“Alone Again, Naturally”

From the start of this semester, I’ve been talking about how removed the human feels from our education system. It began with the death of my dog the weekend before the beginning of the semester. I didn’t really have time to recover. There was no way to postpone, and I could do nothing but potentially set myself back from the beginning by missing classes.

I decided to just power through. The feeling was all too familiar. I had lost my closest friend in the beginning of my college career and was asked to do the same thing. I returned to the same building, lived in the same room, went to classes knowing full well why the seat beside me was now empty. I had learned from that experience, though, and this time around, I was prepared for the emptiness. I didn’t let it control me, there was no room for failure.

And I haven’t failed yet- but I have been angry. It’s hard not to be angry when you’re being asked to reflect on a bunch of shit that doesn’t really feel like it matters (things that you couldn’t make a difference in even if you tried), and not being given time to reflect on the loss of what matters to you most.

Then I began to think about other people, children, who have been dealt blows just as powerful. The loss of a parent, of a sibling, a grandparent. Just to be asked to return to school the next day and follow all of the rules. To listen to your teacher talk about geometry and history and then remember that your favorite person in the world doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s not like death is a new idea to society or even like it’s new-ish. Death has been a part of us long before education. So why is it we’re never taught how to deal with it? Why is there no part of our system that recognizes loss as a life-altering event that requires recognition and guidance, and perhaps a deviation from the “rules” for a little while?

Because as Sean Michael Morris suggests in “Technology is not Pedagogy”, “we have not coded for the human in education,” and as bell hooks suggests in “Teaching to Transgress” we are taught “to believe a classroom [is] diminished if students and professors regard… one another as “whole” human beings” (14). Education is not about people, and it’s not about being a person. It is not about being the best version of yourself. Education currently has no stakes in well-being.

We continue to give our children to “a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies” and wonder why students suffer from mental health problems (“Critical Digital Pedagogy: a Definition” Morris and Stommel). They are being taught the wrong values from the beginning. Our system is a lazy excuse for an “education”, and it only gets lazier as our reliance on technology grows.

Morris and Stommel highlight that a key aspect of Critical Digital Pedagogy includes a “dialogue in which both students and teachers participate as full agents”, and my interpretation of “full agents” aligns much with my understanding of hooks’ “”whole” human beings” (14). Education means nothing if we don’t acknowledge ourselves within it. Everything I write, I read, I make- it is all an effort to be better. If not, who am I doing all of this for? To impress my mother? To please my father? Everyone else is going to die- and I will be “Alone Again, Naturally”, and so education should be an effort to endear you to yourself (Gilbert O’Sullivan).