#I sat through the pledge of allegiance the last couple years of school | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jme-crocodile · 6 years ago

Text

(TW: my catholic school trauma)

Reading “The Boy Who Could Change the World”

It’s difficult to even imagine what America was like before the industrial revolution. Their notion of freedom was far stronger than the one we have today. For many Americans, life wasn’t about showing up at a job at a specified hour, following orders all day, and returning home for a couple hours of “free time”—that would be considered slavery. A free American was one who worked on their own or with their family, worked from home, worked whatever hours they liked, and got paid based on what they accomplished.

Under the putting-out system, for example, merchants would deliver raw materials like cotton to your house. When you felt like it, you’d card, spin, and weave the raw cotton into cloth. And then the next week the merchant would come by to buy from you whatever cloth you had produced.

He goes on to discuss mill workers in New England, who were mostly young girls, some around the age of 10. This was before our modern day labor laws, so the girls were working fourteen hour days. They still found time to read & discuss books/ideas, though.

And through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees’ pay, the girls walked out.

What these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the Voice of Industry, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.

[..]

But their writing in the Voice shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves—wage slaves—and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.

Their bosses didn't like this, at all. The mill owners fired the girls, blacklisted their names, and then did something strange: they sent girls to school.

The schools they built—the common schools—would be easily recognizable by any modern student. “The door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.” (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) “Each teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes … in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.” The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing “30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.”

Instead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order “by the mildest possible means” to instill “a regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the children themselves.”* Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered “cheating” and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)"

[...]

Careful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.*

So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits … and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.”

As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.”"

As the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: “The proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.” Why? “When [their laborers] are well educated … controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.”*

Indeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. “No language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,” warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is “our surest safety against internal commotions.”‡ The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,” warned the committee. “Unsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses … are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.”

More accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.║ In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%. The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school."

And so the spread of schools and factories destroys the American model of freedom. Instead of being independent farmers or self-employed manufacturers, Americans are herded into factories enmasse, forced to work for someone else because they cannot earn a living any other way. But thanks to schools, this seems normal, even natural. After all, isn’t that just the way the world works?

The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular “text features,” they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple-choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. “The joy of finding things out” is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.”

School hasn’t seemed to have changed much since the early 1800s, at least the not sort of schooling geared for the masses. As a child, I was strongly discouraged from risk taking, ridiculed by teachers when I gave the wrong answer, punished for asking questions, had to ask permission to use the bathroom (and was often refused), refused permission to get a drink of water (the school had no air conditioning & it was June in Pennsylvania. Yes, multiple children got heat exhaustion, daily. Our parents commiserated, but thought this was normal. Teachers treated this as normal. We were told to “toughen up” and respect our elders when we complained.) We were taught to need someone’s permission to get medical attention.

I was once refused when I needed to see the nurse (I was going to vomit.) The teacher accused me of lying & told me to sit down. I sat down, and about two minutes later threw up. I half expected to get a demerit for dirtying the floor. I burst into tears, blubbering out humiliated apologies to my classmates and to the teacher. Above my concern for my dignity and health had been placed my teacher. That was my mentality as a kid.

(Normal is whatever you’re used to, but people shouldn’t be used to this.)

The thing that stands out in all of this, now, was how the other students remained frozen. I don’t know how to interpret their freeze -- they didn’t move to get me a tissue, or towels, or anything. The teacher had forbade me from moving to clean up myself, so I had to wait for the nurse to arrive in a puddle of my own vomit. I obeyed. My classmates were staring at their desks, at the wall, anywhere but the teacher or myself. Maybe they were suffering second-hand embarrassment, or pity, or even fear that the teacher would lash out at them, next.

That was the sort of environment we grew up in, for 14 years of our lives.

In all of this, I notice this kind of moral fragmentation that society today seems to encourage. There’s a sense that people have abrogated all responsibility: “oh, that’s not my department, I’m not the one who makes the rules.” So we ignore people in pain, and accept on an instinctive level that there’s nothing we can do.

Except that isn’t true, even that asshole Lowell said, “The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine.””

This submissive attitude people have comes from fear, from an underestimation of our own strength and compassion.

---

Like, do people get what this does to a person’s self-esteem? Maybe not, because they’re all suffering from the same blindness.

Last week during the heat wave, I started experiencing heat exhaustion and my instinctive thoughts were to move as little as possible, and wait for it to be over.

I mean, what does that sound like to you?

Like, maybe my experiences at school were unusually bad, but it looks to me a lot like our society is systematically abusing kids into submissively accepting poor treatment by their superiors.

#unschooling #aaron swartz #tw-school

781 notes · View notes

dragons-in-bowties-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Crazy Rich Asians made me want to open up to my Asian American community

I watched Crazy Rich Asians for my second time at a screening for Asian American journalists. Although I don't remember the last time I saw a movie in theaters twice, I wanted to take my boyfriend, who is also mixed and Japanese American, and who introduced me to Kevin Kwan's original novels in the first place. I wanted to see his reactions in real time, but mostly, I wanted to feel the energy in the room, to watch Asians on screen, surrounded by Asian Americans, to lose myself, for a couple hours, in a collective emotional experience.

I've been seeking out communal moments like this lately, because when they resonate, they lift me out of looping, anxious thoughts and remind me that everything I feel I share with someone. Like the time I watched an eclipse outside my favorite bakery through a barista's cardboard glasses, which he offered to everyone in sight. Or when I saw an L.A. performance of George Takei's Japanese American incarceration musical, Allegiance, and sobbed freely, surrounded by people doing the same. Or when I walked to a candlelight vigil for a neighbor killed in a terrible accident and watched as tiny lights came on against the darkness. Even when these moments come about through pain, they make me feel a part of something grounded and loving and larger than my free-floating self.

Not that I expected Crazy Rich Asians, a romantic comedy, to pull the theater into a meditation on mortality and oppression. I'd read all three of the books and found them fun and addicting, not critical enough to be satire, but tongue-in-cheek enough not to read like a total endorsement of conspicuous wealth. The story itself isn't the milestone, though, nor is the casting, really-I've seen American indie movies with Asian-heavy casts, like Lena Khan's The Tiger Hunter, starring Danny Pudi as an extremely lovable immigrant from India in the 1970s. Culturally speaking, because I'm not Chinese American and have never been to Singapore, I feel more gut-level connection with stories from Japan, like Hirokazu Kore-eda's After the Storm-which, family dynamics aside, tapped childhood memories of chiseling through frozen Yakult when I was too impatient to let it thaw.

What makes Crazy Rich Asians special is its scale. Director Jon M. Chu turned down an offer from Netflix in favor of a wide theatrical release, and it's hard to imagine the film would have gotten this much attention if it'd gone straight to streaming. In the past couple of weeks, I've watched commentary pour in from Asian American writers I follow on social media. Jen Yamato did a satisfyingly comprehensive series of interviews with the cast. Quincy Surasmith wrote about seeing the movie in the predominantly Asian San Gabriel Valley. In one of my favorite pieces of the bunch, Stephanie Foo described what it meant for her as a Malaysian American: “One character texts another person, 'Wah, so many Rachel Chus lah!' Another character texts back, 'Alamak!' (Essentially, the Malay version of 'Oy, vey!') That was it-I heard people talking like they had in my house growing up, and…waterworks. Those tears didn't shut off for the rest of the movie.”

Amid valid criticisms of the film-particularly that it earned its mainstream appeal by focusing on wealthy, beautiful, light-skinned East Asians at the expense of everyone else-I've enjoyed watching people shut down a less thoughtful critique: that Crazy Rich Asians doesn't represent the full diversity of the Asian experience. Of course it doesn't. Why should films highlighting grossly underrepresented communities have to clear such an impossible bar when films by white people each have the freedom to be a single story?

My critique of Crazy Rich Asians is that it doesn't represent people like me, Vietnamese-American men aged 31 who grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts and had two dogs growing up, a yellow labrador that died and was later replaced by a golden doodle. My piece:

- Kevin Nguyen (@knguyen) August 13, 2018

This public conversation happened to come at a time when I was already rethinking my approach to community. I didn't grow up with an Asian American community, or really any stable, long-term community at all. My family moved often; between the ages of seven and sixteen, I went to eight schools. I had friends, and even kept in touch with many of them long-distance, first by Lisa Frank notecard, then Earthlink, then AIM. But in terms of a larger community, our neighbors and family friends changed all the time. We saw my dad's family, most of them in Oregon, rarely, and my mom's, in Japan, even less. Our most constant extended family were my mom's Japanese American relatives in Southern California, a constellation of my grandfather's distant cousins we called Auntie and Uncle and saw at the occasional funeral and New Year's party. But for most of the time, my nuclear family was it.

Isolated and always moving, we became close and insular. Knowing we came from somewhere else and would probably soon leave for somewhere else still, we could conform to some parts of the local culture while questioning or avoiding the rest (like, respectively, the Texas pledge and our neighbors' invitations to their fundamentalist churches). In the end, I became fiercely connected to all the places we lived, even Texas, but partly because I knew I'd lose them soon: nostalgia in retrospect or anticipation. Still, even though I knew everything strange would eventually become familiar, that I'd look back and wish I'd immersed myself even more, told all the people I admired how I felt about them, making that initial connection to a new group of people has never stopped feeling difficult.

After college, when I became a reporter in L.A.'s Little Tokyo for the local Japanese American newspaper, I knew I was entering a small, tight community, but I didn't realize how small, exactly. Americans with Japanese heritage made up a narrow enough niche to begin with-even considering our diversity: the mixed ones, the jet-setting international ones, the ones from Japan, the ones whose families had been American for five generations, the ones who grew up in cities like Torrance and Gardena surrounded by people like them, the ones in the Midwest who knew few people of color at all. But in Little Tokyo, culture seemed like less of the in-group marker than neighborhood presence and involvement. Friendships went back decades and grudges did, too.

In a community this tight, there was no way to write without conflict of interest or upsetting someone a couple degrees of separation from me. Even though we had a limited audience of mostly elderly people, including my supportive last-remaining auntie, I worried about this all the time. I dealt by keeping my distance from most people. I sat in the backs of rooms or walked the perimeter taking notes, introducing myself only when I needed to and then, as soon as I could, drifting away again. I didn't want to feel obligated to anyone or make anyone feel betrayed if I saw an issue differently than they did. Often, I liked this way of working. It fit my introverted personality and my experience growing up as a perpetual outsider, known to my friends but able to go under the radar among everyone else. Since I left the paper to go freelance, two years ago, I've kept it up, having these intimate interviews that make me love not just my subjects but people in general, then creating distance again, even when a former subject makes a friendly gesture long after I've published their story, even when I would love for us to be friends.

What a great pic to sum up an awesome day here in New York… So much Love!