Good and Evil

So, I had a few minutes to kill today and I was reading random things and two really struck me.

The first one I had to stop reading partway through and come back because I thought I was going to be sick, so just like they warned us on the radio last night, this article is horrifying and I don't want to put a link to it until after I warned you.

But if you aren't convinced that evil exists in the world and you are sitting down, read this.

But just after reading that, I read this, an interview with a young man who was convinced that joining the military was the right thing to do and then grew increasingly troubled after joining up.  He grew so concerned that he was convinced he would go to jail rather than finish his term until he found out he could apply for conscientious objector status, which he did.

But his willingness to examine his own approach to the world and to make decisions and take actions that were so against the grain of the organization he was in, what his family thought and any number of other difficult obstacles.

It is difficult to imagine a person willing to not just deliver late term abortions but do so in the manner he did.  Perhaps you could dismiss it and say he could only do that because of some psychosis or very serious mental disorder.  But what about the people he paid to help him?

To then read about a young man willing to go against all the community or local pressure to go along with doing something wrong was very refreshing.  So in the same few minutes that I almost threw my computer out the window because of what I read and the pure evil of the people involved, I came back (I had put it down so I wouldn't throw it) and read about this courageous young man.  Nice turn around.

Amy Chua and the Brooklyn Free School

Lots of people read the article in the Wall Street Journal about Amy Chua and her outlook on parenting, and a lot of people have responded.  Or was it alot of people...

Regardless, it was an interesting article, one that stirred up lots of folks and apparently made Ms. Chua feel like she needed to retract or explain some of the things she wrote.  She took the time to interview and try to re-work her image, but she must be excited about the buzz as it clearly helped sell a lot of books!

David Brooks took a slightly different tack and called her a wimp!  He felt that the sleep overs and play dates her kids were missing were a lot more intellectually demanding than the thousands of math problems or hundreds of hours of piano practice.

Interestingly enough, the most recent edition of This American Life and the last piece of the story in particular suggest something similar.

The episode ends with a piece about the Brooklyn Free School which opened seven years ago and is modeled after the Sudbury Valley School with no classes, no set curriculum, no grouping based on age, no grades and an emphasis on democracy as students really do control and vote on everything that goes on in the school.

The story ends with a discussion of an all-school meeting called by a young woman upset at being called a "whore" by a couple of her school-mates.  She felt it was important to discuss the issue as an entire school, that calling people ugly things was something that they needed to bring up in front of everyone.

In the end, there was no resolution, there was no proposal to be voted on for a new rule, in some ways it felt like a let down.  But not to the young lady in question.  She was so glad that she had the chance to call a meeting, that she had that authority and that respect and that she had a chance to discuss this with her peers and then be able to move on and feel good.  She felt sorry for adults because they don't have that power in their daily lives.

But to navigate that environment, a world where students really do have control and authority and respect sounds to me to be a far more challenging and also far more rewarding environment than one in which everything is decided for you, whether it is by your mother or an autocratic school environment. 

So maybe Amy Chua really is a wimp, but in a larger sense, perhaps many of us adults are as we'd rather know that our children are in an environment where adults decide what is best for them and provide control and structure and authority.  Maybe we are all afraid of the Lord of the Flies rearing its ugly head and scaring the little ones.

I'm starting to think that Daniel Greenberg and others like him who've built the free school movement and suggested that kids really ought to be trusted with the opportunity to decide for themselves what is important are right.  I wonder if we have the courage to try it.