So in trying to resolve these sorts of questions I tend to look back at U.S. history to try and start to divine some answers. Compulsory schooling was a new idea in the 1830s when Horace Mann and his fellow Massachusetts educational reformers set up the first compulsory state “common” schools in Massachusetts. From what I’ve read, Mann and his comrades were inspired by the universal compulsory education that had recently been set up in the European state of Prussia. Throughout the 19th century, Prussia was on the leading edge of state-directed K-12 education along with developing the modern state university system that was later mimicked in the U.S. and the rest of Europe.

I think it is important here to come to grips with the reality that huge endeavors like implementing universal mandatory public education for all young people are motivated and justified by the logic of building the state. Helping individual young people with their development is really not part of that calculus. Prussia in the early 19th century was a totalitarian militaristic state rather than a democratic republic. The goal of the elite that controlled the Prussian state was to leverage state directed educational and industrial development to build the country into an unrivaled military-industrial power. A power that would be ready to fight and win the next war, and never lose another war like they did to Napoleon’s French army in 1806. Giving every young person in the country a state-directed “free” education was all about that goal.

Horace Mann and the other educational reformers in the U.S. in the 1830s who were inspired by the innovative Prussian model were also motivated by the goal of building a stronger country. The U.S. at the time was at a very challenging developmental crossroads. It was transitioning from being an agrarian society of small towns with mostly citizen farmers who were of Northern European ancestry with fairly consistent Protestant beliefs in the ethics or hard work and self-regulated morality. It was becoming an industrial society of big cites and massive immigration of people from all over Europe who were not necessarily Protestant, but Catholic or even Jewish.

Though the U.S. was not a totalitarian state like Prussia, I see Mann and his fellow reformers representing a progressive intellectual elite who were uncomfortable with change and felt that they knew best about the appropriate direction for the country going forward. Whether they were just protecting their own privilege or they had more noble motives, one way or another they envisioned public schools as the “melting pot” that would transform the children of these immigrants into American citizens who accepted that path forward around secularized Protestant values. As far as I can tell, it was an idea that was not about a humanistic attempt to facilitate individual young people’s fullest development. It was all about a vision for building the state, the United States of America.

It was an idea that had “legs” and spread across the country so that by the beginning of the 20th century there was compulsory school in every state. (It has become so ingrained in life that I wonder if most people today even think about compulsory school as a deliberate social policy choice and not just the only natural place for people to spend their youth.) But for much of that century schools were still financed mainly by local taxes and run by local school district boards. So poorer communities tended to have poorer schools, and the inherent biases of economic, racial and gender privilege were reflected in how schools “tracked” their students into academic, vocational or other educational paths.

But as our society evolved in the 20th century, including launching a “war on poverty” and movements for racial and gender equality, the role of education as a means to those ends evolved as well. Public schools became the main tool to address and redress economic, racial and gender inequality. Even if other efforts fell short, universal public education could give every child in this country – whether poor, female, or of color – the opportunity to “rise above” their unprivileged circumstances and be given the educational keys to success. Increasingly, that effort to ensure fairness and equal educational opportunity fell to states rather than individual communities. (And in the most extreme cases where the states resisted this effort the federal government stepped in.)

It is the nature of management by remote bureaucracies (in this case state and federal educational policymakers) that the management tools tend to be sledge hammers rather than scalpels. American psychologist Abraham Maslow famously said…

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

I guess he’d get a second on that from Peter, Paul and Mary…

If I had a hammer
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening
All over this land

When it comes to federal and state educrats “all over this land”, I think they still feel that the only bureaucratic tool they have to ensure educational equality is the “hammer” of compulsion. If you are given the responsibility of managing an education system remotely from capital cities around the country, and you will never interact with over 99.9% of the 50+ million students and several million teachers that actually engage in that educational process, then I can see how “command and control” seems like the only way to make this superhuman feat anywhere near doable.

So you require communities to open taxpayer funded schools to every kid. You require schools to teach a standardized curriculum. You require kids to go to school, be instructed in that curriculum, and take standardized tests to prove that that instruction took. You may not require them to wear uniforms, but uniformity is what the process is all about. Anything less than that is a recipe for inequality and disaster.

Not very interesting or innovative, but bureaucratically speaking, what can be fairer than that? The rest is just funding and administration.

If you live in a society that was designed to be governed by the democratic process, but that society is still wedded to various forms of economic, racial, gender, sexual orientation and age privilege; it is hard to trust people with that privilege not to manipulate the system to protect it. If the college-prep curriculum is optional, can you trust the local school districts to offer it in all schools, even in the most underprivileged neighborhoods? And even if you make it available to all students, can you trust school counselors not to routinely council underprivileged kids to take the vocational track instead?

But in the 21st century is this sort of standardized compulsory one-size-fits -all schooling really an appropriate developmental path for fifty-two million American kids with a range of life goals and learning styles?

John Taylor Gatto, a thirty-year veteran of New York City public schools (three-times NYC Teacher of the Year) turned radical education critic is quoted to have said…

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

But lacking that learner-driven educational empowerment, Gatto laments that…

A handful of social engineers – backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling: teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, et al. – has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.

Gatto’s thinking is echoed by Jack Hassard, a former high school science teacher and Professor Emeritus of Science Education at Georgia State University. Hassard was involved in the development of several science teacher education programs, including the design and implementation of a clinically based masters program for mathematics, science, and engineering majors. He was director of the Global Thinking Project, an Internet-based environmental program linking schools in the U.S. with countries around the world. He also conducted seminars around the country on science teaching, inquiry and technology for the Bureau of Education and Research and for school districts’ staff development programs.

In his May 6 blog piece on the “Art of Teaching Science” website, “Are the Common Standards & Assessments the Antithesis of Progressive Values?” , Hassard writes…

We think that Common Standards and Assessments are the antithesis of the progressive values upon which this nation was founded. The idea of having a single set of standards and associated assessments appears to remove individuality, creativity and innovation from American classrooms.

Common standards and assessments were conceived and developed in an undemocratic and authoritarian manner, and have minimized our freedom to have an education system that empowers its citizens to a life that is rooted in progressive ideals. Instead we have enabled conservative thinking and conservative think tanks, acting in their own self interests, and those of their corporate partners, especially publishers and testing companies, to take over pubic education and open it to for-profit corporations and privatization.

It’s not the 20th century anymore. Maybe conservative corporate interests took over the management and direction of the U.S. public education system in the early 20th century (see my piece on that subject) and continued to hold sway throughout the century through A Nation at Risk in the 1980s and No Child Left Behind at the century’s conclusion. But now in the 21st century we can take a fresh look at whether compulsory school serves any sort of truly egalitarian societal purpose or just perpetuates an outmoded system of top-down control of human development.

After that fresh look in this new century, maybe there is no longer that same need, at least not in every community, for compulsory schools to ensure a bureaucratic equality. Maybe we have evolved enough as human beings to have developed the sophistication to treat individuals differently but still fairly. Maybe we are ready to change the public education paradigm from “you must” to “you may”, and make schools community centers where young people can come when they want to learn a particular body of knowledge that they are not able to learn on their own. Maybe we are ready to have gatherings of youth and adults in those educational venues where everybody is there because they want to be, rather than have to be, and the zeitgeist will truly be about the joy of learning and not compliance with far-away bureaucratic rules.

And then again, maybe we are not ready. Maybe there is still too much inequality within our communities to trust people to treat each other fairly in a more evolved way, without the heavy hammer of the state hanging above them.

But if we are not yet ready, maybe we should at least be starting to imagine the day when we will!

As I have said before, becoming familiar with the concept of unschooling reading works by John Holt, Pat Farenga, Matt Hern and John Taylor Gatto, I have been taking a long look back at the road I’ve traveled and the key developmental experiences that have contributed the most to who I am today. Though I went to school (K-12 & college, some 20 years worth!), my school experience contributes relatively little to who I really am today, and the wisdom and skill set that I bring to my life’s activities. What is more significant, in retrospect, are the major themes of my own self-directed learning done outside of school.

Case in point is my interest in religion, and my informal pursuit of understanding about the topic, its history, its contemporary practice, and the underlying reasons it is an important part of so many people’s lives. I’ve always been an atheist but I’ve also become fascinated by religion. Go figure! But having the opportunity for over twenty years to participate in Unitarian-Universalism, which is generally framed as a religion (albeit a non-dogmatic one), I became very interested in learning about the nature of the religious process and the role it has played in human society. Add to that my fascination with history, where religion seems to have played a much larger role than the more conventional study of history, particularly in schools, would lead you to see.

Wikipedia says…

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

Unlike many people I’ve met, I’ve had little or no religious instruction in my life, and never really set foot in a “house of worship” until I was 13 (other than attending a couple weddings). Neither of my parents were ever involved in any sort of religious practice, though we had family friends who were. My mom always said she believed in god (not sure whether the capital “G” would be appropriate here), but she also firmly believed that religion was the scourge of the Earth!

My dad was a university English professor, who actually wrote his dissertation on John Henry Newman, an influential Anglican theologian in the early 19th century. But beyond that, I don’t recall him ever talking about god, believing in god, or religion. My dad might well have been an atheist, but both my parents could definitely be described as humanists, based on the definition from Wikipedia…

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns, attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.

Some people, especially some folks on the religious right, would describe humanism, or particularly “secular humanism”, as a religion (I recall Jerry Falwell making that argument more than once!) I generally would not, but I see their point, since for example, many people who hold essentially humanist values and view the world from a secular framework participate in Unitarian-Universalism based on those values.

So what follows is a long narrative (over 7000 words) of my own exploration of religion – its ideas, practice, and the reaching for a deeper metaphysical meaning of life. In putting together this piece, I struggled to try and break it up into smaller free-standing segments. But I think it speaks more to that natural human drive to learn and develop, when it is not diminished by a focus on formal schooling. So in my case I have spent thousands of hours participating in activities that have broadened my understanding of religion and its practice, but never gone to divinity school or even taken a formal “class” on religion.

Duck & Cover, Heaven & Hell

I was in fourth grade in 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and those moments when there was apparently a real possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Somewhere in that time frame I became aware of this possibility, probably as a result of TV news coverage and a couple “Duck & Cover” drills led by my teacher in my elementary school classroom. For those of you too young to remember these exercises, you were spared a fearful experience of powerlessness and contemplation of the apocalypse. For me, it was my first confrontation with my own mortality, and with it, contemplation about an afterlife and the existence of god.

During the 1950s and into the 1960s, in classrooms throughout the country, teachers instructed their young students something to the effect that, if there was the brilliant flash of a nuclear bomb explosion, students should immediately duck under their desks and cover their faces with their hands. This would supposedly give you some small modicum of protection from the immediate effects of the blast. Whether or not this technique would provide any real help if there ever was an actual nuclear apocalypse, who knows, but it sure scared the crap out of me and my classmates and gave us (thank you very much!) a new fear to live with every day.

So I can recall thinking about it while I walked home from school after one of these drills. It was pretty easy for me to let my imagination run wild envisioning the blue sky rent by a flash brighter than the sun. Would I be killed instantly or have enough time to realize that this was the end of everything before I died. And then my imagination would invariably refocus on what might happen next.

So was there a god? Would I go to heaven? And if I was not believing in that god, was there a hell and was I in danger of going to instead?

Honestly, I had no evidence at that point that gods or the “God” actually existed at some transcendent level. I had never sensed the presence of or been spoken to by he/she/it. I had never had the yearning for this ubiquitous deity to be present and a guide in my life. I had the love of my parents, teachers, my friends’ parents and other adults in my life. But I knew at this point in my life that I lived in a world where most people believed in a deity in some form or another.

But it did raise anxiety in me that I needed to confront this whole god concept, because if I died (in a nuclear explosion or otherwise) I might actually be confronted by God’s representative (Saint Peter in conventional Christian theology) and my belief or lack there of could send me to a very less hospitable permanent residence. Was I willing to risk going to hell on the chance that my intuition that I had not sensed the existence of a god was misguided? I pondered this many times as I walked the tree-arched streets of my hometown between school and home, and not being able to completely and comfortably resolve it, hoped that the Cuban Missile Crisis or some such other event would not lead soon to a holocaust.

I don’t recall ever asking my parents about god and whether they believed. Maybe I was embarrassed to even admit that I was possibly a non-believer and flirting with being damned to hell forever. Later in my teenage, when my mom was going through the traumatic period after she and my dad divorced, she confided in me that she believed in god, even talked to god (though I don’t recall her relating god responded in any way) but was totally opposed to organized religion, which in her mind, was the source of most of the war and hate on Earth. I think my dad in some vague way believed in some sort of god, but he was pretty inscrutable on these sort of topics. If I only had him alive and in front of me one more time I would ask him directly. My mom shared with me much later that my dad had shared with her on a couple of occasions that he sometimes felt so out of place in the world that he wondered if he in fact was (seriously) some sort of alien from outer space.

Dandelion Wine

Reading Ray Bradbury’s book in 9th grade English class paved the way for my own encounter with, and embrace of, a more metaphysical and even magical side of life, while still not believing in god. Few books I’ve read have had as much impact on me. It’s one of those cases where you encounter an idea that does not seem to impact you immediately, but seeds a thought in your mind that maybe comes to fruition at some later time, when perhaps that idea addresses a new need to view the world more broadly.

I think as a child I lived in a world of constant magic, creativity and imagination, so acknowledging a magical side of life was not an issue in my conscious awareness. There was just life and it was what it was… and for me that included being magical.

As a youth I began to be exposed more to the “muggle” (that great word from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books which conveys a more precise meaning here than the word “real”) world when my parents’ relationship began to fracture, leading to their divorce when I was ten. Add to that, my own precocious sexuality being put down two years earlier by a third grade teacher when my supposed friend blurted out to the whole class that I had told him I would “pull down my pants for Amy” (another classmate of ours), something I had told him in confidence. Four years later it was the ugly aspects of my junior high school experience including being jammed in with way too many other kids my same age and feeling constantly and utterly inadequate.

Reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine was one of those occasional oases during my three year participation in that discomforting educational institution. I was already into science fiction and fantasy, having read Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Mysterious Island, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, plus various other more pulpier stuff. So in Dandelion Wine, here was Bradbury writing about a kid’s summer experience, where no aliens came from the sky or zombies from the ground but real life events were still framed in a magical fantasy context. I appreciated the reframing (which our English teacher did his best to point out to me and all my classmates). Of course then I looked around me and saw nothing magical about my junior high experience, and was too busy just trying to keep some small shred of my self-esteem intact, I filed Bradbury’s summer odyssey away in my mind.

During my preteen and early teen years I only managed to inhabit magical realms compartmentalized from “muggle” life in books, comics, TV and movies. Even today, the smell of paperback books brings back memories of wild imaginary tales plus one of my favorite local haunts, now an Ann Arbor landmark called the “Blue Front”. It was a hole-in-the-wall newsstand, that also sold comic books, pulp sci-fi paperbacks, Mad Magazine, and even some soft-core porn magazines (which as a kid you might be able to sneak a look at when the guy behind the counter was looking away).

Marvel & DC comic books with their super heroes and villains, expanding exponentially on the capabilities of normal humans, plus movies about archetypal witches, wizards, vampires, and giant reptiles emerging from the sea, led a kid with an active imagination to at least imagine that the muggle world could be incanted with these sorts of meta-real possibilities. My friends and I would fantasize about having super powers ourselves, being more than “just kids” somehow, so better to challenge what felt at times like a tyranny of adults and their “adult world” and the lack of their acknowledgment of us (youth) as equal partners in it.

Experiencing Many Religious Paths

In 1969, when I was fourteen, my mom joined the Unitarian church in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Note that the denomination would later merge with the Universalist church to form the present day Unitarian-Universalism or “UU” for short) Given my mom’s antipathy with religion, Unitarianism was still a good fit. Though categorized as a “religion”, it was not about god and doctrinal dogma at all, but instead about humanist values and progressive social action. To top it off, the congregation’s minister, Reverend Erwin Gaede, was an avowed atheist. (How’s that for an oxymoron, an “atheist minister”?) But mostly my mom joined because she was becoming a political and feminist activist, and this church and its congregants were the nexus of liberal political activism and influence in this very progressive politicized college town.

While my mom attended the Sunday service, she dragged me along for their youth program (what in more conventional churches would be referred to as “Sunday School”). Consistent with what I would learn later about typical UU practice, rather than learning so much about the principles of Unitarianism, our class studied a range of the world’s other religions. We learned about the origins of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We had guest speakers from a range of other churches and synagogues in Ann Arbor, which would be followed by our class attending that denomination’s weekly worship service on a subsequent Sunday (or Saturday). I probably attend at least a dozen different services, including Catholic, Reform Jewish, Mormon, Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopal, Congregational, Lutheran, Baptists (both majority white and majority black congregations) and Christian Scientist. (If Scientology had been around we would have probably tried to check them out too!)

Certain memories stick with me from all those visitations. All the getting up on your feet to sing or down on your knees to pray. Taking the various communions (wafer and grape juice or even wine) and wrestling with the metaphor of ingesting the body and blood of Christ. The mostly incomprehensible sermons. The sing-songy canticulation by the Rabbi and Cantor. The exuberant call and response between the Baptist minister and his black congregation. In contrast, the Quaker service led by no one, where the attendees sat quietly until so moved to rise and randomly say something they thought was appropriate. The pomp and incense of the Catholic service which I recall was still in Latin rather than English. And I also recall at each religious venue looking around to confirm that these were just a subset of the regular people I otherwise encountered in my life in the more secular venues of my hometown.

In the mid 1970s my mom stopped attending the Unitarian Sunday services and my participation in the youth program ended as well. I filed it away as another experience not knowing there was more to come.

Altered Consciousness

It wasn’t until I finished high school, that I was able to de-compartmentalize and begin to find magic in moments during my regular life. Not coincidentally I was introduced to marijuana, that next fall after high school graduation, during my first year of college. Having not really had any experience at the time with meditation or other metaphysical disciplines, smoking weed was my first (at least first recognized) experience with altered consciousness. It certainly felt like a very different world getting high, and say going to the movie theater and watching the movie Fantasia sitting in the front row.

So even when I was not high, I now had been introduced to another frame of reference, and based on the preponderance of thought and discourse, historically and in the current media about spirituality and deeper levels of consciousness, I began to imagine what a deeper level might feel like, which is a first step towards making it part of your life. So recalling Dandelion Wine, when I saw a kid joyously playing and laughing, or an old woman see me and smile knowingly, or when I felt completely enmeshed in the moment, I would ponder, or at least imagine, if somehow I was in touch with some deeper magical level. It felt good – affirming and supporting – to imagine I was operating within a deeper tapestry of connected existence with the rest of humanity and the larger universe.

I recall a hit song of the time I heard a lot on the radio, “Strange Magic” by the Electric Light Orchestra…

Oh, I’m never gonna be the same again
Now I’ve seen the way it’s got to end
Sweet dream, sweet dream

Strange magic
Oh, what a strange magic
Oh, it’s a strange magic
Got a strange magic
Got a strange magic

Sitting at the Laundromat pondering entering the adult world (what I want to be when I grow up), my family’s clothes churning in a mixture of Tide and water in the Wascomat washer, it was such a relief and an inspiration to hear Jeff Lynn (ELO’s lead singer) reminding me about that non-mundane side of things. Inspired perhaps by the ELO song, I recall a tune and lyric of my own that came to me one day as I walked the tree-lined streets of my hometown, and would sing to myself over and over sometimes, like a mantra, particularly when I walked…

Everything has got magic
In its own way
Cool the rational logic
Hey, hey

Certainly to be mystically connected and in tune somehow with everything around me had some efficacy for everyday life, allowing me to relax, bear witness and be, rather than nervously fret and cautiously observe, detached.

I think some people might frame this sort of experience as getting in touch with god, and I thought about that at the time, but there was no sense of a deity, except perhaps a sense of a level of consciousness perhaps in all those big old trees around me. The question of who created all this did not seem to matter… it just is and I am. It would be years later exploring Unitarian-Universalist thought where I would be presented with the ideas of “many spiritual paths” and “creating your own theology”. After Dandelion Wine, attending various worship services, and my own earlier deeper-level experiences, these concepts would resonate with me.

Playing & Contemplating the Silver Ball

In the late 1970s during my last couple years in my hometown of Ann Arbor, inspired by that song from the Who’s rock opera “Tommy”, I became a pinball wannabe wizard, making time each day I was on campus for my college classes to drop a few dollars worth of quarters in the slot and transcend my muggle life into the world of metal spheres, plastic flippers, bumpers, targets, spinners and those accursed ball-eating gutters.

It was a profoundly simple and dazzling universe of exotic noises and lights highlighting the spectacular laws of kinetic physics guiding that iconic silver ball on its course. It was a compelling game of skill that required a calm mind, hyper focus, extreme sensitivity and the ability to meld with the machine and bring it alive in a target-dropping point-scoring flow.

So embracing this “zen” of pinball was a small but important step for me in beginning to acknowledge a subtle, deeper level of meaning in everyday life. I found I could play better pinball if I communed with the machine, treating it like a sentient being that wanted to be engaged, honored, and played well. It would be silly perhaps if you took this sort of thing literally, but I was exploring the subtle world of the efficacy of metaphor. I would later read Karen Armstrong’s History of God and other books about the efficacy of religion which highlighted the important role of metaphor and mythos is religious teaching.

Trying to live viscerally in the moment, I began taking greater notice of the plants and animals that inhabited my home town, giving them metaphorical sentience as well, touching the plants, inquiring into their health and acknowledging the squirrels, crows and other critters. I became very cognizant of the weather, which became the metaphorical communication and commentary of “Mother Nature” with me and my fellow Ann Arborites. Walking across town, in the humid heat of summer or the biting winter wind, became a journey with a host of friends and acquaintances, going through the cycles of their existence. I imagined the big old trees advising me. In summer I would often walk across town barefoot, feeling all the sensations of pavement, asphalt, wood, grass and bare ground and the subtle messages implied metaphorically in each.

Still at this point, if asked, I would call myself an atheist and not acknowledge believing in god or any other such deities. Instead I was enjoying my relationship with Mother Nature, a more relaxed metaphorical deity, with less of a need to be real.

Practicing Unitarian-Universalism

Thirteen years later in 1991 my partner Sally and I joined the Sepulveda Unitarian-Universalist society (often known by its nickname “the Onion” because of its onion-shaped sanctuary) in the midst of the San Fernando Valley northern suburbs of Los Angeles. Our son Eric was five and his sister Emma was two, and the several neighborhood kids they played with were well indoctrinated in their family’s Catholic or Evangelical Protestant religious beliefs. Since I had grown up as an atheist in a humanist college community and Sally had parted company with the religious aspects of her family’s Judaism, we thought it might be a good experience for our kids to to be exposed to a progressive alternative to the religious dogma the neighbor kids were relating to them.

Sally and I started regularly attending the Sunday service at the Onion and Eric and Emma participated in the “Sunday school” youth program. Sally and I really connected with the congregation’s minister, Charlotte Shivvers, and I recall a number of her “sermons” about UUism and tales of famous UUs that we found very interesting and inspiring. It was certainly a strange new thing for me (who had never taken any religious practice seriously as a youth) to see the humanist values that I had grown up with reframed in a sort of religious context.

Given my obvious interest and initial enthusiasm for this strange new thing, Charlotte recruited me to serve on one of the congregation’s committees, which I was soon co-chairing. Then I was recruited to serve on the Board and eventually to do a two-year term as Board President. During my four-year tenure on the Board I was exposed to every element of the logistical and administrative side of running a religious congregation, as well as how a congregation was woven into a larger denominational structure. My tenure on the Board, and particularly as President, was during a very difficult time for the congregation. There were major issues with direction, staffing and budget, and a debilitating split among significant factions within our small congregation of about one hundred members.

The UU denomination tends to be good about training their key volunteers in the best practices for egalitarian meeting facilitation skills, and I took full advantage of that training. As President, I ended up facilitating a number of Board, committee, and full congregation meetings, that included a very difficult working through of those issues. So much so that after two years as President I felt that there was no sort of assemblage of angry people that I could not navigate and assist with moving through due process.

Also typical of UU practice, there are a number of “lay led” (led by a congregation member rather than a professional minister) Sunday services, and all members are generally given this opportunity (including formal or informal training) if interested. I was interested, and learned every aspect of putting together and leading such a “worship service” as it was often generically referred to. This included creating a sense of “sacred space” (a temporary separation from the muggle world) as people entered the sanctuary by preparing the venue beforehand with pictures, artifacts, candles, etc. Having the appropriate opening music (whether recorded music on the PA or played on the piano) to set the right mood for the particular focus of the service. Weaving in the various standard components, including an introduction and welcoming, a meditation, music and opportunities for the assembled congregants to sing, prearranged individual readings by selected congregants, and responsive readings by the entire group. Then generally a “sermon”, or really whatever the main presentation would be. Finally an appropriate conclusion and tying-up of things, including more music, maybe hand-holding and blowing out of candles, etc.

Over the 20 years I have been a member of the congregation I have probably been involved in developing and leading two or three Sunday services a year. I also developed and led the two memorial services for my mom. Between my experiences on the Board and those occasions “in the pulpit”, I feel like I could function as (or at least present a pretty good imitation of) a full-blown minister. These days, whenever I attend a religious service – whether weekly worship, wedding, funeral, coming of age (UU or some other denomination) – I note and critique the various aspects and the work of the “moderator” (person leading or otherwise facilitating), and log away any particularly effective components I had not thought of before.

As a side note, our kids have had similar training in and experience with creating and leading “worship services”, as they both have participated extensively in the UU older youth community, conferences and camps. Our son Eric in particular has functioned as a youth camp “chaplain”, which included developing and leading several worship services during the camps duration. Moving beyond his dad’s experience, Eric recently was asked by friends to officiate their wedding ceremony, which he did apparently to the satisfaction of the couple and the family and friends in attendance. (Prior to the service he was “ordained” through a donation to the Universal Life Church.)

Wrestling with Religion in History

I’ve always been fascinated by history and the developmental narrative of our human species. I have had my share of formal history classes in school, including the standard high school and college general studies fare along with some more niche classes in modern Russian, women’s and journalism history. But the bulk of my study of history, including religious history, has been initiated by my own interest outside of any school context and has generally involved reading any number of books on the topic.

The history of religion particular fascinates me because I have found religion to have played a critical role in that history, including the history of the United States, explaining so much about why our society is how it is today. That critical role, to a large degree, went unacknowledged in my standard high school and college history classes. It intrigues me how much of that was about keeping education completely secular and how much perhaps is just a conventional wisdom that misjudges the significance.

My greatest exposure to the evolving role of religion in the sweep of human history has been through reading many of the works of British theologian and historian Karen Armstrong, including her books A History of God, The Battle for God, and A Case for God. Armstrong chronicles the development of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Christianity) during the Axial age (800 to 200 BCE), and later spin-offs of Islam, Kaballahism, Protestantism, Deism, and an evolving atheist thread. Her thesis is that religion emerged and has evolved to address human needs for meaning, and I find this passage in her Wikipedia biography telling…

She has been particularly inspired by the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on practice as well as faith: “I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s about what you do. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” She maintains that religious fundamentalism is not just a response to but, paradoxically, a product of contemporary culture and for this reason concludes that, “We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.”

Reading Armstrong’s work and weaving it together with the books I’ve read by Riane Eisler (particularly The Chalice and the Blade), I have shifted from the conventional wisdom about religion from my own upbringing in a secular, humanist college town. That conventional wisdom was that religion was the enemy of human progress and (per Karl Marx) “the opiate of the masses”. What I have come to see is that the inspirations for the development of the world’s great religions were humanistic, but in many cases the practice of religion was co-opted by the powers that be into a tool (the opiate part) for controlling people. (See my piece “Religion is not the Problem, Patriarchy is” for more on this.)

I have read extensively about the period of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and its role (for better and for worse) in challenging the religious control model of the Roman Christian church, and playing a critical role catalyzing a “Modern Era” of individualism, nationalism, republicanism, industrialism, and exploration and exploitation of the larger world. It fascinates me how the dour 16th century religious theology of John Calvin went on to become the underpinning of a secular industrial Western society. And how that theology in its WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) expression has been so critical to the development of American society and culture. (See my piece “American Calvin” for more on that.)

I also had the pleasure to read a great book, Out of the Flames, about one of the mostly unsung figures of the Reformation era, Michael Servetus, who is credited as the founder of Unitarianism. He was a brilliant scholar, Renaissance man and challenger of conventional wisdom about God and religious authority. In the simplest terms, Servetus challenged the conventional Christian belief that Jesus Christ was an aspect of God and essentially believed that he was a regular human being like the rest of us. Jesus was not our “lord” in some hierarchical sense, but more an egalitarian exemplar of what all human beings could aspire to be. Even today, such a belief would be considered by many Christians to be very heretical. It continues to intrigue me how UUism plays out so many aspects (both positive and negative) of Servetus’ legacy.

Religion in American History

I have come to understand that religious ideas and practice have played a key role in the history of America and the development of American culture in at least two ways, that often are underplayed in American history textbooks. First, Calvinist theology and the associated religious practice as embodied in the “Puritan” or “Protestant Ethic” has played a crucial role in powering and regulating the secular development of the nation, its people and resources. Second, religion has played a key role of catalyzing much of the grass-roots resistance to the American “establishment” (for better and for worth) throughout the country’s history and continuing today.

Works by various authors I have read document how Calvinism, a seemingly dark and dour theology that sees the mass of humanity as innately “depraved” and undeserving of salvation in its own weird way liberated Western society from the grip of Feudalism and catalyzed the “Modern Era”. It allowed Europeans to harness the advances of science, wield large sums of money to build and staff factories, and explore and commercially exploit the rest of the non-European world (including the “New World” of the Americas). It ameliorated unbridled exploitation, great wealth amidst great poverty, and all the winners and losers in the exercise of state sponsored war and capitalism.

Calvinism caught fire in Colonial America, where a strong ideology that both inspired hard work and restrained profligate behavior was needed to “tame” the wilderness and subjugate the indigenous “heathen” Indians. Various Protestant sects, growing out of Calvin and Luther’s ideas, became the religion of the majority of European-American colonists. Many of the emerging American elite, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, believed in a non-puritanical Deist or Unitarian theology that saw human nature in much a more positive light, not innately and irredeemably depraved. But much of the common folk of the country embraced flavors of Christianity with very Calvinist roots. But both elite and common folk embraced the secular Calvinistic ethos that “living to work” was next to godliness.

That embrace of religion by the common people in America brings us to that second role I now understand that religion has played in U.S. history, that of catalyzing much of the various national movements that challenged the “establishment” of the time. This includes the Great Awakenings of the Colonial period, the Abolition and Temperance movements of the 19th century, and the Civil Rights and more recent conservative movement of the 20th.

Coming to Grips with the Bible

I’ve always been a bit intimidated by the Bible, since I was a kid who grew up outside of religious ideas and practice. I would see copies lurking (seemingly unread) in the nightstands of motel rooms my family stayed at when we traveled and I would see it sworn on in real or fictional court proceedings in TV and film. At each occasion of its presence, I would be reminded that it contained some sort of ancient wisdom that I and the circles of people around me were choosing to do without (at our peril perhaps). I understood it to be the words of a deity that I was choosing not to believe in. It was best out of sight, out of mind!

As an older youth watching the news on TV (particularly speeches by Martin Luther King or interviews with Billy Graham) or reading various fiction or non-fiction I would see references to various biblical passages with their at times archaic syntax and moralistic tone. I understood that there were good people that found wisdom and inspiration in its text and I recall making a few half-hearted attempts to read the first several chapters of its first book Genesis. But lacking a compelling enough narrative in any context that I understood, I soon put it down. I also experienced various pop culture recitations of the Jesus story (drawn from the New Testament) in the form of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell that I found interesting and at times compelling.

But it wasn’t until I was a young adult in college and then beyond when I started reading a lot of feminist works that referenced the Bible and were generally highly critical of many of its cited passages. At yearly Passover dinner with my partner Sally’s family, I learned the gist of the story of Exodus told around the Passover Seder. After reading Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade I even made a more determined effort to read significant excerpts from the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I have also heard various pieces of these tracts at a number of Jewish worship services I have attended, mainly for relatives’ Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

After reading Eisler’s work, my partner Sally’s mom suggested that I read Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God. Like Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, it was a long tough slog through a scholarly work written more like a text book than an engaging narrative. But reading Armstrong after reading Eisler gave me a unique perspective, moving me for the first time beyond that conventional humanist wisdom that, as my mom used to say, “Religion is the root of all evil in the world”. My exposure to UU non-dogmatic theology was also broadening my religious perspectives. My synthesis of these two provocative writers with the UU framing thrown in was that religion was not the problem in itself, it was religion woven into patriarchal models of power-over and control that were the real problem, like gasoline and an open flame.

One of the things I found fascinating in Armstrong’s work, was her looking at the people who compiled the first five books of the Bible, identifying four such “editors”, each designated by a name or its one-letter abbreviation.

The first has been dubbed the “Jawist” or “J”, and was given this name by an 18th Century biblical scholar because he used the Hebrew God’s proper name “Jahweh” (“Yahweh”). This person is believed to have lived in the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah and compiled the original version of the Adam & Eve story in Genesis that depicted God inhabiting the Garden of Eden and interacting directly with his human creations.

The second writer is known as “Elohim” or “E”, because he preferred to use the more divine title “Elohim” for God, and this person was probably a contemporary of “J” but lived in the kingdom of Israel north of Judah.

The two had had very different interpretations of the stories of the people of Israel, based perhaps on their geographic contexts. Says Armstrong…

J saw Abraham, a man of the south, as the prime hero of Israel and had little time for Moses, who was far more popular in the north and one of the leading protagonists of E’s narrative. Neither J or E seems to have made any effort to research the history of Canaan, but were content to adapt the old stories to the conditions of their times.

Armstrong paints the picture of two very popular regional bards, holding forth to their different regional audiences, aware of and reinterpreting each of the other’s stories to add their own slant and biases. There appeared to be none of the tension with the pagan deities in either of their stories that was later added to their reworked tales and made the cut in the version of the Bible that has survived into the modern world. Yahweh/Elohim was just one deity among many, not yet the be all end all. Armstrong sees their portrayals of God and their human characters not as “morality tales”, but more morally ambiguous stories like many later works of great fiction.

The third school of biblical editors, are known as the “Deuteronomists” of “D”, and represented a group of priests, prophets and scribes during the time when the Temple still stood and the ancient nation of Israel was still a strong political entity. They were attempting to reform the religion of Israel by reinterpreting the stories of J and E into a more secular political context. Their program, according to Armstrong…

Would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult; a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen; and a centralized state with a single, national shrine. The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology.

The fourth group of editors is known as the “Priestly” school or “P” and reinterpreted this edifice of stories of the people of Israel in a very different context than the “Deuteronomists”. The nation of Israel had been conquered, the Temple destroyed, and its leaders and many others deported to Babylon in exile. Temporal power was no longer in the cards, and the exiles who came together as the P group reworked their cultural stories away from the power and glory of the D school into a portable theology that could support a people in exile, wherever they might be. It sounds to me like something not unlike the Christian Reformation two millennia later. People should be their own priests (thus the name “Priestly”), and read the liturgy and follow the dietary laws that had been previously practiced only by the official clergy. God would be present wherever they gathered to pray. Out of this new orientation came the biblical books of Leviticus and Numbers, laying out a how-to of religious practice and law.

For me as a “secular humanist” and atheist, Armstrong’s framing of the context for these five opening books of the Bible (the Torah of Judaism) takes a lot of the negative “charge” off the Bible, and puts this literary classic more in the realm of Shakespeare than scripture.

Wrestling with the Concept of Mythos

My exploration of religious thought, particularly the works of Karen Armstrong and Joseph Campbell, has included wrestling with the two types of wisdom that the Greeks called “mythos” and “logos”. In classical Greek culture, each had its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mix the two. In modern American society “mythos” has become devalued, both by believers and non-believers, equating the word “myth” with something that people continue to believe which isn’t really true.

Logos (reason) is the pragmatic mode of thought that enables people to function effectively in their day-to-day muggle world. But for many if not most people, accepting and understanding the deeper and often inscrutable mysteries of life and life’s struggles is best done through mythos (metaphor).

In ancient times, according to Armstrong, the “why” and other metaphysical questions of life – why it was okay to kill other creatures for food that were not all that different from humans, why it was important to be kind to others, why bad things happened to good people, why life was such a struggle, how a young person became an adult – went beyond the rational logic. These questions required mythology and ritual practice beyond mere words and knowledge that was attainable through the senses. Out of this mythology and practice religion developed, and when undertaken in the appropriate context, led to individual discovery and insight on the deeper “why” and other metaphysical questions of life.

I have had my own experience with ritual practice transcending logical thought. I recall the last evening of a yoga retreat Sally and I attended. All the retreat participants gathered in the lodge for a drumming circle and a sort of call and response chanting and singing know as “Kirtan”. In the midst of the rhythms that we were all contributing to (with the array of drums they made available to everybody) or amidst the sound of sixty voices in unison responding to the call of the person leading, I felt a profound sense of some sort of “truth” well beyond what any words could fully describe. A connection between all of us in attendance that felt like it was also between everybody else as well.

I consider myself a humanist who believes Albert Schweitzer’s famous quote…

There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

But somehow, I believed that even more strongly after participating in that Kirtan circle, in a state of great relaxation and inner tranquility, hearing the combined voices of sixty human souls (including my own) all unique but choosing for that moment to blend as one.

So was that perhaps at least a more visceral glimpse at the religious “practice” that Armstrong was talking about in the ancient world? Something she attempts to write about with mere words on a printed page? Were the great religious thinkers of the ancient world, like Buddha and Confucius, often described as a profound “nothing” beyond all the muggle somethings of the world.

As Armstrong says…

Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms.

That makes sense to me, even though I, like Buddha and Confucius (who are way beyond my league), do not “believe” in deities that “exist” in some form. They intuited a deeper level that did not “exist” in any precise sense of that word, but could be intuited by others by following certain disciplines of thought and action (like going beyond ego or practicing the Golden Rule).

And what I have come to see as one of Armstrong’s most profound insights, is that along with many secular thinkers, most Western religions got caught up in an obsession with logos, and in order to try and stay relevant, reframed their sacred texts, including the Bible and the Koran, as literal truth (logos) rather than metaphorical stories (mythos) meant to suggest insights on the human condition. This is the religious fundamentalism of today. Not a return to “old time religion” as many people errantly believe, but a modern ideology developed in opposition to scientific thought. I find it also reflective of the “atheist fundamentalism” of some contemporary thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris.

Reading Armstrong’s stuff I have had my own epiphany as well. Our country has a great principle of separation of Church and State, which acknowledges a role for both. How about agreeing as well on some sort of principle of the separation of logos and mythos, and acknowledging the value of both? If religion stayed in what Armstrong describes as its original realm of a vibrant and non-discredited mythos, would people be expressing so much hate and acting with such violence in the name of religious “truth”. Perhaps the richest thought combines elements of both.

Moving Forward

I have done my best to learn about, comprehend, and come to grips with religious thought and practice not because it has played a role in my own foundation, inspiration and moral compass; but because it has played such a role for many of the other human beings I interact with and attempt to influence with my advocacy. I want to better understand, honor and be effective when I address both “people of faith” and secularists like myself. Since it has apparently been such an important part of the narrative of human history, I don’t feel I can do my part to navigate the currents of that history into the future without a full understanding.

Armed with more metaphorical meaning of “God”, I enjoy challenging a person who believes in more of the “guy in the sky” concept of that word to dialogue with me on metaphysical concepts and perhaps acknowledge that their belief in an encompassing deity and my metaphysical non-theism are not necessarily incompatible. Perhaps “believers” and “unbelievers” can coexist in this world without one’s thought and practice contradicting the thought and practice of the other.

I like Karen Armstrong’s quote that challenges various sorts of dogmatic thinking, whether in support of or opposition to religious thought and practice. Speaking to the development of Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the second Temple Armstrong writes…

Anybody who imagines that revealed religion requires a craven clinging to a fixed, unalterable, and self-evident truth should read the rabbis.

For me, as always… the learning continues!

My father turned me on to an article in Psychology Today about a woman named Kate Fridkis and her unschooling experience. After reading it and realizing how much her experience mirrored my own, I was compelled to comment, and encouraged (by my father) to blog about my experiences, here. I use the word ‘abbreviated’ because there’s a lot I could expound upon, but I think this diary sums it up pretty nicely.

After graduating 8th grade at a ‘progressive’ charter school (with mixed results) my parents gave me the option to attend a traditional public high school, to home school, or to continue on the charter school route. I ended up at a traditional school (out of pure curiosity) and lasted through 9th grade, at which point I realized that I was very done with what traditional schooling had to offer.

While I only officially ‘unschooled’ from 10th grade and beyond, I did not go the traditional college route, either. Like Fridkis, I got to explore my interests without constriction or judgment, during those years of freedom after 9th grade. And, like her, I gravitated toward fantasy (and later, sci-fi) writing. I had grown up in a rich tradition of fantasy and science fiction literature, and when I thought about it, had been writing stories since I was a young girl… you know, when I could fit it in.

I ended up heavily involved in online roleplaying communities, wherein I could borrow their worlds and create my own characters; weave my own narratives with other people, young and old, all over the world (some of them I even got to meet, later on). This was my first chance to flex my writing muscles and two important things happened — I got all that lousy writing out the way (that you just have to do when you get started — practice makes perfect), and I learned not only that I wanted to write novels, but that I quite conceivably could.

I had a small college fund waiting in the wings, which I decided was too precious to touch until I was absolutely ready. So, in order to move out, I got a job at a mom and pop breakfast joint when I was 18 (as a server, initially), quickly working my way up to manager. Despite being 19 at that point (I held the job until I was 22), I perpetually had people ask me ‘Are you the owner?’. I have to attribute my poise and overall competency to my unschooling years (when I got to be heavily involved in youth leadership in my Unitarian Universalist community). And I must say, I got a heady dose of perspective working a day job during my college years; truly coming to understand what my life could be if I did not become a writer and did not have a college degree to cushion the blow.

After four years, the job became a strain on my creativity. I’ve been working on a science fiction novel since I was 18 (that has slowly morphed into book one in a Young Adult Sci-Fi Trilogy) and have been periodically taking courses through UCLA’s Writer Program, which despite being labeled as ‘extension’ and requiring nothing in the way of credits (only money), is considered a reputable program. For me, it’s been sufficient college experience. Often, in the course of writing, I have to do a lot of research, and I end up learning a lot of new things. That’s the beauty of the internet — it brings the classroom to you. In fact, the majority of my UCLA courses have been online, with an instructor in Kentucky (whom I absolutely adore).

I’ll be 23 in July. Just last September, I decided to quit the job that nursed me into adulthood and subsist off my fund to make some serious progress on my book. I completed a first draft in less than three months, continuing to study through UCLA, and am now knee deep in the 2nd draft (along with loose planning for books two and three). I’m confident that when I do start looking for part time work again, I’ll have enough done that I can begin the process of querying agents, or at least, be very close. I’m very grateful that I was able to use my college fund in this way… I can’t think of how it could’ve benefited my dreams and my budding career more.

That’s my story in a nutshell. I’m still nervous about the next 6 months, as I watch the money that’s been my safety net dwindle beneath me. But, being allowed to cultivate my own agency has engendered a confidence in myself that keeps me afloat, and I know that even when I look for work again, it’ll only be temporary. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that being able to explore my interests so freely is what set me on this path, and no matter how tough it’s been, working my way to this point, I wouldn’t do anything differently.

Emma’s response to a comment that some science fiction writers don’t seem to be interested in developing their stories’ characters…

It’s so interesting that you bring it up. I know a bit about archetypes, both in character and in plot (I’ll be the first to admit that I’m writing ‘the Hero’s Journey’ with a MacGuffin thrown in there somewhere… chuckles). There’s a Joseph Campbell quote I love (on top of the fact that he coined the phrase that sums up my life philosophy: follow your bliss), which I keep on my desktop and refer to often:

The hero path… where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where he had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

When I read that it kind of blew my mind, because that’s certainly the essence of the story I’m writing (I know he’s written a lot on the subject). I know about this idea that there are only a few stories that keep being retold. Likewise, the characters that inhabit them tend to reoccur, and often perpetuate stereotypes we’re not even aware that we hold. In this way, stories can be unhelpful (or even, damaging) to our overall evolution… because storytelling is a big part of how we process what life means, what roles we all can play, and how we can be with each other in the world. Speculative fiction, at it’s best, helps us reexamine the human condition, ideally in ways we haven’t before.

I agree with you that it’s crucial to look at fiction, particularly genre fiction, through this lens. Exposure to quality fiction and the analysis of it (and really everything else) is a big part of what writing is… so I do my best to compensate for the experience I might have garnered in a college setting.

‘Character development’ has actually always been my strong point. For all my weakness in other areas (worldbuilding, namely… that’s tough), I’ve been observing and reflecting on the human condition my entire life. People fascinate me, and I’m sure that’s due in part to my parents, who encouraged me as a child to talk about the people in my life, to break down their personalities and actions and understand the motivations behind what drove them. It went beyond that… we wouldn’t simply talk about my friends, we’d talk about their parents and their family dynamics; we’d talk about my teachers and the students they taught and why there might be conflict between them. And to a lesser degree, we talked about the characters in the books that I read. Just to give a few examples.

I spend a lot of time on my own, thinking about the people I know, even just tangentially, trying to piece them together like a puzzle. The more I learn about them (whether or not they know me well or even think much about me), the more invested I am in fully understanding who they are, even if only privately. I do it unconsciously, and as I learned in my online roleplaying days, this grew into an aptitude for creating characters who not only felt lifelike, but stood apart from the cardboard cutouts that many of the people playing with me were happy to inhabit (and that I always found so unbearably dull).

Creating characters and watching them develop organically is the most exciting part of writing fiction for me. I love shattering stereotypes, because I like to think I’ve done it in my own life. And having read much of the YA that’s out nowadays, I can safely say that I stand a good chance of making an impression — I seem to understand people a lot better than many of these budding authors. Not merely what makes people tick, but what makes them compelling, because I’ve spent so much of my life being compelled by them.

Not to toot my own horn too much, though. There’s always so much more for me to learn! But I guess I wouldn’t want you to worry about me personally. I can only speak for myself, but I do feel like I’ve had a fair amount of exposure and I understand the vital subtext of storytelling. It’s my goal to utilize this to be thought provoking, and challenge the paradigms that people have been content with for so long. This also reflects my upbringing — I was raised outside of traditional gender roles, traditional power dynamics, and traditional expectations about my responsibilities moving through society. I guess it’s no surprise that I would have something to say, and storytelling is the perfect medium. I’m confident that my life’s experience will be reflected in the things that I write, and that it’s opened my eyes to many undercurrents of human coexistence that some people never reflect upon. I’ve always been a deep thinker; I guess a part of me hopes to help others break through the surface of their own preconceptions.

Responding to a comment about the importance of the college credential to getting certain types of jobs…

I agree that there are definitely fields wherein a college degree is the best available route, and when trying to find a job, you will be judged and often overlooked if you don’t have one. My dad has a few interesting blog pieces about how that reflects our culture — we’ve come to place a high emphasis on ‘being an expert’ and the pieces of paper that verify it. We’ve also come to ‘consume’ college like anything else, some would say over consume (at least, before we fully consider the consequences of the time and money we’re putting into it).

Not trying to dis college, though… I think it’s lovely idea and it can be a transformative experience for many people. I won’t lie when I say that I do wish I got to experience the social aspect of it, and the general broadening of knowledge that comes with studying your chosen subject (in my case, literature, but I’ll admit I wouldn’t have been too keen to suffer through ‘general ed’, I’m just not the kind of person who retains everything put in front of me, so to study anything that I wasn’t interested in would’ve largely been a waste).

But see, I know that about myself. I have no problem with anyone who seeks out college as the path to their career — my only stipulation is that they get a little perspective before diving in. I know a lot of privileged kids (upper-middle class kids) whose parents put the money aside to pay their kids way. I watch them graduate high school and make ready to go to college immediately, dithering around about their major, or even worse, not taking it super seriously. College becomes route, and I don’t know if they fully appreciate the investment their parents are making in their future.

How can a kid whose never lived on their own, never worked to make a living wage, fully appreciate a college that costs anywhere from 6k-50k a year? (that’s a broad estimate, I know). And for the kids whose ways are not paid in full, who are taking out student loans they may be saddled with for years to come, how can they truly value the money they’re spending when they’ve never had to subsist solely off money they’ve earned completely on their own time? Maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to pour so much money into a degree that may not be relevant to them.

There are exceptions of course, and kids who work while they’re in college… and I truly admire them. I know that the ideal is that they’re able to get a job right after they graduate and start paying off those loans. This is the best case scenario, but in my experience it’s often not what I see happening. The majority of the servers I worked with ay my breakfast job had college degrees they weren’t doing anything with (and I was their boss).

Again, not trying to put down going to college, either as a route to a career or just for the sake of the experience. Not at all. Just trying to advocate a kid having enough of a sense of their own interests and abilities to make that choice for themselves, and to be informed when they do.

My thanks to Emma for letting me republish her thoughts on my blog!

I know the Post has a wonderful contributor, Peter Gray, who is an eloquent homeschool/unschool advocate (and just had that great interview with unschooler Kate Fridkis published in Psychology Today). So if the Post is trying to provide “both sides” of the homeschooling issue, they sure picked an uniformed, unthoughtful spokesperson for conventional public “schooling”. My initial reaction is that it rises to the level of hate speech, but that may be my buttons talking.

So I’m trying to parse his bilious words while re-initializing this previously unrevealed array of triggers in my psyche that he so expertly managed to activate with a mere 514 word rant. Certainly for sheer “button per word” efficiency, Danziger must be up there with the best of show. (Take a deep breath Coop… exhale… once more… okay?… yes… good… let’s proceed.)

Danziger intros with an anecdote that inspired his piece…

The other day after listening to a friend extolling the virtues of her home-schooled son and his exquisite sensitivity (he found a tree branch in the backyard, named it Tree Willy, and asked if it could move inside and be part of their family), I got to thinking about how much that boy could use some time on a playground hanging out with, well, other kids.

Sounds like a person Danziger’s perceiving as perhaps the stereotypical liberal tree-hugger mom of some economic privilege pushing his own buttons, though he’s not candid or thoughtful enough (not sure which) to note that and share this self-revelation with us. Instead it launches him into a delicious or hateful (depending on your own button configuration) rant of one-liners (more Curtin or Aykroyd… you decide).

I thought but didn’t say: Being home-schooled is a great idea if your father is a blacksmith.

Such restraint! Presumably if your dad’s a blacksmith you can learn a practical trade at home (if its the 18th freakin’ century!)

I always thought one advantage of attending school was to go into the world and meet people who are not blood-related… You know, socialize. Figure out who to befriend. Who to avoid.

Oooh… slam that button! Like all us homeschoolers are keeping our kids locked in the basement, at best xenophobes if not child abusers. I’m thinking but not saying, “Like its some sort of social paradise being jammed in a middle school classroom with all those other 13-year-olds, comparing oneself unfavorably!” Just because most kids in school spend most of their day locked up in classrooms doesn’t mean kids who “homeschool” are similarly confined to their parents’ homes. There’s actually a whole interesting world out there one can partake of!

I thought people went to school to read books that they might not find in their parents’ library. You know, books that don’t include words like “thou” and “begot” or phrases like “he dwelleth in the land of Canaan all the years of his life which numbered 848.”

This pushes that button in me that makes me want to blurt out “religious intolerance” and even “hate speech”. It’s the worst of that “us and them” thinking that some of my fellow progressives can descend into when they forsake the Golden Rule.

Before this evening I had never met anyone who home-schooled her children, probably because I don’t hang out with the Amish or with the well-to-do in Topanga.

Add to religious intolerance a loathing for rich liberal tree-hugging ex hippies. Danziger’s got to be into some serious projection there!

The home school mom reminded me of what I, a public school teacher, observe every day: the splintering of America, the intentional segregation of America’s youth.

Okay… finally… a legitimate point here worth discussing, if we can lose all the knee-jerk stereotyping!

Every morning as I head to work on the west side of Los Angeles I see kids in uniforms hurrying toward religious day schools. Some of these families fall in line with liberal Kennedy-style types, while others attend schools where the instructors are Santorum-style true believers. Still others attend Orthodox Jewish day schools that pledge allegiance to God and Israel before America. Still others send their kids to culturally Jewish schools so they’ll connect to the Judaism their parents abandoned years ago.

Ow… maybe not! Is Danziger defensive about his own religious belief or loss there of? There’s also a lot of secular private schoolers on that same west side. Is Danziger afraid of people who don’t look exactly like him and his kids, that aren’t homogenized?

What I do know is that the concept I was taught in elementary school — the idea of the melting pot, the dream of a nation of people of different colors and religions and ethnicities and classes coming together to be stronger for being united, has all but vanished… Whatever happened to “e pluribus unum?” Out of the many, one.

Okay again… back to that real issue!

Some of us in America still resonate with the idea of a “melting pot”, that wherever you came from and whatever your former beliefs, when you come to this country you transform into something new – an “American” – adopting a new set of shared beliefs. This was certainly the vision of Horace Mann, who championed the cause of and launched universal mandatory public education back in the first half of the 19th century. At that time the U.S. was a predominately Protestant country beginning to absorb a huge influx of Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The stated fear among many Protestants at the time was that the Catholics would owe their allegiance to the Pope rather than their adopted country, and change the nation’s prevailing Calvinist values.

Others of us have reframed America as a “salad bowl”, where we encourage and celebrate that diversity rather than trying to melt it all down somehow. I must admit I fall more in this second camp, but I appreciate my comrades who feel we need strong shared values to be a cohesive and functional society. Certainly it appears our current “red vs blue” ideological differences have led to a certain amount of dysfunction in our political and legislative processes.

But yes… point taken! Let’s continue to have this very important discussion! But please, thoughtfully!

The Psychology Today piece is, “Meet Kate Fridkis, Who Skipped K-12 and Is Neither Weird nor Homeless” by Peter Gray, who seems to have become a top-flight spokesperson (along with my friend Pat Farenga) for this “life path” for young people that does not involve routinely going to school. Here’s Gray’s short bio sketch on Fridkis, with the kicker in the last statement…

Kate Fridkis is 26 years old, is happily married, lives in New York City, has a master’s degree in religion from Columbia University, is a part-time chazzan (cantor) at a synagogue (a job she’s held since age 15), and is a full-time writer. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Salon. She’s working on getting her first novel published. She writes funny and insightful essays about body image on her popular blog, Eat the Damn Cake. And recently she has become a fellow blogger here at Psychology Today… Oh, and she also skipped all of school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

You can read the piece to get her whole story which seems remarkably unremarkable other than the fact that the only school she went to was college. But what struck me from the piece was an insight that unschooling may well make it easier for young people to transition from youth to adulthood in a much more gradual and natural manner, and at a pace and tempo that they have much more control of than someone who is “schooled”.

Since school is a major institution generally involving a large number of adults and youth trying to coordinate a manufactured experience with educational value, its pace of events, its tempo of regular transitions from one activity to the next is generally dictated by the institution itself. The student needs to adapt themselves to that pace and tempo, since an institution is rarely adaptable. If the student finds the pace to quick or two slow and the transitions too jarring, they are in for a rough ride.

In contrast, Fridkis says in her interview…

My education was never pre-structured, but always oriented around my interests and the natural progress of my life… I had so much time to discover what I was interested in and pursue it. I had space to grow without judgment or constriction. I was able to be confident enough to chase my dreams.

What a blessing to be able to unfold your life at its natural pace, your natural pace. How much it allows you to relax, even looking forward, because you have confidence that you will continue to control, as much as possible, when you plunge into something challenging or when you can lay low and put things on cruise control. Having that sense of control changes the dynamic I think between “play” and “work”…

I learned early on that work and play can be the same thing, on some level. When you love what you do, you work to get better at it, to learn more about it. Work fits naturally into the pursuit of something inspiring. Because learning wasn’t separate from living for me, as a kid, it made sense that I’d have jobs and make money as a part of my education and my life… There’s no training period, or special area where you wait to be released into the rest of your life. You’re already living it.

Even when you are five years old, you can develop an understanding, a comfort level, that the things you do are meaningful and real, meaningful to you and to others around you. The paradigm in school is that you are constantly practicing, not ready for “primetime” (reality) until you are judged (generally by someone else, an adult) to be sufficiently proficient.

Another key part about controlling the pace and tempo of your own development is managing your own “appointment calendar” as it were, not having people in your face when you may not be ready for them, even if at some later point they will have a gift of wisdom or insight you might then be interested in…

I had a lot of adult role models and mentors in addition to my parents. Because I was free during the day, I joined groups, like a writing workshop, that were, with one exception, adults-only. Some of my good friends were retirees. We got along really well, and they liked to give me advice… I also worked regularly with adults at my job. These people weren’t necessarily my teachers. At least, that doesn’t feel like the right word for them. But they were a part of my education.

And if you can control your own “appointment calendar” then you can relax I think in the confidence that you are protecting yourself from unwelcome intrusion by people whose energy you are totally uncomfortable with.

Because I didn’t grow up surrounded by a group of my same-age peers, I didn’t feel pressure to change my personality, look a certain way, or suppress interests that might not have been “cool.” So I got to be a lot of things at once that might seem contradictory, but aren’t, really. I was nerdy and dorky and obsessed with fantasy novels (I both read and wrote them), but I was also outgoing and popular with other girls and boy crazy. I always had a boyfriend, but I was pretty innocent. I didn’t feel pressure to be sexual, and I didn’t feel pressure not to be sexual. I could be shy in some situations and daring in others.

I recall very difficult times in my own early adolescence, particularly in junior high being surrounded by so many other kids my own age that I was constantly comparing myself unfavorably to. Whereas outside of school, rather than a steady parade of other 13-year-olds with their own issues and projecting them perhaps on me, I could interact with a range of folks, including adults, older and younger youth, and people my own age who I felt comfortable with.

And when you have developed that comfort of expecting to continue to live and interact at your own pace, tempo and terms, then even plunging into a big educational institution at some point can be a thrilling adventure rather than perhaps a more stressful ordeal where you fear the waters are full of icebergs and you are restrained by that fear…

Academically, I was at an advantage in college. I liked learning, I asked questions, I was engaged in class, and professors rewarded me for being interested. I was surprised at how uninterested so many of my peers seemed… I didn’t feel reliant on my peers, the way they seemed to feel. I didn’t feel that I needed their approval.

I went through college and graduated twice. The first time after finishing high school at age 17 first at Western Michigan University and then finishing my BA in Speech (with a concentration in TV and film production) at the University of Michigan five years later. The second iteration began in 1983 at West Los Angeles Community College and then finished three years later at California State University Los Angeles in December 1986 with a BS in computer science. When I started my fist year of college the first go-round I was coming off twelve straight years of schooling. I stumbled through those years sometimes present and sometimes more just going through the motions. My coursework was unfocused and I pretty much sampled a little bit of this and that.

When I got to Los Angeles after graduating in 1978 it was a total shock to me that I was completely unprepared for. I had so much growing up to do that I had no inkling of before I got there. After working several years (a couple with just minimum wage jobs) and finally getting a sense of what I really was all about, I met my life-partner Sally and we planned to marry and have a family,

Given that more focused plan, I decided to go back to school to get a practical degree that would help me get a good-paying job. My second iteration at college felt a lot like what Fridkis encountered in her quote above. I was in college for a specific purpose rather than the first iteration when it had felt like the thing I was supposed to do. I was in my late 20s and had more real life experience under my belt.

So getting back to where I started, I’m thinking about what it takes to have an “organic transition” (if that makes any sense) from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. That rather than the shock I encountered when I landed in Los Angeles and was soon completely on my own, a not so confident stranger in a strange land. I survived somehow, but it was touch and go at times, and I have the psychological scars and mid-life health issues to bear.

Listening to Fridkis’ story I think about her coming of age at her own pace and incrementally blossoming into full adulthood perhaps without that shock of plunging in the deep end and struggling for life to be meaningful. Her life had always been about meaningful real experience, not seventeen years of practice followed by reality with a vengeance.

Not that everyone can have a life without wrenching twists and turns and getting in over one’s head at times. Still, going with the flow, organically living a real life (what we term “unschooling”), and taking in “schooling” in smaller self-administered doses, resonates with the sum of my experience in this incarnation.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda!

I keep thinking of the lyrics of John Mayer’s song “No Such Thing”…

So the good boys and girls take the so called right track
Faded white hats, grabbing credits, maybe transfers
They read all the books but they can’t find the answers
And all of our parents, they’re getting older
I wonder if they’ve wished for anything better
While in their memories tiny tragedies

They love to tell you, stay inside the lines
But something’s better on the other side

I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the top of my lungs
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you got to rise above

I am both intrigued and troubled by the fact that her ideas about creating a developmentally appropriate environment for children seem to have had so little impact on our public education system in what are conventionally the preschool and elementary school years. In digging a little deeper into the history, it seems her innovative ideas suffered a similar fate as the ideas of other “holistic” educators like John Dewey, succumbing to the “business efficiency” movement in education in the second and third decades of the 20th century.

Montessori was born in Italy in 1870. Overcoming barriers to women, she managed to gain a degree in the natural sciences from the University of Rome and, despite opposition from students and faculty, fight her way into medical school at the University, finally graduating in 1896 as a doctor of medicine. Her early career involved working with mentally disabled young people and researching ways to help them overcome their developmental challenges. As part of that research she read everything that had been published in the previous 200 years regarding education theory, and applied this wisdom to improving her efforts on behalf of this specially challenged group.

Starting in 1901 she attended the degree program in philosophy at the University of Rome, focusing her studies on developmental psychology and educational theory, becoming a noted voice in academic publications and lecture circles. Her vision was to apply these ideas of improving the educational process for young people with mental disabilities to all youth. In 1906 she began to make that vision real, opening a school for children of working mothers, “Casa dei Bambini” (Children’s House), in a low-income housing project in Rome. By observing the behavior of the kids in her school, applying the educational ideas she had learned, and trial and error, Montessori developed a new educational “method” based on what she saw as the best of human developmental and educational theory.

Her method was based on her observations that young human beings spontaneously seek growth and learning because that is the spiritual nature of their humanness. Given proper nurturing, this spiritual force impels them to unfold their personality, expand their powers, assert their independence, and create an adult identity. What we adults regard as misbehavior is caused by our failure to provide the proper environment or by our misguided efforts to direct human unfolding according to our prejudices. Embracing the context of her own Catholic religious beliefs, Montessori felt that in traditional education, “Man has substituted himself for God, desiring to form the minds of children in his own image and likeness; and this cannot be done without subjecting a free creature to torture”.

Unlike conventional schools at the time (or even still today), her method was centered around the learning process known as Constructivism. Rather than instructing students on existing frames, filters and other constructs that interpret and organize a body of existing knowledge, students were given free reign to experience a prepared environment first-hand (with a minimum of guidance from the teacher) to “construct” their own frames and interpretations and act upon the environment to both acquire and test new knowledge. Preparation of that learning environment was facilitated by specialized educational materials developed by Montessori and her collaborators.

Her school was very successful, and soon others were opened on the same model, and news of her success spread around the world. From the Wikipedia article on Maria Montessori…

As early as 1909, Montessori’s work began to attract the attention of international observers and visitors. Her work was widely published internationally, and spread rapidly. By the end of 1911, Montessori education had been officially adopted in public schools in Italy and Switzerland, and was planned for the United Kingdom. By 1912, Montessori schools had opened in Paris and many other Western European cities, and were planned for Argentina, Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Syria, the United States, and New Zealand. Public programs in London, Johannesburg, Rome, and Stockholm had adopted the method in their school systems. Montessori societies were founded in the United States (the Montessori American Committee) and the United Kingdom (the Montessori Society for the United Kingdom). In 1913 the first International Training Course was held in Rome, with a second in 1914.

Montessori and her “scientific pedagogy” were stars on the rise as the world was inspired at the turn of the 20th century by the movement of “Modernism”, rejecting traditional thinking in favor of new ideas (including leveraging the latest scientific wisdom) or combining existing ideas in new innovative ways. Her approach to early childhood education seems to have been the state of the art along with her vision of how a more holistic and humanistic education of youth could bring about a more peaceful world. In that latter regard, Montessori would go on to be nominated for six Nobel Peace Prizes during her lifetime.

The Montessori Movement Blossoms in the U.S.

Focusing on the United States, it appears that Montessori’s ideas were beginning to gain traction in the second decade of the 20th century. From the Wikipedia article on Maria Montessori…

In 1911 and 1912, Montessori’s work was popular and widely publicized in the United States, especially in a series of articles in McClure’s Magazine, and the first North American Montessori school was opened in October 1911, in Tarrytown, New York. Scottish-born American inventor Alexander Graham Bell and his wife became proponents of the method and a second school was opened in their Canadian home. The Montessori Method sold quickly through six editions. The first International Training Course in Rome in 1913 was sponsored by the American Montessori Committee, and 67 of the 83 students were from the United States. By 1913 there were more than 100 Montessori schools in the country. Montessori traveled to the United States in December 1913 on a three-week lecture tour which included films of her European classrooms, meeting with large, enthusiastic crowds wherever she traveled.

During this same time period there were other voices advocating for educational transformation. In 1911 American anarchist Emma Goldman was part of a group that set up the Modern School in New York City based on the anarchist ideas of radical Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer and with philosopher Will Durant as its first principal.

In 1912 American educator Homer Lane moved to England and founded the Little Commonwealth School in Dorset. Lane believed that children should completely direct their own educational process with no curriculum imposed on them by their teachers, as well as participating with their teachers on managing the schooling process. His school was perhaps the first democratic-free school, and inspired English educator A.S Neill to open his more famous Summerhill School in 1923, which continues to this day, now run by Neill’s daughter Zoe Readhead.

The most famous and influential of the progressive educators in the U.S. during this period was American John Dewey, who believed, like Montessori, that a dedicated and highly trained teacher could create an enriched learning environment within which the young person could direct their own learning process. Unlike Lane who believed in complete educational freedom for the young person to explore whatever was of interest to them, Dewey was closer to Montessori in seeing the teacher not as the “sage on the stage” (like in conventional schools) but the “guide on the side” presenting a preset curriculum that the student would then explore in their own way rather than being directed step by step by the teacher. From 1904 to 1930, Dewey was professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the university’s Teacher’s College, training and otherwise inspiring a generation of progressive educators.

According to my friend Ron Miller and his excellent summary of American educational history in his book What are Schools For?…

Believing in a positive conception of human nature, Dewey and other progressive educators challenged the traditional American culture and its Calvinist pessimism. Progressives supported an ideal of democracy far more liberal than mainstream American ideology, giving students greater responsibility for their own learning. They objected to industrial capitalism which fosters a selfish competitiveness, rewarding the successful with a disproportionate share of wealth and power.

Montessori and Dewey in particular were the most visible leaders of that progressive educational challenge.

A Business-Led Educational Counterrevolution

During this very same time period a number of other events came together to challenge or otherwise diminish Montessori’s and other progressive educational movements. The “muckraking” journals of the period that had previously exposed malpractice and corruption in the meat-packing and other industries (including the same McClure’s journal that published the series lauding Montessori’s method), turned their focus on “inefficiencies” in the American public education system. Public schools were becoming a major expense in community budgets (while not directly producing any revenue), so they were an obvious target. This crusade provided a platform for the business efficiency experts of the day, like Frederick W. Taylor, to strut their stuff criticizing those schools and proposing “business efficiency” solutions that in retrospect did nothing to save educational funds or improve the educational process.

You can read more about this crusade in Raymond Callahan’s book, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (or my piece on the book). But long story short, the education establishment gave in to this crusade, and agreed to rebuild the public education system on these ideas of business efficiency and industrial mass production. The prevailing business view was that young students must be directed in their education completely by their teachers, who in turn would take their marching orders from principals and on up the chain of command. Business-focused educational administrator Elwood Cubberley, famously said…

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specification for manufacturing come from the demands of the twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specification laid down.

Progressive educators like Montessori and Dewey believed instead in a more holistic approach to education where each student needed to build their knowledge through their own self-directed process.

Dewey’s Disciple Disses Montessori

It is ironic that perhaps Montessori’s educational ideas lost their luster in the U.S. in the second decade of the 20th century because of a critique not from conservatives or business interests, but from educational progressives, particularly one of Dewey’s disciples. Continuing from the Wikipedia article on Maria Montessori…

Influential progressive educator William Heard Kilpatrick, a follower of American philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey, wrote a dismissive and critical book [in 1914] titled The Montessori Method Examined, which had a broad impact. The National Kindergarten Association was critical as well. Critics charged that Montessori’s method was outdated, overly rigid, overly reliant on sense-training, and left too little scope for imagination, social interaction, and play. In addition, Montessori’s insistence on tight control over the elaboration of her method, the training of teachers, the production and use of materials, and the establishment of schools became a source of conflict and controversy. After she left in 1915, the Montessori movement in the United States fragmented, and Montessori education was a negligible factor in education in the United States until 1952.

Doing a little more digging, I don’t think Kilpatrick’s educational vision was that different from Montessori’s? According to Kilpatrick’s Wikipedia article, he…

Developed the Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form of Progressive Education organized curriculum and classroom activities around a subject’s central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be that of a “guide” as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses. Proponents of Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.

I’m not sure what to make of this! Seems to me Montessori and Dewey had a great deal of commonality in their more holistic approaches to education, and would have done better to establish common ground in challenging the traditional educational establishment. Perhaps Kilpatrick was guilty of playing to some xenophobia, given that Montessori was a European, and even worse, a devout Catholic.

Given the conservative business-focused educational counterrevolution I’ve addressed above, eventually Dewey’s progressive ideals were co-opted, and according to Ron Miller in his book What are Schools For?, the greatest lasting influences Dewey had on the American classroom were…

Cosmetic changes, such as portable rather than fixed seating in classrooms, are about as near to progressive reform as most public schools have ventured. To conceive of the school as a laboratory where individuals explore their lives’ possibilities, or where society experiments with new values, would entail sweeping changes in the philosophy, curriculum, methods, and administration of public schools.

World War I

The case that Montessori, Lane, Dewey and others were making for a more humanistic, progressive and even revolutionary approach to education also lost traction because of the events of World War I, events that I believe destroyed the “immune system” of Western culture and any sense of momentum of human progress. Any forward looking optimism and celebration of human achievement took a devastating hit when the most supposedly “civilized” countries in the world flung themselves into an apocalyptic world war for no better reason that I can see than jaded economic self-interest and macho national pride. Millions of people, the critical mass of entire generation of young men in Europe (and to a lesser extent America) slaughtered each other on the battlefields. Calling it “the Great War” (though technically correct due to its broad scope relative to previous wars), gives it a sort of stature that is an abomination given the self-serving national motives that catalyzed it.

Adding to the scope of the devastation, the overwhelming majority of the artists and intellectuals of the time became advocates and cheerleaders for the war rather than resisting and putting forward a more evolved vision of peace and cooperation. From Jacques Barzun’s book about Western cultural development during the past five centuries, Dawn to Decadence…

What is truly astonishing is the unanimity, unheard of on any other subject but the war and the enemy. Looking over the roster of great names in literature, painting, music, philosophy, science, and social science, one cannot think of more than half a dozen or so who did not spout all the catchphrases of abuse and vainglory… But not before 1914 was the flush of blood lust seen on the whole intellectual class… And everywhere the clergy were the most rabid glorifiers of the struggle and inciters to hatred. The “Brotherhood of Man” and the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” were no longer preachable.

In this context, how could the majority of people continue to place any stock in champions of human development like Montessori, Lane and Dewey? How could forward-looking optimism survive in the face of overwhelming pessimism at the condition of human civilization?

Montessori Resurfaces in the U.S.

It was three decades later after her death in 1952, after worldwide depression and an even bigger world war that Montessori’s educational approach would become popular again and considered worthy of another look by Americans because of the space race with the Soviet Union.

According to Ron Miller in his book, What are Schools For?…

After 1920, public education responded to industrialization by expanding dramatically in scope. With mandatory attendance and child labor laws, the great majority of young people went to school, and stayed in it much longer. College came to be seen as essential to personal success and the achievement of national goals. By the 1960s it was asserted that the “knowledge industry” had replaced the railroads as “the focal point of national growth.” As a result, education became the battleground for one of the most significant social conflicts of the 20th century.

According to Miller, it was the efficient and accelerated learning achieved by Montessori’s approach that caught the interest of middle class Americans. Yet Montessori had not been concerned with the “output” of the child. To use her method as a shortcut to academic success, or as a tool for efficiency or national prestige, was to adopt the letter of her approach without its holistic spirit. The revival of her method was due more to its academic results than to its holistic foundations.

By the 1970s, the Montessori method was the most widespread, best organized independent alternative movement in American education. Unlike other holistic educational approaches, her method has been welcomed in middle class communities, and as I noted at the top of this piece, today there are over 3000 Montessori schools in the U.S. and over 20,000 around the world. Yet given that, her ideas (and those of Dewey) have had little impact on the public schools in the U.S. that educate nearly ninety percent of our young people.

On a more personal level, you could call Holt our son Eric’s “savior”. Holt’s truly radical ideas about human development had a profound impact on my partner Sally and me. Those ideas gave us the major justification in 1999 for pulling our son Eric out of school in eighth grade, possibly saving him from a train wreck of an educational experience in his teen years from which he might never have recovered.

In doing the research for this piece and rereading some of Holt’s work, I am struck by how much I have become his kindred spirit. Struck by how much the ideas he champions (so outside the mainstream of conventional wisdom about human development) have inspired me to write and blog about my own take on the truths of how human beings develop and human society evolves.

Holt, World War II & World Government

Like my own dad, Holt completed college and then joined the military to fight in World War II. He served in the U.S. Navy on a submarine in the Pacific. According to his Wikipedia biography…

During the war, he concluded that nuclear weapons were the world’s greatest danger, and only a world government could prevent nuclear war. After his three-year tour of duty in the Navy, he got a job with the New York branch of the World Federalist Movement. Starting in the mailroom, he became the executive director of the New York branch [the United World Federalists or UWF] within six years. However, he became frustrated with UWF’s ineffectiveness and left it in 1952.

I think this formative experience as a young adult is an important insight into Holt’s character. The World Federalist Movement was launched in 1947 in parallel with the creation of the United Nations, which advocated for the UN to have a stronger mandate toward becoming more of a world government. If nothing else, I think this shows Holt’s idealism and connection to the political left and its vision of moving beyond nationalism and militarism toward a more humanistic society.

Holt as a Teacher

According to the Wikipedia article, after parting with the UWF Holt was convinced by one of his two sisters to become a teacher. From reading his work, particularly his thoughtful observations about the children with whom he interacted, a portrait of a sensitive and caring soul emerges, and I can see why his sister would think teaching a good next step for him.

Holt did his first four years teaching fifth grade in a small private boarding school in Colorado. It was a particularly insightful experience for him because, unlike most teachers who interact with their students only in the classroom, he had the opportunity to observe students outside of school as well, living the rest of their lives. He was struck by how differently some kids behaved inside versus outside of school…

When I started, I thought that some people were just born smarter than others and that not much could be done about it. This seems to be the official line of most of the psychologists. It isn’t hard to believe, if all your contacts with students are in the classroom or the psychological testing room. But if you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you can’t escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word, intelligent, come into the classroom and, as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt?

Holt also had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the babies and young children of his sisters and friends. Again, he was struck by how confident and self-directed the young children were versus the mostly frightened, timid, evasive, and self-protecting kids in his fifth grade class. He became determined to figure out what was going on. What was it about the school environment that seemed to be disabling so many kids?

How Children Fail

Holt moved to Boston and got a teaching job at another private school. In discussing his observations with a colleague, Bill Hull, they decided to start a classroom observation project, where one of them would teach while the other observed. What Holt observed and documented in his journals shocked him, but provided an answer to his earlier questions about why so many kids seemed so less capable in school than in the rest of their lives, including before they were old enough to go to school.

Here is a summary of the findings he documented in his first book How Children Fail published in 1964 after eleven years of teaching…

* Children in school abandon their natural inclination to be “thinkers” in favor of being “producers”, moving away from exploration and focusing instead on pleasing teachers and being right at all costs.

* Children learn to see failure as dishonorable and humiliating, rather than an important step in constructing meaning and real learning.

* Being afraid of mistakes, children never try to understand their own mistakes and will not try to understand when their thinking is faulty.

* When teachers praise children, they rob them of the joy of discovering truth for themselves.

* In mathematics, children learn algorithms and develop only a superficial understanding of numbers, and cannot apply their learning to real situations.

* Teachers (Holt included) generally cram students for year-end tests and the material learned is forgotten shortly after the tests because it was not motivated by interest or does not have practical use.

As to that last point, Holt once quipped ironically that the good students are differentiated from the bad students because they forget the material after rather than before the test.

The provocative and controversial conclusion of How Children Fail was that children’s academic failure was not despite the efforts of schools but because of those efforts. He saw compulsory education as fundamentally coercive and noted that…

The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence.

This conclusion ignited controversy and notoriety for Holt, in a decade (the 1960s) when other conventional ideas of inequality between people were openly being challenged. He made appearances on major TV talk shows and wrote book reviews for Life magazine. Others were speaking out for the rights of black people and for the rights of women. Holt was speaking for the rights of young people to be treated with respect and dignity, like adults were striving to treat each other.

How Children Learn

In his follow-up book, How Children Learn, published in 1967, Holt tried to draw lessons from his observations on how young people really learned, and how school short-circuited that process. Children learn most effectively by their own motivation and on their own terms, and find most teaching that they have not requested just as patronizing as adults do. Given that, teachers and parents should provide instruction only when kids request it.

Still trying to salvage the teaching profession, which he continued to be a member of, Holt argued that teachers should not pressure children to learn in a way that is of no interest to them, that teachers should evaluate which type of multiple intelligence students’ possess and teach and assess them individually on that basis.

Wrote Holt…

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

It is interesting to ponder why Holt came to these conclusions while so many of his fellow teachers did not. Did he have a uniquely high sensitivity to what made people, particularly young people, tick and was able to see inside their souls? With his keen observational skills, was his opportunity to observe children at a range of ages (before and during their school years) plus in and outside of the classroom (in every facet of their lives) unique? Or perhaps being an overly sensitive person and lacking a “thick skin”, his own buttons were being pushed and he projected his own discomfort on the education system as a whole?

It is also sobering to ponder how radical the idea of “trusting children” was and still is today! Many people today would still argue that such trust is naïve and even dangerous.

New Paradigms for Education & Learning

After many years of working within the system as a teacher, and having made these observations that challenged (at least in his thinking) the very core of the externally driven instructional process, Holt became completely disillusioned with the whole concept of compulsory education in school. He ended his teaching career in the late 1960s to devote himself to promoting his radical ideas about youth development, youth rights, and the rules of engagement between youth and adults in society.

Other radical thinkers were beginning to challenge the conventional educational paradigm. In 1968 Daniel Greenberg and others set up the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts (patterned after the Summerhill school in England) where the students completely directed their own learning, participated in the democratic governance of the school, and where the adult staff were not even referred to as “teachers”. Ivan Illich, an academic and Roman Catholic priest, in his 1971 book Deschooling Society, put forward a thesis that the regimentation of the learning process in schools was leading to a regimentation of society in general.

By the late 1970s, Holt had come to the conclusion that reform of the education system was impossible and it needed to be completely replaced by a new paradigm. He wrote…

The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Homeschooling & Unschooling

Holt was convinced that kids did not need to be coerced to learn, that given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources would do so naturally, a line of thought that came to be called “unschooling”. Holt’s 1981 book, Teach Your Own, put forward this vision of an education “based at home” that became the “bible” of the early progressive homeschooling movement. The chapter headings from the original edition (rearranged and reworked in later editions) and a brief description of the content give you a sense of the book’s comprehensive scope…

1. Why Take Them Out – Framing major reasons for homeschooling, including the limitations of schools, the wish of parents to take full responsibility for their children, and acknowledging the full civil rights of children

2. Common Objections to Homeschooling – Providing responses to major objections to homeschooling, including the areas of socialization, embracing diversity, the dangers of “unqualified” teachers, logistics, and how children manage to learn what they need

3. Politics of Unschooling – Responding to more societal issues raised by homeschooling, including issues of economic privilege, poverty, and giving all people in society access to an equally good education

4. Getting Them Out – Addressing legal and logistical issues that parents may encounter pulling their kids out of school

5. Homeschoolers at Work – Giving examples of what a kid’s unschooling curriculum might look like

6. Living with Children – Exploring the nature and needs of children and new rules of engagement to acknowledge their inherent worth and dignity

7. Learning in the World – Addressing the reasons for and the logistics of giving kids access to as much of the real world as possible

8. Living and Working Spaces – Thoughts on creating venues for homeschooled kids to come together for shared activities

9. Serious Play – Addressing the importance of giving kids the space and privacy to fantasize and play

10. Learning without Teaching – Addressing how kids naturally learn by doing, by wondering, by figuring things out, and often in the process resist teaching when well-meaning adults try to force it on them.

11. Learning Difficulties – How homeschooled kids and their parents best address learning difficulties and disabilities, and the important differences between the two

12. Children and Work – Addressing the need for a young person to find their calling rather than just get a good education and find a high-paying job

13. Homeschooling and the Courts – Looking at examples of court challenges to homeschooling and the legal arguments that have been used successfully to defend the practice

Holt made it clear that homeschooling should not be about parents simply replacing teachers directing their child’s learning process. His was the more radical notion that in order to homeschool successfully a parent needed to be able to have an authentic relationship with their child, more like a peer than a superior. In Chapter 2 he wrote…

We can sum up very quickly what people need to teach their own children. First of all, they have to like them, enjoy their company, their physical presence, their energy, foolishness, and passion. They have to enjoy all their talk and questions, and enjoy equally trying to answer those questions. They have to think of their children as friends, indeed very close friends, have to feel happier when they are near and miss them when they are away. They have to trust them as people, respect their fragile dignity, treat them with courtesy, take them seriously. They have to feel in their own hearts some of their children’s wonder, curiosity, and excitement about the world. And they have to have enough confidence in themselves, skepticism about experts, and willingness to be different from most people, to take on themselves the responsibility for their children’s learning. But that is about all that parents need. Perhaps only a minority of parents have these qualities. Certainly some have more than others. Many will gain more as they know their children better; most of the people who have been teaching their children at home say that it has made them like them more, not less. In any case, these are not qualities that can be taught or learned in a school, or measured with a test, or certified with a piece of paper. (Page 55 of the PDF)

I see Holt’s radical reframing of the relationship between parent and child, adult and youth, as a logical extension of the ideas of civil rights and human rights growing out of the 1960s.

Holt’s Legacy

Holt died in 1985 at age 63. He bequeathed his quest to transform education and his lifetime of work to protégé Patrick Farenga, who I have had the pleasure to get to know at several Alternative Education Resource Organization conferences. You can learn more on Pat’s website.

I think Holt is still the “patron saint” of the homeschooling movement to many parents and others in the progressive community. He framed the movement broadly as applying full human and civil rights to children, not just as an alternative venue for school. He represents a continuing thread in our culture carrying forward ideas of more egalitarian rules of engagement between adults and youth from his philosophical predecessors, including A.S. Neill, Homer Lane, Will Durant and Bronson Alcott.

Certainly his ideas were critical in my own development as a parent, and the opportunities we finally gave our son Eric and daughter Emma to leave school and chart their own developmental course. Read more about the paths my kids charted in that regard in my piece “Unschooling rather than Highschooling”.

So happy birthday John! I hope wherever your current venue, your development proceeds unabated!

Is there even a legitimate conflict that needs to be resolved? I think so, though a conflict short of Baby Boomers “eating their young” as the inflammatory rhetoric in the Esquire article stated. There are issues on the table in Congress about whether or not to have a two-tier solution for Social Security and Medicare that would leave benefits for existing beneficiaries (and possibly some or all Boomers) pretty much as is, while providing a less rich set of benefits for younger folks. Also, various educational subsidizes of particular importance to younger adults could be in danger of being cut to dial down government budgets.

Beyond that, I’m not sure how much can be done about the transition in the work world towards a global economy and the resulting impact on jobs and wages, plus the transition from traditional pension plans to individual retirement accounts and 401Ks. These seem like horses that left the barn decades ago, and we Boomers, Gen-Xers and Millennials are pretty equally impacted.

And finally, just the basic issue about who is going to be at the table making these decisions. Will Gen-Xers and Millennials be appropriately represented in terms of voice and vote? Obama is a Gen-Xer and there are others of that generation in Congress and state legislatures (though probably not yet reflective of their numbers). But who will speak and vote on behalf of our Millennial constituency? Back when we were all pretty confident that things would be improving for the younger generation, maybe having our young people at the table was not so critical. But now that the path forward is more problematic?

Getting Young People into the National Discussion

Up to now our young adults have not registered or voted in numbers to reflect their percentage of the population relative to older citizens. Certainly efforts by conservative legislatures to increase ID requirements to register and vote are particularly problematic for young adults, who are more likely to have transitory living arrangements and ID (if any) at an address other than where they are currently residing. Due to that and other typical dynamics of young adult life, Millennials are unlikely to be running for legislative seats in numbers representing their population percentage.

I don’t know if most of us older folks have even been concerned about that up to now, assuming that we are their parents and grandparents (or at least part of those generations) and we feel that younger folks should trust us to consider their interests and know what’s best for them. Or since they will have the opportunity some day to be the elders themselves, we are just not that concerned about fully considering their take on things while they are still not part of that elder cohort. Certainly most of our schools are run on that assumption, that all important decisions about a kid’s development need to be made by adults with little or no consultation with the young person.

If it ever was appropriate to have a discussion about our collective future without younger people at the table, I don’t think it is still appropriate today! But how do we update our country’s institutions to engender more of the voice and vote of those people among us who have the biggest (or at least the longest) stake in the future?

Generational Theory

I’m wondering if William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory might give an interesting perspective to this needed discussion about resolving conflict between Boomers and Millennials.

Per Wikipedia…

Strauss and Howe define a social generation as the aggregate of all people born over a span of roughly twenty years, or about the length of one phase of life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and old age. Particular generations are identified (from first birth year to last) by looking for cohort groups of this length that share three criteria. First, members of a generation share what the authors call an age location in history: they encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. Because members of a generation are shaped in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults, they also tend to share certain common beliefs and behaviors. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation also tend to share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation.

Strauss and Howe posit a repeating eighty-year cycle of societal development which includes four stages – high, awakening, unraveling and crisis – each roughly twenty years in duration. Society goes through a “high” period of cohesion and consensus, followed by the emergence of a new way of looking at things (the “awakening”), which eventually “unravels” the societal consensus and leads to “crisis”, which when resolved leads to a new “high” consensus, and on into the next iteration of the cycle.

So in our society’s most recent hundred years we have had a “crisis” (the Great Depression & World War II), followed by a “high” (the post-war economic growth and conformist 1950s), then a new “awakening” (the movements for social change in the 1960s and 1970s), followed by an “unraveling” (the culture wars and hyper-materialism of the 1980s & 1990s), and finally the next “crisis” (9/11 & Great Recession).

Each generation (roughly a twenty-year birth span) has a controlling “archetype” that is formed by the cycle stage of their youth and young adulthood, plus generally trying to differentiate themselves from their parents’ generation. Each eighty-year cycle has the same sequence of four generations controlled by one of the following generational archetypes – prophet, nomad, hero and artist – formed by when they were born in the cycle and what generation their parents were from.

I suggest you read the Wikipedia article if you are interested in more of the details of this fairly complex theoretical mechanism.

Bringing this historical theory back to the generational conflict that’s the focus of this piece, my Boomer generation (born 1943-1960 after the crisis of the Great Depression & World War II) carry the “prophet” generational archetype…

Born after a Crisis, during a time of rejuvenated community life and consensus around a new societal order. Prophets grow up as the increasingly indulged children of this post-Crisis era, come of age as self-absorbed young crusaders of an Awakening, focus on morals and principles in midlife, and emerge as elders guiding another Crisis. Due to this location in history, such generations tend to be remembered for their coming-of-age fervor and their values-oriented elder leadership. Their main societal contributions are in the area of vision, values, and religion.

The intervening Gen-X generation (born 1961–1981) fall under the “nomad” archetype…

Born during an Awakening, a time of social ideals and spiritual agendas, when young adults are passionately attacking the established institutional order. Nomads grow up as under-protected children during this Awakening, come of age as alienated, post-Awakening adults, become pragmatic midlife leaders during a Crisis, and age into resilient post-Crisis elders. Due to this location in history, such generations tend to be remembered for their adrift, alienated rising-adult years and their midlife years of pragmatic leadership.

The next generation, the Millennials (born 1982-2004), are for the most part the children of Boomers and carry the “hero” archetype…

Born after an Awakening, during a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire. Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening. Due to this location in history, such generations tend to be remembered for their collective military triumphs in young adulthood and their political achievements as elders. Their main societal contributions are in the area of community, affluence, and technology.

So confessing my own bias, I tend to be a sucker for these abstract frameworks that attempt to find some systematic meaning in things that others might see as completely unconnected. I can understand if you are skeptical, or find little or no value in these perhaps oversimplified theoretical constructs. Acknowledging that… I proceed.

Applying Generational Theory to Boomers & Millennials

So if you accept Strauss & Howe’s theory there would be a natural recycling conflict between each succeeding “Prophet” generation and their offspring “Hero” generation, in our current case between Boomers and their Millennial kids. According to the Wikipedia piece, Howe frames our current generational context as follows. Note that the “Silents” are the pre-Boomer generation, and he refers to the twenty-year stages as “turnings”, with the “third turning” being the “unraveling” stage and the “fourth turning” the “crisis” stage…

Howe posits that America is currently in or about to enter a Fourth Turning. The individualism, risk-taking, and conspicuous consumption of the recent Third Turning are winding down, and today’s social mood is marked by new sobriety about unpaid debts at home and unmet challenges abroad. Society is beginning to view the recent Third Turning as a period of drift when public problems were allowed to accumulate — problems that are now reaching a level of urgency where the nation must tackle them head-on.

Like all turnings, Fourth Turnings are pushed by the aging of each generation into a new phase of life. Yet unlike other turnings, the emerging lineup of generational archetypes is likely to push history forward in a sudden, concerted, and decisive direction. According to Howe, this is true today as well. As Boomers replace the Silent as elder leaders, they will reject caution and compromise and act on moral absolutes. As Gen Xers replace Boomers in midlife, they will apply a new pragmatic survivalism to management decisions. As Millennials replace Gen Xers in young adulthood, they will revitalize community, social discipline, and public purpose.

So are we as Boomers faced with our kids’ Millennial generation that is perhaps more externally focused on action within a context of building community while we Boomers have been more internally focused on ideas and spiritual/metaphysical development (Gandhi’s “be the change you seek”)? I ask that question not intending to slight either of these quests. Do our kids need to understand that our gift to them is perhaps a vibrant ethical framework forged in what may appear externally as self-absorption? Do we need to understand that our kids also need the gift of more material resources in their quest to build a new sense of community to weather the impending crisis?

Conflict between world views can be a good thing, when there are appropriate ways to talk it through and find common ground, rather than letting it spiral into “us and them” thinking and direct confrontation.

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel crafted a developmental theory of history that saw conflict between competing world views (and the different groups within society that held them) as a positive rather than a negative, and in fact the main mechanism of the development of human society. A new conception of society begins as a thesis, a set of ideas that are initially abstract and untested, and undoubtedly with some logical flaws. Those flaws catalyze the challenge of a contrary conception, the antithesis, which “stress tests” the effectiveness of those ideas in more concrete terms. The surviving hybrid of tested and modified components of the original thesis and antithesis that weather this real-world trial emerge as a new synthesis.

So when the author of the Esquire piece attempts to speak to generational conflict, but perhaps does so in a way that looks to engender confrontation between “us and them”, I think it unwise to repudiate the whole argument based on its most divisive components. I think it is important to do our best to move beyond just having our buttons pushed, and accept this antithesis as constructive dissonance that highlights the weak points of our generational thesis and the need to find some new common ground and work out the legitimate issues raised.

If Strauss and Howe are right, Boomers have been inwardly focused towards societal contributions (our “thesis”) in the more abstract areas of vision, values, and religion (peace, love, joy and oneness of the human community). If so, we should acknowledge that our Millennial offspring (if they are in fact the thoughtful and intelligent people that we had hoped to raise) are appropriately “questioning authority”, particularly our authority, and poking the appropriate holes in our generational world view.

Suggestions on the Path Forward

In this regard, some things for us to consider as Boomers in our path forward with our Millennial kids…

* If due to pragmatic political deals our societal “safety net” is emerging as significantly stronger than theirs, then we should acknowledge that situation and not support such deals.

* If we have perhaps over-hyped higher education as “helicopter parents”, raising the demand and resulting price of that education above where it should be (based on its true value), then we should back off from that crusade.

* If corporations are exploiting young workers with extended unpaid internships then we should not accept this as a “new normal”.

* If the economic reality (at least for the next decade) is a limited number of well-paying jobs and a higher cost of living, then we should live as simply and frugally as we possibly can so that we can “retire” as early as possible and surrender our own well-paying jobs so they are available to younger workers.

* If the traditional markers of “adulthood” – marriage and family, home purchase, career job – are significantly more elusive in the realities of the new economy, then we should back off from pushing our kids to attain them, particularly if its about our own sense of being “successful parents” and how we are judged relative to our peers.

* Finally, if their continues to an ideological gulf between progressives and conservatives within the Boomer generation that is contributing to the dysfunction of our legislative system, all us Boomers need to take ownership of that dysfunction and keep our focus on resolving it.

Everyone should read (and share) this. Everyone.

Followed by posting a provocative quote from the linked piece…

“From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.”

I took notice!

Eric, now 26, has emerged from his youth into adulthood as a thoughtful person not prone to hyperbole, and someone I (biased perhaps) would consider a thoughtful spokesperson for his circle of young adult peers and his “Millennial” generation.

Eric’s must read is a piece in the April 2012 edition of Esquire magazine, “The War Against Youth”, by 36-year-old Canadian Stephen Marche, who writes a monthly column for the magazine, “A Thousand Words about Our Culture”.

FYI… Per a short Wikipedia article on Marche, he was a finalist for the 2011 American Society of Magazine Editors award for columns and commentary. Also noted in that article, is that during a Canadian election campaign in October 2010, the Toronto Globe and Mail published online a commentary by Marche where he “effusively taunted a candidate for mayor of Toronto for the man’s obesity”. Assuming both these citations are true, Marche perhaps combines an incisive social criticism with a penchant for anger and at times hurtful words. But given Eric’s nod, I don’t necessarily want to judge the message by the messenger.

Marche’s Thesis

The provocative opening rhetorical salvo of Marche’s piece encapsulates his angry shot across us Baby Boomers’ bow…

The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.

Setting a context for the past three decades in which members of Eric’s “Millennial” generation were born and now entering adulthood, March elaborates…

Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance. In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation… This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Marche’s summation of that trend calls out an ugly bifurcation between the older and the younger among us…

If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own.

And as a result…

The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?

Given that that last question perhaps harkens back to his rhetorical excess of taunting a candidate for his obesity, if you read the arguments in his piece he has a point.

Marche says Baby Boomers are to blame, not by intent, but more by selfish naiveté and inaction, as in that activist wisdom from the 1960s that goes something like, “If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem”.

Marche’s Case

Marche calls out the scope of the areas where our young people are facing this disenfranchisement…

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base.

I think there is merit to this argument, because I have certainly had at least anecdotal experience to this effect. What follows is my attempt to lay out the key points of his argument that older Americans are disenfranchising the young.

Taking Away Youth Voting Rights

According to Marche, the recent trend particularly in red states to create stricter ID requirements for voting has impacted the number of young people able to vote in elections. Many young people are being prevented from voting since they do not have current photo IDs, including being away at college on election day where they don’t have an ID with a local address.

I tend to agree. Most people attend college in their first adult years when they are likely to be developing their political consciousness (with any coursework in social studies presumably contributing to that development). Further, habits (including voting and political activism beyond just voting) developed in those first adult years are likely to carry forward into their years beyond. Development of those good habits of democratic citizenry are stymied rather than encouraged.

Exploiting College Graduates

Marche points to statistics that while the cost of a college education has greatly increased since 1980, the quality of that education has deteriorated. And increasingly, those college graduates are having to take unpaid internships rather than getting paying jobs out of school. Unpaid or minimal-pay internships are becoming the “new normal”, giving even major corporations the opportunity to exploit young workers desperate for even a path towards the possibility of scarce jobs that actually pay real salary…

The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we’ve forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.

Of course they do! You get to try someone out on the cheap! If they don’t work out, not much ventured. If they are competent at their work you get their labor for a period of time at little or no cost. One of our son Eric’s close friends with a business degree did an internship at a company for at least half a year before he was actually paid.

Graduate Degrees

Marche points out that for increasingly more professional jobs these days, graduate degrees are required, degrees that have generally become hugely expensive to obtain, saddling graduates with major debt for years, hopefully repayable by getting high paying jobs. I know someone who put himself and his family in considerable additional debt to get his MBA, hoping to leverage that degree to get a high-paying job to pay off his previous debt. Instead he spent the next 18 months not able to find any job at all! I also hear about other young adults in our extended family with graduate degrees doing unpaid internships. This includes people that do several years of graduate work to get degrees as social workers or therapists and then must do hundreds or even several thousand hours of traineeships and/or internships which are mostly unpaid before they have the opportunity to get their professional credentials and put out their shingle.

By the time you jump through all those hoops, there may be a glut of people with comparable credentials, so its a crap-shoot at best, often in the best circumstance saddling decades of debt…

Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That’s not just an expression.

Unionized Blue-Collar Jobs

Marche calls out the disparities in manufacturing jobs between recently hired versus long-time workers even in many union shops…

Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job.

I’m no expert onf this, but this seems to be the brave new world of unionized trades and professions. Two-tier union contracts that maybe “grandfather” some benefits to existing workers but change the playing field for newer hires.

Troubling Implications

Marche notes that this exploitation of young people is a global phenomenon with its connections to recent unrest in the “Arab Spring” as well as the U.S. “Occupy” movement, plus protests and riots in various countries in Europe…

The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, “those who earn less than a thousand euros”; the NEETs of England, “not in employment, education, or training”; the hittistes of Tunisia, “those who lean against the wall.” Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.

Many of us progressives are heartened by the “Arab Spring” and “Occupy” movement, naïve perhaps that the economic privilege being challenged (particularly by the latter) may soon extend to those of us like myself with good jobs squarely in the middle class. Could a large swath of young adults in my own kids’ generation never have the opportunity to join me in that middle class? Will those young adults quietly accept that fate? I wouldn’t, and I’m pretty uncomfortable feeling like I’m on the wrong (privileged) end of this divide!

As a Boomer and a person who is determined to be aware of my impact on the world and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, I take no solace when Marche writes…

Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way.

Grimacing, I read the rest of the paragraph…

But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children’s birthright for a mess of their own pottage.

Though it might be tempting to dismiss Marche’s argument due to his angry and at times unfocused rhetoric, I think he has touched a very key sore spot in the rules of engagement between my generation and my kids’.

I think those of you reading this who are Baby Boomers yourself need to read Marche’s piece, and even if he has not presented it in the most thoughtful manner, consider it through the lens of say Stephan Stills, one of the great bards of 1960s folk-rock who wrote the lyric in his 1967 song “For What It’s Worth”…

There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

Forgiving me the naval warfare metaphor, but a shot across your bow, perhaps not so expertly fired, is still a shot across your bow.

Life, at its best, is a series of adventures; not always successful, not always happy endings, but compelling narratives worth living, sharing with others and spurring our fullest development.

Continuing my series on the key unschooling threads in my young life, I share some of my key developmental travel adventures, which were mostly endeavors engaged in outside of any classroom, school or other formal learning situation. Yet they were some of my most important developmental experiences, giving me a useful orientation along with a sense of agency that I have taken into my adult life, more significant to the person I’ve become than anything I learned in school.

With the wrong mindset, travel can be cast as an arduous logistical chore, long dull hours in a seat, or the discomfort of unfamiliar food, people or circumstances. But when traveling is cast in the light of adventure, I think it can be the greatest of experiences, particularly for kids. If life is a journey, then a trip to somewhere else can be a microcosm of life’s journey, a metaphorical education on perhaps how better to lead one’s life.

This is quite a long autobiographical piece (over 8000 words) weaving together a handful of pieces I have written previously in order to capture an important unschooling thread in my young life that has had a profound impact on who I was able to become as an adult.

Day Trips in the Wayback

I was about seven when my parents bought the first of a series of used station wagons, including that wonderful peculiarity, that third row of seats in the back, and in the case of our Mercury, even facing backwards. Since the second row of car seats was generally referred to as the “back seat”, my brother and I came to dub the third row as the “wayback seat” or simply the “wayback”, which also riffed on the wonderfully creative “Rocky & Bullwinkle Show” we watched religiously, and particularly the history traveling time machine of Mr. Peabody (the professorial talking dog) “and his boy Sherman”.

Since my mom was in homemaker/parent mode during the week (certainly not a natural fit for her, though she loved her kids), and she and my dad tended to get on each others nerves if they spent too much time together (they divorced when I was ten), my dad took the opportunity often to take my younger brother Peter and I out on day-long adventures on Saturday or Sunday.

Our dad took us on many day trips which were launched with no specific destination in mind beyond simply a direction to start off in. I think he craved encountering things that were unexpected, and therefore perhaps, more interesting. Throughout the course of the day’s drive we would end up at some fast-food place for lunch, a miniature golf course or bowling alley for a few games and maybe a donut shop for “goodies” and jolts of caffeine (Cokes for us and coffee for dad). He seemed happy to be alone in the front driving while we were seemingly at times miles away in the “wayback” playing out some fantasy world which might or might not be incorporating the world we saw going by.

Sometimes my brother and I were tail-gunners in a World War II bomber being shot at by, and returning fire on, the other cars and truck behind us. This was usually more narrative invention than simulated first-person shooter video game, because each of us tail-gunners had a back story and a long relationship with the other. We were often injured by enemy fire invoking dramatic prior-to-death confessions and/or miraculous recoveries. Sometimes we rolled the time-clock forward a century and wielded imaginary laser-cannons instead of machine-guns.

Other car trips we would informally survey the general friendliness and shyness of the drivers and passengers of other cars behind us by animatedly waving at them from our perch, and seeing if they would return our boisterous and friendly waves with the same, or a more restrained wave or none at all and perhaps even a grimace. It was certainly an interesting informal survey of the range of human behaviors.

My brother and I were not always off in our own invented worlds but also spent plenty of time collaborating with our dad on the logistics of the day’s agenda. Which cheap fast-food restaurant to stop at. How to best recover from getting “lost” and getting back on the intended path, even consulting maps where necessary (we even might have asked for directions once or twice). We learned to expect the unexpected and go with the flow, and that every ostensibly wrong turn could lead to something interesting, fun or even memorable. We learned how to entertain ourselves for hours on end where others might succumb to boredom. We learned all the techniques (making up some ourselves) to spice up the adventure of travel.

Cross-Country Adventures

The pinnacle of travel adventure in the “wayback” were our vacation trips from Ann Arbor Michigan back east to either Binghamton, New York (where my maternal grandparents lived) or Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Either of these was a day-long drive usually begun at five in the morning to avoid a long hot summer afternoon driving in a car with no air conditioning.

Because of the pre-dawn start time, the car would be configured for the trip the night before. The backseat and wayback seat were put down flat and we would put down two thin cot mattresses to cover the entire area of the station wagon behind the front seat. Suitcases were squeezed into corners or somehow underneath the seats, leaving a large flat cushioned area which would then be festooned with pillows and blankets for my brother and I to initially sleep in and later play in during the long day’s trip. This of course was before the days of seat belts and I shudder to think what would have happened in this configuration if we had gotten in a crash.

The morning of the trip we would be awoken by our dad (he never seemed to sleep very much), and bleary-eyed and still in our pajamas, we would stumble outside and climb into the back of the fully decked-out station-wagon. My dad usually took the first shift driving would as we set out on this grand day’s adventure. My brother and I would nestle ourselves under all the blankets and amongst the pillows and peek up through the windows and watch the street lights go by.

These trips, taking us farther afield from mostly flat same-old southeast Michigan, included following and crossing larger rivers (like the Mohawk and Hudson in New York), or crossing big suspension bridges or the long rolling ridges of the Finger Lake region of upstate New York (with my mom’s commentary of this or that town she had memories of from growing up), or cutting through the granite-laced mountains of western Massachusetts. On our trips to “the Cape” we would heighten our anticipation of the destination by all four competing to see who would be the first one to see the Atlantic ocean.

There would also be those funky one-of-a-kind places where we would always stop. Like a little restaurant outside of Binghamton that had this really cool pinballesque bowling game played by sliding this heavy metal disk down an eight-foot metal alley. The disk would slide over metal triggers which would cause the pretend pins to fall, and then the mechanisms would calculate and display your ten-frame bowling score.

We all understood that the whole point was the change of scenery, the change of perspective, going with the flow and rolling with the punches. Even bad weather was reframed from an anxiety producing obstacle to an exciting challenge that would make this trip that much more memorable.

Sleeping Compartment

Part of the adventure of travel was sleeping in strange and interesting places. Nothing fit that bill more than having a sleeping compartment on an overnight train. No travel experience from my youth was more romantic and thrilling than the winter holiday train trip we took several times from our home in Ann Arbor to my grandparents’ house in Binghamton New York. “Over the meadow and through the woods…” as it were.

The train originated in Chicago and got into Ann Arbor in the early evening. Since Ann Arbor was a smaller town and just a short stop, we had to wait for the approaching train on a cold outdoor platform and quickly drag ourselves and our luggage on board. The conductor then led us to our small compartment, what they called a “roomette”. With our luggage either stowed in the baggage car or in a small “closet” in our room, the seats in the room folded down and a mattress was pulled down from the wall and pretty much covered the entire floor of the compartment. This in effect turned the small space into one maybe queen-sized bed, shared by all four of us, with a window looking out at the passing countryside.

It was particularly that window, and the view it provided, that was the key to the exciting adventure ahead. My brother and I would change into our pajamas and sit on the bed looking out while our parents maybe had coffee or a drink in the lounge car before joining us kids under the covers. The fun was being all warm and snuggled under the blankets while being able to watch the cold winter world go by outside.

The train’s path took us from Ann Arbor some forty miles east through Detroit with a major stop at the big station there. From Detroit the train continued east, and in one of its most exciting anticipated moments, took the tunnel under the Detroit River, reemerging in Ontario Canada. The descent into the blackness of the tunnel, with only an occasional light zipping by for maybe a quarter of an hour underground, was one of the big highlights for me of the train journey.

After crossing the farmland of southern Ontario, the next great moment of the journey was crossing the Peace Bridge over the St. Lawrence Seaway to leave Canada and arrive in Buffalo New York. Picture a small boy in a darkened train compartment under the covers in bed looking out a big train window down through a metal frame railroad bridge at the icy waters below, full of small icebergs, ghostly white against the dark water. What could be more memorable?

I still love riding the train whenever and wherever I can. Maybe not the fastest way to get across town or across the country, but a multi-faceted adventure in ways that few other means of travel can offer. Like driving a car or riding the bus, you can watch the world go by, but on the train there is the interior dynamic as well – all the fellow passengers and train staff (even if just a conductor) that you can interact with, and an interior space that you can move around in and explore. The latter is particularly true on the longer-haul trains that have the various lounge, dining and observation cars. It all can synergize into its own little ad hoc short-time-span community of travelers, as good a community as one could find I think. Certainly as a metaphor for life, on the train it is not just about getting from point A to point B. The journey plus sharing it with one’s fellow travelers, and not necessarily the destination, is the point.

Burnt Out in Brussels

Travel of course can be problematic and stressful, particularly when best laid plans break down and one is in a strange place where it is not clear how to proceed. Rising to those occasions is one of the great developmental experiences one can have. I had such an experience traveling with my mother and younger brother through Western Europe when I was 15.

My mom, ever skilled in creative improvisation on a modest budget, figured out how to trade houses for the summer with a couple in Oxford England, who had arranged to attend classes at our local university that summer. The trade included using each other’s cars. Since at the time the cost of living was actually less in Oxford than Ann Arbor, our only major additional expense for the ten-week trip would be the air fare to and from Europe. My mom found a cheap charter flight for us from Detroit to Amsterdam in mid June and returning from London in late August. Only problem was the flight arrived in Amsterdam several days before we could take possession of the Oxford house. So she parted with some additional money to reserve a few nights of lodging in Amsterdam and surface travel from there to Oxford. No big deal, though an added expense against a tight budget.

I don’t know if it is endemic to right-brained creative people like my mom and me, but we aren’t good at keeping a large set of bits of information in our heads, so we need to make extensive use of lists and other planning and organizational devices to keep it together. Despite our best efforts to plan, we are subject in a bad moment not to remember a key bit of information and panic, which causes our minds to go blank, increasing the panic and at times causing a sudden, temporary, but total dysfunction.

My mom had one such episode when we left Amsterdam after our three day stay there, headed by train to Brussels to catch a second train to Calais and then across the Channel to England. I recall that our train got to Brussels late and my mom took a wrong turn in the station and we missed our train to Calais. At this point, normally subject to panic perhaps, she managed to keep it together, find out that there was a nice hotel not far from the airport and hired a cab to take us there. I don’t remember the hotel name, but I do remember the lobby with its high ceiling and antique curtains and couches, including the one we sat down on to regroup. My mom did her best to communicate in English with the desk clerks only to learn there was no room available in the hotel, and the alternative lodgings suggested all involved logistical complications that were daunting and problematic in one way or another. It was at this point that my mom lost it and started to sob in the big crowded lobby of this hotel so far from home in a foreign land.

It’s funny sometimes the things that motivate you. Like many teenagers, I was shaky enough in my own self-esteem to be easily embarrassed by my parents’ behavior when I was with them in public. In the Brussels hotel I did not want to have anything to do with a blubbering parent. The only thing more humiliating (in my thinking at that moment) than a crying woman in a public place, was to be the powerless kid of that crying person sitting there next to her and unable to do anything about it, feeling every set of eyes in the place looking and judging. I imagined that someone would shortly volunteer to help somehow and my mom would be reduced to utter obsequiousness and humiliation which would also be humiliating for me (projecting my own self-esteem issues of course).

This turned out to be a milestone in my relationship with my mom and her transition in my eyes from iconic parental authority figure to fellow human being and more of a peer. I discovered that I was perfectly capable of asserting my own personal authority when the situation called for it. Such is the developmental milieu of travel that it can take you out of your conventional patterns, things can come completely unraveled, and one must take the reins and improvise.

Before anything else happened I said pointedly to her something to the effect of, “Listen… here’s what we need to do.” I laid out a plan where we would get something to eat at the hotel, since we were all tired and hungry, then take a cab back to the train station and set up shop there for as long as it took to find another train to Calais. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a path forward and more that my mom, in her temporary diminished capacity, was capable of piecing together.

So we executed my plan. Found the hotel bar to have some sort of sandwiches and then got a cab back to the train station. I helped my mom negotiate with the station agent and we found an evening train to Calais. We would deal with what to do next once we got there. Turned out we got to Calais too late to do the channel crossing, but got good advice on a nearby reasonably priced hotel where we spent the night and were able to relax and regroup. The next morning we took our space-age hovercraft ride across the Channel to the English side and then by a wonderful open-air double-deck bus on a beautiful early September day to London and another bus on to our destination in Oxford.

After rising to the occasion in Brussels, I took more ownership for the trip in general, and my mom relied on me as her co-planner and car trip navigator. It was weird sitting in what would be the driver seat of an American car, as my mom braved driving on the “wrong” side of the road, and I encouraged her onward as we explored the country on three- or four-day excursions from our home base in Oxford. She later would joke proudly with friends about how I took over in Brussels, embellishing the story as she always would do, and how I relentlessly forced the three of us to see every cathedral and castle in England.

Though I won’t detail it in this piece, I’m sure those of you who have lived in foreign countries for parts of your lives would agree that there is no more compelling developmental experience, particularly so for young people. All the big or even little differences you encounter living within a different culture (even one with a shared language and much shared heritage like England), jump out at you and make you examine a myriad of things you might otherwise do under the radar of your awareness under the banner of “business as usual”. I think the experience can teach you to be more present, and even when returning to your home, continue with a heightened awareness of the assumptions behind your home culture.

My Own European Odyssey

In 1973 at age 18, having surly caught the travel bug three years earlier, I planned a ten-week journey to Europe with a female friend. I’m not sure I really knew what I was getting myself in for, but I did have that previous experience spending the summer in England with my mom and brother, plus a two-week high school Russian Club trip to the Soviet Union a year after that. Add to that the adventures of long family car trips back east or the ad hoc day-trips with my brother and dad. So I felt comfortable with being a traveler and the logistics involved, including not being intimidated by being in other countries where I did not speak the language.

So my friend and I got our passports and bought our plane tickets and alerted people I knew in Oxford and Munich by mail that we would be coming and trying to look them up. Other than that there was very little additional planning, other than deciding what clothes, toiletries and other personal items to fill our backpacks with. I recall having basically two changes of clothes besides what I was wearing to take me through the ten-week trip.

Long story short, my friend got cold feet in our first few days in England, and decided to abandon the trip and return home. After struggling with the decision to continue on my own (including a tearful international call to my mom from a pay phone), I pushed forward for nine weeks on my own. These events turned the trip from a fun adventure with a good buddy into a much more intense existential odyssey, a stranger in a strange land of languages I could not speak or understand and other heavily developmental experiences.

On My Own

After parting company with my friend in London, I boarded a train that would take me to a ferry across the Channel and then on to Basel, Switzerland. From there I would change trains and head to my next destination, Munich in southern Germany, with the hope of hooking up with a German couple I had met with my mom during our trip to England three years earlier.

I arrived in Basel at three in the morning after that long train ride, exiting the train in the midst of a huge busy station, full of people speaking languages I did not understand and train schedules in German on the various displays on the walls. I had to fight back fear and homesickness to keep focusing on the task of buying a ticket for and finding the next train to Munich. Luckily there, and most places I went, I could find somebody who spoke at least a bit of English, and I even learned a few phrases in German along the way to help me navigate mass transit.

By morning I was on a train to Munich, feeling a bit better that I had successfully negotiated my first foreign-language train station, and that I would hopefully end the day connecting with my friends in Munich who knew me and spoke pretty good English as well. Things did not work out that way.

I had thrown myself into a hugely developmental “deep end” that I could not say I was looking forward to but was determined to traverse somehow and return home a triumphant world traveler. I quickly discovered that when you are on your own, wrestling with loneliness in a “strange land”, encounters with other people and time spent alone have a more profound impact, than when one has a familiar buddy to help buffer and process the new experiences.

Army Brats

It is interesting that some of us are bitten by the travel bug while others of us don’t seem to be into this sort of adventure at all, even when blessed with golden opportunities to do so.

Arriving on the train from Basel, the Munich station was even more chaotic, with people everywhere including outside on the surrounding streets. I did not know at first that I had stumbled into the Bavarian capitol during its yearly Oktoberfest, the busiest week of the year. I called the number I had for the couple we had befriended in England three years earlier, but repeatedly there was no answer. Looking for a “Plan B”, I discovered that the nearby youth hostel was full, along with virtually all the hotels, cheap or otherwise, that I might have in desperation paid for a bed to sleep in.

On my own in this crowded chaotic environment, I quickly learned that these major European travel hubs, like the Munich train station (and youth hostels I later stayed at) usually had a fair amount of other older youth and/or young adults like myself from the U.S., Great Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries, traveling about like myself. This impromptu network became a very important asset that I often tapped into during my trip.

In the Munich train station it was a Canadian guy named Bill, maybe a couple years older than me, who noticed me looking around perplexed, came up and said hello. I shared with him my dilemma, and he provided the possibility for a solution. He was also traveling on his own, like me, and had arrived just several hours earlier and had been presented with the same lodging dilemma. Bill had had the fortune to meet an American, Stu, again around our ages, whose dad was stationed at the U.S. military base in Munich. Stu was living in a college dorm on the military base and taking classes at an extension of a U.S. university, and had offered Bill a place to stay while he was in town. Bill suggested that maybe his impromptu host could find me a bed or couch for me to sleep on as well.

Sounded good to me… I was quickly learning to go with the flow, have low expectations when traveling, and focus on the basics, which in this case was that anything had to be better than sleeping in a busy train station. I tagged along with Bill as he guided us back to his host’s environ and introduced me. Stu was gracious and welcoming in that sort of stereotypical 1970s Cheech and Chong sort of “cool man” sort of way and offered me the living room couch to sleep on that night.

Bill, Stu and I had a bond that I ended up sharing with many other people my age I met in my European odyssey. We were immersed in that wannabe flower-child, hippie ethos of solidarity with others of our kind. I certainly looked the part with my long hair, bell-bottom pants and pack on my back. Stu had his long “freak flag” hair as well. Thinking about it now I recall Graham Nash’s opening lyric in his 1970 Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Teach Your Children Well”…

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye

Part of that bond was very often celebrated by “recreational intoxication”, which was the state of things when Bill and I were invited into Stu’s dorm suite. Stu’s living room couch (my prospective sleeping place) currently sported two of Stu’s fellow army brat student buddies sharing a pipe with a big chunk of hashish in the bole. There was also a half-full bottle of Tanqueray gin on the coffee table with a scattering of shot glasses. I unburdened myself of my fifty-pound backpack and gratefully (dutifully?) took my place in that third spot on the couch, joining, at least for now, this “circle of equals”, passing our “peace pipe” of sorts.

Between the THC and the alcohol chasers I got seriously stoned pretty quickly. With continuing gratitude and great focus I endured this ritual without passing out or getting physically ill (on other occasions I was not quite so blessed), until my couch mates and my host decided to call it a night, and I had the sofa to myself and transitioned more gracefully into unconsciousness.

Over the next three days Bill and I explored Munich and frequented the Oktoberfest tents set up by the region’s brewers, with their oom-pah-pah bands, big glass mugs of beer and even bigger bouncers at the entrances and exits. I quickly learned to request, “Ein grosses bier, bitte”, and was rewarded with a grand foam-dripping mug of amber liquid way tastier than any of the standard American beers I recalled from before my European trip.

We also spent a fair amount of time those three days talking to our hosts and their circle of army brat college student friends. I was a bit shocked to find that most of the group spent the bulk of their time in their little campus enclave, attending their classes during the day and limiting their evening hours to pretty much just hanging out with each other, generally getting high and drinking the cheap booze they could buy at the base PX. I thought it was ironic that I had spent all this money and done all this planning to get to Europe so I could explore this historic continent, while they were already here, but rarely ventured out into the surrounding environment of Munich and the beautiful environs of mountains, forests and the Rhine River in the larger Bavaria. Somehow sharing that certain ennui, while passing the bottle and hash pipe, was more compelling (or perhaps more comforting and even medicating) than venturing out into these wonderful foreign lands.

Their choice (and thoughts about its possible motivations) stuck with me as I parted company with this group and continued on with my travels, with Bill as a companion for a while, and then back on my own. I was pondering whether, at least at this point in our lives, I was perhaps more of a “seeker” and a “free agent” than they were. Then again, maybe it was mainly pride and ego that drove me to continue on my own, not really knowing what I was in for and lacking the safety net of a close friend ever at my side to help with difficult decisions along the way or help get through the lonely patches.

A Very Long Day

One memorable day of my European odyssey began before sunrise in Trier Germany and ended finally at 4am the next morning in Brussels Belgium, with four cities and six train-rides in between, and me gaining a better sense of the extent of my own physical and mental stamina.

I left the youth hostel where I had been staying early Sunday morning and headed for the train station, my fifty-pound pack on my back. I was now four weeks into my odyssey, and though a healthy youth with a dependable constitution, I was frayed at the edges, both physically and psychologically. I was traveling with the clothes on my back plus two changes in my pack, and neither I nor my clothes got washed more than once a week. (Though most of the hostels I stayed at had showers, they generally did not have hot water, and I hated cold showers!) I also was feeling the dry mouth and stuffy nose of a cold coming on, and the weather had turned chilly and gray.

Being quite the geography and military history geek (we used to say “buff”), I got it in my head to go to one of the places featured in my various historical war board games… maybe Waterloo or some place associated with the Battle of the Bulge. Researching my youth hostel guide (one year out of date), I found no hostel in or close to Napoleon’s final battle, but Clervaux, a fortress town on my Avalon Hill Battle of the Bulge game-board, did have one. I could stay there and maybe find a way to get to Bastogne, the famous town where General McAuliffe and the U.S. 101st Airborne Division held out against the German assault.

It was as good a plan as any! I had nowhere I had to be and no one expecting me. With my rail pass I could improvise, hop on any random train and just show the plastic card with my picture to the conductor. I recalled the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “You Never Give Me Your Money”…

Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go

… as I boarded the train that would take me to Luxembourg City, where I would catch my second train up into the mountainous forests of the Ardennes to Clervaux.

Clervaux was a beautiful little town built on and surrounded by steep hills, nestled in a small river valley, the town center dominated by an old castle and church. I found the street to the youth hostel, which wound its way up the hill. Carrying the fifty pound pack, and nursing that cold, I felt glad that my day’s travels were almost done.

But when I got to the hostel, there was a sign on the door saying it was closed for the season. It was Sunday and the whole town was pretty closed down. My throat was getting sore and I was low on water and not finding a place where I could get more. Being on a tight budget (that could afford a $2 youth hostel but not $10 to $20 for a hotel room) I retraced my steps down the hill to the train station to catch the last train of the day back to Luxembourg City.

Back at that city’s train station, and now desperate to find cheap lodging (and not sleep in a station as I had done once or twice previously), I found a train leaving for Namur Belgium, which according to my guide, had a hostel as well. When I got to Namur it was the end of the work day and the station area was bustling with people going here and there. As in all these situations, if I was not fortunate enough to find someone who spoke English, I knew how to say “youth hostel” in French and German, but could not really understand more than the most rudimentary instructions and directions. Somehow I found out what bus I needed to board and what stop I should get off at. The bus was crowded (I could not find a seat and had to stand) and the driver was in a churlish mood, yelling at a boarding passenger at one point in a language I did not understand. I screwed up my courage and tried to tell him that I needed to get off at the stop for the youth hostel. He nodded grimly, said nothing, and drove on.

After what seemed like an hour or more, I got off the bus at a stop that seemed like the right one, but I was certainly not sure. I wandered around the streets asking anyone who looked reasonably willing for directions. I did not understand their words, but they pointed in a direction that I would walk for a block or two, then ask for directions again.

After two or three iterations of this (and not finding my destination), I had the fortune to come to the attention of two young Dutch women driving a car who were kind enough to hail me and ask if I was looking for the youth hostel. I said yes and they offered me the back seat of their small sedan. We finally found the hostel, but consistent with my day’s karma, it was full. My two vivacious and good-looking rescuers were gracious enough to drive me back to the train station (though not gracious enough to fulfill my fantasy and offer me a place to stay for the night).

It was now evening when I boarded my next train from Namur to Liege, where another potential lodging was indicated in my guide. I got into the station after ten in the evening, and the station master gave me directions (mostly in English) on how to get to the youth hostel, which was a long walk from the station across the Meuse river to the other side of town. Dog tired with sore throat and now aching shoulders hoisting my pack, I set off through the dark cold stone city. I must have walked at least four miles, when I came across an open tavern where I stopped and ordered “Ein grosses bier bitte”.

It was the best tasting pint my lips have ever tasted. The bitterness soothed my throat and the alcohol gave me enough of a buzz to press on. Unfortunately, the time spent indulging my thirst led to my arrival at the hostel just past midnight, and despite my pleadings the proprietor stuck to his guns that his establishment was closed for the night and I was once more out of luck.

Bewildered and still buzzed from the beer, I walked the five miles back through town and over the Meuse to the train station. There was a train due in at 2am headed for Copenhagen. I had talked to other fellow travelers (at previous hostels where I had actually managed to secure lodging) who had used overnight trains to sleep. This train was scheduled to arrive in Copenhagen Monday morning, so I boarded it with the plan to sleep in my seat.

The first stop happened to be in Brussels about 3:30 in the morning, at an open platform rather than an enclosed station. I saw a neon sign across the street that said something close to “Hotel”. Now sneezing with a runny nose, without much conscious deliberation I debarked from the train, crossed the street and stumbled into the hotel and asked the night desk clerk for a room. He had one which cost me what I remember to be several hundred Belgian francs (about $15 American I recall). I shelled out that budget-busting sum and was so grateful and longing to sleep in a real bed after my ordeal of a day.

Just like no beer had ever tasted as good as the one I had sucked down a few hours earlier in Liege, no clean sheets, soft mattress and pillow had ever felt better against my beaten body. In that little room, just hours before dawn, I contemplated my existential situation.

Feeling very lonely, I again contemplated bailing out and returning to the States. But maybe pride, maybe a sense that I might never have this opportunity again, drove me to continue until my money ran out. I had budgeted my trip to be about ten weeks to see all the sights of Western Europe. I was apparently developing enough tenuous self-respect that I did not want to risk losing it truncating my trip and not completing that itinerary. I finally passed out from utter fatigue pondering where I would head off to tomorrow.

Tunnel Under the Alps

Seven weeks into my European odyssey, on a train from northern Italy to Switzerland, now a very weary traveler and feeling like somewhat of a lost soul, I entered what I recall as the Saint Gotthard Tunnel under the Alps, and emerged into a completely transformed world and a new chapter in my existential journey with fresh insight into the human condition. (I may have actually gone through a different tunnel of comparable length, as noted by someone who has heard this story with a good knowledge of Western European railway geography, though at the time that was my recollection.)

It was now early November, and I had boarded the train in Venice headed across Northern Italy then under the Alps to Interlaken Switzerland. My now lengthy trip was mostly behind me, but my soul was fatigued and longing to go home, yet determined not to do so until my money ran out. You can add in my own personal ennui having spent the last few nights in Venice, a city that might qualify as the ennui capitol of the world with its soot-stained brick piazzas, looking like it had been recently raised out of the Adriatic, still in need of having the water marks cleaned up, and likely to re-submerge.

I recall the train left first thing in the morning on a sunny early December day with a temperature in the fifties. It was mid-afternoon before we reached the famous tunnel, an astonishing nine miles long, dug under the Alps between 1871 and 1881 at the cost of at least 200 worker’s lives lost. The sun still shone in a cloudless sky when we entered the south end of the tunnel, and though the actual time might have only been about twenty or thirty minutes, in my spent psychological state it seemed quite longer, long enough at least for the blackness to capture my attention and my imagination in all its metaphorical power.

Alone, rattling along in the all-encompassing dark, a sense of dread flowed through me that the world, or at least my world, had suddenly ended. It was a month earlier on my trip that I had watched on German television the start of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, and then met an American soldier on a train, called back to his base to counter an imminent Russian military move against Israel. It all felt like the world was coming apart with me right in the middle of it an ocean away from home and family.

From that dark nothingness the train emerged from the north end of the tunnel into the other extreme, a white-out blizzard with thousands of large snow flakes impacting against the window of my train car. I recall it was ten or fifteen more minutes before I could see anything but white out that window, as the train found its way out of the snow squall. From my now cozy seeming compartment I could see a winter wonderland of evergreen trees punctuated by the occasional wood and stone houses all decorated in a thick icing of fresh snow. The train finally pulled into the station at Interlaken, my intermediate destination and transfer point to another train that would take me up to the mountain town of Grindewald.

I only had time to buy and eat some way too expensive railroad station food before I boarded the train to my final destination. The snow continued outside at a less frenetic pace as the train climbed upward into the mountains, stopping at every little village along the way. It was late afternoon and the end of the school day, and at every stop dozens of Swiss school kids either boarded or debarked from the train. They sat in the seats all around me, with their rosy cheeks, brightly colored hats and backpacks, laughing and chattering in what sounded to me like German, full of energy and enthusiasm for the daily adventure of the ride home from school.

I was a lonely soul surrounded by all this joyous youthful energy and hope for the future, and the irony of this scene was not lost on me. I had my reasons to be sad and reflective, but the world was full of other people with reasons for hope and joy. The view of the Swiss winter wonderland out the window was appropriately stunning and I was headed to what by all accounts was a gorgeous little town at the base of one of the world’s most photogenic and storied peaks. Not enough perhaps to get this eighteen-year-old to shelve his angst and ennui, but enough at least to give his darkened places glimmers of light and hope.

I arrived in Grindewald in the early evening and checked in to my youth hostel. On its upstairs balcony I looked out over the valley below at the lights of the town, though darkness and clouds obscured the view of the Eiger across the valley from my location. Like most youth hostels I stayed at I found other English-speaking older youth and young adults to talk, swap stories and even venture into town for a beer with. My extreme wave of angst had passed through me and moved on for now.

The next morning brought blue sky instead of clouds, and out on the hostel’s balcony, there across the little valley where the town nestled, was the amazingly huge mountain, with its jagged peaks gleaming white and silver and filling half the sky. I had somehow found my way, on my own, to one of the most spectacularly beautiful places in the world with a whole lifetime of additional adventures ahead of me. Yes I was still homesick, but I knew at some level that I had the courage and the agency to seek out and find a place like this. Other destinations would be attainable in the future when I was ready to seek them.

Saying Goodbye to my Home Town

Five years later, after completing college in 1978, I decided to leave Ann Arbor for Los Angeles in a half-baked scheme to fling myself off the deep end again and into adulthood in a big strange city, leaving behind my hometown with its close and dear friends, plus ghosts and memories in every neighborhood, park, store and other venue from the 23 years of my young life there. Lacking a really well thought out plan, this one at least made me feel like I was moving forward with my life somehow.

I was readying myself to depart from my comfortable little university town and all of its tree-lined streets I had walked, barefoot and shirtless on warm summer nights, bundled in down jacket, wool beanie and scarf wrapped round my nose and mouth on pristinely frigid winter days, or in the spring rain, with or without an umbrella. My brother Peter had left town two years earlier to go to college in Chicago. My mom had remarried my dad and gone south (literally and maybe figuratively as well) for Dayton, Ohio a year after that. I still had my war game buddies, JLO youth theater friends, and my “Feminist Aunts” Mary Jane and Carol, and other old friends of my folks. Despite the absence of my biological family, it was certainly enough of a network to build the foundations of an adult life, but not for me.

I had a half-baked dream of being in the film and TV business, wearing some hat or the other behind the camera, rather than in front of it as an actor. I could have actually pursued that dream in Ann Arbor, having connected with a number of other budding film/TV students in my university courses. But I was drawn to Los Angeles, the biggest pond of the entertainment industry, where my former theater group mentor Michael had relocated and offered me a free room in his house. I had never been to LA, and had no idea how overwhelming it could prove to be for a very small fish in that very big metaphorical pond. But at some deep level I knew that I had to have that experience to break through the thrall of my maybe idyllic, maybe sheltered youth. Like my previous backpacking through Europe and ordeal perhaps, but one I had to see through.

Like I had done backpacking through Europe, I was planning to leave Ann Arbor traveling light, with just a suitcase full of clothes, my backpack, and my few other intimate possessions. I had no car or furniture. All the other stuff of real or sentimental value I had accumulated was safely stored at my parents’ new place in Dayton. I think I continue to this day to travel and otherwise to chart life’s journey with a minimal amount of corporeal baggage, and just a few close companions at any given time. Arriving at a new destination with just the barest of necessities increases the creative possibilities of redesigning your life, but at the cost of feeling that heightened sense of being surrounded by the strange and losing the continuity of familiar life-threads and themes.

I have continued throughout my life to periodically dislocate and relocate myself, metaphorically if not geographically, in the name of reinvention, growth and evolution. Though it has continued to be jarring and discomforting, I have persevered on placing my bet and rolling the dice for the unknown with its seemingly unlimited possibilities.

I had planned my trip to Los Angeles to be an adventure of course, on my favorite conveyance the train. Amtrak from Ann Arbor to the Midwest’s railroad hub in Chicago. Then the Amtrak “Super Chief” (or whatever it was called I don’t really remember) to Denver Colorado where I was planning to spend a few days with a friend before boarding a plane for that last leg to Los Angeles. Turns out I got to the Windy City just as Amtrak unions went on strike and I ended up instead on a much less thrilling Greyhound bus crossing the cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska on my way to the Rockies. The lyrics from Paul Simon’s song “America” came to mind.

Jackie, I said, as I boarded the Greyhound for Pittsburgh… Michigan seems like a dream to me now.

Going Forward into Young Adulthood

My first few years in Los Angeles (now as a young adult with all that travel experience from my youth under my belt) would turn into another ordeal. Again, pride and some fortuitous circumstance kept me from bailing out until I had properly played the adventure out. My earlier travel experiences and the resulting growing confidence that I could overcome adversity mitigated my fear and gave me that extra bit I needed to hang in.

I have made a good life for myself in Los Angeles, highlighted by my life-partner Sally and my two now young adult kids. That path to the present has had its ordeals as well, but the experiences of my youth, including the travel adventures I’ve shared, have prepared me to weather them. I have also come to count on having that sort of epiphany I had coming out of the tunnel under the Alps and getting those occasional jolts of inspiration and glimpses of the true power and beauty of our human developmental adventure.

Looking back, my travel adventures have been an education both in the big things – like setting a direction, going with the flow, rolling with the punches, and being present in the moment – plus all the logistical details that help you maintain yourself and surround yourself with a rich environment for growth. There is no better time spent than when you can unhook yourself from your “business as usual” and chart “the road less taken”.