drafted the 1779 Virginia Bill for the More General Di=usion of
Knowledge, the first piece of legislation in the young country to
propose at least three years of primary education for both boys
and girls. However, the bill failed, and in many respects, American public education continues to fail the Je=ersonian dream of
emancipatory learning. Only now it fails in the face of a climate
crisis, unsustainable resource use, and rising world populations.
single item for sale at my local mall that asks the consumer to do
something, make something, or master a skill (the store that sold
telescopes and chess sets recently closed). Yet American teenagers
have on average one hundred dollars a week of disposable income,
which they typically spend at the mall. What they consume helps
them adopt an easy, o=-the-rack persona, but it does little to cultivate real self-invention, the unfolding of one’s nature that Em-
We need schools, as novelist Mark Slouka recently wrote, that produce “men and
It fails at a time when the stakes concerning public education
have never been higher.
Writer and teacher David Orr, author of the environmental
education classic Ecological Literacy, has observed that too often in
this country, education has only served to make Americans “better
vandals,” uncritical consumers and exploiters of the natural world.
While pundits like Thomas Friedman lament that American children are falling behind in science and math, rarely do we hear that
they are being woefully ill-prepared for the arts of citizenship and
stewardship—dispositions that will be every bit as necessary on
Friedman’s hot and crowded planet. If we want to preserve democracy in America, radical and widespread changes in the way we
educate American children and teenagers must begin at once.
Politicians in Washington have spent decades disparaging American public schools as too far gone, too decrepit to bother resuscitating. But as I look back
over my students’ list of grievances concerning their own high
school educations, it strikes me that none of these problems
seems at all intractable. As with other American crises, such
as energy policy, tax reform, and drug sentencing, the problem
doesn’t seem to be a lack of solutions, but rather an absence of
will. My students’ complaints, largely about the classroom envi-
ronment and the content of the curriculum, can be clustered into
three groups: quality of teaching, expectations placed on students,
and relevance of subject matter to that much-contested realm
they call “real life.”
As someone who has spent nearly twenty years in writing class-
rooms with late-adolescent Americans, I’d like to take a crack at
this list. But before I do, it’s necessary to say a few words about
the students themselves. At the risk of generalizing, it seems to
me that two of the more serious problems a<icting American
adolescents today are the fear of not fitting in and an astonishing
lack of curiosity about the world beyond their cell phones. Popular
culture instills high levels of passivity among its most vulnerable
targets, the young. There is, to take one pervasive example, not a
erson called the “chief end of man.” This passive shaping of the
self leads, I think, to a flimsy narcissism that results in a lack of
curiosity about the world outside the self: real life.
A neighbor who is a longtime high school English teacher
told me recently, “When these kids get to you, they won’t have
learned a damn thing about writing. All I do in class is police.”
Like my neighbor, many of us assume that the American youth
have become captive to popular culture. Certainly this makes
teaching much harder today—probably harder than it’s ever
been—but it also seems like an opportunity to contest the
ground we as educators have yielded too quickly to the entertainment industry. Instead of allowing the practice of accumulation
to replace authentic experience, we should be creating opportunities for our students to learn how to more fully inhabit their
own lives and the larger world.
Which brings me back to the teachers. The first charge:
teachers show no passion for their subjects and they don’t seem to
know their subjects very well. I would wager, along with my students, that many teachers show little passion for their subjects
precisely because they don’t know them very well, or as well as
they might. For this reason, some critics have proposed abolishing entirely the education departments at all American universities. I understand this sentiment. About half of my writing
students are education majors, and I hear endless complaints
about busywork and irrelevant assignments. One student stayed
in school an extra year to earn a minor in Appalachian studies so,
she told me, “I would actually know something worth teaching.”
But if we do not take on the rather cumbersome task of dismantling ed schools, we should at least insist that prospective
teachers major in the subjects they plan to teach. That would
be the most immediate and dramatic way to increase teachers’
knowledge of their subject and, presumably, their passion for it.
Nothing I have found, or have observed while mentoring new
teachers, inspires more confidence in front of a class than mastery of the material. Teenagers are like hyenas in their ability
to sni= out uncertainty and fear in an instructor; quickly they
