tensions to a minimum. Send me a cheese, said Epicurus, so I can dine with pleasure. Thus, he encouraged the students at his little garden school to practice enjoying life and having a little fun each day. They more they did, the easier it became to let go of their morbid after-life fears and also build more cheerful feelings about life’s blessings here and now. No one knows how ecstatic they would have been about yogurt! Meanwhile, in conservative schools like Plato’s Academy, he was telling students to imitate the gods who he believed never smiled much. He put laughter and enjoyment much farther down an ethical scale than liberals like Democritus. Like medieval monasteries, students at the Academy focused seriously on spirit-objects and conservative politics, where city-states were run by a small elite group. Thus, serious contemplative habits dominated his school. Later on, in the Middle Ages, somber, serious, silent, and chanting rituals became dominant.
Radically different educational models thus evolved even in ancient Greece; enjoyable humor was just one of the differences. Socrates' conservative student Plato began offering a radically elitist and undemocratic educational model in his Republic, and to liberals it became something to make fun of. For example, Plato had said all of mankind can be defined as a featherless biped. So, some liberal students promptly plucked the feathers from a chicken, gave it to some Academy students, and said here’s an example of Plato’s mankind.
Plato’s obsession with Spirit-Ideas also produced some more radical feelings. He said such knowledge could only be achieved with serious contemplation by a very small number of people, and so he soon condemned all such sense-based enjoyable practices. Also, for all practical purposes the lower classes were to be kept uneducated except for learning a trade, so they could more easily be controlled and dominated by the ruling elite. Thus, for him feelings like pleasure, enjoyment, cheerfulness, and humor merely helped lash people to the greatly inferior, always changing natural world, a world of illusions at best. Enjoyment in any of its forms simply made learning about Spirit-Ideas almost impossible, and so the conservative educational foundation for the entire Middle Ages was more or less set. Conservative Christians like Augustine quickly substituted contemplation for prayer and worship, but ignoring humor and enjoyment remained the same.
Have You Heard This Joke Before?
What? Are we liberal Deweyans kidding? Should enjoyable humor become a much more important part of our public schools? Why not? As we've seen, professional psychologists have finally learned what kind and practical-minded parents have known for thousands of years: verbal and physical fun is as important to a healthy body-mind as non-fat milk is to a healthy yogurt. Such enjoyable learning habits also help remove all the competitive and grade-based motives from school life; humor and enjoyment help make learning itself an end-in-itself.
Obviously enjoyable learning isn’t completely ignored in schools today -- is it possible to stop children from having fun? No, but it is possible to keep conservative classrooms boring, repetitive, and in general a waste of time and energy when the main goal is memorizing more academic facts! Again, it should be asked: when in the real world has the reader ever added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided 3-digit numbers without a calculator, or helped a young Hamlet avoid killing his step-father? So, humor is a habit-art useful throughout life, why not get more serious about formally teaching it in our public schools? Now is that irony worthy of Socrates himself? Humor is a habit-art useful throughout the business world too; it’s also a big part of our TV shows and films, and probably always will be. And what’s more, it would make learning to write and read so much more enjoyable than it is now. So, in all seriousness, we liberals ask why not have classes like Jokes, 101, 102, ... 112? Wouldn't such classes also be another enjoyable way to build useful speaking habits when jokes are told to the class? Don't look now, but many people have made rather comfortable livings merely knowing how to write a good joke, as late night TV monologues keep teaching us.
Who doesn’t yet realize, humor is useful throughout life, especially when nature keeps knocking people and buildings down. So, in addition to teaching children how to read, write, and think creatively, why not also teach children of all ages more about humor's art, so it can become a more organized, conscious, and powerful living tool? Why not? Why not also teach children how to have some fun talking about outrageous assumptions people have often used, like all life is merely an illusion and ultimately means nothing, or all life merely reflects spirit objects no one can see?
Also, on-going humor studies in our public schools would be yet another way for students to enjoy school more, rather than merely reading about dull, boring, and humorless abstract textbook facts? Is there anyone who still believes George Washington would be a rather average Joe on Wall Street were he alive today? In all seriousness I ask, why not make enjoyable humor an on-going study for 12 years, just like math and spelling? Just imagine, 1st grade humor, 2nd grade humor, and so on. Isn’t humor much like music? Aren’t they both kinds of universal languages? And wouldn't such studies help make one's personal, social, and business life more colorful, pleasant, and productive? Remember the saying, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? And Jill as well, right?
In truth, even young children can begin seeing humor has a number of logical forms. For example, there’s the form of three responses to a statement, the last one being the humorous one. If, say, a woman gives a man a compliment, the man can offer a humorous response with 3 ideas: I’m honored, touched, and aroused! And the older students get, the more they’ll want to read humorists like Aristophanes, Mark Twain, and even Rodney Dangerfield. They too make it easier to see humor both within us and all around us, day in and day out. Dangerfield had a rather tough childhood, so he used humor to make his life more livable: When I was born, he said, I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother! That’s another logical form of humor, offering a bizarre result from a rather commonplace observation. How many other responses can you offer to the first statement? Aristotle said humor is basically the art of seeing surprising results after normal statements.
Is there a better antidote to psychic dread and seriousness so many students feel than learning how to see life’s humorous possibilities? There are in fact many pompous-acting people in the world, including conniving and two-faced politicians, so why shouldn’t the habit-art of writing jokes and humorous stories about them start being taught even in the primary grades? For example, that politician is such a windbag we should use him to power our generators; that politician talks so crazy his parents should be sent to a psychiatrist! Teaching such humorous skills is really just another natural result of focusing on learning excellent character habit-art useful throughout life. When gang members offer kids money to start selling illegal drugs, couldn’t they say things like I’m too young to waste the rest of my life? Or I’d like to but I’ve heard some terrible things about jail food.
Also, there’s also the pun form of humor: I’m thinking about becoming a 7th Day Adventurer. In fact, there are an infinite number of such examples. So, again, where is the harm in teaching kids how to use different forms of humor in everyday situations? Isn’t even bad humor better than no humor at all: I wanted to be a drug addict but my local dealer wouldn't let me; he was afraid he’d starve to death! In fact, isn't learning to humorously make fun of life’s real dangers a big part of character excellence itself; who wants to keep taking life seriously all the time? The more that happens, the more morbid and distorted life becomes.
Reading and also writing jokes and humorous stories has many other educational benefits too. For one thing, it’s an enjoyable way to become better readers and writers! I still remember reading James Thurber's The Night the Bed Fell in 6th grade. And for another thing, a humorous habit also helps build a critical way of seeing the status quo, like saying politics is the fine art of government mismanagement. Again, verbal humor and enjoyment is a large part of a healthy body-mind, and a useful tool for not taking our own feelings, ideas, and problems too seriously, as well as building the very healthy habit of laughing at ourselves when we act stupidly or neurotically. All such humorous habits help weaken delusional feelings of superiority as well as morbid persecution feelings. I was a stupid kid; my parents argued between themselves so much I thought they were trying to poison ME!
With so many useful results from such habit-arts, liberal parents, teachers, and students have a right to start demanding their public schools become more serious about thinking and writing humorously. What knowledge is more useful, knowing how to solve a quadratic equation, or knowing how to make fun of our self, and all the pompous and error-prone people around us? Isn’t humor in TV, radio, and films a valuable addition to human health and culture, and if so, then why not actively start studying the art in elementary schools, as well as learn to give humorous speeches? There’s absolutely no reason why such a habit-art shouldn't also be a graduation requirement! After all, such habits would also be useful for breaking down all the artificial separations conservative schools build between learning in school and outside of school. How many TV shows teach people how to spell the word quadratic, and how many celebrate many of life's humorous observations and possibilities?
One time, after the school year just started, a teaching colleague told me not to smile until Thanksgiving. Heaven forbid; it might make students feel they could actually have some fun in school. It’s merely one result of forcing students to keep learning what they have no need or desire to know. In such conservative schools, above all else, students need to feel as if learning more and more academic trivia is very serious business, so absolutely no humor will be tolerated, especially for religious ideas no one really knows anything about! For example, I was so bad yesterday my guardian angel asked to be reassigned. Is it blasphemy or merely humor? Are such ideas educational or not? No doubt, some conservative educators will seriously argue teaching such classes will help the school lose its accreditation. Well, why not just tell them to change their accreditation requirements? Such requirements, however, are helping produce students largely unprepared for the real world, in both skills and character habit-arts. We liberal Deweyans, however, are interested in body-mind health, not obedience to some feudalistic conservative educational model.
In fact TV and films often showcase some of the most perceptive and polished humorists and wits in the world, and so learning more about humorous art also teaches kids more about their world. Who can't laugh at all the satirical humor in films like The Bonfire of the Vanities, or Marlon Brando’s Bedtime Story, as well as keep learning about important character habits of helpfulness?
Studying, analyzing, and most of all talking and writing different kinds of humor would not only empower students to keep growing their own enjoyably playful feelings, but also become more confident about speaking in front of a group. Such talking would help weaken irrational fears about talking in public. In fact, cheerful and humorous habits are useful throughout life, and not merely while students are in school. Who can't appreciate how playfully enjoyable events like 'Outhouse Races' help people lose stressful tensions? No doubt, nature is both stable and dangerous, and has tragic events, but humor is a good way to lessen their dreadful feelings: Hey, that storm could have been worse, it could have taken us to Kansas! In fact, a humorous habit-art helps make recovery from any tragedy that much easier; about that I’m very serious!
In short, playful and creative humor can not only be great psychic therapy, especially for morbid and depressed students, but also educational as well. Without humor and cheerfulness, the chances merely increase for lawlessness, disrespect, and drug abuse, and they are no joke. Such habits are wasting precious taxpayer dollars by the billions! So, shouldn’t every classroom have at least one weird-looking comical character walking around and saying “Gimme drugs, gimme drugs!”, and also health-minded students regularly taking the student into a hospital for treatment? What better way to laugh constructively at such actions, and thus avoid their dangers? Again, laughter and humor are not only therapeutic, but educational as well.
How Many Jokes Can You Create?
Writing jokes is also another enjoyable way to keep strengthening one’s creative writing skills. No doubt, during the Middle Ages conservative schools promoted serious, fearful, and obedient habits. One philosopher actually took the time to say an infinite number of angels can fit on the head of a pin. Well, when science was almost non-existent there was so much in life still completely uncontrolled and dangerous, like leprosy and plague, as well as those frisky bands of roving gangsters called armies who might wreck everything. Muslim armies almost conquered all of Europe in the 700s CE. As a result, humor and enjoyment were not a part of early education; in fact they weren’t tolerated very much at all. Feeling cheerful and laughing were often seen as signs of foolish sinfulness. However, the less such habits were taught to people as a whole, and left mainly for royal-court fools, then life itself stayed very serious and dangerous. Robbers could be around any bend in the road as well as any city street corner. At medieval royal courts laughter and enjoyment was often the work of specialists; often little people became court jesters and are still honored today on playing cards as Jokers. Only recently, with the growth of humorous films and TV shows, have people of all ages begun feeling humor’s useful and healthful results.
More Educational History
As with every other secular habit, humor too has grown slowly. How could it be otherwise in a world still dominated by peoples' ignorance, fears, and anxieties? Luckily, educational history records a few such liberal teachers. As we saw in the last section, Marcus Quintillianus wasn’t afraid to build a more liberal and humane educational model. He too was a kind-hearted 1st century version of John Dewey. For both, not only are academic studies important, and not only is character development just as important, but they both celebrated making such studies more enjoyable and pleasant for students. However, because there weren't teacher colleges like there are today, such ideas remained vulnerable to conservative educational models, and thus remained isolated and weak. Not enough people were educated to keep such ideas energized and growing.
Then, with Rome’s fall in the 400s CE, the centralized government collapsed and political power was decentralized as Europe sank again into a feudalistic society we call the Dark Ages. Eventually, however, business arts and the growth in practical scientific knowledge helped lift the gloomy feelings of life and energized the more secular oriented Renaissance, or re-birth. As a result, more liberal educators like Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Michael De Montaigne (1533-1592) weren't afraid to write more about making learning enjoyable. A little later more liberal thinkers like John Locke agreed, and said punishment should be used as a learning tool of last resort. It was another baby-step of educational progress.
For those few humane educators who noticed how children learned much better if it was enjoyable, other aristocratic skills also became enjoyable games, like hunting, archery, riding, music, dancing, and poetry. A hugely popular education book written in the 1500s was called The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529). It taught young aristocrats how such enjoyable activities develop one's character, and so should be an important part of anyone's education, like Aristotle had suggested centuries earlier.
But once again, there were feudalistic limits on who could get such an education. Such enjoyments were greatly restricted to upper class boys; in some places serfs and peasants were forbidden by law from even going to school. That’s how much the conservative aristocracy feared educating the lower classes; they knew it would threaten their own concentrated feudalistic social and economic power. As a result, only recently has enjoyable learning and humor become a more important part of psychological health, giving students another important learning tool for improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. Thus today liberal parents and teachers ask how much of an enjoyable game can we make learning anything. How much classroom work can we make as enjoyable as kids make outside of school? In other words, how much can we preserve those almost instinctive enjoyable and humorous learning arts, so they can keep making learning easier throughout life? Little wonder such habits also became an important part of Dewey's liberal educational model.
Dewey too saw how learning anything becomes easier when it becomes enjoyable, and humor makes everything more enjoyable. The challenge he made to teachers and parents was to make our public schools more fun and enjoyable, rather than remaining quiet, somber, and serious places. For example, many find learning to type boring, but when it becomes a means to, say, building a book or any kind of constructive art, then enjoyment makes learning to type easier and more creative. Creativity itself is a kind of enjoyable playfulness in all of life’s events. Outside of school most children already seem to know how to keep learning as enjoyable as possible, so why not start making the subject more intelligent and conscious study? After all, if parents sometimes kill those natural habits of enjoyable learning, then shouldn't our public schools be places where they can be nurtured in a safe and intelligent way? What’s the worst that can happen; students will actually learn how to enjoy life and learning more? Gosh, that’s sound bad doesn’t it?
To our cores nature has made us feeling creatures, much more than thinking and reasoning ones; and as a rule people prefer enjoyable rather than painful feelings. If we weren’t so built, if we were all pure rational thinkers, then drug addiction or obesity could never become the problems they are. What good would pain-relievers be if we couldn’t feel pain? But when, say, students want to write a humorous work of art, then they begin learning how to intelligently produce enjoyable feelings. That indeed is a very useful habit-art. For example, there’s some intrinsic pleasure to be found in typed misspellings making funny-sounding worts, some poetic feelings from the flow, go, and show of a humorous story, of course in the pride of slowly creating a humorous work of art, and also from helping keep humorous feelings about life alive and growing. And from such writing it becomes easier to continue connecting humorous ideas to one another.
Thus one of liberal education’s most important arts, learning ‘what we’re about’, can be more enjoyably accomplished by learning more about forms of humor. Perhaps most importantly of all, liberal parents and teachers want students to know what it feels like to enjoy overcoming their challenges with a little creative humor, rather than continuing to practice dull, routine, and mechanical learning. In fact, humorous feelings and smiles can happen any time of any day, but to consciously control them, so they do happen, depends on a rather large IF. IF we first actively teach students such skills, then they can begin seeing life’s funny side even in serious situations. No doubt, every book, even this one, can only point the way to feeling such excellent energies, but it’s a good first step. And then liberal schools can continue growing such habit-arts with active and intelligent practice. No doubt that’s a big IF, but it’s a possible if, if you know what I mean!
Why All The Fuss?
It all about something called body-mind health. In general, conservative schools ignore that habit-art and instead focus on teaching all students the same set of book facts. But, in liberal schools body-mind health is a product of learning to happily and playfully enjoy learning itself. It helps reduce stressful and cramping muscular tensions, as well as lessen morbid feelings about life itself. It’s certainly nothing new. Even in the late 1500s Edward ‘Shakespeare’ De Vere saw how important enjoyable learning was, even for shrewish people: "No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken." As a result, liberal schools, homes, and churches actively help young folks FEEL pleasure in their work with humorous habits, so as to keep making life and work more enjoyable. Writing little jokes about, say, a mean teacher or parent, or a neurotic student helps make life less serious and more enjoyable; it’s like having a kind of psychic antidote against life’s painful and obnoxious events. Even simply smiling and maybe whistling a little can help build humor’s first enjoyable plateau, so to speak.
For sure, such a habit-art is not instinctive and doesn’t grow naturally. To build such instinctive feelings humor must be actively and intelligently PRACTICED AND FELT. So the less children of all ages learn how to make their learning more enjoyable, the more difficult learning and life becomes. It can also be described as the art of entertaining our self, and with practice it becomes an end-in-itself – something practiced just for itself.
Luckily, with the growth of our TV and film industries, humor and enjoyment are becoming more commonplace today, and for good reason. For many hundreds of millions of years, satisfying and enjoyable feelings helped build useful habit-arts. Doesn’t it feel liberating to know every new habit, every new idea, and every improvement began with an enjoyable feeling for how life might be improved here and now? After all, what else is progress but the process of creatively improving something? It's always a process of reconstructing and rearranging how useful objects and habits might become more pleasantly felt. Poetically, the river of enjoyable feelings flows into a virtual ocean of progress, if their results are useful and constructive to people.
As we saw earlier, conservative Plato was addicted to reasoning seriously about Spirit-Ideas, but the more difficult it became to understand how they might actually work, the less enjoyment he probably felt. Eventually he all but gave up trying to understand them, as liberals like Democritus and Protagoras had suggested even before Plato was born. They weren’t really necessary for learning useful and excellent habits for living intelligently. And, of course the more comic writers like Aristophanes treated such ideas humorously, the easier it was for more people to keep focusing more on making life here and now more enjoyable and bearable. Atomists like Democritus and Sophists like Protagoras anchored their enjoyable feelings to the natural world, as much as they could, and thus taught themselves to enjoy the few brief years as much as they could. For such liberals, the less enjoyment, humor, and cheerfulness we teach ourselves to feel, the more life remains a stressfully chaotic and routine grind. Sadly, however, most of the world believed in such spirits, and so more liberal habits of humor and enjoyment eventually grew weaker as conservative religious habits grew stronger. The Middle Ages began unfolding in the 400s CE. Serious conservative learning models and schools kept increasing the feeling for a perfectly enjoyable and eternally pleasant life after death, rather than here and now. And the more that happened, the more dangerous life remained for everyone! From such a conservative and vulnerable psychic world we are all just now emerging.
Thus for we liberal Deweyan Humanists, learning about our natural world and enjoyably useful problem-solving skills should not only include humorous studies, but they should be taught at every level of our public schools! Learning to see the humor in peoples’ actions also helps weaken habits of obedience to all forms of power. That’s some of our good educational news. The bad news is teaching such habits on a formal level is still a major challenge, simply because not enough parents, teachers, and students are demanding they be taught in our schools, homes, churches, mosques, synagogues, and ashrams. We see some of the results of that neglect in some of our violently religious and secular events. In the Muslim world, for example, sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis remains a tragic fact of life, just as Protestants and Catholics killed each other for centuries. So, why shouldn’t liberals and independents of every faith start demanding humor be taught as a regular part of school studies? Not only is tolerance promoted with such habit-arts, but they enable and empower people to take a little psychic holiday anywhere and anytime! Indeed, as we continue leaving the feudalistic Middle Ages behind us, these days continue opening up many new and creative learning possibilities and challenges, even for getting all those mean muggers out of Central Park and all uncivilized gun-happy hoodlums out of every neighborhood. How many times have we heard a teacher or parent encourage us to write a joke about something? Those are in fact the kinds of educationally creative habit-arts Dewey encouraged all children to practice, and thus make even learning to read and write more enjoyable and fun.
21. HOLLYWOOD TALK
Do we really need separate English classes, or creative writing classes? Isn't it possible for students to enjoyably learn more about those important skills in any class, especially when they're allowed to write and perform their own skits? Can’t English grammar, creative writing, and intelligent talking even to learned in gym, history, math, or science classes, if students are encouraged to write little skits intelligently? This section answers those questions with a yes.
The idea isn't really farfetched. What if, say, student teams in such classes were actually allowed to intelligently write little skits in history, science, and even math classes about the people and ideas studied in those classes? First of all, it would be great way for students to begin feeling how interrelated and organic knowledge is if, say, they were allowed to write a little skit in math class about, say, Pythagoras. With such skits even primary students would also begin learning more about what intelligent writing and speaking can be in any subject. A skit about Pythagoras can begin teaching students not only about math, but about ancient history, religion, human nature, sociology, psychology, and so many other important topics. And best of all, when such skits are intelligently written and performed, they also help students know more about one of the most important things of all -- themselves! Intelligent writing and talking can reveal knowledge about the speaker as well as the outer world.
How many young folks come out of our public schools feeling they have nothing to say and therefore should say nothing, even if they see others harming people and disrespecting just laws? The more students feel afraid to speak up in intelligent ways, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. So, the more young folks learn to speak up intelligently for themselves about how they feel and what they know, the stronger our democracy itself becomes. That is the ultimate liberal education goal: to teach students how to intelligently solve personal and social problems. As we've been seeing, the more feudalistic institutions become, the more dangerous they can be to the public good.
What? an educational conservative might ask. Are you completely bonkers? Do you really know what you're asking? You're asking history, science, and math teachers to actually learn something about good writing! How realistic is that? And you’re also asking English majors to forget all about their literature studies and learn some practical subject to teach, like psychology or economics.
Those points are well taken, but they're not fatal these liberal ideas. True, secondary teachers would also learn more about how their subjects can be taught with community service projects, but such skills can be learned quickly, especially if schools are converted to a liberal model only one year at a time, beginning with 1st grade. And really now, aren't there more useful facts to learn than literature facts? Psychological and economic knowledge is useful to everyone throughout life, and that makes them more important. In any case, however, this section may help give parents, teachers, and students a few more ideas about teaching intelligent writing in any subject! If ex-math teachers like myself can learn a few rules of good writing, then can't anyone?
In conservative schools, history teachers, for example, usually lecture about their subject, and also assign students to quietly read and then answer some text book questions. As we've been seeing, however, such student activities tend to build passive, non-verbal, unquestioning, and uncreative habits, and are thus less than the best habits for living in a democracy. So, more liberal Deweyan parents and teachers aim at giving students a more enjoyably active role in history, science, and math classes; intelligently writing and performing little skits also helps build more creative thinking and team-oriented character habits too, thus helping make school itself more active, social, and enjoyable while building more democratic habits.
For example, a history class can be asked to divide itself up into teams, and then choose a subject they'd like to write a little skit about, say, some part of Roman history they’ve been studying. Such an active team writing assignment will not only encourage students to do some independent questioning and research to learn more about that period, but also about good writing and teamwork habits as well, the kind of skills many business people use daily in the real world. One team might choose to write about what poor folks did in their daily lives, another team may want to write about soldiers, another about politicians or emperors, and another team may want to write about women’s lives. With such active skits students would begin making historical ideas not only feel alive and more real than mere dry and cold book ideas, but independent research and performing skills would be built as well.
Needless to say, what applies to history also applies to any formal class, even humor or economics. After all, every subject was artfully built by intelligent people, and thus they all have a human element to them. Imagine how much students could learn about freedom of speech, for example, if they wrote and performed a skit about Galileo defending his scientific work before the Inquisition, or Albert Einstein talking to a math tutor about what non-Euclidean geometry can really look like, or about his having to deal with a very possessive, jealous, and insecure wife! Such actively and intelligently written and performed skits thus add what most conservative book-oriented classes now lack, a real human dimension to otherwise dry and cold facts!
Learning how to intelligently write and perform little subject skits is a habit-art useful throughout life. They help build the all-important confidence to intelligently speak up about subjects people feel are important. Why should such skills and habits be largely confined to theatre classes, when they’re useful in any profession? Don't even plumbers and carpenters need to know how to write and speak intelligently? And in the business world many people are asked to make oral presentations on a regular basis, as do sales people, politicians, and even people on a personal relationship level.
Again, in conservative history classes, where teachers normally lecture and give out book assignments, students really don't get much good writing, reasoning, researching, or speaking practice. In such schools the emphasis is always on covering the material for the next test, or standardized test. Thus many useful and intelligent habits in general remain weak, like good writing and speaking arts. As a result, the facts learned in school are soon forgotten. In fact, learning to write, think, and talk intelligently, truthfully, joyfully, and humorously improves and deepens all other habit-arts.
That, then, brings us to the question of what it means to write, think, reason, and talk truthfully and intelligently. Luckily, thanks to the growth of our electronic medium, most everyone now has examples of such skills on a daily basis, on our TVs and radios; even conservative hostile-sounding talk radio hosts are careful of what they say; there are laws against slander and liable. So, even they can become educational when children are taught how to notice what the speaker is saying and what it can mean. It also helps students more easily identify one's assumptions as they speak. Words like no, none, all, everyone, and everything tell us what a speaker's assumptions are. For example, ‘no politicians are trustworthy’ is merely an assumption simply because it can't be proved.
So, the obvious question becomes, what do we mean by the intelligent kinds of talk practiced in Hollywood? Creative writers in the entertainment industry have built a rather interesting speaking habit based mainly on making true statements about themselves! So, the more students start listening more intelligently to such talking, and how a few words are used, the easier it becomes to practice the habit-art in their own subject skits. In general, it's the art of using a few words to talk mainly about one’s own habits. In that way making truthful statements becomes easy, rather than difficult. After all, people know themselves best, and so language can be used to tell others about themself.
Thus, with such writing and speaking skills, talking honestly becomes more than just an idea; it becomes another useful character habit. After all, language and words can be used to convey many meanings, thus allowing talking to take on more than one meaning most people aren’t trained to recognize. It all starts with learning how to use certain abstract words having more than one meaning. After all, talking honestly has been an ideal celebrated for thousands of years. One commandment is You Shall Not Lie, and one of Buddhism's Eight-Fold Path to nirvana is called right-speaking. So, the more we know how to talk about our own feelings and ideas, the less chance there will be for telling lies and misinformation.
Some simple examples will, no doubt, better explain what I mean. Say, for example, some US history students want to write a skit about what some people felt about slavery in the South before the Civil War, and how different people felt differently about it. But if the skit is written intelligently, then it can also reveal some facts about the speakers' own habits and feelings. That's essentially the art of intelligent writing in the entertainment industry, and also in much of life itself. Much of the time, people can not only talk about outside events, but also about their own habits and feelings. The art actually goes back to ancient Greeks like Socrates, who agreed with the ancient saying to Know Yourself! He questioned others’ feelings, trying to show they really didn’t know what he assumed they should know. The more people know what their words can mean, and how to intelligently use some pronoun words like ‘he,’ and ‘she,’ 'this,' and 'that', the more language can become a 2-for-1 sale, so to speak.
When, for example, a speaker uses the abstract pronoun 'this', it has a double meaning. It refers to some object being talked about, like this car or this computer, and it also refers to the speaker itself! Sentences like 'This slave is not well,' then can refer both to a slave, as well as the speaker’s own health! Thus, the word ‘this’ can refer to both objects at the same time! If, on the other hand, a woman says 'That slave is not well,' then we know she's talking about someone else, not this but that object. Do you see how such words can be used to reveal important information about the person speaking?
So what might such a skit sound like? Even in the simple antebellum skit I’ve written we can see more clearly what I mean. The scene is a southern mansion just before the Civil War; it's dinner time and the family's seated around the table.
Father: Well it certain looks like Lincoln's gonna get elected in November. This is certainly not a happy time. Are you boys ready to see that rascal Republican wreck our entire way of life? (The word ‘this’ also tells us the speaker himself is not happy!)
Eldest Son: Well daddy, I fer one am worried; this could be dangerous for all Southerners who want slavery. Everyone knows slaves are inferior people, don't they Daddy? But I'm not ready to die defending that idea. (Again, the word ‘this’ tells us he himself is dangerous to those who believe in slavery. Also, his 'everyone' statement is true, simply because questions aren't statements of fact, just a way of asking for more information. So, he’s not really saying Africans are inferior people, even though it seems he is!)
Eldest Daughter: This is crazy. (Again, she tells us more about herself, referring to her own 'crazy' habit of saying whatever she wants). That's just ridiculous and wrong. (The indefinite pronoun 'that' refers to both the brother's racial idea and to the brother himself.) I certainly don't think of slaves that way. Mammy James raised me to be a good person and I thank her for that. What's more, I've seen some of our slaves work out some really tough problems for themselves. Should we condemn a whole race just because a few aren't really smart? After all, a lotta white folks aren't very smart either, including this young woman! (The phrase word 'good person' also has a special meaning; it refers to both a person's moral habits, but also a sexual habit as well. A good person keeps the same sexual partner, whereas a 'nice' person has several sex partners.)
Second Son: Oh hush up sister dear. That's northern talk. I say all slaves oughta be whipped on a regular basis, so they'll know their place. (Notice again, he's not saying they should be, but rather merely I say they should be! Thus, it's a true statement.) If we don't, they might rise up and kill all of us! (The word ‘might’ can be added to any statement of fact, and thus make it merely probable, not certain and true. After all, isn’t there a chance anything might happen?) Besides, we'll go outta business if we have ta pay slaves to work for us. (Again, the word 'if' is important; all it means is if something happens, then something else might happen, and so he's still truthful. It's called a hypothetical statement. If something happens, then something else might happen.)
Second Daughter: Oh brother dear, that is just not helpful or intelligent. (Again 'that' refers to the brother’s actions.) How can you say such a thing? (Asking a question avoids the whole problem of telling the truth; it’s just a request for more information.) If we have ta pay slaves, we can just raise our prices for cotton, that's all, just like everyone else. (It's another 'if-then' hypothetical question.)
Obviously, young children needed be bothered with all this information about intelligent writing all at once. They can learn more about it as they grow older. But even in such a little skit like that there's a lot of information being given out about the speakers and their feelings. Even primary age students can begin practicing that writing art. What's more, the art of politely but firmly disagreeing with people is another important lesson learned from the skit, especially useful for women who are often trained not to say anything, but merely do what they're told to do. In liberal schools, however, all children are taught habits useful in a healthy democracy, like speaking up when it's felt necessary. If not, then passive and obedient habits will keep making dangerous and stressful feudalistic systems remain in place.
Also, such a history sketch also helps students become more aware of economic ideas too, like all labor costs and taxes are ultimately paid for by the people! The Civil War freed Africans to charge more for their work, but ultimately all the people pay for those increases, not just employers. In short, all such price increases are paid for by the people. Today, the government may tax tobacco and oil companies, but ultimately smokers and drivers end up paying those taxes with higher prices, instead of the tobacco and oil companies.
Also, it becomes easier for students to begin seeing another important economic fact of life. The more people are allowed to hide their money in overseas banks, and thus avoid paying taxes, then the more taxes others must pay to make up the difference. The point is, with such intelligent skits the very important world of economics begins opening up too, a subject conservative book-oriented schools usually keep ignoring, as they do with political activism. When have you ever seen a student protest against some local politician or business owner? So, in more liberal public schools both economics and politics become much more important; such knowledge is useful throughout life, not just to pass the next test. And such skits also encourage more intelligent questions, like how many Southerners were for abolition, and how many Northerners were for slavery? Why were there riots in New York City after Lincoln started drafting men into the Union Army, and how much did wealthy folks like John Pierpont Morgan pay the government not to fight in the war?
Given such research and writing freedom, and of course some guidance by teachers and even older students, such writing skills can begin growing even in primary schools. What 5th graders wouldn’t like to write and act out a little skit about how different insects attack other insects, and how those who are attacked might feel? Wouldn’t it be a great way to teach bullies how their actions make others feel? And, again, such skits would help grow some intelligent feelings about all forms of health, from biological to political. For example, in a skit about buying a car, wouldn’t students start learning more about our economic system itself, and how, say, when someone buys a new car they helping pay for auto workers' health insurance and retirement benefits? They can also be used to teach others about intelligently buying a used car. Such skits involving real life situations, not only the outer world will become better known, but the inner world of personal feelings and habits will be better defined as well. No doubt, learning such writing habit-arts will feel awkward at first, but what new habit-art doesn’t feel awkward at first?
Here's another little skit helping explain the ideas I’ve been talking about. Please notice again how good speaking habits like truth-telling are also encouraged with such skits. It's an interrogation scene with a detective and a suspect, also showing how important it is to respect just and fair laws. A detective stands over a sitting suspect, questioning him.
Det: Do you know a prostitute named Belle Merriweather?
Sus: I ain't never seen her. (A double negative statement means he has seen her.)
Det: Cut the double negative crap Sluggo; we got witnesses who say they saw you with her day before last.
Sus: Alright, maybe I seen her once or twice before, but she just chatted. (Even if he never saw Belle, the word 'maybe' makes the statement true. And, the second indefinite pronoun 'she’ could also refer to the speaker, telling the audience more about his inner feelings.)
Det: What about Belle’s boyfriend, Weasel McHenry?
Sus: The Weasel? This guy's a flake; he can't keep his mind on one subject for more than a few minutes. (Again, the word ‘this’ referred to the person talking, and tells more about his inner world.) I was with him once, but we didn’t connect. (Again, true enough; the indefinite pronoun ‘him’ could refer to any male he was ever with! Using indefinite pronouns like that in fact make it easy to talk about the person speaking. What's more, with such pronoun use it's much easier for young folks to start seeing themselves more objectively, to tell others what they’re like merely with the word 'this.': this is hopeless; this is great.)
Det: When’s the last time you saw Belle?
Sus: I dunno. I think it was last Tuesday. (Again, the words 'I think' prevent anyone from making a false statement; I think merely means someone’s thinking about something. "I think I’m on Mars’ is true if I really think it!)
Det: Did you ever give Weasel any money for Bell’s sexual services?
Sus: Only once, but nothing happened; she's really a nut-case. (True again. The words ‘only once’ have no truth value. It’s not a complete statement; it’s just a phrase. And again, ‘she’ could refer to any woman or even the actor himself. After all, there's more to being a woman or man than just having a female or male body; there’s also the inner psychological feeling.)
So, just by experimenting with such simple writing and performing skits students can easily begin feeling how to speak more intelligently and truthfully at the same time. By using pronouns even young students can thus begin feeling how to tell others about their own habits and feelings. When a male, for example, uses the word 'he' he also can tell others about himself. In the second skit we learn the suspect may like to connect with men, thinks he's flakey, sometimes lies, and doesn’t relate well to some women. In short, such writing and speaking helps students to know themselves better and learn more about others are feeling.
Also worth mentioning is another useful speaking habit for those who want to respect and speak truthfully. That's the habit of answering one question with another question; it preserves respect for both the truth, for others, and also protects one's privacy. For example, suppose a friend asks ‘Are you going shopping now?’ someone might ask ‘What do you need from the store?’ That way the conversation stays alive and focused on getting more information, rather than staying on a question-and-answer level. It's also a good way to ward off impolite and nosey people. A stranger might ask ‘Are you going to Los Angeles?’ and get the reply ‘Who isn't?’ Also, the more people use the word please, the more impolite and respectful they act. A rude person may ask ‘Get me a soda will ya? and someone may say ‘Get it yourself, will ya?’ The greedy rich will always be with us, right? Did you notice how the word 'right' turned a statement into a question, and thus saved me from making what might be a false statement?
Building New Ethical Feelings Too
In the upper grades such writing and speaking habits can also begin helping produce some important ethical feelings as well. For example, down through history different philosophers have said there's a big ethical difference between using results to justify one's actions, and using merely a person's inner motives and feelings to act ethically. In fact, Dewey notes how most ethical systems are divided between saying outer results or inner motives are ethically most important. Ancient sophists and modern-day Utilitarians say what’s most important ethically is the outer result of improving our social world. If, say, the outer result of an action produces more pleasure than pain, then it’s a good action. So, if a program like Social Security produces more social pleasure than pain, then we should pass it and keep it going, even if some conservatives say it’s too socialistic and not in the true spirit of capitalism and profit-making.
On the other hand, however, many believe what matters most ethically are one’s inner motives, desires, and feelings. Only they should determine if an action is ethically right and moral. Stoics, Christians, and Immanuel Kant said what’s ethically most important is not the outer results of an action, but rather a person’s inner motives. Thus following one’s inner motives is best, like doing one’s duty and obeying god’s will, or one’s good will motives for telling the truth no matter what the outer results may be. For such people, damn the outer results and do what you feel is right.
So, another great thing about writing and performing such skits, high school students can begin growing more aware of such important philosophic issues. What's more ethically important; outer results or inner feelings and motives? For liberals like Dewey, however, it's a false and artificial separation. For him both one's inner motives and outer results are important for doing what's ethically right and good. What's ethically right about wanting to build a more satisfying public good, and yet keeping all the money one makes? Such questions and skits in any class can become talked about at the high school level. It's another way we liberals want to keep increasing the outer public good as well as keep building a set of intelligent and healthy inner motives. Intelligently writing little skits thus helps students know what kinds of inner motives are healthy, and which ones could be healthier. Is a selfish motive healthy and right, and if not, then how can it be improved.
Making TV and Films More Meaningful
The more students focus on writing such skits and questions, another useful result is produced: TV, films, and real life become more meaningful. The simple statement, ‘This is nice’, for example, not only tells us something about the outer world, but the person’s inner sexual habits as well, namely they’re not faithful to only one partner.
When, for example, actors say things like “This is disgusting,” or “This is hopeless,” they share important facts about their inner feelings and the outer world! The person speaking is disgusting, hopeless, and nice. Such talking opens up the entire range of human actions and habits to simple statements. ‘She's a real Black Widow’ means exactly that; she can be dangerous to certain men. And the same can be said for words like fools, hustlers, saints, and angels. Some in Hollywood really practice Robin Hood-type habits -- robbing from the greedy rich and giving to the needy poor. As a result, statements like ‘He's just another Robin Hood’ are much more than mere words. After all, Hollywood has integrity in its work: actors who actually have such habits get to play such roles in movies; it makes acting itself much easier and more meaningful.
Humphrey Bogart, for example, played detective roles simply because he himself practiced capturing murderers in real life, or killing evil Nazis, or becoming dangerously paranoid if he didn't drink alcohol, like happened in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre! Errol Flynn and many others played a Robin Hood role because their actions and motives were similar; he wanted to help the poor and disadvantaged and acted to do so! It's another result of Behavioral role-playing; the more a role is played, the more its motive feeling can be felt; the more one practices a healthy diet, the more its motive feelings grow.
So again, creatively teaching intelligent speaking and writing habits can be learned more naturally within a more active writing and role-playing learning model. It also imitates the kind of learning kids use in the real world. Performing skits can be used in school not only to teach young folks how to speak more truthfully with questions and indefinite pronouns, but also share information about themselves, and thus learn more about themselves as well as make school a much more informative place to be. How can students help psychically damaged people unless they know more about their inner motive feelings? Thus, such honest speaking helps make school much more interesting than merely sitting quietly and reading books day after day and year after year.
Writing and performing skits is thus another important way of becoming a more mature person. And, such skits can also be therapeutic. They can help students change possibly dangerous subconscious motives and feelings into more healthful ones! For example, often it’s said movie and TV provokes real violence; monkey see, monkey do. There's some evidence for it too; some studies show children are more likely to act violently after seeing acts of violence. So, those who like to watch such shows may mean they too have similar subconsciously violent motive-feelings, and so just might produce dangerous actions. Thus, the more such students are identified, the easier it becomes to help them grow some more intelligent feelings with more positive and constructive skits. If not, such feelings could eventually turn to violent actions when such impulsive motives are acted out!
So, the TV shows and movies a student likes to watch can reveal some important information about one's inner motive-feelings. They're an important sign of what’s going on inside them. Student skits can thus help bring subconscious motives to a more conscious level of awareness, so they can be talked about intelligently, with friends or even those with more psychological knowledge. Also, students in a psychology lab can begin learning about more healthful and intelligent ways of acting out their violent motive-feelings, like punching inflated dolls. No doubt, violent movies may help produce violent actions, but they liberal educational challenge is helping them know how to express violent feelings constructively and harmlessly, so others won’t be endangered, right? We'll see more ideas about psychological excellence in Section 37.
So, in reality many useful educational results can spring from helping young folks start learning more about Hollywood’s self-revealing talking arts, and also how to use performing skills to help build more healthful motives and habits. Even Bible skits can help produce such results. If so, then such active skits become very useful educational tools helping students of all ages to feel more at home in the adult world they're living in. Comedic skits and acting silly about potentially dangerous feelings may be even more helpful for building more intelligent motives and habits. They too help young students gain more self-knowledge and a more healthful control over their own actions. In fact many so-called Fundamental Christian churches are already using such speaking habit; if you listen closely to some sermons and the words used, the speaker is telling people more about their own feelings than anything else.
Also, such small performing skits can be great way for students to start experimenting with another useful habit-art: story-telling with film. As good cameras become more affordable, students can be encouraged to record their skits, helping see themselves more objectively, and better learn what they like and don't like about themselves. The aim is to help students realize habits and just habits, everyone has their own different set of them, and more intelligent actions can build more intelligent habits. It gives meaning to the old saying, work is the best therapy. Such useful behavioral facts help empower anyone to gain more control of their life.
Such skills thus help make school a more humanistic place to be, instead of places where academic facts are learned, and then soon forgotten, and a slave-like obedience is demanded on a daily basis. Instead, schools become places where students can be honest about themselves, and also learn more about other students. So, when we teach young folks how to give their words a personal level of meaning, we not only encourage more intelligent and humane talking habits, but how to consciously feel their own subconscious motive feelings, and thus become better connected to their own motives. Such skits thus help bring children out of their self-centered psychic bubble, so to speak, and into the more social realm of adult living. In promoting such writing and performing skills in all classes, students learn what down-to-earth honesty means. At least that's what this dummy says! So, if nothing else, why shouldn't all liberal parents, teachers, and students demand such skits become a regular part of all public school classes? To say the least, they help students know themselves better, and also the past actions helping make our world what it is today.
22. LIBERATING TOOLS
As we’ve seen throughout these pages, nature is a continuing process of change and reconstruction, but we humans have developed an experimental art helping expand our physical powers to better protect us from nature's destructive events, as well as keep improving nature itself. It's the experimental art of tool making and using. With physical tools we've begun liberating ourselves from nature's total control. In fact, our tools have become so developed we can now work to improve nature at its most fundamental atomic level. We can now even build better life forms including human improvements as well; indeed, the future looks brighter now than it ever has, thanks to our tools. Certainly, many challenges still remain, like learning which new objects, like modified foods, will actually work best, but our growing tool chest has finally helped open the door to eternal improvement. Thus, also challenging is learning to share more equally the benefits of such improvements. Liberal democratic schools will begin teaching students such feelings.
Global warming, too, seems to be a growing major challenge for us tool-using humans. If we can create more eco-friendly transportation tools, like electric and solar engines helping harness more of nature's renewable energies, and phase out coal-burning energy plants and internal combustion engines, less dangerous carbon dioxide and methane will go into our air and we'll increase the chances for more people to enjoy nature's great gift of life itself. In our ever-changing and precarious world economics too has become a powerful tool, so why shouldn't students begin seeing how its intelligent use helps make life better for everyone? Greed remains a habit-art as deadly as global warming.
Biological, Physical, and Mental Tools
Sad to say, in most of our public elementary schools knowledge about tools and how to use them intelligently is still greatly neglected, especially in the earlier grades. Even in public high schools tool use is usually restricted to small wood and metal shops, making personal objects rather than helping improve neighborhood conditions. Computers are also becoming more popular, but often students use them for playing games. In more liberal schools, however, even 1st graders can begin feeling how, say, some safe gardening tools can be used intelligently as a way to test new ideas while working to improve the world around them. What flowers are best to grow in our own weather climate, and how can we make useful objects for them to grow in, as well as nap mats, and cardboard shop fronts.
Given the age of the earth, both humans and tool use have only recently evolved. Our 5 billion year old earth has been continually changing since its birth. At one time Alaska sat on the equator, the Appalachian Mountains were as tall as today's Rockies, and dinosaurs could walk from Poland to New York, where some might say some still exist. For almost all that time biological tools continued mutating, some of which became useful internal organ-tools. For example, after Permian trilobites of 250 million years ago became extinct in a worldwide Ice Age, Triassic reptile organs began growing in numbers; as Cretaceous dinosaurs were dying out about 65 million years ago, our small and wily little primate organ-tools grew more useful. But then, more than 2 million years ago physical tool-making began using natural objects like stones to make life better. That tool-making art has remained useful from that day to this, as has the challenge to use such tools peacefully for the public good, rather than violently for the benefit of only a few.
For hundreds of thousands of years simple stone tools like axes and hammers helped increased the control and production of food. So far nature has encouraged those kinds of tool-making habits. With such tools, begun over 2 million years ago, life for our hominid ancestors like Homo habilis became a little easier and more livable. Within their small African clans tool use started becoming a very important part of both nature and human life. They helped defend clan member and get more food in a very dangerous world. One hungry saber-toothed tiger might just ruin your whole day. So, without physical tools we would almost certainly have remained a small and rather vulnerable species.
Much later, some Erectus ancestors slowly evolved into Neandertals about 200,000 years ago in Europe; they were better adapted to live in Ice Age conditions. They in turn were replaced by our better tool making Cro-Magnon ancestors, beginning about 30,000 years ago. Lately archeological tools have even helped find evidence for some new human species. Through all such changes, however, the continuing challenge was to keep gaining more intelligent control of nature and use it to keep improving life. Thus, for the most part, our physical tool-making and using habit-arts have continued liberating many of us from remaining a slave to the limits of our own weak and puny biological tools. A major current challenge, however, is liberating people from those who greedily use economic tools to keep enriching themselves at the expense of others.
Tools Open the Way for Liberal Thinking
Later on, in ancient Greece, as people gained more control over nature by making better physical iron and bronze tools, they helped open the way for an entirely new liberal model of nature. A few practical-minded people in what is now Western Turkey begin building a new liberal model of life and nature, one offering people a way of seeing life much different from the conservative spirit-based model. Intelligently using their tool-making and using arts to build business colonies outside of Greece, a few secular thinkers became convinced mankind had become dominant over all other animals not because spirit-gods created them and gave them tools, like fire for example, but rather we ourselves gradually built our useful tool kit to intelligently make life better for everyone. In fact, that liberal model of life and nature has, since the 1600s, become the most fruitful and productive philosophic model. Our modern tools continue liberating us from nature’s dangers, allow us to control more natural energies, and thus make life better.
Thus, with the expansion of our physical tool kits in ancient Greece, Western civilization's first liberal secular model of life and nature was created – Atomism. In the 400s BCE creative people like Democritus began using a few ideas as mental tools to build an entire liberal atomistic model of life and nature. And of course today, microscopes, telescopes, computers, and tool-making machines continue giving us more control over microscopic enemies as well. Such tools have opened up entirely new worlds to study, learn about, better control, and thus keep making life safer and more livable. The challenge today, however, for nations like the US remains not letting such power be controlled by a narrow and small number of people mainly for their own profit and well-being.
Recently, liberal Behavioral psychologists like Dewey have also used a few ideas as tools for building a more useful psychological model. How do children best learn what they know, and how can we make their ideas even more intelligent and democratic? Thus, new idea-tools continue growing, like intelligent practice, imaginative and creative question-asking, experimental testing of idea, and of course the very important idea of useful results as the best way to judge how intelligent our ideas are. A mere 4 centuries ago such idea-tools started giving Western civilization a much greater conscious control over conservative learning habit-arts like contemplative reasoning and mere logical thinking. Without those liberal experimental kinds of idea-tools human progress would be much less than it is now, and schools would be even more medieval as well.
Ancient Greek Philosophic Tools
Earlier we saw what, for conservative Plato, was a very important philosophic idea-tool – his psychological model of human nature. Such a conservative tool was then used to justify many of his educational ideas. In his Republic, for example, his model of human nature said everyone has an inborn and innate 3-faculty psyche. He called them the nutritive, combative, and rational faculties; in effect they acted like philosophic tools, and helped justify building not only conservative schools and political systems, but also saying who should be educated, and who shouldn’t be.
For example, in a vivid simile he used the idea-tool of a reasoning faculty and said it was like a divine chariot driver. In some people that faculty could control the other 2 faculties of desire-appetite and combativeness. In most people, however, such a controlling faculty was pictured as weak and ineffective. As a result, only those with a strong reasoning faculty should be educated to become political leaders; they could best control their sexual and food desires, greed, and war-like impulses. Only they had the reasoning power to remember what he assumed was all the eternal and unchanging divine knowledge each of us has in our psyches at birth. Thus for him, physical tool use for making a living could produce only secular practical knowledge, and that was far from what felt to him was the best eternal and unchanging spirit-knowledge. So, with his conservative idea-tools, he concluded only such people should be allowed political power after being carefully educated for some 50 years.
Being a conservative aristocrat by both birth and education, he felt most people had very weak divine faculties of reasoning, and so to teach most everyone a reasoning habit-art would be a waste of time. To him most people merely wanted to work, eat, drink, and satisfy their sexual desires. In effect, then, his psychological idea-tools helped justify not building public schools for everyone. Most everyone should either learn a tool-using skill or become a soldier-guardian; for them shield and spear were their basic tools. No doubt, many conservatives today still feel the same way. College costs have become more expensive for all students, but wealthy aristocrats can better afford to pay them. And in public schools future low-skilled workers should learn to obey their supervisors and learn what they're told to learn. For such people to learn independent and intelligent habits of thinking and acting would be dangerous to all forms of concentrated power, including economic and political power.
Faculties Became Psychological Idea-Tools
In effect, then, Plato’s 3-faculty psychological model was used as a philosophic tool helping justify a basic feudalistic educational system. In ancient Athens only highly rational types, like Socrates or the gifted mathematician Theateatus, should continue their education to eventually become rulers when they were older. And such educational ideas continued justifying a feudalistic social status quo all through the Middle Ages, only then with religious Christian ideas. Thus people were told secular kings and queens, as well as the Pope, were in fact chosen by god to rule over others, and so obedience remained the most important character habit.
As we've seen, throughout history, mostly only noble-born boys were educated. Even as the medieval world evolved into our modern one, similar psychological idea-tools continued dominating educational systems. Such ideas were used from Augustine in the 400s, to Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s, and into the 1700s by Germans like Immanuel Kant and Scotsman skeptics like David Hume. The result continued to be a faculty model of learning, eventually called atomistic psychology after Democritus' atomic ideas became useful scientific learning tools. Faculties were said to be more or less independent learning powers developed by certain kinds of subjects. Both Kant and Hume’s psychology made such idea-tools eternally unchanging human faculties. Hume even wanted to be known as psychology’s ‘Isaac Newton’, and the discoverer of eternal psychological truth. At the time most everyone still felt Newton had already discovered the eternal scientific Truth about nature and gravity, and why the planets and tides act as they do. In one place even atheist Friedrich Nietzsche agreed with Plato’s ancient 3-part psyche, minus the divine reason of course. For him the combative faculty-will was much stronger than a reasoning faculty. However, in the late 1800s such psychological idea-tools began being challenged by more liberal thinkers, Dewey included. In essence they were unscientific, and thus merely arbitrary and baseless. In Section 28 we’ll see how, in the early 1900s, faculty psychology was finally proved to be a pure and unadulterated mythical assumption-tool, but I wanted to again mention it so readers will be a little more familiar with the idea, and how it's been used as a psychological tool the same way carpenters use their tools to build their objects.
The Rise of Behavioral Learning Idea-Tools
Today, with great confidence we liberal Deweyans say such conservative faculty idea-tools, celebrating passive kinds of reasoning, should be replaced with much more active experimental ideas like habit-building, intelligent practice, and learning to see the best future results for their work. When students are taught such habit-arts, then universal education is more easily justified than it is in a more conservative model. For us liberals most everyone can be educated to learn many different kinds of excellent habit-arts, especially democratic ones. All it takes is a little actively enjoyable practice involving muscles as well as minds. And, the more that happens, the more liberated all students become to not only intelligently guide their own learning, but also build more democratic institutions helping end all concentrated feudalistic systems of power.
As we've seen, the conservative educational goal is often said to be creating ‘well-rounded adults’; sometimes the educational goal is teaching students how to solve their own problems. But within most public schools a book-dominated system is still practiced, where students learn how to solve mainly useless academic problems, like who discovered America and how to solve abstract math problems. In such schools both personal and current social problems are almost always ignored. In effect, then, the conservative public school goal reduces to training students for learning more academic facts in college, even though some 70% of high school students don’t go to college, and far fewer than 30% graduate. What's more, such schools continue conditioning students to build undemocratic habits, like obeying their supervising teachers with no questions asked. How many times have you ever heard a student ask a teacher why are you asking us to learn such useless knowledge?
Many feel eventually most students will probably learn how to make a living with physical tools, if they're lucky enough to find a job. Today, more than 20 million people in the US are finding even that goal difficult since the latest economic recession of 2007-09. It's yet more evidence parents are still clueless about how to improve their own public schools, aren't very practical-minded about education, and unconcerned about teaching students how to intelligently solve their personal and social problems. Most people still ignore teaching students how to use democratic tools like protests, organizing people to better share power, and of course voting intelligently.
However, with more liberal democratic ideas of educational freedom and experimental learning, it becomes easier for all students to see how future results are the best objects of knowledge, in whatever field they study in. Such results are what have made scientific learning-tools much more reliable than, say, conservative learning tools of reading and memorizing more academic facts. And, such results have helped build the democracy we now have, as weak as it still is. Such active and experimental learning-tools, like intelligent experimentation, have become much more important tools for all students, not just the intellectually gifted. After all, most everyone can build the excellent democratic character habits helping make life much more rewarding and safer with a little enjoyable practice.
For us Deweyan liberals those are the best results for our public schools; what best endures is the good done for others, said Dewey. Learning how to intelligently use such experimentally active idea-tools simply helps children better learn what they want to learn, as well as keep improving our own neighborhoods. Don't even gifted students need to learn active intelligent actions are the most effective way to build the strongest kinds of character excellence.
In short, the liberal psychological learning-tools of modern Behaviorism mean most every student can learn many useful kinds of excellent habit-arts. We liberals use them for teaching students more than merely how to prepare for the next subject or standardized test. That to us is a rather perverse educational model, and has no place in a democratic society. Much more important for democratic health is learning how to intelligently improve both personal and social weaknesses and excesses, like hatred and greed. Like adults, kids too find some ideas and skills more interesting than others, and so the science and art of liberal education itself becomes first learning what student needs and desires are, and then use those interests for also teaching them what creative, constructive, intelligent, respectful, and scientific habits of learning feel like. What's more, in that process physical tools like hammers, saws, and drills become very useful for students of all ages. As we saw earlier, young children go through a constructive building period from around 8 to 11 or 12. So, the more they learn how to build things intelligently, like useful beautification workshops of all kinds, the easier it becomes to keep them emotionally involved with school and learning. Conservative schools have a major drop-out problem simply because they ignore student needs and desires.
On a behavioral level for hundreds of thousands of years our primitive tool-making ancestors treated learning as an active, organic, and experimental affair, and so learning itself was a natural process. However, with the growth of organized schools it became economically useful to educate only wealthier students, and teach them the knowledge useful to their social class. Such a model is no longer best in any growing democracy.
Vocational Schools
Why not? Two words -- Industrial Revolution. Since the early 1900s vocational schools have become more popular. With Dewey's help they began helping students learn more about using and making tools. Society was becoming mechanized and so the more students knew how to operate such tools, the easier it was to get a job. Soon, however, he saw how such schools often focused on merely teaching students how to run a machine or work on an assembly line. Young folks thus often became extensions of the corporate world, and were paid poorly compared to the millions owners were making. Thus life for workers often remained stressful and frustrating. Around 1900 the country’s industrial sector was growing stronger, with the help of new inventions and also high consuming events like World War 1; war has always been good for business. And so most vocational schools quickly became less than what they could be. Many continued ignoring teaching students useful character habit-tools for solving personal and social challenges, like ending political corruption, how to form labor unions, and better liberate their politicians from wealthy control. In fact, those goals have become even more important in the last 30 years as wealth has become much more concentrated in a small upper class.
For Dewey, there’s much more to excellent tool use than merely running a machine, no matter what kind it is. Again, the results of such machines help determine their worth and value. Why keep producing more guns and tanks rather than those objects helping build a more peaceful and respectful world, like better schools and more recreational areas. Why should wealthy folks have the most freedom to enjoy months of recreation while workers are kept anchored to their work-tools? Why shouldn't workers also have the freedom and power to say what should be built, like more electric cars and more environmental friendly power generators? In short, vocational schools too could be doing much more to better educate students about the effects of their work on both themselves and our world, so as to help students become less vulnerable to corporate profit-making and all the harmful results that goal can produce? Recently, automotive CEOs easily ran their companies into bankruptcy; it was easy without more democratic worker control of their own company decisions. And once union contracts were ended, it became easy to write new ones paying workers much less than they made before. Why shouldn’t vocational students be learning how they too can help build a more democratic world by organizing and then demanding more democratic decision-making power? Why shouldn't they too be learning how socially dangerous concentrated economic power can be for those not allowed to have such decision-making power? Without such power the feudalistic world continues on.
The more such important democratic character habits are taught in public and vocational schools, the easier it is to feel even ideas themselves are mental tools useful for building a more democratic world. It might not sound like an important idea, but it is. It makes thinking creatively itself easier; if one idea-tool doesn’t work, then try another. So, the more students feel mind and body aren’t really 2 different objects, and schools shouldn’t teach mere academic book-facts, the easier it is to build more liberal schools where ideas are used as tools to keep improving life. Down through history the conservative separation of mind and body has made it easy to keep students learning more abstract knowledge, and thus keep life more stressful and unhealthful for everyone. After all, even kings and queens get sick. So again, we see how important the simple psychological idea-tool of body-mind is for building more active and experimental public schools. When body and mind are seen as one object, then constructive and intelligent actions help build constructive and intelligent feelings and ideas. The challenge of building such liberal schools is still with us. Feudalistic conservatives simply don't want anyone learning democratic habits with active and intelligent practice, especially not in economic and political ways. Those are the fields when fortunes continue to be controlled for just a few people. Presently, around 30,000 make more than 10 million dollars a year, and as we’re seeing today, the personal and social results of that feudalistic economic system are making life more stressful for millions.
So, when those kinds of democratic habits are taught in academic and vocational schools, students can more easily begin feeling how democracy should work for the public good, and also how they can begin taking a more intelligent control over their own growth and learning. The key, again, is knowing what results a person wants their actions to produce, and then slowly practicing such actions a little at a time. Someone who wants to lose some extra weight, for example, would then practice eating a more healthful breakfast, and once that habit starts growing, then moving on to lunch, and so on. Such practice is also the key to improving one’s liberal voting habits, spending a little more time each day to intelligently choose those people who also will work for the same results, like, say, ending the power of obscenely wealthy people to keep controlling our political system. In liberal schools such skills are not separate from any other subject; they’re an important part of every subject. Who doesn’t know mathematical, historical, and even scientific facts are a part of all political decisions? So, learning more democratic political also teaches other important facts as well. Have you ever heard an intelligent politician who doesn’t also know many useful math, science, and history facts?
Without teaching students in all schools such democratic skills, feudalistic institutions easily continue becoming more powerful and dangerous. Luckily, in more liberal schools, such habits of organized student power can start growing in elementary schools, with simple building projects. When students are allowed to work on different constructive and cooperative projects like, say, building classroom and school planters, then math, science, and history facts also begin growing, as well as how intelligent actions help make life more beautiful and learning more enjoyable. The stronger such habits grow even in vocational schools, the easier it becomes to begin feeling democratic power is the most intelligent tool for improving all social weaknesses and excesses. With such intelligent tool-using projects, learning itself becomes more fluid, organic, enjoyable, active, creative, and less stressful, rather than passive, boring, and overly repetitious.
Other Liberal Educational Results
Several other useful results can easily happen from such constructive tool-work. For one thing, students can begin seeing even mathematical ‘certainties’ are merely human art, not eternal Truth. As we’ve seen, Plato said mathematical reasoning way the only way to learn eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth. Secondly, tool-based community work-projects help give students the confidence they can keep improving life if they work together as a team. It was no accident the first truly liberal democratic models of life and nature began growing in the ancient Greek world where tool-based colony building was a regular part of life for hundreds of years BEFORE democracy evolved in the 400s BCE! Indeed, because of such democratic results, people like Socrates and Plato began a conservative countermovement; they began using their idea-tools experimentally to see if they could discover any eternal meanings in nature, and thus re-energize conservative feelings for eternal and unchanging kinds of knowledge. Socrates failed in the attempt, and it took his student Plato decades to discover he couldn’t learn about such objects either.
Third, such tool-work helps students begin seeing life more objectively, rather than subjectively. They can begin seeing a feudalistic conservative model of life and nature is, in fact, rather harsh, inhumane, and out of touch with most people. Even simple constructive building projects like classroom planters help young students feel everyone’s work is important, and isn’t that feeling the best basis of any healthy democratic system. Carpentry and plumbing skills are often just as useful as computer and drawing skills. Thus, a creative tool-based school became the basis of Dewey's liberal educational model, helping build important feelings for intelligent and cooperative work. In such schools, then, teachers help bring such feelings to a conscious level of awareness, so students can begin not only feeling them, but thinking and talking about them as well.
No doubt, many people still feel teaching students to work with physical tools is somehow less than best, even though they can help young folks earn honest and good money after graduation. But what's also emphasized in good liberal schools is using tools creatively and intelligently in one’s community. In fact, even the world's smartest people learn to use tools creatively, both physical and mental idea-tools. If they didn’t, new tool creation would be almost non-existent. Physicists and engineers use tools to creatively build atomic accelerators and airplanes, lawyers use idea-tools to prove guilt or innocence, and politicians use idea-tools and write new laws. But students will also learn another important fact of life: too often new idea-tools come from the corporate world and are meant to keep increasing their power. That's the basic feudalistic political model we have today, and to we liberals it can be made to work for the public good only as our politicians are liberated from corporate financing. Such results can start growing at a small local level of government, and continue growing from there, just as any new habit grows on a personal level.
Such work-projects will also build a more intelligent idea of tools. Today, many people often think of tools like carpentry and plumbing tools. So, they tend to look down on those using such tools as a sign of mental inferiority. As we’ll see shortly, I too had such feelings. But in reality dental and surgical tools are not inherently better than carpentry or plumbing tools when one wants to build a new cabinet or fix a broken pipe; in fact in that situation they’re inferior. Plumbers even sometimes make more money than some dentists and doctors who often have huge education debts to pay, as well as high medical malpractice insurance.
The habit-art of intelligent and creative tool use at the primary level would help expand such narrow feelings about tools. Teachers in conservative schools are usually not interested in teaching such habits as creative tool-use; most of the time they're interested in just teaching children how to solve a problem, so they'll be able to pass the next standardized test, upon which their jobs often depend. But, from around 8 to 12 years of age children are especially curious about building things with tools; for many it's a natural activity for their growing bodies. So, why shouldn’t all intelligent and creative tool use too be cherished, looked after, and celebrated in our public schools? They help liberate students from their own weak and limited bodies, and, if taught creatively, also liberate one’s thinking habits as well.
Only tools, both physical and mental idea-tools, have been the greatest liberators of our human race, but their intelligent use for personal and community improvement has been almost completely neglected in our conservative public schools. For them book-facts are all important, not student growth and excellence. As a result, people have rather shallow feelings about the results of their own actions. Car drivers and coal-burning power plants around the world are now contributing to global warming on a serious level, thus challenging more people to build more eco-friendly kinds of transportation and energy systems. So, schools and the media are becoming more important than ever before. Students in liberal schools will find it much easier to begin feeling such results, as well as feeling challenged to creatively respond to them. How big of a carbon 'footprint' do students have, and how can it best be reduced, both personally and socially? Time will certainly tell. Either way, teaching students to start feeling how such challenges will best be solved creatively with our habit-tools remains one of our greatest educational challenges. Not celebrating such ideas and actions in fact makes life that much more difficult, dangerous, and stressful. Rich folks can easily move to cooler climates, but most people don't have that freedom.
All is certainly not lost. There are some hopeful educational signs even within the establishment media. For example, in the Wall Street Journal of 12-2-12 a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., Caleb Rossiter, essentially agreed with Dewey when he said "... schools should rework their reading and math curricula to prepare (children) for trades ... such as bricklayer, hairdresser, plumber, nurse's assistant, or computer technician." Dewey of course was much more elegant in saying similar things. Even such professions still have a great deal of room for creative improvement. Not only did Dewey want all students to learn something about using tools in the real world, but more importantly, also about intelligent and creative tool use. As the old saying goes, there're more ways than one to skin a cat. Still, it shows how even some conservative newspapers now are thinking about education more like Dewey did several decades ago. The social and personal results of such schools are becoming more unacceptable.
Another example of tool-use’s cooperative benefits can be seen in many of Finland's schools. There teachers are well paid and trained, guidance counselors are plentiful, each student is fed and made to feel equal to all others, and cooperative exercises are emphasized as well. Anu Partanen's article in The Atlantic magazine, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success, talks about how their more active schools make it easier for students to learn more academic facts; test scores put their students in the highest levels of accomplishment. A little later we'll see how students in liberal Deweyan schools can also do well in conservative schools, and more importantly, learn some excellent learning habits in liberal schools as well. Finland's neighbor Norway, however, has a system similar to the US's, where students mainly sit at desks all day and do book-work, and their test scores are much lower than Finland's. So, the educational moral of the story is ____________? (It’s a fill-in-the-blank pop quiz!)
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Remember when you were starting a new school year and your teacher asked you to write a little essay about what you did during your summer vacation? Well, here’s my 2 paragraph offering.
While in college one summer I worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, helping build an addition to a hospital. For a few weeks I had the difficult job of drilling holes in pieces of iron. The work was slow but I was young and strong and so routinely plunged ahead with more muscle than mind. After a few days, however, my supervisor noticed I was still working in the same routine way, using more muscle than creative thinking. So, he sent one of the other carpenters around. He looked at what I was working on, and within minutes built a lever which made the drilling much easier. I wonder if he heard the sound of my jaw dropping. Here was this ‘hotshot’ Joe College who had even taken Honors Physics in high school, and yet my knowledge was merely about ideas, rather than how to creatively use my idea-tools in the real world. My knowledge was separated from practice, and so remained merely ideas, rather than vibrant and powerful knowledge.
Even today I can still feel how amazed I was at how inventive and creative that ‘lowly’ carpenter was with just a few simple tools. He probably never took a physics class in his life, and yet his practice -- his creative experience -- taught him the same kinds of level-ideas I had merely redd about in school. Thus, his knowledge was much richer, deeper, wiser, and more useful than mine. Amazing. Another one of life’s ‘insignificant’ people had more real physics inventiveness and creativity than this ‘big shot’ Joe College!
Arrogantly looking down on those who use tools to actually build things still seems to be a common feeling for many people around the world. Because our conservative public schools generally restrict such tool use to wood and metal shop classes, and even then teach little about creatively using such tools, students learn little about creative tool use both in school and in their neighborhoods. Such shop classes are often reduced to, say, making key chain bobbles or smoking pipes. As a result, students also don’t learn one of life’s greatest habit-arts -- how to use tools intelligently and gracefully in the real world. How many girls are almost completely helpless when it comes to fixing anything, like a car, and so need to spend money because they lack such knowledge?
In her excellent book Inside Soviet Schools, Susan Jacoby describes some of these feelings. She talks about the negative reaction of Soviet bureaucrats to Khrushchev’s school reforms; he insisted students get more work experience, especially at harvest time. Before that, however, it had been an important part of many progressive Russian schools when Dewey and other educators visited in the late 1920s. After that, however, such liberal ideas apparently grew less important as Russian industrialization took off in the 1930s, and also after Khrushchev was ousted from power during the cold war. The Cuban Missile crisis humiliated the Russian establishment. Ms. Jacoby describes a Russian prejudice against those who use tools for a living, as if doctors and lawyers were somehow always better people than manual workers. In reality, however, many doctors and lawyers are mainly interested in making as much money as they can. Here, however, are some questions liberal people might ask: Are all doctors or computer programmers always better people just because their tools help them make more money than all those who make less? Aren’t there crooks and incompetents in every profession, and if that’s true, then isn’t the habit-art of working intelligently and honestly much more socially important than anything else?
More Useful Results from Intelligent Tool Use
No doubt many conservative US educators and bureaucrats have similar feelings against allowing students to actually use tools on community projects. How many colleges and universities, high schools, and elementary schools ignore such work projects, where students use real tools to test how their creative plans work for improving life? In fact, how many such schools still ignore such tool-use even on simple neighborhood rehab or useful building projects?
For us liberal Deweyans the educational moral is obvious: The less such work happens, the more 2 unintelligent feelings remain strong. First, many students will continue feeling physical work is actually beneath them, and thus feel any kind of tool use isn't worth their time and effort. In reality, however, such knowledge is power too, even knowledge about car repair. And secondly, many students will continue feelings disconnected from the entire scientific model of nature as something to keep improving! Thus, they won't be empowered to keep creatively improving their own communities and schools; from such personal weaknesses grow the need for more government services! Merely making our neighborhoods places where, say, painting tools should be used more often would help build many more positive feelings about learning what intelligent action means. So, again, why shouldn't students in all public schools begin feeling their own intelligent and creative work can produce some really fine works of art, thus building feelings of pride and confidence to challenge those who often see their neighborhood as merely more drug turf?
In many of our decaying cities today we're seeing the visually and economically depressing results of not teaching students how to use tools intelligently. Conservative educators keep telling people we need to make all students study academic book-facts so they can become well-rounded students and get new jobs. Meanwhile, our cities continue decaying, corporations are paying politicians to allowed jobs to be shipped overseas, union contracts are being torn up, developers are grabbing land and raising rents, and worker salaries are lowered while some 3,000,000 people, the wealthiest 1%, continue taking a huge percentage of profits in the form of obscene salaries and investment earnings. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually used their money to help people start more businesses, or help build more liberal schools. But many such conservatives within that small group often use their money to keep paying politicians to pass more laws making it easier to keep taking more and more of the public's money! Many for-profit charter schools are doing just that. For such people privatizing the entire economy, especially Social Security, is the ultimate goal in life. Many now called that situation class warfare. The stock market scam in the 1920s was merely another example of such actions.
With confidence we liberal Deweyans say, the more tool-using community service work is ignored in our public schools, the more our great cities will continue becoming first urban wastelands, often followed by high rent condos. As we’ve seen, some 50,000 people in New York are homeless while multimillionaires live on the Upper East Side.
No mere book alone can better teach such important democratic habits than constructive community work-projects. So, if more of our public schools, homes, and churches emphasized and encouraged creative, cooperative, and enjoyable tool use, such inhumane social differences would almost certainly grow smaller, replaced by more caring people, useful businesses, and the democratic feeling of sharing power in all its forms.
Using even simple agricultural tools intelligently in our public elementary schools would begin emotionally and intellectually connecting students with their communities. Los Angeles, for example, is actually on the edge of a desert and water is getting more expensive. Shouldn't students there be learning how to intelligently match plants to their surroundings, and start bothering politicians to do the same in all public spaces, rather than continue ignoring the situation and planting water-hungry vegetation? Is it wise to plant a million water-hungry trees? Instead of continuing to plant water-hungry vegetation, more students might start asking such intelligent questions, and then perhaps planting some very fragrant desert plants, making it a nasal treat to even walk past them. Why not keep our senses as alive as they are for 1st and 2nd graders? With such useful work-projects even in elementary school, students might even help encourage more people to walk and exercise more, rather than keep poisoning everyone air with their cars! Why shouldn’t such creatively intelligent tool-use become a normal part of school? It’s a creative art useful for many different challenges throughout life, not just while one is in school, and it's a great way for students to use their afternoons actively and constructively. How else can any Garden of Eden be built?
In the lower primary grades especially, students regularly use tools like paper, scissors, and glue. How many wide-eyed youngsters proudly burst into their homes with the results of such work? But why not keep broadening such tool use with more community work-projects? For example, couldn’t they also help decorate senior citizens’ living spaces with flowers and even paintings, and thus brighten up senior lives as well? And wouldn’t seeing seniors also begin teaching students how important it is to build healthful diet and exercise habits as soon as possible?
Another useful result of such work is building useful feelings for more abstract scientific studies later in high school; what makes some art more intelligent than others? What results do our foods produce in our bodies, and what foods produce the best results? What chemical make some fertilizers better than others? In effect, we liberals are asking our public schools to start liberating student learning power with more active and intelligent work-projects. No doubt, some teachers might break some fingernails, or even get their shoes dirty, but the potential learning results for students are far more important.
Parents are the great engines of all educational reform. But when they know little about such educational possibilities within more liberal schools, then they in effect limit intelligent social kinds of knowledge and skills. Creative thinking and tool use is useful in all fields of work! How many public schools today have classes like Creative Tool Use, 101, 102,…, 112, or Creative Tool Making? About as many as have Creative Joke Writing I'll wager. Really now, if we want adults to know how to intelligently care about their own neighborhoods, and rely less on government help to keep them safe and growing, then why aren’t we teaching students how to work in those ways? No doubt, such active and intelligent tool work would help deepen the knowledge of every future Ph. D, as well as every corporate CEO and blue collar worker!
Such intelligent tool work will also help build another excellent idea-feeling. Students will also begin feeling all tools, both physical and mental, can be playfully enjoyed as ends-in-themselves as well as the best means for physically improving life! In other words, they can begin learning how intelligent tool use feels while helping produce useful results. To some it may be just another subtle philosophic point, but feeling something like a tool just for its sensual feel is a useful habit-art from every kitchen to every corporate board room. Unlike conservatives like Plato, us liberals don’t want to restrict sensually feeling of the world, but rather increase it, and get more in touch with our feelings! The more students feel sensually in touch with life, the less need they’ll feel for drugs to produce that result! And the more students feel how important it is to keep improving the common and public good for everyone, the less greed and corruption they’ll practice as adults.
No doubt, such important psychic and social results helped Dewey realize, no matter who we are and what we learn, people know best and are influenced only by what they build! If they build helpful objects as students, it’ll be easier to keep building them as adults. I still remember much about that hospital addition I helped build over 30 years ago, and how good it still feels to help people today. In fact, such feelings are at the core of this book, helping people see another model of education.
It may even be stated more poetically. With such constructive projects young folks can even begin feeling tools as even sacred objects; after all, they’ve done more to liberate our human race than any other single habit-art. Only tools extend and magnify feeble human powers, thus enabling us to keep reconstructing and improving nature like no other species ever has. Not that that always happens, but in liberal schools it can and should be an important educational goal! With the right kind of machine just one people can move mountains. In fact, intelligent tool use is essential to all forms of intelligent progress; wherever it exists, tools exist.
So, to deny even young students the freedom to start feeling such ideas and results in effect denies the over 2 million year old means to our strongest knowledge -- reliable and dependable experimental scientific knowledge. Celebrating tool use, and not with just pencils, paper, scissors, and glue should be an everyday part of liberal school life, including how to care, repair, and clean them as well as how to sensually savor their use, invent new ones, and improve old ones. It helps students feel there's always room for improvement. Such creative tool use is, in fact, the psychic earth from which all progress begins growing; tools make active and intelligent testing much easier. With thoughtfully creative experimental tool use, learning itself can become a more graceful, natural, and enjoyable habit-art. The more tool use is respected, savored and enjoyed, the deeper we feel how important creative thinking and building is, and the more liberated we become to keep treating them as sacred as any living person.
Tool-using teamwork also helps students feel a good definition of democracy itself: democracy is the social art of people working intelligently together to make their lives better! The more children feel they can keep making life better, the stronger our democracy itself grows; democracy is an active political system. No doubt, the pencil, paper, scissors, and paste makers are grateful for the business, but why restrict tool use to them? An intelligent tool-using program helps increase student independence, creativity, and confidence, and thereby lessens boredom, frustration, dropping out, and also using precious public monies to control hurtful actions? How many more innocent young folks will die from brutal violence before our public schools start teaching students how to act constructively in their own neighborhoods, and start feeling all people should be respected as long as they respect our just laws and others?
During his teen years one founder of Behavioral psychology, John Watson, was encouraged to teach himself how to build an entire house by himself! Plumbing, electrical, and carpentry skills are not that difficult to learn, even for young folks. Then, after he went to college and saw how important writing skills were, he already had the confidence to teach himself that skill too; he went on to earn his doctorate in psychology. Intelligent tool use is not only a confidence builder, but also helps increase peaceful and constructive feelings, rather than brutal ones.
And finally, in an economy like ours, depending for its health mainly on auto and construction work, wouldn’t the high cost of housing come down and be made more available to more people if more students had building skills and used them intelligently? Wouldn’t building community gardens help lower food prices? If less money was needed to build a house, and more people knew how to finish the work, couldn’t more of them be built and more people afford them?
We liberal Deweyans say such ideas are definitely worth experimenting with in all our conservative public schools, beginning at the primary level and then growing from there. Why should we continue allowing our public tax money to keep funding schools where students remain physically and psychically tool-illiterate? The result often makes students feel separate and alienated from their own communities. Everyone works with tools of one kind or another, so isn’t it to our benefit to teach students the art of intelligent tool use, including possibly the best tool ever invented, the modern computer. With its help, it's revolutionized life in so many ways, so knowing how to use it in the planning stages of improvement projects should be another important part of liberal school work. They can help make work that much easier and more enjoyable.
18. CHARACTER EXCELLENCE: 106
INTELLIGENT Sex!
Now that I have your attention ... should liberal public schools help students to at least talk intelligently about intelligent sex, and what such respect means in action? In this last section on character excellence we ask: Should teachers and students be free to talk intelligently in class about one of life’s most important character habits – intelligent sex? I mean real intelligently, so they not only begin hearing what respectful sex sounds like, and how freedom is given to a partner to control the pleasures feeling best to them, but equally importantly, about the more than 20 harmful sexually transmitted diseases they might possibly get by practicing unwise and unintelligent sex. Don't our publicly funded schools owe at least that much knowledge to the next generation? Without it, we will keep seeing sexually abusive actions on a wide scale, as we're seeing now in our sexually integrated military branches, as well as child abuse and unregulated prostitution. Why shouldn’t anyone who’s interested in learning such knowledge be free to get it in our public high schools?
Also important and useful is knowing how to love one’s self sexually, as well how to have fun in a sexual relationship. What is wrong with giving such information freely to those high school students who want to more about sexual excellence? In fact, the more such knowledge can be talked about freely, the further the next generation steps away from medieval myths and superstitions. Needless to say, to us liberal Deweyans that’s a good thing; it helps make sex more democratic and equal between partners, rather than merely keeping it male dominated. Such students will also be more willing to keep making our nation and its liberal high schools places where young folks can keep getting intelligent information useful throughout life. In fact, different kinds of sexual relations are helping define our modern world, a world where many still believe all non-heterosexual habits are evil and produce sinful results. Even in our early 21st century world there are probably more superstitious myths about sexuality than any other idea. I don't know about you, but the older I got the more I learned how enjoyable, fun, and respectful sex can be. What’s wrong with such knowledge? It’s only made my life richer and safer as well!
Certainly, I realize many conservatives want to keep such liberal ideas and knowledge away from young folks. They want to keep controlling what young folks learn and also conserve their own sexual habits; many want as much control over the next generation as Church leaders have wanted for thousands of years. They may say there is some evidence teen pregnancy increases as sexual knowledge becomes a more open subject in high school, even though it’s difficult to prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
In any case, however, many people still feel very uneasy when someone suggests students should be free to learn more accurate knowledge about sex even in high school. Many women still feel uncomfortable and embarrassed just talking about it, many men still feel women should merely keep satisfying male sexual needs, such habits should be practiced by everyone, and marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Still, we liberal Deweyans ask, shouldn't young folks be free to begin seeing how sexual needs are satisfied in many different ways, and probably have been for thousands of years. Shouldn't young folks be free to learn how to make a sexual relation more fun, enjoyable, respectful, safe, and rewarding no matter who is involved? Shouldn't fun films like Woody Allen's What You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask, be allowed in high school classrooms where students want to learn more about the funny side of sexuality? After all, isn't learning to have some fun with any subject the best way to learn more about it?
On the positive side, however, many millions of sexually liberated adults now feel what's most important about sex is making it as safe as possible. No doubt, the AIDS epidemic beginning in the early 1980s has been a huge wake-up call to begin questioning all assumptions about intelligent sex. Since then, it’s simply no longer wise and intelligent to keep assuming no harmful results will happen during sex with someone else. If so, then why shouldn't our liberal high schools be allowed to teach more intelligent assumptions about sex, casual or otherwise? After all, doesn't everyone have a right to reliable knowledge about anything, as long as it’s constructive and helpful? Who are conservative educators to say no student should have access to such knowledge in our public high schools? When parents and students don't have such knowledge, then why shouldn't our public high schools be places where they can get such knowledge? After all, they are sexually mature, and so would find such knowledge useful. As millions of adults now know, respectful and enjoyable sex is another sure sign of character excellence, where all the parties involved are respectful of a person's own sexual needs and expressions.
Sad to say, to many people, even talking about respectful and enjoyable sexual ideas shouldn’t be allowed in our public high schools, even though many such students are sexually active! Believe it or not, in some parts of the world men actually remove a woman's clitoris just so she won’t enjoy sex with anyone! It’s the kind of control many conservatives today still want over women. However, all such disrespectful actions go against the entire democratic spirit of people having the equal right to control their own bodies. Here's another example. Merely about 40 years ago professional psychiatric organizations were saying homosexuality was abnormal, and yet today same-sex marriage is becoming more acceptable around the nation, as are gay and lesbian soldiers. Since when is their blood any less red than anyone else’s? In truth then, liberal high schools, homes, and churches can take pride in offering ideas about intelligent, enjoyable, and respectful sex to any student who wants to learn about them. Such ideas are useful long after knowledge about quadratic equations and geometric theorems have faded.
As we saw earlier in the quote from Behaviorism’s founder John Watson, sexually mature teens have a right to know about their newly developing adult bodies, how they work, and how to treat them intelligently and respectfully. If nature hadn’t encouraged intense sexual feelings to grow, they wouldn’t have grown. And with human population already becoming a serious problem in many places, such knowledge would be even more useful; there are still too many unwanted children in the world. So, it’s even more important these days to teach sexually active young folks how to enjoy sex and make it fun, but also how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy as well as make the event physically safe from disease. Such results can not only save people personal pain and expense, but public expense as well. In fact, learning more about respectful, loving, and intelligent sex can make any relationship more rewarding and productive.
No doubt many conservative parents will cringe at all such ideas, but since when is any useful knowledge something to ignore? Isn’t using accurate knowledge wisely and intelligently the very definition of character excellence itself? The fact such knowledge and ideas have been formally ignored in our conservative public schools for so long merely increases the likelihood for deadly sexual diseases to keep growing, like AIDS and some 20 other sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention much unhappiness in life and marriage itself. So, again, we liberals ask why shouldn’t high school students be free to start learning about such ideas, preferably with parental approval.
Some Specifics
So, we can move from such general ideas to more specific ones. Certainly, students themselves can help control the conversation with their own questions. Are sexual habits all learned, or are some people born heterosexual, bi-sexual, or homosexual? What does it mean to respect sexual habits? Is heterosexual marriage natural, or merely another manmade institution? Can 2 men or 2 women really love each other as deeply as a man and a woman can? What’s kinds of fun and enjoyment can people have with sexual events?
No doubt, more than ever before, today feelings about sexual variety and diversity are separating people into 2 very different groups -- heterosexual and LBGT groups (Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Gay, and Transgender). So, just becoming more aware of that fact, and also of what group one feels most comfortable in, will not only help save young folks from wasting their time and energy trying to be something they’re not, but such knowledge will also increase the democratic respect and tolerance for people of different groups! That result in itself would be a great educational improvement over what we now have, which often counsels students to just say no. Judging by election results since 2000, promoting more tolerance for same-sex marriages has become a very important human rights issue. What right does any government have to control who should marry whom? In today’s growing democratic world, any kind of sexual intolerance and irrational fear about law-abiding people is no longer a sign of psychic health and character excellence. Respecting just, fair, and equal laws about sexuality is rapidly replacing obedience to old religious taboos, at least in more democratic countries.
Self-love is definitely another important idea young folks can get more accurate information about. To many religious people especially, self-love is still surrounded with all kinds of myth and misinformation. For centuries conservative religious groups condemned self-love as sinful and wrong; even conservative Plato in ancient times said sex should only be aimed at creating a child. Today, however, such ideas are fading rapidly with some 7 billion people on the planet already. If nothing else, self-love is a very natural and safe way to keep enjoyably relieving dangerous stress, which can be a frequent result of living in industrialized nations. A daily work schedule to merely stay responsible for our economic bills can create many stressful tensions, especially for those who’ve never learned to work in a relaxed way. What's more, self-love creates the opportunity to always maximize one's pleasure, rather than always relying on a partner. But, in any case, no matter what specific sexual ideas students choose to learn more about, the more accurate knowledge they’ll have, the less reason there will be for unreasonable feelings of fear and guilt. And, the more irrational actions of intolerance and hatred that go around, the more likely such actions will come around. In any case, we liberal Deweyans say high school students should be free to get such knowledge if they want to.
Sexual respect is another important specific idea worth talking about. In our growing democratic world, where equal rights is growing, what’s important to know about intelligent sex is not only choosing who to love, but also how to respect and honor their partner, or partners. It’s another very important character habit. It helps define sexual excellence itself. Is someone allowing a partner to control their own body, or merely using them to satisfy their own feelings? Is someone acting selfishly by dominating and controlling the event? In truth, the more young folks learn about what respectful sex means specifically, the less vulnerable they’ll become to sexual kinds of selfishness and disrespect themselves, and such actions are still much alive in today’s world. Are a partner’s sexual actions helping a person to keep growing and learning more about themselves, or not? Whether it’s sex, diet, or any habit, to keep controlling someone else's actions is just as obscene and wrong for heterosexuals as well as non-heterosexuals. Women especially are still very vulnerable to such actions, largely because they’re still not free to even talk intelligently about about respectful sex in high school.
Ending a relationship intelligently is another specific idea about respectful sex. It's an important skill to have. Sometimes people in a relationship just need to back away when they learn more about their partner. And sometimes people discover they don't have the same basic goals and needs, and so grow apart over time, instead of together. Is there one way to intelligently end all such relationships, or are there as many different ways as there are different people? And how important are actions of self-love when one is not in a sexual relationship? For me it was very important, and still is.
Also, many Hollywood films have made some important educational contributions to the art of sexual excellence. For example, if you'd like to see how dangerous sexually possessive actions can be, I recommend Basic Instinct. As it shows, sexually possessive actions can even lead to an early death, no matter what sexual group one belongs to. So again, knowing how to end a relationship and let a partner go, both physically and emotionally, is just as important for sexual character excellence as knowing how to intelligently have some fun with sex. In fact, there are groups helping people with weak, excessive, and unhealthful sexual habits, just as there are groups helping drug and alcohol addicts. So, why shouldn't high school students be allowed to talk about such sexual habits in formal classes, be better able to judge the excellence of their own habits, and also know how to keep improving them with intelligent kinds of practice? If students already have an excessive sexual habit, like disrespecting others, why shouldn't they be able to see its dangerous results, and begin working to improve it? In any case, however, our liberal public high schools should be helping students talk more openly about such habits. How can people learn to live together respectfully and enjoyably unless they're taught such habits? After all, the 2 biggest sources of problems between people are money and sex. So, the more such intelligent knowledge is restricted, the more life becomes a more dangerous case of the blind leading the blind, so to speak.
AIDS Changed Everything
Sexual diseases are another very important specific topic for high school students. Ignorance about them can produce long-lasting painful and even fatal results. For example, the deadly disease known as AIDS seemed to change everything in the sexual world, much of it for the worse but some of it for the better. Of course the worse was the great loss of life from it, but one positive result was to help grow the same-sex marriage movement, helping people stay faithful to one's partner, or partners, at a time, rather than assuming casual sex with anyone would always be healthful and safe. People began realizing casual sex with almost total strangers could be fatal. No doubt, long term sexual fidelity to one partner may be more of a challenge for men. Some research shows most lesbians want a monogamous relationship. But, in any case, the more widespread AIDS became, the more same-sex marriages were seen as a useful idea. As a result, their legalization has kept growing, making it easier for men to keep their long-term relationships growing as well.
The negative and dangerous results of AIDS and all sexually transmitted diseases is now challenging all our educational institutions, homes, and churches as never before. Since the 1980s, AIDS grown into a worldwide tragedy of the very worst kind; it sprang from one of the most basic human needs -- to share loving feelings and actions with someone else. Many millions of people, both hetero and non-heterosexual, will probably die in Africa and Asia alone as a result of public schools not teaching accurate and reliable knowledge about such diseases. In some parts of Africa even political leaders denied the link between sex and AIDS. As a result, vulnerable young folks kept saying ‘yes’ to casual sex all too quickly, even though today’s drugs can better help control the disease. That educational weakness alone promoted a social tragedy of the first rank!
However, many poor people in Africa and Asia simply can’t afford the expensive drugs. Even in the US, with the world’s best medical technology, hundreds of thousands have already died from AIDS, and more are infected each year. Too many young folks now feel it’s not really a danger and can be controlled; in fact it’s still a dangerous and expensive disease. They're also not being educated to ask how long before the virus grows drug resistance? Evidently the virus started growing within the non-heterosexual community, but because life has become so interactive it’s spread into the hetero and drug-taking communities as well, with infected blood and casual sex.
As a result, it's caused more challenges to our public schools. More than ever before, secondary students need to know how to act intelligently to protect one's self from getting such diseases in the first place! Even if the more than 20 sexual diseases had easy cures, who knows how many more deadly incurable sexual diseases will evolve in the future? There's always a possibility. Viruses are continually evolving around the world and thus becoming drug resistant; it’s just another danger of living in a continually changing biological world. Clearly young folks of all ages in both hetero and non-hetero communities need to know more about intelligent sexual practices, and be better educated about what they mean in this still-dangerous day and age.
In any case, however, merely being free just to DISCUSS any and all healthful and accurate sexual knowledge while still in high school would no doubt help make young folks much more intelligent and tolerant about all its different forms and expressions, especially for all those students living in a more or less intolerant sexual environment. In many places around the world today women are still often treated as something to be dominated, controlled, and even abused, and all marriages should be only between a man and a woman or women. In truth, today serious and dangerous population pressures are helping more parents train some children for same-sex relationships; more than 7 billion people on the planet is already probably too many. So, as democratic equal rights and liberal schools continue growing around the world, so too will grow the need for accurate and reliable sexual information, helping promote habits of democratic sexual freedom and tolerance. Growing such habits peacefully can be greatly increased with building of more liberal schools, where accurate knowledge about all bodily functions is celebrated, both physical and psychological functions. The following may help deepen such feelings.
A Little Personal Story
Obviously, many people today already know AIDS has shortened the lives of tens of thousands of very fine people. Many who have died tragically were some of the most talented, most intelligent, kindest, most loving, wisest, and best lovers of justice and fair play the world has ever seen! In fact, I believe if the heterosexual community ever took the time to learn about all the good results produced by the non-heterosexual community, from inner cities, to prisons, to suburbia, and to corporate boardrooms, then all forms of legal discrimination against them would cease immediately. In that respect, many of our TV shows are educational. However, many in the non-heterosexual community prefer to stay ‘underground’, as it were, and not talk about all their social accomplishments and good work. Thus, there's a big information gap between heterosexual and non-heterosexual groups. Again, liberal public schools can do much more to narrow that information gap.
Like many other 'baby boomers', many of my childhood classmates became members of the gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual community while still in junior high, as soon as they became sexually active. In fact, many of them simply had little real choice about such habits; often both parents were non-heterosexual, thus making it even easier to train their kids with habits they thought were the best. As a result, many found same-sex relations satisfying simply because that's the way they were raised at home. And, more importantly, such sexual relationships reduced the chances for getting diseases like syphilis or gonorrhea, not to mention all unwanted pregnancies.
However, those facts, plus a long history of health within such relationships, helped create a very dangerous sexual assumption: same-sex relationships couldn’t become deadly! In short, many young kids I went to school with soon felt confident and assured such relationships were in fact superior to heterosexual ones. They too simply assumed life can't really produce life-threatening results with same-sex habit-arts! In fact, however, as Dewey saw clearly, NATURE IS ALWAYS DANGEROUSLY STABLE! Such habits were so pleasurable and personally rewarding, many young folks felt no harmful results could possibly happen to them. In that respect our conservative book-centered public schools, and non-heterosexual community in general, helped endanger millions of people.
I remember one of my non-heterosexual classmates in particular. By the time he was eighteen his parents helped him build a fine sense of justice, so fine in fact he let himself be drafted and sent to Vietnam to see justice was done. The more brutality US soldiers showed innocent Vietnamese, the more those soldiers deserved to be treated brutally. What goes around should come around, as the saying goes. So-called fragging, or throwing hand grenades near them, became a common occurrence, especially against brutal and vicious officers. The infamous My Lai massacre brought home that reality to the US. Soldiers were being given orders to kill innocent Vietnamese men, women, and children, often so generals could keep claiming higher body counts to their politicians in Washington.
So, knowing this, my classmate didn’t go merely to fight against the Vietnamese; after all, what right did the US have to interfere in this civil war? Instead he volunteered to see even US soldiers got what they deserved; those who arrogantly took innocent life could themselves be killed. That was the kind of man he was raised to be, a lover of justice and a hater of disrespect.
Naturally, after he was discharged he continued practicing his non-heterosexual habits. Like millions of others he assumed unquestioningly they were healthy and completely safe; it was an easy assumption to make. Such habits were the only ones he had ever known, and their results hadn’t been dangerous to health. Thus casual sex with many partners became a routine and propulsive habit. Like millions of others he felt completely safe; never before in history had such a ‘free love’ life-style become life-threatening. In fact, many felt such habits were as sacred as any religious habit.
In fact, in Western civilization religious sexual orgies had existed even in ancient Greece. The ancient Greek version of it was the Dionysian religious orgy. People felt wine-drinking and group intercourse before the planting season somehow united them spiritually with Dionysus’ god-like growing power, helping both new plants to grow and even people to become immortal like the god. Also, ancient Rome too had its share of stress-relieving orgies, especially among the Epicurean upper classes, where pleasure was said to be the highest good. Even in the modern book The Dance of Siva, (1918) it was written: “(free love) has a deep and spiritual significance; (it symbolizes) the mystic union of finite and infinite.” (Hopkins, 270). And no doubt feelings of defiance against society’s intolerant non-heterosexual people made many feel even more justified sexually; such habits liberated them from heterosexual habits. But, as always, results, not feelings of pleasure, superiority, or sacredness, are what keep any habit-art excellent.
As a result of ignoring more accurate sexual knowledge in our public high schools, millions of people still are fearful and threatened by those with different kinds of sexual habits. Thus unjust, unkind, undemocratic, and even hateful actions against them are often the result. Laws against same-sex marriage, for example, are working in many states. However, the good news is intelligent education in our public high schools, homes, and churches are helping increase public tolerance for such habits. It’s yet another reason why public schools are so important to any nation's health, peace, and stability. Even though too many undereducated parents still believe such sexual habits are in fact sinful and always wrong, younger folks in particular are feeling more tolerant than ever before. And the more such accurate and intelligent information is taught, like safe-sex habits, the less chance there is for producing dangerous and unhealthful results. In fact, freely talking about intelligent and respectful sexual habits and ideas in high school is another important part of both personal and social health, as well as character development. How can anyone have an excellent character without having some accurate knowledge of sexual habits, and how to make such events safe, fun, and enjoyable? How can anyone be sexually respectful when they don't know what that means in action? Ignorance is not bliss; far from it. Ignorance can be dangerous and life-threatening.
Talking Rationally About Sex
Not only is it possible, but no doubt for many high school boys it would be highly educational and enjoyable. It would also go a long way to reducing personal actions of disrespect as well as breaking sexual laws. The fact is, smiling or not, the more a subject is talked about rationally, the easier it is to practice it intelligently. Beyond such enjoyment, however, intelligent talk can also help build some very useful habits. In fact, building an excellent and intelligent set of sexual habits might be a life saver. For example, in a democracy based on equality and liberty, not respecting all law-abiding and peaceful people with different sex habits can be dangerous; what goes around often comes around. Even though some TV programs try to educate young folks about such sexual diversity, they often ignore all the finer ideas about making sex enjoyable and fun. Even the few adult films I’ve seen rarely show what respectful and fun sex can be like. As a result, peoples' ignorance and disrespect for a partner is often left in place, as well as unfounded fears and superstitions. Probably the most common one is based on religious ideas: all forms of sex are sinful and morally wrong outside a man-woman marriage. Recently I heard a conservative woman say Democrats are promoting immorality by not campaigning against same-sex marriage. It's a natural feeling for those raised to believe only their own habits reflect some kind of absolute moral Truth. However, as Dewey points out, probably every conceivable action has been celebrated at one time or another, including murder and cannibalism.
Teaching such knowledge is definitely a major challenge. Even in much of the US today, not to mention many conservative countries, it’s still physically dangerous to even mention ideas like equal sexual rights and tolerance, much less making sex fun and enjoyable. Even in supposedly modern and advanced countries like Russia and China I've often redd reports about mean, unkind, and vicious discrimination against non-heterosexuals. Such unreasonable discrimination, however, is being challenged more and more around the world by more liberal people. If so, then why shouldn't our public high schools be helping young folks learn more about sexual reality? Sex can be as much fun as any other habit, so why not learn more about it? Shouldn't high school students be free to intelligently debate different sexual ideas, and learn to defend their ideas only with accurate and reliable knowledge? Such debates are really the essence of democracy and help promote understanding between people, especially when many still believe mythical and superstitious ideas. Shouldn't the next generation be free to debate such ideas, as long as they don't encourage dangerous actions or breaking just and fair laws?
Today, many in the LGBT community and liberals too are working to keep growing such freedoms and liberties in our public high schools for those who want such knowledge. It helps people to both live, let live, and live better and more rewarding lives. What person wouldn't like to hear their partner say it's time to play hide the salami!? Or, it's time for the finger-train to start rolling! No doubt, more accurate and respectful sexual actions are being encouraged with the help of social protests, political referenda, and legal rulings even at the Supreme Court level. They're all helping challenge conservative feelings and assumptions about different sexual habits. As a result, many people around the world are being challenged to build some more intelligent and respectful sexual habits. After all, if such intelligent habits don't hurt me, then why bother denying them to anyone? Even so, why shouldn’t such knowledge be available in our public high schools?
So, for those who value democratic liberty, equal rights, and justice, building liberal high schools where such sexual ideas can be openly and freely talked about becomes another educational challenge. Many of our conservative book-oriented schools could be doing much more to build such intelligent habits of respect and encouragement. The fact is many heterosexuals are still psychologically naïve, believing non-heterosexual habits are somehow unnatural and wrong, are always a matter of choice, and hence can be easily changed, corrected, and made right simply by wanting to stop them. To us liberals, however, such naive ideas reflect a shallow understanding of human nature and habits themselves. Many non-heterosexuals I’ve been around really had no choice about what to desire sexually, and told me so; from the proverbial Day 1, so to speak, they were simply taught to desire one kind of partner, and so they felt completely normal and natural with that lifestyle! Hence, they were no more free to reject them than birds are free to reject flying, animals to reject digesting food, or people to reject their skin color. For millions today around the world, so-called LBGT habits have become propulsive instincts to be judged by their results, just like any other habit.
The Nature of Habits
This might be the time to talk a little more about the nature of habits, like Dewey did in his Human Nature and Conduct (1921). We'll start talking more about them in some later sections about psychology, but a few ideas here might be useful later on. It might also increase feelings of tolerance for those who practice different kinds of sexual habits.
In that book, Dewey talked much about how repeated actions become habits, and the more they're repeated, the stronger and more propulsive they become. In fact, for him they become what's commonly called will power. For example, the more a person eats certain foods, the stronger becomes their diet will power, and the more difficult it becomes to change or improve it. And what’s more, the less desire one has to improve it. Such habits are comfortable and enjoyable, and thus helps make building a better diet habit more challenging and difficult. Those old habits just keep firing away, as it were, and kept people eating the same kinds of foods. What’s more, because our public schools aren’t teaching students how to intelligently change a habit they want changed, most people don't realize it’s best to change it slowly, using rewards to help learn new eating habits. The more a person enjoys eating more healthful foods, the sooner a more healthful diet habit grows. In any case, however, it all depends of a person’s desire. If their habits feel right, then there’s little desire to change them.
So, the more young folks start seeing such reliable psychological facts, the more respect they can have not only for their own habits, but for others’ as well. What's more, a person is responsible for their own habits and the results they produce. If they don't want to change them, then they shouldn't be expected too, unless of course those habits are destructive and dangerous. Thus those with destructive criminal habits, for example, are often jailed, making social life less dangerous.
For us Deweyan liberals, the sooner young folks start learning such important facts about their own body-minds, the sooner they'll be able to more intelligently guide their own growth. Obviously, I'm not suggesting 1st graders start learning about sexual habits, but merely how to change and improve any habit they want changed and improved. After all, people have to live with their own habits all through life, so why shouldn't they know how to change those they want changed? In fact, the sooner young people learn how to use such facts, the easier it’ll be living in the adult world, where intelligent and respectful sexual habits are expected. Again and again history shows us intolerant habits have changed as more accurate knowledge and facts were learned and practiced. For example, for most of US history many people were completely intolerant about equal rights for Africans and women, and many still feel that way even today! Many would simply condemn such ideas as communistic or against god's will, and thus say they're not worth allowing, even though equal protection under the law was a part of our constitution’s amendments after the Civil War. Old racial habits simply continued on. In fact, as history tells us, hundreds of thousands of people were willing to die rather than accept equal rights for Africans; that's how strong master-slave habits were to millions of people. But, the more our schools were de-segregated in the 1950s and '60s, and allowed different races to interact, the weaker those habits became. Without actually practicing more tolerant and democratic actions in schools, and building them into propulsive habit-arts, unreasonable and intolerant feelings and ideas would have been improved much more slowly with the help of lawsuits, fines, jail time, and of course kinder homes and churches.
So if people can learn to look beyond a person's skin color, and focus on their actions instead, then why shouldn't they learn to look beyond their own sexual habits, see different one, and then deal with people as people, rather than being somehow less than human for practicing different habits? Obviously, such liberal habits promoting equal rights can be learned, and learned more quickly with the help of intelligent talk in liberal public schools. Because such talk about racial differences was largely ignored in our public schools, in the early 1900s many innocent Africans were murdered in cold blood for no reason at all, except to make others afraid to vote and demand their equal rights. It was racial warfare between politically powerful whites and Africans! And of course within the past 4 centuries, as people practiced kinder and more tolerant religious habits, Catholic Church officials were forced to become more tolerant of other religions. During the Middle Ages they had the political power to publicly burn alive many heretics, so as to continue making people fear even thinking about different religious ideas. In short, any habit, even powerful religious ones, can be changed and made kinder and more tolerant with the help of intelligent talking and also more intelligent actions. Thus, teaching young folks to judge others by the new liberal test of producing constructive results has become a more intelligent way of building sexual character excellence and a more peaceful society.
For us Deweyan liberals, in today’s world it just doesn’t matter what sexual habits people choose to practice; just as a person's skin color doesn't determine their character excellence. Such excellence is the result of a person's own kind motives, helpful actions and their results, and little else. So what matters most about one's sexual habits are is the constructive results they produce. Do they promote respect, confidence, and enjoyment, or not. Do they promote self-knowledge and esteem, or just selfishness, sadness, and disrespect? If the latter set of results are produced, then they help make a person's life more dangerous, so why shouldn't young folks know about those facts, as well as how to produce the first set of results? So, for both scientific and ethical truth, actual motives and results have become the most objective and intelligent way of judging any action! That's yet another result growing from Dewey's liberal thinking about habits and character excellence. In truth, disrespecting good and equal sexual laws is just as dangerous as disrespecting anyone's equal rights, no matter which sexual tribe one belongs to. Why condemn and work to deny anyone's healthful sexual habits when they produce healthful results? And why deny useful knowledge about sex to even high school students who want to know more about it? Restricting such knowledge is certainly not what liberal democratic schools, homes, and churches are about.
The sad truth is many of our conservative public schools, homes, and churches ignore even formally talking about such intelligent sexual character habits. Thus, they help cause more personal and social stress, like child abuse and unlawful prostitution. It's a shame, especially when teaching such knowledge certainly doesn't hurt students; in fact it would almost certainly increase their respect for their schools and others, as well as their tolerant feelings for different habits. An example of how weak such character habits still are has recently been seen when a majority of people in 11 states voted selfishly not to share equally their marriage rights with same-sex couples, even though it wouldn't hurt them at all. It would simply make the democratic ideal of equal rights stronger and more diverse. It shows we're still a long way from having liberal schools celebrating equal democratic rights. In those states most people still choose to practice their feudal undemocratic habits of sameness and uniformity.
No doubt, more recently in 2009 there have been some positive signs of change in a few eastern states, and on November 6, 2012, 2 states voted to share such rights equally. Enough people saw through 2 of the ideas often used to justify sexual discrimination: children will be corrupted by seeing same-sex couples, and the family institution of one-man one-woman will be weakened. But isn’t that like saying merely living around an ocean will make children want to act like the ocean? Isn't that the same kind of logic? Thus, more and more people are asking themselves: Isn't it most important to raise children in a secure and safe home? Exactly how will a person's own traditional family be weakened merely by allowing same-sex marriages to others? I for one have never really heard a good answer from conservatives to those questions; is it mainly because the logic would be so weak it would be easy to see its flaws? Changing times are calling for new habits, however. The Supreme Court recently ruled the government's denial of federal equal benefit rights to same-sex couples is unconstitutional, as is a California state law prohibiting same-sex marriages; it's against the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th amendment, even though most people voted for it.
Again we can go back to the nature of habits. Routine habits help people feel such behavioral sameness and uniformity should be preserved no matter what. Such habits are celebrated by conservatives everywhere. So, people with different habits are easily labeled as somehow flawed and not worthy of equality, and thus must not be allowed to marry and live together. Doesn't the Bible say god created man and woman for each other? Thus, for many religious conservatives different sexual habits are often seen as the devil’s work, even though they also believe god has planned out everything to happen just as it does, and thus knows all things, past, present, and future. Habits can even overrule logic in many cases, thus making will power stronger than reason itself. How can anything be condemned if god has planned all events and knows everything before it happens? Isn't everything a form of god's will, even different sexual habits? We liberals are simply freer to ask such logical questions, and the situation becomes even stranger when different kinds of families have been living together for decades without even knowing it.
With such intolerant ideas and talk, is it any wonder many conservative churches are losing more and more young people? They feel LBGT people have the same kinds of human needs as everyone else, like for respect, peace, equality, enjoyment, and fun? In ancient Greece, the liberal humanist Protagoras suggested similar ideas when he said people are the measure of all things, not the gods, as Plato and Socrates believed. Peoples' habits are used to judge right or wrong, not absolute Truth. In any case, our public schools can be made to teach much more enlightened kinds of sexual character excellence if enough people simply take the time to build more liberal schools, where high school students are free to learn about different kinds of sexual habits, and about democratic sexual character excellence as well. It's another major liberal educational challenge growing around the world today. What’s to fear? Why not simply learn to live, let live, and treat people as people? In fact the more non-heterosexual my schoolmates became, the less interest they had in this straight guy?
Like science and its art of experimental learning, more tolerant ethical habits are growing in many parts of the world. Because of their routine conservative habits, many people are just now emerging from narrow medieval feelings about sex. They still feel only their own sexual habits should be practiced. That's the natural danger in all routine habits, and Aristotle too saw it long ago. Everyone's habits naturally make them want to see and hear only similar kinds of actions and ideas. They help us want social sameness and conformity, and when they’re challenged with more democratic habits of diversity and difference, life begins feeling strange and wrong. How else can one explain why people go to, say, the same church? Don't we want to hear how only our own ideas are right? But, democracy itself is challenging people to act more humanely towards those with different habits. Merely smiling helps put people at ease, rather than feeling tense and suspicious?
It’s more than a simple challenge. After all, for thousands of years different tribes around the world have been intolerant of others, merely because they're different. Such actions, however, are no longer considered democratically excellent. Building more tolerant habits certainly won't be easy, especially since intolerant conservative habits have been practiced for thousands of years. Even well-educated ancient conservative and moderate Greeks like Plato and Aristotle labeled everyone else as ‘barbarian’, and it wasn’t just them either. Many Orthodox Jews and upper class Romans often felt the same way about those with different habits. Even the New Testament preserves examples of how prejudiced Jesus was against non-Jews, telling his disciples not to go into Gentile houses, and even calling a non-Jewish woman a dog! Such examples show us not only how human he was, but also how powerful and intolerant routine habits can become when they're said to reflect eternal and unchanging Truth. But today we liberals have a potent weapon to make all such habits more tolerant and democratic, namely our own neighborhood schools! The growth of more liberal democratic habits also show us how civilization itself can be defined as the process of learning to respect different people as people! In that process our public schools, homes, and churches all have important roles to play. Since liberal Democritus in the 400s BCE, equal democratic rights for all law-abiding people have been an important liberal value worthy of celebration; they simply help produce a more peaceful, just, equal, and tolerant society.
Another important inconsistency can also be mentioned between a conservative model of political excellence and sexual practices. Conservatives love to talk about reducing the size of government, and getting government off of peoples’ backs, so to speak. Yet, when they have the power, they often use it to pass harsh and unfair sexual laws. For example, they’ve often passed laws against sodomy, even between adults in the privacy of their own homes! Drug laws too are often passed, even for personal use in their own homes. The result often makes it easier to jail people with different habits. Such laws thus violate conservative ideas about keeping the government out of peoples' lives, as well as all the ideals of equality celebrated in our Constitution. If conservatives are the ones wanting most to keep the government out of peoples' lives, then how are such laws against, say, same-sex marriage justified at all? Evidently it's not OK for the government to collect more taxes from the rich to help employ people during an economic recession, but it's OK to jail people for merely doing in their own homes what harms no! To us liberal Deweyans such logical inconsistency is simply no longer tolerated. Even US Supreme Court Justices have been ruling that kind of thinking is unconstitutional. A few years ago they struck down a law outlawing sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes! What right has any government to write such laws, much less enforce them?
And so we liberals continue asking our public schools to become more active in teaching such ideas. Indeed, the more people allow such unequal and unjust laws to exist, the more George Orwell’s controlling and oppressive ‘Big Brother’ government becomes a reality! Shouldn't even high school students begin seeing such laws merely reflect personal habits, often based on conservative medieval ideas of an absolute and eternal ethical Truth? Since 2003, our largely conservative Court has been seeing such intolerant ideas and feelings in a more democratically tolerant and intelligent way. It’s definitely another example of using results to judge laws, rather than merely equating them to old conservative ideas. Nature is a place of diversity, not sameness, and the more peaceful it is, the better and more natural it is for everyone.
19. SPARE THE ROD, IMPROVE A LIFE
If it could be written, people might find it interesting to read a history of violence against children. If nothing else it would no doubt help more people become more aware of a serious problem still plaguing too many children. Even slaves can fight back, but children must submit or suffer painful consequences. With violence against both boys and girls in homes and schools, as well as love and kindness, for thousands of years children have been kept docile and obedient to those with social authority, like parents and teachers, as well as religious, military, and political leaders. Even intelligent children and those from wealthier families were sometimes physically abused. In our modern era of Behavioral psychology, however, where more positive and enjoyable rewards have become much better teaching tools, learning more intelligent democratic habits has become easier. Sadly, that idea is still far from being used everywhere. In many places today children are being made to believe only one version of reality is eternally and unchangingly True, and so feeling a democratic respect and tolerance for other law-abiding habits becomes more difficult. In spite of it, however, such democratic habits seem to be growing and that’s the important point.
No doubt, any kind of unjustified violent actions against children should be a concern for all democrats and independents around the world. Children are just too precious to become psychologically perverted and destructive at an early age, and yet it's still happening far too often around the world, and even in the US. Because unjust physical abuse affects a person’s character habits and feelings, there are now organizations working against cruelty to children, animals, and spouses. For those who aren’t yet convinced of how socially dangerous and wasteful results are produced by violent forms of punishment, this section may help people begin seeing the need for teaching more intelligent ways of helping young folks better learn what they want to learn. After all, we all continue paying the price for such antisocial actions in the form of expensive and wasteful prisons, police forces, and court systems, not to mention mental health and drug abuse programs. So again, we Deweyan liberals ask, why shouldn’t our publicly funded schools help empower children to intelligently defend themselves against abusive people, even parents? After all, such actions are illegal, and they simply make everyone's life more stressful and frustrating. No doubt, our conservative public schools could be better educating students to respond more intelligently in violent situations, just as they now often teach children how to avoid unwanted and dangerous advances by adult strangers.
A Few Facts About Violent Habits
For hundreds of thousands of years violent hunting habits were aimed at animals. Considering mankind has only been living in cities -- civilization -- for less than 10,000 years, and been hunting animals for over a million years, it's a little amazing we haven't wiped out our own species already. Into the 1800s the British countryside regularly echoed with hunting cries of Tally Ho, and of course violence against primitive peoples as well as women too continue being a serious social problem around the world, including the US!
Only recently have kinder and more enjoyable learning tools become more widespread in our public schools, even though physical punishment is still practiced. Who isn’t aware of paddling in public schools, psychological threats of failure and flunking, and other means of physical punishment in private religious schools? Learning to use enjoyable rewards as a much more effective learning tool have only recently become a more intelligent alternative to physical and psychological forms of punishment for not learning what the teacher says they should learn. Again, since Dewey published his ideas of Functional Behaviorism in his Human Nature and Conduct, such negative kinds of punishment have remained in place. With his help, more peaceful and respectful teaching tools and ideas like pleasant encouragement, rewards, and enjoyable practice have grown much stronger in the past century; they’ve helped civilize our public schools even more.
Today more and more people are becoming more aware of the obnoxious results of negative and violent forms of punishment inflicted on children to force their obedience. So, there is still much our public schools could be doing on a formal level to actually teach more positive and intelligent learning habits, and thus empower the next generation to intelligently keep making their own neighborhoods less violent places to live. And the more such habits grow, the easier it’ll be to keep making our world less violent too. As terrible as they are, atomic weapons may have produced at least one good social result: they’ve helped reduce warfare to small local areas rather than world wars. Let’s hope that trend continues, and it will with the growth of more liberal schools where students learn how to intelligent defend themselves against undeserved physical and psychological punishment. Such habits will no doubt help make violence towards other nations less frequent too. As the ancient Greeks learned so well, violent self-destructive war is a terrible teacher. The greatest danger these days seems to be from small terrorist attacks and mentally unbalanced individuals, thus creating the need to keep track of what people are doing in our own neighborhoods. Even widespread and under-regulated government surveillance has become a more serious social problem; who knows what private companies are doing with all the personal data they're collecting?
Meanwhile, in our public schools violent punishment seems to be lessening, even for students who are disruptive in class. Expulsion now seems to be the punishment of choice. But how wise is that? Shouldn't our public schools be the one place students can get some intelligent advice about how to improve their habits?
Unlike centuries ago, today teachers usually just ignore students who don’t work their assignments and instead daydream about being somewhere else. That's definitely an educational improvement. Still physical punishment exists in many private schools and homes. In the Catholic High School I went to for 2 years, followers of Christ often struck students in the face just for smiling and joking around, even outside the classroom, and when I was doing my student teaching in public junior high some students were still occasionally paddled with some force. What’s more, such violent punishment is still a serious social problem in many homes too. Thus, both violent physical and mental abuse remains a large part of school and home life. Besides expulsion, psychological forms of punishment are still the norm in both public and private schools in the form of failure and flunking. And, as some prison statistics keep showing us, continuing forms of home punishment are helping produce psychological feelings of anguish, frustration, resentment, inferiority, revenge, self-punishment, and even hatred. In fact, as children, over 90% of those in prison have suffered excessive, continuing, unhealthful, and psychologically distorting pain. However, simply because liberal homes and public schools are much more concerned to empower children with intelligent and respectful character habits, they’re much more focused on teaching both students and parents more intelligent ways of interacting with each other, especially how to recognize disrespectful actions, and then how to defend themselves against violent forms of punishment. For us liberals, children should be empowered in our public schools with such skills. Why? Well, the harmful social results of such actions affect all people, whether they pay taxes or not.
Both painful and pleasant feelings have been a part of nature probably since life first evolved around 4 Billion years ago, otherwise life itself wouldn’t have lasted very long. Even today single celled animals with no nerve cells still react to some poisons, as if they were painful. And when nerve cells evolved long before the Cambrian Era some 600 million years ago, such reactions became even more deeply felt.
Today, with our own fantastically complex human nerve cells and brains, we probably feel pain more deeply than any other animal. It helps explain why such prolonged and undeserved pain can produce some very destructive psychological and social weaknesses. No doubt, it was also one reason Aristotle said mankind can become the worst, as well as the best, of all other animals. No other animal can become as vicious or as kind as we can, thus creating our still important educational challenge – helping more and more young people in our public schools, homes, and churches learn more enjoyable and pleasant ways of learning what they want to learn. In that process more positive and enjoyable rewards are used, rather than pain and non-productive isolation. The more students learn to enjoy learning, and use enjoyable games as learning tools, the less need there will be for building more inhumane prisons where enjoyable habits of learning aren’t taught.
In short, there's been much growth away from using negative kinds of punishment to teach students, but it's only a beginning; major educational challenges are still in front of us, namely empowering young students to better defend themselves against violent actions. The good news is liberal public schools respond much easier to such challenges. They aren't afraid to formally teach children more enjoyable and pleasant ways of learning, and also what to do if someone keeps using physical kinds of punishment as a learning tool. With their emphasis on character development, and psychological excellence, they're more capable of teaching children what it means to respect all other law-abiding people, and where to simply seek help to better control those who continue painfully abusing others. Even parents and guardians simply do not have a right to keep physically abusing children.
Some History of Educational Pain
Why is pain such still such a widespread educational tool? Perhaps a little history will help show why the problem is still with us. Said simply, not very many people realize how serious the problem is, and also know how to use much more intelligent teaching tools than pain, fear, humiliation and forced obedience. With those kinds of learning tools a feudal and undemocratic world has existed for many thousands of years. It's a popular comedic bit to mention how Jewish parents have used guilt as a non-violent teaching tool. As a result, many Jewish children often feel guilty about even trivial actions; the TV series Seinfeld was often a funny example of it. No doubt, when children act selfishly, disrespectfully, or greedily they should not only be told such actions are socially acceptable, but also what actions are better, like sharing and helping others. In such ways charity has become an important character habit for all civilized religions and philosophies worthy of the name. But in any case, love and affection are much better learning tools to build such habits. So, why should it be any different with learning anything, be it facts or skills?
In fact, habits of linking pain and education are thousands of years old already, and so are still a part of many school systems. They probably began growing even as people began settling into villages and building towns and cities. Even in primitive times pain was used as a teaching tool, especially at puberty; the ceremony signaling the end of childhood and beginning of adulthood was often a very painful affair. In such cultures around the world pain was often caused by circumcision, knocking teeth out, tattooing, fasting, or other ways. Such pain increased the feelings for the knowledge children were often given at that time; they were told these were the most important things to know, like tribal myths and ideas. Traumatic pain made it easier to remember such myths. Also important was learning how to drive away childhood spirits and attract wiser and more helpful adult ones. Other than that, however, inflicting pain at the primitive level of living was for the most part unnecessary. There were already strong emotional bonds of affection between primitive children and adults, and so learning adult skills and knowledge by simple imitation was usually smooth and natural. Thus skills, knowledge, and character habits -- the three pillars of Dewey’s liberal education -- were routinely passed on within the affectionate bonding between adults and children who, naturally, wanted to learn adult habits. In short, children were emotionally connected to the adult world from a very early age, and so pain as a learning tool was often unnecessary.
However, the great weakness in such an imitative learning system was the lack of intelligent and organized experimental testing of ideas, so as to keep finding the knowledge and skills producing much better and more reliable knowledge. In short, routine imitation as an educational tool made it too easy for primitive habits to remain routine, rather than intelligent, experimental, and progressive. It helps explain why some primitive habits and beliefs have lasted to the present day in some places.
As with so many other habits, agricultural arts began changing life in fundamentally new ways, and changing education as well. Crops meant building villages, towns, and then cities as more food allowed more people to grow, social classes to evolve, and so new educational habits were needed to promote feudalistic political and military structures. One result was the building of schools where students were often forced to submit to learn what teachers wanted them to learn, especially to fear those in authority. Such feelings made revolution less likely, even from the slave class, and thus kept feudalistic systems in place for thousands of years. The Egyptian pharaonic system was merely one of many.
With pain as a major teaching tool new skills and obedience were learned and passed on. For peasants to even look at the pharaoh was punishable by death. Other skills, however, were learning in a more enjoyable atmosphere. Metal working and jewelry, for example, were taught as family businesses, usually by a relative, as were weapons-making and pottery. People became freer to learn with enjoyable physical practice different trades and professions. Like today, ancient business and government scribes and tax gatherers needed to keep accurate records; how else could the government know how much to safely skim off the top, so to speak, and use for their own needs? So, writing and calculating skills were often taught to scribe and tax collector children, often with some painful tactics.
Early on, teachers discovered smacking children occasionally with various kinds of tree branches and sticks kept students fearful of those in authority, as well as focused on learning what teachers wanted them to learn. As early as 3,000 BCE teachers in both Iraq and Egypt regularly smacked their students when they didn’t pay attention, or did sloppy work learning how to read and write the more than 700 symbols in their languages. No doubt, it also inspired early Bible writers to recommend the same teaching techniques at home; spare the rod and spoil the child! In ancient Palestine, the Bible mentions pain as an important part of a boy’s education. Many parents even today still justify painfully punishing their children as a sign of love itself. From the Book of Proverbs: He who spares the rod hates his son;... Beat him with a rod ... save his life from sheol; ... a rod for the back of fools; ... the rod and reproof give wisdom. And of course for thousands of years Jews themselves have been heartlessly rounded up and beaten, repeatedly expelled from countries, and even killed in huge numbers.
No doubt, early in civilization the painful flogging of slaves was learned as well. The more warfare spread, the more common slavery became throughout the ancient world, and so pain and humiliation helped keep them passive and obedient, sometimes for generations. Both Plato and Aristotle had slaves working for them. What's more, for many centuries men all over the ancient and medieval worlds were absolute rulers of their families -- a man's home was his castle, complete with dungeon; medieval serfs were legally bound to their work. Thus, early on in civilization, social 'pecking' orders quickly evolved, as efficient as any gorilla, chimpanzee, or pigeon groups. Punishment was just about everyone's main tool for teaching obedience, and we might imagine how some Chinese teachers may have used pain to make their few students learn how to properly write about 100,000 characters in their language. As in many other cities Aztec schools too were anchored to their temples, taught by their priests, and regularly used punishment as a teaching tool even for noble and wealthy boys; their 'commoner' schools, however, supposedly used less physical violence where less knowledge was demanded.
Meanwhile, back in ancient Greece, democratic habits began evolving in the 600s BCE. Greeks loved to talk and debate others about different ideas, and so asking questions, speaking, learning, and education became stronger social habits in many democratic cities. Thus Western civilization’s three basic models of life and nature – liberal, moderate, and conservative – began evolving and growing. The old monopolistic conservative spirit-models of life and nature gave way to new, more naturalistic ones with the help of more intelligent learning habits.
In more conservative city-states like military-obsessed Sparta, however, pain and learning remained linked to each other. There, children were exposed to pain and harsh living conditions at an early age, and Spartan teachers were an equal opportunity employer. Girls were treated just as harshly as boys, being made to go about naked even in winter. Such painful teaching was thought to toughen children and thus increase the production of tough warriors. As a result, even young Spartan men had absolutely no second thoughts about regularly inflicting pain and even death on their Helot-slaves, and in fact were encouraged to do so while still teenagers! Thus pain helped endanger everyone's life. And of course it’s commonly known, in their circuses many Roman citizens enjoyed watching hungry lions and bears kill innocent Christian men and women who refused to obey Roman religious laws. For those of you who think mankind's basic violent nature is the same as it always was, and can't be changed with better kinds of education, you just might want to rethink that idea. Even psychically twisted and vicious Nazis Heinrich Himmler regularly lied to Germans about what they were doing to Jews and other minorities.
No doubt, people still like to see their enemies defeated, but such 'civilized warfare' now relies more on making people break some law and thus hurt themselves, rather than merely murdering them. Life has become less brutal, but there’s still much room for improvement, for example by empowering children to use more enjoyable learning tools, like pleasant rewards. Especially important for us liberal Deweyans are the first three years of schooling, and so neighborhood primary schools remain very important institutions for building a more respectful, peaceful, and democratic world.
Of course, alongside the use of pain as an educational tool, there continued growing the more civilized tools of affectionate and encouragement. Wealthy democratic-minded Greeks, for example, could afford to hire more affectionate tutors for their children, and so enjoyable home-schooling became the preferred educational method for the upper classes. Tutors eager for customers knew the key to their success was to start from what the child was interested in, and from there gently keep expanding those interests to connect with the educated adult world. Both Plato and Aristotle were tutored at home, and years later Aristotle himself became a tutor to teenaged Alexander the Great. Much to his discredit, however, he too encouraged using pain as a learning tool, although he didn’t say exactly how big a piece of lumber should be used. He probably never wacked Alexander; in fact as he was busy conquering the world Alex sent books and biological specimens back to Aristotle for his research. At schools, however, in the morning boys sat on their stone seats or on the floor, kept quiet, and practiced their writing, usually on wax tablets.
Still, the overall objective was to teach children to support the political and military status quo; tribes were on the lookout for more trinkets and slaves. And, the preservation of such conservative habits and feelings was often promoted painfully. Medieval torture tools also show how diabolically creative some people were when it came to inflicting pain on those who dared teach themselves different ways of acting and thinking. I wonder … what new painful habits will be devised for our modern day heretics: liberal economists? These days truthful and plain speaking liberal econs seem to have become an endangered species on more and more university and college campuses often controlled by wealthy conservatives. Fess up; how many liberal econs already know the road to full professorship is paved by not criticizing too many conservative ideas, like economic regulation and publicly owned organizations, like banks, utility companies, and even elections? The more they do, the more they might endanger the flow of grants from wealthy donors.
Pain-Fear Made People Accept Feudalistic Institutions
No doubt, pain on both a personal and social level was used for forcing people to accept a feudalistic social order; even religious fears and superstitions played a large psychological role. Public school educated people today often feel undemocratic feudalistic social systems only existed in the Middle Ages. In fact, however, as we've been seeing, such systems run by a small number of ruling elite have existed for thousands of years, and still exist today most everywhere. In fact, a brutally widespread ancient feudal social order no doubt helped conservatives and moderates like Plato and Aristotle paint their own philosophic pictures of life and nature. They even justified their feudalistic models by saying eternally fixed and unchanging objects control all such systems, so they should be maintained. They said such eternal and unchanging objects were themselves arranged in a feudal hierarchy, with the most powerful object at the highest point in the system. Thus human society too should have its own natural feudalistic pecking order, enforced with pain and violence when necessary. The more they traveled, the more they saw examples of such feudalistic systems where pain was a regular teaching tool.
Even today such systems continue on, with the US Supreme Court being just one example among many; almost all of our economic system is feudalistic too. That’s how new and weak democratic habits of voting and sharing power equally still are. Today's feudal economic, political, and educational systems, by the way, are what give the following saying its truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same. However, the hopeful and encouraging news from liberals like Dewey is this: the more young folks are educated in our public schools to practice more democratic habits, the easier it will be for adults to keep taking a more equal share of such institutions.
In short, the ancient world already had feudalistic fiefdoms. Large, wealthy estate-owners kept growing wealthier by absorbing those farmers who couldn't pay their debts. Earlier we saw how liberals like Solon were elected to democratize such feudal power, so it was shared more equally. Even after the feudalistic Roman Empire collapsed, wealthy families continued using their power to keep increasing it, including barbarian tribes brutally battling each other for more land and trinkets. Thus, little landed fiefdoms continued on. Italy’s Lombard region was just one example.
In Roman times too pain was often used as a normal teaching tool, and it continued right on into the feudalistic Christian era. Roman schools taught Greek subjects like reading, writing, and public speaking, but they had little tolerance for music and games many Greek teachers used as a break from making students memorize Homeric stories about brave and crafty warriors. Such stories were believed to help build important character habits. In such schools, physical punishment often helped naturally curious children to stay quiet and seated on stone chairs, keep writing their letters, and memorizing stories about heroes for their character development. Even in the 300s CE Augustine, in his Confessions, tells how his teachers weren't afraid to wallop him if he dared take an unscheduled mental break from his work; how dare any student actually think some thoughts on his own! And I myself saw such painful actions on a regular basis at parochial high school. Once, a classmate who dared laugh out loud in front of a somber 60-something Brother was promptly slapped across the face, as were some in class as well. Pain thus helped students continue fearing and obeying their teachers, and also continue accepting the work they were given, no questions asked. Learning was serious business and pain was used to build such habits of obedience.
Even in the Roman world liberal thinking was regularly attacked soon after Augustus founded the Empire in 27 BCE. Even as conservative Paul of Tarsus was writing letters of advice to his Christian churches around 50 CE, Augustus, who wanted to become a god, started attacking liberal Atomists. He simply demanded all their books be destroyed, especially the great Atomist poem On Nature by Lucretius, written around that time. As a result, free speech, democratic values, philosophic variety, and naturalistic thinking gradually became rarer as education remained conservative and life remained spirit-based.
Again, however, some progressive educational ideas based on affection as a useful teaching tool continued on, especially for upper class males. As the early Synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke were being written after 70 CE, educators like Marcus Quintillianus (about 35-100 CE) noticed how fewer and fewer young boys were going to schools where punishment was common. Who wants to be painfully punished while trying to learn more about the world? Thus school enrollment was declining. Obviously the word about painful punishment in school was spreading even to the schoolboy level, and so many of them simply chose to do almost anything else besides go to school. So, knowing how valuable education was to a well-run empire, and how enjoyment was a valuable educational tool, Marcus suggested teachers should encourage children with praise and verbal rewards so they would want to be in school and keep learning, rather than use whips and tree branches on them. He too was home-schooled and tutored by a loving father in his native Spain. Still, many teachers themselves felt an uneducated public was best for social stability; uneducated people often simply believed what they were told and so helped feudal systems stay in place, especially political and military ones. After all, the less people knew, the easier it was to control and keep taking advantage of them.
Ancient China, however, was a little more progressive. Like today's world it offered the chance of social advancement to brighter students, and the possibility to become wealthier. And so with Confucius’s help, an education system grew based on ability. Filling their civil service jobs were largely based on academic talent, rather than merely belonging to a powerful family. Intelligent boys from any social class who had good memories could pass tough exams and get well-respected government jobs. It didn’t matter what your religious habits were either.
Other than that, however, most everyone else in China still lived in a feudalistic society; boys and girls from the largest farmer class almost always stayed at home, worked the fields, and paid their taxes to support the rulers. Rulers, nobles, merchants, and slaves all needed to be fed and so the government regularly took much of what farmers grew. Even after Communists took control in 1948, such a feudalistic political system has remained in place.
Only slowly, within the past century or so, have educational punishment tools even begun to be reconstructed and ignored in our public schools. Still used, however, is the psychological tool of fearing to get bad grades and not passing to the next grade. And in many homes today parents still believe children need to feel pain when they don't obey them and quickly do as they're told. Without learning how to intelligently use much better learning tools, like enjoyable and pleasant rewards to better mold young habits, many parents simply continue treating their children the way they were treated, ordering them about day in and day out, keeping them dependent and docile, and playing the role of master rather than friend and helpful guidance counselor. How do I know? Both advertising and over 2 million people in US prisons show us the results of inflicting excessive punishment and threats on children.
Today we still see commercials taking advantage of those raised with the fear of punishment. So-called hard-sell ads simply ORDER viewers to do this, or buy that NOW?! Hurry, hurry, hurry! Pick up the phone and call NOW! Why else do such dictatorial advertisements work unless viewers have already been conditioned, often painfully, to slavishly do this or that and hurry up about it? In truth, such undemocratic and obedient habits are not just a public school problem, but a major social problem as well. Hard-sell ads still reflect that reality, and it's why they continue being made. In fact, as we’ll see in a later section (23), psychologists often go into the advertising business; the money is often much better than teaching, there’s normally lots of work, and it's a way to use all their knowledge about human habits.
As a result, we Deweyan liberal democrats look at such facts a little differently; they're challenging us to build a more intelligent democracy. After all, routine obedient habits simply make it easier for people to keep accepting all the undemocratic feudal systems we still have, like our corporations, banks, government, and armed services. For us liberals then, our schools become an important social tool for building a more democratic society, and where economic, political, and military power is shared more equally, rather than by a small group. And our schools should be helping students learn some useful business skills before they graduate high school, so they can start earning some honest money! The more our public schools encourage students in our elementary schools to choose what to learn, what they'd like to become, and teaching them how to experiment intelligently in any learning process, the more they'll become more powerful democratic engines, rather than the conservative feudalistic servants. Our public schools can become much better at connecting students to their own neighborhoods as well as their improvement.
Remember the Summerhill model of education mentioned earlier? In such schools children are given complete freedom to study or even not. Obviously, for us Deweyans, it’s just not the best kind of education, especially for poor children who haven’t yet learned how to intelligently experiment in any learning process. However, students at such schools often develop a fine sense of democratic independence, respect for others, a sense of how democratic freedom feels, and a dislike for accepting the status quo. Such intelligently independent character habits are, in fact, the biological engines for all healthy and active democracies. In fact, advertisers have already adjusted to that fact. With more independent-minded people who can actually think for themselves, so-called ‘soft-sell’ ads are now a common advertising tool. They’re often the ones using sexy men and women to sell their high-priced goods, like cars and homes. Their subliminal message is more subtle: only people who drive these cars or dress like this get the sex object they want, so be cool and buy this car or this condo. Many people still feel objects of high social status are worth having and working for.
More Affectionate Home Schooling
Thus, for thousands of years wealthy folks have had great educational advantages, and still do to this day; their wealth can be used to make learning more enjoyable and pleasant. Around the world wealth continues giving some students an affectionate learning relationship with teachers in private schools, and thus making the democratic ideal of equal educational rights and opportunities little more than an idea. Such educational advantages began growing in the ancient world. Affectionate one-on-one learning no doubt began with praise and encouragement for teaching children what they wanted to know.
At the lower economic levels, however, education was more practical, less painful, and family oriented. Middle class artisans and merchants often taught their sons at home workshops and on the job, while mothers taught daughters at home; other options for women were almost zero. Even in the small village of Nazareth, for example, Joseph no doubt lovingly taught first-born son Jesus carpentry skills at his home workshop. As a rule, the relationship between a Jewish father and his first born son was a very close one, and the Gospels reflect such feelings. They record how he often talks about a father’s love, but much less so about a mother-son relationship. To him even Mary Magdalene was someone to expel evil spirits from and become a follower, not a friend or disciple.
No doubt, we’re much more creatures of habit -- willpower -- than reasoning or thinking, as Hume and Dewey said, but that fact makes early childhood education about democratic habits even more important than ever. If children aren't educated to know what democratic respect for rules and equal rights feel like, the more it becomes to practice them as adults. And what's more, they're learned much easier with teaching tools other than pain, punishment, and psychological fear. If pain were the only educational tool, life itself would be infinitely more brutal and dangerous than it is now. Our senses also relay feelings of pleasure and joy, and that is indeed modern Behavioral psychology's good education news. Intelligent habits -- intelligent will power -- begin forming after birth with enjoyable feelings, rather than the sudden impact of lumber or lash on flesh, skull, or butt. In any case, a great benefit of Behavioral learning psychology teaches what caring and loving parents and teachers have known for centuries: loving and enjoyable rewards are much better teaching tools than pain. Children naturally want to please parents and adults, and get their approval. So, the sooner they consciously learn to make their studies more enjoyable, pleasant, and entertaining, the easier it'll be to make their home lives more secure and our society more democratic. Shouldn't corporate workers have equal decision-making power with the board of directors? If not, workers continue remaining vulnerable and controlled by other decision-makers.
Again, a Liberal Education Mission
Thus, the liberal public school mission becomes clear: to keep empowering the weakest and most vulnerable among us with more intelligent character habits while teaching what the child wants to learn. What's more, in that model painful and psychological punishment are phased out; they help distort and warp a person's entire psychological inner world. And if practiced too much at home, pain helps create fearful, rebellious, vindictive, and unproductive feelings and actions. Such people often begin seeing others as threatening and harmful. How many veterans returning from years of warfare still feel they need to attack people? And how many young folks, painfully kept powerless and docile, begin stealing and robbing merely because they want what others have? Often, too, the money’s used to buy more illegal drugs. If such drugs were available on a controlled basis, such self-destructive and violent actions would begin withering away. So, naturally, we liberal Deweyans say our public schools should also be formally training more students as psychological councilors, so they too can help build more intelligent character habits in younger students. Why continue making students learn more and more almost completely useless academic facts? These are our schools, folks, so how should they be operating?
We Deweyan liberals today know full well, the earlier children are taught more intelligent habits of learning and acting, the less need there will be to correct unintelligent and disrespectful habits later on in expensive prisons or government programs. Why not simply teach such habits in our public schools, as soon as those schools are freed from conservative laws dictating the book-facts all students must learn to graduate? All such schools are feudalistic, not democratic. So, in more liberal schools, learning more and more academic facts is simply replaced with a more personalized active and experimental learning model, where students can enjoy actually getting out of classrooms and start learning more socially useful democratic skills, like working together and thinking independently about improving our neighborhoods.
Needless to say, such useful habits are learned much more quickly with positive learning tools like encouragement and enjoyment. If not, then students in the inner cities will continue remaining vulnerable to their neighborhood gangs who start offering the security and money they badly want even to teenagers. The more students are taught to see such unlawful gang activity as a social menace, the freer they'll be to start making their own neighborhoods more civilized places to live, play, go to school, and continue learning.
Thus, to neglect improving violent, painful, and fearful parental and educational habit-arts only perpetuates the conditions helping maintain a feudalistic status quo, putting young folks into jail, and helping make our democracy one in name only. In fact, many liberals are now calling our conservative school systems the school-to-jail pipeline, and there's certainly some truth in it. The less children are taught useful character and employment habits, the more vulnerable they remain to criminal actions. So, more liberals and independents are being challenged today to start demanding our politicians and educators first liberate students from our conservative book-centered educational models, and then begin teaching more democratically intelligent habit-arts to the next generation. We Deweyan liberals know what democratic schools should look like, and so we simply want more power to start experimenting with them in all our public schools. We know our conservative book-and-test dominated schools are simply not producing the kinds of personal and social results helping build a healthy democracy, so they need to be improved.
As we’ll see in Section 29, Curiosity and Creativity, what’s most important in today’s schools is not the trivial facts one is punished for not learning, but how quickly students can think creatively about solving neighborhood challenges here and now. For example, how many different ways can we build a better park, community garden, school grounds, or fish farm, and how can we use democratic voting to decide what to do? How many useful experimental workshops can we build on school grounds, and what should they be? Our book-centered public schools are simply keeping students too isolated and disconnected from such creatively intelligent work in their own neighborhoods, and thus keeping children psychically and physically weak and isolated from life itself. One result is around 50% of adults don't even vote in major elections. No doubt, if you’re feeling more challenged to start helping improve a conservative educational system, where students begin learning more healthy habits of democratic power-sharing by actually practicing them, then it makes all my writing thus far worth every single minute of time. Such feelings are the first step to actually improve our schools.
Obviously, not only excessive pain, whether physical or psychological, can be deadly; even too much water causes drowning. However, in our conservative book-oriented public schools today, there are still psychological forms of punishment; grades and promotions are used as a psychological form of punishment. Sometimes even school work is used as a punishment; I know from experience. Before I learned about positive forms of rewarding and praising students for their work, I used school work itself as a punishment. How many students have been similarly punished; write 100 times I will be a good boy? Isn't that the ultimate negative conditioning against learning itself? Why should children want to keep learning to, say, write when it's a form of punishment? That’s how unwise and unloving some TEACHERS are! How can children learn to love learning and to intelligently express their feelings and ideas verbally or in writing unless they’re actually encouraged to do so? It's as if only such academic book-facts are really the best form of education! Both our prisons and our high youth unemployment numbers keep telling us it's not true.
A Common Conservative Objection
No doubt, many conservatives will offer some objections to building more liberal schools. One common objection might sound something like this: our schools really don't have the instructors, money, or responsibility to help children learn to intelligently guide their own studies while learn what they want to learn. Besides, don't parents have a right to treat their children any way they want? If they want to beat them every so often it's really no one's business but their own, right? To us Deweyan liberals, however, such objections merely reflect the feudalistic educational assumptions still being used even in the world's oldest democracy, the United States. In fact, there's a whole educational system in place that demands students keep learning more and more academic trivia, whether it's useful or not. From elementary school to universities, they all demand students keep learning such knowledge, and also creating serious levels of debt as well. So, conservatives might say, to start rebuilding such a system is just too large a job; people should just accept it, deal with it, and send their kids to pre-schools where they're conditioned to accept the system as it is.
Such objections, however, are often meant to scare people from even trying to improve their own neighborhood elementary schools, where all reforms should begin. After all, for thousands of years conservatives have actively worked against growing democratic habits; they would mean the end of all forms of feudalistic power, both religious and secular. Even today, the conservative wealthiest 1% often use their money to keep public schools as book-oriented as possible, and in the process also keep intelligent democratic habits as weak as possible. They often finance the election of conservative school board members. To us liberal Deweyans, however, democratic habits of choice, especially in education, are a good way to help make life more stable, peaceful, and rewarding. Look at the terrible social results we've seen since 2008 in the housing, banking, and auto markets caused by feudalistic institutions run by a small group of directors! And what's more, history teaches us such feudalistic systems keep causing economic breakdowns and serious kinds of social chaos on a regular basis, as well as promoting devastating and brutal wars in the hunt for more and more profits. So, again, what's it going to be folks, feudalistic or democratic schools?
In fact, our democratic system is allowing people to take more control of their own neighborhood public schools, but only if enough people can get organized. In such schools the next generation will start learning the habits of creative problem-solving and how to intelligently test their ideas. And they’ll also begin learning how organized democratic power will give our representatives the power to more intelligently control wealthy corporations, banks, and the military, rather than the other way around. After all, all children will become part of a community, and the more ignorant they are about how it works well, as well as how their own body-minds work well, the more brutal and dangerous life can become, as we see today almost daily in our news shows. And the more expensive too: for more prisons and police, more profit-obsessed bank bailouts, higher insurance rates for crime, expensive medical insurance for health services, more money to stop dangerous and brutal gang activities, accidents due to drug and alcohol abuse, loss of life, and many other expenses. If basically ignorant children are allowed to stay that way, then the results of such an educational model extend way beyond the school and home to the national social life in general! That’s just another fact of civilized life.
Many people who know others are physically abusing their children often don’t report them to their local public health officials, to help improve such painfully abusive situations. They don't feel it's any of their business, simply because they've never learned to build a strong community feeling for defending the weakest and most vulnerable among us. And so our public schools become important places where more intelligent communal habits can be taught, especially in poorer neighborhoods where unhealthful habits seem to be practiced from generation to generation. So, isn’t it obvious? The practice of unhealthful, excessively violent physical abuse of children should be a much more important subject in our public schools; if not, vulnerable children will remain defenseless against abusive pain. Tax supported prisons in the US are already larger than humane conditions can deal with, and thus keep sapping funds for building more healthful and intelligently democratic schools.
As our nightly news broadcasts keep reminding us, young folks often relieve their own frustrating tensions and anxious fears with self-destructive actions, like drug abuse or reckless driving. Such unintelligent actions often start when abused children abuse weaker animals, like dogs and cats. Unless such feelings are remolded, some may go on to abuse younger children, and then later, adults. Murder and mayhem are still serious threats to everyone's safety in many parts of the country, not to mention other countries, and physical abuse and punishment is often a big cause of the problem. So, why shouldn't young folks be free to express any negative feelings they might have of self-worth, powerlessness, fear, and hopelessness? If so, then such punishment, wherever it happens, whether in school or outside of it, can start being dealt with more intelligently; in fact, no one really knows how widespread female abuse still is.
Violent forms of home punishment helps give the US the highest percentage of people in jail; Russia is 3rd on the list. India, on the other hand, has about 3 times as many people as we have and yet they're jailing fewer people. What's going on? It turns out they're experimenting with a more humane system of reeducation as the key to lowering disrespectful criminal actions. People are simply being taught more intelligent money-earning habits, and it’s helping produce better social results, like not wasting tax payer money keeping people locked up. So naturally, in the spirit of helping improve the unhealthful and unwise use of physical punishment as a teaching tool, we Deweyan Humanists ask wouldn’t more liberal schools better teach what both physical and mental health means in action, so young folks can begin growing such intelligent habits? No doubt, more actively intelligent community service work projects in all our public schools would greatly help increase the growth of such habits, and thus lower the need for expensive court-imposed community service work later on.
Some More Commonsense Advice
Kids sense their dependency and powerlessness, so normally they want love and affection from their parents and guardians; it feels much better than being physically punished and enslaved. Also, if children feel loved and they act disrespectfully and selfishly, then withdrawing parental or teacher affection and love becomes a much better teaching tool than using more violent punishment and humiliation. Isolation is another non-violent form of punishment, but it should also be followed by telling the child what actions they should practice, as well as rewarding a child when they practice such actions. Don’t good parents get their children to agree to improve their actions if they misbehave, and then reward them with love and affection when they do act excellently? It’s just another common sense result from using affection as a teaching tool.
No doubt, the more our schools, homes, and churches use such positive non-violent educational tools to grow more intelligent habits, the faster many of our serious social problems will shrink. Why shouldn’t even young children be taught in school to speak up when they feel anyone's unjustly using physical punishment on them? The sooner they learn they deserve to be respected just as much as anyone else, the better off they’ll be, even if it means reporting an abusive parent or guardian. And, also, why shouldn't they start learning about how more positive and enjoyable rewards are much better learning tools?
You’d think our public radio and television stations too would be more involved. No doubt, programs like Sesame Street are good for children; they help them see what respectful actions look like. But they’re weakness lies in their inability to make children actively practice more intelligent habit-arts. It’s one thing to tell a child something, but it’s something entirely different to actually encourage a child to practice more intelligent actions. In short, simple lecturing to a child is not as good a learning tool as actual intelligent practice itself. So, once again, we see how important our homes, public schools, and churches are. They can actually encourage children to role-play and, say, call the police or tell a teacher if they’re being unjustly punished by an adult! In truth, such excellent habits means more than merely watching people have fun singing, dancing, and working together! Knowledge lives in our muscles, not just our eyes and ears.
Parents and teachers can also restrict children from even seeing mindless violence, or better yet, watch such shows together, make sure the child can say what to do in similar situations, and then actively practice those ideas. That way their knowledge sinks into their muscles, rather than just their memories and thoughts. It’s all part of a more liberal educational model, and of actively making our own little corner of the world more peaceful and less dangerous.
Just like learning any other habit-art, for best results children need to enjoy learning and practicing intelligent ideas, so they can see what their useful results are like. There’s no need to wait for politicians to pass a new law, or for abuse to continue on unchallenged. Also, with the growth of our new electronic network and the Internet, children can not only start controlling their own education, but also connecting themselves with children in other cities and even around the world, to learn more about life there. In fact, the more children learn how to connect with other students, the faster new ideas can be experimentally tested, and perhaps improved.
What have we got to lose with such liberal practices in our public schools, I mean besides unnecessary social stress, disrespectful and antisocial abusive violence, and of course higher taxes? We Deweyan liberals say even young students should begin learning to CONSCIOUSLY identify and report those who use fear and punishment to force obedience and slave-like behavior in others. And also begin learning how to use more enjoyable and pleasant actions as the best learning tools. With such habits our present practices of psychological punishment and intimidation with threats of failure and poor grades will soon become ancient history. Such kinds of punishment are necessary when parents allow schools to continue forcing and enslaving children to learn what they often neither want nor need to know.
So, the more children are given the freedom to choose what they want to learn, and learn to reward themselves for intelligently learning those skills and habits, then the stronger our democracy will grow. Students will start realizing their organized democratic power is more powerful than any amount of wealth. With such enjoyable learning skills it’ll also be easier learning how to respect others and how to resolve personal problems peaceful, rather than violently. It's called Conflict Resolution; young children can begin learning about such skills in the first 3 years of school, and they can continue growing until they graduate. In any case, however, the longer we keep students ignorant of such skills by keeping their heads buried in academic textbooks, and merely memorizing more and more book facts, the more such intelligent learning skills will remain weak and unhealthful. Clearly, the growth of such schools is mainly a question of organizing the public’s democratic power, especially in high crime neighborhoods; there such student learning skills and empowerment may be needed most.
In any case, however, there’s really nothing very philosophically profound about any of these ideas. As we've seen, even ancient tutors were aware of such teaching tools. So, they're really just more examples of humane commonsense thinking on Dewey's part. What’s more, they’re not absolute truth; they’re just practical and useful ideas that often produce better personal and social results. No doubt, life will sometimes create situations where violence will need to be used, but who knows how often they will be needed when students learn more intelligent kinds of habit-arts? And learning them will be easier when excessive and inhumane forms of punishment are ignored.
20. ENJOYABLE LEARNING
Humor As a Serious Learning Tool
Learning was made more enjoyable even in ancient democratic Greek city-states with the writing of comic plays, in the Renaissance, and of course in local pubs were alcohol flowed. Laughter was often heard as people swapped their humorous stories. Such theatres and pubs were probably the major places using laughter and enjoyment to help share information and educate people. Ancient Athenians not only laughed at serious people like Socrates when they saw Aristophanes’ comic play The Clouds, but they also learned more about his ideas. Early on liberals too began celebrating humor and enjoyment. The great liberal Atomist Democritus earned his unique nickname as the Laughing Philosopher. He proved to people laughter and secular ideas can exist side by side in one person. Then, two generations after him, his follower Epicurus continued celebrating pleasure, enjoyment, and cheerfulness as useful habits helping make life and learning that much more bearable. No doubt, such habits helped make his health problems more bearable. True, such habits like moderate pleasure and cheerfulness were celebrated by many people, but the Atomists put enjoyment and pleasure at the core of their ethical thinking; to them intelligent pleasure was the only good, with the emphasis on the word intelligent. Dewey too accepted the idea of intelligent enjoyment and pleasure as one goal of ethical actions, so it shows how important the idea of enjoyable learning has been within the liberal tradition. For much of history such habits helped make ordinarily dangerous and stressful daily life feel more bearable and livable.
To liberals like Epicurus, enjoyment and humor helped make building any useful character habit easier, thus helping produce peaceful, untroubled, and enjoyable kinds of feelings. They, in turn, helped keep stressful, painful, annoying tensions to a minimum. Send me a cheese, said Epicurus, so I can dine with pleasure. Thus, he encouraged the students at his little garden school to practice enjoying life and having a little fun each day. They more they did, the easier it became to let go of their morbid after-life fears and also build more cheerful feelings about life’s blessings here and now. No one knows how ecstatic they would have been about yogurt! Meanwhile, in conservative schools like Plato’s Academy, he was telling students to imitate the gods who he believed never smiled much. He put laughter and enjoyment much farther down an ethical scale than liberals like Democritus. Like medieval monasteries, students at the Academy focused seriously on spirit-objects and conservative politics, where city-states were run by a small elite group. Thus, serious contemplative habits dominated his school. Later on, in the Middle Ages, somber, serious, silent, and chanting rituals became dominant.
Radically different educational models thus evolved even in ancient Greece; enjoyable humor was just one of the differences. Socrates' conservative student Plato began offering a radically elitist and undemocratic educational model in his Republic, and to liberals it became something to make fun of. For example, Plato had said all of mankind can be defined as a featherless biped. So, some liberal students promptly plucked the feathers from a chicken, gave it to some Academy students, and said here’s an example of Plato’s mankind.
Plato’s obsession with Spirit-Ideas also produced some more radical feelings. He said such knowledge could only be achieved with serious contemplation by a very small number of people, and so he soon condemned all such sense-based enjoyable practices. Also, for all practical purposes the lower classes were to be kept uneducated except for learning a trade, so they could more easily be controlled and dominated by the ruling elite. Thus, for him feelings like pleasure, enjoyment, cheerfulness, and humor merely helped lash people to the greatly inferior, always changing natural world, a world of illusions at best. Enjoyment in any of its forms simply made learning about Spirit-Ideas almost impossible, and so the conservative educational foundation for the entire Middle Ages was more or less set. Conservative Christians like Augustine quickly substituted contemplation for prayer and worship, but ignoring humor and enjoyment remained the same.
Have You Heard This Joke Before?
What? Are we liberal Deweyans kidding? Should enjoyable humor become a much more important part of our public schools? Why not? As we've seen, professional psychologists have finally learned what kind and practical-minded parents have known for thousands of years: verbal and physical fun is as important to a healthy body-mind as non-fat milk is to a healthy yogurt. Such enjoyable learning habits also help remove all the competitive and grade-based motives from school life; humor and enjoyment help make learning itself an end-in-itself.
Obviously enjoyable learning isn’t completely ignored in schools today -- is it possible to stop children from having fun? No, but it is possible to keep conservative classrooms boring, repetitive, and in general a waste of time and energy when the main goal is memorizing more academic facts! Again, it should be asked: when in the real world has the reader ever added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided 3-digit numbers without a calculator, or helped a young Hamlet avoid killing his step-father? So, humor is a habit-art useful throughout life, why not get more serious about formally teaching it in our public schools? Now is that irony worthy of Socrates himself? Humor is a habit-art useful throughout the business world too; it’s also a big part of our TV shows and films, and probably always will be. And what’s more, it would make learning to write and read so much more enjoyable than it is now. So, in all seriousness, we liberals ask why not have classes like Jokes, 101, 102, ... 112? Wouldn't such classes also be another enjoyable way to build useful speaking habits when jokes are told to the class? Don't look now, but many people have made rather comfortable livings merely knowing how to write a good joke, as late night TV monologues keep teaching us.
Who doesn’t yet realize, humor is useful throughout life, especially when nature keeps knocking people and buildings down. So, in addition to teaching children how to read, write, and think creatively, why not also teach children of all ages more about humor's art, so it can become a more organized, conscious, and powerful living tool? Why not? Why not also teach children how to have some fun talking about outrageous assumptions people have often used, like all life is merely an illusion and ultimately means nothing, or all life merely reflects spirit objects no one can see?
Also, on-going humor studies in our public schools would be yet another way for students to enjoy school more, rather than merely reading about dull, boring, and humorless abstract textbook facts? Is there anyone who still believes George Washington would be a rather average Joe on Wall Street were he alive today? In all seriousness I ask, why not make enjoyable humor an on-going study for 12 years, just like math and spelling? Just imagine, 1st grade humor, 2nd grade humor, and so on. Isn’t humor much like music? Aren’t they both kinds of universal languages? And wouldn't such studies help make one's personal, social, and business life more colorful, pleasant, and productive? Remember the saying, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? And Jill as well, right?
In truth, even young children can begin seeing humor has a number of logical forms. For example, there’s the form of three responses to a statement, the last one being the humorous one. If, say, a woman gives a man a compliment, the man can offer a humorous response with 3 ideas: I’m honored, touched, and aroused! And the older students get, the more they’ll want to read humorists like Aristophanes, Mark Twain, and even Rodney Dangerfield. They too make it easier to see humor both within us and all around us, day in and day out. Dangerfield had a rather tough childhood, so he used humor to make his life more livable: When I was born, he said, I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother! That’s another logical form of humor, offering a bizarre result from a rather commonplace observation. How many other responses can you offer to the first statement? Aristotle said humor is basically the art of seeing surprising results after normal statements.
Is there a better antidote to psychic dread and seriousness so many students feel than learning how to see life’s humorous possibilities? There are in fact many pompous-acting people in the world, including conniving and two-faced politicians, so why shouldn’t the habit-art of writing jokes and humorous stories about them start being taught even in the primary grades? For example, that politician is such a windbag we should use him to power our generators; that politician talks so crazy his parents should be sent to a psychiatrist! Teaching such humorous skills is really just another natural result of focusing on learning excellent character habit-art useful throughout life. When gang members offer kids money to start selling illegal drugs, couldn’t they say things like I’m too young to waste the rest of my life? Or I’d like to but I’ve heard some terrible things about jail food.
Also, there’s also the pun form of humor: I’m thinking about becoming a 7th Day Adventurer. In fact, there are an infinite number of such examples. So, again, where is the harm in teaching kids how to use different forms of humor in everyday situations? Isn’t even bad humor better than no humor at all: I wanted to be a drug addict but my local dealer wouldn't let me; he was afraid he’d starve to death! In fact, isn't learning to humorously make fun of life’s real dangers a big part of character excellence itself; who wants to keep taking life seriously all the time? The more that happens, the more morbid and distorted life becomes.
Reading and also writing jokes and humorous stories has many other educational benefits too. For one thing, it’s an enjoyable way to become better readers and writers! I still remember reading James Thurber's The Night the Bed Fell in 6th grade. And for another thing, a humorous habit also helps build a critical way of seeing the status quo, like saying politics is the fine art of government mismanagement. Again, verbal humor and enjoyment is a large part of a healthy body-mind, and a useful tool for not taking our own feelings, ideas, and problems too seriously, as well as building the very healthy habit of laughing at ourselves when we act stupidly or neurotically. All such humorous habits help weaken delusional feelings of superiority as well as morbid persecution feelings. I was a stupid kid; my parents argued between themselves so much I thought they were trying to poison ME!
With so many useful results from such habit-arts, liberal parents, teachers, and students have a right to start demanding their public schools become more serious about thinking and writing humorously. What knowledge is more useful, knowing how to solve a quadratic equation, or knowing how to make fun of our self, and all the pompous and error-prone people around us? Isn’t humor in TV, radio, and films a valuable addition to human health and culture, and if so, then why not actively start studying the art in elementary schools, as well as learn to give humorous speeches? There’s absolutely no reason why such a habit-art shouldn't also be a graduation requirement! After all, such habits would also be useful for breaking down all the artificial separations conservative schools build between learning in school and outside of school. How many TV shows teach people how to spell the word quadratic, and how many celebrate many of life's humorous observations and possibilities?
One time, after the school year just started, a teaching colleague told me not to smile until Thanksgiving. Heaven forbid; it might make students feel they could actually have some fun in school. It’s merely one result of forcing students to keep learning what they have no need or desire to know. In such conservative schools, above all else, students need to feel as if learning more and more academic trivia is very serious business, so absolutely no humor will be tolerated, especially for religious ideas no one really knows anything about! For example, I was so bad yesterday my guardian angel asked to be reassigned. Is it blasphemy or merely humor? Are such ideas educational or not? No doubt, some conservative educators will seriously argue teaching such classes will help the school lose its accreditation. Well, why not just tell them to change their accreditation requirements? Such requirements, however, are helping produce students largely unprepared for the real world, in both skills and character habit-arts. We liberal Deweyans, however, are interested in body-mind health, not obedience to some feudalistic conservative educational model.
In fact TV and films often showcase some of the most perceptive and polished humorists and wits in the world, and so learning more about humorous art also teaches kids more about their world. Who can't laugh at all the satirical humor in films like The Bonfire of the Vanities, or Marlon Brando’s Bedtime Story, as well as keep learning about important character habits of helpfulness?
Studying, analyzing, and most of all talking and writing different kinds of humor would not only empower students to keep growing their own enjoyably playful feelings, but also become more confident about speaking in front of a group. Such talking would help weaken irrational fears about talking in public. In fact, cheerful and humorous habits are useful throughout life, and not merely while students are in school. Who can't appreciate how playfully enjoyable events like 'Outhouse Races' help people lose stressful tensions? No doubt, nature is both stable and dangerous, and has tragic events, but humor is a good way to lessen their dreadful feelings: Hey, that storm could have been worse, it could have taken us to Kansas! In fact, a humorous habit-art helps make recovery from any tragedy that much easier; about that I’m very serious!
In short, playful and creative humor can not only be great psychic therapy, especially for morbid and depressed students, but also educational as well. Without humor and cheerfulness, the chances merely increase for lawlessness, disrespect, and drug abuse, and they are no joke. Such habits are wasting precious taxpayer dollars by the billions! So, shouldn’t every classroom have at least one weird-looking comical character walking around and saying “Gimme drugs, gimme drugs!”, and also health-minded students regularly taking the student into a hospital for treatment? What better way to laugh constructively at such actions, and thus avoid their dangers? Again, laughter and humor are not only therapeutic, but educational as well.
How Many Jokes Can You Create?
Writing jokes is also another enjoyable way to keep strengthening one’s creative writing skills. No doubt, during the Middle Ages conservative schools promoted serious, fearful, and obedient habits. One philosopher actually took the time to say an infinite number of angels can fit on the head of a pin. Well, when science was almost non-existent there was so much in life still completely uncontrolled and dangerous, like leprosy and plague, as well as those frisky bands of roving gangsters called armies who might wreck everything. Muslim armies almost conquered all of Europe in the 700s CE. As a result, humor and enjoyment were not a part of early education; in fact they weren’t tolerated very much at all. Feeling cheerful and laughing were often seen as signs of foolish sinfulness. However, the less such habits were taught to people as a whole, and left mainly for royal-court fools, then life itself stayed very serious and dangerous. Robbers could be around any bend in the road as well as any city street corner. At medieval royal courts laughter and enjoyment was often the work of specialists; often little people became court jesters and are still honored today on playing cards as Jokers. Only recently, with the growth of humorous films and TV shows, have people of all ages begun feeling humor’s useful and healthful results.
More Educational History
As with every other secular habit, humor too has grown slowly. How could it be otherwise in a world still dominated by peoples' ignorance, fears, and anxieties? Luckily, educational history records a few such liberal teachers. As we saw in the last section, Marcus Quintillianus wasn’t afraid to build a more liberal and humane educational model. He too was a kind-hearted 1st century version of John Dewey. For both, not only are academic studies important, and not only is character development just as important, but they both celebrated making such studies more enjoyable and pleasant for students. However, because there weren't teacher colleges like there are today, such ideas remained vulnerable to conservative educational models, and thus remained isolated and weak. Not enough people were educated to keep such ideas energized and growing.
Then, with Rome’s fall in the 400s CE, the centralized government collapsed and political power was decentralized as Europe sank again into a feudalistic society we call the Dark Ages. Eventually, however, business arts and the growth in practical scientific knowledge helped lift the gloomy feelings of life and energized the more secular oriented Renaissance, or re-birth. As a result, more liberal educators like Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and Michael De Montaigne (1533-1592) weren't afraid to write more about making learning enjoyable. A little later more liberal thinkers like John Locke agreed, and said punishment should be used as a learning tool of last resort. It was another baby-step of educational progress.
For those few humane educators who noticed how children learned much better if it was enjoyable, other aristocratic skills also became enjoyable games, like hunting, archery, riding, music, dancing, and poetry. A hugely popular education book written in the 1500s was called The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529). It taught young aristocrats how such enjoyable activities develop one's character, and so should be an important part of anyone's education, like Aristotle had suggested centuries earlier.
But once again, there were feudalistic limits on who could get such an education. Such enjoyments were greatly restricted to upper class boys; in some places serfs and peasants were forbidden by law from even going to school. That’s how much the conservative aristocracy feared educating the lower classes; they knew it would threaten their own concentrated feudalistic social and economic power. As a result, only recently has enjoyable learning and humor become a more important part of psychological health, giving students another important learning tool for improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits. Thus today liberal parents and teachers ask how much of an enjoyable game can we make learning anything. How much classroom work can we make as enjoyable as kids make outside of school? In other words, how much can we preserve those almost instinctive enjoyable and humorous learning arts, so they can keep making learning easier throughout life? Little wonder such habits also became an important part of Dewey's liberal educational model.
Dewey too saw how learning anything becomes easier when it becomes enjoyable, and humor makes everything more enjoyable. The challenge he made to teachers and parents was to make our public schools more fun and enjoyable, rather than remaining quiet, somber, and serious places. For example, many find learning to type boring, but when it becomes a means to, say, building a book or any kind of constructive art, then enjoyment makes learning to type easier and more creative. Creativity itself is a kind of enjoyable playfulness in all of life’s events. Outside of school most children already seem to know how to keep learning as enjoyable as possible, so why not start making the subject more intelligent and conscious study? After all, if parents sometimes kill those natural habits of enjoyable learning, then shouldn't our public schools be places where they can be nurtured in a safe and intelligent way? What’s the worst that can happen; students will actually learn how to enjoy life and learning more? Gosh, that’s sound bad doesn’t it?
To our cores nature has made us feeling creatures, much more than thinking and reasoning ones; and as a rule people prefer enjoyable rather than painful feelings. If we weren’t so built, if we were all pure rational thinkers, then drug addiction or obesity could never become the problems they are. What good would pain-relievers be if we couldn’t feel pain? But when, say, students want to write a humorous work of art, then they begin learning how to intelligently produce enjoyable feelings. That indeed is a very useful habit-art. For example, there’s some intrinsic pleasure to be found in typed misspellings making funny-sounding worts, some poetic feelings from the flow, go, and show of a humorous story, of course in the pride of slowly creating a humorous work of art, and also from helping keep humorous feelings about life alive and growing. And from such writing it becomes easier to continue connecting humorous ideas to one another.
Thus one of liberal education’s most important arts, learning ‘what we’re about’, can be more enjoyably accomplished by learning more about forms of humor. Perhaps most importantly of all, liberal parents and teachers want students to know what it feels like to enjoy overcoming their challenges with a little creative humor, rather than continuing to practice dull, routine, and mechanical learning. In fact, humorous feelings and smiles can happen any time of any day, but to consciously control them, so they do happen, depends on a rather large IF. IF we first actively teach students such skills, then they can begin seeing life’s funny side even in serious situations. No doubt, every book, even this one, can only point the way to feeling such excellent energies, but it’s a good first step. And then liberal schools can continue growing such habit-arts with active and intelligent practice. No doubt that’s a big IF, but it’s a possible if, if you know what I mean!
Why All The Fuss?
It all about something called body-mind health. In general, conservative schools ignore that habit-art and instead focus on teaching all students the same set of book facts. But, in liberal schools body-mind health is a product of learning to happily and playfully enjoy learning itself. It helps reduce stressful and cramping muscular tensions, as well as lessen morbid feelings about life itself. It’s certainly nothing new. Even in the late 1500s Edward ‘Shakespeare’ De Vere saw how important enjoyable learning was, even for shrewish people: "No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken." As a result, liberal schools, homes, and churches actively help young folks FEEL pleasure in their work with humorous habits, so as to keep making life and work more enjoyable. Writing little jokes about, say, a mean teacher or parent, or a neurotic student helps make life less serious and more enjoyable; it’s like having a kind of psychic antidote against life’s painful and obnoxious events. Even simply smiling and maybe whistling a little can help build humor’s first enjoyable plateau, so to speak.
For sure, such a habit-art is not instinctive and doesn’t grow naturally. To build such instinctive feelings humor must be actively and intelligently PRACTICED AND FELT. So the less children of all ages learn how to make their learning more enjoyable, the more difficult learning and life becomes. It can also be described as the art of entertaining our self, and with practice it becomes an end-in-itself – something practiced just for itself.
Luckily, with the growth of our TV and film industries, humor and enjoyment are becoming more commonplace today, and for good reason. For many hundreds of millions of years, satisfying and enjoyable feelings helped build useful habit-arts. Doesn’t it feel liberating to know every new habit, every new idea, and every improvement began with an enjoyable feeling for how life might be improved here and now? After all, what else is progress but the process of creatively improving something? It's always a process of reconstructing and rearranging how useful objects and habits might become more pleasantly felt. Poetically, the river of enjoyable feelings flows into a virtual ocean of progress, if their results are useful and constructive to people.
As we saw earlier, conservative Plato was addicted to reasoning seriously about Spirit-Ideas, but the more difficult it became to understand how they might actually work, the less enjoyment he probably felt. Eventually he all but gave up trying to understand them, as liberals like Democritus and Protagoras had suggested even before Plato was born. They weren’t really necessary for learning useful and excellent habits for living intelligently. And, of course the more comic writers like Aristophanes treated such ideas humorously, the easier it was for more people to keep focusing more on making life here and now more enjoyable and bearable. Atomists like Democritus and Sophists like Protagoras anchored their enjoyable feelings to the natural world, as much as they could, and thus taught themselves to enjoy the few brief years as much as they could. For such liberals, the less enjoyment, humor, and cheerfulness we teach ourselves to feel, the more life remains a stressfully chaotic and routine grind. Sadly, however, most of the world believed in such spirits, and so more liberal habits of humor and enjoyment eventually grew weaker as conservative religious habits grew stronger. The Middle Ages began unfolding in the 400s CE. Serious conservative learning models and schools kept increasing the feeling for a perfectly enjoyable and eternally pleasant life after death, rather than here and now. And the more that happened, the more dangerous life remained for everyone! From such a conservative and vulnerable psychic world we are all just now emerging.
Thus for we liberal Deweyan Humanists, learning about our natural world and enjoyably useful problem-solving skills should not only include humorous studies, but they should be taught at every level of our public schools! Learning to see the humor in peoples’ actions also helps weaken habits of obedience to all forms of power. That’s some of our good educational news. The bad news is teaching such habits on a formal level is still a major challenge, simply because not enough parents, teachers, and students are demanding they be taught in our schools, homes, churches, mosques, synagogues, and ashrams. We see some of the results of that neglect in some of our violently religious and secular events. In the Muslim world, for example, sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis remains a tragic fact of life, just as Protestants and Catholics killed each other for centuries. So, why shouldn’t liberals and independents of every faith start demanding humor be taught as a regular part of school studies? Not only is tolerance promoted with such habit-arts, but they enable and empower people to take a little psychic holiday anywhere and anytime! Indeed, as we continue leaving the feudalistic Middle Ages behind us, these days continue opening up many new and creative learning possibilities and challenges, even for getting all those mean muggers out of Central Park and all uncivilized gun-happy hoodlums out of every neighborhood. How many times have we heard a teacher or parent encourage us to write a joke about something? Those are in fact the kinds of educationally creative habit-arts Dewey encouraged all children to practice, and thus make even learning to read and write more enjoyable and fun.
21. HOLLYWOOD TALK
Do we really need separate English classes, or creative writing classes? Isn't it possible for students to enjoyably learn more about those important skills in any class, especially when they're allowed to write and perform their own skits? Can’t English grammar, creative writing, and intelligent talking even to learned in gym, history, math, or science classes, if students are encouraged to write little skits intelligently? This section answers those questions with a yes.
The idea isn't really farfetched. What if, say, student teams in such classes were actually allowed to intelligently write little skits in history, science, and even math classes about the people and ideas studied in those classes? First of all, it would be great way for students to begin feeling how interrelated and organic knowledge is if, say, they were allowed to write a little skit in math class about, say, Pythagoras. With such skits even primary students would also begin learning more about what intelligent writing and speaking can be in any subject. A skit about Pythagoras can begin teaching students not only about math, but about ancient history, religion, human nature, sociology, psychology, and so many other important topics. And best of all, when such skits are intelligently written and performed, they also help students know more about one of the most important things of all -- themselves! Intelligent writing and talking can reveal knowledge about the speaker as well as the outer world.
How many young folks come out of our public schools feeling they have nothing to say and therefore should say nothing, even if they see others harming people and disrespecting just laws? The more students feel afraid to speak up in intelligent ways, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. So, the more young folks learn to speak up intelligently for themselves about how they feel and what they know, the stronger our democracy itself becomes. That is the ultimate liberal education goal: to teach students how to intelligently solve personal and social problems. As we've been seeing, the more feudalistic institutions become, the more dangerous they can be to the public good.
What? an educational conservative might ask. Are you completely bonkers? Do you really know what you're asking? You're asking history, science, and math teachers to actually learn something about good writing! How realistic is that? And you’re also asking English majors to forget all about their literature studies and learn some practical subject to teach, like psychology or economics.
Those points are well taken, but they're not fatal these liberal ideas. True, secondary teachers would also learn more about how their subjects can be taught with community service projects, but such skills can be learned quickly, especially if schools are converted to a liberal model only one year at a time, beginning with 1st grade. And really now, aren't there more useful facts to learn than literature facts? Psychological and economic knowledge is useful to everyone throughout life, and that makes them more important. In any case, however, this section may help give parents, teachers, and students a few more ideas about teaching intelligent writing in any subject! If ex-math teachers like myself can learn a few rules of good writing, then can't anyone?
In conservative schools, history teachers, for example, usually lecture about their subject, and also assign students to quietly read and then answer some text book questions. As we've been seeing, however, such student activities tend to build passive, non-verbal, unquestioning, and uncreative habits, and are thus less than the best habits for living in a democracy. So, more liberal Deweyan parents and teachers aim at giving students a more enjoyably active role in history, science, and math classes; intelligently writing and performing little skits also helps build more creative thinking and team-oriented character habits too, thus helping make school itself more active, social, and enjoyable while building more democratic habits.
For example, a history class can be asked to divide itself up into teams, and then choose a subject they'd like to write a little skit about, say, some part of Roman history they’ve been studying. Such an active team writing assignment will not only encourage students to do some independent questioning and research to learn more about that period, but also about good writing and teamwork habits as well, the kind of skills many business people use daily in the real world. One team might choose to write about what poor folks did in their daily lives, another team may want to write about soldiers, another about politicians or emperors, and another team may want to write about women’s lives. With such active skits students would begin making historical ideas not only feel alive and more real than mere dry and cold book ideas, but independent research and performing skills would be built as well.
Needless to say, what applies to history also applies to any formal class, even humor or economics. After all, every subject was artfully built by intelligent people, and thus they all have a human element to them. Imagine how much students could learn about freedom of speech, for example, if they wrote and performed a skit about Galileo defending his scientific work before the Inquisition, or Albert Einstein talking to a math tutor about what non-Euclidean geometry can really look like, or about his having to deal with a very possessive, jealous, and insecure wife! Such actively and intelligently written and performed skits thus add what most conservative book-oriented classes now lack, a real human dimension to otherwise dry and cold facts!
Learning how to intelligently write and perform little subject skits is a habit-art useful throughout life. They help build the all-important confidence to intelligently speak up about subjects people feel are important. Why should such skills and habits be largely confined to theatre classes, when they’re useful in any profession? Don't even plumbers and carpenters need to know how to write and speak intelligently? And in the business world many people are asked to make oral presentations on a regular basis, as do sales people, politicians, and even people on a personal relationship level.
Again, in conservative history classes, where teachers normally lecture and give out book assignments, students really don't get much good writing, reasoning, researching, or speaking practice. In such schools the emphasis is always on covering the material for the next test, or standardized test. Thus many useful and intelligent habits in general remain weak, like good writing and speaking arts. As a result, the facts learned in school are soon forgotten. In fact, learning to write, think, and talk intelligently, truthfully, joyfully, and humorously improves and deepens all other habit-arts.
That, then, brings us to the question of what it means to write, think, reason, and talk truthfully and intelligently. Luckily, thanks to the growth of our electronic medium, most everyone now has examples of such skills on a daily basis, on our TVs and radios; even conservative hostile-sounding talk radio hosts are careful of what they say; there are laws against slander and liable. So, even they can become educational when children are taught how to notice what the speaker is saying and what it can mean. It also helps students more easily identify one's assumptions as they speak. Words like no, none, all, everyone, and everything tell us what a speaker's assumptions are. For example, ‘no politicians are trustworthy’ is merely an assumption simply because it can't be proved.
So, the obvious question becomes, what do we mean by the intelligent kinds of talk practiced in Hollywood? Creative writers in the entertainment industry have built a rather interesting speaking habit based mainly on making true statements about themselves! So, the more students start listening more intelligently to such talking, and how a few words are used, the easier it becomes to practice the habit-art in their own subject skits. In general, it's the art of using a few words to talk mainly about one’s own habits. In that way making truthful statements becomes easy, rather than difficult. After all, people know themselves best, and so language can be used to tell others about themself.
Thus, with such writing and speaking skills, talking honestly becomes more than just an idea; it becomes another useful character habit. After all, language and words can be used to convey many meanings, thus allowing talking to take on more than one meaning most people aren’t trained to recognize. It all starts with learning how to use certain abstract words having more than one meaning. After all, talking honestly has been an ideal celebrated for thousands of years. One commandment is You Shall Not Lie, and one of Buddhism's Eight-Fold Path to nirvana is called right-speaking. So, the more we know how to talk about our own feelings and ideas, the less chance there will be for telling lies and misinformation.
Some simple examples will, no doubt, better explain what I mean. Say, for example, some US history students want to write a skit about what some people felt about slavery in the South before the Civil War, and how different people felt differently about it. But if the skit is written intelligently, then it can also reveal some facts about the speakers' own habits and feelings. That's essentially the art of intelligent writing in the entertainment industry, and also in much of life itself. Much of the time, people can not only talk about outside events, but also about their own habits and feelings. The art actually goes back to ancient Greeks like Socrates, who agreed with the ancient saying to Know Yourself! He questioned others’ feelings, trying to show they really didn’t know what he assumed they should know. The more people know what their words can mean, and how to intelligently use some pronoun words like ‘he,’ and ‘she,’ 'this,' and 'that', the more language can become a 2-for-1 sale, so to speak.
When, for example, a speaker uses the abstract pronoun 'this', it has a double meaning. It refers to some object being talked about, like this car or this computer, and it also refers to the speaker itself! Sentences like 'This slave is not well,' then can refer both to a slave, as well as the speaker’s own health! Thus, the word ‘this’ can refer to both objects at the same time! If, on the other hand, a woman says 'That slave is not well,' then we know she's talking about someone else, not this but that object. Do you see how such words can be used to reveal important information about the person speaking?
So what might such a skit sound like? Even in the simple antebellum skit I’ve written we can see more clearly what I mean. The scene is a southern mansion just before the Civil War; it's dinner time and the family's seated around the table.
Father: Well it certain looks like Lincoln's gonna get elected in November. This is certainly not a happy time. Are you boys ready to see that rascal Republican wreck our entire way of life? (The word ‘this’ also tells us the speaker himself is not happy!)
Eldest Son: Well daddy, I fer one am worried; this could be dangerous for all Southerners who want slavery. Everyone knows slaves are inferior people, don't they Daddy? But I'm not ready to die defending that idea. (Again, the word ‘this’ tells us he himself is dangerous to those who believe in slavery. Also, his 'everyone' statement is true, simply because questions aren't statements of fact, just a way of asking for more information. So, he’s not really saying Africans are inferior people, even though it seems he is!)
Eldest Daughter: This is crazy. (Again, she tells us more about herself, referring to her own 'crazy' habit of saying whatever she wants). That's just ridiculous and wrong. (The indefinite pronoun 'that' refers to both the brother's racial idea and to the brother himself.) I certainly don't think of slaves that way. Mammy James raised me to be a good person and I thank her for that. What's more, I've seen some of our slaves work out some really tough problems for themselves. Should we condemn a whole race just because a few aren't really smart? After all, a lotta white folks aren't very smart either, including this young woman! (The phrase word 'good person' also has a special meaning; it refers to both a person's moral habits, but also a sexual habit as well. A good person keeps the same sexual partner, whereas a 'nice' person has several sex partners.)
Second Son: Oh hush up sister dear. That's northern talk. I say all slaves oughta be whipped on a regular basis, so they'll know their place. (Notice again, he's not saying they should be, but rather merely I say they should be! Thus, it's a true statement.) If we don't, they might rise up and kill all of us! (The word ‘might’ can be added to any statement of fact, and thus make it merely probable, not certain and true. After all, isn’t there a chance anything might happen?) Besides, we'll go outta business if we have ta pay slaves to work for us. (Again, the word 'if' is important; all it means is if something happens, then something else might happen, and so he's still truthful. It's called a hypothetical statement. If something happens, then something else might happen.)
Second Daughter: Oh brother dear, that is just not helpful or intelligent. (Again 'that' refers to the brother’s actions.) How can you say such a thing? (Asking a question avoids the whole problem of telling the truth; it’s just a request for more information.) If we have ta pay slaves, we can just raise our prices for cotton, that's all, just like everyone else. (It's another 'if-then' hypothetical question.)
Obviously, young children needed be bothered with all this information about intelligent writing all at once. They can learn more about it as they grow older. But even in such a little skit like that there's a lot of information being given out about the speakers and their feelings. Even primary age students can begin practicing that writing art. What's more, the art of politely but firmly disagreeing with people is another important lesson learned from the skit, especially useful for women who are often trained not to say anything, but merely do what they're told to do. In liberal schools, however, all children are taught habits useful in a healthy democracy, like speaking up when it's felt necessary. If not, then passive and obedient habits will keep making dangerous and stressful feudalistic systems remain in place.
Also, such a history sketch also helps students become more aware of economic ideas too, like all labor costs and taxes are ultimately paid for by the people! The Civil War freed Africans to charge more for their work, but ultimately all the people pay for those increases, not just employers. In short, all such price increases are paid for by the people. Today, the government may tax tobacco and oil companies, but ultimately smokers and drivers end up paying those taxes with higher prices, instead of the tobacco and oil companies.
Also, it becomes easier for students to begin seeing another important economic fact of life. The more people are allowed to hide their money in overseas banks, and thus avoid paying taxes, then the more taxes others must pay to make up the difference. The point is, with such intelligent skits the very important world of economics begins opening up too, a subject conservative book-oriented schools usually keep ignoring, as they do with political activism. When have you ever seen a student protest against some local politician or business owner? So, in more liberal public schools both economics and politics become much more important; such knowledge is useful throughout life, not just to pass the next test. And such skits also encourage more intelligent questions, like how many Southerners were for abolition, and how many Northerners were for slavery? Why were there riots in New York City after Lincoln started drafting men into the Union Army, and how much did wealthy folks like John Pierpont Morgan pay the government not to fight in the war?
Given such research and writing freedom, and of course some guidance by teachers and even older students, such writing skills can begin growing even in primary schools. What 5th graders wouldn’t like to write and act out a little skit about how different insects attack other insects, and how those who are attacked might feel? Wouldn’t it be a great way to teach bullies how their actions make others feel? And, again, such skits would help grow some intelligent feelings about all forms of health, from biological to political. For example, in a skit about buying a car, wouldn’t students start learning more about our economic system itself, and how, say, when someone buys a new car they helping pay for auto workers' health insurance and retirement benefits? They can also be used to teach others about intelligently buying a used car. Such skits involving real life situations, not only the outer world will become better known, but the inner world of personal feelings and habits will be better defined as well. No doubt, learning such writing habit-arts will feel awkward at first, but what new habit-art doesn’t feel awkward at first?
Here's another little skit helping explain the ideas I’ve been talking about. Please notice again how good speaking habits like truth-telling are also encouraged with such skits. It's an interrogation scene with a detective and a suspect, also showing how important it is to respect just and fair laws. A detective stands over a sitting suspect, questioning him.
Det: Do you know a prostitute named Belle Merriweather?
Sus: I ain't never seen her. (A double negative statement means he has seen her.)
Det: Cut the double negative crap Sluggo; we got witnesses who say they saw you with her day before last.
Sus: Alright, maybe I seen her once or twice before, but she just chatted. (Even if he never saw Belle, the word 'maybe' makes the statement true. And, the second indefinite pronoun 'she’ could also refer to the speaker, telling the audience more about his inner feelings.)
Det: What about Belle’s boyfriend, Weasel McHenry?
Sus: The Weasel? This guy's a flake; he can't keep his mind on one subject for more than a few minutes. (Again, the word ‘this’ referred to the person talking, and tells more about his inner world.) I was with him once, but we didn’t connect. (Again, true enough; the indefinite pronoun ‘him’ could refer to any male he was ever with! Using indefinite pronouns like that in fact make it easy to talk about the person speaking. What's more, with such pronoun use it's much easier for young folks to start seeing themselves more objectively, to tell others what they’re like merely with the word 'this.': this is hopeless; this is great.)
Det: When’s the last time you saw Belle?
Sus: I dunno. I think it was last Tuesday. (Again, the words 'I think' prevent anyone from making a false statement; I think merely means someone’s thinking about something. "I think I’m on Mars’ is true if I really think it!)
Det: Did you ever give Weasel any money for Bell’s sexual services?
Sus: Only once, but nothing happened; she's really a nut-case. (True again. The words ‘only once’ have no truth value. It’s not a complete statement; it’s just a phrase. And again, ‘she’ could refer to any woman or even the actor himself. After all, there's more to being a woman or man than just having a female or male body; there’s also the inner psychological feeling.)
So, just by experimenting with such simple writing and performing skits students can easily begin feeling how to speak more intelligently and truthfully at the same time. By using pronouns even young students can thus begin feeling how to tell others about their own habits and feelings. When a male, for example, uses the word 'he' he also can tell others about himself. In the second skit we learn the suspect may like to connect with men, thinks he's flakey, sometimes lies, and doesn’t relate well to some women. In short, such writing and speaking helps students to know themselves better and learn more about others are feeling.
Also worth mentioning is another useful speaking habit for those who want to respect and speak truthfully. That's the habit of answering one question with another question; it preserves respect for both the truth, for others, and also protects one's privacy. For example, suppose a friend asks ‘Are you going shopping now?’ someone might ask ‘What do you need from the store?’ That way the conversation stays alive and focused on getting more information, rather than staying on a question-and-answer level. It's also a good way to ward off impolite and nosey people. A stranger might ask ‘Are you going to Los Angeles?’ and get the reply ‘Who isn't?’ Also, the more people use the word please, the more impolite and respectful they act. A rude person may ask ‘Get me a soda will ya? and someone may say ‘Get it yourself, will ya?’ The greedy rich will always be with us, right? Did you notice how the word 'right' turned a statement into a question, and thus saved me from making what might be a false statement?
Building New Ethical Feelings Too
In the upper grades such writing and speaking habits can also begin helping produce some important ethical feelings as well. For example, down through history different philosophers have said there's a big ethical difference between using results to justify one's actions, and using merely a person's inner motives and feelings to act ethically. In fact, Dewey notes how most ethical systems are divided between saying outer results or inner motives are ethically most important. Ancient sophists and modern-day Utilitarians say what’s most important ethically is the outer result of improving our social world. If, say, the outer result of an action produces more pleasure than pain, then it’s a good action. So, if a program like Social Security produces more social pleasure than pain, then we should pass it and keep it going, even if some conservatives say it’s too socialistic and not in the true spirit of capitalism and profit-making.
On the other hand, however, many believe what matters most ethically are one’s inner motives, desires, and feelings. Only they should determine if an action is ethically right and moral. Stoics, Christians, and Immanuel Kant said what’s ethically most important is not the outer results of an action, but rather a person’s inner motives. Thus following one’s inner motives is best, like doing one’s duty and obeying god’s will, or one’s good will motives for telling the truth no matter what the outer results may be. For such people, damn the outer results and do what you feel is right.
So, another great thing about writing and performing such skits, high school students can begin growing more aware of such important philosophic issues. What's more ethically important; outer results or inner feelings and motives? For liberals like Dewey, however, it's a false and artificial separation. For him both one's inner motives and outer results are important for doing what's ethically right and good. What's ethically right about wanting to build a more satisfying public good, and yet keeping all the money one makes? Such questions and skits in any class can become talked about at the high school level. It's another way we liberals want to keep increasing the outer public good as well as keep building a set of intelligent and healthy inner motives. Intelligently writing little skits thus helps students know what kinds of inner motives are healthy, and which ones could be healthier. Is a selfish motive healthy and right, and if not, then how can it be improved.
Making TV and Films More Meaningful
The more students focus on writing such skits and questions, another useful result is produced: TV, films, and real life become more meaningful. The simple statement, ‘This is nice’, for example, not only tells us something about the outer world, but the person’s inner sexual habits as well, namely they’re not faithful to only one partner.
When, for example, actors say things like “This is disgusting,” or “This is hopeless,” they share important facts about their inner feelings and the outer world! The person speaking is disgusting, hopeless, and nice. Such talking opens up the entire range of human actions and habits to simple statements. ‘She's a real Black Widow’ means exactly that; she can be dangerous to certain men. And the same can be said for words like fools, hustlers, saints, and angels. Some in Hollywood really practice Robin Hood-type habits -- robbing from the greedy rich and giving to the needy poor. As a result, statements like ‘He's just another Robin Hood’ are much more than mere words. After all, Hollywood has integrity in its work: actors who actually have such habits get to play such roles in movies; it makes acting itself much easier and more meaningful.
Humphrey Bogart, for example, played detective roles simply because he himself practiced capturing murderers in real life, or killing evil Nazis, or becoming dangerously paranoid if he didn't drink alcohol, like happened in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre! Errol Flynn and many others played a Robin Hood role because their actions and motives were similar; he wanted to help the poor and disadvantaged and acted to do so! It's another result of Behavioral role-playing; the more a role is played, the more its motive feeling can be felt; the more one practices a healthy diet, the more its motive feelings grow.
So again, creatively teaching intelligent speaking and writing habits can be learned more naturally within a more active writing and role-playing learning model. It also imitates the kind of learning kids use in the real world. Performing skits can be used in school not only to teach young folks how to speak more truthfully with questions and indefinite pronouns, but also share information about themselves, and thus learn more about themselves as well as make school a much more informative place to be. How can students help psychically damaged people unless they know more about their inner motive feelings? Thus, such honest speaking helps make school much more interesting than merely sitting quietly and reading books day after day and year after year.
Writing and performing skits is thus another important way of becoming a more mature person. And, such skits can also be therapeutic. They can help students change possibly dangerous subconscious motives and feelings into more healthful ones! For example, often it’s said movie and TV provokes real violence; monkey see, monkey do. There's some evidence for it too; some studies show children are more likely to act violently after seeing acts of violence. So, those who like to watch such shows may mean they too have similar subconsciously violent motive-feelings, and so just might produce dangerous actions. Thus, the more such students are identified, the easier it becomes to help them grow some more intelligent feelings with more positive and constructive skits. If not, such feelings could eventually turn to violent actions when such impulsive motives are acted out!
So, the TV shows and movies a student likes to watch can reveal some important information about one's inner motive-feelings. They're an important sign of what’s going on inside them. Student skits can thus help bring subconscious motives to a more conscious level of awareness, so they can be talked about intelligently, with friends or even those with more psychological knowledge. Also, students in a psychology lab can begin learning about more healthful and intelligent ways of acting out their violent motive-feelings, like punching inflated dolls. No doubt, violent movies may help produce violent actions, but they liberal educational challenge is helping them know how to express violent feelings constructively and harmlessly, so others won’t be endangered, right? We'll see more ideas about psychological excellence in Section 37.
So, in reality many useful educational results can spring from helping young folks start learning more about Hollywood’s self-revealing talking arts, and also how to use performing skills to help build more healthful motives and habits. Even Bible skits can help produce such results. If so, then such active skits become very useful educational tools helping students of all ages to feel more at home in the adult world they're living in. Comedic skits and acting silly about potentially dangerous feelings may be even more helpful for building more intelligent motives and habits. They too help young students gain more self-knowledge and a more healthful control over their own actions. In fact many so-called Fundamental Christian churches are already using such speaking habit; if you listen closely to some sermons and the words used, the speaker is telling people more about their own feelings than anything else.
Also, such small performing skits can be great way for students to start experimenting with another useful habit-art: story-telling with film. As good cameras become more affordable, students can be encouraged to record their skits, helping see themselves more objectively, and better learn what they like and don't like about themselves. The aim is to help students realize habits and just habits, everyone has their own different set of them, and more intelligent actions can build more intelligent habits. It gives meaning to the old saying, work is the best therapy. Such useful behavioral facts help empower anyone to gain more control of their life.
Such skills thus help make school a more humanistic place to be, instead of places where academic facts are learned, and then soon forgotten, and a slave-like obedience is demanded on a daily basis. Instead, schools become places where students can be honest about themselves, and also learn more about other students. So, when we teach young folks how to give their words a personal level of meaning, we not only encourage more intelligent and humane talking habits, but how to consciously feel their own subconscious motive feelings, and thus become better connected to their own motives. Such skits thus help bring children out of their self-centered psychic bubble, so to speak, and into the more social realm of adult living. In promoting such writing and performing skills in all classes, students learn what down-to-earth honesty means. At least that's what this dummy says! So, if nothing else, why shouldn't all liberal parents, teachers, and students demand such skits become a regular part of all public school classes? To say the least, they help students know themselves better, and also the past actions helping make our world what it is today.
22. LIBERATING TOOLS
As we’ve seen throughout these pages, nature is a continuing process of change and reconstruction, but we humans have developed an experimental art helping expand our physical powers to better protect us from nature's destructive events, as well as keep improving nature itself. It's the experimental art of tool making and using. With physical tools we've begun liberating ourselves from nature's total control. In fact, our tools have become so developed we can now work to improve nature at its most fundamental atomic level. We can now even build better life forms including human improvements as well; indeed, the future looks brighter now than it ever has, thanks to our tools. Certainly, many challenges still remain, like learning which new objects, like modified foods, will actually work best, but our growing tool chest has finally helped open the door to eternal improvement. Thus, also challenging is learning to share more equally the benefits of such improvements. Liberal democratic schools will begin teaching students such feelings.
Global warming, too, seems to be a growing major challenge for us tool-using humans. If we can create more eco-friendly transportation tools, like electric and solar engines helping harness more of nature's renewable energies, and phase out coal-burning energy plants and internal combustion engines, less dangerous carbon dioxide and methane will go into our air and we'll increase the chances for more people to enjoy nature's great gift of life itself. In our ever-changing and precarious world economics too has become a powerful tool, so why shouldn't students begin seeing how its intelligent use helps make life better for everyone? Greed remains a habit-art as deadly as global warming.
Biological, Physical, and Mental Tools
Sad to say, in most of our public elementary schools knowledge about tools and how to use them intelligently is still greatly neglected, especially in the earlier grades. Even in public high schools tool use is usually restricted to small wood and metal shops, making personal objects rather than helping improve neighborhood conditions. Computers are also becoming more popular, but often students use them for playing games. In more liberal schools, however, even 1st graders can begin feeling how, say, some safe gardening tools can be used intelligently as a way to test new ideas while working to improve the world around them. What flowers are best to grow in our own weather climate, and how can we make useful objects for them to grow in, as well as nap mats, and cardboard shop fronts.
Given the age of the earth, both humans and tool use have only recently evolved. Our 5 billion year old earth has been continually changing since its birth. At one time Alaska sat on the equator, the Appalachian Mountains were as tall as today's Rockies, and dinosaurs could walk from Poland to New York, where some might say some still exist. For almost all that time biological tools continued mutating, some of which became useful internal organ-tools. For example, after Permian trilobites of 250 million years ago became extinct in a worldwide Ice Age, Triassic reptile organs began growing in numbers; as Cretaceous dinosaurs were dying out about 65 million years ago, our small and wily little primate organ-tools grew more useful. But then, more than 2 million years ago physical tool-making began using natural objects like stones to make life better. That tool-making art has remained useful from that day to this, as has the challenge to use such tools peacefully for the public good, rather than violently for the benefit of only a few.
For hundreds of thousands of years simple stone tools like axes and hammers helped increased the control and production of food. So far nature has encouraged those kinds of tool-making habits. With such tools, begun over 2 million years ago, life for our hominid ancestors like Homo habilis became a little easier and more livable. Within their small African clans tool use started becoming a very important part of both nature and human life. They helped defend clan member and get more food in a very dangerous world. One hungry saber-toothed tiger might just ruin your whole day. So, without physical tools we would almost certainly have remained a small and rather vulnerable species.
Much later, some Erectus ancestors slowly evolved into Neandertals about 200,000 years ago in Europe; they were better adapted to live in Ice Age conditions. They in turn were replaced by our better tool making Cro-Magnon ancestors, beginning about 30,000 years ago. Lately archeological tools have even helped find evidence for some new human species. Through all such changes, however, the continuing challenge was to keep gaining more intelligent control of nature and use it to keep improving life. Thus, for the most part, our physical tool-making and using habit-arts have continued liberating many of us from remaining a slave to the limits of our own weak and puny biological tools. A major current challenge, however, is liberating people from those who greedily use economic tools to keep enriching themselves at the expense of others.
Tools Open the Way for Liberal Thinking
Later on, in ancient Greece, as people gained more control over nature by making better physical iron and bronze tools, they helped open the way for an entirely new liberal model of nature. A few practical-minded people in what is now Western Turkey begin building a new liberal model of life and nature, one offering people a way of seeing life much different from the conservative spirit-based model. Intelligently using their tool-making and using arts to build business colonies outside of Greece, a few secular thinkers became convinced mankind had become dominant over all other animals not because spirit-gods created them and gave them tools, like fire for example, but rather we ourselves gradually built our useful tool kit to intelligently make life better for everyone. In fact, that liberal model of life and nature has, since the 1600s, become the most fruitful and productive philosophic model. Our modern tools continue liberating us from nature’s dangers, allow us to control more natural energies, and thus make life better.
Thus, with the expansion of our physical tool kits in ancient Greece, Western civilization's first liberal secular model of life and nature was created – Atomism. In the 400s BCE creative people like Democritus began using a few ideas as mental tools to build an entire liberal atomistic model of life and nature. And of course today, microscopes, telescopes, computers, and tool-making machines continue giving us more control over microscopic enemies as well. Such tools have opened up entirely new worlds to study, learn about, better control, and thus keep making life safer and more livable. The challenge today, however, for nations like the US remains not letting such power be controlled by a narrow and small number of people mainly for their own profit and well-being.
Recently, liberal Behavioral psychologists like Dewey have also used a few ideas as tools for building a more useful psychological model. How do children best learn what they know, and how can we make their ideas even more intelligent and democratic? Thus, new idea-tools continue growing, like intelligent practice, imaginative and creative question-asking, experimental testing of idea, and of course the very important idea of useful results as the best way to judge how intelligent our ideas are. A mere 4 centuries ago such idea-tools started giving Western civilization a much greater conscious control over conservative learning habit-arts like contemplative reasoning and mere logical thinking. Without those liberal experimental kinds of idea-tools human progress would be much less than it is now, and schools would be even more medieval as well.
Ancient Greek Philosophic Tools
Earlier we saw what, for conservative Plato, was a very important philosophic idea-tool – his psychological model of human nature. Such a conservative tool was then used to justify many of his educational ideas. In his Republic, for example, his model of human nature said everyone has an inborn and innate 3-faculty psyche. He called them the nutritive, combative, and rational faculties; in effect they acted like philosophic tools, and helped justify building not only conservative schools and political systems, but also saying who should be educated, and who shouldn’t be.
For example, in a vivid simile he used the idea-tool of a reasoning faculty and said it was like a divine chariot driver. In some people that faculty could control the other 2 faculties of desire-appetite and combativeness. In most people, however, such a controlling faculty was pictured as weak and ineffective. As a result, only those with a strong reasoning faculty should be educated to become political leaders; they could best control their sexual and food desires, greed, and war-like impulses. Only they had the reasoning power to remember what he assumed was all the eternal and unchanging divine knowledge each of us has in our psyches at birth. Thus for him, physical tool use for making a living could produce only secular practical knowledge, and that was far from what felt to him was the best eternal and unchanging spirit-knowledge. So, with his conservative idea-tools, he concluded only such people should be allowed political power after being carefully educated for some 50 years.
Being a conservative aristocrat by both birth and education, he felt most people had very weak divine faculties of reasoning, and so to teach most everyone a reasoning habit-art would be a waste of time. To him most people merely wanted to work, eat, drink, and satisfy their sexual desires. In effect, then, his psychological idea-tools helped justify not building public schools for everyone. Most everyone should either learn a tool-using skill or become a soldier-guardian; for them shield and spear were their basic tools. No doubt, many conservatives today still feel the same way. College costs have become more expensive for all students, but wealthy aristocrats can better afford to pay them. And in public schools future low-skilled workers should learn to obey their supervisors and learn what they're told to learn. For such people to learn independent and intelligent habits of thinking and acting would be dangerous to all forms of concentrated power, including economic and political power.
Faculties Became Psychological Idea-Tools
In effect, then, Plato’s 3-faculty psychological model was used as a philosophic tool helping justify a basic feudalistic educational system. In ancient Athens only highly rational types, like Socrates or the gifted mathematician Theateatus, should continue their education to eventually become rulers when they were older. And such educational ideas continued justifying a feudalistic social status quo all through the Middle Ages, only then with religious Christian ideas. Thus people were told secular kings and queens, as well as the Pope, were in fact chosen by god to rule over others, and so obedience remained the most important character habit.
As we've seen, throughout history, mostly only noble-born boys were educated. Even as the medieval world evolved into our modern one, similar psychological idea-tools continued dominating educational systems. Such ideas were used from Augustine in the 400s, to Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s, and into the 1700s by Germans like Immanuel Kant and Scotsman skeptics like David Hume. The result continued to be a faculty model of learning, eventually called atomistic psychology after Democritus' atomic ideas became useful scientific learning tools. Faculties were said to be more or less independent learning powers developed by certain kinds of subjects. Both Kant and Hume’s psychology made such idea-tools eternally unchanging human faculties. Hume even wanted to be known as psychology’s ‘Isaac Newton’, and the discoverer of eternal psychological truth. At the time most everyone still felt Newton had already discovered the eternal scientific Truth about nature and gravity, and why the planets and tides act as they do. In one place even atheist Friedrich Nietzsche agreed with Plato’s ancient 3-part psyche, minus the divine reason of course. For him the combative faculty-will was much stronger than a reasoning faculty. However, in the late 1800s such psychological idea-tools began being challenged by more liberal thinkers, Dewey included. In essence they were unscientific, and thus merely arbitrary and baseless. In Section 28 we’ll see how, in the early 1900s, faculty psychology was finally proved to be a pure and unadulterated mythical assumption-tool, but I wanted to again mention it so readers will be a little more familiar with the idea, and how it's been used as a psychological tool the same way carpenters use their tools to build their objects.
The Rise of Behavioral Learning Idea-Tools
Today, with great confidence we liberal Deweyans say such conservative faculty idea-tools, celebrating passive kinds of reasoning, should be replaced with much more active experimental ideas like habit-building, intelligent practice, and learning to see the best future results for their work. When students are taught such habit-arts, then universal education is more easily justified than it is in a more conservative model. For us liberals most everyone can be educated to learn many different kinds of excellent habit-arts, especially democratic ones. All it takes is a little actively enjoyable practice involving muscles as well as minds. And, the more that happens, the more liberated all students become to not only intelligently guide their own learning, but also build more democratic institutions helping end all concentrated feudalistic systems of power.
As we've seen, the conservative educational goal is often said to be creating ‘well-rounded adults’; sometimes the educational goal is teaching students how to solve their own problems. But within most public schools a book-dominated system is still practiced, where students learn how to solve mainly useless academic problems, like who discovered America and how to solve abstract math problems. In such schools both personal and current social problems are almost always ignored. In effect, then, the conservative public school goal reduces to training students for learning more academic facts in college, even though some 70% of high school students don’t go to college, and far fewer than 30% graduate. What's more, such schools continue conditioning students to build undemocratic habits, like obeying their supervising teachers with no questions asked. How many times have you ever heard a student ask a teacher why are you asking us to learn such useless knowledge?
Many feel eventually most students will probably learn how to make a living with physical tools, if they're lucky enough to find a job. Today, more than 20 million people in the US are finding even that goal difficult since the latest economic recession of 2007-09. It's yet more evidence parents are still clueless about how to improve their own public schools, aren't very practical-minded about education, and unconcerned about teaching students how to intelligently solve their personal and social problems. Most people still ignore teaching students how to use democratic tools like protests, organizing people to better share power, and of course voting intelligently.
However, with more liberal democratic ideas of educational freedom and experimental learning, it becomes easier for all students to see how future results are the best objects of knowledge, in whatever field they study in. Such results are what have made scientific learning-tools much more reliable than, say, conservative learning tools of reading and memorizing more academic facts. And, such results have helped build the democracy we now have, as weak as it still is. Such active and experimental learning-tools, like intelligent experimentation, have become much more important tools for all students, not just the intellectually gifted. After all, most everyone can build the excellent democratic character habits helping make life much more rewarding and safer with a little enjoyable practice.
For us Deweyan liberals those are the best results for our public schools; what best endures is the good done for others, said Dewey. Learning how to intelligently use such experimentally active idea-tools simply helps children better learn what they want to learn, as well as keep improving our own neighborhoods. Don't even gifted students need to learn active intelligent actions are the most effective way to build the strongest kinds of character excellence.
In short, the liberal psychological learning-tools of modern Behaviorism mean most every student can learn many useful kinds of excellent habit-arts. We liberals use them for teaching students more than merely how to prepare for the next subject or standardized test. That to us is a rather perverse educational model, and has no place in a democratic society. Much more important for democratic health is learning how to intelligently improve both personal and social weaknesses and excesses, like hatred and greed. Like adults, kids too find some ideas and skills more interesting than others, and so the science and art of liberal education itself becomes first learning what student needs and desires are, and then use those interests for also teaching them what creative, constructive, intelligent, respectful, and scientific habits of learning feel like. What's more, in that process physical tools like hammers, saws, and drills become very useful for students of all ages. As we saw earlier, young children go through a constructive building period from around 8 to 11 or 12. So, the more they learn how to build things intelligently, like useful beautification workshops of all kinds, the easier it becomes to keep them emotionally involved with school and learning. Conservative schools have a major drop-out problem simply because they ignore student needs and desires.
On a behavioral level for hundreds of thousands of years our primitive tool-making ancestors treated learning as an active, organic, and experimental affair, and so learning itself was a natural process. However, with the growth of organized schools it became economically useful to educate only wealthier students, and teach them the knowledge useful to their social class. Such a model is no longer best in any growing democracy.
Vocational Schools
Why not? Two words -- Industrial Revolution. Since the early 1900s vocational schools have become more popular. With Dewey's help they began helping students learn more about using and making tools. Society was becoming mechanized and so the more students knew how to operate such tools, the easier it was to get a job. Soon, however, he saw how such schools often focused on merely teaching students how to run a machine or work on an assembly line. Young folks thus often became extensions of the corporate world, and were paid poorly compared to the millions owners were making. Thus life for workers often remained stressful and frustrating. Around 1900 the country’s industrial sector was growing stronger, with the help of new inventions and also high consuming events like World War 1; war has always been good for business. And so most vocational schools quickly became less than what they could be. Many continued ignoring teaching students useful character habit-tools for solving personal and social challenges, like ending political corruption, how to form labor unions, and better liberate their politicians from wealthy control. In fact, those goals have become even more important in the last 30 years as wealth has become much more concentrated in a small upper class.
For Dewey, there’s much more to excellent tool use than merely running a machine, no matter what kind it is. Again, the results of such machines help determine their worth and value. Why keep producing more guns and tanks rather than those objects helping build a more peaceful and respectful world, like better schools and more recreational areas. Why should wealthy folks have the most freedom to enjoy months of recreation while workers are kept anchored to their work-tools? Why shouldn't workers also have the freedom and power to say what should be built, like more electric cars and more environmental friendly power generators? In short, vocational schools too could be doing much more to better educate students about the effects of their work on both themselves and our world, so as to help students become less vulnerable to corporate profit-making and all the harmful results that goal can produce? Recently, automotive CEOs easily ran their companies into bankruptcy; it was easy without more democratic worker control of their own company decisions. And once union contracts were ended, it became easy to write new ones paying workers much less than they made before. Why shouldn’t vocational students be learning how they too can help build a more democratic world by organizing and then demanding more democratic decision-making power? Why shouldn't they too be learning how socially dangerous concentrated economic power can be for those not allowed to have such decision-making power? Without such power the feudalistic world continues on.
The more such important democratic character habits are taught in public and vocational schools, the easier it is to feel even ideas themselves are mental tools useful for building a more democratic world. It might not sound like an important idea, but it is. It makes thinking creatively itself easier; if one idea-tool doesn’t work, then try another. So, the more students feel mind and body aren’t really 2 different objects, and schools shouldn’t teach mere academic book-facts, the easier it is to build more liberal schools where ideas are used as tools to keep improving life. Down through history the conservative separation of mind and body has made it easy to keep students learning more abstract knowledge, and thus keep life more stressful and unhealthful for everyone. After all, even kings and queens get sick. So again, we see how important the simple psychological idea-tool of body-mind is for building more active and experimental public schools. When body and mind are seen as one object, then constructive and intelligent actions help build constructive and intelligent feelings and ideas. The challenge of building such liberal schools is still with us. Feudalistic conservatives simply don't want anyone learning democratic habits with active and intelligent practice, especially not in economic and political ways. Those are the fields when fortunes continue to be controlled for just a few people. Presently, around 30,000 make more than 10 million dollars a year, and as we’re seeing today, the personal and social results of that feudalistic economic system are making life more stressful for millions.
So, when those kinds of democratic habits are taught in academic and vocational schools, students can more easily begin feeling how democracy should work for the public good, and also how they can begin taking a more intelligent control over their own growth and learning. The key, again, is knowing what results a person wants their actions to produce, and then slowly practicing such actions a little at a time. Someone who wants to lose some extra weight, for example, would then practice eating a more healthful breakfast, and once that habit starts growing, then moving on to lunch, and so on. Such practice is also the key to improving one’s liberal voting habits, spending a little more time each day to intelligently choose those people who also will work for the same results, like, say, ending the power of obscenely wealthy people to keep controlling our political system. In liberal schools such skills are not separate from any other subject; they’re an important part of every subject. Who doesn’t know mathematical, historical, and even scientific facts are a part of all political decisions? So, learning more democratic political also teaches other important facts as well. Have you ever heard an intelligent politician who doesn’t also know many useful math, science, and history facts?
Without teaching students in all schools such democratic skills, feudalistic institutions easily continue becoming more powerful and dangerous. Luckily, in more liberal schools, such habits of organized student power can start growing in elementary schools, with simple building projects. When students are allowed to work on different constructive and cooperative projects like, say, building classroom and school planters, then math, science, and history facts also begin growing, as well as how intelligent actions help make life more beautiful and learning more enjoyable. The stronger such habits grow even in vocational schools, the easier it becomes to begin feeling democratic power is the most intelligent tool for improving all social weaknesses and excesses. With such intelligent tool-using projects, learning itself becomes more fluid, organic, enjoyable, active, creative, and less stressful, rather than passive, boring, and overly repetitious.
Other Liberal Educational Results
Several other useful results can easily happen from such constructive tool-work. For one thing, students can begin seeing even mathematical ‘certainties’ are merely human art, not eternal Truth. As we’ve seen, Plato said mathematical reasoning way the only way to learn eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth. Secondly, tool-based community work-projects help give students the confidence they can keep improving life if they work together as a team. It was no accident the first truly liberal democratic models of life and nature began growing in the ancient Greek world where tool-based colony building was a regular part of life for hundreds of years BEFORE democracy evolved in the 400s BCE! Indeed, because of such democratic results, people like Socrates and Plato began a conservative countermovement; they began using their idea-tools experimentally to see if they could discover any eternal meanings in nature, and thus re-energize conservative feelings for eternal and unchanging kinds of knowledge. Socrates failed in the attempt, and it took his student Plato decades to discover he couldn’t learn about such objects either.
Third, such tool-work helps students begin seeing life more objectively, rather than subjectively. They can begin seeing a feudalistic conservative model of life and nature is, in fact, rather harsh, inhumane, and out of touch with most people. Even simple constructive building projects like classroom planters help young students feel everyone’s work is important, and isn’t that feeling the best basis of any healthy democratic system. Carpentry and plumbing skills are often just as useful as computer and drawing skills. Thus, a creative tool-based school became the basis of Dewey's liberal educational model, helping build important feelings for intelligent and cooperative work. In such schools, then, teachers help bring such feelings to a conscious level of awareness, so students can begin not only feeling them, but thinking and talking about them as well.
No doubt, many people still feel teaching students to work with physical tools is somehow less than best, even though they can help young folks earn honest and good money after graduation. But what's also emphasized in good liberal schools is using tools creatively and intelligently in one’s community. In fact, even the world's smartest people learn to use tools creatively, both physical and mental idea-tools. If they didn’t, new tool creation would be almost non-existent. Physicists and engineers use tools to creatively build atomic accelerators and airplanes, lawyers use idea-tools to prove guilt or innocence, and politicians use idea-tools and write new laws. But students will also learn another important fact of life: too often new idea-tools come from the corporate world and are meant to keep increasing their power. That's the basic feudalistic political model we have today, and to we liberals it can be made to work for the public good only as our politicians are liberated from corporate financing. Such results can start growing at a small local level of government, and continue growing from there, just as any new habit grows on a personal level.
Such work-projects will also build a more intelligent idea of tools. Today, many people often think of tools like carpentry and plumbing tools. So, they tend to look down on those using such tools as a sign of mental inferiority. As we’ll see shortly, I too had such feelings. But in reality dental and surgical tools are not inherently better than carpentry or plumbing tools when one wants to build a new cabinet or fix a broken pipe; in fact in that situation they’re inferior. Plumbers even sometimes make more money than some dentists and doctors who often have huge education debts to pay, as well as high medical malpractice insurance.
The habit-art of intelligent and creative tool use at the primary level would help expand such narrow feelings about tools. Teachers in conservative schools are usually not interested in teaching such habits as creative tool-use; most of the time they're interested in just teaching children how to solve a problem, so they'll be able to pass the next standardized test, upon which their jobs often depend. But, from around 8 to 12 years of age children are especially curious about building things with tools; for many it's a natural activity for their growing bodies. So, why shouldn’t all intelligent and creative tool use too be cherished, looked after, and celebrated in our public schools? They help liberate students from their own weak and limited bodies, and, if taught creatively, also liberate one’s thinking habits as well.
Only tools, both physical and mental idea-tools, have been the greatest liberators of our human race, but their intelligent use for personal and community improvement has been almost completely neglected in our conservative public schools. For them book-facts are all important, not student growth and excellence. As a result, people have rather shallow feelings about the results of their own actions. Car drivers and coal-burning power plants around the world are now contributing to global warming on a serious level, thus challenging more people to build more eco-friendly kinds of transportation and energy systems. So, schools and the media are becoming more important than ever before. Students in liberal schools will find it much easier to begin feeling such results, as well as feeling challenged to creatively respond to them. How big of a carbon 'footprint' do students have, and how can it best be reduced, both personally and socially? Time will certainly tell. Either way, teaching students to start feeling how such challenges will best be solved creatively with our habit-tools remains one of our greatest educational challenges. Not celebrating such ideas and actions in fact makes life that much more difficult, dangerous, and stressful. Rich folks can easily move to cooler climates, but most people don't have that freedom.
All is certainly not lost. There are some hopeful educational signs even within the establishment media. For example, in the Wall Street Journal of 12-2-12 a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., Caleb Rossiter, essentially agreed with Dewey when he said "... schools should rework their reading and math curricula to prepare (children) for trades ... such as bricklayer, hairdresser, plumber, nurse's assistant, or computer technician." Dewey of course was much more elegant in saying similar things. Even such professions still have a great deal of room for creative improvement. Not only did Dewey want all students to learn something about using tools in the real world, but more importantly, also about intelligent and creative tool use. As the old saying goes, there're more ways than one to skin a cat. Still, it shows how even some conservative newspapers now are thinking about education more like Dewey did several decades ago. The social and personal results of such schools are becoming more unacceptable.
Another example of tool-use’s cooperative benefits can be seen in many of Finland's schools. There teachers are well paid and trained, guidance counselors are plentiful, each student is fed and made to feel equal to all others, and cooperative exercises are emphasized as well. Anu Partanen's article in The Atlantic magazine, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success, talks about how their more active schools make it easier for students to learn more academic facts; test scores put their students in the highest levels of accomplishment. A little later we'll see how students in liberal Deweyan schools can also do well in conservative schools, and more importantly, learn some excellent learning habits in liberal schools as well. Finland's neighbor Norway, however, has a system similar to the US's, where students mainly sit at desks all day and do book-work, and their test scores are much lower than Finland's. So, the educational moral of the story is ____________? (It’s a fill-in-the-blank pop quiz!)
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
Remember when you were starting a new school year and your teacher asked you to write a little essay about what you did during your summer vacation? Well, here’s my 2 paragraph offering.
While in college one summer I worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, helping build an addition to a hospital. For a few weeks I had the difficult job of drilling holes in pieces of iron. The work was slow but I was young and strong and so routinely plunged ahead with more muscle than mind. After a few days, however, my supervisor noticed I was still working in the same routine way, using more muscle than creative thinking. So, he sent one of the other carpenters around. He looked at what I was working on, and within minutes built a lever which made the drilling much easier. I wonder if he heard the sound of my jaw dropping. Here was this ‘hotshot’ Joe College who had even taken Honors Physics in high school, and yet my knowledge was merely about ideas, rather than how to creatively use my idea-tools in the real world. My knowledge was separated from practice, and so remained merely ideas, rather than vibrant and powerful knowledge.
Even today I can still feel how amazed I was at how inventive and creative that ‘lowly’ carpenter was with just a few simple tools. He probably never took a physics class in his life, and yet his practice -- his creative experience -- taught him the same kinds of level-ideas I had merely redd about in school. Thus, his knowledge was much richer, deeper, wiser, and more useful than mine. Amazing. Another one of life’s ‘insignificant’ people had more real physics inventiveness and creativity than this ‘big shot’ Joe College!
Arrogantly looking down on those who use tools to actually build things still seems to be a common feeling for many people around the world. Because our conservative public schools generally restrict such tool use to wood and metal shop classes, and even then teach little about creatively using such tools, students learn little about creative tool use both in school and in their neighborhoods. Such shop classes are often reduced to, say, making key chain bobbles or smoking pipes. As a result, students also don’t learn one of life’s greatest habit-arts -- how to use tools intelligently and gracefully in the real world. How many girls are almost completely helpless when it comes to fixing anything, like a car, and so need to spend money because they lack such knowledge?
In her excellent book Inside Soviet Schools, Susan Jacoby describes some of these feelings. She talks about the negative reaction of Soviet bureaucrats to Khrushchev’s school reforms; he insisted students get more work experience, especially at harvest time. Before that, however, it had been an important part of many progressive Russian schools when Dewey and other educators visited in the late 1920s. After that, however, such liberal ideas apparently grew less important as Russian industrialization took off in the 1930s, and also after Khrushchev was ousted from power during the cold war. The Cuban Missile crisis humiliated the Russian establishment. Ms. Jacoby describes a Russian prejudice against those who use tools for a living, as if doctors and lawyers were somehow always better people than manual workers. In reality, however, many doctors and lawyers are mainly interested in making as much money as they can. Here, however, are some questions liberal people might ask: Are all doctors or computer programmers always better people just because their tools help them make more money than all those who make less? Aren’t there crooks and incompetents in every profession, and if that’s true, then isn’t the habit-art of working intelligently and honestly much more socially important than anything else?
More Useful Results from Intelligent Tool Use
No doubt many conservative US educators and bureaucrats have similar feelings against allowing students to actually use tools on community projects. How many colleges and universities, high schools, and elementary schools ignore such work projects, where students use real tools to test how their creative plans work for improving life? In fact, how many such schools still ignore such tool-use even on simple neighborhood rehab or useful building projects?
For us liberal Deweyans the educational moral is obvious: The less such work happens, the more 2 unintelligent feelings remain strong. First, many students will continue feeling physical work is actually beneath them, and thus feel any kind of tool use isn't worth their time and effort. In reality, however, such knowledge is power too, even knowledge about car repair. And secondly, many students will continue feelings disconnected from the entire scientific model of nature as something to keep improving! Thus, they won't be empowered to keep creatively improving their own communities and schools; from such personal weaknesses grow the need for more government services! Merely making our neighborhoods places where, say, painting tools should be used more often would help build many more positive feelings about learning what intelligent action means. So, again, why shouldn't students in all public schools begin feeling their own intelligent and creative work can produce some really fine works of art, thus building feelings of pride and confidence to challenge those who often see their neighborhood as merely more drug turf?
In many of our decaying cities today we're seeing the visually and economically depressing results of not teaching students how to use tools intelligently. Conservative educators keep telling people we need to make all students study academic book-facts so they can become well-rounded students and get new jobs. Meanwhile, our cities continue decaying, corporations are paying politicians to allowed jobs to be shipped overseas, union contracts are being torn up, developers are grabbing land and raising rents, and worker salaries are lowered while some 3,000,000 people, the wealthiest 1%, continue taking a huge percentage of profits in the form of obscene salaries and investment earnings. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually used their money to help people start more businesses, or help build more liberal schools. But many such conservatives within that small group often use their money to keep paying politicians to pass more laws making it easier to keep taking more and more of the public's money! Many for-profit charter schools are doing just that. For such people privatizing the entire economy, especially Social Security, is the ultimate goal in life. Many now called that situation class warfare. The stock market scam in the 1920s was merely another example of such actions.
With confidence we liberal Deweyans say, the more tool-using community service work is ignored in our public schools, the more our great cities will continue becoming first urban wastelands, often followed by high rent condos. As we’ve seen, some 50,000 people in New York are homeless while multimillionaires live on the Upper East Side.
No mere book alone can better teach such important democratic habits than constructive community work-projects. So, if more of our public schools, homes, and churches emphasized and encouraged creative, cooperative, and enjoyable tool use, such inhumane social differences would almost certainly grow smaller, replaced by more caring people, useful businesses, and the democratic feeling of sharing power in all its forms.
Using even simple agricultural tools intelligently in our public elementary schools would begin emotionally and intellectually connecting students with their communities. Los Angeles, for example, is actually on the edge of a desert and water is getting more expensive. Shouldn't students there be learning how to intelligently match plants to their surroundings, and start bothering politicians to do the same in all public spaces, rather than continue ignoring the situation and planting water-hungry vegetation? Is it wise to plant a million water-hungry trees? Instead of continuing to plant water-hungry vegetation, more students might start asking such intelligent questions, and then perhaps planting some very fragrant desert plants, making it a nasal treat to even walk past them. Why not keep our senses as alive as they are for 1st and 2nd graders? With such useful work-projects even in elementary school, students might even help encourage more people to walk and exercise more, rather than keep poisoning everyone air with their cars! Why shouldn’t such creatively intelligent tool-use become a normal part of school? It’s a creative art useful for many different challenges throughout life, not just while one is in school, and it's a great way for students to use their afternoons actively and constructively. How else can any Garden of Eden be built?
In the lower primary grades especially, students regularly use tools like paper, scissors, and glue. How many wide-eyed youngsters proudly burst into their homes with the results of such work? But why not keep broadening such tool use with more community work-projects? For example, couldn’t they also help decorate senior citizens’ living spaces with flowers and even paintings, and thus brighten up senior lives as well? And wouldn’t seeing seniors also begin teaching students how important it is to build healthful diet and exercise habits as soon as possible?
Another useful result of such work is building useful feelings for more abstract scientific studies later in high school; what makes some art more intelligent than others? What results do our foods produce in our bodies, and what foods produce the best results? What chemical make some fertilizers better than others? In effect, we liberals are asking our public schools to start liberating student learning power with more active and intelligent work-projects. No doubt, some teachers might break some fingernails, or even get their shoes dirty, but the potential learning results for students are far more important.
Parents are the great engines of all educational reform. But when they know little about such educational possibilities within more liberal schools, then they in effect limit intelligent social kinds of knowledge and skills. Creative thinking and tool use is useful in all fields of work! How many public schools today have classes like Creative Tool Use, 101, 102,…, 112, or Creative Tool Making? About as many as have Creative Joke Writing I'll wager. Really now, if we want adults to know how to intelligently care about their own neighborhoods, and rely less on government help to keep them safe and growing, then why aren’t we teaching students how to work in those ways? No doubt, such active and intelligent tool work would help deepen the knowledge of every future Ph. D, as well as every corporate CEO and blue collar worker!
Such intelligent tool work will also help build another excellent idea-feeling. Students will also begin feeling all tools, both physical and mental, can be playfully enjoyed as ends-in-themselves as well as the best means for physically improving life! In other words, they can begin learning how intelligent tool use feels while helping produce useful results. To some it may be just another subtle philosophic point, but feeling something like a tool just for its sensual feel is a useful habit-art from every kitchen to every corporate board room. Unlike conservatives like Plato, us liberals don’t want to restrict sensually feeling of the world, but rather increase it, and get more in touch with our feelings! The more students feel sensually in touch with life, the less need they’ll feel for drugs to produce that result! And the more students feel how important it is to keep improving the common and public good for everyone, the less greed and corruption they’ll practice as adults.
No doubt, such important psychic and social results helped Dewey realize, no matter who we are and what we learn, people know best and are influenced only by what they build! If they build helpful objects as students, it’ll be easier to keep building them as adults. I still remember much about that hospital addition I helped build over 30 years ago, and how good it still feels to help people today. In fact, such feelings are at the core of this book, helping people see another model of education.
It may even be stated more poetically. With such constructive projects young folks can even begin feeling tools as even sacred objects; after all, they’ve done more to liberate our human race than any other single habit-art. Only tools extend and magnify feeble human powers, thus enabling us to keep reconstructing and improving nature like no other species ever has. Not that that always happens, but in liberal schools it can and should be an important educational goal! With the right kind of machine just one people can move mountains. In fact, intelligent tool use is essential to all forms of intelligent progress; wherever it exists, tools exist.
So, to deny even young students the freedom to start feeling such ideas and results in effect denies the over 2 million year old means to our strongest knowledge -- reliable and dependable experimental scientific knowledge. Celebrating tool use, and not with just pencils, paper, scissors, and glue should be an everyday part of liberal school life, including how to care, repair, and clean them as well as how to sensually savor their use, invent new ones, and improve old ones. It helps students feel there's always room for improvement. Such creative tool use is, in fact, the psychic earth from which all progress begins growing; tools make active and intelligent testing much easier. With thoughtfully creative experimental tool use, learning itself can become a more graceful, natural, and enjoyable habit-art. The more tool use is respected, savored and enjoyed, the deeper we feel how important creative thinking and building is, and the more liberated we become to keep treating them as sacred as any living person.
Tool-using teamwork also helps students feel a good definition of democracy itself: democracy is the social art of people working intelligently together to make their lives better! The more children feel they can keep making life better, the stronger our democracy itself grows; democracy is an active political system. No doubt, the pencil, paper, scissors, and paste makers are grateful for the business, but why restrict tool use to them? An intelligent tool-using program helps increase student independence, creativity, and confidence, and thereby lessens boredom, frustration, dropping out, and also using precious public monies to control hurtful actions? How many more innocent young folks will die from brutal violence before our public schools start teaching students how to act constructively in their own neighborhoods, and start feeling all people should be respected as long as they respect our just laws and others?
During his teen years one founder of Behavioral psychology, John Watson, was encouraged to teach himself how to build an entire house by himself! Plumbing, electrical, and carpentry skills are not that difficult to learn, even for young folks. Then, after he went to college and saw how important writing skills were, he already had the confidence to teach himself that skill too; he went on to earn his doctorate in psychology. Intelligent tool use is not only a confidence builder, but also helps increase peaceful and constructive feelings, rather than brutal ones.
And finally, in an economy like ours, depending for its health mainly on auto and construction work, wouldn’t the high cost of housing come down and be made more available to more people if more students had building skills and used them intelligently? Wouldn’t building community gardens help lower food prices? If less money was needed to build a house, and more people knew how to finish the work, couldn’t more of them be built and more people afford them?
We liberal Deweyans say such ideas are definitely worth experimenting with in all our conservative public schools, beginning at the primary level and then growing from there. Why should we continue allowing our public tax money to keep funding schools where students remain physically and psychically tool-illiterate? The result often makes students feel separate and alienated from their own communities. Everyone works with tools of one kind or another, so isn’t it to our benefit to teach students the art of intelligent tool use, including possibly the best tool ever invented, the modern computer. With its help, it's revolutionized life in so many ways, so knowing how to use it in the planning stages of improvement projects should be another important part of liberal school work. They can help make work that much easier and more enjoyable.