Last Christmas break I read a Charles Dickens' classic. Not a A Christmas Carol, but another book with just as much to say to our modern age: Hard Times. The Common Core crowd and the education deformers may think they are pedaling something new, but their brand of education and thinking about life was alive and well back in Dickens' day. The book begins in a classroom where these words are being spoken: 'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.'
I almost expect the speaker to talk about reading 80% informational texts.
Teaching these past few years in an educational system that is increasingly about numbers and data, about labeling students as numbers, about favoring informational texts at the expense of story and narrative, about doubting people but believing in scripted curricula and tests, has made me think a lot about dichotomies:
data versus people
information versus stories
facts versus truth
doubt versus belief
As for that first dichotomy, I've become aware that some people do view both teachers and students as mere fodder for data. Teachers become "human capital" and students become test scores. We reduce people to numbers, to stimulus and response. Threaten teachers enough and they will finally produce results.
Out in society, there are many who have discounted free will, and even person-hood at all. We are simply pre-programmed "wet robots," (to borrow a phrase from Dilbert). When I read the book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Linier a couple of years ago in paperback, something really struck me from his afterward. He conjectured that many people still engaged in religious faith because it afforded them a way to still believe in people.
I think there's a lot of truth there. There are a lot of people out there who don't believe in people any more.
When I look at those dichotomies, which I live with every day in my classroom, I have to come down on the side of people, stories, truth, and belief. I need these things to be tempered by numbers and facts, but numbers and facts don't make life worth living or show me what is good. They may give me (sometimes) practical ways to make life better, but they can't give me any assurance that life itself is worth living.
It is people, story, belief, and truth that make my life worth living. And no story makes the value of these things more clear than the Christmas Story.
The value of being a person, a person, beyond anything that can be measured or explained, is affirmed. God himself became a person. Being a person is transcendent-- or can be. In many ways, the Christmas Story makes God the ultimate humanist. Being human matters. It matters so much that he became one himself.
The Christmas Story affirms the importance of story. There is the story itself, in its various forms in different gospels, which all seem to merge into a single narrative for most of us. There are the stories Jesus grew up to tell--human stories. Madeleine L'Engle quotes someone as saying that "Jesus was God who told stories." And then there is the whole story of Jesus' life. It is a story. Not a set of facts. Jesus was not data driven. He was, it would appear, to be driven by love.
And the Christmas Story is about truth. If you go in looking for facts, you may be disappointed. Many things can be proved as facts. But some truths can only be expressed as story. Truths like love. Love can be explained away as a fact: it is an accidentally produced biological stimulus designed to perpetuate the species. Love in its most mysterious, ineffable sense, does not exist. The Christmas Story affirms Love, affirms that to be human is a transcendent experience, affirms meaning. It affirms the Truth that being human matters.
Read some young adult literature, some fairy tales, some fantasy. The villains never believe in love. The key to Good winning is to believe in it. Stories give us faith in a deeper truth: that love is at the center of everything. Read The Giver. Read A Wrinkle in Time. Read Harry Potter. Read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Heck, even read the faith-denying The Amber Spyglass. What saves the day? Love. Everyone wants to believe in Love.
I look at the people I most admire, people who have changed the world for the better. They were all acting out of Love: Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, William Wilberforce (who took down the British slave trade). And the teachers at Sandy Hook who gave their lives trying to protect their students. And millions of people who every day do small, unnoticed, unheralded acts of kindness. I refuse to reduce Love to a fact. It is a Truth-- a mysterious, numinous Truth.
If nothing else, I need to believe in Love. But there are so many things I need to believe in to do what I do.
I need to believe in my students. I need them to believe in themselves. There is data (oh, the irony!) to suggest that belief in your own ability to become smarter enables you to become smarter. Not believing means you may not grow intellectually as much as the believer.
And so I have to come down on the side of people, of stories, of truth, of belief. Whatever you may think of the facts of the Christmas Story, the Truth of it affirms these holy abstractions:
People
Stories
Truth
Belief
These are the abstractions I try to live out every day in concrete ways, using pencils, pens, paper, computer screens, white boards, and even M&M's. The abstract always becomes incarnate in the specific, whether it is dry erase markers, or dry bales of hay in a manger somewhere.
Merry Christmas.
