Disons le mot

By David Mamet

Thursday, December 17, 2020

 

My beloved Clover Park has come alive. It is 17 acres of walks and playing fields and picnic areas. Just north of the Santa Monica Airport.

 

One can stroll, work out, sit on a bench and see the planes take off and land, watch the children play and the families picnicking. Here, it is always afternoon, and the temperature is “either 72 degrees.” And, until 2013, one could meet a trainer in the park. We saw one-on-one instruction in boxing, jiujitsu, circuit training, and classes in chi gong, tai chi, and yoga.

 

Then the city council struck and insisted that all the personal trainers register and pay the city many dollars a year in fees, which only an inbred delicacy prohibits me from characterizing as “protection.” So the trainers and their clients disappeared.

 

The students from the local private schools were nannied to the park for exercise and games, and perhaps the schools “stepped up and saw the Captain.” And perhaps not.

 

In any case, the personal trainers left the park. Note, this is in Santa Monica, where the global phenomenon of bodybuilding began; at Muscle Beach.

 

And we may marvel at the prosperity it created. Who would have thought that immense fortunes could be made from calisthenics, and any money at all from running, at one time thought to require only feet and earth?

 

But the city council, those urban Robin Hoods, drove the trainers out and, with them, the money they earned and spent here; and the customers who paid taxes for the use of the park. But, lo and behold, today the trainers and their clients have returned.

 

I do not know that the city council have shown either compassion or reason, which would be unlike them. Stranger things have happened, but not around here. In any case. The signs warning the trainers have disappeared, the fitness folk are back.

 

And the park is alive with kids. It makes my heart glad, not only that they are out in the air, but that they are not in school.

 

California has the highest taxes in the nation, and our schools are ranked 37th, in what I must assume is charity. Let us consider this apparent contradiction as a solution (I don’t believe it makes sense considered as anything else): The California one-party kleptocracy could not exist without the support of an ignorant electorate.

 

“Raised by the liberals” is the modern equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant.” I speak as one who has seen four children through private and public schools of West Side Los Angeles, as one who has spent most of his life as a teacher.

 

I was raised in the horror of the Chicago public schools. Many of my teachers were born in the 19th century; the wooden desks were linked by iron stanchions and held glass inkwells. The use of the steel-tipped pen had just been superseded, but the watering can, which, previously, held the ink, still sat by the teacher’s desk.

 

I didn’t learn a goddamn thing. It might have helped my grades, if not my education, had I ever opened a schoolbook, but I was bored spitless, and ashamed of my failure to embrace the, to me, impossible alternative of pointless effort.

 

But outside of school hours I read voraciously, and was certainly better read than the teachers. How do I know? As no one with curiosity or the love of learning or of language could have subsisted for decades pontificating about the same dull trash. And neither can they today.

 

Thomas Sowell points out that, taking the same skills and levels of education into the free market, most teachers would earn 55 percent of their current wage. And now the beneficent governments, in recognition of — you may fill in the blank — continue to pay them while depriving the taxpayers of the services for which they have paid.

 

Of course the Left is opposed to charter schools. They are opposed to education. Teachers are, to the Left, a protected class, which is only common sense: They are both a milch cow and a purveyor of the essential service of indoctrination. In my youth this was called “socialization.” This meant, I believe, learning to sit down and shut up, and pay attention.

 

It was difficult for me, as for you, to pay attention to that which neither interested me nor offered hope of some later gain. The schools of today are vastly more dangerous than those of yore, as they offer both things.

 

The grotesqueries of “sex education” and the thrill of protest are irresistible to the young mind. How is their leisure spent but in fantasies of sex and power? And the presentation of doctrine presents, to them, the certainty of future gain: that gain (earned by passivity) being exemption from marginalization, blacklisting, and attendant anathemas. Disons le mot. It’s time to stop routinely according to teachers the encomium “hard-working, dedicated, and underpaid.”

 

It takes very little time to prepare the vaunted “lesson plans,” the toil of which is supposed to consume their afternoons, evenings, and weekends. And it takes no time at all to remove last year’s lesson plan from its folder.

 

It takes little time to grade tests, and it is not taxing. The math solution is correct or it is not, at a glance; and the papers are short, and, at that, need only be scanned.

 

Some teachers are good. Some, indeed, are an inestimable gift to the student. I have met a few, and likely you have, too. Most of these had no connection with a school but were wise, and enthusiastic about conveying their insights (whether mechanical or philosophical) to those eager to learn. The beloved shop teacher or coach is remembered all our lives. Who recalls an English teacher?

 

Am I advocating, then, an abolition of schools?

 

Yes. What good do they do?

 

The children in the park are learning more than they would in school. What are they learning? Something. How could they not? They are mobile engines of curiosity.

 

They can learn to read with the help of a parent or older sibling. Having learned to read, they can learn whatever else they require.

 

One might ask, “How will they get a job?” But how will they get a job selling Diversity, or Social Justice, or flogging a film-school degree? These will have to exist on some sort of subsidy. It is no wonder that the Left wants college to be free; they re­ceive, in return, an ignorant, biddable voter.

 

It was said that a liberal-arts education allowed the child to follow his instincts, exposed to a variety of subjects and modes of thought. Everyone, during that forgotten day, knew it was a lie, but we all went along with the gag.

 

But even that, a fig leaf to the intellectual laziness of parents and the delighted nodding of the college-bound, is no more. No one now knows why children are sent to college. And, in the plague, we may ask why they are sent to elementary school. It functions as day care, of course, and this is not an inconsiderable benefit to working parents. But if the parents would like their children, eventually, to be self-supporting, they might take a close look at the waste of twelve years of their intellectual curiosity, receptivity, and malleability.

 

That irreplaceable period will not return, but the habit of rote reception of doctrine will remain, indelible.