The schools that souls need

Poetry is a commitment of the soul

Gaston Bachelard

The soul, Simone Weil argues, has needs in the way that the body needs food, sleep, warmth.  “To be rooted,” she says, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”  Although she died long before our bewildering digital displacement, she identifies the cataclysmic uprooting caused by conquest and colonization, and two more sources that continue to hurt us today: money (“money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive”) and modern education influenced by technical science, pragmatism and specialization:

A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the Earth moves round the Sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks up at the heavens. This Sun about which they talk to him in class hasn’t, for him, the slightest connexion with the one he can see. He is severed from the Universe around him.

There has been a new focus on rootedness in schools, a turn to and awareness of place, although I worry that it will be “implemented” rather than lived, with teachers penciling “placed-based learning” into their calendars, and children going outdoors to find plants, sketching in notepads, and bringing the dirt of the day back in their shoes yet severed still from the land it comes from. 

Rootedness for souls demands more than a walk in the woods. A friend recently sent me a poem by Brad Aaron Modlin that comes closer.

“What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade”

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listento the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She tookquestions on how not to feel lost in the dark 

After lunch she distributed worksheetsthat covered ways to remember your grandfather’s 

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleepwithout feeling you had forgotten to do something else— 

something important—and how to believethe house you wake in is your home. This prompted 

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailinghow to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks, 

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughtsare all you hear; also, that you have enough. 

The English lesson was that I amis a complete sentence. 

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equationlook easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions, 

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent lookingfor whatever it was you lost, and one person 

add up to something.

Awakening Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridgesaid that poetry awakens the mind’s attention  

from the lethargy of custom… directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

There is, surely, no place where this awakening is more necessary than schools. I have been rereading Simone Weil, a thinker who can shake awake even the most somnolent. She asks, in her essay “Human Personality,” what prevents us from hurting a fellow being:

What is it, exactly, that prevents me from putting that man’s eyes out if I am allowed to do so  and if it takes my fancy?

 Although it is the whole of him that is sacred to me, he is not sacred in all respects and from every point of view.  He is not sacred in as much as he happens to have long arms, blue eyes, or possibly commonplace thoughts.  Nor as a duke, if he is one; nor as a dustman, if that is what he is. Nothing of all this would stay my hand.

What would stay it is the knowledge that if someone were to put out his eyes, his soul would be lacerated by the thought that harm was being done to him.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being…there is something that goes on indominantly expecting…that good and not evil will be done to him. 

Too often, although we now stay our hand, we lacerate souls in schools. Why? Some people, Weil argues, get pleasure from hurting others, but most are simply unaware (they have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand). What is necessary, she says, is an “attentive silence,” because, although the soul blows, too, always provoke a cry – why am I being hurt? – “it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the secret heart.”

The noise of schools, though, is deafening. We hurry down familiar halls to solve the problems we have created, advancing, progressing, pressing forward, organizing our streams of data, our information linked, layered, stacked, prioritized to implement, to achieve, to perform. There is no room for silence. We rush to fill it.

Even here the silence presses in on us until we click our way out of it.

And in our secret hearts, the silent cry. Who, now, is generous enough to attend?