Some people hate. I’ve had people tell me to hate some one, some group, or some thing. I can’t muster up the energy to do that. Some people lash out with toxic aggression (seems to be a trait of the United States “mindset.” And, then there are people who can remain calm in the midst of turmoil and act with no fear for themselves. Neerja Bhanot was one of those people.
I think there are many people who have these attributes, but who fortunately are never put to the test. There were a plane full of people on United Airlines flight 93 headed to Washington on 9/11/2001. We see many such people during the big disasters that becoming more frequent. We see it among teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, policeman….. We see these qualities among mothers and fathers. We also see it among dogs, who will put themselves at risk to help or protect others without any training or request.
But, here in the U.S. and in many other places around the world, aggression and violence are valued and promoted. The toxicity of anger, hatred, and violence is a pandemic in the U.S. that is a greater threat than the pandemic of Covid-19. In fact, this pandemic of aggression-hate-violence is so threatening that it is likely to bring down this country along with a huge death toll. We find ourselves in a pandemic of delusional psychosis (a) on the “right” of the political spectrum (I don’t know what to call it) and (b) on the left, which seems to be stuck in another kind of delusion of normalcy and self-absorption.
33rd Anniversary: Flight Attendant Who Saved American Lives Shot Dead By Terrorists.
She was the youngest person and first civilian to posthumously receive India’s highest award for gallantry.
This week in September 1986, Flight Attendant Neerja Bhanot, 23, of Chandigarh, India was shot dead while shielding three children on the hijacked Pan Am Flight 73.
She is credited with saving the lives of 360 passengers when radical Islamist terrorists hijacked her aircraft in Karachi, Pakistan. She informed the pilots who used their escape hatch to get away. When the terrorists demanded to know who the Americans were on the flight so they could execute them, Bhanot gathered all passports and hid those belonging to Americans under seat cushions.
The terrorists confused and unable to determine the national origins of the passengers didn’t execute anyone. When Pakistani police raided the plane she was able to nearly singlehandedly evacuate all the passengers as the firefight ensued.
She was one of the last people on board and found three children still hiding. As she led the children to safety the surviving terrorists spotted the children and opened fire on them. Neerja jumped in the way of the bullets and was mortally wounded.
She was able to evacuate the children to safety before dying from her wounds. She also posthumously received a “Special Courage” award from the government of Pakistan and recognition from the U.S. Department of Justice. The 2016 Indian Hindi-language biographical thriller drama, Neerja, is about her life.
During my career as an educator, which started off as a leap off of a cliff into a raging fire, I became increasingly concerned with the issue of “what to teach.” I began teaching as a middle school science teacher in New York City. It was a great environment with good, but challenging, students. However, I was generally clueless, even though I thought I had a lot to offer. With the help and support of my principal and a French teacher, I began to see the errors in my thinking and approach. I began questioning many of the assumptions I had about teaching and learning. And, then I studied with Gregory Bateson for an intensive summer program on education. That summer turned everything upside down. Bateson’s ideas slowly soaked in over many years and even decades as the processes of developing deeper understandings percolated. About 8 years after the Bateson program, I entered graduate school. I entered the graduate program with a kind of selfish attitude. I said to myself that “I don’t care about grades or the professors’ styles of teaching. I am going to learn as much as I can from this experience… just for me.” As I finished my masters degree, then doctoral degree, I left feeling like I was embarking on a path of continual learning, of challenging my and others’ ideas. And, now, having retired from the academic path, I am still learning and challenging.
But, what was it about the learning that occurred during this initial period that changed the way I approached my interaction with the world? I certainly slogged my way through many boring and seemingly irrelevant courses, which were really quite deadly. However, there were many more professors who enlivened the material being studied and who focused heavily on challenging the status quo. And, studying with Gregory Bateson was entirely a process of upending the assumptions of how we think, learn, relate, and live.
However, the big issue is how the system of education fails our children and, for that matter, many, if not most, adults going through colleges and universities. This issue has been plaguing me for decades. From the institutions of education, we get more “national standards,” more “teacher accountability,” more “testing,” and more “teacher-proof curricula.” All of these actions just continue to deaden the entire system of schooling.
Today, I started reading an old book by the noted philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. His book, The Aims of Education, was first published almost a century ago in 1929. Below, are two short summaries with quotes about “what to teach” and “testing.” Reading books from this time period is slow going. The way the English language was used was different, so I’ve summarized most of what he wrote, but have included key quotes.
What to Teach (from page 13 in The Aims of Education)
In teaching children, “…above all things we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’ — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.” …. Throughout history, education at one point may be “alive with a ferment of genius,” but in later times, education becomes pedantic and routine. “The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima.” [The corruption of the best, the worst — from https://www.latin-online-translation.com]
Testing (from page 17 in The Aims of Education)
Whitehead describes the issue of how best to teach as dependent upon the teacher (intelligence, knowledge, etc.), the students (intelligence, knowledge, etc.), the students’ potentialities for later life, and the contexts (physical, social, cultural, etc.) in which the students live. “It is for this reason that the uniform external examination is so deadly.”
And, here we are almost 100 years later still suffering from the “deadly” approaches to schooling. During the mid- to late-1800’s, politicians and those with influence over education were quite explicit about not providing a good education for the masses. In John Gatto’s well-researched chapter, “Some Lessons From the Underground History of American Education,” he describes a pattern of control exerted over education that had the intention of control over children in order to control them as adults and keeping all but the very elite under-educated.
Here are a few choice points from this chapter:
A School or A Prison?
1857 — effort to have schools take complete control over children through behavior modification, so that they took over the role of parent.
1906 — William Torrey Harris (U.S. Commissioner of Education said on page 279, “Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. — The Philosophy of Education (1906, p. 270)
Just before World War I — Woodrow Wilson said on page 272: “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
1917 — (page 272) “…the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as ‘the education trust.’ The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918, was to ‘impose on the young the ideal of subordination.’”
And, in the contexts of present-day education, not much has really changed. We do not use the same words and phrases to describe what should happen in schools. Instead of being straight forward with our intent, we couch our language in words and phrases that may imply more positive goals, such as “raising standards” and “holding teachers accountable.” The strategies used to dumb down our children, to segregate the classes, and to control our children have become more insidious, but are still the major influences on what is taught and how that information is taught.
We have done a wonderful job of preparing our children to be adults who welcome authoritarianism, who will be obedient and subservient, who will not question authority, and whose thinking abilities have been blocked and strangled. And, here we are in 2021, in a society dying from decades of psychological violence against its citizens.
References
Gatto, J. T. (2002). Some lessons from the underground history of American education. In R. Kick (Ed.), Everything you know is wrong: The disinformation guide to secrets and lies (pp. 274–287). New York: The Disinformation Company.
Harris, W. T. (1906). The philosophy of education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education. New York: Mentor Book/New American Library (Macmillan).
A couple of days ago, I took my wife for a diagnostic procedure, which us older people usually takes 3 hours or so. And, since anesthesia is usually involved, she could not drive herself. So, I packed up some readings and my computer and drove her to the facility. Conveniently, there was a nice looking breakfast—lunch (and self-described) diner right next door. And, even better, they had outdoor seating. I ordered an Hawaiian omelet, which I thought was a bit pricy, but it sounded delicious. When it arrived, it took up over half of a 14-inch plate with the other half stacked with hash browns, I realized the price was not bad at all. It could easily have been brunch and dinner, but I devoured it in one sitting. The owner stopped by to see how I was doing. I gave him accolades about the food and service, and asked apologetically for him to kick me out, if he needed the seating. He smiled and said they’re open till 4:00. He lied, they close at 2:30, but his heart was in the place he liked. After my wife’s procedure, she was craving French fries. So, we stopped by this little gem of a restaurant. I ran in ordered some fries. When they came out of the kitchen, he handed me the box and a muffin. He didn’t want to charge me for any of it! I told him, “no, here’s $5. I’ll feel better supporting a great business.” He begrudgingly accepted the money, then said, “I have a rule to put people before business.” I smiled and told him I’d be back. My wife loved the fries, too.
This encounter reinforced something that I have been thinking about for a while. And, that is, how the pursuit of money can be poison.
Over a year and a half ago, I decided to start a little online store with books and other goods that could support people interested in complex living systems, learning, teaching, and inquiring. These kinds of stores require no particular investment and no inventory. You provide links to the goods, and you get a commission on the sales. “Easy enough,” I thought. It was a lot of work putting the store together. And, once together, it required regular attention. Once this store went ‘live,’ a subtle change descended upon me. Every encounter with a friend or new acquaintance slowly became an opportunity to draw in a new customer. After a while, I noticed that I was thinking about how to promote my store, when I was having deep and immensely interesting conversations with people. Resentment started to build, as friends did not help me promote my store. I was turning into a money-monster.
So, I decided to scrap the store altogether. “Screw it,” I said to myself, “it is not worth the loss of relationships.” Just as I made this determination, a friend sent me a note about how wonderful my bookstore was. “Nice, but yuck!” So, I made a determination. I dumped all of the store items, except books, which are one of my loves. And, I repeated over and over again to drill it into my head that, “I don’t care if anyone ever buys a book from this store. I’m just going to leave it here as a service. And, I’ll just buy books from my own store. And, that’s all okay.”
Working for money is one thing. My father labored in a factory most of his life. I’ve worked in all kinds of jobs, including factories, retail, real estate, and then schools and universities. People who work at some occupation earn money, which usually is not enough to live on. But, it is honest work in which one is compensated. The real estate job I had was not one of them. That was my first introduction to the poison of money. Commission sales, running your own business, and the big corporate money contexts carry a huge potential for the pursuit of money poisoning one’s own psychological state and all of the relationships one has. The little restaurant owner I described did not allow his business to undermine his caring for relationships. I have known a few business owners like this, but they certainly do not seem to be in the majority.
Rural Poverty in the Deep South, 1972
Homelessness, Hopelessness, and Complete Despair in New York City, 1975
However, there is even a sense of money as poison among working class people. But, it is a different sort of poison. Living paycheck-to-paycheck is difficult. If we find ourselves in this sort of position, we are always under stress. Such stress can affect our relationships and our senses of self-worth. This poison is more insidious in many ways. It eats away at the core of our beings. And, those people living in extreme poverty, including the homeless, are experiencing another type of money-poison. The poison of having no or not nearly enough money to survive. The effects of this situation are beyond terrible. No human being should have to live like this, no matter what the circumstances.
Wars are fought over money. Wars make some corporations huge amounts of money. Crimes are committed for money… either out of greed or desperation. Marriages and other relationships fall apart over money. And, misery is propagated over money.
The question we all need to ponder is “how can we not allow the toxicity of money to ruin our relationships, our society, and our global community?”
