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Created: November 22, 2001
Latest Update: November 23, 2001
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Chapter 5: Mea Culpa


Learning Is Messy

Copyright: Jeanne Curran, November 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.

It was Yvone Lenard who said to us back in 1963 in the UCLA French Department that "learning is messy." "Performance," she added, "is neat." That has remained my guiding principle through almost 40 years of teaching since then. But bureaucracy, as Weber promised us, turned learning into discrete rituals that can be sliced up, duplicated, run through the institutional factory, and turn out the greatest number of "educated" products at the least cost, and with the least effort from the workers and from the products themselves. That's not messy. And that's not learning.

When I first came to Ambassador in 1971 or 72, I found a wonderful, turbulent world. The Watts Riots had just taken place. The government was scrambling to make things more equitable in keeping with the Civil Rigts Movement and the protest of the sixties. Ambassador is very close to "Watts," but had been located in the upper middle class, living-beyond-your-means bedroom community of Santa Rosita. The Left and the minorities fought to remove the college, whose offices were then located in a bank in Santa Rosita, to vacant land just to the South of the "Watts" area.

The politics of the left won. The campus moved. And those who had planned, organized, and ran it never ever gave up trying to turn it back into the elite suburban model of their dreams. After all, this was the land of Hollywood, anything could happen.

Notes: The dream permeated all the staff because it was in romantic Southern California and because they had no real experience with marxism, with revolution, and with their own complicity through denial. Then this translates into the way the teaching goes down. And then we take off on the revolutionary path after Freire and Gide, and Nietzsche, etc. And then we come down to the daily battleground.

Oh, yes, the daily battleground. And that is where we find ourselves, isn't it? Now, you understand that I'm hopeless as the narrator of this story because I can't even remember where we were. That's because the antics of Slubberdegullion and Taradiddle and the Aging Fox go on, even unto the present day, and it's enormously hard to concentrate about what happened long ago when you find yourself in the middle of it right now.

Well, even though we've lost a whole week in here, I haven't given up. I can be a farily good narrator, if all these characters will just settle down and leave me in peace for a while. Now, let me see. Where on earth were we? Oh, yes, the daily battleground. Slubberdegullion was reputedly very bright. I'm not entirely sure about that myself because Slubberdegullion blustered so that he was far too much for anyone who was "passing" to cope with. Frankly, he always scared me to death. Too unpredictable, angry, a bit of Rabelais in him. Trouble with Rabelais was that although his boisterousness went over just fine in the Sixteenth Century in l'Ile de la Cite, it was a tad too risky in modern urban areas, at least for youngish women trying to pass for middle class.

Actually, if I'd known him as a robust male (or perhaps even female) drinking buddy, he could have told some wild tales and been a worthwhile companion. But the brakes didn't hold. He was willing to risk too much for one who had barely managed to slip past the guardians of the gates. Taradiddle was less intimidating, not near so scary. Taradiddle basked in Slubberdegullion's bluster, and tried very hard to develop the same air, but just made you giggle or smile.

And then there were others. The one, who just hated to be interrrupted, was very slow and precise, and went on and on and on until if you didn't interrupt him you'd burst. Then he'd scold you like a bad child who had broken into his heavy thoughts. And this was in the seventies when feminism was in its heyday!

And of course we had the gorgeous batchelor with whom everyone fell in love, students and colleagues alike. Oops, no. That's right. I remember now. He wasn't a batchelor, but I think he was between wives.

We had real Marxists, and real conservatives, and lots of idealism about the possibilities of education in this community. Well, most of us had that idealism. Some of us just wanted to be the elite faculty of the elite college in Santa Rosita. I guess we really were an eclectic group, with little to hold us together. That's easier to say now than it was then, because thirty years later I have the wisdom of hindsight.

But these were still exciting times back then, when we did face all the possibilities the Civil Rights Movement brought with open door admissions to our colleges. We set about what I guess we hoped was education for revolution against the injustices of the past. We moved from Marxist perspectives, from ethnomethodology and phenomenology, and in a few cases from the classic perspective. We weren't very tolerant of each other, even back then, though.

I remember Taradiddle approaching me angrily.

"How could you tell your students that in 25 years the university runs the risk of being just like a high school?"

"Easy. If we move any further in the direction of one-to-one correspondence and linearity on accountability we are going to end up that way. Just look at how the Stull Bill is requiring that every year of grade school be broken into readily measured objectives. That's not learning. That's Freire's "banking education." (Although I should note in all fairness that I'm not really sure if I knew Freire then.) If that continues, we'll be teaching high school if we're still here."

He huffed and he puffed. But 25 years later we're both teaching in a college that feels like a high school. Now some of us have refused to conform. But the cost is overwhelming. That's how I lost this last week, struggling to catch up with my own self-imposed deadlines. I rest my case.

We weren't into postmodernism back then and so no one thought to turn their theories back on them as they spoke eloquently of Marxism and referred to some of us as "capitalists." Just think of it. I was successfully passing as a "capitalist." No one noticed how much they were denying of our own complicity in the social system we lived in. And no one knew yet how to build new discipline into the system without losing the good and requisite discipline along with the old structural violence.

Now that undoubtedly takes some explaining. I don't mean to obfuscate, you know. It's just that I'm tired, and a little panicky about how much time I've lost in telling this tale. What I mean here is that some of us thought it was enough to just "raise consciousness," to bring to common awareness the concept of enterprise liability, which still existed way back then, to acknowledge the exploitation of the Native American, of the African Americans.

And that was a good starting place. We did need to begin by talking, by making it socially acceptable to say what our mothers had taught us never to say. For as long as we denied all these things, and repressed them deep within ourselves, we were as complicit as those who championed the Vietnamese War. So we fantasized ourselves as radical and brought our eager and excited students to awareness.

But right about this point is when we began to diverge. Like the others I took my students on field trips to the Free Clinics, the Drug Rehabilitation Centers, the "Groups" that abounded in every neighborhood for getting in touch with ourselves, the later "Me" generation.

Twenty-five years ago I didn't have this all worked out in my head. It was happening, and I was smack in the middle of it. Nothing could have been more exciting for a teacher than to greet this whole new wave of students who wanted nothing more than to "learn" everything that had been hidden away from them for so long.

One of my first field trips was to the Free Clinic. Everyone, simply everyone, had a group to develop consciousness. And in our Marxist concern for avoiding class distinctions we had established Free Clinics so that those without the resources of Woody Allen could still avail themselves of this liberating consciousness raising. Once we started to recongize an Other we figured we should understand ourselves as "Other" and were fascinated by these encounters with ourselves.

My students and I ventured to a Free Clinic in one of the South Bay beach cities. We all sat on the floor cross-legged, young gurus that we were, and waited for enlightenment to begin. A fairly ordinary exchange of "getting in touch with myself" and expressing my feelings progressed around the group until one young man. You know, I keep forgetting that I don't need to say "young man." We were all young, then, weren't we?

Sorry, I digress. A slender dark-haired and rather morose guy across from me began to speak of his week.

"I had a terrible week. I lost confidence in myself. I just couldn't get anything right. It was my father all over again, telling me that I just wasn't good enough."

One of the "therapist/counselors" quietly passed a pillow, an ordinary bed pillow, to the speaker. And he placed it before him and began to beat it passionately. He sobbed that he couldn't help himself as he pounded the pillow. And then he produced tears, as he added remorsefully that he had turned to heroin again. Well, I think it was heroin. Who remembers after twenty-five years?

I was spellbound. This was so phony that vaudeville must have been played better. And believing in the spirit of consciousness-raising, I joined right in enthusiastically.

"That is so much bull shit."

Well, that got their attention. All eyes turned to me. I had been teaching the concept of "plastic intimacy" and explaining to my students the importance of reality therapy in coping. Here was a drug user announcing that he had no responsibility for is own life and actions. It was all the pillow's fault. What a splendid example for my students to follow a confrontation with reality in a supportive group environment. There appeared to be enough pillows that we could all pulverize one.

Silence.

Uncomfortable silence.

Jerry, a friend of mine who was running the session, gave me a pregnant glare. He turned pointedly to the guy with the father pillow and encouraged him to beat it up some more:

"Did the incidents this week bring back memories of something that happened with your father?"

"Yeah," he murmured as he began to hammer away at the helpless pillow again. "He always blamed me for everything. He . . . .

"Oh, come on . . . It wasn't your father who took the drugs this week. It was you. . . "

"Yeah, but I couldn't help it." with a ragged beat to the pillow.

"Why not?"

"Now, wait a minute. . . . Let's try to understand this. John was struggling to maintain when he was overcome by . . .

"John wanted heroin, or whatever. John didn't want to work at staying straight. John took heroin, or whatever. Now John blames it on pillow. . . ."

"We are not here to judge. That is inappropriate in . . . "

"Neither are we here to play games and support this kind of cheap forgiveness . . ."

"John is entitled to his feelings . . ."

"Yeah, I'm entitled to feel pain . . . "

"May be, but you're not entitled to escape responsibility for your self destructive acts by beating the crap out of that poor pillow. . ."

Couldn't stop right there to explain to my students what was going on, but another counselor moved the group into a new phase of awareness, and Jerry glared at me.

We took a break for coffee and Jerry read me the riot act. I couldn't bring my students if I was going to interrupt the therapeutic process.

"Therapeutic process! That's a straight con game! How much experience with hard drugs have you had?"

"You have to understand why he does it."

"He does it because he wants to, Jerry. Because it's easier than facing the discipline of not doing it."

"He doesn't have that discipline."

"And he's not working too hard at developing it."

"It's time to go back in. No more disruptions. We'll talk tomorrow."

And so we dragged through the rest of the meeting with minimal consciousness about the discipline John wasn't developing, and broke up around ten. I said goodnight to my students. Jerry headed for the therapy debriefing group, and I headed for my old Mustang. Turned out I was parked right next to John, the Discipline-Lacking-One, who came over as I got into my car.

"Hey, how'd you know that was bull shit?"

"I grew up with it. Why'd you do it? It's pretty silly, you know."

"I have to. It's a condition of my parole that I attend this group once a week. I was busted for drugs."

"Figures. Good night."

611 . . . Jerry called an hour or so later. And scolded again. I had no sense of the therapeutic process. Yeah, right. I wasn't fond of holding out crying towels. Now, if it's a condition of your parole, well, then I can see your point. Gots to put up with some inconvenience to stay out of jail. But I don't have to buy into it.

Jerry was one of the draft dodgers who'd filtered back into the country from Canada. He was really into therapy and senstivity and feeling. And he still had a lot of innocence, even more than me. He told me one night about a therapy session with a schizophrenic. After an hour, he was so caught up in the imagery, he had difficulty coming back to reality. Damn, Vietnam screwed up a lot of lives, in so many ways. Kids, for whom insanity was seductive. Well, compared to some of the insanity in our system they weren't so far wrong.

Discipline

I tossed and turned that night wondering how this was all going to create the transformation I dreamed of. Teaching everyone to think for him/herself. I had Freire's instinct of seeing the potential in people. I had tried to tell Hans that my students were as bright as the kids at Harvard. My years at Tulane and then at UCLA had taught me that. The elite colleges didn't have a corner on the bright students, they just had the ability to focus on them, and not worry about everyone else.

Hans insisted this was just raw intelligence, and that they lacked discipline. True. But so did the elite students. They weren't all there for the academic discourse. Lots were just there to get their degrees and get on with their lives. Our students were different. They were more like me. They were excluded, and they knew it. Shades of Frantz Fanon. We were pretty clear about who we were. That was lived experience. And we were pretty clear about our own intelligence. We knew we were smarter than lots of those with titles of authority.

But at the same time we knew we were "different." A lifetime of being excluded made it pretty clear to me that we weren't on an equal playing field. But the privileges I hadn't had gave to those who belonged a confidence, some skills, a sense that the system was meant to help you. That confidence, those skills were real. They could pass easily and comfortably through the whole corporate system. I couldn't. My students couldn't.

And that led to anger. Real anger, hard anger, not just a desire for fair treatment, but anger. How dare you treat me like your servant? How dare you say to me, as one of my colleagues did.

"Well, we're all doing something important. So could you just cover that meeting?"

"Sure, I never do anything important. Would you like me to feed the kids, too? Or will the babysitter do that?" You Son-of-a-B#@#, I'm not your wife. I have the same degrees you do.

But then the therapist said "You can't judge them by your standards."

"Why not? Aren't they judging me and my students by their standards. My students don't have the same functional literacy as those of Harvard. So they're not "bright enough" for these teachers. I know I can teach them. But they know they're not bright enough to read, let alone to learn. They're passing, a "C if they can breathe," I swear, I'm not making this up. Then when we have our Honors program one of the very, very few local Phi Beta Kappas announces, "We are gathered here today to honor grade inflation."

Twenty-five years later I'm still angry. You get used to it, but it doesn't go away. The pain of their "knowing" that we're not OK, not as smart as them (hah!), not "real college students, (hah!), lack integrity.

Now, see, here I go again. I'm probably not a good narrator. I'm trying, you understand, but Fanon was right. I don't just want to be treated fairly. I'm angry and I want them to know it, and I don't want to indulge in cheap forgiveness with them. And now I hear Ribbit, our "meat and potatoes chair." He just wants a nice smooth operating department, in the old tradition, teaching young scholars to go on and seek doctorates in sociology so they can carry on the tradition.

Hello! That tradition got us here! Look at this mess! This tradition got some of you ranting at me that what I'm doing isn't teaching. Excuse me. I'm the one with the Ph.D. in education, in learning theory. You guys don't think anything matters if it isn't quantitative, but you don't any of you know quantitative analysis. That's what you hired me for. Oh, yes, Aging Fox knows it. But he doesn't know how to teach it to those who come in without the traditional academic mathematics. I do! That was my specialty. But it takes time and love and support, and then they all learn. But if they all learn, whom shall we fail? We know these aren't "good" students. With few exceptions we must document their "not goodness" or we won't be taken seriously academically.

Of course, then I'm not exacting that theoretically unsound grade curve flaunted as the most successsful blame the victim routine I've ever encountered. If I can't teach them, it must be their fault.

OK. That's better. I digress. This is the tale of a better world, not a chance to wreak my vengeance on reality. I had forgotten how angry I get over these issues. I'll behave now as a much better narrator. I'll get on with our tale.

These issues, of how smart our students actually were, of how much they were prepared to learn, of whether we really did manage to respect their integrity as learning and thinking individuals, all these were very much "dans l'air." We didn't exactly talk about them, because my mother's sense of "don't let the neighbors know" still predominated. Instead, the guys went about selling their Marxist perspective of class issues to all these eager students, and denouncing those of us who hadn't studied Marx, and just wanted to survive. I went to an elite school. Private. Expensive. Surely one of my professors knew who Marx was, but they didn't bother to mention it very often. And I didn't bother to think about it very often because we were so far below the "working class" standard that I figured the Marxists were all too well off to understand the problems of the streets.

We should have gotten along pretty well. All I wanted was to bring sociological skills in learning how to make the system work for you to all these people who hadn't been let into college before. And if the guys were teaching Marxism, that should have been what they wanted. But they still believed in term papers. So at semester's end they insisted upon term papers and even final exams.

One small problem. These people really had come from schools where they weren't taught comfort with reading, where they weren't given lots of opportunity to write. Fodder for the snotty Phi Beta Kappas of the campus: these people can't read and write! "No shit, Shelock. What was your first clue?" And what have you done to make reading more exciting for them? And how have you taught them to write?

And lo and behold. Grade curves appeared magically, and we discovered that our students weren't so bright, after all. Of course, since we weren't into reflexivity and postmodernism yet in those days, we were never asked how these students were supposed to have learned to write term papers and exams, just because that was how we were used to measuring learning. One of our more radical colleagues led marches and supported rallies, and assured her students how important their learning was, but then grew nervous without a traditional grade curve, and sprung an exam on them at the last moment. She was a Marxist. Radical Marxist. Feminist. Radical feminist. And of course she was not complicit with the system of dominance over the poor and minorities. She just denied that she had harmed them.

But to hurry on with the tale I've been charged with. Nah, let's be honest. I insisted on this role as narrator. In our family the narrator does the typing. And I wasn't about to type if I couldn't be the narrator. My typing. My story. But once I get into the swing of it I'll hurry along more efficiently. It's just that I keep discovering that all that stuff I repressed over the last twenty-five years keeps popping up . I knew I'd have trouble with a linear tale. Time isn't like that, you know. But that's another story.

I was angry about the hypocrisy of the open door affirmative action proffered to the community, when all that meant was you could get in, but no one wanted the responsibility of how to change the whole institution to fit its new structural context. The federal government said we couldn't discriminate anymore. Well, about time. But it wasn't the federal government discriminating now. The law was on our side. But the term papers and the final exams and the grade curves, they were within the institution. They were handled by committee. They didn't discriminate. They just put up the barriers so we could prove that you weren't really competent enough to make it anyway. The rules were winning!

On the other side of the continent, which might as well have been in Russia for its likelihood of entering my life, Joe Feagin was fighting the same crap and calling it institutional racism. But he had a lot of support, in Texas, I think it was, then. I had come in a roundabout way from physics and math to French to education and learning theory, and a postdoc in Sociology, having passed through the usual number of husbands along the way. That was one approach to tuition in the old days. All of my mentors had meanwhile been enticed off by the brain drain of the seventies to Texas and Canada. So minus mentors and husband and inclusion into the well-schooled group of marxists and feminists, I just dove in on my own into the streets as laboratory.

It was exciting. It was just like having my own great laboratory to work in. Lonely, I would have preferred some pals to play with, but there were lots of students, most of whom were pretty serious adults. And I was naive. I had this theory that if I just built this wonderful sandbox to play in, the other guys would want to come and play with us. Field of Dreams, yes. But in real life, it didn't work out. Well, now, that's not true. It worked out beyond my wildest dreams. It just didn't turn out as I had imagined it.

I thought my colleagues would come and join me in this wonderful new affirmation of education, and that we would all live happily ever after. The students came. And we did experience the wonder I knew was education. But then the "good" students came with my colleagues. They had coffee, they directed work shops, they directed. Until one day I discovered that the "good" students were directing and the "others" were working. And then the Aging Wolf took one of our grants and paid the "good" students, but made the "others" work for . . . well, I believe "credit" is what they called it. I sure didn't know the word "colonialism" then, but I know it when I see it, and I saw it.

I still can't believe, as I look back, that we grew so far apart, all of us. We seemed to want the same goals - social justice, an end to discrimination, an end to the exploitation of empire. How did we get so lost?

Well, my first clue was the increasing emphasis on grades and "standards." Somehow all those emphases cast me and my students as less than OK. We weren't real teachers and real students; given real students the rest of my colleagues would have been able to reproduce Yale and Harvard, which is where they really belonged. I was hearing the domination of hierarchy and empire again. And I'd been hearing that since the days when they tried to arrest at Tulane for inviting students from Dillard. It was still against the law for Blacks and Whites to meet together on a white campus. But it was only the late fifties then.

Tulane students who could barely perform academically themselves often complained of the problems of teaching at Dillard, where "they" can't even read and write. But we did meet at Tulane, cops or no cops. And they were just like us. Now, here I was in California in the seventies and it was Tulane and Dillard all over again. But I already knew that was malarkey. And I thought the Marxists knew that, too. Wasn't that was classism was all about?

Revolution wasn't just about war and fighting. It was also about educating. It was also about understanding oppression and domination and exploitation, and learning to not do it to ourselves. And here we were in this wonderful new university able to educate. But I didn't know how to measure learning. Just like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, we could have discussions of nature and nurture, just as folks did on the porch of the General Store. We raised the same issues that came up in social psychology. Of course, we couldn't give a paper and pencil test and measure how much folks knew about nature and nurture because paper and pencil tests were strange to the social context of the General Store. Who'd you ever see taking a pencil and paper test on the front porch of a General Store?

And term papers? Why one minister in the Graduate Sex class . . . . no, no, that'll take us too far afield. But you must remind me to come back to that one. Maybe next November . . . .

Anyway, you get the idea. There were some things that would have to change in education to make our new teaching fit us all better. We already knew that paper and pencil tests were culturally discriminatory. And most of these people were adults, rushing back for what they had been denied in childhood and young adulthood. Those tests were the "rational objective" excuse used to bar them from education to start with. Why bother? "They" couldn't learn. So when we finally open the doors to learning, we were supposed to use the same old measures that had done such harm to them earlier?

Even worse. Those that had the skills were the first to surge ahead. Made sense. The only thing holding them back was the bars of admission. They were so bright and hungry they could adapt to anything we did to them. So they did well on these "tests" to prove their worthiness. And in the process they made the colonial case against the others for the colonizers. If William Julius Wilson can do it, so could the others, if they really had the potential and worked hard. Since they can't do it, they don't have the potential and so we weren't harming them by keeping them out anyway! Shades of rhetoric. And unsophisticated masses, used to sound bites, consoled themselves in the denial that we had ever done any harm to minorities and immigrant classes.

Oh, sure. We might have harmed a few, like Clarence Thomas and William Julius Wilson. But no system is perfect. And our system was open enough to permit them to get around the barriers. Look at them now. A Supreme Court Judge and a Harvard professor! And they had no real problem in our educational system. They didn't ask for paper and pencil tests to be eliminated as culturally discriminatory. They excelled at them. All one has to do to make it is to be so much better than all the others that one can endure the extra burden of learning and finding careers in spite of the system.

All this swirled as "idees dans l'air" over the last three decades of the twentieth century. These ideas floated everywhere. The popular debates went on. But rarely were they challenged by the reflexive questions of what we were really grading, what we were measuring and certifying as "learning."

I guess that didn't really matter until the doors were really open and the gang burst in. But it mattered terribly there at Ambassador. These people had flooded in to learn. Most wanted college degrees. The first in their family to go to college! They were proud of what they were doing. We were proud of their faith in us to do what they wanted; to "teach" them. And with no models to guide us most of us just dove in and started spreading the wisdom we had acquired from the great books of the world.

Well, not quite the world. This was the seventies, and we still believed in the righteousness of the canon of Western civilization. So we taught them from the Western Canon, which was pretty much what we knew, but we included Marx, whom we took to include them, except that we forgot that race might not be quite like class.

Most of us taught off the cuff, inspired by the events of the day. And no one in those early seventies asked us about how we graded. Grading didn't become an issue until a few years later as the tremendous popularity of sociology began to drop and some of these students began to go into business, accounting, etc. and the difficulties of the lack of previously honed academic skills were triggered by the catalyst of formally prepared teachers who had never considered the reflexive approach to theory. Math was math was math. I had to do it. They have to do it. I have not calculated a regression coefficient in twenty years, easy. But, of course, it is essential that each of my students calculate a regression coefficient or they will not meet our "standards."

And of course, there are more sophisticated arguments that do matter in academia. Knowledge of how to use a machine will be relatively useless if the machine is broken. So there must be true understanding of the formula. In one semester, with almost no prior effective training in mathematics. Right. And if the machines do break down, I hope you won't be depending on these students to rebuild them. But what good does it do to treat every math student as if he/she will have to rebuild the calculator, the computer? What they need is to understand the math as a tool, capable of aiding them in many tasks. If the tool breaks down, call the expert who fixes it. How many of us could have fixed our calculators, in the old days? Slide rules maybe, calculators, no. Computers, sort of, networks, no.

While we were inventing ways to play with, develop familiarity with, and plunge into sociology, like the Serious Sociologist, our students were learning new ways of approaching theory and critical thinking and the social world we wanted to fill with justice and equality and peace. We weren't teaching traditional sociology, to the chagrin of "Meat and Potatoes" and the Aging Wolf. We were teaching applied sociology, and building the skills and competences of traditional sociology on those applied efforts.

But enrollments began to drop. Patterns of enrollment shifted to Public Administration. Gradually our world was changing. Those who had been awarded their degrees wanted jobs commensurate with those degrees, and affirmative action efforts rewarded them with those jobs. But then the corporate world began to complain, as it discovered that degrees hadn't made up for the continuous exclusion from schools that had emphasized the traditional schools, and the grade battle began.

I think it was Sonoma that complained first as a community, that our college graduates couldn't read and write up to "standards." They demanded that we give fewer A's. An A should mean that you had mastered basic grammar and writing and reading skills. And suddenly, standards were the issue.

Never mind all the theoretical considerations. This was real world stuff. Employers, who controlled the economic structure of the community, wanted to be able to hire A students knowing that they were A students, nevermind what color or ethnicity or gender they were. That's what they were paying for.

Or was it? We thought we opened our doors to make up for the many years of injustice in denying higher education to those we had refused to educate effectively at lower levels and in segregated schools. Now a largely white male economically-based group insisted that we were supposed to certify students in worker skills.

I don't know why we didn't challenge it. Most of the guys were so radical, Marxist, they didn't like me for being a capitalist, if I were one. Frankly, with my background, no one ever asked those questions. I didn't know you had to pick a side. But the guys didn't challenge it. They jumped right in and agreed. We had to have higher standards. Get that radical shit out of the catalog!

Gee. I guess being radical Marxist wasn't so hard, after all, and I had been so intimidated by all their boasting of radicalism. All you had to do was put the radical shit in the catalog, and then take it out again. Even I could do that.

Unfortunately, I couldn't change my grading system to fit the employers' needs to have our students stamped "Prime," "Write approved," "Read only." Grades at the end of a course are a measure to most of us of how well we've done in what we studied in that course. At least that's what they meant fifty years ago when I went to school. And that's what I'd been teaching my students.

If I applied the "standards" of a traditional curriculum, and demanded the tests and term papers I might have done at Tulane or UCLA, my students would not have done well, and I would have been forced to give Cs or lower simply because of the measures they hadn't learned the skills for. The "standards" were inappropriate, except to the uses of the employers.

And the "standards" were inappropriate to any long-term teaching goals. The standards Sonoma was asking for were appropriate only to work training. And work training is inimical to liberal arts education. The one is immediate and based on employers' needs. The other is general, theoretical, and empowering so that the recipient can go on to specific training more confidently and more independently. If the job trained for disappears, the liberal arts student can easily retrain, and has the confidence to know that.

I had to provide agency with a realistic assessment of the structural context. I couldn't create miracles. We couldn't overcome the costs of the barriers of the last decades in one fell swoop. But we could create a front porch where we could sit and contemplate the big issues of the day, and think about how to erase some of the costs those barriers had erected.

1300 words. Former word count: 5236. I think. 5236 + 1300 = 6536 . Total word count: 6536. +4538 = 11,074 Last half of file now counted.