AS and the Problem with Language: Response to a Great Comment

I was going to get on and do a quick blog about something else, but I will save that topic for another day. I got and excellent and detailed comment from Rebecca on my post, Writing for Visual Thinkers, that I want to discuss further here because my response will need some elaboration. For the entire comment, check out the post and comments.



In my original post, I spent a few sentences discussing generalizations. Rebecca wrote this about my short discussion.



First she quotes what I wrote.

"In the auditory-sequential world, generalizations are understood as shorthand, but in the visual world they are seen as incomplete at best, and at worst, they are lies."



Rebecca then wrote:

"I was going to quote Ayn Rand, but we sold the book. This is an interesting point, though -- that is what the study of linguistics is about, how we use words -- not just generalizations, but all words -- as symbols for concrete and abstract realities and manipulate words as a means to categorize, analyze, and express thoughts about those realities. What I don't understand is, if generalizations are inferior and inaccurate, why the use of so much jargon? Jargon is merely specialized language. Jargon, more than generalizations, IS shorthand, a means of saying with one word an idea, process, or concept which would otherwise require a lengthy explanation."



And here is what I want to say about generalizations and jargon.



First, I don't think that generalizations are inferior and inaccurate. What I did say is that to a certain part of the population they come across that way. Generalizations are a good way to organize and categorize knowledge. In much of Gifted Education, we focus on increasing the ability of our students to make meaningful generalizations because this develops a person's ability to think about complex issues.



However, people with Autism Spectrum Disorders have a great deal of difficulty with generalizations. Remember that all the ASD share the characteristic of being, in part, a social-communication disorder. Part of the challenge for people with ASD is that they do not easily understand figurative language and they do not perceive the body language that would help with this. There are several areas of the brain that may be involved with this, such as the superior temporal sulcus in the temporal lobe, and possibly visual-motor centers in the superior colliculus. But wherever the problem may manifest in the brain (and it is likely that it involves different areas and the communication between them), but upshot of it is a lack of sophistication with language, which is processed by the brain through the auditory sensory processing systems downstream of the primary auditory system, even when it is written.



For example, when N. was younger, I used to say things to him like:

"Would you like to put that dirty plate by the sink?" Although posed as a question, intonation and body language, as well as an understanding of my role as the mother, would give most children the idea that this was a command disguised as a question for politeness. But N. would not see the body language, hear the intonation, or take not of my social role in the situation. He would take the question absolutely literally and respond with his actual desire, thus: "No, I don't want to do that." Now, I quickly figured out, using all the skills that N. did not have, that he was taking my question literally, and I learned to pose my commands directly and concisely in order to get the desired behavior. It worked quite well if I merely said; "Please put the dirty plate by the sink." N. was not being oppositional, he was merely being literal. The problem is that many adults jump immediately to the conclusion that literal children are, in fact, oppositional--and this is where many kids with Aspergers (AS) get into trouble in the wide world beyond the family.



Generalizations are a sophisticated juxtoposition of concepts with reality. They do not directly map onto reality, and when we use them, most of us are aware of the difference. For example, I can make the following generalization: "Christians believe in orignial sin, and therefore..." using the generalization to get on to the actual idea about Christians that I want to present. But beware if you are dealing with someone with AS (or even someone with the broader autistic phenotype). Such a person will immediately call up every counter-example of your statement and derail the conversation into a discussion of the branches of Christianity that do not accept the doctrine of original sin. People with AS and other ASD must be taught directly to understand use of language that goes beyond the literal, such as figures of speech, metaphors, and generalizations.



Another fascinating and wonderful characteristic of the ASD, is that of detail orientation. One area that we see this is in the visual thinking skills that so many people on the spectrum have. Certain kinds of visual tests show that people with ASD are able to process and remember the details of visual input whereas neurotypical people forget the details and retain the gestalt, which is the big picture. There are several ideas currently being investigated about the origins of this skill. But one thing that we do know, people on the spectrum tend to pay attention to the parts rather than the whole. They can perseverate on the parts endlessly, and miss the "big picture."



Generalizations are the verbal counterpart to the big picture. A person making a generalization is doing so in order to get past each detail and present an overall concept for consideration. But to the person with AS, and to those who think almost exclusively in pictures, the generalization seems woefully undetailed and therefore incomplete or even untrue. They have great difficulty with generalizations and can perseverate on the problems they pose, thus missing what comes next. When it comes to writing this is a real problem, since we must make generalizations in order to write concisely about ideas.



Think about all of the generalizations I have made thus far about people with AS, ASD and neurotypicals. I did not do it because I believe that in each individual case what I am talking about applies in exactly the same way, but in order to get across to you an idea about communication and AS.



And now, a word about jargon.



I do understand that in any field, jargon, or technical language is necessary to convey concepts concisely. When I, as a scientist, use certain terms with other scientists, they do not mean the same thing as when I use them in general company. For example, when I taught genetics, I used the term evolution to mean "a change in gene frequencies over time within a population." Any biologist hearing me in context knew exactly what I was saying. Our educations provide us with an agreed upon meaning for the use of the term. But in the general population, the word evolution means something very different. As it is often used, it means change over time leading to some kind of improvement. Directionality (a teleological concept) is not part of what biologists mean. Thus, we get all sorts of amusing (at least to me) controversy over the term.



But as we become more and more specialized, jargon quickly becomes a problem. When scientists within different branches of the same field cannot communicate because they do not understand the technical differences in meaning, well...to quote the warden in Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."



Although I do think that jargon is sometimes used to obfuscate, I do not think that it is always so. To make a generalization (:)), I think that many scientists, especially those who are primarily visual thinkers, overuse jargon because they have not developed the ability to use ordinary language in a sophisticated enough manner to communicate to the general public or even to scientists outside their fields. And in my experience with reading and writing as a scientist, I believe that the way we teach or do not teach writing in graduate schools of science has weakened such skills further. Many times, the use of an apt figure or speech, a metaphor, a generalization, or a homely example would clarify a point and make it more understandable to the reader.



Please do not misunderstand my generalizations here to mean that scientists are all autistic. Only some of us are. And some of the rest of us do have the broader autistic phenotype showing in how we communicate. And neither are all scientists visual thinkers. But a lot of us are. And for some of us, so much so that communicating in words is a difficulty we'd rather forgo.



And as for our students with ASD, I believe it is important to understand their difficulties with the use of generalizations. For if we can understand what the problem is then we are much more likely to be able to teach them how get beyond it. It is so much better than throwing our hands up in the air and calling these kids lazy and intransigent.



Oh, and one more idea: I just realized that generalizations are so useful in writing because language is auditory in nature. Since our auditory working memory can hold, on average, only about seven bits, we generally resort to chunking. For example, if I want to remember a four digit number, such as 1,492, I am very likely to repeat it as "fourteen ninety-two." I have chunked it into two numbers instead of four. Generalizations are a way of chunking a lot of detail into an overall concept, freeing up processing space for manipulating the concept intead of spending an inordinate and impossible amount of energy sorting out every detail.



Anyway, thanks for the comment, Rebecca!

As you can see, it was a very fruitful source of thinking for me!

Oh! And I'd love to know what the quote by Ayn Rand was. I read every one of her books several times as a teenager.

The Rabbi's Sermon and Blessing OR The Most Beautiful Yom Kippur Ever

Our Yom Kippur was a beautiful day. It was a warm and sunny fall day. The leaves are just beginning to turn in Albuquerque, although the Bosque is still green, but we can sense the season to come in the turning of the first leaves.

One of the highlights of the day for me, is the morning service. There are so many memories bound up in that service for me. We sing "Shachar Avacheshka," which is "Early will I seek You..." and it is one the few congregational hymns still done in the old Reform, Germanic style. Even the English words reflect the heritage of Classical Reform:

"Early will I seek You, G-d, my refuge strong.
Late prepare to meet You, with my evening song.
Though unto Your greatness, I with trembling soar,
Yet in my inmost thinking, lies Your eyes before.

What this frail heart's dreaming, and my tongue's poor speech,
Can they even distant to Your greatness reach?
Being great in mercy, You will not despise,
Praises which 'til death's hour, from my soul shall rise."

The theme of the morning service is that of the Day of Decision. Yom Kippur is the day when the metaphorical gates of heaven are open to all who seek to enter with a humble heart. The normal morning prayers, the Shema (Hear, O Israel!) and her blessings, the Amidah (standing prayer) and the K'dusha (G-d's Holiness), are supplemented with reminders that the House of Israel is called to holiness, and that we are unable to do this awesome work alone. We read the Viddui--the confession--silently and then together, as a congregation. We ask earnestly for G-d's great help in our desire to come nearer to holiness. The Torah reading for Yom Kippur morning is Nitzavim--You Stand--taken from D'varim (Deuteronomy):

"You stand this day, all of you, before Adonai, your G-d--the heads of your tribes, your elders and officers, every one in Israel, men, women, and children, and the strangers in your your camp, from the one who chops your wood to the one who draws your water--to enter into the sworn covenant which Adonai your G-d makes with you this day...And it is not with you alone that I make this covenant: I make it with those who are standing here with us today before Adonai your G-d, and with all who are not here with us this day...For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, nor far away. It is not in heaven that you should say: 'Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it down for us, that we may do it?'...No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and on your heart, that you may do it...I call upon heaven and earth to witness against you this day that I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse..."

The emphasis of the Torah reading is the idea that we are standing before the Eternal, but that whether we will have life or death, blessing or curse, is our own choice.
After the Torah, reading, I had the honor of chanting the Haftarah (Prophetic Reading) in Hebrew for the 11th year. The Haftarah for Yom Kippur morning is taken from Isaiah: K'rah b' Garon--Cry Aloud:

Cry aloud, lift up your voice like a shofar and declare to my people their transgression, to the House of Jacob, their sin...Is this the fast I look for? A day of self-affliction? Bowing like a reed and covering yourself with sackcloth and ashes?...Is not this the fast I look for: to unlock the shackles of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage, to let the oppressed go free, to break every cruel chain? Is it not to share your bread with hungry and to bring the homeless poor into your house?...Then shall your light blaze forth like the dawn...You shall renew your body's strength,; you shall be like a watered gardern, like an unfailing stream. Your people shall rebuild the ancient ruins and lay the foundation for ages to come..."

All of this ritual and beautiful and moving. It was made even more beautiful this year, because the congregation has gotten a sound system for the choir. When we designed the sanctuary, we did not make allowance for the accoustics from where the choir stands, and the sound went up into the nichos in the ceiling. I know the music of the High Holy Days, and I know it is beautiful. I know what it should sound like. But since N. has been too old for babysitting and children's services, I have been sitting out in the congregation in order to help him manage his prayers, and have not been with the choir. Therefore, I have been unable to really hear the harmonies and counterpoint, and I had forgotten how beautiful the music really is.

And when I think about it, my vow to be there and to be one with the prayer instead of standing outside the service with my perfectionist hat on and with the critical voice in my head, also made the beauty of the service far more apparent than it has been in many years. I don't know what it was, exactly, perhaps all of it--the sound system, staying in the "good reality," hearing the words as if they were addressed to me and not some "they" out there--but not only did the service appear beautiful to me, but the holy congregation that I stood among glowed with love and beauty. I was getting it: This is what it means to choose life and blessing. It is to be life and blessing, love and beauty, and thus see it in everything.

I have no doubt that I will still wrestle with this all of my life. This is, perhaps, one of the challenges that I was born with; a challenge that the One will use to draw me closer to holiness. But the high vistas are nice to reach occasionally, if only to remind us of what is possible.

There was much then, that was high and holy, that I experienced on Yom Kippur. However, it was the rabbi's sermon at the morning service that really spoke to me. I cannot reproduce it here. There were too many insights and impressions to ponder, to do it justice. I will, rather, give my understanding of the theme and then post the link when it is available.

The sermon was about two meanings of fear. There are two different words for "fear" in Hebrew, one that has the sense of the fear we have that causes us to avoid danger, and one that expresses the existential fear/awe that we have when we encounter that which is much bigger than ourselves. It is that second fear that we deal with in our encounters with Holiness. On Yom Kippur, we fast and deny ourselves bodily pleasures. We dress in white, the color of the shrouds we will be wrapped in by the Chevrah Kaddishah (Burial Society) when we die. The rabbi pointed out than on Yom Kippur, when we do all of these actions, when we contemplate the emphemeral nature of our lives, we are practicing for our deaths, so that we do not live in fear of it. So far, so good. I could nod in understanding and appreciation of what he was saying. Yes. Yes. That makes sense.

Then came the kicker. The rabbis said something to the effect of this: But what we really live in fear of is life. We hide from ourselves those things about ourselves that scare us, and by doing so, we do not live our lives. We distract ourselves with the foilables and tragedies of the rich and famous, and delight in their sins, in order to avoid living fully. We are not choosing life. We are afraid to know it. We go to our graves not having lived. And the rituals of Yom Kippur are meant to turn us around, to cause us to face those things that we most fear, and enable us to choose life. If we so choose.

And for me, that was the missing piece. What is perfectionism, really, but the attempt avoid failure? And the avoidance of failure comes from this fear the rabbi was talking about. As I said last week about perfectionism: "A perfect heart is non-living. It is a fantasy, an idol we pursue because we are so alien to where we actually live." And where does perfectionism come from? It comes from fear. Fear of failure, fear of loss, fear of not being acceptable as one is. And the need to control comes from that same root. Perfectionism and the need to control both come from fear.

The rabbi completed his sermon by telling this story of the Baal Shem Tov (the Master of the Good Name, who was the founder of the Hassidic mystical tradition):

The Baal Shem Tov was found to be wise enough to be shown the world as it really is, so the angels commanded that he look upon it. He looked upon it and saw a great pit, full of fire. And suspended over the fire was a tightrope. And upon the tightrope was a man walking. He walked unaware of the tightrope he walked upon or of the fiery pit he was suspended over. And then, suddenly, the man walking was made aware of his predicament. And he began to cower, and lose his balance, teetering from side to side, nearly falling into the fiery pit. And the Baal Shem Tov called out to him: "Do not fear! Do not fear at all! You can fly! You can fly!"

This is my rendering of the story. It creates in me a visceral reaction of great joy. I do not wish to deconstruct it. There is a song that comes from this story. It is based on a saying of Rebbe Nachman of Bratislava, he of the empty chair. The choir sang a rendition of it after the sermon. But I am more familiar with the NIFTY campfire version of it:

Chol Ha-Olam Kulo

(The World is Just a Narrow Bridge)

All of the world is just a narrow bridge,

Just a narrow bridge, just a narrow bridge.

All of the world is just a narrow bridge,

Just a narrow bridge.

And the main thing is not to fear,

And the main thing is not to fear at all.

And the main thing is not to fear,

Not to fear at all!

It is really quite extraordinary what being there does for one's soul. I want to be there more often.

The Rest of the Day

The rest of the day went beautifully but not perfectly. In the afternoon service, we remembered the history of our people and the faith of the ten martyrs. We passed around a lemon studded with cloves, sniffing it to help with the faintness of lack of water and food. We listened to the afternoon Torah--"You Shall Be Holy" --from the holiness code in Leviticus, and the Haftarah of Jonah, reminding us that the Eternal does care for "Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!" We sang Ani Ma-Amin--our hope for the making of the messianic age. We remembered our dead and cried for them through the singing of El Malei Rachamim--G-d, Full of Compassion, during Yizkor, the memorial service. And all the while, as we grew more haggard and hungry, the tear-stained faces of the holy congregation, joined by those no longer with us and those yet to be, grew in beauty and goodness and light.

And then the sun got to be low in sky and the Sandias glowed orange the reflected light in the east. And we began the great service of Neilah--the Gates. Our voices sounded thin and raw in the vastness of this service, "as the gates begin to close." Our last pleas brought with great longing and reliance, as the congregation leaned into the last prayers.

"This is the house of G-d, this is the gates of heaven.

Open for me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter and thank Adonai!...

Remember us unto life, O, King who delights in life...

Oh, Source of Blessing, you are with us in death as in life..."

And the mighty El Norah Ahleela--G-d of Awesome Deeds:

"G-d of awesome deeds, G-d of awesome deeds,

Grant us pardon as the gates begin to close!

We who are few in number look up to You, with trembling,

we praise You, as the gates begin to close...

Proclaim a year of favor, return the remnant of Your people to honor and glory,

as the gates begin to close..."

The cantor and choir surprised our rabbi, using a setting he had written, adapted from the Sephardic tradition.

Once more, we stood before the open ark and sang:

"Avinu Malkeinu--Our Father, our King, let the gates of heaven be open to our plea...

Avinu Malkeinu--do not turn us away empty-handed from your presence..."

And, as the sun set, we leaned into the last prayers as the gates began to close. All of us, standing together. And the congregation fairly glowed with beauty:

"Turn back, turn back...for why should you choose to die, O House of Israel?...

Now send forth your hidden light and open to Your servants the gates of help...Open the gates, open them wide! Open the gates, Adonai, and show us the way to enter...

Seu sha'arim...Lift up your heads, O gates! Lift yourselves up, O ancient doors! Let the King of Glory enter. Who is the King of Glory? Adonai of Hosts--G-d is the King of Glory!...

And as the sun set, the final Kaddish:

"We sanctify Your name on earth, as we pray for the coming of Your Kingdom, in our own day, our own lives, and the life of all Israel..."

"Shema, Yisrael..Hear, O Israel, Adonai is G-d, Adonai is One!"

And three times: "Blessed is G-d's glorious kingdom, throughout space and time!"

And seven times: "The Eternal is G-d!"

And then, the long, triumphant blasts of the shofarot, the rams horns, for many in Congregation rose to to the Tekiah (including N., who had practiced for this moment).

And we made Havdalah--the separation between the Holy Day just passed and the work day to come.

And then the second really extraordinary moment of the day for all of us--the rabbi's blessing.

He always gives us a blessing at the end of a service. After Havdalah, he said, "Let's all join hands..." and at that moment he looked up and saw the congregation standing, utterly spent with the day's prayer before him. Did he see the same glow of beauty that I had noticed growing throughout the afternoon? I don't know. But I think he must have.

He faltered, and said, "...but you are already holding hands..." And then he bowed his head, and was overcome with...what?...but, whatever else it was, he cried. I have never seen this before. He gave the blessing from one of the Songs of Ascent: "Blessed are you in coming in and going out..." in a broken voice. Tears of joy. Awesome.

What an incredible day. The most moving, amazing Yom Kippur I have ever experienced.

What a great thing 'being there' does for the soul.

We broke our fast quietly this year, all of us together, and yet it was quiet. Small conversations. Talk turning to the ordinary things of life as we ate bagels and lox, creamed herring and crackers. Lemonade stinging our raw throats. "Yes, this is Sam's last year of college"..."Marilyn is interviewing for jobs"..."It was good, very good this year"...This was a hard year for her, but we had such intimacy. I miss her terribly"..."What are you doing for Sukkot?"...

It is time for life to creep in as we turn to the festival of Sukkot. The season of our joy. The celebration of the Ingathering Harvest.

Yom Kippur: Perfectionism, the Cult of Control, and the Journey to Wholeness

We are in the Yamim Noraim. The Days of Awe. Yom Kippur is coming. And every Yom Kippur, I try to do it perfectly. This is the first annual Yom Kippur musing that I will blog. G-d willing, I will not repent perfectly, but rather live imperfectly and thus have more to muse about next year.

An admission. I am a perfectionist. I am not a "recovered perfectionist" or even a "recovering perfectionist." Alas, I am a dyed in the wool, true blue perfectionist. Whether it is a personality trait or whether it is determined by other attributes; whether it is genetic or developmental or environmental in origin, I do not know. But I am one. A perfectionist.

And there is something that I do know about this trait: it is highly rewarded in our culture. That unbroken string of A-grades in high school, those scholarships I received in college, that really high and darn near perfect GPA all attest to that fact in my own life. And I know something else from nearly half a century of wrestling with this highly-rewarded trait: It can be really, really difficult to live with regardless of whether you are the individual living with the trait or the unfortunate soul living with the individual living with trait. Or both. Like me.

The phrase "good enough for the government" has no currency in our household. In fact, it took me a long, long time to understand that phrase in a positive manner. I finally understood it in a flash when I was teaching a chemistry class how to differentiate between accuracy and precision. "Accuracy," I explained, "Means how close you can come to the correct answer for a measurement. For example, if the answer is 1.36 kilos, and your scale gives you a weight of 1.30 kilos, you are accurate only to the tenth of a kilo. Well, actually, kilos aren't really measuring weight at all--they are measuring mass, but in the common parlance we say weight, but...Class--don't worry about that last bit. Just focus on the meaning of accuracy." (Did you catch my perfectionistic aside that I had to correct in order not to confuse the issue further)?

But on to precision. "Now precision," I told the class, "Is something else. It tells us the number of decimal points to which a particular instrument is capable of measuring. For example, our balances in here can give us a mass to the nearest tenth of a gram. Suppose I take the mass of an object and it comes to 4.2 grams, but there is play in the pointer between the point 2 and point 3 mark. And it settles halfway between. Then I can estimate the hundredth of a gram, making it 4.25 grams, but no further! I cannot say that it is 4.23 grams and I cannot say that it is 4.250 grams. My instrument is not calibrated precisely enough for me to make any further estimations."

And at that moment I got it! The phrase "good enough for the government" does not mean that the government is okay with sloppy and therefore inaccurate measurements. It is not talking about accuracy at all! Rather it means that in a particular instance, you do not need further precision than what you have! I felt like shouting "Eureka! I have found it!" Of course, I did not. I thought I had said enough to confuse my students for the day. I admit I am slow. It only took me around 20 extra years to figure that out compared to your average person--the one who had it down at age 20 or so. But I have an excuse. My perfectionism got in the way.

Lately, I have come to develop another hypothesis about perfectionism. My new hypothesis came from several different streams of thought that I have been pondering lately. One is from reading Tom Brown, Jr.'s books. You know that reading blitz that our family has been up to lately? Well it has entered my consciousness and has been rumbling around in my cortex, causing all sorts of interesting ponderings that are quite unrelated to what my cortex is supposed to be processing given the two tests I have this week. It's amazing how productive I am at pondering right near test time. One might think that it is an avoidance mechanism. But that's kind of Freudian, don't you think?
Anyway, back to Tom Brown, Jr., the illustrious Tracker. All of his writings contain references to a spiritual element that underlies his tracking and survival abilities. Sometimes he states it explicitly, but mostly it is implicit to his world view. The idea is that you will think and act like an alien on your own planet until you understand yourself as a part of the whole, living being of the environment you are in. When this happens, you become a part of a whole greater than yourself and experience a belonging in the environment that makes the process of survival natural and undifficult. It becomes like experiencing flow. You are not trying. You are being. Sounds Zen. Or Chassidic. Or mystical. In other words, it is a truth that underlies all of the myriad religious traditions humanity has developed. The point is that the Tracker talks about wholeness and being part of a living whole. As we shall see, I have come to see that perfectionism is the antagonist of wholeness and of life.

Another thread for the wool-gathering comes from some other reading that I am doing. I have been reading a book called The Overscheduled Child which was previously called Hyper-parenting. The authors changed the name because a lot of parents would not even pick it up due to the implied criticism of their parenting. See what I mean by perfectionism being a highly rewarded trait in our culture? The authors talk a lot about the origins of the need to be perpetually active and competitive in our culture. They believe it comes from a false sense that we can control all outcomes if we are perfect parents.

Finally, at Rosh Hashanah second day services, I ran into a friend that I had not talked to in a long time. In the course of our conversation with still another person, she brought up the fact that I am a member of 'the club.' She meant the cancer survivor's club. And she commented to both of us that, "Elisheva has been through some really tough experiences and low moments, but through them I have seen her grow." Turning to me, she said, "You have given up running around trying to control everything all the time, and you now have a peace and wholeness you did not have before." (I call it an AFGE--Another F-ing Growth Experience. It's another version of the two-by-four's that the Eternal regularly aims at our heads. Look, I rely on G-d, but that doesn't mean that I think S/he/it is nice. As 'Rabbi' Mick Jagger puts it, you get what you need).

I began talking about how, really, this was not a conscious change on my part. What really happened was two-fold. First, I went through my cancer experience rather passively. I was exhausted from surgery, my marriage had ended, I was trying to raise my kids and support them all on my own, and now I had treatments to manage as well as a household to keep up. Not to mention that full time job that goes with supporting said kids. I was too damned tired to remember my own name half the time, let alone try to control what was happening. And it felt good to be passive and not try to "run around controlling everything." Secondly, I went through anger. I was angry that I had spent more than twenty years being a good girl. I ate right. I exercised right. I denied myself chocolate. I did Tai Chi. I got A's. I was darn near perfect. And it still happened. I got cancer. Obviously, attempting perfection did not lead to control. And control did not lead to a perfect outcome. In fact, the outcome was downright lousy. All that work and misery about perfection and I get this? The big "G" really does have a twisted sense of humor.

Aside: One side effect of this is that I no longer buy into the "perfect health, perfect body" mythology that pervades the airwaves in the US. I now enjoy eating and drinking and being satisfied. I figure that G-d designed chocolate to go with your whole grain cereal and morning coffee, and that a glass of wine with Brie is as close to the Garden of Eden as I'll ever come. And that union with my husband on Shabbat really does help reunite the Eternal and the Shechinah, even if my body and his are far from the ideals that grace every fashion magazine in the western world. I'm going to die sometime in the future no matter what and I refuse to stand before the Eternal and say that I did not enjoy every good thing creation offered because I was worried it would kill me. That means Tai Chi and CHOCOLATE. Walking and Wine. Break the symetry and live!
Of course, I do not do that perfectly either. But every time I slip into perfectionistic thinking I make myself and everyone around me unhappy. As I said, It comes slowly to me.

But back to the hypothesis I mentioned.
Hypothesis 1: Perfectionism arises in part from the idea that we can control all outcomes.
Hypothesis 2: This concept of control comes from the idea that human beings have godlike power and is, therefore, idolatrous.

Now on to some language lessons.

First: The word "perfect" has a teleological implication. Perfection is something to be attained at the end of something. It is not a state of being and becoming. It is a state of finality. Or to put it more plainly, as the biologist that I am: Perfect is non-living. No living system can be perfect. Since perfection implies lack of growth and change, anything that is perfect cannot be living.

Second: There is no Hebrew word for perfect. Any translation that renders a Hebrew phrase into something like "perfect sacrifice" has been misunderstood. The closest we can come is the Hebrew root, Shin-Lamed-Mem
שלם, which gets rendered into words like Shalom, Shalem, and Shleyma. The root meaning has the sense of wholeness or completeness. The greeting 'Shalom aleichem,' often rendered as 'peace be with you,' is really wish for wholeness. Shalem, as in "Ma-shlemcha?" which is often rendered as "How are you?" actually means something like "how is your health/wholeness?" Think about it: the English word health, comes from hale and means whole. And that brings us to the problematic word "shlayma" which is the one that gets translated as "perfect." But the sense of the word is more like "complete" or "whole." As in the phrase "refuah shleyma" which gets translated sometimes as "perfect healing." It would be better translated as something like "complete healing" or "whole healing."

As I said, I am a perfectionist. And perfectionism is death. It is idolatry. So what to do?
Well, the first step is definitely not to apply perfectionism to becoming whole! I am going to become whole and try to do it perfectly! That's a trap!
Do you see where it is, o wise and gentle reader? The trap is in the trying. Trying is stress. Trying is hard. It disarticulates things rather than putting them together.
Our culture is about reductionism. The art of picking things apart into smaller and smaller pieces until nothing means anything. And at Yom Kippur, this is what perfectionists like me tend to work at. Taking it all apart. Trying to find out where we failed at perfection. Resolving to correct it. To be more perfect next year. An impossible task.

Wholeness--well, that's the state of things that are living and being. Completeness.
Somehow, you cannot try to become whole. You either are or are not whole. You either are or are not part of the whole. Wholeness. Oneness with "the Spirit that moves through all things." Completeness.

I seem to be approaching the idea. And I get that getting it is the same thing as being it. It is like approaching a limit in math. You can approach and approach but you will never get there. You are there. Or not. You are whole. Or not. It's like I need a calculus to transcend the dichotomy. (I always did say that math is mystical in the extreme). Thank goodness I do not have to become like Isaac Newton and invent this calculus. It is there in the practices and teachings that underlie all of human spiritual ritual and custom. Including mine.

So this Yom Kippur, I am not going to work at it. I am not going to try. I think I'll just get dressed in white and be there. Fast not because it is hard and making things hard is the way to get to wholeness. Fast rather because it allows one to understand the fundamental importance of the cycle of hunger and fulfillment, of thirst and satisfaction, of emptiness and fullness. It is not the one or the other. It is, rather, in the completion of the cycle, the fusion of the yin and the yang, the devekut--the clinging--of Adonai and Shechinah--the completeness of the sparks from the shattered vessels, that allows us to break the dichotomies and become at one with all of life.

In Yiddish it is rendered in a more homely way:
Es iz nito a gantsere zakh vi tsebrokhn harts.
There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.

There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.
Not a perfect heart. A perfect heart is non-living. It is a fantasy, an idol we pursue because we are so alien to where we actually live.

That is Yom Kippur. To stand before the Eternal offering only the wholeness of a broken heart.

May we all be inscribed for life and goodness, wholeness and blessing in the new year.
(Note that the word perfect is nowhere to be found in this blessing!)

Not Back-to-School Today! Unschooling, Formal and Informal Learning

The coming of the school year for our friends and neighbors has had some influence on us as we begin our second year of homeschooling. I have previously discussed the evolution of our homeschool adventure here. We changed over time from a formal, scheduled school-at-home approach to the more fluid approach of unschooling. Last year, we did do some back-to-school-type shopping and even took advantage of the govenor's tax-free back-to-school shopping weekend. This year, we did no back-to-school type shopping. Oh, N. did propose to use The Teaching Company's Great Courses DVDs as a means to his goal of reviewing basic math and learning algebra. And I ordered them when we agreed on that. But we felt....well, a teensy, weensy bit left out of all of the excitement. We had no reason to read the Back-to-School insert in the newspaper. N. gets his clothes as needs them now, so there was no need for a school clothes shopping trip. And anyway, we were getting ready for our California trip. It was this, in the end, that helped us over the "wow, we're not going 'back to school' " left-outness.



But even though we are not going back to school, and we are not going to school-at-home, we still made an educational-type transition today. In the Bird Baylor, 'I'm in charge of celebrations' mode, we had our first day of Not Going to School. Today, N. woke up ready to begin some of the learning that he planned with us toward the end of July. And this transition led me to do some reflecting on what it means, exactly, to be unschoolers. The question that I am ruminating on is this: Is having a structure/routine compatible with calling ourselves unschoolers? What about the presence of some formal, structured learning?

Now that we are back home from our trip (it is difficult to call all that busy-ness a vacation), we decided (note the pronoun) to add a little structure to our days. So today we resumed praying the morning service. And since it is the month of Elul (in the Hebrew Calendar), N. decided to practice blowing the shofar, which is the custom in this month of preparing for the Days of Awe.

Is this learning? Well, yes, of course it is! N. is learning content--the adult practices that go with the month of Elul, Jewish customs and tradition, the structure of the Hebrew calendar. He is also practicing skills--how to blow a shofar, chanting prayers in Hebrew, the choreography of Jewish prayer, etc.

But this is certainly not formal education. It is the kind of learning-by-doing that is considered education at its best by such advocates of unschooling as John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and Alison McKee. It is learning that comes naturally in the process of living our particular lives in our own cultural and social context.

After we prayed the morning service and blew the Shofar, though, N. got out his hunting knife and we opened the big box that had come from The Teaching Company. He examined the three courses therein--Basic Math, Algebra I, and The Joy of Science. He opened up the math workbooks that came with the first two courses, and he read the outlines inside the DVD cases. Then he collected a clipboard, a pencil and a spare, and paper, and popped in the Basic Math DVD and selected Lesson 1--Review of Addition and Subtraction. On the screen, Murray Siegel, Ph.D. was standing in a room full of instruments of math instruction, lecturing from notes and using a white-board.

This would be recognized anywhere as learning; indeed, it looks like schooling. Well....kind of. I mean, how many students in school listen to their math lectures sitting cross-legged in an easy chair, while snacking on nuts and drinking water? How many students in school can literally freeze-frame the professor and use scene selection to replay a difficult-to-understand bit. Never-the-less, this still looks like formal education. It is structured. It has a teacher, it has a white-board, and it has a workbook. N. even had "homework." He had a page of workbook problems to practice after he finished watching the DVD. True, he checked his answers himself using a calculator and then compared that to an answer key. No red pens--thank goodness!--and immediate feedback was his. Still, one wonders, is this also unschooling?

I think the answer to that question is that it depends. It depends on the answers to other questions. Questions like: Who decided that N. would learn Basic Math? Who decided that he would use a DVD course from The Teaching Company? Who decided that he would do it right after morning service without even taking a break? In our case, the answer to each of the above is: N. did. He made a goal for himself to review 4th - 8th grade math so that he could learn Algebra. He got interested in Algebra by watching his sister, Bruce and I solve important problems that way. (Important because they pertained to things we were planning to do). He pored over The Learning Company's catalogue and decided that he would like to use their product. He determined when he would begin and that he would do the math on days that someone would be around to help him if he needed it. And today he got up ready to begin.

Is this unschooling? I think it is. There was no imposition of goals on the learner. We have definitely moved from being 'sages on the stage" to becoming 'guides on the side.' There is structure--but it comes from goal-setting. N. has learned that routine and regular practice are very helpful to the accomplishing of goals. And this is a good thing to learn in this world. Actions do have consequences. How you go about working on goals has a lot to do with whether or not you accomplish them. Practice does make perfect sometimes.

So we are unschooling this year.

And the rest of our day? N. spent the afternoon in his room, making a contour map of his secret spot for Kamana II. He didn't need me at all for that. He had not 'scheduled' it. But he clearly had it in mind for his First Day NOT Back to School.

Rejecting "Pomo": Another Reason to Homeschool

My post-secondary education has been mostly in the sciences. I hold degrees in Geology, Biology, and now, I am studying in the neurosciences.

Now, some of you--the ones who spent your mornings in English Literature classes and your afternoons playing Frisbee on the Quad while we poor science geeks were in physics labs quantifying the forces on said toy (you know who you are)--might say: "I'm sorry. You missed a lot."

And it is true. I missed the phenomenon called postmodernism--called "pomo" for short, according to Wickepedia. I did not learn it. I do not understand it. I cannot "grok" it. I try not to even think about it.

I know that's an evasion--but we all have our weaknesses.

But yesterday a set of books from Amazon--ordered a week ago by 2-day delivery (don't ask)--arrived. (If you insist on asking, the books were originally dispatched from Coffeyville, KS). One of the books was Who Killed Homer? (WHK) And that is the one that I started to read with my lunch yesterday.

Wow! I almost didn't get my afternoon work done. In fact, I admit that I took some shortcuts.
The book is about the rapid disappearance of an understanding of our culture's classical roots in American education. Publisher's Weekly puts it this way:

"...classicists Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath explain what has been killed, who did it, and why. They rescue the Greeks from postmodernist scholars who disparage the thought and art of these 'dead white European males'..." (paperback back cover).

I haven't finished the book yet, so I don't know if they actually "rescue the Greeks,"* but I did spend some reading time grappling with the problems presented by postmodernism. And now I am actually thinking about it. You know how it is: if you ignore entropy, it only gets worse. But at the same time that I was pretending that postmodernism would go away, or that, at least it did not affect me when I was teaching at the college, high school and elementary level, of course it was. Affecting me--that is.

From my reading about the term postmodernism--admittedly limited--and from the discussion of it in WKH, I will reduce it's complex and (according to Wickepedia) somewhat fluid definition to the essential idea that reality is socially constructed. All of it. In other words, the postmodernists think that Aristotle had it wrong: reality isn't really real. A is not A.

So that's what the classicists, philosophy majors and creative writing afficianados where discussing on the Quad while I was laboring to isolate my unknown by titration in Quantitative Analysis. Damn! I wish I'd have know that someone had revoked reality. I wouldn't have wasted my time determining the unknown amount down to the nearest picoliter. Who cares? It's not real anyway! Let's go play frisbee! Oops. But what if Newton's laws of motion aren't real, either? Better just have a beer.

OK, for you chemists out there, I exagerate. Our titrator was not that precise. In fact it had the disconcerting habit of letting loose more than one drop of reagent at the critical moment, turning the solution pink before we could count the actual drops. Meaning that we had to redo the experiment. From the beginning. And buy the TA the supper he missed because the Dining Hall closed at 7:15 PM. For the non-geeks reading this, that's called "burning the midnight oil." Drat that 1970's technology!

But I digress. Sort of. Because the point I am trying to make here is that a scientist cannot accept this premise of postmodernism. I mean, if reality is socially constructed--which I take to mean that it is agreed upon by a culture--then the Earth ceased rotating around the sun during medieval European times. But only for the Europeans. And only until Galileo. But of course, at the archives of the Roman Catholic church, the earth did not start revolving around the sun until 1993, when church officials remembered that they'd condemned Galileo of heresy all those years ago and cleared him. Maybe they were eager to have seasons again?

I admit that this is a ridiculous argument that takes the "pomo" stance way too far. I got carried away. I'm sorry.

My actual point stands though: a scientist cannot accept that reality is socially constructed.
The job of a scientist is to use experimental and empirical methods to determine how the universe functions. In order to do this, the scientist must start with the idea that the universe operates in a predictable way following universally (get it?) applicable laws. If a scientist wishes to do her job with integrity, she cannot decide to throw out evidence because it does not agree with her (socially constructed) ideas about the world.

I'm sure that a "pomo" advocate would interject here that science is, itself, a socially constructed pursuit with socially constructed rules. And that integrity really doesn't exist. (Or is this last nihilism? Amoralism? Damn--wish I'd have taken that modern philosoply course. But I didn't have time. I was spending hours mucking about with reality in science labs). At the least, the "pomo" would say that integrity is whatever we say it is.

And that brings me to the issue of postmodernism and education. Because, if we say that reality is whatever we agree it is, then nothing is absolute. Not the laws of nature. Not the values of western culture. Justice? Forget it. Right action? It's whatever we say it is.

Talk about the tyranny of the majority!

Those people, those heroes, who stood up against injustice, must have been delusional--after all, they did not accept the socially approved reality. Martin Luther King? He was just wasting his time. With pomo, society needs no heroes.

These ideas--although generally not this blatant (no good pomo-ist would say that about MLK)--are pervasive in our educational system. And the effect on our children is that it teaches them to never stand out in a crowd. Never stand alone. Although our children are taught all about multiculturalism on MLK day, they are implicitly taught never to do what MLK did. He stood up for an absolutist principle. The one we call justice.

And if our children do not learn that there are values worth standing up for, they become sheep for the sheering. Not taught to think independently, they become servants of the state rather than free citizens. That's not the purpose of eduation in a republic.

And that is another reason why I homeschool my son. I am not interesting in raising cannon-fodder.

"Am I buggin' ya? Didn't mean to bug ya. Edge, play the blues." --Heard on "The Joshua Tree" released by U2.

Well. I wonder what diatribe Chapter 4 of Who Killed Homer will provoke?


*I have a hard time thinking of Agamemnon and Achilles as needing rescuing. Oh, all right, I admit that they were probably oppressors of women and war-mongers, but they were authentic HEROES. And heroes can take care of themselves. Or at least discuss what their tragic flaw was when they met as shades in Hades.

Creeping Fascism: Are We Servants of the State?

I admit it. Late May and early June is usually a time of the year in which I actually avoid deep thinking, prefering to celebrate the end of the semester by reading thrillers and working in my yard. And still the world of homeschooling turns, even though I am preoccupied with watching the sunset and sunrise from my little piece of paradise.

So today, I finally feel compelled to discuss some issues that have been developed on other blogs and tie together some ideas that have been rumbling around in my head for a while--even as I watched wonderful sunrises and sunsets from my front porch.

In Connecticut, their version of Child Protective Services (DFS) has been enlisted by certain school districts to force parents who wish to homeschool their children to keep the kids in school. Judy Aron over at Consent of the Governed has blogged extensively about what is happening there. I am linking to her first recent post on the issue here, but you should look also at today's post, as well as one about the press conference, which can be viewed here. It is well worth viewing.

There is no question that the school districts that have reported these parents to DFS for "education neglect" have abused their power. What is very interesting is that in the cases discussed during the press conference (linked above), the parents were removing their children as a last resort after reasonable attempts to work with the schools to get their children a public education. In these cases, another issue stands out--the children had health problems that should have resulted in some form of an individual educational plan--either an IEP (under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) or a 504 Plan (under Americans with Disabilities Act). The IDEA in particular mandates that the schools must work as a team with parents/family in order to provide a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) to a child with a disability. In the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA, Congress found that " strengthening the role and responsibility of parents and ensuring that families of such children have meaningful opportunities to participate in the education of their children at school and at home" can make "the education of children with disabilities...more effective." (IDEA 2004 601.c5B). It is also stated in the law that all members of an IEP team must agree to educational interventions. And yet, in the Connecticut cases, parents were dictated to, bullied and threatened with loss of their children if they did not comply with unilateral plans put forth by the school districts involved.

These abuses most likely have a number of causes, including money--because school districts get federal money for each child with disabilities educated under IDEA, and they can use this money in their general funds--that is they do not have to show that the money goes specifically for special education. Although this is a loophole that taxpayers ought to be concerned about, I believe there is a more insidious idea being promulgated here. This is the idea that the state has a kind of ownership of the child and merely contracts to the parents the duties of raising the child as a servant of the state. This is not an American value. Neither is it a democratic ideal; it is, rather, a fascist concept. The Constitution of the United States clearly demonstrates that a government governs at the pleasure of the citzenry. Government is the servant of the citizen, not the master. Citizens are not the servants of the state, rather they direct their government to do certain, constitutionally defined jobs in order to protect their liberties and live their lives.

The abuse of power represented by the actions of the Connecticut school districts and the DFS--which apparently is allowed to ignore certain basic constitutional rights of the accused--appears to stem from the idea that a petty bureaucrat or school official knows better than we do what is best for ourselves and our children. That these people are often more poorly educated and have less information than the parents they are harrassing would be laughable if they did not have so much power to disrupt lives and waste public resources doing so.

Another example of this "creeping fascism," has been making the rounds of the homeschooling blogosphere recently. I found out about it at this post on Corn and Oil. (By the way, Susan, I hail from your part of the world and went to school with your state congressman, Bill Brady. Don't know why, but I have been unable to comment on your blog because the registration never goes through). In a forthcoming article for California Law Review, professor Kim Yuracko of Northwestern University, essentially argues that the state has the constitutional power to dictate the ideas that parents teach their children in the course of homeschooling them. The article is called Illiberal Education which can be accessed by clicking on the link. Home Education Magazine has posted the abstract, commentary and links to other analysis here.

Although acknowledging that homeschooling is a "diverse" phenomenon, Yuracko incorrectly states that it is controlled by fundamentalist Christians who want to isolate their children from "secular influences and liberal values" (Yuracko, 2007, abstract). How, well, illiberal of Yuracko. The paper is poorly written and has numerous factual errors with regard to the diversity and philosophy of homeschooling. It also uses numerous logical fallacies in the pursuit of the argument. It is the central point, however, that demonstrates another example of fascistic thinking that I want to address.

Yuracko argues that education is essentially a "public function" that states delegate to parents and that parental power over their children's education is therefore limited. This law professor has it exactly backwards. The state may have an "interest" in the education of future citizens, but by sending their children to public schools, parents are delegating their responsibility to educate their children to the state. Not the other way 'round. Our children are not servants of the state. In a Constitutional Republic, such as the United States, the state is our servant.

In reading the entire article, it is clear that Yuracko would like to have the power of the state to limit the freedom of certain classes of parents (namely fundamentalist Christians) to pass their own beliefs and values on to their children. Rather, Yuracko would like force her own values on all of us. This would be a violation of our liberties under the United States Constitution. It also smacks of an incredible amount of elitist chutzpah on the part of a law professor.

It should be clear to anyone who has taken more than a cursory look at my blog that I am not a fundamentalist Christian. In fact, I strongly disagree with many of their ideas and beliefs. I am not a political conservative, either. Rather, I'd like to see the words "conservative" and "liberal" banned from polite discourse so that citizens could talk to each other on the level of issues rather than shout at each other from ideological positions. I do, however, remember the words of Martin Niemoller:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
(New England Holocaust Memorial Version)

Either the rights of citizens belong to all of us, or they will belong to no one.
Disagreement is protected and even encouraged in our American values. Supression is not.

Maybe someone like Yuracko is afraid of homeschooling and homeschoolers precisely because most of us have made a choice to teach our children their rights as citizens of the United States.

And, no, I don't do the Pledge of Allegiance with my son in our homeschool. Rather, every day we stand before the flag of the United States and recite the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." (From Findlaw).

My son is not a servant of the state. He does not owe allegiance to a specific government, office, or person. He owes allegiance to an idea. The idea that "governments are instituted among (human beings) at the consent of the governed." The idea that the government exists to serve the citizens. If he chooses to run for office or serve in the military as an officer--and himself becomes a servant of the citizens, then he will take an oath of fealty. Not to a government, flag, office or person. Rather, he will take an oath to "protect and defend the constitution of the United States." To protect and defend an idea. The idea of liberty.

What We Do Matters Part 1

Last week, as some you know, I was the lawyer for a Mock Trial for Special Education Law 510. It was a difficult case. The parents of a child with AS had taken him out of school because there was disagreement between the school people and the parents about his special education needs. Because the boy was academically gifted, the school people thought he should be in the general education classroom with no special education component. The parents differed because they were concerned about how being in the general education classroom environment would affect the child's ability to learn. Large classrooms are noisy, confusing places and the sensory over-stimulation can affect an Aspie's ability to focus. The parents also had concerns that the child was marginalized and being bullied. So they took him out of school, but for reasons involving the child's socialization, they brought him to the municipal park to play and sometimes he was in the park while the school children were also playing in the park. Nearly two years later, the principal of the school and some teachers tried to ban the child from the park, saying that his behavior was a problem. They insisted that they should have the right to have the school psychologist re-evaluate the child before he could play in the park.

When we first got the case, my group spent a good deal of time mucking around with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), because we were focused on the park issue. And we were a little angry because, we are not lawyers, and after all, in class we had studied the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and we did not see how the case we were given fit. Here is a homeschooled child being deprived of the right to play on a public playground. I even contacted Judy Aron over at Consent of the Governed because she is a researcher working with National Home Education Legal Defense. However, because I was swamped with my other course, I was unable to take Judy's gracious offer to help.

At one of our rather hilarious group meetings--we coped with the stress with humor--a change of perspective took place. We began to wonder about why the parents were bringing such a case two years after taking their child out of school. And we realized that the real violation took place when the parents' concerns were ignored at the child's IEP meeting two years ago. Not only that, the school people compounded the problem by asserting their power against the family two years later. The parents were most likely bringing the case in order to get the school off their backs and to stop what they perceived to be harassment by a powerful institution. With this change in our perspective, we were able to find our case in IDEA--because Congress found that one problem (among many) with special education was that parents are not included in the IEP process effectively. (And this is very true as any parent who has dealt with the special education process can tell you). And Congress wrote into the law ways to correct that. I don't know if we won or not yet. In the original case, the school won on procedural grounds--in our public institutions you can behave very badly, but if you cross all your "T's" and dot all of your "i's" you can get away with it.

In my closing statement I said, in part:

"...But in our concept of law, (justice) is not in some pure realm. Justice is not justice if it does not reach into the sometimes messy conflicts of ordinary lives. A great scholar and legalist once said: “Justice delayed and justice denied will bring the sword.”
I think what he meant was that what we do here now matters. How we respond to the need of one person for justice matters. How an individual is treated in our public institutions matters. If a child is bullied, if his parents are harassed, if a student does not receive needed services, all of this affects all of us. We have learned this only too well this past week as the details of the Virginia Tech shooting have been revealed."

This shows that government schools, and the people who operate them, don't know winning for losing. When a lawyer came to talk to our class about the IDEA and due process hearings, I saw this clearly. He kept talking about the how the schools can "win." What he did not appear to get is that if a parent is frustrated to the point of bringing a due process hearing, there is a problem that the school has not dealt with in some way. When a school comes off as asserting its considerable power over individual citizens--taxpayers all--then the school loses the public relations battle even if they win the case. This is so, because schools are not generally perceived as friendly places by the people who were and are compelled to go to them, and school people are not held in great respect in our communities. The root of that issue is twofold: the compulsory nature of school attendance in a free society and the virtual monopoly school people have over education process in this country. School people are not required to listen to the people they require to attend, and to pay for their services. Further, the institutional power school people have, which is derived from compulsion, has created in many of them an unbearable officiousness and know-it-all attitude. On top of it all, public schools have not shown great success in teaching their clients to read and write and figure, let alone educating them to think critically for themselves about the issues of our day. This is painfully obvious to anyone who has taught at the university level in the United States. And the name-calling and sound-byte-repeating-nature of what passes for public discourse is another indicator of the failure of schools to educate. For all these reasons, even if the school people have the letter of the law on their side, in any tangle with the public, they lose good-will.

I believe that one problem common to much of our institutional life in the United States is that at our core we have forgotten how to treat one another as unique, irreplacible human beings. When, as in the case above, the needs of the child are eclipsed by the need of an institution to deny responsibility for mistakes it has made, for unthinking power asserted over children as if they were interchangable parts, we all lose. As I said further in my closing argument:

"...(my clients) ask that the ... Public Schools recognize that this is not about power. It is not about money. It is about the future of one child. And if justice means anything at all—if it is to have a reality beyond abstraction, then what we decide here in the midst of a real and messy conflict matters."

Ultimately, it all comes down to this: What we do to one another matters. What we say to one another matters. How we treat one another matters. It matters in communities where we are acting as individuals, and it matters even more in institutional settings where the institutional power of what we represent can become oppressive to our brothers and sisters.

If we are honest with ourselves, we all know we make mistakes in our dealings with others. And when we do, we are obligated to make things right. To admit that we are, all of us, fallible human beings.

I think that when we insist that events like the VT shootings are about gun-control, or about surveillance, or about the evil in one individual, we are missing a critical point. And by this I do NOT mean that we do not need need to have a conversation about gun-control, or about surveillance, or about the fact that people can do evil. What I mean is that all behavior has causes--whether the behavior itself is rational or not. And if we are really honest with ourselves, we can see where a fragile mind and heart can be broken when cornered and bullied in an institution that does not care to stop it. An institution in which those with power turn a blind eye to the responsibility that power entails. And in many cases, that institution is the local public school.

Were the Virginia Tech teachers and students who were murdered in cold blood killed randomly? Yes. They were innocents who reaped the whirlwind sown by others; those who, when given power, chose to turn a blind-eye to the consequences of that power. It is wrong to start pointing fingers at the administration at VT, and blame the victims who were killed because they did not to fight back. The shooter made certain choices and is responsible for them--that is true. But it is also true that those choices were influenced by a broken mind and heart. And that mind and heart were damaged, in part, by terrible emotional pain inflicted by other children who were allowed to bully someone in a public institution that compelled his attendance. Bullied by children who were not taught what it means to be civil, to be compassionate, to be able to put themselves in the place of another person.

And in our case, we began to understand that we were seeing the same thing. A situation in which a public school refused to solve a problem with parents and a little boy by talking to them, treating their concerns as important, stopping the bullying.

In The Uncertainty Principle, a masterful episode of his PBS series, The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski takes us to Auschwitz. There he discusses the importance of the the spiritual component in our dealing with each other as human beings. He says that ultimately, we must remember when making judgements that we are fallible, that we cannot know everything with certainty. In making choices about how we deal with one another, Bronowski says, we must "touch people." And he plunges his hand into the pond--into the ashes of those who were murdered because an institution, the Nazi party, was certain of their unworthiness to live. That scene has stayed forever etched in my mind. And I wonder, can a compulsory institution--one that is given absolute power over the lives of students, one that regularly passes judgement on the worthiness of students by standardized test, one that refuses to be questioned or reformed--can such an instition ever really "touch people?"

Perhaps the spiritual shallowness of the institution is no accident of law or custom. Perhaps the lack of spiritual depth comes from the very nature of the beast. After all, we know that many of the people who make up the system, start out with the best intentions in the world. And yet, when stripped of their own spiritual nature, forced by the nature of the institution into a mold that insists that no one is responsible and that all values are relative, when acting not as individuals, but at the behest of the system, they behave without regard to the sacredness of the individual.

This is something to think more about.