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The Excess of Stephen H. Webb

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0400

In the fall of 2010, Stephen Webb challenged me to a footrace at Wabash College. I accepted. We lined up on a sidewalk crack. Before the signal came, Webb bolted off. As I ran to pass him, he pushed me into the road. He tried to grab my shirt to stop me from passing him again. He laughed with wildfire in his eyes. A couple of years later Webb wrote to me, saying, “I was, if you recall, going to write about you, beginning with this sentence: ‘A screaming came across the sky. . . . ’ (stolen from Gravity's Rainbow) but never got the chance.” I feel that way about him now. It aches.

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Dead White Guys

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

At the time of my high school graduation, I embodied minority educational empowerment. I was a poor, Mexican-American boy, a first-generation college student; itinerant and bright, raised in the Catholic Church, full of pious ideas and wet dreams and, thanks to the philanthropy of Bill and Melinda Gates, enrolled at a devout Catholic college to study the great books, philosophy, and all that jazz. I was even invited to pray at a LULAC banquet, as an exemplar to the Latin@ community.

I sometimes overstate how hard I worked during the undergrad years, but I really did read and study and learn far more than I should have, given how hard I partied and all the other things I was doing. The point remains that I left Franciscan University of Steubenville with a serious foundation in the Western canon, Franciscan thought, and personalist phenomenology.

I matriculated to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently married and teaching K-8 Spanish, to study education. I learned on my first day how awful St. Augustine (a North African ) was, and what a waste of time it was to read books by white, European men. So we read more white, European men, beginning with Marx and Weber.

Then we got to critical race theory (Cornel West’s Democracy Matters had just been published) and all that “Can the subaltern speak?” kind of stuff. I learned”primarily from white men”what a wretched thing my newly acquired Western canon was. And how disempowered I had been at the hands of Homer, Augustine, and Dante. Doing the very thing I once thought was the path to socio-political empowerment, I came to find out, had been a total waste of time. I’d sinned and was in need of redemption. I was a miserable Mexican wretch who needed to wallow in the mud of injustice to be cleansed from too many bubble baths with Don Quixote.

I was to abandon it all and start anew with fresh, critical ideas. But the freshness wore off quickly and the ideas became more and more predictable. Vocabulary was key. The lexicon of “hegemony,” “privilege,” “problematizing,” and so on. I learned it all and was quite open to it, but when it came time to select a Ph.D. program, I went to study with this crazy, old Deweyian progressivist”a “bourgeoisie Liberal,” as Richard Rorty once put it”because he called me out at a conference, whilst I proudly wore my guayabera , for implicitly referring to myself as “underprivileged.” He told me to feel privileged for being intelligent. I went to Ohio State and found Nietzsche, Foucault, Jean-Luc Marion, and most of all William James. More white men.

These men left me more suited than ever to mount an argument against the patriarchy of Western metaphysics within its institution par excellence , the modern university. And for much bigger and more serious reasons than demographics. We cannot experience folklore, real life, the flux of the commons, by importing the folkloric into this institutional space, like a museum or mausoleum, nor by walking out the front door. The only way to find it is like Alexandre Dumas’ mad priest in The Count of Monte Cristo : digging and scratching one’s way through the Western canon with passionate fidelity. This is the dogged spirit of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man .

R.R. Reno published a review in First Things some time back that greatly influenced me entitled “Theology After the Revolution.” The gist was that today’s critical theologians, unlike practitioners of the nouvelle theologie , had lost their footing in the object of their own critique. In class I often draw a comparison between serious, intentional disobedience and accidental disobeying; an “I reject you” and an “Oops!” If one is serious about being critical, in the tradition of
(post-)Enlightenment critique, then one cannot dissent clumsily or by accident. One must understand the object of one’s departure as much as possible. You’ve got to do your homework. Period.

This is why I have become so fed up with shallow, popular academic trade books. You know what I mean: Mexicans CAN!: A Critical Approach to Teaching Brown People How to Find Their Inner Aztec Komodo Dragon in the Marginal Diaspora”A (Post)Critical Approach. If you don’t know what I mean, go to an academic conference book display. They’re everywhere.

Unlike theology, however, educational theory may not have been subjected to a sure-footed critique to begin with. William James agreed in his day. In a letter to G. Stanley Hall he wrote, “Pedagogic literature seems to contain such vast quantities of chaff that one hardly knows where to seek for the grain.” The reasons for the chaff then may have been different than they are in today’s academy, but the void they leave behind is akin to the hollowed-out, mendicant imagination that produces that icon of late modernity we see right now in Halloween displays: the zombie. The living dead. The ultimate dead white guys. A ghastly, pop-cultural projection of the present predicament of the West: we are so afraid of our inevitable demise, we must commit suicide to prevent it.

Samuel D. Rocha is an assistant professor in the educational foundations and research graduate program at the University of North Dakota. He blogs at Patheos .

RESOURCES

R. R. Reno, Theology After the Revolution

White History Month

Aliens and the longings of late modernity: reflections on ‘Independence Day’

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A Curriculum of Life

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:01:00 -0400

What if your child died at the age of 8 or 10? What would her eulogy be about? Perfect school attendance? What wonderful grades she got? How well-behaved she was in school? No. It would be about her smile, her love, the way she laughed. Sadly, many children who are simply prepared for adulthood, just as adults who merely prepare for retirement, find the time and space of their lives monopolized by what is not most important.

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Real ‘School Choice’

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Thursday night was my first chance to watch the Republican National Convention. I won’t offer another tired commentary about it”with this one exception: a reaction to, and reflection on, Jeb Bush’s speech on schooling and school choice.

By definition, authentic choice cannot exist within a compulsory system. They are antonyms. Any choice worthy of the name cannot be constrained by an institutional system of compulsion. The only real possibility of any serious form of “school choice” then, is only possible after the disestablishment of compulsory schooling.

Sadly, both reigning, mirror-image political parties today accept compulsory schooling as more than a descriptive state of affairs: they seem to endorse it as a normative value in and of itself. There is a disturbing Messianism to the credentialist creed of schooling today.

There’s no such thing as “school choice” in today’s discussion, on either side. The idea that a quixotic “compulsory choice” between home, private, public, or charter schools”all relative equivalents of the same, impoverished assumptions and curricula”is a serious, real “choice” only has traction today because we’ve become so alienated from the reality that schooling has not, does not, and will never have a monopoly over education , real education.

Any school smaller than the world is just too small a place for education.

I may seem to be overemphasizing the need for rejection and denial , while forgetting about the proclamation of the Gospel, the good news. My sense of proclaiming the good news is always in a minor chord, deeply influenced by the apophatic; the via negativa and the via dolorosa : ways toward God that pass through the dark night of absence and suffering. Love hurts. This renders a tragic vision of the world that, I want to argue, is more than truth : it is a dark aesthetic revelation of reality . Tell me not what is true, show me what is real” show us Your face and we shall be saved .

This gets me to a practical challenge: how will this way of seeing reality”the reality of a world both without (compulsory) schooling and within the world as school”educate people in a holistic, authentic way? What is the purpose behind tilting at today’s schooling and senseless credentialism? The classic response to the suggestion of removing the placebo effect created by compulsory schooling always takes the form of nervous cautionary questions, asking what will come next”“If I stop taking these sugar pills, what will happen to me then?”

Here is a more constructive response, inspired by childplay:

My two boys have been playing make-believe with their cousins all morning. Earlier, over coffee, they performed a rather disjointed play in three acts for us. Don’t get too excited: it wasn’t very good”at least I didn’t think so”and I didn’t particularly enjoy watching it. But that was not the point. I didn’t need to patronize them with the virtue of “self-esteem” to truly esteem what they were doing and how importantly real it was. It was not entertainment or amusement.

I could see that their play was serious; it was obvious, with signs of it everywhere. For one: they were extremely self-righteous and bossy about it. “Sit here and watch the play”No! Don’t clap yet. It’s not over. NO! Not yet!” They constantly fought over who was to do what, who should stand where, who was going next, and what they were supposed to be doing in the first place. “And where did Gabe go? Gabe! GAABBE! Where are you?!”I think he went inside.” It was clear to me that they were not taking their make-believe lightly.

Afterwards, I sat trying to resurrect yet another manuscript I wrote during grad school into a proposal to my field’s top conference of the year”the Philosophy of Education Society”I could hear them running around, going about doing even more of their imaginative nonsense. How annoying it was to me! (Reality can be very annoying sometimes.) I did not find their tireless play precious, at least not then; but I did consider it to be the most important thing going on at the moment; so important, in fact, that I decided to write about it instead of working on my still-unfinished conference paper.

While the adults work, the children play; and their play is usually more serious and earnest than our work. If we worked as seriously as they played, the world might not be any better or worse, but life would surely be far richer, more enchanting, and less mediocre.

I never joined them; I didn’t pass out ribbons or stickers or other cheap, external rewards or adulation. For one, I didn’t want to; but more importantly, any such meddling would have been deeply disrespectful to the sacredness of their play. I wasn’t good enough then to play at their level of rigor. I was working .

People often argue that children need to play and go to recess to have “fun.” I don’t see it that way. Fun, to me, is only coincidental. These valiant defenders of fun, I suspect, have never really played. Or they forget that real play, the play I am describing here, usually ends in tears or disappointment or fighting or all three.

Play is not important because it is fun; and I do not think that children are nearly as interested in constantly amusing themselves as we are. The fun is for us, not them. They are being absolutely serious. How strange that nowadays we celebrate children who work and adults who play! (Just contrast elementary school science fairs from collegiate and professional sports.)

My boys and nieces understood and practiced the art of play in all its dead-serious nonsense. The fact that I found it childish and tedious is not important; focusing on that aspect would be losing oneself in translation. The more important, educative reality is that this was sacred time, doing perhaps the most ambitious, important thing that was attempted around here all day.

This is what the school of the world allows us to do and be that the smaller, compulsory ones do not. This is school choice at it’s finest. It goes beyond the consumerist fancy of choosing and picking and ventures into authentic freedom, the only “choice” that really matters: the choice to elect what is beautiful” To whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.

If someone saw them playing and asked why they were not in school”my nieces actually are enrolled in school, but were not required to attend that Friday; my youngest is too young; and the older one is a different story for a different time”I would have laughed and said, “Of course they are in school! Why aren’t YOU in school today?”

The abolition of compulsory schooling is not (only) the disestablishment of schooling institutions; it is also a return to a school of the world, a curriculum of life. When the school is destroyed, everyone goes back to school. No exceptions. No choice other than the only one that really matters: the choice to imagine the real. No more work. Only play. No more fun or amusement, only what is most serious: love.

Samuel D. Rocha is an assistant professor in the educational foundations and research graduate program at the University of North Dakota.

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