The Urge To Destroy In This Year 2020 ?

The nineteenth century anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin famously asserted "The urge for destruction is also a creative urge." This concept came to mind recently when I came across a tree trunk that had clearly been vandalized. I suppose it could have been an animal or some other natural phenomenon that created the hole in the trunk, but it sure looked to me like the work of human hands, and it did not strike me as the result of any sort of creative urge.

I live in a densely populated urban area where I am regularly confronted by the human urge to destroy. Graffiti I can understand as the result of a creative urge, but branches ripped from saplings, litter, and over-turned city bikes? Not so much. I imagine that someone could argue that destruction is a precursor to creativity, like slums that must be bulldozed to make way for palaces, but it's a stretch. The most one can say for random human destruction is that it can, maybe sometimes, like in the case of graffiti, be considered in the benevolent light of creativity.

Every day in every preschool classroom, the urge to destroy is nevertheless evident. Even if it isn't part of the creative urge, it is, apparently something deeply human. Paper is torn into tiny bits and scattered on the floor, carefully constructed block towers are joyfully toppled, pages are ripped from books, toys are dismantled in ways that they can never be put back together. Some of it is accidental, of course, but as a boy once replied when I asked him why he had intentionally broken something, "I wanted to see if I could break it."

When I passed around to the other side of the tree with the vandalized trunk, I saw that it was notable in the sense that it's trunk was bizarrely deformed, looking something like one of those candles in a Chiati bottle stereotypically found in an Italian restaurant. It was strikingly different from the trees around it and because of that it roused my curiosity. It occurred to me that perhaps it had been curiosity, the primal scientific urge, that had caused someone to begin picking a hole in the trunk. If the trunk was so different on the outside, one could wonder if the interior was equally deformed.

I think it's safe to say that much of the "destruction" we see around the classroom can be marked up to curiosity, even if misguided, but that still leaves the question of broken bottles, wantonly discarded fast food wrappers, and knocked over bicycles. I suppose some of it could simply be chalked up to laziness, although psychologists tell us that there is no such thing. Feelings of depression, alienation, disenfranchisement, or just plain old anger at the world seem more likely causes of this sort of destructive behavior.

A psychologist friend told me that he was once engaged to treat an eight-year-old who had been referred by his parents for his "destructive behavior." The boy slumped into a chair and started the conversation by declaring, "I'm bad because I'm sad." If only we all could be as insightful as this kid.

Humans destroy to create, we destroy to explore, we destroy to express despair, and perhaps we are sometimes unconsciously driven to join the universe's unstoppable quest for ever-increasing entropy. As teachers and parents, we are too often poised to punish, to scold the child for something that he's broken, but it's never that simple with us human beings.

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Education When Time For School Is At An End HURRAY !!

Over the course of the last 70 years or so, our expectations of children have changed dramatically. In many ways we perceive them as less competent. As a society we have lowered our expectations of what they are capable of doing in the world. They no longer walk themselves to school. None of them carry pocket knives, and for that matter, are kept far away from most tools. And even if you trust your own child to be home alone as you run a quick neighborhood errand, the wider society considers you neglectful because, of course, children younger than, say, about 15, are perpetually on the verge of stupidly killing themselves (or being killed by nameless, faceless others) if left for even the briefest moment without adult supervision. Or so our urban legends about childhood would have it. As a result, our children are growing up in a world scrubbed of risk, challenge, hurt feelings, and failure because, as we've come to believe, they are not capable of handling it.

At the same time, and perhaps partly as a result of this cultural paranoia, we've placed unreasonable expectations on our children, especially our youngest children in the form of schooling. We are institutionalizing our children at younger and younger ages. They are spending more and more time in "school" and less and less time playing, while being subjected to greater and greater academic expectations. Today, more than 80 percent of kindergarten teachers expect five year olds to be reading. In 1998, that number was 30 percent, and in 1950 that number was approaching zero. That our literacy rate hasn't budged over the past half century despite these developmentally inappropriate expectations tells us that our early literacy efforts, at best, have no impact, but there is ample evidence that this phenomenon is taking a mental health toll on our children, with one in five children between the ages of 3-17 struggling with a diagnosable mental illness, mostly in the form of anxiety and depression, much of which can be linked to these pressures.

These dynamics represent bookends of fear that are crushing our youth. We're afraid they are going to be hurt so we've dramatically restricted them. We're afraid of them falling behind so we reign them to carts in academic coal mines. It's almost as if our greatest fear is of childhood itself . . . or children, or liberty, or play.

From where I sit, the time for school is at an end. We have clearly reached a point of diminishing, dramatically diminishing, returns. For most children, most of the time, school is a place where they can be safely warehoused and made to nose the grindstone in a way that is contrary to what large majorities of scientists and psychologists tell us is appropriate. This is the same phenomenon we're seeing with environmental denialism. We, as a society, are so committed to our habit of schools that we struggle to even consider a world without them, the most common knee-jerk question being, "But without schools, what will the children do while their parents are off at work?"

It's a central question, a question about caring for the children more than "education," an important question that has been answered in different ways by different societies throughout human history. Most prime of life adults have pretty much always worked productively in useful ways, this is nothing new in human evolution, and while birth mothers may have traditionally shouldered a somewhat larger share of the burden of child care, a substantial part was handled by the wider community, the village. Instead of ghettoizing child care into out-of-the-way, low paying, low prestige corners, most prior human civilizations have placed caring for the children at the center of life, creating communities in which children were included, in which caring for them was the responsibility of us all, and in which they were free to have a childhood, under the watchful eyes and loving hearts of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors. It's from living in a community that we learn what we most need to learn, from a wide variety of adults and other children, the lessons of working together, of being personable, of asking a lot of questions, of taking responsibility, and, when ready, and not necessarily waiting until the arbitrary age of 18 or 21, to assume our own productive, useful work.

We are currently a long way from achieving anything like that vision, but it is nevertheless the way forward, not just for children, but for all of us. If this change is to happen, it won't come from on high, but rather must bubble up from us, from individuals choosing to place caring for our children at the center of our lives. Indeed, it's already happening with more and more parents opting for homeschooling, unschooling, cooperatives, and democratic free schools. There is a lot of irrational fear to overcome. There is a lot of science denialism to overcome. There are a lot of addictive habits to break. And there are economic realities that make it seem insurmountable. But we know what to do and that is to create community, to find it, to nurture it. It can begin to happen in libraries and on playgrounds, in work places and nursing homes. It can begin in our schools and churches; where sports are played, where music is made, and where dancing is happening. It starts when we seek to make space for children everywhere that community is happening. It starts with learning to trust more people, including children, because trust is the greatest antidote to fear.

If there ever was a time for schools, it's at an end. When we bring the children back into the center of our lives, we will once more have the kinds of communities in which we can all thrive, together.

(I've written a follow up post in which I sketch out one idea for how a future without schools could look.)

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Irrevocable Decisions Education

Author and Yale University professor of philosophy and cognitive science L.A. Paul proposes a puzzle in which you are to imagine that you are approached at a party by a charismatic stranger with whom you exchange a few minutes of delightful banter. He says to you, "I'm a vampire and I think you would make a great vampire." He goes on to offer to make you into a vampire, telling you how wonderful it is, how you will be immortal, how you'll have super strength and speed, the ability to fly, and, like him, you'll be irresistibly charming. You have to admit, that all sounds pretty good, but you have some concerns. "What about the blood drinking? I don't like the sound of that. And I don't know if I can live without ever seeing the sun again. Those seem like a pretty big downsides." The vampire nods, "I get it, but let me assure you, once you're a vampire, those things won't matter."

Dream the Combine and Clayton Binkley

What do you decide? Becoming a vampire is an irrevocable decision. You can't really know if you'll be able to abide the negatives so you have no choice but to take the vampire's word for it. Becoming a vampire means you will become a whole new individual. Not only will you have super powers, but you be someone for whom drinking blood is not repulsive and never seeing another sunrise is no big deal.

Paul's point is that transformative experiences require something irrevocable to happen. Of course, we don't always get to choose our transformations, such as the type that happen when, say, someone loses a leg, but others we do get to choose, but only if we have the courage to make irrevocable decisions. Deciding to become a parent is in many ways quite similar to the decision to become a vampire. There's no going back and the moment that baby is born everything changes.

I recently sat down with a friend who is considering a major life change. He's decided to leave his current job and is seriously considering going into a whole new profession. He's in the process of weighing options, assessing the pros and cons, considering the impacts on his loved ones. That he's going to make a change is clear, the only question is whether or not it will be a transformative one. Another friend in a similar situation has defined her fulcrum as being between "safety" and "following my heart." Both of these people are looking at being "vampires" from the other side of their irrevocable decisions: they see the cool stuff, but aren't sure if they'll be able to live with the blood drinking. They've both asked for my advice and I've urged them to choose transformation.

I am not the person I was 50 years ago. Every atom in my body has changed, numerous times, between then and now. I have encountered hundreds of moments that irrevocably changed who I am. Transformation is a fundamental aspect of how the universe works: if you don't choose your transformations, they choose you, and there is no way to know what it means until you are on the other side. We live in an ever-emerging now, so in that sense, every moment is a transformation. We are always in the process of emerging, but I've come to see that we don't always have to live at the effect of transformation. We can be the cause as well, at least sometimes, but it requires doing something frightening. It requires stepping into the unknown. It requires making an irrevocable decision and then summoning the courage or gumption or whatever to embrace it like a parent embracing their newborn baby.

As for regrets, we all have them, but the worst, I think, are those we harbor about things we didn't do. We're all going to be transformed. The question is: do we choose our transformation or does it choose us?

I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!