The Natural Products of Our Training

by Laureen

I'd like to direct your attention to this article in the Washington Post, "Pearls Before Breakfast." That article illustrates to me that public school in America is absolutely successful at what it sets out to do, and that the vast majority of us are the natural products of our training.

The article covers a social experiment conducted by some of the Post's staff writers:

 

He emerged from the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most  measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a  long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a  small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he  shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money,  swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play...

 

In the three-quarters of an hour that he played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang  around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven  gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change.  That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three  feet away, few even turning to look.

 

"He" is Joshua Bell, arguably one of the best violinists of all time, and what he played was a sampling of some of the best music ever written for violin. He played for free, on his Stradivarius violin, posing as just another busker at rush hour, to see if beauty could transcend context.

These people, these passersby, are largely government workers.   The world does not end if they're ten or fifteen minutes late, but we are so conditioned by the bell ringing to be in our seats on time or face the direst consequences the bureaucracy can throw at us, that we no longer are even able to stop for beauty. We have a time clock to punch, and that is the all-important priority in the morning. We have to be in our seats on time, and twelve years of public school indoctrination has drilled that into our habits so completely, that as adults, we're still doing it, and allowing it to be done to us. "Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?" asks the article.

In this case, the opportunity cost to these people of this habitual behavior was to miss out on something irreplaceable. Something that they will never see again, was determined by their force of habit, to be less worthy than being to work on time.

 

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life,  British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for  beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be  symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the  capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

 

"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

In the subsequent article, it was determined that most of the passersby didn't even recognize the music for what it was. We don't listen to music outside our own very narrow preference range, usually. There's no benefit to it. We listen to whatever the radio's playing, with no time or appreciation or attention for whatever isn't. It was noted that at least one person rushing by couldn't even hear what was being played, due to his iPod. It's especially true of urban dwellers, but as a culture we're increasingly surrounding ourselves with us-ness, and cutting ourselves off from the  experiences that could illuminate, expand, or challenge us. Which is hardly surprising, since we've spent twelve years being told to read the book and only the book, and answer questions only on the material the teacher deems important and that therefore by extension anything else is either wrong or irrelevant. If it was important, I would have been taught it somewhere along my educational career, right? So if I don't know what it is, it must not matter.

 

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording  once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding  it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent  newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups  of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at  their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

 

Even  at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid  and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard,  otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really  there. A ghost.

 

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

Our need to rush on to the next thing, to keep our schedules, to ignore the fascinating things happening all around us isn't inherent, it's trained. Trained by years of having just 50 minutes per class, then ten minutes to rush to the next thing, sit down, settle down, focus on the next checkbox until the next bell. We are not born this way.

 

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman  and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking  briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand. "I  had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal  agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie  off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training  facility in the basement."

 

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

 

You  can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka  who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being  propelled toward the door.

 

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

 

So  Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between  Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit  the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told  what she walked out on, she laughs. "Evan is very smart!"

 

The  poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born  with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart  is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the  poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

 

...But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent.  Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and  watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Those children  knew what over a thousand adults passing by had been conditioned to ignore; that something fantastic was happening, something worthy of attention. And their parents, who were on a time crunch (for what? We'll never know) physically blocked that spark of curiosity, that urge of their child's, to explore what they were hearing. At three years old, Evan got the message that schedules and time crunches and whatever he was going to be being taught that day was more important than hearing the art coming from a man who can command $1000 a minute for his talent, who was sharing that talent for free, in exchange for nothing more than a temporary, almost fractional pause, in the daily grind.

 

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back  in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting  the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the  best classical musician in America.

Something fundamental, something primal and critical and necessary has been crushed out of the American people. Is it unreasonable for me to think that we are behaving just like well-trained monkeys? Twelve years of steady conditioning is not inconsiderable. It takes far less than that to achieve results with rats. Have we become a juggernaut of widget-crankers, incapable of spending even  scant minutes on glory?

Apparently. 

We can do better, we must do better, and as parents making the choice to step away both from the training and the scheduling, we are making our stand against the pressure to mindlessly conform. We have the opportunity to model for our children that art both great and small is happening all around us all the time, and that these transcendent, transitional moments of grace are available to be captured in the soul. As fortune favors the prepared, creating a life that allows for effervescent moments to be experienced, I think, is something that is a calling.

Laureen is a writer, a professional editor, a scuba instructor, a beginning  sailor, a traveler, and an obsessive researcher who's chiefly focused  on, and delighted with, her husband Jason and her sons Rowan and  Kestrel. She's a lifelong Californian, which lends a very distinctive  spin to both her ideas and her politics, and she's discovered, in her  peregrinations, that the world is far smaller yet far more fascinating  than anyone gives it credit for being. She holds forth her opinions on  that in her blog, The ElementalMom.

Comments

[JoVE]

I read something recently that suggested that we have become addicted to adrenalin. That all that rushing gets our adrenalin going and when we don't have it, we feel withdrawal. Seems to me that you add that to the many years of training to be on time no matter what and accept someone else's definition of what's important and you have a pretty powerful force.

[Shannon]

I read this entranced by the thought of children turning to look at the music and being turned away by their parents. It's fascinating that we as parents are often the obstacles to our children's learning and yet I hear parents ask me "how can I make them sit down and do their schoolwork?"
Though, I do have one other "thought-provoker" for you...does it matter that he is a world-class violinist playing classical music of some kind that someone arbitrarily decided was "the best"? I'm willing to bet that children would turn to almost any music and find it wonderful, with or without famous composers :)

[Tana]

Very interesting. When it comes to time management, so many of the experts out there tell you to schedule your day. Three hours for this, fifteen minutes for that. I, for one, have never been able to operate that way. If I'm on a roll, I'm going to keep working. If I've run out of steam, I'm going to switch gears. I am so much more productive that way, and now that you mention it, the fifty minute class with ten minutes to switch gears and get to the next class is what I hated most about school. Learning for the pleasure of learning was an occasional gift rather than something you expected to happen every day. You really had to work hard to find that groove. But once you did, you got so much further ahead. At least I think so.

[piscesgrrl]

I guess I'm conflicted about this article. As unschoolers, I totally agree about freeing ourselves from the stifling constraints of bells and timelines and rigid schedules. However, there are things we choose to do (like museum art classes, guitar lessons) because we oh-so-want to. Happening upon a delightful, unexpected concert on our way to one of those chosen activities would create a similar amount of conflict in us. So we might not look any different from the iPod-wearing, blackberry-clutching exec if we paused, wanting to listen, groaned in conflict, and moved on to our activity, would we? Granted, we could call the guitar teacher and beg off for that one time - there are options for us. I'm just saying.

I might ask the violinist if he were going to be there later on our way back, when we'd have the time to enjoy without having to give up something else we enjoy. I admit I would be really disappointed that I had to make a choice between two desired activities.

Thanks for my morning food-for-thought!

[Marcia]

I guess this article hits home for me because of my son. He regressed at 14mo & when he started coming back to life again, this was a constant- the blue bird in the tree, or the bug on the sidewalk. & no he couldn't be rushed, we had therapy appointments to keep for him 3-4x a week, but he didn't care & because of him, i learned that life still goes on without being EVERYWHERE on time. now he's also 3yo like the boy in the story & i can very much see us walking by any person playing any music & my son craning to watch, but because of what he's taught me, we'd have stopped so he could have that enjoyment- & thus i'd enjoy watching him enjoy it. i think he still sees things as more interesting than even many kids his age, but it's made me open my eyes again to how fluid & beautiful the world & life is. taking some time out to watch a person play music, or whatever, would likely take importance over anything else we may have planned (as most things would probably still be there tmrw).
thank you for sharing this.
~marcia~

[Poppins]

Incredible. What a thought-provoking post to read this morning. I've spent the past year on a journey of artistic exploration, trying to find the beauty and adventure in the everyday, and I can see so much in what they did and what you've written.

I homeschool because we can live at "human speed". Not at industrial speed or average speed or experts-say speed. You've really reinforced the importance of that for me.

[FR]

Some other factors that would influence my behavior in that situation:
Expectations - From previous experience with street musicians, I would not expect such beauty in that setting, and maybe my mind would filter them out to some extent even if their music is enjoyable.
Location - At a subway station at the start of the workday, you're much more likely to find hurried people than, say, mid-day in a pedestrian zone. And of course, US vs. Europe...
Crowd psychology - If a few people had been standing there already, more would be more likely to gather. Like seed money in the violin case. When a classmate of mine on a high school trip played his clarinet in the streets of Munich, we made sure a few of us were always around to direct more interest to this musician. ;-) And we had fun listening too.
Fear - Often street musicians induce guilt in better-off passers-by, appear aggressive in the way they demand money, or even have accomplices pickpocketing while you pay attention to them. So if I don't make eye contact but "mind my business", I can avoid that.
Punctuality as a virtue - Personally, if I have time commitments, to others or myself (!), I want to honor them. I don't even want to blame only schools or parents or society or my German background for it, though sure a combo is at play. I just feel I generally get satisfaction from being on time, doing what I planned, and I stress from running late. Which is not to say I don't enjoy making exceptions to this rule, gleefully even, occasionally - but that would be about as low a % as the # of people looking vs. ignoring...
Sense of time - Kids simply don't have an adult's perception of time yet, for better or worse, and much fewer commitments, to others and themselves. Thanks for showing us in this post that letting them (and us) smell the roses is just as important a virtue to learn/keep!

[Dave]

I admit that this is somewhat sad to see, but is it really a surprise? This happened at a busy Metro station where people are trying to get to work. Even though I love classical music, I couldn't allow myself to pause for more than a few moments if my job/career would be jeopardized for it. Besides, this deals mainly with people going to work, not school. But as far as school goes, having timed classes is pretty much necessary. Maybe you're only writing against pre-college schooling, but in college the students actually do learn this way. You have time for yourself to read the material at relatively your own pace, class is mainly for discussion, asking questions, writing down additional information, and taking the occasional test. I admit, it's hard to enjoy literature assigned for class as much as I want to, but school is more beneficial than detrimental.

[greg]

What do you think would happen if Brittany Spears busted into a dance and song there at the metro station...how many would continue on with their day.....or how many would be camera phone snapping and trying to let the networks know? Late to work or not.