Deaf and Blind, not to mention Dumb

Let me qualify this rant in advance by stating that I’ve already crosschecked my thoughts and emotions against those of two of my fellow high school teachers, and neither of them completely shares my view. One of them agrees with me but doesn’t feel as strongly as I do, while the other sides somewhat with the students that I’m about to trash.

Also let me qualify it by stating that what follows was written in the heat of anger. Now that I’m calmed down, I can see that maybe I overreacted. Or then again, maybe not. But anyway. . .

* * * * *

Today at my school we were treated to a presentation—and by "we," I mean all of the students and teachers in the district; attendance was compulsory—by Ibiyinka Alao, a Nigerian artist who has achieved worldwide fame. In 2001 he won first prize in an international competition sponsored by the United Nations, thus earning himself the title "United Nations Ambassador of Arts." He is also currently the Nigerian Ambassador of Arts. For the past three years he has resided in the United States, in New York, and has spent his time exhibiting his paintings and delivering lectures about their inspiration and meaning, and also about his philosophy of art in general.

He told us that when he first heard the term "rural America" mentioned on television awhile back, he decided that he wanted to see this part of the U.S. for himself. This eventually brought him to southwest Missouri, where during the last month or two he has lectured and shown his paintings at a number of area schools.

Personally, I found his presentation to be fascinating and moving. He explained that his philosophy of art is based upon two ideas: first, that all art should communicate a message to the viewer in a particular idiom, and second, that all art is mysterious, meaning that it demands prolonged attention in order to be deeply understood. A mere cursory glance will not reveal everything that a true work of art has to communicate.

He showed us a PowerPoint presentation of his various works, including the painting for which he won the U.N. competition, titled “The Perversity of Life.” For each painting, he provided a commentary and invited the assembled audience of grade schoolers, middle schoolers, high schoolers, and faculty to look closely in order to catch all of the subtle objects, colors, relationships, and meanings layered throughout the piece. Some of his explanations centered around the idea that life presents each of us with challenging and difficult things, but that for the artist -- and I think he meant to imply that each of us is or can be an artist in some medium -- these unpleasant things are the very stuff of artistic inspiration, the very grist for the mill. One of his paintings in particular, which I believe was titled "True Miracle" (if I’m remembering correctly), made this idea explicit by depicting a stylized clam shell with a pearl visible in it at the bottom center of the frame, while above this a number of women dressed in white -- the color of purity -- rose up off the ground while dancing, symbolizing weightlessness. "How does a pearl form?" Mr. Alao asked, and then answered, "It forms because there is a bit of sand or grit, an irritation, inside the clam." He drew the obvious parallel for us: that the irritations of our own lives can serve as the impetus for us to create beautiful and precious things.

It was a rather masterful presentation, in my opinion. But I'm afraid that many, if not most, of the assembled students didn't notice it, because they were too busy being jackasses. Even the ones who weren't being jackasses were probably so distracted by the ones who were that they found it impossible to derive very much benefit from Mr. Alao's presentation.

When the lights first went down and he began speaking, and when he brought up the first PowerPoint slide, there was a momentary hush as all attention focused upon him. This lasted maybe a minute or two before the first evidence of fidgeting became apparent in a low, steady hiss of shifting bodies, followed by the feathery sound of whispering and murmuring as amplified by the hard, hollow gymnasium. The grade schoolers were on the gym floor, while the high school students and their teachers were seated in the tiered rows of folding chairs above. From my raised vantage point, the grade schoolers looked en masse like an undulating carpet of seaweed: bodies swaying and writhing, arms rising and lowering, heads bobbing and weaving. The letters "ADHD" came to mind and would not go away.

Having said that, in truth the grade schoolers were relatively and surprisingly well behaved. Whenever Mr. Alao would ask a question of the audience, such as, "Do you see such-and-such in this picture?" a childish chorus of "YESSSS!" would arise from the youngest ones there. In other words, most of them were indeed paying attention and even participating. And after all, little children are famous for fidgeting, even if they haven’t always done it to the extent that today’s attention-challenged children do.

And so, of course, as you’ve already guessed, it was the high schoolers and middle schoolers who were misbehaving, and who were infuriating and embarrassing me with their noise and inattention. The presentation lasted for about an hour and a half—granted, a rather long time—but the pace and mood were quite varied what with the different pictures being shown and the modulated tones of Mr. Alao's voice. He also brought up the lights near the end and brought out an original artwork that he painted over the past three months. He called upon five volunteers to come down to the floor and help unroll the very wide canvas for public view.

I would have hoped that all this variation would forestall the boredom response, but that was not to be. Only about ten minutes into the event, I found myself struggling mightily to find a place of comfort between, on the one hand, the immense enjoyment I was deriving from Mr. Alao's words, pictures, and general presence—he's quite a charismatic and charming man—and, on the other hand, my rising tide of rage and disgust at the behavior of the teenagers all around me.

They let their boredom be known with little reservation. They whispered and joked with each other. They punched each other in the arms. They giggled at Mr. Alao’s frequent childlike laugh, which I personally found to be one of his most charming and endearing habits. Many of them slept, which at least kept them quiet, but seeing as the light of the video projector was bright enough that Mr. Alao could still see the audience, I suspect he probably noticed some of the sleepers, and I can’t imagine this made him feel very good.

The worst part of it was the contrast between how the students were behaving and the content of what he was saying. The man was laying his heart bare before us, in both his paintings and his words. He explained that he had always been a taciturn young man—and of course he paused to define the word for the younger ones (not to mention the older ones)—and said it was only three years ago that he became able to speak before audiences like us without displaying much fidgeting and nervousness. In explaining the origins of several of his paintings, he filled us in on his private emotional life and told us about his personal and family histories, thus giving us quite an intimate glimpse inside the soul of a sensitive artist who constantly struggles to make sense, and to make beauty, out of the confusions and hardships of life.

Or at least he would have given us such a glimpse if there had been anyone there to receive it. More and more in recent years, on occasions like the one I’m describing, I am drawn to dwell upon the Aristotelian/medieval concept of adaequatio in the inflection given to it by E.F. Schumacher in his book A Guide for the Perplexed. Although the word in general refers to the model of truth as the conformation of rational thoughts to objective realities which they can grasp, Schumacher speaks of it in more widely in terms of the adequacy—or inadequacy—of an individual to perceive truth at all, and in particular, to perceive the deepest truths of life and reality. “Are all men ‘adequate’ to grasp all truth?” he asks, and then answers no. There must be a necessary minimum capability and appropriate predisposition for a person even to recognize the existence of an exceptionally profound and/or delicate and elusive truth, let alone to understand it. Such is the nature of, for example, the type of truth approached by religion.

Such is also the nature of artistic truth. Ironically, this is the very thing that Mr. Alao talked about today when he stressed the essentially mysterious aspect of a true work of art. As he stated this, he was facing a group of students who for the most part could not have cared less about him, his artwork, his words, or his presence. And this lack of caring was functionally equivalent to deafness. The man might have stated the secret meaning of life itself, and it would simply have fallen to the gymnasium floor and died quietly.

Aside from my anger and embarrassment—both for him and for the student body, not to mention us teachers who rightfully shoulder some (but hardly all) of the blame for this state of affairs—the main thought that occurred to me during this fiasco was how sad it all was. Whether he was aware of it or not, Mr. Alao was fighting a losing battle against the influence of television, video games, and the Internet. He couched his delicate and profound insights in chains of sustained, coherent thought, and this simply doesn’t fit the cognitive and emotional capacities and patterns of the contemporary generation of American teens. They are “adequate” to something else entirely, something whose form fits the lines of the flash-cut editing and mind-mushing rhythms of music videos, C.S.I., and video games, and whose content fits the idiotic and sentimental/nihilistic tropes of (un)RealityTV and maudlin pop songs. As a generation they are deaf and blind to anything that doesn’t conform to this shape. And as such, they are dumb not only in the sense of being stupid, but in the sense of not having much, or perhaps nothing at all, to say of value, since their inner world is informed by the basest kind of trash and the outer world appears to them as a solipsistic reflection of their shallowness and barrenness—although very few of them realize this even when it is pointed out to them directly.

* * * * *

It’s at this point, reading back over my own words, that I begin to feel uncomfortably and unwarrantedly crank-ish, even for me. As I stated at the start of this rant, after having thought and felt the above things, but before typing them all down, I asked a couple of my fellow teachers for their thoughts about the students’ behavior today. I hoped that maybe I had just been seated in a particularly noisy and nonrepresentatively disruptive part of the crowd, or that maybe my current penchant for misanthropy and cynicism is slanting my reaction.

One teacher told me that she would have been angry at the students’ behavior if she had been Mr. Alao, but she stated it in such a mild, noncommittal tone that I knew she wasn’t nearly as incensed over it as I am.

The other teacher took up for the students a little bit by pointing out that attendance at the presentation was compulsory, and that virtually none of the students, aside from the ones who are members of the school’s art club, were interested in it. Thus, their using the event as an opportunity to relax and bask in the glow of no classwork was only natural.

She did have a point, of course, and it’s the same one that I made in a previous blog post when I argued that mandatory public education is a terrible thing, especially as practiced in the current system. But even this second teacher was disappointed by the fact that presentations like the one today appeal to so few of the students. When she went on to state that it’s always this way, regardless of the nature of the special speaker who’s brought to the school and regardless of the nature of his or her presentation, we both knew this was not so much an excuse for the students’ behavior as it was a statement of the central problem itself.

Because the fact is that the majority response to presentations like Mr. Alao’s this morning is mirrored in the classroom every day when the same students respond with the same apathy, the same boredom, the same attitude of dismissal, and the same restlessness to profoundly significant and potentially life-transforming ideas, books, works of art, etc. Far from being confined to the specific situation in the gymnasium today, the problem confronts us every day, and not only in our classrooms, but in contemporary American culture at large.

Incidentally, this second teacher with whom I spoke has taught in public schools for nearly twenty-five years, and to me her attitude smacks of a kind weary resignation to the nature of things. After she answered my question, I told her that if I were to write a book about my experiences thus far in the teaching profession, I would find it difficult to resist the temptation to adopt a Mencken-esque, über-cynical tack by titling it Pearls before Swine. In response, she simply smiled and said she knew what I meant. I rather hate feeling that way, since I find most of my students to be personally likeable, and most of them seem to like me as well. But still, all too often when I attempt to approach the point of dealing with something truly profound in my classroom, I find that this can’t happen because the kids simply won’t accept it. They begin to “space out” and lose interest almost immediately, especially if I’m trying to deal with something purely in verbal, Socratic terms, or something located purely in a written text, without any multimedia sleight-of-hand to sweeten the pill. In such situations, I feel like Mr. Alao facing the disruptive crowd this morning.

Of course, in such situations I also tend to fall into introspection, and to find reconfirmed my original recognition that I, who spent much of my childhood visiting Sesame Street, Gilligan’s island, and the Brady house, and who had many of my teenaged emotions shaped by the vapid sappiness and antisocial aggressiveness of various rock songs—that I am really not all that different from these current teenagers. What difference there is, is really more one of degree than of kind. I figure I’ll spend the rest of my life trying in various ways to fill, reshape, or otherwise overcome the television-shaped vacuum in my soul. One of my worries as a teacher, and as a member of American culture and society, is that it is becoming ever more difficult for each successive generation of young people to wake up to this vacuum inside themselves, since the narcotic influence of the electronic media web, as enabled by and exemplified in the triumph of consumerism and the rise of multinational megacorporations that act—and are treated—like sovereign nations, grows ever more potent. Whether this web will ever be sewn shut completely, so that the only thing anybody will know is what lies inside it, is still an open question. Personally, I think present indicators point to its success.

(N.B. I’m aware that when I criticize contemporary teens for their behavior in school like I’ve been doing here, I’m contradicting my previous post to this blog, where at the end I speculated that perhaps contemporary student resistance to school should be regarded as cause for optimism since it might indicate that students recognize unconsciously the inhuman nature of the ideology and organizational structure of public education in its current form. Yes, it’s a contradiction. No, I feel no need to try and resolve it; cf. the term “conflicted” in the blog’s title.)

* * * * *

Although I did not ask Mr. Alao directly what he thought about the student behavior today, I think perhaps my unasked question was answered by the fact that he felt it necessary during his presentation this morning to pause and plead with everybody to quiet down no fewer than four times. On one of these occasions, he took the opportunity to tell everyone that silence is good because when we talk too much, we run the risk of letting out and wasting all of the beauty inside us. I thought this a most pertinent and valuable observation, but it didn’t appear to make much difference in the general racket being made, since on either this or one of the other occasions when he asked the students to bring down the noise level, a few of them—high school boys—began emitting intermittent birdlike whistles, presumably out of pure rowdiness, as a kind of joke. As for me, I thought the joke was on them since they only seemed to be confirming Mr. Alao’s warning.

* * * * *

After we returned to our regular classrooms, I was still rather “hot,” and I let the kids in my classroom know exactly what I thought and felt about the behavior of the student body. They all just stared at me wide-eyed. When the next hour’s students came in, I asked them what they had thought of the presentation, and to my surprise the majority of them said they had found it quite interesting. Hm.

During my last class of the day, which just ended a few minutes ago, one of the students mentioned Mr. Alao and this led to a brief discussion among us all. I explained some, but certainly not all, of my thoughts as detailed in this blog post, which I’ve been returning to intermittently throughout the day, and of the students who responded, as opposed to those who simply showed no reaction, there was a vague attitude of agreement with me. One of the students, however, complained that Mr. Alao spoke at such length that he seemed to be beating his ideas to death, especially in relation to the painting involving the clam, mentioned above. I responded that I fully understood, from my own classroom experiences, why he would do this, since the students as a group weren’t giving him any indication that they were hearing or understanding him, so why wouldn’t he feel it necessary to belabor the point?

* * * * *

After this morning’s presentation, I walked down front and shook hands with Mr. Alao. I thanked him for sharing his words and paintings, and when he heard that I teach high school English, he was most interested to know what my students are reading at present. All in all, he was quite personable and enthusiastic. Then a little while ago I encountered him in the hallway as he was headed down to the art room. It turns out that he will remain here at the school for the rest of the day, visiting various classrooms from kindergarten on up to talk more with the students and demonstrate how he paints. As far as I can tell, his good will is unperturbed, which I hope means that he didn’t share my negative reaction to the events of the morning.

A Google search for his name—Ibiyinka Alao—yields much fascinating information about him and his work.