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I suppose it depends upon your point of view. A biologist has defined a human being as an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. A 19th Century edition of Encyclopedia Britannica defined us as “a seeker after the greatest degree of comfort for the least necessary expenditure of energy.” A chemist seems to have the most practical view: “A thing with sufficient amount of fat to make seven cakes of soap, enough iron to make a medium-sized nail, a sufficient amount of phosphorus to equip two thousand match heads, and enough sulfur to rid one’s self of one’s fleas.”
Shakespeare probably went over the top when he has Hamlet say: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” Shakespeare does bring man back to earth when he has Hamlet utter “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.”  That puts most of us somewhere in between.
I have spent 58 years of my life going to schools, 20 of them trying to learn something, and 38 of them teaching in schools from kindergarten to 50-year old school administrators at NDSU and Tri-College. I have taught literature, creative writing, and journalism to high schoolers, school administration to doctoral candidates, and senior education majors at Concordia. I spent 21 years as principal of both elementary and high schools, often subbing briefly for teachers at all levels in all subjects. Teaching ABCs to kindergartners can be nerve-racking and fun at the same time. Educating an animal who has 100 trillion brain cells, give or take a few trillion, is very exciting, complex, and frustrating work.

Robin Williams And Albert Einstein Could Have Been Buddies

A simple story about a high school principal can illustrate the complexity in harnessing 100 trillion brain cells. The principal was driving home late one night when he had a flat tire on a lonely dark street. He jacked up the car, took off the flat tire, and was just about to put the spare on when he accidently kicked all of the wheel bolts down a nearby sewer drain. He sat down on the curb, defeated. There was no gas station nearby, no phone, just a dark building by the side of the road.
A window flew up on the building and a voice asked what was the matter. He explained his predicament. The voice replied, “Why, that’s simple. Just take one bolt off from each of the other wheels, and use them on your spare.” The principal thanked the man profusely, and noticed a sign above a doorway, “Mental Institution”.  The principal asked, “Are you one of the inmates?” The voice replied, “Yes. I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.” It’s those 100 trillion cells working.
Robin Williams, called the most imaginative, inventive comedian in the world, probably used his 100 trillion brain cells faster than anybody, including Albert Einstein, who may have had another 10 trillion at his scientific disposal. But Russell Brand said Williams had a “divine madness” who possessed an explosive “geyser of comedy.” Brand added a very important paragraph to his friend’s epitaph: “When someone gets to 63 I imagined, hoped, that maturity would grant an immunity to adolescent notions of suicide but today I read that suicide isn’t exclusively a young man’s game. Robin Williams at 63 still hadn’t come to terms with being Robin Williams.” Dealing with the minds of principals, crazies, Albert Einstein, and Robin Williams is a very challenging enterprise.

When Leave No Child Behind Left Every Child Behind

George Bush’s contribution to education was a great program for the 19th Century and the beginning of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Too bad he came up with it in the 21st. What a disaster. It reminds me of the greatest putdown in world history. An angry member of the British House of Commons was debating Prime Minster Benjamin Disraeli on some policy when he said, “Some day you are going to die of the pox or the hangman.” Without even blinking, Disraeli responded:”That depends, Sir, whether I embrace your mistress or your policies!”
The new president of the National Education Association, that dreaded teachers’ union, started her career in New Mexico as a school lunch salad girl. She later went to college and became an elementary teacher and was later selected as Utah Teacher of the Year. Not only is she a gifted teacher, she plays a mean guitar and composes songs. She put these words together in a song protesting Leave No Child Behind: “If we have to test their butts off, there will be no child’s behind left.” It should become a classic.
Years ago when I was teaching poetry, literature, and writing, I used the Japanese haiku as a tool to sharpen both thinking and writing. A haiku must contain 17 syllables–five in the first line, seven in the second line, and five more in the third line. A student came up with this beauty:
                                             
 If I hold thee tight
                                            
 In my closed hand, butterfly
                                              
Sense I thy beauty?
   
That little haiku says a lot on almost any level if you spend some time thinking about it. (As soon as this student graduated from college four years later I hired her as a teacher.) In a way, the haiku reveals secrets about education. Close your hand and you kill it. Keep your hand open, you might see it fly off, but you can still understand and appreciate its beauty as it flies off. That’s what education is. It teaches about restraint, collaboration, deductive reasoning, humanity, appreciation of visual imaginative beauty, and a hundred other things. The student must have some freedom to contemplate his future, his personal talents, and his or her role in life. The butterfly helps.
This story emphasizes why we must eliminate most of the testing going on in the schools today. Don’t destroy creativity and confidence in a student’s ability. A mother asked her very busy little daughter what she was drawing on paper with crayons. “God,” said the child. The mother said, “But, my dear, nobody knows what God looks like.” Her child responded, “They will when I’m finished.” That’s what educators have to inspire.

History Is Not Bunk

If students believe that the world is mad but they still want to live in it, they basically have three choices: (1) They can forget things and live only for the moment to make their brief life on earth as bright as possible (drugs and booze), (2) They can surrender any hope for pleasure and happiness and give one’s dedicated and ruthless devotion to work for a more reasonable world (making money and spending it), (3) They can study the  humanities (all things such as art, music, history) and end up somewhere between the first two choices (all that glitters is not gold)
Students have to learn that studying the past is the first step in controlling their future. Henry Ford said, “History is bunk.” It is not. It is our life’s blood. History, including the art, music, literature, architecture, and politics of the times, enables us to find out what our values really are. Adding to this accumulation of values are other studies that help us find ourselves. A Jewish proverb states, “How terrible is the past which awaits us.”  George Santayana put it more bluntly: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  None of us can be versed in all subjects. I admire astronomers because millions of galaxies, universes, stars, and planets seem to be beyond my ken.
Man is a fascinating animal. We offer men and women condemned to die a last meal before the state kills them, sometimes only two hours after they have had their choice. But we know almost from the hour of our birth we are going to die. With what is happening in the universe with solar flares and such, couldn’t every meal be our last? OK, OK.

The Failure Of Our Culture

All people, modern and ancient, advanced or primitive, have cultures. A culture is the sum total of habits, beliefs, customs, language, techniques of doing things that are taught to members of the culture. Man has the ability to pass on his experiences from one generation to the next. Genetically we are about equal to Cro-Magnon man of 20,000 years ago. We could take a Cro-Magnon baby, place it in a suburban family in Fargo’s Rose Creek, and it would grow indistinguishable from his step brothers and sisters.
But man is now a misfit in our culture because we have not kept up with a very fast rate of technology. We can’t stop technology but we must learn how to control it. Our culture has taught most of us that sticking a knife between somebody’s ribs, even in wartime, would be very difficult. Look at the record of man in war from shell shock to battle fatigue to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  But we don’t seem to have many queasy feelings about dropping bombs from 35,000 feet on faces we cannot see. We have neglected the humanities, the study of our culture that makes us human and different from most animals.
We Must Teach “No Man Is
 An Island”

If we followed the precepts expressed by John Donne in the 17th Century in his Meditation 13 we might be living up to the promise of our culture:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Above all else, this is what we must teach, but we can’t teach students that no man is an island by having him take test after test after test. Every student must have the opportunity to study a common core so his mind is tempted to explore, to search, to learn everything in our culture. Notice I did not capitalize common core. I do not endorse standardized testing on Common Core materials. Teachers will know whether students have achieved mastery of the materials. Trust teachers. Education is an amazingly complicated process. All politicians should try it for a short while only to discover how difficult it is. Students march, stroll, swim, meander, stumble, crawl, and run to different drums and drummers. Basic education is not just reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is also art, music, history, social studies, all of the humanities. To live and prosper in a complex society we must educate ourselves every day. Curiosity may kill cats but for man it makes life worth living.

Shakespeare And Anne Hathaway’s “Second Best Bed”

To understand decisions thoroughly we must learn to assemble little bits of information. When Shakespeare’s will was read he was criticized by some for leaving the “second best bed” in their home to his wife Anne Hathaway. Some thought he was describing her very modest ability in the marriage bed. However, she was pregnant when they were married so she must have been pretty good. Actually it involved Elizabethan construction.  The “first bed” was a huge affair, usually part of the construction of the house, sometimes permanently attached to the framing. To give her the “first bed” might mean tearing the house down. So to fully understand the will one must have knowledge of Elizabethan construction as well as the use of first and second beds. The first bed was  reserved for guests. Shakespeare was not a poor man. The “second best bed” would have been pretty expensive. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But sometime a lot can be fun.

Raymond is a former Marine officer and school board superintendent and resides in Detroit Lakes.