Tonight's Poet Corner: U.S.ED

U.S.ED
by Belinda Roddie

America's school system does not exemplify,
nor provide,
education.

Let me explain.

Education, as a concept, is, at a surface level,
the ability to cognitively identify and explore the
things we see, while expanding our minds outward
toward the things we do not know. Our minds, of course,
are naturally built not only to solve problems,
but also to create
personal and/or widespread
innovations and revolutions that
challenge the established rules that we already have -
not simply in our material environments, but also in our
conscious and subconscious proceedings.

(Rules, by the way,
are not made to be followed or improved upon.
They are made to be
questioned, torn down, rewritten, and
questioned again.)

Education is, on a deeper level, the
principle of breaking habits. Of noticing
more than a dirty coin's two sides. It is the way to
seeing the fourth dimension, beyond the stilted
view of our human eyes. It is the idea that
although we only see a fraction of the universe's
color spectrum, we can go
further toward understanding what we
cannot view superficially within the
uncharted, undocumented cosmos. But it is also the
understanding that we,
as emotional animals,
have the capacity to grow, evolve, and
determine the finite future of our nebulae. And

whoever decided that the
philosophies, sciences, and
theories that we have in the twenty-first
century are enough, that,

"Yes, this is it. We've explored every facet of the
human psyche. We
understand this tiny world and everything in it,"

is either lying to himself, or
fucking things up purposely for the sake of
making himself feel better.

Albert Einstein once said that everyone is a genius,
and he was right. But school is not about education.
See, we are raised to believe that we live in a
four-cornered, four-walled world where every
crack, hole, bridge, and anomaly
has been magnified, oversized,
scrutinized, analyzed, and vaporized by any
possible scientific stratagem known to the modern man,
so that's it. School, in America, has not been built to
expand reality. Au contraire, it is constructed to
enforce this so-called limited reality - a

perspective that it condones
over all others that may seem "crazy," "unorthodox,"
or "out of touch" - and expects us to work, and think,
only within those set limits. This is done
in order to create a universal structure of teaching,
to make things more "efficient" and "progressive,"
thereby making education a commodity,
an economic system, a machine - and not the
raw, uninhibited mosaic of adventurous "What ifs"
that it is meant to be. In short,
schools are simply putting their students through an

assembly line,
giving them blunt tools and hoping that they know
how to cut stone and carve out better and stronger
houses for old men to live in and
hospitals for old men to die in, while the next
generation struggles to find out how to do the exact
same thing for their fat and affluent elderly. And yet
people, for some inexplicable reason, still wonder
why on Earth
the youth are dropping out of school and
losing motivation to contribute anything to the
betterment of society and the people who
need said contributions the most within said society.

It's mind-boggling, and yet the reason is so
fucking concrete that I can
walk on it like it's a fresh sidewalk,
tarred and paved by the fathers of students who,
when asked why
they are trying to become better readers, say that
they do it in order to pass the next literacy exam
so the local school they are enrolled in gets rewarded
for a number grade on a
piece of scantron paper. A chunk of stale brain to
stick into cork with a pin,
instead of putting still beating hearts on display.

People wonder, in their clouded, uncontrollably
milk and honey-addled minds, why students,
when supposedly given every resource, still
do not show scholastic improvement, or don't
do so hot once propped against a cubicle
or behind a pizza counter, with only
one door out of the building. Well, others
before me have answered: Because the
material they learn is not useful. Because it does
not make them care any more potently about the world
outside their select city boroughs. Because it does not
teach them how to fix a car, file taxes, raise a
child, strengthen relationships, or mend
sick stomachs or a feeble cortex. Because
in order for the

feds to get enough money to supply more
data claiming that we need more tests
so the feds can get enough money
to supply more data claiming that we
need more tests [...], the

school system has been stripped of
the practice of education in order to mold an
"opportunity" for students to move
listlessly from point A to point B,
repeating the process ad infinitum until the
grades are stamped, the crackling
diploma is issued, and the
young boy and young girl are left with no creative
outlook on the world that they have been propelled into.

The school system - and this may surprise you - is
not a broken one. It is,
more accurately, a displaced one. As in,
it is not benefiting the people we think it is benefiting.
It is certainly not
broken - not for the people financially
profiting from it, at least.

I took
two tests, the CBEST and the CSET. Both
cost, in culmination, three hundred dollars,
shipped in a computerized gift box to
test monitors who knew that all I had to do
was prove that I could
regurgitate enough useless literary
factoids that didn't
apply to my

mindset and my imagination and my methods.
To prove, by blackening the dot of the most
pretentious answer I could find for the question, that
I could be a capable, innovative teacher. When did
remembering what a fucking morpheme was
constitute a logical example of how I could
make a goddamn difference in the lives of
dozens of students, most of them
English learners, so they could view the world
in a brand new way? Their perception is being filtered,
like cheap film through a thick, unforgiving
veil, and I
have not been picked from the
"enlightened" litter to perpetuate the

misguided mentality of the factory
in which I am forging steel.

Fuck. That. Noise.

That noise that bleats and
brays every minute, every hour,
from superintendents, directors,
coordinators and administrators, all
innocuously proclaiming,

"I'm doing this for the children!" No, you're not.
You're doing it for the
five digit salary, the curtailed health benefits, and the
401k plan that won't do much when you've wasted your
earnings on number two pencils and fixing
copy machines so you can
print the same bland lesson plan over, and over, and
over again and fail to comprehend why no one in your
rambunctious fifth grade class seems to give
one iota of a shit. This

is not education.
This is, on
every fucking level, every plutocrat's
wet dream, because the hierarchy they dwell in
works for them - the rich become richer, and the
poor become poorer, and art disappears and paychecks
dissolve into worthless pennies, and people die from
minor infections because a
young woman, graduated from a mediocre,
multiple choice nursing program,
forgot to sanitize her hands before
administering a booster shot,

because she was late from her other job
at the deli, where she tried to accommodate for an
impending foreclosure on her house
by working sixty hours a week in order to
feed a family of seven. Education is the
ability for that young nurse to look into her
dying patient's eyes and read his entire story from it,
take it home, wrap it up, and tie it to a
pigeon's leg to send out, so everyone
gets the chance to be inspired and
driven by human nature.

Because God bless America, land of the free,
home of the brave, and somewhere, in the
arid heartland of it all, a second grade Guatemalan
girl stares numbly at me when I say reading is not simply
there to instruct her, but, against all bureaucratic
wishes - to change her.