October 31, 2007

STANDARDIZED TEST FOR YOUR SCHOOL

[From Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual, WW Norton, 1997]

Here are a few questions that may help you find out what's right and wrong with your community's schools. Add or subtract points for any statment that is true:

1. THE PRINCIPAL

is seen regularly in classes finding out what's going on . . . +10

is seen regularly in hallway in conversation with students . . . +5

is seldom seen in the hallways . . . -5

uses a bullhorn in hallways . . . -8


2. THE SCHOOL

has less than five hundred students . . . +5

has more than five hundred students . . . -5

is still trying to figure out this year's actual enrollment . . . -8


3. THE WORST TEACHER IN THE SCHOOL

just started this year. . . 0

has been in the system five years . . . -3

is working on 20 . . . -5

is now a principal or downtown administrator . . . -8


4. OLDER STUDENTS ARE TYPICALLY CONSIDERED

discipline problems . . . -10

members of a community . . . +5

potential teachers and tutors for younger students . . . +10


5. IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES CLASSES

students don't use textbooks since the teacher prefers primary sources . . . +5

students don't use textbooks because the system ran out and the new order hasn't come in . . . -3

What history and social studies classes? They were replaced by the anti-drug program years ago . . . -8


6. PARENTS

are regularly used as volunteers in elementary school . . . +3

are regularly used as volunteers in middle and high school . . . +5

are required upon coming to the school to sign a log and explain the purpose of their visit . . . -5


7. TV IS USED

to teach critical thinking about the media and advertising . . . +10

to make curriculum more informative and interesting . . . +5

to view purple dinosaurs and show business kids from hell . . . -5


8. DEDUCT ONE POINT FOR EVERY TV COMMERCIAL SEEN DURING THE TYPICAL SCHOOL DAY. [ ]


9. AS STUDENTS GROW OLDER THEIR PERFORMANCE TENDS TO

get worse . . . -10

stay about the same 0

get better . . . +10


10. THE SCHOOL

is open to the community after regular classes . . . +5

offers classes for adults and families . . . +5

teaches its community's history and culture . . . +5

practices a wide variety of teaching styles and techniques . . . +5

has lots of field trips and out-of-school activities . . . +5

offers assistance to students affected by drugs/alcohol, pregnancy, parenthood, truancy, abuse, gangs, etc. . . . +5


11. THE SCHOOL

offers anti-drug program but not drama classes . . . -5

offers driving lessons but not civic lessons . . . -5

offers JROTC but not mediation or peer conflict resolution . . . -5


12. STUDENTS LEARN

how to ask searching questions . . . +5

how to get around locker searches . . . -5

how to argue persuasively with their parents . . . +5

how to argue persuasively with their parole officer . . . -5


13. FOR SECURITY AND DISCIPLINE THE SCHOOL USES

city police . . . -10

security guards . . . -5

school faculty and administrators . . . +5

school faculty, administrators and the students themselves . . . +10


13. UPON ENCOUNTERING A YOUNG PERSON IN THE HALL, A SCHOOL OFFICIAL WOULD TYPICALLY SAY SOMETHING LIKE

"I need to see your ID." . . . -5

"Good morning, Jannine" . . . +5


14. THE SCHOOL BELIEVES THAT STUDENTS LARGELY LEARN BY

listening . . . -10

doing . . . +10


15. IN PREPARING FOR LIFE AFTER GRADUATION, THE SCHOOL

concentrates on the needs of college-bound students . . . -5

is as interested in student not going to college as those who are . . . +5


16. DEDUCT THREE POINTS FOR EVERY AUDIO-VISUAL AID OR COMPUTER IN THE SCHOOL THAT IS NOT WORKING [ ]


17. EXTRA-CURRICULAR PROGRAMS SUCH AS THE ARTS, SPORTS AND SKILL-ORIENTED CLUBS ARE CONSIDERED

nice but in today's competitive environment must give way to other things . . . -5

an important part of what makes the school great. . . . +5


18. BONUS: THE SCHOOL IS

a happy place that I would enjoy attending . . . +20


SCORING YOUR SCHOOL
Top of the class: 145 and up
Tries hard : 100 and up
Needs effort : 60 and up
Get a new school board : Below 60

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: A STANDARDIZED TEST FOR YOUR SCHOO

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

[From Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual, WW Norton, 1997]

Here are a few questions that may help you find out what's right and wrong with your community's schools. Add or subtract points for any statment that is true:

1. THE PRINCIPAL

is seen regularly in classes finding out what's going on . . . +10

is seen regularly in hallway in conversation with students . . . +5

is seldom seen in the hallways . . . -5

uses a bullhorn in hallways . . . -8


2. THE SCHOOL

has less than five hundred students . . . +5

has more than five hundred students . . . -5

is still trying to figure out this year's actual enrollment . . . -8


3. THE WORST TEACHER IN THE SCHOOL

just started this year. . . 0

has been in the system five years . . . -3

is working on 20 . . . -5

is now a principal or downtown administrator . . . -8


4. OLDER STUDENTS ARE TYPICALLY CONSIDERED

discipline problems . . . -10

members of a community . . . +5

potential teachers and tutors for younger students . . . +10


5. IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL STUDIES CLASSES

students don't use textbooks since the teacher prefers primary sources . . . +5

students don't use textbooks because the system ran out and the new order hasn't come in . . . -3

What history and social studies classes? They were replaced by the anti-drug program years ago . . . -8


6. PARENTS

are regularly used as volunteers in elementary school . . . +3

are regularly used as volunteers in middle and high school . . . +5

are required upon coming to the school to sign a log and explain the purpose of their visit . . . -5


7. TV IS USED

to teach critical thinking about the media and advertising . . . +10

to make curriculum more informative and interesting . . . +5

to view purple dinosaurs and show business kids from hell . . . -5


8. DEDUCT ONE POINT FOR EVERY TV COMMERCIAL SEEN DURING THE TYPICAL SCHOOL DAY. [ ]


9. AS STUDENTS GROW OLDER THEIR PERFORMANCE TENDS TO

get worse . . . -10

stay about the same 0

get better . . . +10


10. THE SCHOOL

is open to the community after regular classes . . . +5

offers classes for adults and families . . . +5

teaches its community's history and culture . . . +5

practices a wide variety of teaching styles and techniques . . . +5

has lots of field trips and out-of-school activities . . . +5

offers assistance to students affected by drugs/alcohol, pregnancy, parenthood, truancy, abuse, gangs, etc. . . . +5


11. THE SCHOOL

offers anti-drug program but not drama classes . . . -5

offers driving lessons but not civic lessons . . . -5

offers JROTC but not mediation or peer conflict resolution . . . -5


12. STUDENTS LEARN

how to ask searching questions . . . +5

how to get around locker searches . . . -5

how to argue persuasively with their parents . . . +5

how to argue persuasively with their parole officer . . . -5


13. FOR SECURITY AND DISCIPLINE THE SCHOOL USES

city police . . . -10

security guards . . . -5

school faculty and administrators . . . +5

school faculty, administrators and the students themselves . . . +10


13. UPON ENCOUNTERING A YOUNG PERSON IN THE HALL, A SCHOOL OFFICIAL WOULD TYPICALLY SAY SOMETHING LIKE

"I need to see your ID." . . . -5

"Good morning, Jannine" . . . +5


14. THE SCHOOL BELIEVES THAT STUDENTS LARGELY LEARN BY

listening . . . -10

doing . . . +10


15. IN PREPARING FOR LIFE AFTER GRADUATION, THE SCHOOL

concentrates on the needs of college-bound students . . . -5

is as interested in student not going to college as those who are . . . +5


16. DEDUCT THREE POINTS FOR EVERY AUDIO-VISUAL AID OR COMPUTER IN THE SCHOOL THAT IS NOT WORKING [ ]


17. EXTRA-CURRICULAR PROGRAMS SUCH AS THE ARTS, SPORTS AND SKILL-ORIENTED CLUBS ARE CONSIDERED

nice but in today's competitive environment must give way to other things . . . -5

an important part of what makes the school great. . . . +5


18. BONUS: THE SCHOOL IS

a happy place that I would enjoy attending . . . +20


SCORING YOUR SCHOOL
Top of the class: 145 and up
Tries hard : 100 and up
Needs effort : 60 and up
Get a new school board : Below 60

October 25, 2007

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: HOARDING MY MEZUZAH

SAM SMITH - According to the Washington Jewish Week, "That signature piece of Judaica is a fixture (literally and figuratively) on doorposts almost anywhere there are Jews. But in some isolated communities where the Jewish population is shrinking and scribes are becoming an endangered species, the supply of mezuzot is dwindling as well, and that's where [Aviva] Gottlieb comes in. The 27-year-old member of Kesher Israel Congregation in the District hopes to counter that trend by hunting for surplus mezuzot to ship overseas to communities that no longer take them for granted. . . The Mumbai area has long had the largest concentration of Jews in India, but "they are only about 4,000 in number a mere fraction of the vitality they once generated in the city," according to the Web site the-south-asian.com.

So now what the hell am I meant to do?

We bought our house from the estate of a recently departed Jew and have left the mezuzah on the door frame for the same reason Alfred Einstein had a horseshoe over his door. Asked a friend, "You don't believe in that, do you?" Replied Einstein, "Of course not, but they tell me it works."

I first became aware of the problem when the air conditioner guy started using all sorts of Yiddish expressions. I had to apologize for not understanding his references. He also apologized, saying he had just assumed I was Jewish because of the mezuzah. We immediately dropped consideration of BTUs and turned to the far more interesting matter of whether the devices provided protection for goyim as well as Jews. We eventually agreed it was best to hold on to it.

We've had an exceptional happy time in the house since then and the air conditioning has worked just fine; and so, despite the problems of the good people of the Mumbai area, I'm going to hold on to it.

LET 'EM PLAY

1986

This spring I graduate again from high school, this time vicariously, and one of the major lessons of this return trip has been a deepened appreciation of the role that sports and other extra curricular activities play In education. I no longer think of them, in fact, as extra-curricular at all. The category seems oddly discriminatory and, despite the skill with which academia bedizens its petty prejudices in the cloak of wisdom, it is anti-intellectual as well. To suggest that sports, drama, art, politics or community service are external to the curriculum of an educated person borders on yahooism. Absent these elements, education becomes a brutish parody of what it says it is, a motley collection of facts without context, without integration either with one's own body and soul or with any human community.

I suspect, in fact, that some of the less appealing characteristics ascribed to the stereotypical yuppie are the result of a failure of this integration. The roots, in part, may be found in an education that, at best, did not value extra-curricular activities highly enough to see them other than as the first in an endless series of performances separating the successful from the not so.

For, in truth, extra-curricular activities can be a bad form of education. Micro-Lombardis of high school football have perverted the learning of discipline, cooperation and effort into a tool of self-aggrandizement. Arts programs have modeled themselves on Hollywood or Broadway. And there are campus politicians, such as the new rightists at Dartmouth, who have mainly learned the worst that polities have to offer.

Such problems, however, are not addressed by "no pass, no play." Rather they reflect, in their own way, the fact that extra-curricular activities have been assigned to the slums of education instead of given the place they deserve as part of the basic curriculum.

If school activities were not so arbitrarily divided, if the relationship between what goes on in and out of the classroom was considered and respected, we might not find so many dichotomies. Academics might be enticed to face the issue, for example, of why schools teach the evils of totalitarianism in history classes and venerate it on the football field. Or why students in English class are made to read poets and novelists who lived and died in penury while encouraging show business values on the school stage.

Of course, "no pass, no play" is not new. I encountered it myself in college two weeks after I had been elected station manager of the campus radio station. I was informed that since I had also been selected for probation I was barred from any extra-curricular activities. Although I had to give up my administrative position, the invisible nature of radio permitted me (as with a good many of my similarly distressed colleagues) to continue full tilt on the air -- under a pseudonym. I spent just as much time at the station, but I got my grades up as well. The main lesson I learned from no "pass, no play" was how to buck the system.

It was not a bad lesson, but it certainly was not the one that the academic community had intended, just as I suspect that the lessons learned from the current crop of "no pass, no play" laws will not be the ones intended.

Among the lessons that may be learned will be how society discriminates against those who do not fit its mold - either because of ethnic background, economics, physical or mental idiosyncrasies, or inclination. And since extra-curricular activities are too often used as early imprimaturs of success, the very student who is failing in the classroom will be forced to fail a second time outside the classroom as well.

If, on the other hand, one views these activities as part of the core, of education, then barring participation becomes as stupid and futile an act as banning students from English because they are flunking math. Further, one begins to see the connections between these activities and the conventional academic subjects, connections that can be exploited to make both more valuable. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of extra-curricular activities is that they provide a rare course in applied knowledge. The student in the classroom is tested primarily against a single criterion: the judgment of the teacher. Despite the enormous utility of this, it is hardly a typical example of how knowledge is used in adult life.

To take a simple case: consider a problem that you as a parent perceive at a school. Now think, truthfully, how you would describe and argue your feelings about that problem with the principal, a teacher, your child, another student, your spouse, a friend who has a student at the school, a friend who has a student at another school, a friend without children. The same knowledge you possess, the same feelings, must be translated in a variety of different ways to have either meaning or effect.

It is in the extra-curricular activities more than in the classroom that this sophisticated use of knowledge occurs. In the classroom, knowledge is organized according to a curriculum and in this sense the term extra-curricular is quite right. For in out-of-class activities, knowledge is acquired or transmitted much as in adult life -- in a random, unorganized fashion that provides both excitement and frustration to that life. Learning to deal with this disorderly flow is an important part of becoming an educated adult. Further, extra-curricular activities provide training in what some psychologists have come to call social intelligence, which can include not only understanding the information that words give us, but the enormous variety of non-verbal data available to us ranging from interpreting the mood of a group to comprehending the meaning of a turn of the lip. To train students to only understand words and printed symbols is to cheat their education.

For the parent, there is a special virtue of extra-curricular activities: they permit the parent to enter the school life of the student in a manner no academic course offers. The parent relies on report cards, an occasional term paper and teacher conferences for some feeling of the what happens in the classroom. If my experience is at all typical, further investigation into the academic environment tends to produce curt, glib or over-generalized responses. But with extra-curricular activities, the interest of the parent is actively sought, whole dinner-table discussions can actually occur, and feelings can be truly expressed. Thus the extra-curricular activity becomes a rare experience that both parent and student can share, especially at a time when words on other subjects may be hard to come by. To a school administration this virtue may not seem a high priority; to parents, and even students, it can be priceless.

Further, I think many parents presume a broader and less rigid limit to education than some educators do -- certainly more so than do many school boards and system administrators. Parents often define education in a non-curricular way -- blending academic, social and cultural goals and values. It may sound vague to a professional but it is really only an amateur's holistic vision. And it is a form of fraud for professional educators to suggest that these goals can be met without the aid of extra-curricular activities.

My own experience of late has been with drama and sports. I have found in them advantages that are either absent or weak in my childrens' classroom learning or which have supplemented or strengthened what has occurred in the classroom; advantages that have led me to regard these activities not just as a source of sharing or pride, but as evidence that my sons' schools are doing what they claim. As in the classroom, not always has the the lesson been learned, or learned well, but at least it has been taught.

In sports, my sons have learned to work in a group, to cooperate, and to understand and value their peers for a variety of reasons. In some cases this appreciation may come from their peers' skill, in other cases their determination, helpfulness, or supportiveness. They have learned that in real life the penalty for failure of effort may not merely be a bad grade and annoyed parents and teachers, but the disappointment of a whole group whose respect and friendship you seek.

While learning to try harder, they have simultaneous learned how to fail. I watch my sons' teams go down to defeat and think back to Little League years when a bad loss could cast a pall on the house for a whole day. No longer. They have also learned that success may not be an individual triumph at all, but a joint mystery, as with a soccer team that won its league championship not because it was blessed with stars but because this highly individualistic group of players developed a remarkable ability to make each other do better than they normally would and to become one for a common goal. It was more than a championship; it was a priceless lesson in the power of a community. to raise itself up collectively.

Sports also teach the importance of concentration; they require the absorption and use of a wealth of small data under extreme stress and time limits. They teach respect and understanding of the human body. And at a critical time of learning about one's self, they can provide a confidence that may not be so easy to come by in other arenas.

Drama, like sports, requires a concentration equal to anything in the classroom. Like sports, functioning within a group is critical. Like sports, the lessons learned are not only applicable to traditional academic courses, but to becoming an educated adult.

One of these lessons is the ability to memorize. It is remarkable that, given the repeated need to memorize in school, so little time is spent developing the skill. One of the few places in school where one can learn how to memorize is during the production of a play.

Further, good drama teachers can introduce their students to sophisticated forms of character analysis that one would find in professional theatre schools. One of my sons was given an exercise that involved figuring out what the characters were really thinking while they were saying their written lines. This sort of study not only produces better actors and actresses but better English students. Once you have seriously acted a part in a play, whole new understandings await in your reading of other literature.

Drama also requires a level of perfection that can only come after one understands the importance of failing over and over again until you get it right. Even the brightest student, used to skimming material and spewing out the correct answer, can be brought to earth by this requirement. A good drama teacher will make even the best try to be better.

Finally, drama encourages the development of self-confidence at an especially timely moment. For both psychological and practical reasons, being able to "perform" may be one of the most useful things one learns in school.

Of course, extra-curricular activities can be abused by both students and school. But often this is because of a tendency to use them as a form of star-shopping, a tendency that "no pass, no play" only accentuates. If one is conscious of the danger, however, it is not hard to avoid. At my high school, there was not one spring play but a whole series of them. Every senior who wanted a significant part in a play got one, indeed was urged to take one. Every year, there would be surprises, as someone not considered a "drama type" turned in an especially good performance. I think many of us who were not "drama types" are glad today that someone pushed us into tryng it at least once.

As I await another high school graduation, I think back about the teachers who were the real influences of the last twelve years. And the names that come to mind include, far out of proportion, coaches and drama and music teachers. I can't conceive of those 12 years without them, nor without them would I have considered that my son had received a decent education. Those school boards around the country that think otherwise are not raising educational standards, but lowering them by removing a part of what should be the basic curriculum of any student whatever their grade in math or English.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: LET 'EM PLAY

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings]

Sam Smith
1986

This spring I graduate again from high school, this time vicariously, and one of the major lessons of this return trip has been a deepened appreciation of the role that sports and other extra curricular activities play In education. I no longer think of them, in fact, as extra-curricular at all. The category seems oddly discriminatory and, despite the skill with which academia bedizens its petty prejudices in the cloak of wisdom, it is anti-intellectual as well. To suggest that sports, drama, art, politics or community service are external to the curriculum of an educated person borders on yahooism. Absent these elements, education becomes a brutish parody of what it says it is, a motley collection of facts without context, without integration either with one's own body and soul or with any human community.

I suspect, in fact, that some of the less appealing characteristics ascribed to the stereotypical yuppie are the result of a failure of this integration. The roots, in part, may be found in an education that, at best, did not value extra-curricular activities highly enough to see them other than as the first in an endless series of performances separating the successful from the not so.

For, in truth, extra-curricular activities can be a bad form of education. Micro-Lombardis of high school football have perverted the learning of discipline, cooperation and effort into a tool of self-aggrandizement. Arts programs have modeled themselves on Hollywood or Broadway. And there are campus politicians, such as the new rightists at Dartmouth, who have mainly learned the worst that polities have to offer.

Such problems, however, are not addressed by "no pass, no play." Rather they reflect, in their own way, the fact that extra-curricular activities have been assigned to the slums of education instead of given the place they deserve as part of the basic curriculum.

If school activities were not so arbitrarily divided, if the relationship between what goes on in and out of the classroom was considered and respected, we might not find so many dichotomies. Academics might be enticed to face the issue, for example, of why schools teach the evils of totalitarianism in history classes and venerate it on the football field. Or why students in English class are made to read poets and novelists who lived and died in penury while encouraging show business values on the school stage.

Of course, "no pass, no play" is not new. I encountered it myself in college two weeks after I had been elected station manager of the campus radio station. I was informed that since I had also been selected for probation I was barred from any extra-curricular activities. Although I had to give up my administrative position, the invisible nature of radio permitted me (as with a good many of my similarly distressed colleagues) to continue full tilt on the air -- under a pseudonym. I spent just as much time at the station, but I got my grades up as well. The main lesson I learned from no "pass, no play" was how to buck the system.

It was not a bad lesson, but it certainly was not the one that the academic community had intended, just as I suspect that the lessons learned from the current crop of "no pass, no play" laws will not be the ones intended.

Among the lessons that may be learned will be how society discriminates against those who do not fit its mold - either because of ethnic background, economics, physical or mental idiosyncrasies, or inclination. And since extra-curricular activities are too often used as early imprimaturs of success, the very student who is failing in the classroom will be forced to fail a second time outside the classroom as well.

If, on the other hand, one views these activities as part of the core, of education, then barring participation becomes as stupid and futile an act as banning students from English because they are flunking math. Further, one begins to see the connections between these activities and the conventional academic subjects, connections that can be exploited to make both more valuable. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of extra-curricular activities is that they provide a rare course in applied knowledge. The student in the classroom is tested primarily against a single criterion: the judgment of the teacher. Despite the enormous utility of this, it is hardly a typical example of how knowledge is used in adult life.

To take a simple case: consider a problem that you as a parent perceive at a school. Now think, truthfully, how you would describe and argue your feelings about that problem with the principal, a teacher, your child, another student, your spouse, a friend who has a student at the school, a friend who has a student at another school, a friend without children. The same knowledge you possess, the same feelings, must be translated in a variety of different ways to have either meaning or effect.

It is in the extra-curricular activities more than in the classroom that this sophisticated use of knowledge occurs. In the classroom, knowledge is organized according to a curriculum and in this sense the term extra-curricular is quite right. For in out-of-class activities, knowledge is acquired or transmitted much as in adult life -- in a random, unorganized fashion that provides both excitement and frustration to that life. Learning to deal with this disorderly flow is an important part of becoming an educated adult. Further, extra-curricular activities provide training in what some psychologists have come to call social intelligence, which can include not only understanding the information that words give us, but the enormous variety of non-verbal data available to us ranging from interpreting the mood of a group to comprehending the meaning of a turn of the lip. To train students to only understand words and printed symbols is to cheat their education.

For the parent, there is a special virtue of extra-curricular activities: they permit the parent to enter the school life of the student in a manner no academic course offers. The parent relies on report cards, an occasional term paper and teacher conferences for some feeling of the what happens in the classroom. If my experience is at all typical, further investigation into the academic environment tends to produce curt, glib or over-generalized responses. But with extra-curricular activities, the interest of the parent is actively sought, whole dinner-table discussions can actually occur, and feelings can be truly expressed. Thus the extra-curricular activity becomes a rare experience that both parent and student can share, especially at a time when words on other subjects may be hard to come by. To a school administration this virtue may not seem a high priority; to parents, and even students, it can be priceless.

Further, I think many parents presume a broader and less rigid limit to education than some educators do -- certainly more so than do many school boards and system administrators. Parents often define education in a non-curricular way -- blending academic, social and cultural goals and values. It may sound vague to a professional but it is really only an amateur's holistic vision. And it is a form of fraud for professional educators to suggest that these goals can be met without the aid of extra-curricular activities.

My own experience of late has been with drama and sports. I have found in them advantages that are either absent or weak in my childrens' classroom learning or which have supplemented or strengthened what has occurred in the classroom; advantages that have led me to regard these activities not just as a source of sharing or pride, but as evidence that my sons' schools are doing what they claim. As in the classroom, not always has the the lesson been learned, or learned well, but at least it has been taught.

In sports, my sons have learned to work in a group, to cooperate, and to understand and value their peers for a variety of reasons. In some cases this appreciation may come from their peers' skill, in other cases their determination, helpfulness, or supportiveness. They have learned that in real life the penalty for failure of effort may not merely be a bad grade and annoyed parents and teachers, but the disappointment of a whole group whose respect and friendship you seek.

While learning to try harder, they have simultaneous learned how to fail. I watch my sons' teams go down to defeat and think back to Little League years when a bad loss could cast a pall on the house for a whole day. No longer. They have also learned that success may not be an individual triumph at all, but a joint mystery, as with a soccer team that won its league championship not because it was blessed with stars but because this highly individualistic group of players developed a remarkable ability to make each other do better than they normally would and to become one for a common goal. It was more than a championship; it was a priceless lesson in the power of a community. to raise itself up collectively.

Sports also teach the importance of concentration; they require the absorption and use of a wealth of small data under extreme stress and time limits. They teach respect and understanding of the human body. And at a critical time of learning about one's self, they can provide a confidence that may not be so easy to come by in other arenas.

Drama, like sports, requires a concentration equal to anything in the classroom. Like sports, functioning within a group is critical. Like sports, the lessons learned are not only applicable to traditional academic courses, but to becoming an educated adult.

One of these lessons is the ability to memorize. It is remarkable that, given the repeated need to memorize in school, so little time is spent developing the skill. One of the few places in school where one can learn how to memorize is during the production of a play.

Further, good drama teachers can introduce their students to sophisticated forms of character analysis that one would find in professional theatre schools. One of my sons was given an exercise that involved figuring out what the characters were really thinking while they were saying their written lines. This sort of study not only produces better actors and actresses but better English students. Once you have seriously acted a part in a play, whole new understandings await in your reading of other literature.

Drama also requires a level of perfection that can only come after one understands the importance of failing over and over again until you get it right. Even the brightest student, used to skimming material and spewing out the correct answer, can be brought to earth by this requirement. A good drama teacher will make even the best try to be better.

Finally, drama encourages the development of self-confidence at an especially timely moment. For both psychological and practical reasons, being able to "perform" may be one of the most useful things one learns in school.

Of course, extra-curricular activities can be abused by both students and school. But often this is because of a tendency to use them as a form of star-shopping, a tendency that "no pass, no play" only accentuates. If one is conscious of the danger, however, it is not hard to avoid. At my high school, there was not one spring play but a whole series of them. Every senior who wanted a significant part in a play got one, indeed was urged to take one. Every year, there would be surprises, as someone not considered a "drama type" turned in an especially good performance. I think many of us who were not "drama types" are glad today that someone pushed us into tryng it at least once.

As I await another high school graduation, I think back about the teachers who were the real influences of the last twelve years. And the names that come to mind include, far out of proportion, coaches and drama and music teachers. I can't conceive of those 12 years without them, nor without them would I have considered that my son had received a decent education. Those school boards around the country that think otherwise are not raising educational standards, but lowering them by removing a part of what should be the basic curriculum of any student whatever their grade in math or English.

PERMANENT LINK

October 24, 2007

LOSING TIME, LOSING SPACE

Sam Smith

URBAN sociologist Claude S. Fisher writes that "our species has lived in permanent settlements of any kind for only the last two percent of its history." As late as the 1850s, just two percent of the world's population lived in cities of more than 100,000, by 1900 only about ten percent. By the end of the last century, however, about half the world's humans lived in cities. In America, fewer than a quarter of us occupy a physical environment that is not primarily manufactured - which is to say, a place in which time and space are not mainly defined by other humans rather than by nature.

[]

There is a road in Maine over which I have walked, run, ridden a bike, and driven cars, trucks, and tractors for parts of more than fifty summers as well as during some of the years' lesser moments. It is not a long road, just a little more than three miles from the end of the point at the mouth of the Harraseeket River to where you turn hard left to go into town, or "up street" as it's called. Now mostly asphalt, the road occasionally surprises visitors by suddenly turning to dirt for a few hundred yards in the middle of a woods before going back to blacktop. For some, the tar provides reassurance of civilization; the dirt is literally terra incognita.

Although the town has only one percent of the population of Washington DC, it has one-tenth the road frontage. Maine, whose far corners are as distant as Washington and Boston with a slightly larger population than both combined, has more highway mileage than the rest of New England put together. So, as far as the town and the state are concerned, there's nothing particularly unusual about this road.

Nothing much happens along it, either. There are some homes, some farmland, a small state park, and a place where clammers park their pickups to walk down to the mud flats. In the more than 50 years that I have traveled this road, only a few new houses have been built. A few new signs have gone up, including a hand drawn one advertising 'cukes' and a town warning that the road is under radar surveillance, which isn't true. Maybe once a month you'll see a cop on the road, less often, say, than the truck from Down East Energy.

It is a beautiful road but then beautiful roads are easy to come by in Maine, so not even that is remarkable. Every once in a while something unusual happens along the road. A house gets moved, cattle get loose, and once I found a stolen car abandoned in the woods.

Mostly, though, the road is just there for whatever those walking, running, riding or driving want to do with it. It's been there, in some version, for over 300 years and isn't going anywhere else. It just sits there until somebody decides to use it. Then it becomes their road: a passage, a respite, a view, a space for meditation, an escape, a prod to memory, a reminder of how simple the good can be. A gift of time and space.

The road is shared by tractors, campers who have lost their way, tourists from Massachusetts driving too slowly and natives driving too fast. Joan Benoit trained on the road for the first Women's Olympic Marathon. When she won the race, all the boats in the harbor blew their horns because everyone knew how hard she had worked to get there.

When I was a boy, and much of the road was still dirt, there was a small hill down which, with freedom's fury, I would ride my red bike towards the quarter mile straight-away and the woods beyond, a place secure from adults, tasks, scolding and trouble. In the woods there was a shell heap left by Indians and a stone wall built by those who came after. I thought there might be moose and bear in the woods as well, but I never saw them. Later I found the remains of Nathaniel and Mary Aldrich's homestead with the sinking stones of the foundations and the standing stones of the barnyard. Not far away, hidden in the undergrowth, was their well. Nathaniel and Mary Aldrich traveled the road before the Revolution and used their time and space to go to sea and to have 14 children.

In the woods there are trees with wide spread branches intermingled with cramped companions standing rigidly at attention - a clue that this had once been farmland, that once there had been enough room for a field pine to stretch its arms.

When I was about 16, Hurricane Carol came through and toppled many of the trees in the woods. In the quiet of the storm's eye my father and I foolishly tried to cut a way to town. The woods hid the wind's noise and anger and we didn't notice that the eye had passed until trees started falling around us. We got out just in time and it would be two days before anyone made it up street.

Down the road about a mile and a half was Mr. Banter's farm, with a kitchen that smelled of chickens and stale milk. It also had the nearest phone. Further still was the house of Jimmy Mann who, when I was 14, taught me how to drive a six-wheel drive Army surplus personnel carrier and how to use the winch in front. His father, Horace Mann, lived on a farm a little further down the point. In fact, Manns had lived in this part of Maine for over 300 years. Several of the newer houses on the point were built by Jimmy Mann but they never seemed all that new because they were built by someone who belonged to both past and place.

The fields had their own time and space. When you were mowing them, your tractor left a fresh green record of the minutes and hours and of what had happened within them. Beyond the fields was the shore where the sea came and went twice a day, rising and falling nine feet, bringing or taking, agitated or bored. Later I would go to sea as a navigator in the Coast Guard. My job was to know where we were and how long it would take to get somewhere else. Time and space were the things most meticulously recorded on charts and in the log.

Beyond the shore was the bay and beyond that the ocean and beyond that the horizon, which made believe it was a stone wall or fence, pretending that time and space had finite boundaries.

Sometimes, along the road, time ran out. A short distance from where you turned left to go to town, my nephew Haze, still in his twenties, died in a car crash. And it was along this road that my mother and I followed the ambulance that had rushed seven miles to where we were futilely trying to shove life back into my father's body.

As the rescue squad crossed the Little River bridge, I noticed that the nine foot tide was out, leaving a half mile of mud flats all the way to Googins Island. That evening, as we returned from the hospital, widowed and fatherless, the tide was in, replacing the half mile of flats with a half mile of still water nine feet deep. The moon shone on the water and I felt an unexpected peace at being inexorably a part of natural time and space.

[]

IN my normal geography of Washington DC, time and space don't come as gift. More often than not they belong to someone else, another commodity that we get to use only upon payment, under instruction, after standing in line, waiting bumper to bumper - or upon throwing our papers into a pile, grabbing our jacket, and rushing out the door.

In fact, there are now more people in prison in than there are farmers, which is to say that you are more likely to find Americans kept in a cage than you are to find driving their tractor along a country road. America has moved from frontier to supermax.

My first diurnal sign of temporal and spatial control typically comes with the morning news - "police activity" the local public radio station strangely calls it, a euphemism which could mean a burning tractor-trailer, a multi-car crash, or the diaspora of construction, but certainly means a delay for those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Capital Beltway hosts many of these incidents. It was completed in 1968. Since then the population of the metropolitan area has doubled. There is nothing remarkable about this; we have come to accept huge traffic jams like we accept storms and drought, except that nature didn't create the traffic jam. According to a study by planners at Berkeley, San Franciscans are losing about 90,000 hours a day sitting in traffic jams. That's enough hours to be considered normal.

All around us are rules, exigencies, interruptions and delays caused by ever more of us wanting to do the same thing at the same time. The line at the movie or nightclub. The restaurant with no table until 9:30; the hotel that is booked; the sign on the Massachusetts Pike last summer - the first I had seen - warning that rest rooms at the next service area were limited.

The cause of these delays is a world in which nearly 11,000 people are added every hour, creating a new population the size of Newark NJ each day. If we continue to grow at the same rate as in the past decade, America will double in population by about 2058. As Gaylord Nelson pointed out that means we will have or need twice as much as everything we had at the turn of the century. Twice as many cars, trucks, planes, airports, parking lots, streets, bridges, tunnels, freeways, houses, apartment buildings, grade schools, high schools, colleges, trade schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons.

Twice as much water and food if you can find it. Twice as many chemicals and other pollutants in the air and water, twice as much heat radiation from all the new construction, twice as much crime, twice as many fires, twice as big traffic jams, and twice as many walls with graffiti on them. In Japan, there is already not enough room for pets in some cities, so people rent dogs just for the pleasure of walking them around the block.

Whenever I hear of another school shooting or other youthful violence, the first thing I think about is Dr. Calhoun and his mice. Dr. John Calhoun put four pairs of white mice in a steel cage eight and a half feet on a side. Within two years the mice had increased to 2,200. The adult mice began excluding young mice from their company and the young began biting, attacking, and slashing one another. Finally social and sexual intercourse became impossible without violence. The mice stopped reproducing and eventually all died out.

We're in a cage, too, except it has shopping malls and freeways and cops with guns and sirens. We have governments and hospitals and schools and we have talk shows and newspapers to help us forget that we're in a cage.

But spend an evening surfing the channels and count the humans trapped or being destroyed - by crime, for fun, in sport. You can say it's television's fault, but, in the end, the producers and the reality cops and the extreme fighters are also in a cage, just like the viewers. Each is trying to control an environment over which they have lost control, whether using a gun, a ball, a camera, their fists or a zapper. And it always ends in another confrontation: another ratings war, another arrest, another illegal deal, another TV pilot, another channel.

If you step back, there is madness in this, but if you think only of those in the cage - what they can hear, see, and understand - then a primal logic emerges, the need to restrain, suppress, or eliminate the proximate usurpers of one's rightful time and space.

We don't talk about it much except when somebody suggests we might do it differently and then we say they are "thinking outside the box." Thinking and living inside the box has become normal.

[]

AS with Dr. Calhoun's mice, the problem began to reveal itself with the young. After World War II, spurred by a series of reports from Harvard president James Conant, America deliberately dismantled the education system that had brought it that far. Among other things, Conant considered the elimination of the small high school essential for the US to compete with the Soviets. America listened and between 1950 and 1970 the number of school districts in the country declined from 83,700 to 18,000. Schools increased in size, administration became centralized, principals became corporate executives and wardens rather than educators, and teachers became bureaucrats rather than prophets with honor in their own classrooms.

By the late 1990s, a center had been established at Sandia, NM, where the Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin - the latter more commonly a leading purveyor of large scale violence - designed ways to keep students safely within the cage. Here is their description of a well-functioning school:

- All students are required to carry ID cards on campus. This process helps ensure that only authorized people are on school grounds and at school functions.

- Tamper-resistant cameras are positioned to monitor areas known for incidents of fights, drug and alcohol use, smoking, and vandalism.

- A hand-held metal detector, loaned to the school by Sandia, is used to search for weapons in rare but threatening situations.

- Better lighting is being installed at strategic outdoor locations thanks to the Public Service Company of New Mexico.

- Microdots, air scribes, and indelible and invisible paint are used on equipment and other assets to deter theft by providing a unique identification.

- Hair-analysis test kits were provided to the school for parents to use in instances of suspected drug use by their children.

- A portable breathalyzer unit was supplied to the school and is used in instances of suspected alcohol use by students or employees.

It is a model not that different from that used by Santana High School, the scene of a recent shooting. As the Washington Post noted, "There were phones in every classroom. Security guards patrolled the hallways with two-way radios. And a sheriff's deputy was assigned to visit the campus each day." Here is the Santana dress code:

"Clothing must be clean and in good repair and garments may not display profane or obscene language or pictures, vulgar gestures, promote or encourage use of any alcohol/tobacco product or any controlled substance. Appropriate footwear must be worn at all times while students are at school or at school sponsored activities. Steel toed footwear and slippers are not acceptable. Students are not permitted to wear or be in possession of any headgear while at school. This includes all hats, hoods, caps, nets, bandanas, scarves, beanies, etc. The school administration may disallow other types of clothing if it is determined that they represent a reference to gang behavior or an attitude/environment that law enforcement, probation, or other school district administrators, deem may jeopardize a safe and orderly environment for students and school staff. Dress Code Specifics: No logos or look alike images representing gangs or racist groups, such as the number 13, clenched fists, swastikas, iron crosses, etc. may be on your clothing or in your possession at any time on the school campus. This includes those sometimes represented on Independent and Metal Mulisha gear. The only "pride" to be displayed at Santana is "Sultan Pride." Pants will be worn at the waist. All straps or suspenders will be fastened. Belts will not hang more than four (4) inches beyond the buckle. No bare midriffs, halters, backless shirts, strapless or tube top shirts. No items of clothing where undergarments [or] swimwear are exposed. No men's sleeveless undershirts, stylish bras worn as shirts, and mesh, lace or sheer (without lining) clothing over bare skin. The tops of shirts/blouses for both males and females should adequately cover the chest area and not expose excessive chest/cleavage. The hem of shorts must be below clenched fists when arm is extended at side so that buttock is covered completely. The hem of skirts and slits in skirts must be below open hand when arm is extended at side. Consequences: Students who are not dressed appropriately will be brought to the office and may be sent home to change or be required to wear a borrowed shirt. Headgear will be confiscated and returned to the student at the end of the day on the first offense, to a parent on a second offense, and remain in the assistant principal's office until the remainder of the term on subsequent offenses."

Now here is an announcement that appeared in the Santana newsletter at the time of the shooting:

"STUDENT CONFERENCES: Today we will begin conferencing with incoming 12th graders (present 11th graders) and continue throughout the next 3 days. Please come to the Counseling office immediately after receiving your call slip so that we can see you quickly and you may return to class."

Note the detail the school lavished on what was on the students' bodies and how little time it had to speak of what was on their minds. And it's not just high schools that have turned their students into controlled substances. Michele Tolela Myers, the president of Sarah Lawrence, wrote in the NY Times:

"Attend a conference of higher education leaders these days, and you will hear a lot of talk about things like brand value, markets, image and pricing strategy. In the new lingua franca of higher education, students are 'consumers of our product' in one conversation or presentation and 'inputs' - a part of what we sell - in the next . . . We 'bid for student talent,' as the new language would put it, because we know that 'star value' in the student body affects the 'brand value' of the university's name: its prestige, its rankings, its desirability, and ultimately its wealth and its ability to provide more 'value per dollar' to its 'customers.' . . . A business professor told a group of us at one recent conference that to run a successful organization you had better make decisions on the basis of being 'best in the world,' and if you couldn't be best in the world in something, then you outsourced the function or got rid of the unit that didn't measure up. Have we really come to believe that we can only measure ourselves in relation to others, and that value and goodness are only measured against something outside the self? Do we really want to teach our children that life is all about beating the competition?"

Apparently, yes. Which is why we are giving up education in favor of cram courses. Which is why, as a matter of national policy, we are reducing knowledge, wisdom, and survival to a matter of checking the right box. Standardized tests for standardized humans - without time or space for anything else. . .

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There are less obvious thieves of time and space. Such as the government. In the past thirty years the number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. Nearly half of all post-Civil War federal criminal laws have been passed since 1970. The number of lawyers have grown with the laws; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. This is not the product of necessity. Neither is the explosion the product of ideology. Both liberals and conservatives have overstuffed the law shelves, albeit for different reasons.

Whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust.

Then there is the media, purportedly our surrogate priest, parent and teacher but in fact functioning like gangs of burglars breaking and entering our brains and stealing time and space from us in a way not even our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary became merely unusual and finally ubiquitous as we moved from manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment and points of reference became ever more distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature. Sitting in a bar, riding an exercycle at the gym, or waiting in the airport, we trade proximate reality for a distant, visible, decibled but ultimately unreachable substitute. . .

Some fifteen years ago, an extraordinary anarchist writer using the pseudonym Hakim Bey described what he called "the closure of the map." The last bit of earth, he wrote, had been claimed by a nation state in 1899:

"Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance - not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of 'territorial gangsterism.' Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed . . . in theory.

Bey asked:

"Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind."

Bey saw an out in the creation of what he called temporary autonomous zones. The TAZ, which he refused to define explicitly, "is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it . . . The TAZ can 'occupy' these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves - because they never intersected with the spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of simulation.". . .

One need not accept all of Hakim Bey's vision to realize that the closing of the map is beyond contention. Further he was brave enough to speak of this claustrophobic specter while the bulk of the nation's intelligentsia refuses to this day to incorporate the diminishing geography of time and space into their considerations. This is not some nuclear reaction that we can not understand nor some chemical poison that we patiently assume our leaders will warn us against before it is too late. This is the essence of human experience: what we can see, what we can hear, what we can have, where we can go and where we are prohibited.

There is at present no politics of time and space, no reporters assigned to cover them, no time on their broadcasts nor space in their papers. And so we are confined in silence. We accept corporate trespassing on our hours and our acres with stunning passivity. We permit television monitors in public areas to interrupt our thoughts, break our sleep, distract our reading and strain our conversation. We turn much of what is left over to our government, as though admitting we were no longer competent to handle time and space for ourselves.

There are, of course, exceptions. For example, the quarter of us who live in places of undefined range and unincorporated rhythms. More than 90% of physical America itself is still not urban. Part of the political tension in this country stems not so much from our differing ideologies as from our contrasting ecologies. It has been like that ever since the first adolescent left the farm for the city, but now the natural and the mechanical repeatedly overlap, symbolized by the cell towers planted in open space like great flagpoles by our corporate conquerors.

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Time and space were once an essential part of our nature. Gertrude Stein wrote that "in America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is." By the 1950s, however, Alan Ginsberg was already speaking of "an America which no longer exists except in Greyhound bus terminals, except in small dusty towns seen from the window of a speeding car."

The deeply religious, the utopian, the cybernetic and the fraternal can still escape into frontiers set at odd angles to the geographic. In fact, the freest people left in America may include the computer nerd and the contemplative nun, for each exist in a liberated zone of tolerance for the human soul and imagination.

Others of us pass in and out, shaping our homes, our offices, our associations, and our families into temporary zones of unregulated humanity, finding little oases in the desert of technocratic progress. Or we move furtively into the countryside, like Winston Smith escaping Big Brother, seeking what we have lost.

But most of it we do either alone or in small, polite equivalents of the gangs to which urban adolescents gravitate in their search for something they haven't lost because they never had it. . .

When we speak of time and space, we treat it as a personal problem. As if we were the only one too busy, too crowded, too behind the program projected on the schedule beaming up from our palm. It is part of the trick that society plays on us; it teaches us to regard its failings as our own.

In the past, there have been times when the politics of time and space came to the fore such as in era of exploration and imperialist expansion, or during moments of land reform and the liberation of slaves and serfs.

We are reminded of such times by the bumper stickers that read: "The Labor Movement . . . The folks who brought you the weekend." Dennis Kaplan and Sharon Chelton note in the journal Conscious Choice, "Why should work hours be increasing in an era characterized by electronic co-workers with the ability to sort entire phone directories in less time than most of us need to sort the mail? The effects of this technology are hardly illusory when measured in terms of productivity (up over 100 percent since 1948).

Yet, most workers have not gained more free time. If they had, [Juliet] Schor tells us, 'we could now produce our 1948 standard of living . . . in less than half the time it took in that year.' We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work-with pay."

Instead we passively accept the strip-mining of time and our space. We tolerate the grossest corporate graffiti while jailing the young who scrawl it only for love and attention and not market share. We let our children be huckstered in the classroom by Channel One when we could be destroying the magic of advertising by teaching them how it really works. We adapt to an explosion of prohibitions in our legal code, the invasion of our privacy to enforce them, and a government that is determined to scare us into doing precisely what it wants.

Some of the alternatives lie in pursuing such causes as a 30 hour week, an end to commercial intrusion of public space, the protection of places where life can bloom and a reassertion of the right of every American to go about their decent business without being blocked, followed, constrained, squeezed, pushed or having to fill out superfluous forms. But it also requires a sense of rebellion, ridicule and revulsion against much that is presently taken for granted. We need what Ned Plotsky called "draft dodgers of commercial civilization," and what Norman Mailer described as "psychic outlaws."

There is much work for such people: a planet to save before it is too late, a democracy being jettisoned for the illusion of order, minds being ossified by ads and agitprop and a media that can't find anything wrong with it all. Not the least, and far closer to the heart of things than it might appear, is the need to recover the moments and the geography that humans require in order to be human - time that brings us love, dreams, imaginings and memory, and space for us to use them as best we can, the most happy proof that we are still alive.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: LOSING TIME, LOSING SPACE

Sam Smith

URBAN sociologist Claude S. Fisher writes that "our species has lived in permanent settlements of any kind for only the last two percent of its history." As late as the 1850s, just two percent of the world's population lived in cities of more than 100,000, by 1900 only about ten percent. By the end of the last century, however, about half the world's humans lived in cities. In America, fewer than a quarter of us occupy a physical environment that is not primarily manufactured - which is to say, a place in which time and space are not mainly defined by other humans rather than by nature.

[]

There is a road in Maine over which I have walked, run, ridden a bike, and driven cars, trucks, and tractors for parts of more than fifty summers as well as during some of the years' lesser moments. It is not a long road, just a little more than three miles from the end of the point at the mouth of the Harraseeket River to where you turn hard left to go into town, or "up street" as it's called. Now mostly asphalt, the road occasionally surprises visitors by suddenly turning to dirt for a few hundred yards in the middle of a woods before going back to blacktop. For some, the tar provides reassurance of civilization; the dirt is literally terra incognita.

Although the town has only one percent of the population of Washington DC, it has one-tenth the road frontage. Maine, whose far corners are as distant as Washington and Boston with a slightly larger population than both combined, has more highway mileage than the rest of New England put together. So, as far as the town and the state are concerned, there's nothing particularly unusual about this road.

Nothing much happens along it, either. There are some homes, some farmland, a small state park, and a place where clammers park their pickups to walk down to the mud flats. In the more than 50 years that I have traveled this road, only a few new houses have been built. A few new signs have gone up, including a hand drawn one advertising 'cukes' and a town warning that the road is under radar surveillance, which isn't true. Maybe once a month you'll see a cop on the road, less often, say, than the truck from Down East Energy.

It is a beautiful road but then beautiful roads are easy to come by in Maine, so not even that is remarkable. Every once in a while something unusual happens along the road. A house gets moved, cattle get loose, and once I found a stolen car abandoned in the woods.

Mostly, though, the road is just there for whatever those walking, running, riding or driving want to do with it. It's been there, in some version, for over 300 years and isn't going anywhere else. It just sits there until somebody decides to use it. Then it becomes their road: a passage, a respite, a view, a space for meditation, an escape, a prod to memory, a reminder of how simple the good can be. A gift of time and space.

The road is shared by tractors, campers who have lost their way, tourists from Massachusetts driving too slowly and natives driving too fast. Joan Benoit trained on the road for the first Women's Olympic Marathon. When she won the race, all the boats in the harbor blew their horns because everyone knew how hard she had worked to get there.

When I was a boy, and much of the road was still dirt, there was a small hill down which, with freedom's fury, I would ride my red bike towards the quarter mile straight-away and the woods beyond, a place secure from adults, tasks, scolding and trouble. In the woods there was a shell heap left by Indians and a stone wall built by those who came after. I thought there might be moose and bear in the woods as well, but I never saw them. Later I found the remains of Nathaniel and Mary Aldrich's homestead with the sinking stones of the foundations and the standing stones of the barnyard. Not far away, hidden in the undergrowth, was their well. Nathaniel and Mary Aldrich traveled the road before the Revolution and used their time and space to go to sea and to have 14 children.

In the woods there are trees with wide spread branches intermingled with cramped companions standing rigidly at attention - a clue that this had once been farmland, that once there had been enough room for a field pine to stretch its arms.

When I was about 16, Hurricane Carol came through and toppled many of the trees in the woods. In the quiet of the storm's eye my father and I foolishly tried to cut a way to town. The woods hid the wind's noise and anger and we didn't notice that the eye had passed until trees started falling around us. We got out just in time and it would be two days before anyone made it up street.

Down the road about a mile and a half was Mr. Banter's farm, with a kitchen that smelled of chickens and stale milk. It also had the nearest phone. Further still was the house of Jimmy Mann who, when I was 14, taught me how to drive a six-wheel drive Army surplus personnel carrier and how to use the winch in front. His father, Horace Mann, lived on a farm a little further down the point. In fact, Manns had lived in this part of Maine for over 300 years. Several of the newer houses on the point were built by Jimmy Mann but they never seemed all that new because they were built by someone who belonged to both past and place.

The fields had their own time and space. When you were mowing them, your tractor left a fresh green record of the minutes and hours and of what had happened within them. Beyond the fields was the shore where the sea came and went twice a day, rising and falling nine feet, bringing or taking, agitated or bored. Later I would go to sea as a navigator in the Coast Guard. My job was to know where we were and how long it would take to get somewhere else. Time and space were the things most meticulously recorded on charts and in the log.

Beyond the shore was the bay and beyond that the ocean and beyond that the horizon, which made believe it was a stone wall or fence, pretending that time and space had finite boundaries.

Sometimes, along the road, time ran out. A short distance from where you turned left to go to town, my nephew Haze, still in his twenties, died in a car crash. And it was along this road that my mother and I followed the ambulance that had rushed seven miles to where we were futilely trying to shove life back into my father's body.

As the rescue squad crossed the Little River bridge, I noticed that the nine foot tide was out, leaving a half mile of mud flats all the way to Googins Island. That evening, as we returned from the hospital, widowed and fatherless, the tide was in, replacing the half mile of flats with a half mile of still water nine feet deep. The moon shone on the water and I felt an unexpected peace at being inexorably a part of natural time and space.

[]

IN my normal geography of Washington DC, time and space don't come as gift. More often than not they belong to someone else, another commodity that we get to use only upon payment, under instruction, after standing in line, waiting bumper to bumper - or upon throwing our papers into a pile, grabbing our jacket, and rushing out the door.

In fact, there are now more people in prison in than there are farmers, which is to say that you are more likely to find Americans kept in a cage than you are to find driving their tractor along a country road. America has moved from frontier to supermax.

My first diurnal sign of temporal and spatial control typically comes with the morning news - "police activity" the local public radio station strangely calls it, a euphemism which could mean a burning tractor-trailer, a multi-car crash, or the diaspora of construction, but certainly means a delay for those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Capital Beltway hosts many of these incidents. It was completed in 1968. Since then the population of the metropolitan area has doubled. There is nothing remarkable about this; we have come to accept huge traffic jams like we accept storms and drought, except that nature didn't create the traffic jam. According to a study by planners at Berkeley, San Franciscans are losing about 90,000 hours a day sitting in traffic jams. That's enough hours to be considered normal.

All around us are rules, exigencies, interruptions and delays caused by ever more of us wanting to do the same thing at the same time. The line at the movie or nightclub. The restaurant with no table until 9:30; the hotel that is booked; the sign on the Massachusetts Pike last summer - the first I had seen - warning that rest rooms at the next service area were limited.

The cause of these delays is a world in which nearly 11,000 people are added every hour, creating a new population the size of Newark NJ each day. If we continue to grow at the same rate as in the past decade, America will double in population by about 2058. As Gaylord Nelson pointed out that means we will have or need twice as much as everything we had at the turn of the century. Twice as many cars, trucks, planes, airports, parking lots, streets, bridges, tunnels, freeways, houses, apartment buildings, grade schools, high schools, colleges, trade schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons.

Twice as much water and food if you can find it. Twice as many chemicals and other pollutants in the air and water, twice as much heat radiation from all the new construction, twice as much crime, twice as many fires, twice as big traffic jams, and twice as many walls with graffiti on them. In Japan, there is already not enough room for pets in some cities, so people rent dogs just for the pleasure of walking them around the block.

Whenever I hear of another school shooting or other youthful violence, the first thing I think about is Dr. Calhoun and his mice. Dr. John Calhoun put four pairs of white mice in a steel cage eight and a half feet on a side. Within two years the mice had increased to 2,200. The adult mice began excluding young mice from their company and the young began biting, attacking, and slashing one another. Finally social and sexual intercourse became impossible without violence. The mice stopped reproducing and eventually all died out.

We're in a cage, too, except it has shopping malls and freeways and cops with guns and sirens. We have governments and hospitals and schools and we have talk shows and newspapers to help us forget that we're in a cage.

But spend an evening surfing the channels and count the humans trapped or being destroyed - by crime, for fun, in sport. You can say it's television's fault, but, in the end, the producers and the reality cops and the extreme fighters are also in a cage, just like the viewers. Each is trying to control an environment over which they have lost control, whether using a gun, a ball, a camera, their fists or a zapper. And it always ends in another confrontation: another ratings war, another arrest, another illegal deal, another TV pilot, another channel.

If you step back, there is madness in this, but if you think only of those in the cage - what they can hear, see, and understand - then a primal logic emerges, the need to restrain, suppress, or eliminate the proximate usurpers of one's rightful time and space.

We don't talk about it much except when somebody suggests we might do it differently and then we say they are "thinking outside the box." Thinking and living inside the box has become normal.

[]

AS with Dr. Calhoun's mice, the problem began to reveal itself with the young. After World War II, spurred by a series of reports from Harvard president James Conant, America deliberately dismantled the education system that had brought it that far. Among other things, Conant considered the elimination of the small high school essential for the US to compete with the Soviets. America listened and between 1950 and 1970 the number of school districts in the country declined from 83,700 to 18,000. Schools increased in size, administration became centralized, principals became corporate executives and wardens rather than educators, and teachers became bureaucrats rather than prophets with honor in their own classrooms.

By the late 1990s, a center had been established at Sandia, NM, where the Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin - the latter more commonly a leading purveyor of large scale violence - designed ways to keep students safely within the cage. Here is their description of a well-functioning school:

- All students are required to carry ID cards on campus. This process helps ensure that only authorized people are on school grounds and at school functions.

- Tamper-resistant cameras are positioned to monitor areas known for incidents of fights, drug and alcohol use, smoking, and vandalism.

- A hand-held metal detector, loaned to the school by Sandia, is used to search for weapons in rare but threatening situations.

- Better lighting is being installed at strategic outdoor locations thanks to the Public Service Company of New Mexico.

- Microdots, air scribes, and indelible and invisible paint are used on equipment and other assets to deter theft by providing a unique identification.

- Hair-analysis test kits were provided to the school for parents to use in instances of suspected drug use by their children.

- A portable breathalyzer unit was supplied to the school and is used in instances of suspected alcohol use by students or employees.

It is a model not that different from that used by Santana High School, the scene of a recent shooting. As the Washington Post noted, "There were phones in every classroom. Security guards patrolled the hallways with two-way radios. And a sheriff's deputy was assigned to visit the campus each day." Here is the Santana dress code:

"Clothing must be clean and in good repair and garments may not display profane or obscene language or pictures, vulgar gestures, promote or encourage use of any alcohol/tobacco product or any controlled substance. Appropriate footwear must be worn at all times while students are at school or at school sponsored activities. Steel toed footwear and slippers are not acceptable. Students are not permitted to wear or be in possession of any headgear while at school. This includes all hats, hoods, caps, nets, bandanas, scarves, beanies, etc. The school administration may disallow other types of clothing if it is determined that they represent a reference to gang behavior or an attitude/environment that law enforcement, probation, or other school district administrators, deem may jeopardize a safe and orderly environment for students and school staff. Dress Code Specifics: No logos or look alike images representing gangs or racist groups, such as the number 13, clenched fists, swastikas, iron crosses, etc. may be on your clothing or in your possession at any time on the school campus. This includes those sometimes represented on Independent and Metal Mulisha gear. The only "pride" to be displayed at Santana is "Sultan Pride." Pants will be worn at the waist. All straps or suspenders will be fastened. Belts will not hang more than four (4) inches beyond the buckle. No bare midriffs, halters, backless shirts, strapless or tube top shirts. No items of clothing where undergarments [or] swimwear are exposed. No men's sleeveless undershirts, stylish bras worn as shirts, and mesh, lace or sheer (without lining) clothing over bare skin. The tops of shirts/blouses for both males and females should adequately cover the chest area and not expose excessive chest/cleavage. The hem of shorts must be below clenched fists when arm is extended at side so that buttock is covered completely. The hem of skirts and slits in skirts must be below open hand when arm is extended at side. Consequences: Students who are not dressed appropriately will be brought to the office and may be sent home to change or be required to wear a borrowed shirt. Headgear will be confiscated and returned to the student at the end of the day on the first offense, to a parent on a second offense, and remain in the assistant principal's office until the remainder of the term on subsequent offenses."

Now here is an announcement that appeared in the Santana newsletter at the time of the shooting:

"STUDENT CONFERENCES: Today we will begin conferencing with incoming 12th graders (present 11th graders) and continue throughout the next 3 days. Please come to the Counseling office immediately after receiving your call slip so that we can see you quickly and you may return to class."

Note the detail the school lavished on what was on the students' bodies and how little time it had to speak of what was on their minds. And it's not just high schools that have turned their students into controlled substances. Michele Tolela Myers, the president of Sarah Lawrence, wrote in the NY Times:

"Attend a conference of higher education leaders these days, and you will hear a lot of talk about things like brand value, markets, image and pricing strategy. In the new lingua franca of higher education, students are 'consumers of our product' in one conversation or presentation and 'inputs' - a part of what we sell - in the next . . . We 'bid for student talent,' as the new language would put it, because we know that 'star value' in the student body affects the 'brand value' of the university's name: its prestige, its rankings, its desirability, and ultimately its wealth and its ability to provide more 'value per dollar' to its 'customers.' . . . A business professor told a group of us at one recent conference that to run a successful organization you had better make decisions on the basis of being 'best in the world,' and if you couldn't be best in the world in something, then you outsourced the function or got rid of the unit that didn't measure up. Have we really come to believe that we can only measure ourselves in relation to others, and that value and goodness are only measured against something outside the self? Do we really want to teach our children that life is all about beating the competition?"

Apparently, yes. Which is why we are giving up education in favor of cram courses. Which is why, as a matter of national policy, we are reducing knowledge, wisdom, and survival to a matter of checking the right box. Standardized tests for standardized humans - without time or space for anything else. . .

[]

There are less obvious thieves of time and space. Such as the government. In the past thirty years the number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. Nearly half of all post-Civil War federal criminal laws have been passed since 1970. The number of lawyers have grown with the laws; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. This is not the product of necessity. Neither is the explosion the product of ideology. Both liberals and conservatives have overstuffed the law shelves, albeit for different reasons.

Whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust.

Then there is the media, purportedly our surrogate priest, parent and teacher but in fact functioning like gangs of burglars breaking and entering our brains and stealing time and space from us in a way not even our parents experienced. What was once extraordinary became merely unusual and finally ubiquitous as we moved from manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment and points of reference became ever more distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature. Sitting in a bar, riding an exercycle at the gym, or waiting in the airport, we trade proximate reality for a distant, visible, decibled but ultimately unreachable substitute. . .

Some fifteen years ago, an extraordinary anarchist writer using the pseudonym Hakim Bey described what he called "the closure of the map." The last bit of earth, he wrote, had been claimed by a nation state in 1899:

"Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance - not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of 'territorial gangsterism.' Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed . . . in theory.

Bey asked:

"Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind."

Bey saw an out in the creation of what he called temporary autonomous zones. The TAZ, which he refused to define explicitly, "is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it . . . The TAZ can 'occupy' these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves - because they never intersected with the spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of simulation.". . .

One need not accept all of Hakim Bey's vision to realize that the closing of the map is beyond contention. Further he was brave enough to speak of this claustrophobic specter while the bulk of the nation's intelligentsia refuses to this day to incorporate the diminishing geography of time and space into their considerations. This is not some nuclear reaction that we can not understand nor some chemical poison that we patiently assume our leaders will warn us against before it is too late. This is the essence of human experience: what we can see, what we can hear, what we can have, where we can go and where we are prohibited.

There is at present no politics of time and space, no reporters assigned to cover them, no time on their broadcasts nor space in their papers. And so we are confined in silence. We accept corporate trespassing on our hours and our acres with stunning passivity. We permit television monitors in public areas to interrupt our thoughts, break our sleep, distract our reading and strain our conversation. We turn much of what is left over to our government, as though admitting we were no longer competent to handle time and space for ourselves.

There are, of course, exceptions. For example, the quarter of us who live in places of undefined range and unincorporated rhythms. More than 90% of physical America itself is still not urban. Part of the political tension in this country stems not so much from our differing ideologies as from our contrasting ecologies. It has been like that ever since the first adolescent left the farm for the city, but now the natural and the mechanical repeatedly overlap, symbolized by the cell towers planted in open space like great flagpoles by our corporate conquerors.

[]

Time and space were once an essential part of our nature. Gertrude Stein wrote that "in America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is." By the 1950s, however, Alan Ginsberg was already speaking of "an America which no longer exists except in Greyhound bus terminals, except in small dusty towns seen from the window of a speeding car."

The deeply religious, the utopian, the cybernetic and the fraternal can still escape into frontiers set at odd angles to the geographic. In fact, the freest people left in America may include the computer nerd and the contemplative nun, for each exist in a liberated zone of tolerance for the human soul and imagination.

Others of us pass in and out, shaping our homes, our offices, our associations, and our families into temporary zones of unregulated humanity, finding little oases in the desert of technocratic progress. Or we move furtively into the countryside, like Winston Smith escaping Big Brother, seeking what we have lost.

But most of it we do either alone or in small, polite equivalents of the gangs to which urban adolescents gravitate in their search for something they haven't lost because they never had it. . .

When we speak of time and space, we treat it as a personal problem. As if we were the only one too busy, too crowded, too behind the program projected on the schedule beaming up from our palm. It is part of the trick that society plays on us; it teaches us to regard its failings as our own.

In the past, there have been times when the politics of time and space came to the fore such as in era of exploration and imperialist expansion, or during moments of land reform and the liberation of slaves and serfs.

We are reminded of such times by the bumper stickers that read: "The Labor Movement . . . The folks who brought you the weekend." Dennis Kaplan and Sharon Chelton note in the journal Conscious Choice, "Why should work hours be increasing in an era characterized by electronic co-workers with the ability to sort entire phone directories in less time than most of us need to sort the mail? The effects of this technology are hardly illusory when measured in terms of productivity (up over 100 percent since 1948).

Yet, most workers have not gained more free time. If they had, [Juliet] Schor tells us, 'we could now produce our 1948 standard of living . . . in less than half the time it took in that year.' We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work-with pay."

Instead we passively accept the strip-mining of time and our space. We tolerate the grossest corporate graffiti while jailing the young who scrawl it only for love and attention and not market share. We let our children be huckstered in the classroom by Channel One when we could be destroying the magic of advertising by teaching them how it really works. We adapt to an explosion of prohibitions in our legal code, the invasion of our privacy to enforce them, and a government that is determined to scare us into doing precisely what it wants.

Some of the alternatives lie in pursuing such causes as a 30 hour week, an end to commercial intrusion of public space, the protection of places where life can bloom and a reassertion of the right of every American to go about their decent business without being blocked, followed, constrained, squeezed, pushed or having to fill out superfluous forms. But it also requires a sense of rebellion, ridicule and revulsion against much that is presently taken for granted. We need what Ned Plotsky called "draft dodgers of commercial civilization," and what Norman Mailer described as "psychic outlaws."

There is much work for such people: a planet to save before it is too late, a democracy being jettisoned for the illusion of order, minds being ossified by ads and agitprop and a media that can't find anything wrong with it all. Not the least, and far closer to the heart of things than it might appear, is the need to recover the moments and the geography that humans require in order to be human - time that brings us love, dreams, imaginings and memory, and space for us to use them as best we can, the most happy proof that we are still alive.

October 23, 2007

HOW TO TELL IF YOU'RE STILL A LIBERAL

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings. This article appeared during the Clinton years.]

Sam Smith

You are probably not a liberal anymore if:

You think the elimination or reduction of social services is a reform.

Accept the idea that Social Security and Medicare must live within the limits of an arbitrary trust fund, but that the Pentagon need be under no such restrictions.

Liked the Clintons' health plan and wonder whether single player health care wouldn't be too socialistic.

Consider a 5% wage increase in an industry to be inflationary but a 5% return on your stocks in that industry to be inadequate.

Think it's all right to bomb the smithereens out of Balkan, Asian or Middle Eastern countries for humanitarian reasons.

Regard the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, PBS and NPR as liberal media.

Know what NARAL stands for but not SEIU.

Agreed with Toni Morrison that Clinton was our first black president.

Have doubts about gays in the US military but approve of having the US military in over 130 countries.

Spend more time thinking about Hillary's chances and executive glass ceilings than you do about sweatshops, the minimum wage or workplace safety.

Are afraid your children can't handle drugs and booze as well as you did when you were their age.

Believe that because you were robbed once, you can support mandatory sentencing and the drug war with a clear conscience.

Have an piercing alarm system on your Lexus but think gun owners are paranoid.

Haven't noticed that democracy and the Constitution aren't doing so well these days.

The front seat of your SUV is higher than the front seat of your plumbers' pickup truck.

FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: HOW TO TELL IF YOU'RE STILL A LIBERAL

[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his writings. This article appeared during the Clinton years.]

Sam Smith

You are probably not a liberal anymore if:

You think the elimination or reduction of social services is a reform.

Accept the idea that Social Security and Medicare must live within the limits of an arbitrary trust fund, but that the Pentagon need be under no such restrictions.

Liked the Clintons' health plan and wonder whether single player health care wouldn't be too socialistic.

Consider a 5% wage increase in an industry to be inflationary but a 5% return on your stocks in that industry to be inadequate.

Think it's all right to bomb the smithereens out of Balkan, Asian or Middle Eastern countries for humanitarian reasons.

Regard the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, PBS and NPR as liberal media.

Know what NARAL stands for but not SEIU.

Agreed with Toni Morrison that Clinton was our first black president.

Have doubts about gays in the US military but approve of having the US military in over 130 countries.

Spend more time thinking about Hillary's chances and executive glass ceilings than you do about sweatshops, the minimum wage or workplace safety.

Are afraid your children can't handle drugs and booze as well as you did when you were their age.

Believe that because you were robbed once, you can support mandatory sentencing and the drug war with a clear conscience.

Have an piercing alarm system on your Lexus but think gun owners are paranoid.

Haven't noticed that democracy and the Constitution aren't doing so well these days.

The front seat of your SUV is higher than the front seat of your plumbers' pickup truck.