Being elsewhere is always the best way to understand being right here (and vice versa) @cwpfairfield @writingproject

I've never been to S. Africa, but I've been to Denmark. I've never met Alan Paton, but I've read Cry The Beloved Country over twenty times (even after Oprah put it on her book list and the price skyrocketed). I've taught in Japan, too, and worked in varying locations around the world. Whenever I leave the United States to teach and/or learn in another nation, I learn more about my life as an educator here.  I understand here more when I gain other ways of knowing.

I've often said, too, "No, I've never visited the diverse nations of Africa but many diverse individuals from Africa have visited me."

Perhaps this is why the drive home today with a friend from S. Africa - a teacher, youth advocate, and motivator - grew sad. In week three of her first visit to the U.S., she has begun to see the holes in our educational system and it is perplexing her. I cannot write for her, but I can make a few stabs at what I heard her articulating today.

• How can bright, energetic students she's meeting at the Young Writers' Institutes have such terrible things to say about schooling, especially in terms of writing and their teachers (Quote: The writing institute is what schools wish they could be, but they can't). Why can't teachers promote students to be exceptional human beings?
• Why are educators, especially those who work in urban centers, completely disrespected?
• Who chooses the leadership in school districts? How can non-educators, politicians, and businesses be trusted with the minds of young people? Why are they ruling U.S. schools?
• Why, in a nation of wealth and extreme everything, do the schools remain underfunded and poorly resourced?
• Why aren't there more programs like the National Writing Project who push for teacher excellence and provide support to help every student?

I did not help her thinking, when I reflected on my own experiences and choices for leaving the classroom. In fact, I told her my questions led me to pursue a doctoral degree (I lost my salary and a position I loved when I chose to find answers to the questions I had about what was destroying education).  At the time it was poor leadership who distrusted the excellent teachers who students trusted, the demise of the Kentucky writing portfolio process, a rising police state of national tests/teacher accountability, and most horrific, a loss in guaranteed funding for the National Writing Project. I wanted to answer my own questions and what I found has disheartened me even more. As I spoke, she grew sadder. TEACHERS and RESEARCHERS are being ignored - like the young people we promote, our voices do not matter. Currently we don't count in the big paradigm shift of top-down management and financial restructuring of schools. We cost too much. There are unions. And worst of all - but most important - real knowledge can't be measured by tests. Each and everyone of them are flawed. If we were to create a nation of writers who wrote to advocate what they believed in, the whole paradigm would collapse. Why? It's much easier to spend time scanning bubbles in a machine.

• Who gets all the money that is poured into districts of poverty? Where does it all go?

 "They are making themselves rich off of the poverty of others," she says out loud. "These people are wrong and disgusting." 

Money pours into impoverished areas of the U.S. and no, I'm not sure where it goes, either. 

Right now, all I know is that very few of all who live in these communities are ever heard. It seems to me that a game of the United States right now is being played between wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives who come from privilege and who simply fight for maintaining these privileges. They do not know anything but pampered society and this is what they advocate for in all sorts of rhetorical games. I'm sorry, but I'm disappointed by both parties and their treatment of education. 

No, I'm not sorry. I'm angry.

Alan Paton wrote, "The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again."

Those with political power don't want anything mended because they've benefited from the power structures that landed them in the very positions they hold.  My students tell me, and so do their teachers, "We know what is wrong. We're tired of us having it pointed out to us. We need materials and support to fix it, not the charity of do-gooders coming in to save us with this or that program. This or that expert from a Research 1 school. This or that text book.  We don't need to be saved. We need to be trusted and empowered to believe in what we know works best. We know what we need but our government doesn't listen to us." 

Paton wrote, "But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power."

I much prefer to learn from youth and the love they have for learning and the best teachers have for teaching. The surest way I know I am being educated by a fool is when he or she introduce themselves as having expertise. Those who do are not after learning...they are after dictating, preaching, and keeping things exactly as they are.

I think Lockhart proved this best in Harry Potter.