Words and Deeds Matter: In Memory of Gene Burkart

Gene Burkart, a lawyer, homeschooler, scholar, and dear friend, succumbed to cancer this past weekend at age 62. He met his death peacefully with his faith, family, and friends supporting him through his final days. Gene was, to me, an unsung hero of homeschooling and local politics in Massachusetts, and his death has left me with an empty feeling.

From the time I met Gene in the early 1980s until he died, he spoke about the work of Ivan Illich with clarity and passion. Indeed, Gene patiently helped me to understand and appreciate Illich’s work over time; like many, I was more confused than excited by Illich’s writing at first, and Gene offered insights and suggestions over the years that eventually led to me share his enthusiasm for Illich. Our long drives from Boston to State College, PA, to spend time with Ivan Illich and friends, were full of memorable conversations; we never put the radio on during those trips. Gene became quite close to Ivan; indeed, the last time I was with Ivan was at Gene’s house, where we had a lovely dinner, just months before Ivan died. Gene went from skepticism about Illich’s ideas to a profound embrace of them, including studying with Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca, Chicago, New York, and Pennsylvania over the years.

Gene was always willing to help homeschoolers, and in the 1980s and 1990s he would draft letters to school districts, represent families in court, and provide advice, often pro bono, for homeschooling families in need. In the past decade, homeschooling became so common in MA that Gene was rarely contacted by homeschoolers, a development he was very happy about. I not only sent a number of people to Gene for help, but I sometimes relied on him to help with legal problems we had at Holt Associates, as well as some state-wide homeschooling issues, and he always rose to the occasion with clarity and cheer.

Gene spoke Spanish and worked often with immigrants; Gene’s people-based practice of the law reflected his integration of mind, body, and spirit. Ideas and beliefs are not to be just mouthed but acted upon in life, and Gene did this with gusto and commitment. He was a cofounder of Waltham’s community gardens, and a long-time advocate for world peace. In 1982 he became an active member of Waltham Concerned Citizens, a group concerned about nuclear weapons disarmament; Gene hosted survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima at his home one year and in 2005 he began a twice-monthly peace vigil in downtown Waltham, holding signs and drawing a crowd to advocate for bringing our troops home from our current wars.

In the last few years, Gene turned to writing and he often shared his work with others and through our local newspapers. For instance, I was pleasantly surprised one morning to read this brilliant, concise letter in the Boston Globe (May 23, 2010):

SCOT LEHIGH’S May 14 op-ed “We need it, but who’ll pay for a longer school day?’’ made me wonder: What was his reaction when he was in fifth grade and the bell rang at the end of the day? Was it, “Gee, I wish I could stay here another two hours?’’ Probably he was like most of us. We couldn’t wait for the doors to open.

Many adults tend to romanticize their school days, confusing schooling with learning. Social philosopher Ivan Illich attributed this phenomenon to what he called the “hidden curriculum of schooling.’’ More than any subject matter, more than the content of what is taught, schools teach above all else the necessity of schools. They instill the belief that only in school does real learning take place.

This causes many to have an inflated sense of the benefit and effectiveness of schooling. They think that more school means more learning. The opposite, however, is true. At a certain point, prolonged schooling becomes counterproductive, actually hindering and stifling initiative, creativity, curiosity, and the joy of learning.

How many students today read a book that’s not on a required list? We need less school, not more.

Eugene Burkart

Waltham

This year, 2012, Gene started a column for the Waltham News Tribune titled “Second Thoughts.” He wrote fluently about social justice issues as well as how his local community has changed, for better and worse. Here is Gene’s last column, published just about ten days before he died. It is filled with Gene’s sense of concern and justice for the individual and his outrage at the horrors of unbridled progress: Second Thoughts: Memories and the Ethic of Hiroshima.

 If you enjoy reading that piece, here is a page that lists all of Gene’s articles that were published by the Waltham News Tribune.

After Illich died, Gene contributed an essay to a book written in Illich's memory, The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection (SUNY Press, 2002). In his essay, Gene writes how he didn't understand Illich's critique of the modern economy until he had been practicing law for several years:

After a while, I saw the joke. When people asked me, "How's work going?" I would answer, "Never been better. Families are falling apart, so there is plenty of divorce and juvenile delinquency; arrests are up, so I have a lot of criminal trials; auto accidents and injures at work are high, so my personal injury caseload is huge. Business is good." In a strange way all of us in the service economy are feeding off social decay, a kind of cannibalizing of society.

Gene's questioning of his work and life, coupled with Illich's influence, made him realize he could live a good life without selling out his soul or checking out of society. In his essay about Illich's influence on him Gene writes:

I realized that I did not have to quit my day job—I could simply work at it less. I soon began a four-day week, which freed me up to read and study more, and become more active in my community. I did not have to get rid of my car, but I could ride my bicycle to work. I knew I would not be self-sufficient in growing food, but I could do composting and enlarge our vegetable garden. Later, when we had children, it was an easy decision not to put them in school. I also began to see my legal work in a new light. I knew it would not lead to social change (with the possible exception of homeschooling cases), but my clients' concerns were real, they were entangled in a morass or legal and social systems. Perhaps I could be an experienced guide for them through these thickets.

Gene ends his essay by noting his "overwhelming sense of gratitude" to Ivan Illich for all he has given him: "Friendship does not lend itself to an accounting, to economics. The only way I can hope to show my gratitude is to strive to be for others the kind of friend Ivan Illich has been to me." I can say with all my heart that Gene was a kind, great friend and that I am a better person as a result of our friendship.

A memorial service for Gene Burkart will be held at Christ Church, 750 Main Street, Waltham, MA at 11AM on August 25, 2012.

The Corruption of the Best is the Worst

If you conversed with Ivan Illich long enough about education, politics, and religion you would eventually hear him utter this Latin phrase: corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst”). Illich often used it to describe Christianity, where he saw that, in the words of this blogger, “'a community of spirit’ has been betrayed by church systems and methods designed to control, institutionalize, and manage Christian vocation.” Upon reading this New York Times article today, I’m certain Ivan would be nodding in agreement and praying even harder that we see clearly and understand the predicament we are in instead of just blindly reacting, or simply ignoring, the deeper issues these things reveal about us.

Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.

. . . After years of dismal employment prospects, Americans are losing trust in a broad range of institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency, public schools, labor unions and the church.

. . . In 2001, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States as the 16th least-corrupt country. By last year, the nation had fallen to 24th place. The World Bank also reports a weakening of corruption controls in the United States since the late 1990s, so that it is falling behind most other developed nations.

The most pointed evidence that breaking the rules has become standard behavior in the corporate world is how routine the wrongdoing seems to its participants. “Dude. I owe you big time! . . . I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” e-mailed one Barclays trader to a colleague for fiddling with the [LIBOR-PF] rate and improving the apparent profit of his derivatives book.

 Have we have gotten so used to the bland lies we are told by our “betters” and officials that our internal alarms do not go off about them anymore? For instance, I have long been struck by how no one has lost a job or their standing as a credible authority for repeating throughout the nineties and the turn of the century that statewide assessments and the federal No Child Left Behind act would not result in “teaching to the test.” (I have a file of such statements from MA and federal officials over the years). This is one small example, but once our words cease to be sincere, isn’t it just another small step to where our actions cease to be sincere?

How School Colonizes Minds and Cultures

John Holt was deeply influenced by Ivan Illich and as I study both I am deeply struck by their vision of what education had become by the early 1970s and where they thought it was likely to go given its trajectory. Sadly, their worst predictions about schooling have come true, and the loopholes that allow individuals to learn and grow outside of institutionalized education are being closed in some countries and tightened in others in order to ensure that everyone receives the same professional treatment from school.

I’m also struck by how few homeschoolers, unschoolers, and alternative educators seem to grasp the insidious concept behind the seemingly innocuous statement that so horrified Holt and Illich, “The world is my classroom.” Indeed, I’ve seen tee shirts and homeschooling/unschooling books and articles that make this proclamation verbatim. As Holt wrote in his 1976 book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (reprinted in 2004 by Sentient Publishing):

I understand now, as I did not understand at all at first, why Illich reacted with such horror when I suggested that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. This seemed to me a perfectly good metaphorical way to describe what I wanted to do in abolishing the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw almost immediately. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are compulsory treatment insitutions. They are places in which one group of people, A, do things to another group of people,B, without consent because still a third group, C, has decided that this is the right thing to do. Prisons, at least those dedicated to some notion of rehabilitation, which by the way a recent study shows that most prisoners hate and fear, are places in which one group says to another, “We are going to keep control of your life, keep on doing things to you until we think you measure up.” In the same way the doctors in the mental hospital say to the patients, “We are going to treat you, keep doing things to you until we think that you measure up, i.e., have recovered, are ‘sane’.” From here we see that school is exactly this kind of compulsory treatment institution. Society has decided that one group of people, the educators, shall be entitled to treat, to do all sorts of things to another group of people, the students, whether they want it or not, until the educators think that the students measure up, are ready to go out into the world and live. At no point is the student allowed to say, that’s enough. It’s for the educator to decide what’s enough.

And so a global schoolhouse would be a world in which certain people would have a constant and unlimited right to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require that we submit ourselves to various sorts of treatment until we did. Seen in this light it is indeed a most horrifying prospect.

Illich, a priest, viewed the situation in a similar way but with a different lens:

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture . . .

. . . School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world’s ills on those who cannot or will not play. (From Deschooling: A Reader, edited by Ian Lister.)

Last year I heard of a movie, Schooling the World, that deals with these issues from today’s point of view but I had not seen it nor did I know much about it. This month my friends at the CooperativeCatalyst.org posted this excellent essay, Occupy Your Brain by Carol Black, about the colonizing effects of mass education and the global schoolhouse and I learned that she is the creator of the movie and website, Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden. Here is some of what she wrote:

Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.  Family and community are sidelined, their knowledge now seen as inferior to the school curriculum.  The teacher has control over the child, the school district has control over the teacher, the state has control over the district, and increasingly, systems of national standards and funding create national control over states. In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education—in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.

The problem with this scenario should be obvious: who gets to decide what the world’s children will learn?  Who decides how and when and where they will learn it?  Who controls what’s on the test, or when it will be given, or how its results will be used?  And just as important, who decides what children will not learn?  The hierarchies of educational authority are theoretically justified by the superior “expertise” of those at the top of the institutional pyramid, which qualifies them to dictate these things to the rest of us.  But who gets to choose the experts?  And crucially, who profits from it?

I urge you to read this essay in its entirety and to consider arranging a showing of the film as a way to encourage people to challenge the idea that compulsory education is innately good and vital for all communities.

UPDATE:

In one of those great moments of synchronicity, I just learned that the film will have a free public screening at Harvard University on April 11 as part of a film series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, from 5—7PM at Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, to be followed by a discussion with its director, Carol Black. If you're in the neighborhood, come and watch it with me!

Slate Magazine Dumps on Homeschooling

Slate published this inflammatory article against homeschooing, entitled "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids. Why Teaching at Home Violates Progressive Values."

It follows standard critiques of homeschooling without offering any perspectives as to why some of the famous liberal educators of the sixties, such as John Holt and George Dennison, came to support homeschooling after years of trying to make schools better for kids. So much to say, so little time to do so! Here's my brief attempt at a comment to this article.

There are so many assumptions about the value of compulsory school attendance and biases against children’s abilities to learn built into this article that it is difficult to rebut in a comments section. As an unschooling family we always offered our girls the choice of attending school and all three of them moved in and out of public school as they wanted to throughout their years of learning at home and in our community (as does Astra Taylor, though the author neglects to mention this). We, and the many homeschooling families we know, never pretend to be our “child’s everything” nor have we ever thought of unschooling as a go-it-alone ideology. Do-it-Yourself-With-Others is the ethos I see most often in the home- and unschooling communities. Further, studies indicate that many homeschooling families only homeschool for about three years, so homeschooled children are moving in and of school, mixing with others, etc. without causing school or society great distress, and have been doing so for decades.

Schooling is directly correlated to income, and schooling creates economic class differences, as a recent Stanford study about the growing education gap between rich and poor indicates. Ivan Illich and John Holt, in particular, wrote about this in the 1970s and eventually concluded it was better to create a new way to help children learn and grow than to try to reform schools, something they and many others before and since have tried to do.

John Holt saw the culture of testing and the distrust of children prevalent in schools then, feared it would get worse, and decided to help those who wanted to try something different with their children to do so. As Holt wrote, homeschooling provides schools with all sorts of valuable information about how children learn and how parents can be involved in their educations. But, as this author indicates, school must be able to control and predict everyone’s learning or else, somehow, civil society will devolve into the haves and have nots—but isn’t that what has already happened?

Holt and Illich offer many other reasons for people to embrace the idea that learning is natural and schooling is optional. Illich wrote how the school delivery system—whether liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist, or communist—is essentially the same in all those countries, only the content changes. Indeed, educationists who insist we need compulsory schooling for democracy to work ignore the fact that our country was founded and grew without any form of compulsory education until the mid nineteenth century. In the 1970s the white Rhodesian government prevented black Africans from voting because of their lack of education—schooling is not a neutral force. Americans have more years of schooling and degrees than at any time in our history, but our problems keep growing, and some of them are caused, not erased, by increased schooling.

Must our humanity and our participation in our government be linked to our ability to consume education in state-approved settings? Must only school-approved reforms be allowed? Should children have a say in the matter of where and how they want to learn? Homeschooling is an answer to these questions that any liberal should consider. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t for everyone, but it does show us another way that we can live and learn as individuals and communities, instead of just being graded products of alma mater.

Will Dropouts Save America? Probably!

Michael Ellsberg, the author of the new book The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late, has a very good op-ed published in last week’s New York Times: “Will Dropouts Save America?”

Ellsberg argues, “American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.”

I heard Ellsberg present his personal story and his ideas at a webinar a few weeks earlier and was impressed by his understanding about the limits and roles of higher education and I look forward to reading his book. This op-ed is a great condensation of some of the major issues we face as institutional interests, using government funding and persuasion, continue to insist that in order to get ahead in life, the roughly 73% of Americans without four-year college degrees must mortgage their children’s future earnings for costly college degrees. The world Ivan Illich described in Deschooling Society, where compulsory education creates deep class divisions in society based on where you attend school, is heavily upon us. I used to think it was just a small group of homeschoolers, alternative schools, and some intellectuals that saw this as a serious problem; now I think the situation has gotten so bad that people like Ellsberg get it without needing to read Illich or Holt (Ellsberg admitted he hadn’t read either of them at the webinar). This gives me hope that our numbers will grow and that common sense and new alternatives to college will stand a chance in the face of institutional resistance to change.