Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
My friend Poor Elijah was beside himself when he dropped by after school. He’s a traditional kind of guy, in an eccentric sort of way. Ordinary mortals flock to heated malls, but he’ll only shop where he has to go outside to get to the next store. Black Friday may have metastasized so now it starts on Thursday, but he refuses to spend a dime until it’s December.
That’s why he was so distressed to hear about shopping in the future. Apparently, all the surfaces in the stores – floors, walls, counters, ceilings – will double as digital screens. That way retailers can alter them minute by minute to match the mood they want you to be in. Meanwhile, data-mining will let them hand you what you want to buy before you know you want it. They’ll also track you via GPS so they can greet you at the door and pretend they know who you are.
Fortunately, as an antidote he’d brought along his copy of “A Christmas Carol,” the 1951 black and white classic that he knows nearly by heart. Every year he watches Scrooge transformed from a grasping old sinner into a decent man. It restores my friend’s strength and his hope, and he comes away with something new to think about.
This year he imagined how the story would be different if Scrooge had been guided by three education consultants.
Action Plan: Ebenezer Scrooge
1. Ebenezer will achieve a Behavior Improvement Average (BIA) in the 80th percentile, as determined by periodic administrations of the Assessment of Basic Human Decency (ABHD).
2. Ebenezer’s initial ABHD data will establish baseline levels for critical life activities, including how many dogs wag their tails at him daily and how much coal by weight Bob Cratchit adds to the office stove. Progress monitoring of ABHD scores will determine Ebenezer’s eligibility for support services before, during, and after the business day.
3. Supplemental Decency Services (SDS) will include the Targeted Intervention Program for Sinners (TIPS) as well as other federally subsidized remediation and intervention programs.
4. Supplemental services will be intentional and will maintain a continuous, positive environment for Ebenezer.
School action and improvement plans really read like this. Like our blueprint for Scrooge, they typically leave out anything significant and constructive that students themselves are expected to do, which is one reason they’re so strikingly ineffective. The most important component in any student’s growth and education, even more than his parents and teachers, is the student himself. We can and should serve as our children’s Dickensian Spirits, but for anything wonderful to happen, they’re the ones who have to change, the same way Scrooge is the one who has to change.
Where then are we leading them?
Before we answer that question, we need to examine where we’re leading ourselves. Because we have our own action plans. Like our school plans they appeal to us because they solve problems on paper, even if they solve nothing in real life. That’s why millions flock to candidates who offer nothing but bombast and empty promises that a people who seem to have lost their greatness will somehow, without changing themselves, gain greatness again.
Ours wouldn’t be a tale fit for Scrooge if we didn’t entertain hope that we can change for the better, too. But our reclamation doesn’t lie in excuses, scapegoating and expediency. It lies, like Ebenezer’s, in examining ourselves, in recognizing where we’ve gone wrong, and in our heartfelt regret, yours and mine, not for what may have been done to us, but for what we have each done ourselves.
There’s room to disagree about reading curricula. There’s room to disagree about tax policy and about foreign affairs. There’s room to disagree about our current president, or the one before him, or those who propose to succeed him. Some of these matters come down to right and wrong, and others don’t, and I’m sometimes unsure which is which.
We expect the world to conform to us. We expect our children to learn even when they don’t work. We expect teachers to make them successful even when we as parents can’t.
One thing, though, seems clear to me.
We’re too damned entitled.
I’m not talking about our obligation to the poor and unfortunate. Even feudal lords acknowledged their noblesse oblige, and our sense of moral duty should at least match theirs.
In what we judge is due us, however, too many of us behave increasingly like kings to whom all things are due.
If you visited the Cratchits at their humble family table and asked Bob what he expected of life, he’d answer that their second round of Christmas punch surpassed his expectations. My father’s list was longer than Bob’s, but not by much. He expected equality before the law and a fair opportunity to make his way in the world.
For some of us, that’s sadly and unjustly still an unfulfilled aspiration.
The trouble is our sense of entitlement has bloated well beyond those fundamentals. We expect the world to conform to us. We expect our children to learn even when they don’t work. We expect teachers to make them successful even when we as parents can’t. We expect schools to spend more time raising them than we do.
We expect universal health care, but we don’t want to pay for it. We expect battlefield victory, but we don’t want to reckon the cost in pain and death. We decry religious intolerance, even as we impose our beliefs on our neighbors. We demand our “rights,” even as we duck our responsibilities.
If Pearl Harbor happened tomorrow, I’m not sure we’d win. It’s not for lack of military courage or prowess, or because Mr. Obama isn’t Franklin Roosevelt. It’s not because we lack an action plan.
It’s because we’re so self-indulgent and irresolute. We expect so much but expect to do so little.
I’m not idealizing my father’s generation, or any past generation. I knew those people, and they certainly weren’t perfect. Nor am I saying we’re all equally lost or equally narcissistic. But I know us, and I know myself.
When Scrooge’s third ghost showed him the future, he didn’t point at anyone else. He pointed at Scrooge’s grave and at Scrooge.
It was only when Scrooge realized that the fault was in himself that something wonderful could happen.
It still can.
In hope and with best wishes, from Poor Elijah and me.
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