The Beautiful Tower of Babel

Last night I watched a TED Talks video posted by a friend on Facebook, discussing the philosophy behind modern education, and why it has become both inadequate to serving the world's continued economic interests, and the personal holistic interests of children. The speaker's (Ken Robinson) main point was that education is designed around a "factory mentality" born out of the first industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century, and in conjunction with similar ideas brewing around personal freedoms and the connection between an individual and society.

One of many points that struck me was Robinson's emphasis that one of education's struggles is to balance teaching cultural identity to students, while teaching them globalization. It's the same struggle that hums at the core of public education–that effort to standardize, to make the many into one. In some ways, this is just what education should do, as no society can function at the most basic level without some shared beliefs and structures.

The flip side to this, however, is the reality of human complexity, and the inescapable fact that as multidimensional beings of infinite capability, we don't always fit into one mold. And perhaps we shouldn't.

Modern western culture teaches that at once both diversity and globalization are desirable virtues; but how can both exist simultaneously? At some point, one has to give in to the other.

The story of the tower of Babel is that originally, humans tried to build a tower up to God's level in order to make themselves all-powerful, and were punished by having this tower struck, and the people all on it, scattered to the four corners of the earth. Diversity of language, culture, and thought, supposedly comes from this original "punishment." Separation, or individuality, therefore, is the result of our confounded efforts to be one.

Of course this is just a slim interpretation of a cultural myth loaded with symbolism, and many scholars do not even apply a concept of punishment to the original story, so much as that of an etiology tale of how civilization came about. But my point is that Babel is beautiful. Our children's Babel is beautiful, and the Babel told in Egypt, Norway, and Malaysia, and in tiny, remote Amazon villages, is also beautiful.

Globalization teaches us to see each other as "one," and that is so important an idea–and yet, it makes me worry that the universality that we supposedly believe we are reaching for, is not universal and is not as liberating as we think. It's a dominant culture (undeniably often the West) that, for better or for worse, is spreading around the globe, and potentially eradicating other sounds of Babel, and even potentially squelching them in its own offspring.

Instead of seeing globalization, like education, as an opportunity to engage in a multi-voiced dialectic, it is so often pushed as a single truth, or to quote the TED Talk lecture, "There's only one right answer…and it's in the back of the book." In American public education, curriculums geared towards standardized testing heavily outweigh approaches more contextually designed around individual classrooms.

In the age of standardized testing, there's no longer an active search for truth, only the dead declaration that wonderful One-ness is coming (but it's our One and not yours). It's the same age that is drugging up so many kids with dangerous ADHD meds, obsessively tracking their academic progress in ridiculously unhelpful charts and numbers, and then continues to cut music, art, science, and recess. I can't think of anything more destructive to our economy than teaching our children to stop being creative, to stop innovating, to stop taking in information with five senses and to process it, play with it, imagine what it could become. You think a strong economy is built on a generation of people who simply learned how to regurgitate answers in Scantrons?

So I guess this has me both thinking about our attitudes towards educating our own children, and how we "educate" the world. I think globalization is inescapable at this point, but I don't mean to say that's a bad thing. In so many hopeful ways it is inspiring. But it makes me wonder what happens to diversity and individuality, as One-ness takes over. I hope it will be a One-ness built on all of Babel, not just some.

progression?

approaching my next birthday, i begin to think again of where i've come from, and where i'm going. and in doing so, i find that i have gone all over the place and yet in some ways haven't moved at all, a bit like john donne's twin compasses that "obliquely run" and yet "make me end where i begun."

bear with me a bit; we're not done yet with the literary references.

i was remembering another entry from my journal from several years ago because i'd been brooding over the fact that a friend was getting married at what i considered to be much too young an age, even as i wished for such happiness myself. i had a dream then that i recorded and which i can still recall because of its vivid qualities. i offer it again as insight into my feelings now:

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june 13, 2005:

i dreamed last night of an intense, wonderful freedom.

i was with a large group of friends on a bright, sunny day. we were driving down a dirt lane with green fields on our left and a wood on our right. i sat in an open carriage with a young man who i couldn't really see; all i could see was the lane ahead of me, the horse drawing the carriage, the land, and the arm of this man-a black, tuxedoed arm-as he tried to control the horse. he kept losing the reins and i was laughing and enjoying the sunshine, and intermittently grasping his arm and the reins.

then we all turned down another road, all of our carriages, and came to a large clearing amidst tall trees where, spread out, were the interiors of a house without walls. suddenly we all split up, as if to play a large game of tag except it involved finding various clues and solving puzzles. and i found myself wandering down the lane and into a lovely field full of buttercups and wheat grass and i met someone from our party but we parted because we hadn't finished the game yet.

suddenly the field ended and i stood on the rocky cliff of the seashore and out among the shallows there was a large ship with sails, tipped up with its hull in the air over the rocks, like a beached whale. i asked someone where our name papers were, and they replied that they were up in the ship.

i climbed into the ship and was immediately in love with its ropes and sails and narrow stairways, and the bright, clear windows of the captain's cabin, but i couldn't find the papers. instead i found the ship's steering wheel and without thinking i reached out and turned it.

the ship lurched into the water, as if it were a great animal that could pick itself up, and began to sail.

at first i was horrified by what i had done by accident, but then i was thrilled by the deep blue sky in the horizon and the happy clear blue water. as i sailed, though, i accidentally ran the ship up against the shallows and somewhere i could hear my friend kristen chiding me to several girlfriends, "she knows exactly what she does and she does it anyway," but i knew that she didn't mean it angrily and somehow i felt as if she were smiling knowingly at me. i didn't care that i'd run the ship up; it was a challenge that i was happy to face, so i turned the ship away and sailed back on those beautiful waters, glad only to be the one who decided which way the wheel turned.

now, thinking about that glorious feeling of being out on the waves, in control of my own destiny and uncaring of what might happen so long as the decision were mine, i wonder what it means to be free. and what it means to be really, truly in love.

is it a freedom, a release, love? i never thought so, although in being bound we do have freedom from solitude, from loneliness, and from the startling unpleasantness of hearing one's thoughts echo back to one's head without being answered.

but for now the desire is to sail alone at full speed, "wherever the wind may drive the boat" until I find someone who is willing to sail alongside me and occasionally take the wheel.

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of course, as a recent disney film reminds us (yes! there is even wisdom to be found in disney!), reflection is good but brooding is bad:

yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery, but today is a gift;
that's why it's called the present.