Some Thoughts on Education and Place:
Webb School
Chapel Talk - O
Jeff Edmonds
It is good to be back at Webb, though
there are many more unfamiliar faces in front of me than familiar ones. For
three good years my life centered on this campus and on the people here and the
buildings and the trees, the green fields and country roads. This place was a
home for me. I guess that’s the way things are—what was once familiar can in
time become a bit strange.
This strange
feeling I have in returning occurs because on the one hand everything seems
much the same, but as I said earlier things are also different. In fact, I can
hardly even recall the way it felt to be a Webbie, even though it has only been
three years. Now I come back as an outsider, a kind of stranger, and I don’t
even know very well how or if what I’m about to say relates to your lives. But
I guess that’s up to you to decide.
I’m going on
about these ideas of strangeness and familiarity because I want to remind you
(if you feel this way) of the way in which who we are depends so much upon
where we are. When I say, “where we are,” I mean not that not only
geographically, for example in chapel in Bell Buckle at Webb, but I mean where
we are in a more expansive sense. “Where we are” includes the types of people
we happen into when we aren’t expecting to meet anyone, it includes how old we
are—“where we are” in time and in history, and it includes our emotional states,
among other things. For example, when I’m angry, the whole color of the world
changes, the shapes of the objects, the closeness of things, their hostility.
When I’m happy, the place of my world takes on different characteristics. It
seems a bit more open, with more possibilities, more choices. “Where we are”
also has something to do with the pace with which we move through the world. Imagine
what Highway 82 looks like from Rocky’s perspective as he chases a car versus
what it looks like from the perspective of the truck driver on his way to the
Wal-Mart distribution center. The same place can appear in many different ways.
And we can also appear to ourselves to be many different people. I act one way
when I’m standing in front of all of you and another way when I’m at home with
my wife and another way entirely when I’m talking to my granddad. In this
sense, we are always many different people because we have the ability to be in
many different places. This is just a complicated way of saying that we are
creatures that can adapt and change with circumstances.
And so, I’ve
been away in another place adapting and changing and reading some old
philosophy books written by people who lived a long time ago on another
continent in very different social circumstances. Reading all those books has
been like traveling to another place, and that’s changed who I am since I was
here before, because like I said, who you are depends so much on where you’ve
been.
So, here I
am. Where I am now is on a stage which has been designed by architects to give
those who stand on it a sense of power. See, I’m up above you and I get to
stand and move around while you have to sit and listen. Even if I stop talking
and turn my back to you like I didn’t even care about you, you will continue to
look at me and wait for me to tell you what to do. It will be awkward. And for
me, this place where I am standing gives me an awkward sense of duty; it
demands that I tell you something about life, something that will help you,
hopefully, and not just waste your time.
This
something that I want to tell you about is this sense of place that I’ve been
describing, and I think what I’ve been describing is how every place that we
are in educates us. The very idea of a place is inseparable from the demands it
puts on us to respond in particular ways and to develop certain habits and ways
of thinking. A place comes imbedded with values: with pushes, pulls, desires,
fears, hopes, pressures. If you doubt this, think about the difference between
the way you feel in here in this place and how you feel when you step out of
the door. I remember the difference as a kind of eruption—noise, movement,
excitement, freedom. So, every place has its behaviors that go along with it.
What this
means is that every place we’re in and everything we do educates, to use the
word properly. Education is about changing one’s habits or re-enforcing them by
means of responding to one’s environment. And education can be beneficial or it
can harm us. So long as it is in our nature to perceive things with our senses
and think about them and talk about them and to react to them, we are engaged
in a process of education. Sitting in front of the television develops a habit
of passively receiving images without asking questions. This is a type of
education. Going to soccer or cross country practice develops habits of hanging
around with other people and using our bodies together. Going to the mall or
even the supermarket develops the habit of seeing the world as a list of
products to buy and consume. This is education. Driving your car develops the
habit of thinking that
So, it is a
huge myth that our culture propagates when it says that education only happens
in schools and classrooms. Education happens everywhere, as much in school as
out. I’m not sure where this myth comes from, but it has at least two effects,
neither of which seem very positive to me. The myth does at least two things:
first it teaches you that learning has a particular place and that it happens
best while you are seated quietly in a chair in a square room with an older and
usually white person in front of you. Kind of like the situation we are in
right now. Secondly, it teaches you that learning is something that we do
roughly between the ages of 5 and 22 when we sit in those educational
institutions. But if we pay attention to our experience, it will teach us
something different from what this myth teaches us.
In fact, like
I said before, we are constantly being educated all the time, whether we are
conscious of it or not—hardly any of your teachers even knew what email or
Microsoft Word was when they were in high school, much less the internet. But
they’ve learned about it, even without going to class. We are always
encountering strange new things that call out to be learned—like for example
the influx of Latinos into an area where there haven’t been any at least for
the 200 years or so since a bunch of Anglo-Saxon Protestants came here before
them. And this causes problems for everyone involved because we are all
encountering a new situation which demands that we be educated whether we like
it or not. These new things (in this case, people, immigrants, Mexicans,
foreigners, strangers) demand a response, an encounter of some sort, and there
aren’t really any good teachers for this because it’s not like Newtonian
physics or algebra, the kind of stuff that we’ve had down for hundreds of years.
Sure, there are guidelines to help us out, the golden rule, for example, or
history, or the self-evident truths of the constitution, but there is also
something particular about these new experiences that these rules and
knowledges can’t fully account for.
And what’s
worse is that many of the folks who are dealing with this experience of
strangers coming into the place where they live buy into the same myth that I
told you about earlier—that education only happens in school to young people.
So, there are a lot of adults who think that their education ended quite a
while ago when they got a paper diploma and a job and all that. And they don’t
feel much responsibility to take the learning that these new experiences
require into their own hands. And perhaps you kids, too, sort of think that
what’s going on outside of school or off the campus of Webb in your
neighborhood or in
But thinking
like this means buying into the big myth that education happens only in
schools, and it forgets that part of what it means to grow up in middle
Tennessee, part of what this place is educating us about, is how to encounter
strange people—and what could be stranger than an illegal alien? They are illegal and alien! When we forget that education happens all over the place, it
doesn’t occur to us that maybe a good way of dealing with this new, illegal,
and alien experience would be to learn Spanish or something like that or to ask
these people a question about where they came from and what that place was like
and why did they come here. Perhaps we could start a kind of dialogue so that
we can learn from each other.
The point I
hope to have illustrated here is that education happens all the time—and most
of the time it doesn’t point itself out and call itself education. But if we can
identify education, then maybe we can control it better instead of it just
controlling us.
Actually, the
few facts, values, and methods and procedures that you will come away with after
your classes as your explicitly
identified education will be a tiny, tiny part of what you actually learned
in school. You will have also learned how to sit in rows and how to respect
your elders and how to listen without speaking and how most people in the world
look pretty much like you (unless you are one of the ones that looks different,
and then you might learn that hardly anyone in the world looks like you) and
how friends are great and how nice it is when we care for each other and how
bad it feels to be treated unfairly and how its wrong to drink and how lots of
people that you respect do it and how it’s normal to drive a big old pick-up
truck and weird if you’re a guy who likes to dance like a girl and that food will
appear in front of you if you go to the cafeteria and it will be put on your
plate by some women and that one of the few black men that you will see will
wash your dishes and how Bell Buckle is charming where the rich people live and
desperately poor on the other side of the tracks and how at Wal-Mart the things
come from China, but you don’t know how they got there or what they are made of
or who made them or if they are any good but boy they are cheap, and how a
train sounds at night when you’re lonely, and I could go on like this but maybe
you get the picture.
The reason
that we teachers don’t call all of this stuff education, even though that’s
what it is, is because this is all the stuff that we don’t have figured out
yet. We don’t know how to teach it, really, but that doesn’t mean it’s not out
there and that doesn’t mean it’s not calling out to be learned. And just
because we teachers don’t know how to teach something doesn’t mean it can’t be
learned. In fact, if there’s any hope for the future it’s that we can learn
from things and places and events that the people who were here before us had
no idea about.
So, to return
to the original theme, which was the idea that this place Webb which used to be
so familiar to me now seems a bit strange, I want to remind you that this
school and the place you’ve come from and your family and even your closest
friends now might become strange in the future. In fact, they are strange
already, if you haven’t figured it out. And that’s the type of critical education
that I think we ought to shoot for—as you head out for your day, to your
papers, tests, lectures, quizzes, which are such familiar parts of your
educational experience, I hope you can see how they are also kind of strange
and weird and maybe could be better and more in tune with that wild part of
experience that teaches us about the things that we still don’t understand. Cause
there’s a bunch of it out there and it’s beautiful and it’s ugly and it’s
hopeful and it’s scary and it’s close and it’s far and it’s warm and it’s
foreign and it speaks another language and comes from a different place and is
exciting for the body and sometimes its wet and sometimes it’s a cool breeze on
your face or a grasshopper on a branch or a spider and its web or an interstate
or a Burger King or a Mexican mowing a lawn or a mansion on a hill or a
terrorist or a republican or a Jew or a homosexual or an African or an insane
person or a supermodel or a poor child or its dying from AIDS or its singing a
song or its laughing or hiking in the woods and it’s all happening all around
us in this place into which we are growing.
That growing
is education, and it happens to us when we least expe