Chapter 6

Two Problems with Public Education

If you were to describe garden zone management in a short sentence, you might say its purpose is to cultivate a deeper sort of courtesy at the grass roots. We've spoken in the abstract about courtesy being more important in our quality-of-life scheme as it involves action that is closer to pure awareness, and saw a number of examples illustrating how courtesy, and the lack of it, are displayed at the grosser levels of activity. My perspective in presenting those examples was that of a neighborhood resident, and most of the incidents I described involved neighborhood youth. Clearly, when we address quality-of-life issues, young people must be kept in mind. A good portion of our effort will be directed toward bringing kids along, for obvious reasons—they represent society's future. There is, of course, a program already in operation that aims to educate children. The public schools are, in theory, the place where young people learn the basic facts of life, the core knowledge required for an individual to ... what? Hold down a job? Get into college? Manage a household? I'm not exactly sure what the school system hopes to accomplish. I guess the goal is to earn each student a high school diploma, which means he or she has mastered arithmetic at least, can read and write to some extent and knows a smattering of facts from a few other fields—geography, biology. The time you spend in school certainly affects your eventual development, but one might argue that it's not until later that the big picture comes into focus, when the fragmented knowledge you retain from the classroom falls into place relative to deeper insights about the nature of life. In any event, we would all acknowledge the education of children is important. It is without question an activity in which every community should have an interest. The government certainly seems to be interested. There are laws that require a child to attend school until a certain age, and municipalities spend a big chunk of our taxes on education. As garden zone managers, we too would be concerned about what goes on at local schools. Although a classroom is not exactly part of the garden zone—it's more like an extension of the interior environment—the children who attend have a large role to play in the garden zone itself. Future garden zone managers, our community leaders, may come out of those schools

I say all this as preface to the following observation: The people of this community do not assign much importance to the education of children. The community's interest is not nearly as serious as you might believe given the rhetoric you hear from county officials and school administrators. To use the terminology of the last chapter, if you measure the strength of a common interest activity by the degree of involvement, then in Camp Springs and the nearby parts of Prince George's County, you would have to conclude that education is not a strong common interest. More precisely, there exists a degree of interest in something they would like to call education, but that something bears little resemblance to a true and complete education.

You can't see this deficiency from the outside. It's only by spending time in class, with students that the truth becomes apparent. I recently had an opportunity to work as a substitute teacher in the Prince George's school system, and it was that experience that gave me the full picture. Take all the coarseness and discourtesy we saw in the neighborhood, increase it by ten-fold, concentrate it in a thirty-by-thirty-foot classroom and then stand at the front of that room as band after band of twenty to thirty teenagers at a time comes flocking through. Kids who mock you, taunt you and throw things at you when your back is turned, who drop trash in classrooms, toss books out windows and smoke pot in the restrooms, who lie, cheat, steal, pull pranks and generally show no respect for the people who are trying to educate them. This is what the teachers in our schools face every day, from September to June. Your senses are assaulted by what goes on at school. Your patience is stretched to the limit. If you want to put your powers of detachment to the acid test, a high school classroom is the place to do it. Just the profanity alone, so carelessly recited by these children, is enough to make you throw up your hands in despair. Despair at such crass behavior in such young kids. Despair at the utterly non-educational atmosphere in these supposed halls of learning. Despair at the sorry state of our American culture. For these children directly reflect that culture: the pop culture, the TV culture, the Hollywood/Las Vegas/Madison Avenue culture. You cannot tell me the community cares about the education of children when they allow this raucous environment to persist in the institutions where young people must gain the knowledge that prepares them for life.

I'm not about to undertake a full-blown analysis of the public education system, but there are several points I'd like to make based on what I observed during the time I spent subbing at Friendly High School, just up Allentown Road from Camp Springs. Apart from the gross incivility, the thing that stands out most is the absence of reality. Everything takes place in a fantasy land. The classwork, the activities ... everything is disconnected, unrelated to the world outside. Granted, you would expect that practical application takes a back seat when you're learning theory, but what I'm referring to goes deeper. Very few of these kids are seriously focused on what they are doing. They are not able, emotionally or mentally, to give full attention to their studies; rather, the whole experience is a game to them. Part of the problem is there is nothing at stake. The world doesn't come to an end if they don't do their algebra. They still go home to a hot meal and a comfortable bed regardless of whether their biology work is done. For most students, school time is an extension of play time, and since the attitudes of kids mimic those of the adults around them, this shows that we as a community, and as a society, don't take school seriously either. Actually, what it shows is there is no reality in our lives, we adults. We too are playing life as if it were a game, and the children pick right up on this.

To see just how much of a game school is,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .text truncated

The fact is, the schools and society as a whole already rely heavily on ritual, especially the government, which could not function without the formal rituals required in courtrooms, parliamentary proceedings, diplomatic dealings and so forth. Yet for the most part these rituals are devoid of spiritual content; which is to say, the people who perform them are not acting from that deeper level of awareness where the internal side of life is distinguished. Without a spiritual foundation, the rituals are lifeless and mechanical. Without the Tao,

Kindness and compassion

are replaced by law and justice;

Faith and trust are supplanted

by ritual and ceremony.[5]

The verse is ancient, but it describes the modern condition perfectly. When the spiritual path is not realized, society is devoid of trust, devoid of compassion. To make up for this deficit, we fall back on the hollow rituals of law.

I must admit that much of this ritual business is over my head. When you look back on the civilizations of antiquity, it's difficult to comprehend how the seers and priests of old divined their complex practices. The Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the native Americans ... what faculty inspired the creation of their temples, their ceremonies and their offerings? The customs of those dead societies are just curiosities now—primitive is how we term them—but don't you wonder if man hasn't lost something over the millennia? Shouldn't we who live on earth today possess the same powers that functioned within our ancestors? I suggest these myths and theologies represent deep connections between man, nature and the universe. Not that I'm going to clear up those connections in this work, but I claim we can indeed recover some of the lost spirit of the ancients. To do so we must locate the path that leads to a recognition and experience of that other aspect, the infinite aspect, of reality. We have to get back to the way of the Tao, in other words. Only when the spiritual side of life becomes enlivened will we have rituals that are not just empty shells, but that capture the timelessness of life. Schools and communities must come together to accomplish this, and garden zone management can facilitate the process.