Man, it was great to see Ben (Joselyn) last night. We talked about so much that has been on our minds. And I finally felt like someone understood what I was saying, and really wanted to hear it. Sometimes when I have discussions with people I generally agree with, I feel like I am wasting time, ya know, preaching to the choir. But I guess I really needed assurance this time, that all the crazy things in my mind actually hold some merit. And talking to him helped me believe that. This break has been great for some introspection. I have written so much in my journal now that I have had the brain-space to work through some of what has been building up in there. This is going to be a long blog, but please read it, and do so carefully.

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Ben and I discussed individuality, and how we have all gotten so caught up in looking out for ourselves that we don't remember how reliant we are on the rest of humanity (and all of nature, really) and vice versa. We forget until we look at the stars, and then we think "oh damn, i really am small." But even still, it seems like we don't recognize what that means. It means that all the petty things we worry about in our individual lives are quite unimportant. I don't meant to say we should disregard our individual experience, but perhaps we can creatively use it to affect the collective experience more positively.

I have just been reading people's blogs and tumblr accounts, watching people's statuses on facebook, observing the suicide rate in the country (especially amongst young adults), and I am just sick of it -- that everyone feels so worthless. That people feel the need to be in a relationship, or buy something, or look like someone in order to feel worth anything.

Ben and I were talking about how, perhaps, we feel so useless in what we are doing in our lives that we have to create problems for us to fix. We have to feel needed by something or someone because we don't feel needed in the world. I will come back to this later. There are also problems that we don't necessarily create, but that we allow to perpetuate. People get depressed because of the state of the world, but then it seems we perpetuate that state by not resolving the pattern in ourselves, but instead, seeing the current state as the only option and accepting that it already is how it has to be. But if we adopt the pattern in our self then we only further the pattern and further our unhappiness with the state of the world, and with ourselves.
"X's father has had a hard life; he's seen some pain, and he is starting to drink more. But its damaging to X to see his father getting drunk. And X is so scared by this image of his father getting drunk that X wants to forget it, so X goes and gets drunk too. Then X feels like shit for resorting to that which he hates in order to escape that which makes him upset."

How do we stop this pattern. There is a psychology about people that often makes them emulate what they have always seen. But there was a place where the pattern started, and it can be broken anywhere, and it can be for better or worse. I don't have the answer but I think it has to do with decisions of the individual AND of the collective...

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Ben and I discussed the education system, particularly in the valley, and we noted how unhappy the majority of people here are. There is no reason this has to persist, but it will if nothing changes. We live in a beautiful place where there are so many opportunities for experiential education, and yet we are sitting in a concrete building regurgitating information, not applying it our lives, and feeling utter useless in the process.

One of the most prominent things I remember from my high school is staring out the window of a classroom at a snow-speckled Mount Si and wondering why the heck I felt like I prisoner. "The mountain is right there, it is a beautiful day, why am I inside learning the word for snow in Spanish, when I could be on the mountain experiencing it." Why couldn't we have been learning the word for snow in Spanish while playing in the snow?

It is bigger than this though because we have (maybe not purposely, but definitely) been conditioned to think of school as separate from the real world. How could this not happen when the real world is so disregarded in education? The school couldn't acknowledge the reality of the world. We couldn't even have Homecoming hallway competitions because the school became so collectively afraid of internal opposition. But then we are still encouraged to take the PSAT and try to get the highest score so we can become National Merit Scholars. If you get in a certain top percentile your picture goes right in the main hall of MSHS. Not only does that encourage competition, but it also rewards a certain learning style, or (in this case) the ability to take multiple choice exams, which is completely different than having a particularly good understanding of the material in those exams. So we are also being encouraged to figure out how to best the system such that the school gets collectively high scores, which obviously demonstrates the ability of teachers to teach, and the ability of students to learn from these teachers. That is ludicrous and its a pile of shit. I was looking through my portfolio of work from Earth Science 9th grade and I just about cried. I wasted so much of my life copying key terms word for word from the text book, because if you miss the word "is" when writing the definition for what the mantle of the earth is then you miss the point for the whole sentence. I think I remember the first time we peer graded our key terms the teacher would read the definition word for word and people would ask "what if they wrote it this way instead?" and she would say "was that exactly what I said? If not, then its wrong."

You know what I see here? An expectation that all students will learn the complexity of what something means by writing a stream of individual words, making sure it looks exactly like the book, which is completely false. An expectation that the book is correct and that if we all conform to what it says then we all must be right. Whats really going on? Laziness. The teacher doesn't have to deal with any variation. The student doesn't have to worry about developing their own way to present the definition. Basically no one is using their brain.

Now that's an extreme example, and perhaps the valley is an extreme example in general, but it is my experience, and it is the experience of thousands of students who go through the valley school system (except the lucky one's who were smart enough to go to Two Rivers, the alternative school where you are put in classes not based on grade level or graduation requirements, but on individual understanding of and interest in a particular subject).

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Ok, now I seem to be contradiction myself.

A) We should stop being so caught up in the individual because we get so caught up in our own lives and forget about the rest of the struggles in the world.

B) We need to consider the individual in order to create the most effective and enjoyable method of education.

Yup. Both.



Like I was saying before, perhaps the root of so much of this unhappiness is that we don't feel necessary or useful. We desperately hold on to the boy who made us feel needed and wanted because there is nothing else that makes us feel that way (and then we get so caught up in our own unhappiness that we over-exaggerate the individual situation we are in and forget about everything or everyone else). Even if there is something else that we are interested in, we don't feel empowered to be involved because we have been copying useless things from textbooks rather than honing individual skills and working toward a place where we have the knowledge and ability to be involved, which is the very thing that could give us a greater sense of purpose, and allow us to see how trivial the "drama" really is.

If the ability to find and hone those things that really ignite our souls could be built into the education system, then school and reality wouldn't have to be so disconnected from each other. Students wouldn't feel like prisoners, wouldn't have to create drama in order to have something to work toward, and would probably be happier.

Additionally, there is a sense of community that emerges when everyone's sense of individuality is empowering to them. The person in their own self is happier because they are doing something they enjoy (eliminating the very compensation of self-consciousness that drives the diminishing of others). And because everyone is doing something individual everyone has something to share with one another. And because it is more geared to personal interests they are probably excited to share. This creates interaction and allows for connections to be made. The connections that are made (which in my experience at Evergreen are pretty much endless) will then allow students to see how each of their interests/disciplines/focuses interact and rely on each other. This creates community AND empowers individuals.

In this way it is possible to embrace individuality (which is real and important), without allowing individuality to become petty or SO individual that we forget who we rely on and who relies on us.

(Oh, this is all so very simplified and roughly laid-out, and I know that. I am just drawing the from examples I have been observing recently, most of which surround people ages 13 to 21, but assuredly extends to people of all ages.)

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Read it again:


A Ritual to Read Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."
-William Stafford

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There is a note to myself in my phone a while back. It says "individual liberty destroying collective liberty." This is something I want to explore further when I pick this subject back up later. It is related to this idea of entitlement too.

I don't think I can continue with these now because I have been writing for hours, there is actually homework to be done tonight, and I need some feedback before I write about this more. So I am hoping that somebody makes a thoughtful response to this post. What has it brought up for you? Do you disagree with any of it? Do you want to talk about a particular aspect in more depth? Anything else?