Matthew Voz

We teach wherever we are

I RECENTLY WATCHED the Oscar-nominated film An Education, a cautionary yarn about a young girl who is sucked into a questionably adult world with the consent of her parents, abandoning her plans to attend Oxford, and eventually learning about life, love, and innocence lost. It is well-acted and fairly engrossing, if a bit trite, but this is not a film column. What it brought up for me is simply the number of different kinds of things one must learn in this life to be a happy, healthy, productive adult. And for each thing we have to learn there is a school to teach us, whether it be the school of hard knocks, the old school, a cow college, or the ivory tower.

The question becomes what we want to learn and when, because in a society as complex as ours there is simply no way to exhaust the options for education. The Viroqua area is a microcosm of this educational smorgasbord, offering a variety of educational opportunities disproportionate to the area’s meager population. There are a total of four elementary education options (Viroqua Public Schools, Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School, Cornerstone Christian Academy, and English Lutheran School) with a vibrant home-schooling cooperative (Kickapoo Home-school Cooperative) and a Montessori Charter School in the works. There are also a total of four secondary education options (Viroqua Public Schools, Youth Initiative High School [YIHS], Laurel Charter School, and Cornerstone Christian Academy), all in a town of less than 5,000 people. As far as choice we couldn’t expect much more for the area in which we live, and this variety is a testament to just how important education is to the members of this community.

And why shouldn’t it be? The choice of where we send our children to school includes the decision as to where our sons and daughters will spend 7 or 8 of the 14 or 15 waking hours of their day. Outside of parents and other family members, a teacher or another kid at school can have more influence on a child than anyone else in his or her life, if for no other reason than the huge amount of time they spend together.

Having three children of my own to make these decisions for, I look back at my own educational journey, one that included a Catholic elementary school, a public high school, and five different colleges, and I try to think back to what worked and didn’t work for me. I have spent much more of my life enrolled or working in a school (I am a teacher at YIHS) than not, and so the question of education is often foremost in my mind.

So where shall we send these children and what will they learn? As with everything, there is a conventional track in education, and its teleology is essentially materialist—that is, its ultimate goal is the accumulation of money and the financial security that this entails. This course often begins with purchasing everything one can from the Baby Einstein catalog, enrolling children in pre-kindergarten classes as soon as they are out of diapers, jetting students through plenty of advanced math and science courses, coaching them to excel on standardized tests, prepping them for their final acceptance into a “good” college prior to their ultimate embarkation into a technology, health-care or business field that pays well and offers strong benefits. Neat and tidy!

It makes sense that we educate ourselves in this way. Americans work more hours per week than any other people in the world (which makes school a handy place to store our children) and our culture has always been consumerist, competitive, and future-oriented. Add to this the increasing specialization at all levels of education to meet the needs of an increasingly technocratic society, and the trajectory of this conventional path toward education can seem narrow, shallow, or even robotic.

But a lawyer is more than a lawyer, a nurse more than a nurse, a computer programmer more than a computer programmer. We are all fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, citizens, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and thinking, emotive creatures who need more than just a paycheck to be satisfied.

Where then, do we learn to be these other things? The first place, of course, is at home. It is not even worth attempting to explain the importance we play in our children’s lives and the importance our parents played in ours. Clearly the best place to learn to be a father or mother, brother or sister is in the home, and we as parents have a daily and oft-overlooked duty to teach our children these arts. And they are essentially arts, crafts that we continue to hone throughout our lives.

They say that children don’t come with owners’ manuals but that isn’t really true. Our parents wrote the manuals for our children while they were raising us every day: From their resolution of a thousand tiny conflicts or from their failure to do what we needed them to do, we learned to be the parents of our children. Certainly the manual we received wasn’t perfect, but we are its editors and the flawed authors of our grandchildren’s manuals as well. No school can teach us that.

But school can teach us more than chemistry and history and geometry. It can teach us some of the things that we can’t necessarily learn at home: how to be a citizen, how to be a friend and a neighbor, and perhaps most importantly, how to be ourselves in a bigger world. This social-spiritual aspect of education is the impetus for all four of the independent schools in Viroqua, each emphasizing its own version of social, moral, philosophical or religious education alongside its academic offerings. The idea is that school, and the school experience, can be a testing ground for real life, not just job training.

It is sort of de rigueur for white, middle-class people to derogate public education for one reason or another, failing to recognize its revolutionary impact on Western society. Public education is literally one of the cornerstones of modern citizenship, and modern society simply does not exist without it. If public education is not working, it is not because the system that has worked for over 200 years is broken, but is due instead to a culture that has abandoned the liberal arts as profitless, the breakdown of the family, and a society with a paralyzing sense of entitlement.

But all is not lost. This summer as we contemplate where to send our children to school, we can reassure ourselves of one thing: Our children have an instinctual drive to learn—it is simply part of their being human. If we can surround them with positive things and avoid quenching the natural fire of their curiosity with our dunderheaded adulthood, they probably won’t end up too bad. They will learn what they need to from us and throw the rest away, forging their own path into the future.