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Classroom Fight On Monday

Poet

I had come to Yellow Springs for the Antioch Writers Workshop, an annual event on the Antioch College campus. My college writing teacher and advisor, the poet Jud Jerome, was an integral part of the workshop.

Field Observations

An Interview With Wendell Berry

The first necessity is to teach the young. If we teach the young what we already know, we would do outlandishly better than we’re doing. Knowledge is overrated, you know. There have been cultures that did far better than we do, knowing far less than we know. We need to see that knowledge is overrated, but also that knowledge is not at all the same thing as “information.” There’s a world of difference — Wes Jackson helped me to see this — between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.

The Talent Of The Room

Writing is something you do alone in a room. Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there’s no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact.

Homework

When we talked to school officials, we kept our argument simple: Oregon law says if we live this far away, the mandatory school attendance law doesn’t apply. The superintendent of the school district threatened us with sheriffs, lawyers, and courts, but I told him to read the statute, and we proceeded with our plans.

Bitter Lessons

What’s Wrong With American Teachers

Lecturing age-grouped children in cellblock rooms of featureless buildings is a nightmarish way to teach. (And please don’t bring to mind images of slum schools; I’m thinking of wealthy, suburban schools.) What it does to teachers — not to mention students — isn’t pleasant to see.

Psychotherapy And The Status Quo

Early in therapy, a young woman I treated for depression described her ideal relationship with a man. “If I had my way,” she said, “I wouldn’t do a thing, except clean the house and talk on the phone. He would make all the decisions. He would pick where we go, what we do, who we see.”

Stephen

I can’t believe how naive I was when I interviewed Stephen Schwartz last year. I was drawn to his warmth, his humor, the beauty of his language. I was moved by his insights about emotional healing. There’s no ideal state of consciousness, he insisted, other than the one we find ourselves in right now.

Gestures Of Protection

“It’s like a spiritual cruise ship, a love boat,” says Joan. She’s determined to be positive. The lounge on the first floor is decorated with large posters of attractive, radiantly smiling men and women who have given money to the ashram.

Confederacy Of Dunces

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

The new dumbness — the non-thought of received ideas — is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it’s really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a “cleansing” so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.