by Daniel Quinn
“I don’t see that what you’re talking about is anything like a cure for cancer.”
He studied me gravely for a few moments, then said, “Maybe you should go spend an hour studying wallpaper or whatever it is you do when you need a break.”
I jumped up out of the chair and stomped to the back of the room to glare at the books in Ishmael’s sagging old book-case. I even opened a couple volumes hoping some brilliant quote would leap off the page at me, but nothing leaped. After ten minutes I went back and sat down.
“It’s some sort of goddamned pride thing,” I told him.
“Go on.”
“If we had a planet hitched up next door that was inhabited by members of an alien race—I started to say advanced alien race—that would be one thing. It would be tolerable if they knew something we don’t know. What is not tolerable is to have these goddamned savages know something we don’t know.”
“I understand, Julie. At least I think I do. But here’s what you must understand. We’re not exploring here what these people knew. You could sit down and talk to every tribal person on this planet about tribal life, and not one of them would spontaneously articulate the Erratic Retaliator strategy for you. But once you articulate it for them, they will of course recognize it immediately and will probably say something like, ‘Well, we all know that. We didn’t say it because it’s just too obvious to need saying’—and I agree. It took one of the great scientific minds of all time to articulate the fact that unsupported objects fall toward the center of the earth, something any normal five-year-old knows—or would certainly imagine he knew if you pointed it out to him.”
“I’m not quite sure what point you’re making.”
“I’m not quite sure either, Julie, to be honest. You’ll have to be patient as I grope for answers that will satisfy you.… Scientists of many different kinds are interested in bioluminescence—the production of light by living creatures—but none of them is trying to find out what these creatures know about producing light. What they know about producing light is beside the point. Not long ago we studied a behavior that enables white-footed mice to be successful. But we weren’t trying to find out what white-footed mice know about being successful. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“The same applies to our study here. We’re not interested in what Leavers know about living, any more than we’re interested in what bioluminescent creatures know about light. Their knowledge is not our study. Their success is our study.”
“Okay. I see that. What I don’t see is how their success has anything to do with us.”
Ishmael nodded. “This is precisely why it’s never been studied by you, Julie. It’s never seemed relevant to study people whose only accomplishment was to live on a planet for three million years without devouring it. But as you approach a point of no return in your plunge toward extinction, this study will soon seem very relevant indeed.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. Sort of.”
“It’s well known that the Vikings visited the New World five hundred years before Columbus did. But the Vikings’ contemporaries weren’t electrified by their discovery, because it was irrelevant to them. You could have proclaimed it from every housetop, and people would have been puzzled to know why you bothered. But when Columbus made his discovery five hundred years later, his contemporaries were electrified. The discovery of a new continent was now very relevant indeed. Until now, Julie, I’ve been like Leif Eriksson tromping around alone on a vast, marvelous continent that absolutely no one cares about and no one wants to hear about. This continent has been open and available for study by your philosophers, your educators, your economists, your political scientists for more than a century, but not one of them has given it more than a bored look. Its existence inspires in them nothing but yawns. But I sense that things are beginning to change. Your appearance here in this room is a sign of that change—and as you recall, I nearly missed it myself. I sense that more and more of you are becoming alarmed about your headlong plunge toward catastrophe. I sense that more and more of you are casting about for new ideas.”
“Yeah. But unfortunately more and more of us are also casting about for more and more exotic forms of hoogymoogy.”
“That’s only to be expected, Julie. What you’re experiencing is tantamount to cultural collapse. For ten thousand years you’ve believed that you have the one right way for people to live. But for the last three decades or so, that belief has become more and more untenable with every passing year. You may think it odd that this is so, but it’s the men of your culture who are being hit the hardest by the failure of your cultural mythology. They have (and have always had) a much greater investment in the righteousness of your revolution. In coming years, as the signs of collapse become more and more unmistakable, you’ll see them withdraw ever more completely into the surrogate world of male success, the world of sports. And, much worse, you’ll see them taking ever more violent revenge for their disappointment on the world around them—and particularly on the women around them.”
“Why on women?”
“The Taker dream has always been a man’s dream, Julie, and the men of your culture imagine that the collapse of this dream will devastate them while leaving women relatively untouched.”
“And won’t it?”
Ishmael thought for a moment before answering. “The inmates of the Taker prison build the prison anew for themselves in every generation, Julie. Your mother and father did their part and are doing it still. You personally, as you dutifully go to school and prepare to take your place in the world of work, are even now engaged in building the prison for your own generation to occupy. When it’s all done, it’ll be the work of all of you, men and women alike. Even so, the women of your culture have never been as enthusiastic about prison life as the men—have rarely gotten as much out of it as men have.”
“Are you saying that men run the prison?”
“No. As long as the food remains under lock and key, the prison runs itself. The governing that you see is the prisoners governing themselves. They’re allowed to do that and to live as they please within the prison. For the most part, the prisoners have chosen to be governed by men—or allowed themselves to be governed by men—but these men don’t run the prison itself.”
“What’s the prison then?”
“The prison is your culture, which you sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago.”
“How do we stop that?”
“By learning something different, Julie. By refusing to teach your children how to be prisoners. By breaking the pattern. This is why, when people ask me what they should do, I tell them, ‘Teach others what you’ve learned here.’ All too often, however, they reply by saying, ‘Yes, that’s fine, but what should we do?’ When six billion of you refuse to teach your children how to be prisoners of Taker culture, this awful dream of yours will be over—in a single generation. It can only continue for as long as you perpetuate it. Your culture has no independent existence—no existence outside of you—and if you cease to perpetuate it, then it will vanish. Must vanish, like a flame with nothing to feed on.”
“Yeah, but what would happen then? You can’t just stop teaching your children anything, can you?”
“Of course not, Julie. You can’t just stop teaching them anything. Rather, you must teach them something new. And if you’re going to teach them something new, then of course you must first learn something new yourself. And that’s what you’re here to do.”
“I get it,” I said.
School Daze
I do realize, Julie, that I have to show you how to explore this new continent that I’ve led you to.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I told him.
“Perhaps you’d lik
e to hear how I first began to explore it myself.”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Last Sunday I mentioned the name Rachel Sokolow as the person who made it possible for me to maintain this establishment. You don’t need to know how this came about, but I knew Rachel from infancy—was in communication with her as you and I are in communication. I’d had no experience of your educational system when Rachel started school. Not having any reason to, I’d never given it even a passing thought. Like most five-year-olds, she was thrilled to be going off to school at last, and I was thrilled for her, imagining (as she did) that some truly wonderful experience must be awaiting her. It was only after several months that I began to notice that her excitement was fading—and continued to fade month after month and year after year, until, by the time she was in the third grade she was thoroughly bored and glad for any opportunity to miss a day of school. Does this all come as strange news to you?”
“Yeah,” I said with a bitter laugh. “Only about eighty million kids went to bed last night praying for six feet of snow to fall so the schools would have to close.”
“Through Rachel, I became a student of your educational system. In effect, I went to school with her. Most of the adults in your society seem to have forgotten what went on when they were in school as small children. If, as adults, they were forced to see it all again through the eyes of their children, I think they’d be astounded and horrified.”
“Yeah, I think so too.”
“What one sees first is how far short real schooling falls from the ideal of ‘young minds being awakened.’ Teachers for the most part would be delighted to awaken young minds, but the system within which they must work fundamentally frustrates that desire by insisting that all minds must be opened in the same order, using the same tools, and at the same pace, on a certain schedule. The teacher is charged with getting the class as a whole to a certain predetermined point in the curriculum by a certain predetermined time, and the individuals that make up the class soon learn how to help the teacher with this task. This is, in a sense, the first thing they must learn. Some learn it quickly and easily and others learn it slowly and painfully, but all eventually learn it. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“I think so.”
“What have you personally learned to do to help teachers with their task?”
“Don’t ask questions.”
“Expand on that a bit, Julie.”
“If you raise your hand and say, ‘Gee, Ms. Smith, I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said all day,’ Ms. Smith is going to hate you. If you raise your hand and say, ‘Gee, Ms. Smith, I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said all week,’ Ms. Smith is going to hate you five times as much. And if you raise your hand and say, ‘Gee, Ms. Smith, I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said all year,’ Ms. Smith is going to pull out a gun and shoot you.”
“So the idea is to give the impression that you understand everything, whether you do or not.”
“That’s right. The last thing the teacher wants to hear is that you haven’t understood something.”
“But you began by giving me the rule against asking questions. You haven’t really addressed that.”
“Don’t ask questions means … don’t bring up things just because you wonder about them. I mean, like, suppose you’re studying tidal forces. You don’t raise your hand to ask if it’s true that crazy people tend to be crazier during the full moon. I can imagine doing something like that in kindergarten, but by the time you’re my age, that would be taboo. On the other hand, some teachers like to be distracted by certain kinds of questions. If they’ve got a hobbyhorse, they’ll always accept an invitation to ride it, and kids pick up on that right away.”
“Why would you want to have the teacher riding a hobbyhorse?”
“Because it’s better than listening to him explain how a bill passes Congress.”
“How else do you help teachers with their task?”
“Never disagree. Never point out inconsistencies. Never ask questions that go beyond what’s being taught. Never let on that you’re lost. Always try to look like you’re getting every word. It all comes to pretty much the same thing.”
“I understand,” Ishmael said. “Again, I stress that this is a defect of the system itself and not of the teachers, whose overriding obligation is to ‘get through the material.’ You understand that, in spite of all this, yours is the most advanced educational system in the world. It works very badly, but it’s still the most advanced there is.”
“Yeah, that’s what I understand. I wish you’d smirk or something to show when you’re being ironical.”
“I’m not sure I could even manage such an expression, Julie.… To return to my story, I watched Rachel being marched through the grades (and I should add that she went to a very expensive private school—the most advanced of the advanced). As I did so I began to put what I was seeing together with what I already knew of the workings of your culture and what I already knew of the working of those cultures that you are so far in advance of. At this point, I had developed none of the theories you’ve heard here so far. In societies you consider primitive, youngsters ‘graduate’ from childhood at age thirteen or fourteen, and by this age have basically learned all they need in order to function as adults in their community. They’ve learned so much, in fact, that if the rest of the community were simply to vanish overnight, they’d be able to survive without the least difficulty. They’d know how to make the tools needed for hunting and fishing. They’d know how to shelter and clothe themselves. At age thirteen or fourteen, their survival value is one hundred percent. I assume you know what I mean by that.”
“Of course.”
“In your vastly more advanced system, youngsters graduate from your school system at age eighteen, and their survival value is virtually zero. If the rest of the community were to vanish overnight and they were left entirely to their own resources, they’d have to be very lucky to survive at all. Without tools—and without even tools for making tools, they wouldn’t be able to hunt or fish very effectively (if at all). And most wouldn’t have any idea what wild-growing plants are edible. They wouldn’t know how to clothe themselves or build a shelter.”
“That’s right.”
“When the youngsters of your culture graduate from school (unless their families continue to take care of them), they must immediately find someone to give them money to buy the things they need in order to survive. In other words, they have to find jobs. You should be able to explain why this is so.”
I nodded. “Because the food is under lock and key.”
“Precisely. I want you to see the connection between these two things. Because they have no survival value on their own, they must get jobs. This isn’t something that’s optional for them, unless they’re independently wealthy. It’s either get a job or go hungry.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
“I’m sure you realize that adults in your society are forever saying that your schools are doing a terrible job. They’re the most advanced in the history of the world, but they’re still doing a terrible job. How do your schools fall short of what people expect of them, Julie?”
“God, I don’t know. This isn’t something that interests me very much. I just tune out when people start talking about stuff like that.”
“Come on, Julie. You don’t have to listen very hard to know this.”
I groaned. “Test scores are lousy. The schools don’t prepare people for jobs. The schools don’t prepare people to have a good life. I suppose some people would say that the schools should give us some survival value. We should be able to be successful when we graduate.”
“That’s what your schools are there for, isn’t it? They’re there to prepare children to have a successful life in your society.”
“That’s right.”
Ishmael nodded. “This is what Mother Culture teaches, Julie. It’s truly one of her most elegant decep
tions. Because of course this isn’t at all what your schools are there for.”
“What are they there for, then?”
“It took me several years to work it out. At that stage I wasn’t used to uncovering these deceptions. This was my first attempt, and I was a little slow at it. The schools are there, Julie, to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market.”
“Wow,” I said. “I see that.”
“A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite. Everyone should go to college, at least for a couple of years. Yes?”
I was waving my hand in the air. “I have a question. It seems to me like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect. Instead of keeping young people off the job market, the system would have been trying to put them on the job market.”
Ishmael nodded. “Yes, on the surface that sounds plausible. But imagine what would happen here today if your educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed.”
I gave that a few seconds of consideration and said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. There would suddenly be twenty million kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The jobless rate would go through the roof.”
“It would literally be catastrophic, Julie. You see, it’s not only essential to keep these fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers.”