A Teacher No Longer Able To Lie To Her Students

I very much recommend this essay from Chaitali Chin in Catapult. In it she relates to why she has had to finally, for good, give up teaching.

I have reason to be able to relate to the difficulties she describes here, not only because both of my sisters have been involved in lower school education for a good portion of their adult lives (hearing for years all of the, usually money related, shit required of them to deal with that had very little to do with actually getting kids involved in learning), but also because it is so easy to understand her inability any more to disassociate the reality of what is going on now, from a desire to pass on a kind of learning that remains hopeful and optimistic. I was involved with local Democratic politics years ago and, sad to say, I didn't last nearly as long as she did in keeping the faith that this was a way to change.

The one part of this essay, though, that bears emphasis here is this:

"...2016 was the year the roof came crashing down. For a decade I’ve lived in fear of this period of my life ending, a period of productivity born from willful ignorance, but I couldn’t have anticipated how much this fear, this terror gripping me right now, has forced me to give up my illusions. I can’t lie to children anymore, and if I can’t lie to children I have no business being a teacher, not in this world, not in the way it exists now. I don’t know exactly what the way forward is, but I know that I can’t base it on perception. Perception has been a false shield. I want to know why the world is this way and why it isn’t getting better, despite the fact that nearly everyone I know wants it to get better. I want to know if there is a better way for people to live on Earth, and I do think this is knowable.

This has been a painful break for me, as it is for everyone who looks at their long-held hopes and beliefs and can no longer find any truth in them. These aren’t small ruptures, to no longer believe humanity can survive under capitalism, to no longer believe that empires die quietly, and to no longer believe that this system of cutthroat competition is the only one suited to human nature. As someone who has worked with children from many different backgrounds, I’ve had a chance to observe people close to their natural state. We’re not as vicious or as incapable of change as some thought leaders would like us to believe. Yet in my adult life I have gotten the message from every angle that there is no viable alternative, that the future has been determined and there is nothing better than this. Well, I’m not ready to hand this to our children and say, “here you go, sorry about the mess,” hoping they’ll be able to one day fix something that is unfixable..."

We have moved from the age where Paul Goodman wrote about "Growing Up Absurd" to the age where it is now the "Absurdity of Growing Up." And we certainly have a new occupant of the White House, as well as many who supported him, who exemplifies that adage in spades. This is also a significant part of what is not "thoughtful, loving structure."

The thing is, an alternative to Capitalism is possible. An alternative that does away with the idea of "cutthroat competition." We just need to have more and more of us to get together and start talking about it; not only the need of it, but generating a consensus on the specifics of what it should be, and how we go about making it happen. The question then is: will you be a part of that, or you will just sit back in despair and do nothing.

One Life, Going Forward: Why I Quit Teaching in 2016

“Like most people in education, I wanted to make a difference.”

By Chaitali Sen

Jan 04, 2017