Orion Magazine - September/October 2011 Sample

as Monsanto’s outrageous contempt for farmers and seed-savers, specialization also seems to create a troubling loss of empathy.

Empathy, what Jane Addams called emotion, has largely disappeared from American public life. Our politics and punditry are too divisive, the gap between rich and poor too wide, the messages from the media too preoccupied with what William James called “the bitch-goddess SUCCESS.” We think of public life as a playing field of winners and losers, when we should be thinking about it, to borrow from Dewey, as a single organism made up of thousands of single but interconnected cells—a whole that needs all of its parts, working cooperatively. In other words, we should be thinking about how our educational institutions can be geared less toward competitiveness and more toward turning out graduates who feel a responsibility toward their places and their peers.

Here is the crux of the matter: As we enter an era of dwindling resources and potential mass migration due to climate change, we are going to need much more empathy — perhaps more than ever before — if we hope to retain our humanity. Empathy must be the measure of our students’, and our own, emotional and ethical maturity.

If my English-teaching neighbor is right, and she is simply policing student behavior until graduation, then John Taylor Gatto is also right that we are simply warehousing students in public schools until they are old enough, as the Steve Earle song goes, to “walk into the county bank and sign away your life.” That might have been Alexander Hamilton’s idea of the American Dream— making bankers rich—but it’s not what Thomas Je=erson envisioned for the country. Nor is it in the best interest of its citizens.

When someone asked Benjamin Franklin what type of gov-
ernment he and the other founders had birthed on this country,
he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The truth
is that we have not kept it. We have relinquished it to Wall Street
bankers and corporations that spend $6 billion a year to ensure
the equator. And we have the worst environmental record on the
planet. If this is a republic, you can have it.

Putting my students in situations where they might learn and practice the art of real democracy has become a large part of my own teaching, and it is with these goals in mind that I often take them to a place in eastern Kentucky called Robinson Forest. It is a brilliant remnant of the mixed mesophytic ecosystem, and it is home to the cleanest streams in the state. Yet only a short walk away from our base camp you can watch those streams die, literally turn lifeless, because of the mountaintop removal strip mining that is happening all around Robinson Forest.

A few years ago, I had one student (I’ll call him Brian) who had only signed up for one of my classes because it fit his schedule. He was, in his own words, “a right-wing nut job,” and he disagreed with virtually everything I said in class. But he was funny and respectful and I liked having him around. On our class trip to Robinson Forest, we all hiked up out of the forest to a fairly typical mountaintop removal site. The hard-packed dirt and rock was completely barren, save for a few non-native, scrubby grasses. To call this post-mined land a “moonscape,” as many do, is an insult to the moon.

Brian was quiet as we walked, and then he asked, “When are
they going to reclaim this land?”
“It has been reclaimed,” I said. “They sprayed hydro-seed, so
now this qualifies as wildlife habitat.”
“This is it?”
“This is all the law requires.”
Brian went quiet again, until finally he said, “This is awful.”

citizens, and that transformation can only begin in better public schools.

that political hirelings do their bidding. As a result, the United
States has the largest income gap of any country in the Northern
Hemisphere (it is also, according to the 2009 census, the largest
income gap in this country’s history). The problem with this, as
epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket have found,
is that every single societal problem, with no exceptions, can be
tied directly to income inequality. As a result, the U.S. has higher
levels of mental illness, infant mortality, obesity, violence, incar-
ceration, and substance abuse than any other country north of
Then he asked, “What do you think would happen if every
University of Kentucky student came to see this?”
I pulled the old teacher trick and turned the question back on
him: “What do you think would happen?”
Brian paused, and then said, “I think mountaintop removal
would end.” A