A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [51]
I had another dream of fishing recently, this time fishing from a boat on a rolling ocean. Once again I caught a huge fish, and once again it rushed me. This time, instead of leaping next to me the fish wrapped the line—strong as steel cable—around the boat, and then dove. It began to pull me down. I awoke, moaning and frightened.
Perhaps this dream, too, is about what we must do. We need not only eat whatever fish the Dreamgiver and the world offers, but we need to let it eat us as well. We need to let the world hook us as we have hooked it, and to let it play us and reel us in. Perhaps in taking the world into our bodies we also need to dive into the body of the world, to dive down deep and let it pull us deeper still, until at last we not only consume but are consumed, until at last we are no longer separate—standing alone and lonely on the darksome heights to which only men aspire—but instead, simply living in commune with the rest of the world.
Only recently—especially after teaching at a university for a few years—have I come to understand why the process of schooling takes so long. Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years. After you learn fractions and negative numbers in first or second grade, what new principles are taught in math until algebra in junior high? It's the same with science, art, history, reading, certainly writing. Nearly everything I learned those years—and this was true for my friends as well—was gleaned through books and conversations outside class. It's true to the point of cliché that most of the "crap" we learn in high school, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, is a bland stew of names, dates, and platitudes to be stored up the night before each test, then forgotten the moment the test is handed in.
During high school, I believed the primary purpose of school was to break children of the habit of daydreaming. If you force them to sit still long enough, eventually they tire even of sinking turn-around fadeaways at the buzzer to win NBA championships. Having sat in the back of the class lining rockets over the left field fence for the better part of thirteen years, I was ready to move on.
I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure. Less time wouldn't do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college. For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.
I have nothing against education; it's just that education— from the Greek root educere, meaning to lead forth or draw out, and originally a midwife's term meaning to be present at the birth of—is not the primary function of schooling. I'm not saying by all this that Mrs. Calloway, my first-grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I've been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies. The problem is much worse than that, it is not merely personal nor even institutional (although the institutions we've created do mirror the destructiveness of our culture). It is implicit in the processes, and therefore virtually transparent.
Take the notion of assigning grades in school. Like the wages for which people later slave—once they've entered "the real world"—the primary function of grades is to offer an external reinforcement