The Game

In Which Public Education Is Roundly Abused, And Rowan Is Decidedly Delinquent In Her Updates

Some time ago, when your negligent (my deepest apologies, again) guide was but a tot, my father and I played a game.  We, being imaginative souls, called it "The Game."  (A recently ironic name, since The Wife and I have taken to calling Society "The Game.")  The Game of old was based on a large square of maroon canvas, various pieces of felt and wood, and an abiding and dedicated sense of curiosity.

The canvas was a map - those of you with predilections for scoffing may begin now at this clear reference and precursor to tabletop gaming - and the smaller squares of felt were decorated with trees and mountains, caves, lakes and streams, farms and fields, anything my small, voracious brain could conjure as an appropriate backdrop for adventure.  We sewed them ourselves.

Using this constantly changing terrain as a geographical guide, my father told me stories in which I was expected to participate (I doubt very much whether he or the proverbial wild horses could have stopped me) by answering questions and choosing directions and courses of action.  I might have been unable to cross a bridge until I brushed up on my French because a troll was guarding it and wanted an answer to "Est-ce que ceci n'est pas une pipe?"  I would have to go learn what the troll was saying (and possibly look into surrealist artists) and figure out the right answer before I could cross and continue.  Maybe there was an item priced in lira when all I had were pesos, and I'd have to find the correct change.  Perhaps a dragon or ghost appeared in a dream, demanding that I tell them the name of the secret malefactress in the book I was reading at the time.  It was a game that stitched together the sometimes disappointing mundanity of the waking world and the wildly colorful and challenging scenarios of my imagination, and my father's.  It was a multiplayer game without the computer, a mix of Carmen Sandiego and the brothers Grimm, in which I was both character and storyteller, in equal parts.

I loved it.

"But Rowan," say my Patient and Forgiving readers, "what on Earth has this to do with Taiwan?"  Well, my Gentle Public, today I went to the orphanage again, something I have now done four times, and began a very basic variant of that Game.  I presented Ken (either he's changed his name or everyone's been getting it wrong all this time) with a little green notebook in which I had written the following:

One day, you find a book.  On the cover, there is a picture of a crying woman.  When you pick up the book, you see a ghost.  The ghost says: "Do you have any threes?"

I had him read it aloud, and then we played Go Fish, in which we practiced the constructions "Do you have _____?  Yes, I have two _____s.  No, I don't have any ______s."  I played up the character of the challenging specter, and Ken took great pleasure in trouncing me, gleefully using the correct English phrases the whole time.

I am brought thence to the subject of Public Education, which can be roughly defined as the practice of carefully and thoroughly eradicating our children's desire to learn.  Children seem to naturally thrive on curiosity and its satisfaction, and regularly reach out for more information and more answers and more questions.  The kids in my lower level classes have to be restrained from gathering around the whiteboard in their enthusiasm to write the words correctly (and how counter-productive is that idea? making sure that children never believe they have a place in educating themselves), and jump at the chance to answer questions and play games and draw and learn.  The upper level classes, after a period of slightly caustic wariness, also settle into an honest desire to wield knowledge with skill and inquiry.  All it takes to encourage them is a concrete and consistent set of rules (not too many, not too unreasonable), and a genuine desire to share what you know and learn alongside them when you've no idea.

Why is this so hard to come by?

Reflecting

In Which I Do Hope The Readers Will Bear With Me

I went to Ghana, stayed 5 1/2 months, and learned how people are the same, and what brings us together.  Here I am in Taiwan, just passing the 7 month mark in a probably 24 month stay, and I'm learning about all the ways we do our damnedest to keep ourselves estranged.

When I was growing up, I was told I could do anything I wanted to, be anyone I liked.  This is a very American concept.  It is also a very American lie.  While it is true that, technically speaking, I can do anything I want, no one mentions the consequences.  No one says to a four-year-old, of course, honey, anything you want, unless it's being a garbage collector, because then people won't respect you.  We have constructed for ourselves a giant isolated bubble in which negative consequences are universally to be avoided.  Anything with any negative side effects at all - any decision that rates a black look from the neighbors, any accidental step that makes us "look bad," in short, any mistake - is ruthlessly weeded out of the society we have so carefully constructed around ourselves.  It's very easily done, too.  We do it by the extremely simple expedient of offering our children carefully tailored choices.  By the time most of us get old enough to realize that we can make our own choices, we're so accustomed to having them all but made for us that we don't know what to do.  We just go on with the plan, get a job that pays the bills and is otherwise totally mundane and uninteresting, get married, have the requisite 2.3 children and wonder vaguely why we feel so damn unprepared for all of it.  Most of us have some kind of crisis after college (Oh God, not Real Life!), and another at 45 (What have I done with my life?), and if we're lucky we manage to keep it down to two and slip into resigned acceptance of the way our lives have turned out.

Being nudged into this kind of society with a well meaning You can do whatever you want is somewhat akin to being taken by your very particular Uncle Steve to the biggest bookstore in the world and told to choose just one in the space of an hour.  You know that there is a right one, or at least a right several, and that you will be judged on your choice.  

What am I learning here?  Partly that it is too late for me, in many ways.  This world is no longer my world, and I have wasted my time in it browsing shelves in the areas of the bookstore that Uncle Steve doesn't care for.  I can no longer labor under the pretense that it is my story in which I'm living.  My story left me competent in nothing but learning.  "Well," said a friend, "What a useful skill," and I agree wholeheartedly, but it is not, unfortunately, a terribly marketable one.  Sadly, marketability sets the boundaries of this no-longer-mine world that I live in, so I am left, in effect, not a useful member of a society that doesn't value real education.  

I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this, and it troubles me.  It is, as I've said, too late for me.  I will never be the kind of person that society - as it is - welcomes with open arms and a friendly word.  At best, this society will leave me alone with no more than a half-admiring, half-bewildered sidelong glance.  But it is not, perhaps, too late for the kids who are now who I was.  This world now belongs to people who are right now running on small, unsteady, bare feet under swing-sets, reaching for stuffed animals, being carried by grandparents.  People even now being told that they can do whatever they want to do.  I cannot make the world into one that accepts me, or them, but perhaps I can offer them a space and a chance at self-awareness and true choice.

This is all leading up to a later discussion of the problem of education and potential solutions, but this part had to come first.