Just a quick note to say I’ve published a new piece on my Substack page — regarding a NYRB review by Verlyn Klinkenborg of two new books on the ocean and our collective damaging impact. In this transition period to a new U.S. Presidential administration, I think it’s important for us to get greater clarity about core responsibilities of democratic societies.
Clearly we have a lot of work to do in the area of environmental justice — for the future of the planet and humanity.
I’ve spend a large part of my professional life as a writer and editor focused on American education. My sense at the start of my involvement with teaching and learning was that our nation had gotten some elements right when it comes to educating children, but it had also struggled on numerous fronts. What made me optimistic about the future of American education and the future of our democracy — not to mention the future of human civilization — were the numerous examples of success in education and the brilliant people I met who were, and many who still are, dedicated to helping schools and children thrive.
In short, as I saw it, the problems were clear and solutions available. All we had to do is focus on promoting best practices, supporting successful programs, encouraging our teachers, and backing the key change-makers who will help transform all of our schools into schools of excellence. And for a time, it seemed we were making strides — logical, essential, lasting strides. The future looked bright.
Here’s a short list of some key developments in education that fed my optimism:
We’ve learned the value of high-quality early childhood education and what it looks like. In turn, we’ve come to understand how early childhood education, when done right, not only prepares children well for their formal education to follow, but also enables children to develop a range of social-emotional skills that help them become happy, engaged children in their schools, families, and communities — and, thus, engaged citizens when they came of age.
We’ve learned how to develop curricula that help children develop a strong base of knowledge for school, work, and citizenship while enabling them to explore their particular interests at a higher and deeper level. In our urban areas, we’ve created entire schools with particular academic foci to support and advance academically talented students with increasing success.
We’ve learned about how to engage children well in the classroom, moving from the classic lecture or drill-and-repeat method to one that actively involves children in the process of learning and that adjusts to a range of learning styles. Teachers have learned how to be less the expert and more a model of inquiry, curiosity, and knowledge acquisition.
We’ve learned, thanks to the research of Howard Gardner and others, that there are a range of predominant learning styles and that we can and should tap into them as needed.
We’ve learned how to create interdisciplinary and experiential learning options that connect the various disciplines to each other and to real-world activities so children see how these skills matter in adult life. We’ve also created successful collaborations between schools and in-demand industries to train high school students for successful careers.
We’ve learned how to build and support what writer bell hooks calls a “beloved community” — that is, a community of children and adults in the daily practice of learning together, with the goal of leaving no one behind.
We know how to foster a growth mindset that encourages students to take risks and tackle increasingly challenging tasks.
We understand the role of gender in learning. For boys, we know that relationships with friends and adults are the foundation of educational success. For girls, we know that a combination of confidence, competence, and connectedness are central. We also understand that gender identity can vary widely along a spectrum and have developed ways to support individual students in their growth.
We know how to evaluate children in a way that encourages further learning, a positive sense of self, and a growth mindset. We’ve also learned the proper place and role of standardized testing.
We know how to support students when they struggle academically so they can get back on track and even accelerate their learning as needed.
We know how not to overburden children with homework while keeping their learning curve on a steady rise.
We know how to integrate social support systems to help children, especially those living in poverty and those with special needs.
We know how to integrate technology into the classroom — and how to choose technology that supports students well in their learning, while keeping problematic technology out of the classroom.
We know a great deal about nutrition and what children need to develop healthy minds and bodies so they can learn well. And we know the importance of feeding children well in schools — especially the millions living in poverty.
We know the value of physical activity for growing minds and bodies, and how to create sports and physical education programs that engage all students.
We know the value of the arts in both academic development of students and in their lives in general. We know how to integrate the arts into the broader academic program — and, more generally, how to encourage creativity.
We know a great deal about the human brain as it relates to learning, especially how to build and strengthen neural pathways. And we’re learning more all the time.
We understand the ideal class size for dynamic learning and for keeping teachers happily engaged.
We know what we need to do to attract and retain high-quality teachers.
We know the importance of hiring a racially diverse group of teachers to support racially diverse groups of children. We know how to help individual educators develop the kind of cultural competencies needed to teach all children well across race, culture, and gender.
We know how to develop effective academic leaders who can guide and support young teachers and encourage and coach colleagues.
We know how to offer effective teacher education in our colleges and universities. Our universities and college have also greatly improved their academic research on education while finding effective ways to share this knowledge with educators.
We know how to help schools continue to evolve through the iterative process of experimentation and innovation that leads to further breakthroughs in teaching and learning.
We know the importance of healthy school buildings and well-designed and accessible classrooms — and we can build them well.
We know all this and more. And it leads one to think, with all this hard-earned knowledge, that our schools should be in a great place now. But it’s clear that, collectively, they are not. Some of our schools are excellent, but too many fall short, usually because they don’t have the resources and support they need. I don’t put much stock in rankings, but it’s telling that our school system as a whole consistently ranks below those of many other developed nations.
What’s the problem? It has come clear to me that the kind of changes we need to make to help children thrive — the kind we already know how to deliver — are being thwarted through a mix of cultural indifference, political structures and power, and corporate desires to profit from schoolchildren. Embedded in these barriers are well-funded campaigns of misinformation that effectively undermine so many positive developments in schools or prevent necessary changes from taking place.
As a result:
Our educational system remains inequitable. It continues to favor the wealthy by significant factors. Education funding for low-income communities is woefully inadequate. The push for “school choice” programs and for-profit charter schools has shifted essential public money away from our mainstream public schools and continues to hamper positive change in public education. And for reasons we should have dispelled long ago, we continue to think that children born into poverty don’t really deserve quality schools.
Our education system continues to adhere to structures that marginalize too many students of color. Even in many well-funded schools where one would think that racial differences in outcomes would disappear, we’re falling short through a combination of willful ignorance of students’ racialized experience and/or the politically motivative campaigns that pretend racial inequity is not an issue or that to talk about race at all is to cause harm to white students. This problematic thinking tries to reduce schooling to a kind of educational hunger games in which any group’s gain is another group’s loss.
Classrooms in schools that don’t serve the wealthy are too often overcrowded and teachers are underpaid and under-supported. As a result, we end up with disengaged students and overwhelmed young teachers, many of whom leave the profession soon after starting. In these situations, the atmosphere for learning atrophies and instead of providing the needed materials, training, and funding, we blame the teachers and the children.
Too many of our school buildings are unsafe and unhealthy. There’s an abundance of stories about broken toilets, lack of toilet paper and soap, the presence of mold and mildew, dead rodents, broken windows, leaky ceilings, chain-locked doors, etc. While we know what it takes to fix them, we embrace the delusion that saving a few dollars and keeping children in hazardous conditions is a smart way to serve our democracy.
Many children come to school hungry. Schools and districts do what they can, but food programs and family support services are inadequate in schools.
While the research on the value of preschool is clear, in too many states we continue to act as if it is not important enough to fully fund.
Emboldened politicians increasingly meddle with curricula to support their own political agenda and power, using as much misinformation and fear tactics as they can muster to encourage voters to see educators as either threats to “family values” or as simply incapable of making wise choices about content and practices. In a number of states, the legislature is trying to rewrite history into an invented story that serves its political ends.
Over the past thirty years, we’ve increasingly outsourced the education of our children (or elements thereof) to private, for-profit businesses, pretending that business efficiency will improve matters and save money — all without creating harm.
I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming early in my career. I really did think we’d be in a better place by now. Logic and moral reasoning strongly suggest that we should be in a better place.
It’s discouraging, for sure. But I see no reason to give up on finding ways to implement the knowledge we already have to create excellent schools in all communities. In fact, the work is more essential and compelling now. If nothing else is clear, we need an adult population in America that is collectively wiser and more interconnected than our current generations of adults. And the only way we’ll get there is through high-quality schools led by engaged, well-trained and educated adults.
To parse out the growing gap between what we know works in schools and how schools actually function is to dive deeply into local, state, and national policies and politics and to understand the history of public education in America and how it mirrors both the strengths and shortcomings of our democratic systems. In short, this is one of those conversations that could go on forever. So for the sake of this piece, I mostly want to make these essential points:
We know what’s right and wrong with our schools collectively.
We have the knowledge and blueprint for high-quality public schools. We have numerous excellent models of high-quality schools.
We know these schools are essential to a thriving democracy.
We need to find a way to support the development of such schools in all communities and support politicians who make public education for democratic success a priority.
A recent and, to my mind, wonderful essay by novelist Marilynne Robinson, “Agreeing to Our Harm” (New York Review of Books, 2024) explores the challenges of improving essential elements of American society where things have clearly gone astray. She starts with a focus on the enormous problem of gun violence and its clear mismatch with our supposedly Christian ideals and values, then moves to the complexities that have led our nation into a series of misguided wars that, in turn, has led to the enormous and tragic loss of life. This sets the stage for the essential problem of our divided politics today, especially the MAGA agenda that exploits the frustrations and resentment of poor white Americans without a viable plan for relieving their grievances. What Robinson offers is the reminder that our democracy has addressed major challenges in the past and has done so successfully. She believes we currently undervalue “the habits of respect that make debate possible.” Because America has an outsized influence on the fate of the planet, she encourages us to be clear about the reality we face and face it together with the patience and deliberation and “the old courtesies that have made democracy possible.”
Her essay made me think again about the problems in schools and led me to a recent book on education — School Communities of Strength, by Peter W. Cookson, Jr. (Harvard Education Press, 2024) — that can help us once again be clear about the reality of schools, their role in our democracy, and what we need to do — and certainly can do — to improve American education, and, by doing so, improve American democracy.
Cookson’s book comes with the subtitle, “Strategies for educating children living in deep poverty.” Without question, he has engaged in “the habits of respect that make debate possible.” He also offers a detailed blueprint for fixing our high-poverty schools so that they collectively serve our neediest and most vulnerable children well. I certainly encourage all educators working in high-poverty schools to read the book and find ways to adapt, evolve, or rethink their programs so they support all students well. If you are an educator and you are not thrilled with your school, why wouldn’t you read it? But I also encourage all of us — whether we work in the field of education or not — to read the book and think about (1) how we can help support the kind of school change outlined here and (2) consider how such change not only serves individual children but also serves our nation so that (3) we can strengthen and improve our overall democratic systems that enable all citizens the opportunity to thrive and live fulfilling lives within a culture that is respectful of individual choices and community needs.
Cookson teaches at Georgetown University, which means he works almost within shouting distance of the White House and Capitol Hill. For all politicians who believe we can and should have the best schools in the work, and who see the link between quality education and quality of life in a democracy, I encourage them to invite Cookson over for a conversation, engage in the habit of respectful debate and see if it sparks ideas about the kind of policies that will improve lives.
Cookson reminds us that children living in deep poverty “have all the same needs, desires, fears, and abilities as other children. They don’t need special schools or classrooms; they need twenty-first century schools and classrooms designed to be communities of care, compassion, inquiry, and discovery.”
In truth, all of our schools need to be schools of care, compassion, inquiry, and discovery. The problem is that we set up so many roadblocks to the creation of such schools — especially for children living in poverty.
Cookson isn’t the only educator, writer, and researcher who offers excellent guidance on this front. I would also encourage folks to read everything and anything by Linda-Darling Hammond, Ted Sizer, Jonathan Kozol, Maxine Greene, Howard Gardner, Pedro Noguera, Lisa Delpit, bell hooks, Richard Rothstein, Diane Ravitch, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. If you’re looking for more writers, I’d be happy to produce a list. The point is, we have great books steeped in research and experience that hold the blueprint to amazing schools. The structures of these schools can — and should — be duplicated. The sooner we collectively engage in this work the sooner our frayed democracy can start to heal and grow.
What I hope we’ll come to understand is that the science of learning and development applies both to our schools and our society. Fix our schools and we’ll stop hungering for politicians who fuel our grievances. Fix our schools and we’ll start to see difference as a democratic strength not as a problem. Fix our schools and we’ll better understand how to build and balance personal freedom and community needs. Fix our schools and we’ll figure out how to enable economic development and environmental health. Fix our schools and we can improve not just our GDP but also our GNP — our Gross National Happiness.
What has been frustrating to me over the past thirty years is that I’ve witnessed what great schools can do. I’ve seen their impact on the lives of children. I have read over and over again how the development of well-functioning, twenty-first century schools that focus on the whole child are possible everywhere. And I have visited many of these schools. We can find these changes in our high-end private schools. We can find them in religious schools and in not-for-profit charter schools. We can certainly find them in our public schools — in both low-income and high-income communities. And yet, here we are stuck in a pattern that encourages us to believe our schools with wildly mixed outcomes are good enough as they are.
I know there are numerous ideas for how to fix our current national woes and repair our social fabric. As for me, I think we should center our schools in the conversation. We keep undervaluing our public school system and the wisdom of our lead educational researchers at our peril. If we remake our schools into world-class learning communities, the rest will follow.
In his 2012 book, High School, Race, and America’s Future, Lawrence Blum writes:
Public discussions about the value of education increasingly focus on the individual student’s academic skills, and how they contribute to his or her college or job readiness and upward mobility. An even narrower focus is student test scores, which are increasingly treated as the standard of educational accomplishment. But traditionally education, especially public education, has been recognized to serve other important purposes. It has aimed to enhance students’ personal growth (including intellectual growth beyond its instrumental value for economic success), to contribute to their moral development, to improve their social relations, and to develop their capabilities as future citizens. Schooling contributes to the social good in helping to produce moral persons and responsible, informed citizens.
Much of the public conversation on education has over-focused on matters of personal gain. I blame much of this shift in thinking on self-enriching political posturing and on corporate intrusion into public education in search of ways to privatize our schools and profit on the backs of children (a form of child labor in my book). The “education industry” will argue that it is only responding to market forces. Whether this is true or whether it has created and manipulated market forces, the reality is that we’re losing grip on a social institution of the highest importance. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are entirely dependent on our schools to educate each new generation to take on the enormous challenge of running our democracy.
If we recenter our thinking on helping our schools fulfill this task — infuse it into every school mission and into every decision we make about teaching and learning — I believe we can find our way through to have the kind of schools that we know we need to become the kind of nation we say we are.
I’ve been focused on poetry these days. But for more than 20 years I wrote and edited a magazine on education. So I can’t read about the college students who are actively protesting Israel’s killing of massive numbers of Palestinians, with America’s support in the form of weapons, and not say something regarding the intersection of the students’ response and the mission of our colleges and universities.
In particular, the protests made me think again about a book I read recently (and wrote about in this blog): The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be, by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner.
Based on extensive studies of a variety of colleges and universities — from community colleges to public universities to elite colleges — the authors draw some important conclusions about what a good education should look like and where colleges and universities get things right and where they have been falling short of late. First, the authors note, far too many students today feel disconnected from their college and university communities and, as a result, suffer an unacceptably high level of stress and isolation. Mental health issues on college campuses, the authors tell us, are rampant. A high percentage of students also report feeling alienated from both peers and their school’s academic agenda. Second, too many colleges and universities are trying too hard to be all things to all people — and, in not-so-shocking irony, fail to serve their communities as well as they intend. The authors zero in on the idea that the overall goal of all colleges and universities is to develop students “higher education capital” — or HEDCAP, as they call it. To that end, colleges need to clarify this mission and develop programs that support it. Within reason, programs that don’t advance the mission should be culled.
Higher education capital — through a general education in the natural and social sciences, the arts and humanities, and the world of computers and coding — includes the ability to:
See things from multiple perspectives.
Develop a cogent argument that accepts the complexities of any situation or problem, and both express the argument and defend it well, while acknowledging (as we all should) the limitations of our individual perspectives.
Be able to situate problems in context — such as in history or current events or literature.
Articulate the value of critical thinking, interdisciplinary engagement, and communication skills — and work hard to develop such skills.
A key observation in the book is that too many students see the arrangement with colleges and universities as transactional. Students and their parents pay tuition and, in return, the schools prepare students for jobs. While all of us who attend or have attended college want jobs that pay well and are fulfilling, Fischman and Gardner see this narrow mindset as, at best, a baseline goal for a college education. The bigger, more important, goal for both students and society is that the college experience be transformational — intellectually and emotionally. In doing so, the college experience helps young adults transition into adulthood with skills that will serve them and society well.
I’ve written about how college and graduate school did this for me. So, not surprisingly, I agree with Fischman and Gardner. And I know many other college graduates who share this view. It’s interesting, too, that the vast majority of college professors see student transformation — through deep study of various disciplines and community engagement — as the core of their work.
Fischman and Gardner found that some colleges and universities are doing a good job helping their students develop HEDCAP skills. But there are plenty of instances of mission drift, and of subsequent confusion and disconnect between students and faculty, between faculty and administration, and between administrators and trustees. In other words, colleges and universities could do a better job clarifying and articulating their mission and purpose, onboarding students to that mission, and developing a comprehensive program that services the mission at every turn.
Fischman and Gardner end the book with specific advice for the varied constituents — knowing that this is the best way to get everyone rowing in unison. In the advice section for students, the authors ask students to:
Acknowledge their great fortune in getting to attend college — a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Use the opportunity to expand their horizons and connect with a wide-range of people.
Take time to connect with professors and seek help, advice, and guidance as needed.
Work hard to develop both intellectual and social skills.
Focus on transformation, not transaction. “Explore new territories physically, cognitively, socially, emotionally and remain open to being transformed.”
I have to admit that I have not attended any of the recent student protests. I’ve only read accounts in newspapers — ones I believe adhere to high journalist standards — along with various analyses and commentary from knowledgeable folks (no television news, which I gave up years ago, and very little social media scrolling). But I feel I know enough to say a few things.
First, I’m glad so many college students are taking what they believe is an important moral stand. They’ve learned about events in Gaza and have decided the right and moral thing to do in response is to let their campuses and the world know they find the killings unacceptable. Some of the messaging may be oversimplified, and some of it misguided, but I think it’s clear that the overall goal is change in the name of peace and justice. Much of the media coverage of the protests, to my mind, tries to make these events into an us-and-them struggle — either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. In reality, as Robert Reich wrote in a recent New York Times column, the vast majority of protesters are not pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli, or vice versa. What they are push for is the end to enormous collateral damage in Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. To date, more than 34,000 civilians have died. Another 77,000 have been injured and an estimated 1.1 million are experiencing catastrophic hunger. Student protesters find this unacceptable in the extreme — as all of us should. In pushing for the end of such slaughter, they are asking the U.S. government to stop supplying the Israeli government with weapons that are being used in such an immoral and repulsive way. They are also asking their institutions to divest from Israeli companies as long as the Israeli government continues the bombing of innocent people. More generally, they are asking the rest of us to make our voices heard on the subject.
The question of the right Israeli response to Hamas’s killing of more than 1,200 Israeli citizens on October 7 is a challenging one — informed by a complex web of historical, religious, political, and cultural issues. And some of the protesters, like many adults, may be oversimplifying matters and saying things that aren’t helpful. Reliance on slogans and signs has a tendency to do that. But I’m still glad the students have stepped up to challenge the adult leaders on their campuses and beyond — to say it’s not OK to sit on the sidelines doing nothing. And I’m dismayed by the college and university administrators who have decided the best way to engage the students is with riot squads.
I suppose what I want is for more colleges and universities to acknowledge and support the students who are pushing for nonviolence solutions in Gaza. At the very least, we should listen to them, not instantly vilify them. I want most is for college administrators to take a careful look at their students and find ways to connect the protests to the colleges’s missions; see this moment as an opportunity for deeper learning, the kind that happens on the best college campuses. I hope it goes without saying that there’s no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia and expressions of hatred on campus. But as long as the students aren’t engaged in violence or the threat of violence, administrators would be wise to find ways to connect these protests to the central mission of the schools.
The Real World of College spells out ways in which colleges could use the protests as a springboard for deeper learning — for instance, through linking events in Gaza with other historic periods of war and political unrest, or through a deep analysis of contemporary geopolitics, or even through the study of literature and art. In truth, just about all areas of study offer the opportunity for deeper cross-disciplinary learning and for building skills is human interaction. I imagine there are many college presidents thinking along these lines. One who stands out to me is Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University. Rather than push to have protesters arrested and encampments disassembled, Roth allowed students to protest, as long as it was peaceful and the protesters weren’t blocking access to buildings or threatening or interrupting other students in their learning. While acknowledging that he didn’t agree with much of what the protesters were demanding, he says in an essay in The New Republic:
“How can I not respect students for paying attention to things that matter so much? I respect that they’re concerned about Gaza; I admire that they’re not entirely taken up with grades or lining up their credentials…. I would prefer they use their energies to pressure the U.S. government to do more to get the hostages released, to stop supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war tactics, and to bring more direct aid to people in Gaza on the brink of starvation. My team expects to discuss all of this with students in the coming days. Right now, I’m most concerned with protecting their right to protest in nonviolent ways that don’t undermine our educational program. For me, the modest violations of the rules are preferable to the narrow-minded vocationalism that others seem suddenly to pine for.”
Roth’s views tie in well with the points Fischman and Gardner make in The Real World of College. If we are, as we say, educating the next generation of leaders, it’s essential that we not only listen to them and take their concerns seriously, but that we help them develop the whole gamut of interpersonal skills along with a strong academic base of knowledge so they will be poised to tackle the world’s most pressing problems as they arise in the future.
As Dartmouth history professor Udi Greenberg said to the New York Times following Dartmouth’s quick crackdown on peaceful student protesters, “We’re supposed to be a living example for how we manage divisive topics, and the most important thing in this process is that we don’t engage each other as enemies. Sending the police on protesters is the exact opposite of engaging each other in good faith.”
Calling in the riot squad to shut students up is not the right response. Rather, the student protests offer colleges and universities an opportunity to engage in deep conversation with students about the world around them. It’s also an opportunity to show we take them seriously. For colleges and universities that simply want their campuses to be bucolic places for job preparation, maybe this summer is the right time to reexamine their mission and purpose.
My third poetry book, EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM, is at the printer — arriving in February. In the meantime, I’m tying myself in useless knots thinking about where I go next. I have a couple projects in progress, which is nice. But without strict deadlines, it’s hard to find my daily focus.
I think, for may writers, these in-between times can be fraught with matters of doubt, anxiety, worth, and so on — until the next project takes hold and all is fine again. Reading a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Glück, American Originality, I came upon her reflections on being an artist.
In “The Cult of Healing” essay, she writes:
“The artist’s experience of his own work alternates panic and gratitude. What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is the capacity of intense, driven absorption. Such absorption makes a kind of intermission from the self; it derives, in the artist, from a deep belief in the importance of art (though not necessarily his own art, except in the presence of it being made). At intervals throughout his life, the artist is taken out of that life by concentration; he lives for a time in a suspension that is also a quest, a respite that is also acute tension.”
Gendered generalized artist aside, Glück basically nails it, I think.
I’m thrilled to have one of my poems in the new issue of The Banyan Review. A nice way to start the new year.
— Fintan O’Toole, in review of Left Is Not Woke, by Susan Neiman, in New York Review of Books (November 2, 2023)
Although I’m partial to Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of The Iliad (the version I read in college), I’m enjoying reading Emily Wilson’s new and highly accessible translation of The Iliad (2023). In her Translator’s Notes at the start of the book, Wilson makes the observation that one of our oldest recorded books still matters immensely today. She writes:
“For a twenty-first century reader, there is nothing unfamiliar about a partisan society riven by constant striving for celebrity, dominance, and attention, where rage and outrage are constantly whipped up by extreme rhetoric and the threat of humiliation, and where grief and loss constantly bleed into yet more rage and aggression.”
Of course, the world of today is vastly different from that of the 12th and 13th century BCE. But human nature still tends to get stuck in troubling ruts. A key difference today, however, is the motivation for destructive behavior. What was once a matter of honor, glory, and renown, Wilson points out, now seems to be more a matter of seeking status, fame, and celebrity.
Much of The Iliad is painful to read — especially the treatment of women. But as I work my way through this cautionary tall of hubris and violence, overlaid with the complex question of free will and fate, I can’t help but think about our times. Maybe the gods are still messing with us, but I’m rooting for peace, love, and understanding.
I was invited recently by The Poetry Society of New Hampshire to read poems from my new book, Adrift. To give the reading an anchor, I agreed to connect the book’s loose theme of adrift-ness to notion of people finding ways to reconnect post-pandemic through poetry.
I would have been fine just reading any of my poems and letting people think what they will, but in retrospect I’m glad we did this exercise. Thinking about the theme has helped me think a bit more about how the past few wearying years — along with the too-real prospects of greater human havoc to come — have impacted my writing, as well as my reading of other poets. And it has given me this opportunity to reflect on the link between poetry and the kind of spiritual and moral connection I think we need in order to fuel hope in a time when hope is in short supply.
I was in Ireland recently — a trip, speaking of connecting, that included a visit to my grandfather’s childhood village — and on a sign in front of a shop in the western Ireland was this William Butler Yeats quote:
“The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to get sharper.”
I searched the internet and my collection of Yeats’ poems for the source of this quote, but with no luck. Perhaps it’s not a Yeats’ quote after all, but one of those things that gets spread around the internet anyway. (If you know the source, please let me know; in truth, I don’t think it sounds like the kind of thing Yeats would write, at least not in a poem.) Whether this quote is Yeats’ or not, I found myself responding with a nod of understanding. I think it’s fair to say that the isolation and loss we’ve experienced during the pandemic, followed by the shocking affront of would-be tyrants in the political sphere, and the increasingly clear, and further shocking, knowledge of the damage we have done and continue to do to the natural world, has forced on us — or most of us, anyway — a different view of the world along with the need to find new ways forward, individually and collectively. For me, at least, everything feels more fragile and confusing and challenging. Maybe life has always been like this and I’ve just haven’t been fully attuned. But of late I’ve experienced moments of real rage and frustration — and have also occasionally slipped into a kind of post-rage emptiness. Like the folks in the London Underground in Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” I’ve been “distracted from distraction by distraction.” And I’m trying to understand what this means for the days ahead.
And I know I’m not alone in feeling more adrift and uncertain about where we are going and what we are collectively doing. That look of adrift-ness is easy to spot in others.
I think some drifting in life is essential. It’s a kind of time out from all the striving. A chance to regroup. But it’s a dangers place to settle for long because it leads to a kind of resignation. Knowing this, I try to countering the adrift-ness as best I can by focusing on understand these feelings, on the one hand, and on letting the world reveal more of itself, on the other. I’ve been both exploring what it feels like to be adrift and thinking about how adrift-ness informs, or can inform, my understanding of the natural and human world — and of art. In this way, I find myself aiming for deeper attentiveness of late — trying to sharpen my senses, as Yeats’ suggests. The underlying question for me is: How should one respond to to our fractured society and our world-damaging behavior?
Of course, implied here is the question of how, as a poet, I can and should respond? What is art’s role here?
Many of the poems in my book were written before the pandemic. But putting the manuscript together during the pandemic influenced its shape, and probably some of the editing to follow — including pulling out of some poems and inserting newer ones that felt more thematic.
For me, I’ve come to realize, this adrift feeling has been about various forms of separation — from nature, from family roots and loved ones, from my younger self/former life, and from a society that itself is seriously adrift. Perhaps most troubling has been separation from my younger self’s unshakable sense of hope for the world — and from what I once thought of as my worldview.
This is big stuff piled on big stuff and can easily knock one off kilter. The voice in my head tries to right the ship by saying, Don’t be a hopeless idiot, dummy. But it takes a while to come around. My more useful response has been to push for greater awareness — to pay deeper attention to the natural world and to what I think truly matters in this complex thing we call human society. The adrift-ness, in other words, has encouraged what Carolyn Forché calls “the poetry of witness.”
When one travels to Ireland, one quickly becomes aware that it’s an such an inviting place to be. Yet one is also aware that Ireland is a nation with a complex and shocking history. The signs are everywhere; and as I traveled throughout both Dublin and County Kerry, I found myself thinking about just how cornered and desperate the Irish were under 300 years of English suppression. At the same time, I couldn’t really imagine how it felt to be living in such squalor and then, while already hanging onto the last threads of the proverbial rope, to enter a famine of shocking proportions that roiled on for a number years without relief. In the mid-19th century, the average Irish person traveled only within short distances of their home. But the Great Famine, if it didn’t kill them outright, suddenly forced so many Irish out into the world with a small bag of possessions and the wish to survive. So many of those who didn’t flee, died. So many who fled also died of disease on diseased-riddled ships. But many, including my grandparents, also made it to a new country and new opportunity. I imagine they experienced adrift-ness is a big way — literally and figuratively. Separated from all they knew and loved, they had to build new lives in new communities that didn’t want them and that treated them with disdain. They had to do all this while speaking the language of their centuries-long oppressors. Of course, this story has been matched in so many other nations over the years and continues to play itself out today — especially as the effects of global warming start to kick into gear.
Given my Irish roots, I also thought a lot about contemporary Ireland and its continuing efforts to fight its way to independence and then to find its identity as a young nation in a quickly globalizing society. Fintan O’Toole’s excellent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, explores the question of modern Irish identity. For the Irish, there’s so much to collectively wrestle with these days, with the essential question being: How does a country that initially prided itself on being rural, Catholic, and independent — only to learn that these three elements would not, could not, lead to a flourishing nation — find its way forward?
It occurred to me that the question of “finding one’s way” is the question we’re all facing as individuals and citizens of every nation now. For all of us, of course, there are other forces beyond the personal that are driving feelings of adrift-ness. My list includes the obvious issues: global warming and our tepid response to date; political unrest and divide led by a plethora of politicians backed by people with enormous wealth who seem determined to erode our democracy (or maybe squash the whole concept of democracy) for personal power; the rise of AI and the growing sense that, increasingly, we are serving our machines; population growth and the pressures on resources; and the ongoing, dispiriting loss of biodiversity. But it also includes more generally that sense of the loss of what writer and activist bell hooks calls “the beloved community.”
In a recent interview for the American Academy of Poets,” Carolyn Forché said about poets working today that “…what we share in common is a sense of urgency regarding all that is at stake and under threat: the survival of our democracy, our humanity, our living Earth.”
I know this fight isn’t the sole focus of poets — or that poets are the only ones who take these challenges seriously. I also know that this is not the only preoccupation of poets. But most of the poets I know do feel a sense of urgency about the role of poetry in addressing or highlighting or exploring the dimensions of these essential life matters. As for me, I’m trying to understand our collect human problems as best I can so that I can help contribute to a more humane response. As a poet, I want to spotlight what I think of as deeper truths —ones that I feel I’m seeing, or sensing, or approaching through greater attentiveness to the natural world, to the best of our literature past and present, to the revelations of the environmental science community, to the philosophers and theologists who have examined human nature from every angle to understand our drive and motivation, our gifts and shortcomings, our love and our hatred, etc. What can I create in response? How do I further the artistic conversations that date back to Homer and are threaded through Danté and Shakespeare and continue to blossom in the beautiful, varied, modern world of poetry?
Writing aside, I also find myself simply longing to learn more about the magic of the world — for the joy it brings, for the wonder it inspires, for the spiritual infusion it offers. I love discovering, for instance, that the largest living organism on earth is a fungi network in Oregon that weighs hundreds of tons and covers ten square kilometers and is between two and eight thousand years old. Or learning that dogs actually do see in color (but not the colors we see). Or that there are more bacteria in your gut than stars in the galaxy. Or that low-frequency whales songs can be heard across oceans. Or that spiders can tune their webs to various frequencies to attract specific insects. You know… the magical stuff. As I write in one of my poems, this sort of knowledge “starts some kind of solifluction of the soul.”
The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel says, “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced.”
I do wish for humanity to buck up and behave better — and I have to believe we can — but I’m also onboard with this notion of just letting the non-human world in more, for the magic it offers and for the humility it inspires.
Jay Parini, in his book Why Poetry Matters, says that poetry is about seeking out patterns, scouring the dark, in order to discover the chinks in time that reveal the light. He also writes, “The poet is always a guest a great feast.”
In addition to attentiveness to the world is the matter of attentiveness to poetry and poetic forms — to the craft. As the late Mary Oliver says, “A poem that is composed without the sweet and correct formalities of language, which are what sets it apart from the dailiness of ordinary language, is doomed. It will not fly.”
We really really really need our poems to fly today. I guess that’s essentially what I’m thinking. In some cases, this means following in the fat footsteps of Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. In other cases, it means finding that joyful, engaging structure of a Billy Collins or Wisława Szymborska poem. In some case, it means taking up Carolyn Forché’s call for poetry of witness. We filter all this art and craft and experience and insight as we aim to build our own structures, our own poetic purpose.
I want to add one more observation from my recent visit to Ireland. With all the collective suffering over three hundred years or more, there has also been some amazing art — including astounding poetry and music — in response. This is what artists and writers do. We bear witness to the world as it is. We don’t (can’t, really) offer solutions. We don’t tell people how to think or live. But we do hope that our art will help lead to a heightened sense of life, a better understanding of the world, a more humane humanity — and, if we’re lucky, to a more just, peaceful, and verdant world.
Irish writer Oscar Wilde says, “Poets are always ahead of science. All of the great discoveries have been stated before in poems.” This is a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true that poets and artists can and do help lead the way, can and do drive change.
Wilde also says, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist. That is all.”
I write because I’d like to see more of us join that rare group of people aiming to truly live. We acknowledge the suffering — ours and others — but we find a way through to spotlight core matters of importance, including the beauty and magic.
Danté, at the end of The Divine Comedy, puts it this way:
The will roll’d onward, like a wheel
in even motion, by the love impell’d
that moves the sun in Heav’n and all the stars.
.
Like many of you, I’ve been digging into the details of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College — and reading articles, commentary, and other public responses to it. I also went back and re-read a piece I wrote for Teaching While White at the start of this lawsuit in support of Harvard’s admissions practices aimed at racial diversity.
If given the opportunity I might rephrase a few of my comments in that earlier piece. But it essentially sums up how I feel on this matter. All things considered, the U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative action based on race boils down to a victory for privilege and power and represents another blow to democratic principles and justice.
At the start of the lawsuit, Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, told the New York Times that the use of race as a contributing factor in college admissions “falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life.”
This was essentially the view the majority of the Supreme Court justices would come to embrace as well.
While in the theoretical realm I imagine most of us would agree with the notion that one’s race or ethnicity should never be used for harm or gain, Blum’s overall position is such a disingenuous one to take when it comes to real-world college admissions. It has been clear for decades now that to be white is to have a leg up in various avenues in life, especially in college admissions. The whole point of affirmative action has been to make college access fair and just — and the statistics make it clear that these efforts have been paying off, even as racial injustice persists more broadly in our society. College admissions, in other words, has been a positive example of what a conscious commitment to racial justice can do in an otherwise stubbornly racist nation. And I think efforts on this front have encouraged colleges and universities to further refine their admissions policies for greater equity and justice all around. There is still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but the pathway is clear.
If Blum truly cared about justice, as his statement implies, he would not have attacked the one system that is working well and causing no harm. Rather, he would turn his attention to fighting the serious forms of racial discrimination that persist in housing, jobs, precollegiate education, the criminal justice system, health care, banking, and elsewhere. There’s plenty of evidence that racial bias in favor of whites in such systems actually do cause lifelong harm to others.
The goal of this lawsuit, it strikes me, was never about racial justice or civil rights, but about restoring a form of injustice that serves to preserve the inequitable status quo. I know that Blum has denied that this has been his goal. But it’s hard to see how attacking an admissions system that creates fair access and a racially diverse student body among a pool of fully qualified candidates can be viewed as a moral good.
A key argument in favor of dismantling affirmative actions is that we’ve come a long way as a nation and that the consideration of one’s race should no long apply. T’would be nice if this were true. But racial injustice and imbalance still tilt the scales toward white Americans. A key statistic is that of family net worth. At the start of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the net worth of white families was ten times that of Black families. Today? The net worth of white families remains ten times that of Black families. When it comes to college admissions, I read recently that middle-class Black students are far more likely today to attend schools with fewer resources than their middle-class white peers. As a new study, highlighted in the New York Times, notes, even as top colleges and universities aim for greater diversity, they still favor the wealthy by a significant margin. In the years covered in the study, the wealthy were admitted to Ivy League schools at a more than twice the rate of the average applicant. So even when it comes to college experience, even in an era of affirmative action, Black students remain at a disadvantage.
There are plenty more statistics one could point to that demonstrate racial inequities in American life. If you are looking for a good source of information on race and economic justice, a great place to start is with Matthew Desmond’s recent book, Poverty By America.
As for Asian Americans, a majority disapprove of the Supreme Court decision and resent feeling as if they are being used as a wedge, in effect, to dismantle civil rights. Many leaders of the Asian-American community have also spoke out about the harm this decision will do to their communities. As Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice’s Asian Law Caucus, noted, “This ruling will particularly harm Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian and Southeast Asian communities who continue to face significant barriers to higher education.”
I don’t want to go on here about what I see as the faulty and reductive logic in the court’s decision and in Justice Roberts’ argument. I imagine you have read plenty on the subject and have a clear opinion. I mostly wanted to go on record again in favor of admissions practices that aim to improve the make-up of the student bodies at top colleges and universities so they more closely represent the nation’s citizenship regarding race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, and more. I also want to go on record in support of colleges and universities in their efforts to create a broadly diverse student body — including matters of nationality, background, interests, talents, and experience — in order to offer a dynamic learning community. The research is clear on both fronts: creating diverse student bodies is both a just practice and smart educational policy.
As Harvard said in response to the decision, the university remains committed to “the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”
We’ve come too far in our collective efforts to improve access to higher education to let this decision stop us in our tracks. We know that the results of such efforts have been positive and beneficial to the society as a whole. In fact, one recent pole notes that 63 percent of Americans support affirmative action in college admissions. The Supreme Court decision has created another hurdle to this work, but I know there are plenty of smart, caring folks who are working hard at the moment to develop new admission systems to achieve the desired outcomes.
I hope the rest of us will support them in finding this path forward. And I hope that all of us will do what we can in our lives to embrace and support antiracism broadly. Racism has been a central disease in our nation since its founding. It continues to thrive when we make no effort to counter it.
Diarmuid and Gráinne
I bought a nice loaf of GF cinnamon-raisin bread. These were the first two pieces out of the package. I know they are trying to tell me something about life — the tension of comedy and tragedy, the yin and yang of daily living. Or maybe it’s a short chapter in the saga of loneliness in which our protagonist is warned about the dangers of personifying slices of breakfast toast.
There’s a certain Muppet quality to these two. Since I was recently in Ireland, I’ve named them Diarmuid and Gráinne.
Sadly, they are gone now.
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” — Dorothy Day
On a recent Wednesday, I ventured down to Cambridge. Massachusetts, to sit in on a public conversation with Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman — regarding the findings in their new book, The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What College Can Be. As one who has engaged in the conversation on the central societal role of formal education for decades now, I was curious to see what these two Harvard researchers had to say about the state of college learning today — and, by extension, the role of our K-12 systems in preparing children for college life.
Gardner, of course, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, developed in the 1980s and expanded and modified over the years since. But he has conducted plenty of other works as a member of the Harvard faculty in the Graduate School of Education. Gardner is the author of thirty books, in fact, and the senior director and principle investigator at Project Zero, an ongoing research center housed at Harvard whose mission is “to understand and nurture human potentials — such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity.”
Wendy Fischman is a long-time project director at Project Zero. She has written numerous scholarly and popular articles on education and is the lead author of Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work (Harvard University Press, 2004). Since 1996, among other things, she has managed various aspects of the GoodWork® Project, specifically focused on the meaning of work in the lives of young children, adolescents, and novice professionals.
Fischman and Gardner’s latest project, resulting in their new book, has been to understand how various constituents view the college experience — especially addressing the question of why attend at all. What do students hope to learn? What did they learn? And, most important, what do they value in their college education? At ten colleges and universities — ranging from private institutions such as Duke University and Kenyon College to public universities such as Ohio State and the Bureau of Manhattan Community College, the research team interviewed 2,000 students and other constituents — including faculty, administrators, parents, and alumni — to get a 360-degree portrait of the values people see in attending college today.
My goal here is not to offer review of the book itself — though I will say that a number of reviews I read found it both insightful and provocative and, thus, worthy of wide attention. What matters most to me is that these kinds of conversations on education get more attention. Simply put, they are essential to the future of our democratic society.
What caught my eye in particular — and what has felt like a steady problem in higher education for all of this century to date — are two key points. First, that the mental health of college students is at an all-time low. Too many students report feeling alienated and anxious. Caught in the grinding logic of the nation’s economic machinery, they see college primarily as a transactional endeavor designed to get them to the imagined promise land of financial security. As a result, the majority tend to focus myopically on grades and résumés. They believe they are in some kind of zero-sum competition with classmates — and wake each day worried about their futures.
Meantime, the majority of college and university faculty members — and the leadership of these institutions — primarily believe that college should be about much larger and more fulfilling human transformation. In short, they see their profession to be about developing each student’s intellectual and social-emotional skills — higher educational capital (HEDCAP), as the Fischman and Gardner put it — to individually thrive and collectively deal with the complexity of human society in all its forms. This intellectual capital includes knowing how to succeed in the workplace, of course, but it runs far deeper to encompass the full-spectrum intellectual engagement — including inquiry, reflection, analysis, problem-solving, collaboration, moral attentiveness, and communication.
At the event, Fischman and Gardner made it clear that they want the leadership of all colleges and universities to take note of the gap between how the majority of students (and many parents) see the point of a college education and what the schools themselves believe is their raison d’être. Closing this gap is complicated business, of course. There is no precise formula. But we can certainly start by both acknowledging the gap and our culpability in creating it — and then use institutional resources to realign programs and missions so they focus on what school leaders say matters most.
These days, vociferous critics bark at colleges and universities from all directions. I don’t want to jump on any such bandwagon here. Educational institutions of every kind function within the larger society, and it’s very difficult to shake off all the pressures that come to bear on institutional decision-making. Much of the criticism about colleges and universities today — at least what I read in the press — strikes me as hyperbolic political posturing with little connection to institutional truth. But as Fischman and Gardner make clear, there are core issues that should be, and can be, addressed.
One central problem in higher education has been the kind of mission creep that, for many colleges and universities, has risen out of the need or desire to attract more students — sometimes simply to stay afloat and sometimes to raise a school’s profile as a highly selective institution. As a result, there has been a steady shift from a focus on college as an experience in human transformation toward college as professional training grounds — the transactional stuff. Essayist and cultural critic William Deresiewicz has written and spoken extensively on this topic, excoriating top colleges and universities for graduating what he describes in one book as “excellent sheep.” These are adults who can succeed at doing what they are told, but struggle immensely to think as individuals or to function collectively for the greater good of society. Too many colleges and universities, he says, inculcate students with a singular ideology rather than focus on developing individual thinkers. I don’t fully agree — I know plenty of free-thinking young college graduates — but there’s an element of truth here that rises from the shift toward high-end job prep and away from engagement with the humanities.
Like Deresiewicz, Fischman and Gardner generally describe the goal of college as place to develop knowledgeable, thoughtful, caring individuals. I’ve heard others describe college as place for the engagement with ideas. These views make sense to me. They outline the kind of college experience we want for own children, no doubt — and we know deep down this is the best pathway to personal and professional happiness and citizenship. But the short-term concern for financial security — fueled by an increasing wealth divide between the haves and have-nots in the nation (see Matthew Desmond’s excellent book, Poverty by America) — has caused high anxiety about basic survival. The statistical reality is that a college degree in the humanities does prepare one well for the workplace as well as life. One’s earnings over a lifetime are as high or higher than those with professional degrees. But worry has a way of overriding such truth — as if students feel they can’t take any chances, especially given the high cost of a college education and the prospect of repaying loans. In short, students are scared about their futures.
The societal problems at play here run deep, of course. The whole overwhelming impact of social media has been an invisible tsunami swamping our collective boats in ways none us could have predicted at the start of the century. And the rise of AI will complicate matters — indeed, already is complicating matters — further. There’s also the problem of ongoing social injustices — primarily racial and economic injustices — that come to bear on life inside every college and university campus. And given our current political landscape (and the maddening soapbox of social media), the related conversations — and institutional decision-making — have gotten increasingly complex and fraught. I would also add that America, as I hint at earlier, increasingly sees itself not as a democracy but as a free-market economy. There’s a big difference. The latter should be answerable to the former, but we seem to be doing just the opposite. The more we see our lives in pure economic terms, the less we see each other as neighbors and citizens — as human beings. Our lives, in other words, keep slipping deeper into the capitalist maw, as if we gave the leadership of our nation over to a bunch of Wall Street chatbots.
Colleges and universities have an important role to play in response to all these matters — and, indeed, must respond, if they see themselves as moral institutions. In the academic arena, if colleges are places for the engaging in ideas, it’s also impossible not to engage with events in the world around them.
Clearly, I don’t mean that they should tell students what and how to think. I’m saying that a key way to address such matters — as Fischman and Gardner argue — is for a tighter focus on the core mission of helping students develop intellectual and social capital. For colleges and universities, this means taking a closer look at what they say they are doing — what they write and publish in their mission statements — ensuring that these words actually represent what they believe matters and, then examining how well their programs adhere to these words. After this, it’s a process of engaging in the realignment of the program. The schools need to ensure that they are sending out the right message to prospective students about what to expect from life in college, recruit based on that message, and then be clear to all students (in as many ways as possible, at every turn possible) about what the institution sees as the goal of learning. In short, if the goal is to be transformational, be transformational.
I realize that my description here is oversimplified. And I know that many critics will point to certain kinds of mission statements as a core problem, especially when they espouse a set of values that others see as political posturing or that hint at a single ideology. In this regard, I know the conversations are difficult. But I think it’s quite possible at the vast majority of colleges and universities to both clarify and strengthen the essential transformational mission. In particular, I’d like to see all colleges and universities to be crystal clear about one essential characteristic that is widely valued — and that is that all colleges and universities are learning communities. In such communities, the focus will be on connecting and supporting students as individuals who are in the process of developing their essential skills for life a democratic society.
Like others, I would argue that the best way to do so is through a strong core humanities and arts programs. But I’m fine with the idea of ensuring that the teaching of such skills are infused into all academic areas — so that students are truly developing and strengthening their humanistic skills along with their intellectual and discipline-specific skills. The goal should simply be that learning takes place within a community.
The quote above from Dorothy Day seems apt for our rather splintered society today. We do live in an increasing transactional world. So it’s not hard to understand why college students would see college as another transactional engagement. But given what we know about the stress and depression and anxiety and loneliness that so many college students experience, the main steps school leadership can take is to counter the troubling patterns by building community, help students understand what you mean by a transformational learning experience — indeed, keep it front and center as a kind of institutional mantra — then work to ensure that your program is tightly focused on such learning.
When I look back on my own college experience, I do recall moments of deep anxiety and uncertainty — and this in a time without social media. At one point in my sophomore year, struggling for good grades in courses that meant little to me, I couldn’t figure out why I was in college at all. I seriously thought about walking away. What saved me was community. I developed a range of great friendships among students, of course. But I also connected with a number of faculty members — adults who saw me, challenged me, and seemed to appreciate my presence. That was enough. In my senior year, by chance, I ended up living in a house with two history professors. We went our own ways during the day, but for three nights a week, we each cooked a meal for the others and sat around the table together talking about life and learning. I was 20 and knew I had plenty to learn (including how to cook). But through these simple meals and conversation with two smart, caring men, I could start to see a path forward. I was happy, content, engaged, alive. I took my classes seriously, but without anxiety. I simply wanted to be there, to learn, to listen, to think. In all, it was a thrilling year.
I don’t know how much intellectual capital I actually developed. But I came to understand that I was, for a time at least, a part of a caring community of learners, and that I was learning for something far more important than grades or jobs. Without knowing the term, I was suddenly in search of transformation from being a child to being an adult — and that I was done forever with the idea that school was transactional.
But I’m going on too much about myself….
Here’s what I want to say. I’m thankful for the research undertaken at Project Zero and Fischman and Gardner’s book, The Real World of College. I hope the book helps push the conversation at the collegiate level about aligning mission and practice so that more students — indeed, the majority — will, when asked, speak about the transformational nature of their learning experiences.
I also hope that these institutions will think more deeply about refocusing on their core missions and the process of recruiting and supporting students. In the event at Harvard, Wendy Fischman bemoaned the shortcomings in the precollegiate world that fails to prepare students to see learning as transformational. But much of the problem lies with college admissions process. The sooner high schools can step out of the college-admissions mindset and into the college-prep mindset, of course, the better. But it makes sense that student and parental anxiety about college admissions would push students to focus myopically on GPA’s, admissions testing, and résumé building — and that, as result, such efforts would exclude the kind of learning that might feel deeply meaningful.
I’m not sure how we change the current system in which high school students must prostrate themselves in hopes of being invited for continued learning at the college level. But I know the high schools are far too caught in the grip of the university — and that the university needs to loosen that grip. The sooner we figure out what I can only describe as more fluid K-16 system, the sooner we’ll be able to focus on the kind of transformational learning we all know matters most.
I know there are efforts being made on all these fronts. But it seems clear there is plenty more to be done. The sooner we center these conversations, the sooner we can realign our actual programs with our missions of human transformation — which, for me at any rate, lies at the heart of what we call education.
Meant to write this earlier…
My second poetry book, Adrift (Grayson Books, 2023) has been released. Due to a weird ISBN issue, it’s available in paperback and hardcover through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.
I’m thrilled to announce that a third poetry book is due out in early 2024. And it looks like a chapbook will come out later this year, too. A busy poetry year!
I thought I’d share here some poems that have been published in various online journals recently:
Bending Spoons — Concision Poetry
The Blur — Open: Journal of Arts & Letters
Sixth Floor, Alley Window — Open: Journal of Arts & Letters
Identity Theft — Bowery Gothic
Night Elegy — Wild Roof Journal
“In the Meanwhile”— Posit
In his remarkable 1970 book, The Hidden Wound — an in-depth examination of the wound of racism on all of us — essayist, novelist, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry offered a nodded to the youthful rebellion of the day that was arguing vociferously for racial and environmental justice, and for the end to war. Critical of adult political and cultural leadership at the time, Berry writes, “The great moral tasks of honesty and peace and neighborliness and brotherhood and the care of the earth have been left to be taken up on the streets by the ‘alienated’ youth of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Reading The Hidden Wound recently, this passage caught my attention because I was one of those young people back then. I didn’t think of myself as alienated, just pissed off at the state of American politics, and yet full of hope for true and lasting change. In fact, at the time, I was sure that change was coming, and coming swiftly. I just knew it.
So I can’t help but wonder now why and how my generation’s passionate interest in racial and environmental justice, and in the common-sense question of peace and neighborliness, would slowly shift away from those beliefs over the coming years and more or less fall in line with the myopic focus on the primacy of individual economic gain and, for the religious type, obsession with personal salvation in the great beyond. The youth of the 1960s and ’70s may have been full of high moral idealism, but in time we didn’t get much of any of it right. In many ways, my generation not only succumbed to what writer bell hooks calls “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” we happily took the reins of this cultural beast — and we’ve been driving it ever since, aiming for the foothills of Mount Doom.
If The Hidden Wound is of value today, I think it lies in this question of what derails us in our collective moral pursuits. I know it’s a bit foolish to talk about a generational “we” — as if all members of each generation see eye to eye on core moral matters. But I wonder why there wasn’t — and isn’t today — a collective majority voice that insists on these matters being the central issues of our time. There’s no question, except in the minds of those who profit from questioning it (and then, I believe, it’s mostly a matter of willful self-delusion), that attention to matters of peace, love, and harmony (Jesus’s thematic trinity) would make life better all around. Less war, less poverty, less racial division, less environmental destruction, and more focus on community and mutuality and reciprocity, are clear cultural goods, are they not? So why didn’t we succeed in the 1960s and 1970s — and why haven’t we made progress since? Efforts today for environmental and racial justice feel more focused today than in recent decades, but then so does the backlash working overtime to neutralize such efforts. And the backlash seems to be winning, again.
As Berry also says, it’s tough to write objectively from within a diseased culture. So it’s hard to know how deeply the disease is working within oneself. While from a fifty-year perspective, I can see some of the shortcomings and biases in Berry’s views (i.e., his literary references that only refer to white, male writers), and I worry about the shortcomings and biases in my own writing, I encourage the reading of The Hidden Wound today. I think the book can help in our efforts to establish a cultural blueprint for evolution toward a truly just society, assuming that this is still a key goal for American society. You know, the elements that can lead us toward “a more perfect union.” “Once you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know,” Berry writes, “you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.”
I also encourage the reading of Berry’s other seminal book of the 1970s, The Unsettling of America. It’s easy to overlook this book, thinking it’s meant for the nation’s farmers and agricultural specialists. But it’s primarily an extension of the argument Berry makes in The Hidden Wound, which is to say a thoughtful discourse designed to help us to understand what better living actually looks like. It’s asking us to shake off the mindset of the imperialists who unsettled the long-running cultural systems of North America and resettled them in their exploitative image. The result has been our ongoing history of exploitation in the name of freedom, but really in service to the exploiters’ personal wishes. The result is… well, you know: America in the 2020s, tied in knots by too much greed and fear. At the heart of this book are a few key points. One, that we really do depend upon the land, and that using it up recklessly, as we are doing, for short-term corporate profits and the convenience of those of us caught in a system, can only lead us toward ruin. Two, that the antidote to our exploiter/exploited binary is to focus on how true communities of care, kindness, and reciprocity function — then build them, nurture them, cherish them.
Berry argues that a central problem for us is that we are essentially a nation of specialists. The fact that we engage daily in the specialist work we were each trained to do in order to stay housed by and fed by (and indebted to) the corporate powers, while buying a little time of our own recreation and amusement, is a main reason why we can both see the trouble we’ve created and yet do little to address it.
The book does address agriculture, of course, as a reminder that the push for abundance of food, combined with the concept of efficiency and the economy of scale, is leading us — can only lead us — to the destruction of land and the end of abundance. Here, once again, the focus should be on supporting local communities (especially local, small farms that understand the need to protect and nurture the land). In fact, this should be a key focus on state and national government. The bottom line for Berry is that “a culture cannot survive long at the expense of its agriculture or of its natural resources.”
Ditto for the people.
The Unsettling of America predicted our current predicaments with shocking accuracy. And there have been many writers and thinkers since who have furthered this argument in various and important ways. As we enter a new year, injected with the hope that fuels so much human adventure, it would be good for us to reflect more deeply on where we have been and where we want go — and what we need to change to get there.
While it may be hubris to think my generation was going to change the world for the better in a single decade or two, it’s depressing now to realize that we’ve basically ended up driving the exploitive bus with great alacrity all these years. It pains me that my generation has collectively botched things up in the hollow name of short-term economic gain, fueled by an obsession with competition and individualism. It also pains me that, collectively, we’ve willingly given so much power to corporations, a move that makes it seem as if that only variable that matters in life is corporate profit — and that top-down economics is the way to run a democracy well. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how wrongheaded this has been.
Happiness, Berry argues, comes to us through connection, not competition. Culture is a matter of “passion for excellence and order handed down to young people from older people whom they love and respect,” Berry writes. “The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent.”
What I hope will help younger generations drive the shift toward a better version of democratic living are the many writers and thinkers among us who have stayed committed to the essential morality of cooperation, reciprocity, and community — especially those who, like Berry, have reminded us over and over that there’s no us without a healthy natural world.
In working on an essay recently about Wendell Berry and his book-length exploration of American racism, The Hidden Wound, I came upon a related collection of essays by bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place. In her book, hooks references Berry often and with deep respect. Turns out — though Berry is a white man and hooks a Black woman — they are both writers who share a number of core views that rise out of their childhoods in Kentucky, as well as their decisions as adults to return to live in the state. Their paths in academia, as students and professors, took them both to California, New York, and elsewhere. But in time, they felt the need to settle in Kentucky in order to reestablish a close connection to the land and to that all-important sense of community. This move also drove them both to write often about the link between environmental justice and racial justice.
Hooks’ essays in belonging: a culture of place were published in book form in 2009, though they were originally published at various points over the previous decade. In all, they are compelling, essential works for their insights into what it takes to build a racially just American society, as well as for their observations about the troubling impact of capitalism on our views of and connection to nature. As I read, I found myself jotting down numerous quotes and passages. One stood out for its direct link the work I do related to education — and that I know is in the hearts of all educators who are working for change in schools that will lead to more caring and engaged students and healthier communities.
In “Again — Segregation Must End,” hooks, who died in December 2021 at age 69, explains her return to Kentucky, particularly to the town of Berea, where she would eventually become a fixture in the community and serve on the faculty at Berea College. She admits she knew very little about Berea before her visit as a guest lecture years earlier. But she quickly embraced the town and university — which was founded in 1855 by John Fee, a white male abolitionist, and dedicated to the principles of antiracism. The work of antiracism is challenging everywhere in the nation today, of course, but the efforts being in made in Berea, and elsewhere, gave hooks the hope and energy that enabled her to dedicate her impressive life to this work.
In the end of the essay, hooks writes:
“Those of us who truly believe racism can end, that white supremist thought and action can be challenged and changed, understand that there is an element of risk as we work to build community across difference. The effort to build community in a social context of racial inequality (much of which is class-based) requires an ethic of relational reciprocity, one that is anti-domination. With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.”
My takeaway: When mutuality thrives, we thrive.
My second poetry book, ADRIFT, is due out later this year or early 2023. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some poems that have been published in various online journals this year. Only two of these poems will be in the new book.
“By the Ferry Landing” and “Ice to Ice”— Narrative Northeast
“The Way She Goes” — Grand Little Things
“The Climbing” — Permafrost Magazine
“Before You (By Which I Mostly Mean I) Die” — The Decadent Review
“Feral Pigs” — Lit. 202: A Literary Journal
“Swimming” and “From Stockbridge to Lee” — The Broadkill Review
“December” and “Unstill Life with Hospital Cup” — The Pine Cone Review
“Identity Theft” — Bowery Gothic
Colm Tóibín most recent novel, The Magician, is about the German writer Thomas Mann — or as the book’s jacket puts it, “[I]n a stunning marriage of research and imagination, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer whose gift is unparalleled and whose life is riven by a need to belong and the anguish of desire.”
More on the book itself in a moment. What caught my attention this morning, what made me pause in my reading and stare off at the trees where late-August cicadas are singing themselves to death while the apples slowly find their autumnal sweetness, was one of Mann’s observations in the novel (as imagined by Tóibín). At this point in the story, between the first and second world war, Mann’s young adult children, Klaus and Erika, seem to be thriving on disintegration of German society. Or at least they are enjoying the shifting norms that allow them to be whomever they imagine. Klaus and Erika, as you may know, would go on to become writers of note on their terms. At this point, Klaus has written a play that focuses on two young men and two young women whose sexuality is clearly fluid.
More on this, too, in a moment. In the novel’s scene, Thomas Mann’s observation is just one of those passing thoughts. But, of course, it runs deep. Listening to Klaus talk so animatedly about his life in the city, his father comes to the realization “that writing, for Klaus, was a dreary process compared to the excitement of doing other things.” An interesting insight into a man who would go on to writer seventeen books, including Mephisto (1936), before dying in Cannes in 1949 of an overdose of sleeping pills — probably suicide, says Wikipedia, “because of financial problems and social isolation.”
I don’t know much about Klaus Mann. From what I’ve read in The Magician, his being gay clearly made him a target in Germany (and later in America, where he would become a citizen and serve in World War II). But Tóibín suggests that Klaus had his moments of joy, especially his close and meaningful relationship with his sister, Erika — who in time moved to Switzerland, met and married the poet W.H. Auden in a marriage of convenience that enabled Erika to become a British citizen, and then worked as a BBC war correspondent.
The whole Mann family saga is fascinating — thus Tóibín’s novel —but this question of whether or not writing is a dreary stopped me in my tracks.
It made me wonder: Do I think of writing as a dreary activity? Maybe, sometimes — especially when comparing it to, say, nights on the town with friends or a summer-afternoon bike ride along the Atlantic coast. But I don’t think “dreary” is the right word for what I feel most of the time. It’s more like a struggle, a difficult task, a confusing process — one that often leaves me exhausted, frustrated, and maybe a bit depressed, but that also can lead through the forest of tangled thoughts and emotions to something that feels close to clarity (with nonfiction) and art (with poetry and fiction).
I know the internet is abound with commentary on writing. Some of it is how-to stuff. Some of it is inspirational. Some of it focuses on craft. Some of it focuses on practices that keep us in our seat — the bird-by-bird metaphor, and so on. I know the world doesn’t really need my opinion on the writing life. But this question got me thinking, not just about writing, but also about how so many people are constantly looking for insights into writing — writing better, writing without worry, writing more consistently, writing successfully, writing for money. Personally, I try to keep it simple. My mantra is contained on a small note by my desk given to me by my daughter: “Talk less. Write more.”
But on occasion, I, too, find myself paying particular attention to what other writers say about the process of writing. I don’t know if any of it is helpful. I’m mostly looking for a sense community in the struggle, a sense that — at all these writing stations around the world at this exact moment — those of us who are engaged in this process of shaping words into sentences with some intent are not alone.
Maybe what I’m thinking, maybe the cicada-like buzz in my head, is that writing does feel dreary some days. Some days, I’d give anything to just be with friends and family and not worry about how I need to crowd the empty page with tiny symbols. Somedays, I find myself longing for a job that allows me to be attentive to the world around me in the moment — or just some professional activity that comes more naturally to me. I think it’s the daily need to close ranks around my thoughts in order to write that feels too heavy some days.
But then again, I like producing writing that enables human connection on another level, on another scale. I love the way literary art (like visual and performing art) functions in life to help elevate our sense of being. Maybe even impact the world for the better.
In Tóibín’s novel, one of the elements of the story that caught my attention is that Thomas Mann seems to write without fear, without deep struggle, without any sense of dreariness or doubt. This may simply be a flaw in novel. Or, since I’m only about a third the way through, perhaps Mann’s writing process will come to light later in the book. But, wow, do I feel enormous jealousy at the way Mann seems to churn out beloved, widely read novels with such seeming ease — and manages to win the Nobel Prize in the process.
At this point in my reading of the novel, though, the lack of description of Mann’s time spent writing feels like a shortcoming. Surely Mann wrestled longer and harder for every page than The Magician suggests.
The other thought that came to mind is that maybe the novel isn’t really about Thomas Mann the writer. It may not even be a novel about the Mann family, despite all the fascinating parallel stories. The way in which Tóibín glosses over the horrors of World War I — almost shockingly so — makes me wonder if this novel is deliberating keeping its distance from historical realities and the whole question of being a novelist and, instead, is a multi-pronged investigation of sexuality — a kind of proof of the truth embedded in the notion of sexual fluidity and the way society has in the past, and continues today, to punish those who find themselves outside the heteronormative bounds.
It seems odd for me to be writing this piece before finishing the novel, before having a solid sense of what I think the book is about. I don’t know if I’ve ever done this before. But, well, I felt compelled today to write this from a position of uncertainty. I suppose that’s because I increasingly live in sphere of personal uncertainty inside a world itself that feels caught in a whirlwind of confusion. For human society, it boils down to a question of what the hell are we doing and why? When I’m writing, that same question keeps shoving its way to the fore. Writing feels particularly hard these days because of the breadth of uncertainty.
But the writing isn’t dreary. It can’t be dreary as long as the stakes feel so high.
Amid all this, it also somehow helps to know that, whatever he felt about writing, Klaus Mann, like his father, kept writing.
Earlier this summer, The Broadkill Review published two of my poems: “Swimming” and “Stockbridge to Lee.”
Happy reading.
I spent a few days in Acadia National Park. The poetry is everywhere.
Common merganser on Jordan Pond.
Common merganser with two chicks (on rock) in Jordan Pond.
Bubble Pond.
Peak of Cadillac Mountain on a cold and windy evening.
Lupines on one of the Porcupine Islands off Bar Harbor
One of the islands off Bar Harbor. Saw a bald eagle, harbor seal, porpoise, and black guillemots out here, too.
It’s the landscape, mostly:
—Father Zosima, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
