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It’s literally the only movie I can think of that is based completely around the unheard of “FEMALE gaze.” Granted, while I’m a huge movie buff I’ve not seen every movie ever made. But even so, even if there’s another example of the “female gaze” in cinema that has escaped me it’s still damn impressive that a kids movie from 1997 based on a Jay Ward cartoon from the 60’s managed to turn gender representation in media on it’s fucking ass!

First things first, let’s look at our leading lady and love interest - Ursula, played by Leslie Mann.

Let me just say that while Leslie Mann is adorable and a talented actress, she does look a little less conventional and a little more plain compared to the bombshells that Hollywood likes to churn out. Leslie, in comparison, looks much more like a real women you’d meet on the street. She dresses pretty conservatively and plain throughout the film ; Wearing outfits that are more functional than fashionable for trekking through the jungle, pulling her hair back and so forth. Not that if she was dolled up and more scantily clad it would give her character any less integrity, but can we appreciate how RARE that is in the male dominated industry of film? Just think about all the roads a film about a woman in the jungle COULD have taken but didn’t - no scenes with her clothes strategically ripped or anything! You can say this is a kids movie, intended for children and that’s why the sensuality of the female lead is so downplayed but there are PLENTY of kids movies that handle women in a very objectifying and sexualized manner despite the target audience is pre-pubescent. Like, a disgusting amount. So I don’t think “it’s a kids movie” is why the film doesn’t take ANY, let alone EVERY, opportunity to showcase the main female character’s sex appeal…

…especially considering the sex appeal of the film rests squarely on the well defined shoulders of our male lead, George of the Jungle played by Brendan Fraser in the best god damn shape of his life!

*Homer Simpson Drooling Noises*

Whenever members of the reddit community try to compare the sexualization of women in fiction to the design of characters such as Batman and Superman, I always want to just sit them down and show them this movie. Because THIS is what the female sexual fantasy looks like, and Batman and Superman are male power-fantasies. Look at him - his big blue eyes, his soft hair, his lean, chiseled physique built for dexterity rather than power. He’s wild and free, but gentle. It’s like he fell right out of that steamy romance novel your mom tried to hide from you growing up.

Hell, the whole plot seems to be designed around how damn hot he is! First, for the majority of the film, he wears only a small strip of cloth to cover the dick balls and ass. Everything else is FAIR GAME to drool over for 40 minutes. Then, after he meets Ursula she takes him with her to San Francisco just so we can enjoy him in a well-tailored suit (as seen in the gif set), running around in an open and billowy shirt along side horses while Ursula and all of her friends literally crowd around and make sexual comments about him, and my personal favorite, ditch the loincloth entirely and have him walk around naked while covering his man-bits with various objects while one of Ursula’s very lucky friends oogles him and makes a joke along the lines of “So THAT’S why they call him the ‘KING of the Jungle’…”

And yes, it’s also a very cute and funny little movie. Out of all the movies based on Jay Ward cartoons, it was the most faithful to the fast-paced humor and wit of the original source material (yes even the new Peabody and Sherman movie which honestly I thought was too cutesy-poo.) But that’s not why this movie is popular with the gay community or why we all became women in 1997. It’s just really cool that there’s a film out there where the sensuality of the female form takes a back seat for the oiled up, chiseled, physique of Brendan Fraser (in his prime that is)

he’s non threatening

let’s take a look at his rival - Lyle is a cravat-wearing trust-fund kid (who, interestingly, is into Ursula’s fortune more than her, which kind of makes this a gender-swapped gold-digger thing too). He’s blonde and Ursula’s mom LOVES him. He’s more uncomfortable and less prepared to cope with the jungle than Ursula is, in his pastels and shiny shoes.

But he talks over Ursula, insists he knows what’s best for her, ignores her autonomy. In spite of the fact that Lyle Van de Groot is a rich, educated, social climber who cares deeply about his clothing and appearances he is a point-by-point checklist of unhealthy masculinity in a way that beefy, inarticulate, uneducated George could never be. Ursula is off on her own doing her own thing and Lyle hires two FUCKING POACHERS to track her down in the middle of the jungle while she’s working (or on vacation? It’s never made clear because he interrupts her before she can explain why she went on the expedition). Lyle ignores the local guides, claiming his experience with a bridge in Maui means the bridge they’re on is safe - which leads to a significant injury for one of the guides. He then tells Ursula the guides are conspiring against him, trying to make himself and his poachers seem safe and the Africans who make up the rest of their party seem dangerous.

Check that body language! A post above points out that we’re never worried about Ursula when she’s around George. That’s because Lyle talks to her like this. Look at his aggressive lean! Look at him literally looking down at her! She’s tilted away from him in the least threatening position possible and he’s so aggressive about whatever point he’s making. When he finds her after he pushed her toward a damned lion he kisses her and she pushes him away. Want a textbook example of gaslighting? Here you go: she says “don’t get all smoochy with me! I remember what happened with that lion” and he responds “What are you talking about? I was fighting that lion the whole time - you were just so terrified you don’t remember.”  Then he shoots George! And then he kidnaps Ursula and attempts to force her into marriage!

Now look at how George and Ursula interact (slightly NSFW):

Even though he’s a big strong dude and he thinks he’s doing what’s okay he lets her set the tone for their interactions. He accepts that he’s out of his wheelhouse and even if he doesn’t understand it he does what she says is culturally appropriate. He learns from her! He listens to her! Compare Lyle leaning into Ursula above to this image of George and Ursula talking:

He’s listening to her, all of his attention is on on her, but he’s totally nonthreatening. His torso is turned toward her but he’s not invading her space, his hands are clasped, he’s smiling, and she’s the one leaning into him. Look at that smile she has, look how happy she is to be listened to. Her posture in both images is vulnerable but in this one with George she’s vulnerable because she has chosen to share with him instead of because she feels threatened.

When George rescues Ursula from Lyle at the end of the film it isn’t a typical damsel situation - George doesn’t have a knock-down-drag-out fight with Lyle, he swings into a tree and offers Ursula a hand so she can reach up and save herself (and before he does it he acknowledges how much it’s going to hurt and *whimpers* and looks human and scared). And you’ve gotta remember that George rescues everybody. It’s not just Ursula - he also rescues a parasailer and gets shot rescuing Shep and Ape. He just likes helping, dammit!

AND this movie offers a perfect counter to the “nice guy” thing - Ursula starts engaged to a jerk who her mom thinks is a “nice guy” the moves on to actual nice man George who isn’t *just* nice - he’s also patient, listens to her, has his own skills and talents, is okay with being goofy, has his own social circle and isn’t totally dependent on Ursula, and looks amazing. Ursula doesn’t go with George just because he’s a *nice* guy who rescued her from an asshole, Ursula goes with George because he’s an interesting, fun person who is supportive of her different way of being an interesting, fun person. AND he’s emotionally available. Google image search George of the jungle and see how many smiles you can find, see how many open looks of confusion there are, see how much sadness you can see in George’s face. Now look for images of Lyle. His two expressions are a smirk and cartoonish fear. I know this is a cartoonish kid’s movie, but it is SO powerful that the hero shares his emotions while the villain masks every emotion but fear. Lyle doesn’t want to open up, he doesn’t want to be vulnerable, he wants CONTROL. George wants to learn, to protect people he cares about, to explore new places, to laugh when he’s happy and to be sad when he’s sad, and that he does that while being a broad-shouldered, physically powerful dude who is NOT totally self-involved is just…

Like, look, I didn’t sign on to tumblr dot com for George of the Jungle discourse, but I’m just now realizing that this movie may have done the most for destroying my conception of stoic masculinity and gender roles as a child.

Like

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets.

Intense book to add to the unschooling shelf. Published in 1972, probably still as radical now as it was then, as many of the “symptoms” of the schooled society he describes have only gotten worse. Some of the big ones, below:

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.”

The pupil is… “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.

“School is an institution built on axiom that learning is the result of teaching.”

Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school… Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

Most learning happens outside of the classroom.

Most learning happens casually, and even most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction. Normal children learn their first language casually, although faster if their parents pay attention to them. Most people who learn a second language well do so as a result of odd circumstances and not of sequential teaching. They go to live with their grandparents, they travel, or they fall in love with a foreigner. Fluency in reading is also more often than not a result of such extracurricular activities. Most people who read widely, and with pleasure, merely believe that they learned to do so in school; when challenged, they easily discard this illusion.

“The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling.”

School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

“School initiates young people into a world where everything can be measured, including their imaginations, and, indeed, man himself…”

People who submit to the standard of others for the measure of their own personal growth soon apply the same ruler to themselves. They no longer have to be put in their place, but put themselves into their assigned slots, squeeze themselves into the niche which they have been taught to seek, and, in the very process, put their fellows into their places, too, until everybody and everything fits. People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands. To them, what cannot be measured becomes secondary, threatening. They do not have to be robbed of their creativity.

Related: I’m really, really sick of reading books about school.

George Saunders on the Longform podcast, talking about spirituality and religion: 

You know when you’re saying goodbye to somebody at the airport that you love and you get all soft? You’re like, “Oh my god, I hardly knew ya.” You know, that kind of feeling? What if that’s the truth? That that times ten is the mode that we should exist in all the time? Then another day you’re just yourself. There’s a big gap between those two people. So, my regret would be how much time did I spend in that regular, old, stupid habitual mindset of taking everything for granted, as opposed to this exalted state of being super-tenderized to the people you care about. I’m guessing that, you know, if there’s a heaven, it’s that at the airport times ten or twenty or a thousand. The regret would be that you, like a lunkhead, spent so much time in that normal state. “Oh, I wonder what I’m going to do today? I hope my book is selling! How do I look? Oh, I’m going bald.” That mode is habitual, but we know from the occasional foray into it, that the other mode is possible. [Congratulations, By The Way] basically says: “Hurry up! Take my advice, hurry up, try to get into that higher state while you can.” How do you do it? I don’t know I’m stupid. I’m like a latecomer. But there’s these thousands of years of spiritual traditions that wouldn’t be a bad place to start. A lot of times in our culture there’s this de facto humanist swagger that says, “Oh yeah, Religion. We used to do that shit.”  But my advice would be, to anyone who wanted it: reconfigure your understanding of “Religion,” and make it exactly that which will give you that airport state of mind more often. And then go into the existing traditions and cull through them to make it that. Or to try to find the authentic elements of those traditions that are really about that. Cos that’s really what they’re about.

Last year, I was at a meeting where a group of community leaders were grappling with some of the challenges facing Minnesota and the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. We were looking at the results of a recent survey that showed, among other things, that substantial numbers of Minnesotans are seriously concerned by the achievement gap in our schools.

At that, one man — a middle-aged white man — registered surprise. He made a couple of comments that revealed two things, even if they weren’t explicitly stated. First, he didn’t think there were very many people of color in Minnesota. Second, he assumed that whites automatically wouldn’t be troubled by the achievement gap. So then, he clearly wondered, who were all these people who were worried about it?

“Minnesota is so white.” You’ve heard white people say it a million times, often with a nervously self-deprecating tone. When white people talk about how white Minnesota is, we often imply or state outright some kind of explanation for it: Minnesota’s not “cool” enough for people to move here, it’s so cold that only fifth-generation immigrants from Nordic nations want to be here, it’s in the middle of nowhere.

White people who talk about how white Minnesota is know that whiteness isn’t something to brag about, but we often seem quietly comforted by it. Racism? Segregation? Nothing we need to worry about, because — ha ha! — this state is just so white!

Here’s the thing, though: it’s not. At least, it’s not as white as it looks if you hang out in most of the places most white people hang out. Yes, on average Minnesota is whiter than most states — but we’re far from the whitest state, and there are large communities of color in Minneapolis and St. Paul. When white people say Minnesota is so white, what we really mean is that Minnesota is so segregated.

Very often, due to residential, educational, and professional segregation, white Minnesotans just don’t see people of color — and when we do, we often don’t realize we do.  Another thing white Minnesotans often mean when we say Minnesota is so white is that if you’re not white, you’re not seen as “Minnesotan.”

We brag about the quality of Minnesota’s schools, because by “Minnesota’s schools,” we mean “schools where white people go.” Whites are aware that less successful schools, often overwhelmingly attended by children of color, exist — just try suggesting that whites send our own kids there — but we still brag about how great “Minnesota’s schools” are because we implicitly dismiss those other schools as not really being in Minnesota.

This is how white Minnesota maintains the narrative in which our state is liberal-minded and prosperous in an uncomplicated way. We always vote blue, right? Well, there you go. We voted for Obama — twice! We’re not racist! How can we be, when there are no people here who aren’t white? Ha ha!

The shooting of Philando Castile has drawn a harsh, and long overdue, national light on Minnesota’s racial segregation, which is among the most extreme in the country. That’s hard for a lot of white Minnesotans to accept, and many still won’t. It’s hard for many white Minnesotans to revise the narrative handed down for generations: that Minnesota is just “so white.”

Here’s something white Minnesotans love to do: laugh, in a way we see as good-natured, about how many immigrants have moved here from Somalia and Laos. Move here — from Africa? From southeast Asia? Ha ha! Go figure!

The implication is, “We’re not saying you can’t move here — we’re just sending the message that you don’t belong here. You’re not really Minnesotan.”

Why does immigration to Minnesota seem so amusing and incongruous? Aren’t white Minnesotans always bragging about how great this state is? Why is it so strange that someone from Somalia would move here for the same reasons white Minnesotans’ ancestors moved here from Germany and Norway and Ireland? Minnesota — it’s the good life! Lakes! Sun! Snow! Employment! Right?

Germany and Norway and Ireland are exactly where my ancestors came from, and I know I’m not immune to prejudice. I hope I can help, though, to build a better Minnesota: a more equitable Minnesota, a Minnesota that celebrates our state as it is, not as we’ve been taught to see it.

We can’t put this shared nightmare behind us overnight, but we can honor the memory of Philando Castile and the many other Minnesotans whose lives have been lost to, or hindered by, racism: we can tell truer stories about life here in the heartland, in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

We can talk not just about Prince, but about the African-American musical community that nurtured his talent. We can talk not just about Oscar nominee Barkhad Abdi, but about the Somali-American community who enrich the fabric of Minneapolis. When we talk about Minnesota’s fertile fields, we can also talk about the generations of hands — many of them Latino and Asian-American hands — that have cultivated those fields alongside German-American and Scandinavian-American hands.

Ole Rølvaag’s epic novel about Norwegian farmers is titled Giants in the Earth. It’s true, in Minnesota we are standing on the shoulders of giants — including a lot of people of color who haven’t been celebrated with novels and statues. That’s a reality that white Minnesotans need to recognize, and we need to participate in the dismantling of a system that makes some Minnesotans more equal than others.

– Jay Gabler

up front caveats:

1. I am not an expert or spokesperson for Black Lives Matter, I only speak for myself and my experience. Following national and local Black Lives Matter groups and other activists is your best way to learn about this movement.

2. I would and will never tell other people how to parent. The decision to take your child to a protest is intensely personal and there are many, many valid reasons to make a different choice than I made.

I was not going to write about this. I get a lot of opportunities to talk and have my voice heard and part of how I choose to participate in social change and protest is to try to make space for other people to be heard. But then I read this post that my friend shared on Facebook (h/t Kemi Ilesanmi, from whom I get so many wonderful things to read and think about):

I love an asset based approach. I started thinking about this for myself. And questioning whether my attitude of making space for others might also be a way of not stepping up or out enough in support. One asset I have is a platform – in real life and online and some people who listen to what I say and read what I write. Another asset, also born of white, cis, femme, blonde, Midwestern privilege, is that people tend to not get mad when I say contentious things. Maybe that means they might hear something differently from me? Maybe it means I’m not being brave enough.

I attended the Black Lives Matter rally and protest that became the I94 shutdown. I brought my 10-year old daughter. My husband and I wanted her to see people who were standing up for what they believe in. We wanted her to understand that she can take action. While we were there we joined the march that started at the Governor’s mansion. It was well-organized, loving, peaceful, and hopeful. The organizers gave us clear instructions for non-violence and how to report someone to the organizers (and not take matters into our own hands) if we saw someone we thought might be violent.

We walked for several blocks. I didn’t know where we were going. I was a little worried my kid would complain about how far the walk was, because, you know, she’s a kid. She asked a lot of questions along the way and I tried clumsily to explain, to help her understand. As with a lot of parenting, trying to explain to her only made me realize how little I know, how shallow my understanding truly is. She asked “Why are we all doing this? Who are we talking to?” I tried to explain that taking big public action helps get the attention of the public, but also of politicians who make our laws and tells them we want them to change the laws.” She wanted to know which politicians, which laws? She said, “Because I know President Obama, he must be on our side, right? How many more people do we need to convince?” Good question.

I tried to explain the more insidious, systemic parts, I tried to start with how our country was founded, with taking land that didn’t belong to us from the Native American community. I tried to start with slavery. Somewhere in here, I brought Hamilton into the conversation (because she loves Hamilton.) I was stumbling all over myself. She said, “MOM! I don’t understand what you are talking about!” We walked in silence for another block, I still don’t really know where we are going, maybe we are going to University Avenue where there are lots of people who could see us. I start worrying that maybe I shouldn’t have brought her (not because I’m scared AT ALL, I felt completely safe during this entire experience) but because should I be asking her to stand up for something if she doesn’t yet understand what she’s standing up for?

I take a deep breath and say “Ok, let me try this one more time and if it doesn’t make sense, let me know, ok?” “Imagine if there is a big dandelion in the yard and we just yank it out, but we don’t get all the roots out. Then maybe that big dandelion is gone, but lots more weeds will spring up from those roots, right? Imagine that big dandelion is slavery, and we might have yanked the top of that big ugly weed so it wasn’t as obvious, but the roots were still there and now there are lots weeds that are still popping up. Those weeds are laws, and attitudes and sometimes feelings we don’t even know we have.” I was sure she would look at me and say “What?!” or ask if we could get ice cream after this. But instead she paused and said quietly, “Oh. Yes! I understand that.” And she ran over to explain it to her dad and grandma. And she didn’t complain about the walk.

We got to the on-ramp of I94 and I realized where we were going. The organizers very clearly explained where the march was going, again reminded us to be peaceful, and gave us an option to leave. My kid was gripping my hand tight and we walked onto the highway. This highway that is a scar through the Rondo neighborhood. A symbol of racism and disregard for black lives and black community literally built into our city. What I saw and heard on the highway:

people standing next to their cars smiling and taking pictures

people sitting in their cars awkwardly not knowing what to do

a bride and groom in their wedding clothes waving from the overpass

a leader of the protest–standing clearly where everyone could see and hear her, praising people’s love and peacefulness, giving calm, clear instructions–bathed in a beautiful evening light

the organizers and other protestors helping to facilitate a car that needed to get through get through the crowd safely

police looking bemused, annoyed, or like this was their job, that they believed in

protestors crying because they were doing what they believed in

protestors shouting because they were doing what they believed in

protestors hugging and holding hands because they were doing what they believed in

I felt pain, joy, sorrow, anger, and overwhelming gratitude to all of the people, and especially the organizers, for giving me hope that change is possible for giving me an opportunity to be a tiny tiny part of something that felt like action. My child was nervous, a little overwhelmed, but she didn’t want to leave, she knew why she was there. She has a very loud voice and she was using it well.

The organizers clearly told us when we should leave if we couldn’t or shouldn’t or didn’t want to risk arrest. Their directions were clear and calm and respectful to the police. We parted ways with a friend who was willing to stay and risk arrest to stand up for what he believes in. I know several of the people who were eventually arrested that night and know them to be some of the calmest, most peaceful, thoughtful people I have ever encountered. I am honored to share a nonprofit community with many of them. It should go without saying that I do not endorse any violence against the police or any one else. I simply do not understand how they can be blamed and charged for the violence they did not condone, repeatedly asked to stop and explicitly condemned. This seems like deciding to charge some customers who happened to be in a bank while it was robbed because it was too hard to catch the bank robber.

We exited on the off ramp and walked back to the Governor’s mansion. It was a long walk. She never complained once.

—

P.S. Here is a great list of resources and more information on how to help, how to take action and how to learn and educate yourself on the issues (so maybe you’ll have better answers for your kids than I did):

specifically, these:

Black Lives Matter Minneapolis

Million Artist Movement

P.P.S. Another amazing and inspiring art and activism project, fellow theater artists, get involved with the Every 28 Hours Plays project.

P.P.P.S. Something else that inspires me is people who are moved to use their artistic skills and creative power who don’t define themselves as activists. Including Mary Engelbreit (yes that Mary Engelbreit) who makes the cherubic drawings of kids on the beach, and bowls of cherries to decorate your kitchen. This artist, this white, middle aged woman, whose work I have loved, but who I never really thought was a real person behind a brand. This person who very easily could have done nothing, she stepped up, she used her art and her platform of many followers to say something she believed, multiple times, and she stood behind it. I love that.

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Good grief, is this an important read, and one which will likely make you angry, either at the system, or at Gatto, or at me for recommending it. Gulped it down on a single 3-hour plane ride.  The first two essays — “The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher” and “The Psychopathic School” — are my favorites. It’s remarkable that they were both acceptance speeches for teaching awards in the early 90s.

I have so many highlights it’s impossible to post them here, but let me gather some of them, and list some big ideas I took away, below.

Education and schooling are not the same.

We all sort of know this, duh, and we misquote Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, etc. as saying, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education,” but Gatto’s point is that schooling not only interferes with one’s personal education, it impedes it, and often destroys it.

What, then, is an education? 

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.

(Suddenly reminded of Bakewell’s wonderful bio of Montaigne, How To Live.)

One of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn’t cost very much, doesn’t depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the self-awareness that propels it are nearly free. It is hard to turn a dollar on education. But schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time.

Gatto brings up Socrates, who thought that paying people to teach the young was a really bad idea, because it would “inevitably expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students.” Which brings us to our next point…

It’s not really the teachers’ or administrators’ fault that school sucks

Schooling is an institution, and an institution’s “unstated goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself.”

The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience.

This “psychopathic” institution encourages a not-so-hidden curriculum, made up of 7 lessons:

1. Confusion (“Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections.”)

2. Class position (“My job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own.”)

3. Indifference (“I teach children not to care too much about anything…. when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch…. the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?”)

4. Emotional dependency (“By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command…”)

5. Intellectual dependency (“Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives… Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being learned.”)

6. Provisional self-esteem (“Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid’s self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged…. . The ecology of “good” schooling depends on perpetuating dissatisfaction, just as the commercial economy depends on the same fertilizer.”)

7. One can’t hide (“There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time… I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood…. children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.”)

If it succeeds, it mostly produces students who possess the following characteristics:

Indifferent to the adult world

Incurious

A poor sense of the future

Ahistorical: no sense of how the past has made the present

Cruel, lacking of compassion, contempt for weakness

Uneasy with intimacy or candor

Materialistic

Dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges

In other words: people who will shut up, go to work, sit still, and then use their wages to buy stuff to make up for their meaningless lives. 

Children have almost no free time to develop into themselves

With television, the internet, and scheduled “extra-curricular” activities, there’s almost no private time or solitude in which a child can just be herself, develop her own questions, her own curiosity, her own interests, her own thoughts. There’s no chance to “know thyself”:

Right now we are taking from our children all the time that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.

We lock away children and old people from everyday life, either in schools or nursing homes

In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn.

But now:

Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present.

This sentence put a big lump in my throat: “eventually you have to come to be part of a place — part of its hills and streets and waters and people — or you will live a very, very sorry life as an exile forever.”

Networks are not communities

In a sneaky way, this part of the book shook me most profoundly — because it was written before social media, it doesn’t mention “social networks” explicitly, but so much of it applies to Facebook, Twitter, etc., and how we often mistake those virtual places as real places, with real community.

A real community allows you to be a whole person:

A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible — lives of engagement and participation.

A network, however, requires only a  piece of you:

it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest part — a highly unnatural act although one you can get used to. In exchange, the network will deliver efficiency in the pursuit of some limited aim. This is, in fact, a devil’s bargain, since on the promise of some future gain one must surrender the wholeness of one’s present humanity. If you enter into too many of these bargains, you will split yourself into many specialized pieces, none of them completely human. And no time is available to reintegrate them. This, ironically, is the destiny of many successful networkers and doubtless generates much business for divorce courts and therapists of a variety of persuasions.

Over time, too much networking leads to a feeling of malnourishment:

If the loss of true community entailed by masquerading in networks is not noticed in time, a condition arises in the victim’s spirit very much like the “trout starvation” that used to strike wilderness explorers whose diet was made up exclusively of stream fish. While trout quell the pangs of hunger — and even taste good — the eater gradually suffers for want of sufficient nutrients.

We all know that feeling from being on Twitter too long. 

I’m also thinking now of the ways that a website like NextDoor attempts to bring community together, but really just re-organizes a community as a network — most of the stuff I see happening on my neighborhood message board is atomization, or splitting apart of the community: all you people who aren’t putting out your garbage vs. those of us who are, mom’s groups, cyclists, craigslist-like transactions, etc. 

Networks divide people, first from themselves and then from each other, on the grounds that this is the efficient way to perform a task. It may well be, but it is a lousy way to feel good about being alive. Networks make people lonely. They cannot correct their inhuman mechanism and still succeed as networks.

Gatto says that, yes, networks have their place, but that they lack any real “ability to nourish their members emotionally.” He says “the only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communal facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task.” (LinkedIn? Ha.)

I want to repeat this until you are sick of hearing it. Networks do great harm by appearing enough like real communities to create expectations that they can manage human social and psychological needs. The reality is that they cannot. Even associations as inherently harmless as bridge clubs, chess clubs, amateur acting groups, or groups of social activists will, if they maintain a pretense of whole friendship, ultimately produce that odd sensation familiar to all city dwellers of being lonely in the middle of a crowd. Which of us who frequently networks has not felt this sensation? Belonging to many networks does not add up to having a community, no matter how many you belong to or how often your telephone rings.

Gatto sees compulsory school as an “involuntary network with strangers.”

We need less schooling, not more.

When you stop thinking about individual schools as “failing” or “underperforming” and you start seeing our school system as an institution doing exactly what it was designed to do, it, in the words of Zoolander’s Hansel, “changes your whole perspective on shit.” You stop thinking about how you can improve schools, and start wondering if there’s another alternative entirely.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education…. No amount of tinkering will make the school machine work to produce educated people; education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms…. the school institution “schools” very well, though it does not “educate” — that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

Gatto sums it up: “Children learn what they live.” 

Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.

The alternative? As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist, the student is always in charge of her own education. We need to do what we can to let her direct her own education from the very earliest age. Gatto:  

Encourage and underwrite experimentation; trust children and families to know what’s best for themselves; stop the segregation of children and the aged in walled compounds; involve everyone in every community in the education of the young: businesses, institutions, old people, whole families; look for local solutions and always accept a personal solution in place of a corporate one. You need not fear educational consequences: reading, writing, and arithmetic aren’t very hard to teach if you take pains to see that compulsion and the school agenda don’t short-circuit each individual’s private appointment with themselves to learn these things. There is abundant evidence that less than a hundred hours is sufficient for a person to become totally literate and a self-teacher. Don’t be panicked by scare tactics into surrendering your children to experts.

You are important and valued, so I want to make sure you all know you get to eat a free meal every day school is not in session. Very few of my students knew about this until I brought it up.

For more information (including where to go near where you stay)

Text: “summer food” to 612.516.3663

Call: 612.516.3663

Visit: 2harvest.org/summerfood

TIL that American booze is legally required to radioactive. This video from Tom Scott explains why.

Basically, this radioactivity (it’s very slight) ensures that the hooch is made from natural grain and plant material. It is possible to make ethanol from petroleum products. You end up with the same C2H6O molecule and pure petroleum ethanol would still get you intoxicated if you drank it. But since people using ethanol for industrial purposes don’t want to pay the same enormous sin taxes as those of us who drink for pleasure, they’ve agreed to make manufactured ethanol undrinkable by adding toxic and unpleasant chemicals. This test makes sure everyone’s on the up and up.

Still, even adding things like methanol and bitter-tasting denatonium doesn’t always stop people from drinking this stuff in a pinch. Around Christmas Day in 1926, during American Prohibition, 31 people died of methanol poisoning in New York City. And beginning in 1930, tens of thousands of people lost partial or complete use of their hands and feet after drinking “Jamaica Ginger,” a manufactured alcoholic tonic that contained a plasticizer called tricresyl phosphate.

#Justice4Jamar

Remember that police violence is an issue regardless of the specific details of any specific case, and promoting the endless “debate” of details is a tactic that those in power use to obscure larger truths. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.

Remember to be wary of people who will not only fail to question the official narrative, but can’t seem to even imagine a world in which it could be questioned. It’s one thing to buy it; it’s something else to put so much energy into attacking or belittling those who don’t.