Moondoggle

Summer of Soul is my favorite concert movie; I’ve enjoyed watching it many times. It has incredible musical performances and backstage stories by many great acts, as well as brilliant editing. The more I watch it the more I find its narrative about the context in which this series of six concerts occurred in Harlem, NY in 1969 is just as interesting as the music: the fight for civil rights, Vietnam, the US moon landing. Amidst the remarkable singing, dancing, and music in the movie are the critical responses of people at the concert to the US putting a man on the moon, which occurred during the concert. One commenter at the concert made a point that rang particularly true to me: “You could have spent that money on earth and made a whole lot of people much better.”

That’s often how I feel about our never-ending school reform efforts: more technology, bigger schools, more testing, more theories and schemes about making children learn what schools determine they need to know so they can become the workers that science, business, and government want. Instead of focusing on the perceived future needs of science, business, and government, why not focus that money on improving the actual needs of local neighborhoods, family healthcare, salaries, and wages? Teflon, computers, and other product spin-offs and social benefits (such as sparking youth’s interest in science) are cited as the bonuses citizens received from the space program, but their creation could have occurred in any number of ways as markets and society sought them over time. But science, business, and government decided winning the space race against Russia was more important than ameliorating poverty, healthcare, and housing.

Thought not widely known, John Holt was a critic of the US Space Program; he once appeared on network TV to express his position. In What Do I Do Monday? John examines different types of writing, and notes the type of writing that makes us feel mystified and manipulated: “These people do not use words to get us to do something, but to tell us in different ways that it makes no difference what we do, that we don’t count. … We are conned into thinking that we are exploring space when we see on our TV sets a picture of men walking on the moon; but space is not the sea, it is not for you and me.”

An article in The Atlantic (Sept. 12, 2012), “Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program,” provides an overview of the resistance that existed then. The article opens this way:

Today, we recall the speech John F. Kennedy made 50 years ago as the beginning of a glorious and inexorable process in which the nation united behind the goal of a manned lunar landing even as the presidency swapped between parties. Time has tidied things up. Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.

We have little power in how our institutions direct their energies and use or create laws and regulations to make us bend to their visions of how life should be lived, other than to withdraw or minimize our participation with them. Ivan Illich wrote at length about this, and John Holt was a great supporter of his work. In his masterful book, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, David Cayley summarizes the situation this way:

In a society whose primary product is “services,” even the most elementary capacities—to give birth, to die, to love, to grieve—come under management, and it comes to seem obvious that these abilities can all be refined and improved by the relevant expertise. “The mind and the heart” are colonized, Illich says. The answer, for Illich, was not to deprecate all expertise and return to tradition but rather to strike a balance. He wanted to write a constitution of limits that would restrain professional expertise at a politically determined line and allow an opposing space for what he called the vernacular or homemade. … We now live after the flood which Illich foresaw—in an age in which it is no longer possible to imagine that compulsory schooling might be dis-established, that a “political majority” might be assembled in favor of what I have called a constitution of limits, that language might once again become a commons and not the plastic medium of professional communicators. Nevertheless, I think Illich’s writings retain a powerful ability to guide, to warn, and to aid understanding for those who are trying to keep their footing in the flood. What cannot be changed can still be withstood. (p. 24)

Unschooling, for myself and others, is a way to withstand the commercial and social pressures caused by, as Cayley says, “the contemporary experience of surfeit.” He continues:

Many of the people I know live in a condition in which all spaces seem fully saturated. Education never ends, health is a constant preoccupation, communication is unrelenting. Both speech and thought are continually entrained by careful “messaging,” branding has become a pervasive metaphor, and ready-made figures of speech increasingly inhibit personal expression.

There is always tension between the desire to conserve tradition and the need to change it when it no longer addresses current needs; unschooling/homeschooling was John Holt’s practical solution to let families balance the traditions that work for them while pursuing new ways to live and learn together. This issue isn’t confined to the education silo; it permeates our lives in many other ways. John Young, a guest blogger on this site, further explores this in next week’s posting