Thoughts on education and schools inevitably come to me after time spent there; this past week, I spent two days at Hadley Junior High, where I used to teach, and on this occasion spent some time doing French classes, and a day at the adult education facility, which mostly takes people who have not been successful in the local English high school, and amongst whom I have several former students.

I had the opportunity, fitted in between curricular needs, to chat with several of these young people. Many are bright, but rudderless. Some are struggling, as we all do, with the overarching question, "What am I going to do with my life?" and not knowing how to begin to answer this. What struck me again, in the emphasis on curriculum, is the continued paucity of providing, through education, a spiritual context, a moral overview which would help these 'kids' to know that there is purpose to their lives, that they are not just here because of the random happenstance of their parents' intimacy in the long ago. Students have not, by and large, been taught to ask the big questions about life, and to search out some of the answers through the literature they are reading, or from the history they are studying. Or, if they have big questions, they rarely have an adult mentor with whom to explore answers, so are deeply reliant on friends, who are often times just as confused. The blindness of desire guides the vision of possibility.

For example, one of the French classes was studying the Renaissance and Paintings. Really interesting stuff, potentially, but the questions they had to answer, on worksheets no less, were more about identifying language than looking at the larger issues: why were these painters driven to paint, and what were they saying about their world, and what were the origins and the implications? In all fairness, there were a couple of questions which asked students to extrapolate about spiritual things (the influence of the middle ages, the shift from religion to science)...but at grade eight level, these are big leaps of thought, and they need background...need to be patiently built up...and this is very hard to do when classroom management is most of the battle.

Even in the adult education facility, there is a 'dead space' of vision. I discussed this with one student, Sean, and another, in the afternoon, who had some familiarity with Baha'i teaching. Both of these students, however, were very frank about their reliance on substances (mostly marijuana) whether for escape or for 'altered consciouness'...the supra-spiritual...the 'inner nirvana provoked by physical means'...one of these young men had all kinds of rationalizations about brain process and was attempting to legitimize the use of pot as a consciousness-raiser in its assistance with seratonin levels...the metaphysics of drugs, from a 17-year old. He even brought out the whole Timothy Leary thing. I have SO heard this all before...

but not to trivialize...as I described the day to Bernie, he put another spin on things, reminding me that at least these young people are asking questions, showing the desire of the spirit for more from life than simple crass materialism. There is a premise in Baha'i teaching that we are all on a quest for knowledge. In fact, one of the fundamental principles is "independent investigation of truth"...and one of my favourite sentences from the Universal House of Justice is "Human beings have the right to know." They do not specify what needs to be known, but implicitly acknowledge the deep human drive to know: ourselves, our souls. God, if you will. We cannot know God, of course...the unknowable...but we can know spirit, and soul's connection to the divine. This is not only a religious concept, of course, but is found embedded in many poets...Canadian poet Jan Zwicky says:

…wisdom is thought conditioned by an awareness
of limits to the systematically provable, articulable, or demonstrable.
Whence this awareness?
Plato, I think, correctly identified one source:
on-going, long-term ravishment by beauty.
The Dao hints at another: loss.
And the folk tradition to a third:
working with one’s hands, in silence;
attending, through the body, to the rhythms of the earth
and one’s own mortality.

I think this is a pivotal statement about spirit. Spirit, here, is multi-sourced. Another important exploration is from one of my favourite Canadian poets, Tim Lilburn, in his collection of essays, Living in the World As If It Were Home. He says,

Contemplation’s impulse is to understand the world.
It is not a romantic confection, not a self-consoling gape at chimerae,
but inquiry into being where the truth of being,
being as unutterably particular or unutterably universal,
lies past the certainty language assembles.
It is a form of knowing that strains across the distance
between mind and world and aims to end in union with what it seeks.
But what is union with something that can’t be known
…ideas in the mind of the divine?

These are poets to whom young people should be exposed. Young men should have to read Whitman! Young women, perhaps Emily Dickinson! But also, they need to read of the books of the world...the Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche...one teacher asked me if this young man had read Catcher in the Rye. I told him probably not, since the fellow had told me he's only read two books in his life, The Outsiders and one he couldn't remember the name of. That's not reading! That's intelligence by coercion, learning by consanguinity if at all. Yet it is a sound-bite age: how can I tell a non-reading young man to sink into John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, when he would look at the size of the paperback and weigh it against an afternoon smoking marijuana, and the battle is lost before it's begun.

The time at the schools saddened me, but also left me with lots of thoughts about the terrible needs of this generation, and every generation, to fill their spirits with the 'right to know.' They need to know that there is more to life than just waiting for the next time to get high. Will they regret, when they are my age, that so much of their youth was lost to drugging, or will they view it as part of a process to find their true selves? I don't know, but I know that the people my age who used drugs as palliatives to spirit believe, for the most part, that their lives began when they left drugging behind and opened themselves to the real learning of life, which is always about loving self, and loving spirit, more than any other thing. God is waiting, not in a Christian transcendental paternal way I think, but I hope more in the manner of a loving friend, for all of us to wake up from whatever chimera we think we have found, and open ourselves to our own hearts and to the divine within, and all around.