A man once came to a teacher of great renown
And asked…
“What is the greatest function of a teacher?”
To which the teacher replied…
“To Motivate”
“But surely” the man replied...
“The greatest function of a teacher must be to teach!”
To which the teacher replied…
*“If I only teach them all that I know,
Then they will only learn all that I know,
And think they have learnt all there is to know.
But if I motivate them to seek knowledge,
Then they will learn all that I know,
And still thirst for more; much more than all I know.”

The result of privatization
Is a loss too great to bear
Government bowing to Industries
Leading us towards despair

Industries teach our children
Whatever whim they choose
While government stands in shackles
It'll happen while we snooze

Gamble with Social Security
Until there is nothing left
The brokers will have the money
While leaving us all bereft

Take elderly off of Medicare
Give them a voucher instead
When the market costs too much
Who'll pay for their hospital bed?

When people remove a government
What will come in its place?
The wealthy, the prideful, the arrogant
Will take charge of the human race

Didn't we fight for our freedom
To break from the monarchy?
Privatization rules through business
For the elite to rule with greed

the words spilled
out in a rush.
they dove
from the tip
of my tongue
before i could bite
them back:
i told a friend today
that i would die
for this. i have no
sons or daughters,
no cats or dogs,
not even a fish
to provide for. if i
could place my body  
on the line to depose
this fatuous fascist,
then i was obligated
to mount a resistance.
and i almost caught
myself by surprise—
my empathy congealed
to galvanize and, in an instant,
catalyzed conviction.
the tears of a student
wearing a hijab, frightened
to show her face outside,
crystallized in my mind
like a mirror, with the phrase,
"the least of these" scrawled
upon its surface.
the shouts of a student
hoisting a hand-drawn
protest sign, almost as high
as her *******,
set my heart to aching with pride
as we stared down riot cops
on mounted horseback. she stood firm
and did not falter.
and though i choked
back tears when i said
that i would lay
my life down
for a stranger,
at least i can say
my voice
did not falter.

In 1972, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan created the concept of Gross National Happiness, a new index measuring different areas of life quality. He said, “the essence of the philosophy of Gross National Happiness is the peace and happiness of our people, and the security and sovereignty of the nation.”

The Dragon King was brave with his wisdom. He spoke the truth against the prevailing myth of our time. He dared to ask questions sage in their foundations. What does it mean to live a fulfilling life? What does a successful community look like? How do we answer these questions knowing what we know about our own humanity?

Asking those questions was like coming home again from the rain, and wondering why you had ever left. An act in response to the desperate yearning to be human. A truth so clear, it has been embraced by dozens of other countries.

But not by the United States of America. We are big, and we influence others, not the other way around. We are powerful, and everyone knows it. We are successful, and we know it.

We worship, and ask, and measure the things that matter.

As Adam Smith said, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”

We measure the things that matter.

What is the essence of the philosophy behind Gross National Product? In the words of Robert Kennedy, “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We have defined success by that which we are able to hold in our hands. We have done so to our very core. We have done so to our most vulnerable. We have done so to our most educated.

In 2011, Amy Chua (the Tiger Mom), laid a truth so bare we could not look away. By her own admission, her tough tactics were simplified and misunderstood: “If I could push a magic button and choose either happiness or success for my children, I’d choose happiness in a second.”

The Tiger Mom would choose happiness for her children, and yet they still would not be successful.

We like to pretend that we don’t play this game, but she played so fervently, we could not look away. We like to pretend that perfect SAT scores, endless club affiliations, mastery of languages and instruments, athletic prowess, social grace, and an unwavering commitment to the community—that those things come naturally from the pursuit of a well-balanced, genuine teenage life. We like to pretend that we are not Excellent Sheep.

But we believe that we measure the things that matter.

From the Stanford-Binet IQ, to the Army Alpha Test, to the first ever SAT in 1926 we have used our creative engines to reduce our humanity to the likes of a No. 2 pencil. After the 1936 invention of the IBM 805—the first electronic test scanner—we would ever more become distinctive only in our conformity.

Uniform in our goals and our language, and everything else that comes in between. Echoed again and again, Bill & Melinda say, success in education is to obtain labor-market value. At least we’re honest about that. What other kinds of success could we imagine without other kinds of values? There is no magic button, there is only the stark white wall of reality that will hit you, hard, when you’re 16 or 18 or 22. And you better be prepared.

But did you know that statistically people are equally as happy one year after winning the lottery as they are one year after becoming paraplegic? Despite our 3lbs brains and large prefrontal cortexes, we are not good at imagining the conditions of our own contentment. We are only good at imagining the future of the stark white wall and the non-existence of the magic button.

Maybe, then, before we imagine anymore, we need to remember. To remember what it’s like to come home again from the rain, and wonder why you had ever left.  Maybe, then, we can finally be brave, and ask, like the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan, What is the root of the root and the bud of the bud?

Maybe, then, we will measure the things that matter.

The tragedy in the irony
of No Child Left Behind
was never the inadequacy of the policy
but rather,
the assumption that it’s possible to have
no losers
in a finite game.

* * *
Each year, less than two and a half inches
of rainwater nourish Death Valley—
the hottest and driest place in North America.

* * *
We play this game all the way through.
“And what do you want to do with that [major]?”
they almost always ask,
with an unpretentious curiosity
that never quite pangs me the way I think it should.
Reassured by the familiarity of the ritual,
of asking and answering
this question
for most of my educated life.

* * *
The Valley,
marked by steady drought,
boasting record heat for days on end,
and devoid of visible life,
is remarkable in it’s
uniform emptiness.

* * *
“How are your grades?”
“What are your extracurriculars?”
“Why do you want to go to a liberal arts college?”
They ask, and I answer.
Across the hall they might ask
“Wouldn’t it make your family proud if you went to college?”
(Like expectations,
some rungs must sit lower
on finite ladders)
But the question is always the same—
it’s always a question of ends.

* * *
In the Winter of 2005
three times the normal amount of rain
wet the dry floor of Death Valley,
seeping into the scorched, thirsty cracks,
parched from praying all summer.

* * *
These ends surface
again and again
in our language.
Yet to escape the international contest
since A Nation at Risk,
investments and ends at every level
are (naturally) presumed economic.

* * *
That Spring saw the coaxing of waxy seeds,
after decades of unbroken slumber,
realized into a singular, infinite bloom.
The sleepy desert lupine
and hearty, golden poppies
felt sunlight
for the first time in 50 years.

* * *
The second tragedy,
greater than the first,
is the alienation of millions of
young beings.
The slow death
wrought by living a bounded life
of the caterpillar
never set to feel the sky.
The passions we mask and confuse
and cement ever more deeply,
hardened, at every step
by the conformity in our
expectations.
The means to which we grasp at
these apparent ends.

* * *
A sudden rush of caterpillars
fed by blue, purple and yellow blossoms
grew until they saw from above,
the spontaneous gathering
of birds, rodents, foxes, and snakes,
renewed again to life
by the tender hands of rain.

* * *
In a world where we stop asking
engineers
to build plants,
I imagine the organic
explosion
of latent seeds
everywhere.

From within the confines
of our narrowly concepted
rituals of the insular good,
we love to love babies
we love to pity children
we love to forget young adults
and we love to blame their parents.

How quickly we forget
or choose to ignore,
from the safety of
acceptance & comfortability & choice
that we once
loved & pitied & forgot
every parent we ever blamed.

How quickly we forget
or never realized
how our sunny dispositions
to judge
blind us so easily
from the facts.

For example, we know
that babies really do prefer the sound of
their mother’s voice
above all others,
that they cry in the accent of their mother’s tongue,
because her voice reverberated
down, so perfectly
into that protected capsule.
That in their glassy-eyed stare,
they see us
in a way no one else ever will.
That fetal brains
are evolutionarily genius
in the way they grow and adapt
to the threats of stress or scarcity
in ways that will shape the
rest of their lives.

We know, for example,
that children are lanterns of consciousness
looking and learning in all directions
at once.
As helpless, dependent beings
they are subconsciously
conducting experiments
and using conditional probability,
reading the complexity of human emotion,
and connecting through language
to piece together their realities.

And so, they exist,
Brilliant and Dependent,
until the impendent time
when we cast them
Worthless and Independent,
ready (or not) to plant
ready (or not) to grow
the next season of seeds.

In spite of our ignorance
and condescension
we will, eventually,
embrace 0-3
only to realize
that it was misadvertised.
That humans do not exist in disparate
parts.
They cannot, like legos,
be constructed in an orderly
fashion,
but, like everything else
on this Earth,
love and grow
wholly
with the cycles of the sun
and the universe.

It is not wrong,
but it is not enough
until we decide, instead,
on that infinite loop
from now until death
over and over
again.

It is in our nature to create dichotomies,
particularly in the grayest of the gray.
How do you debate en masse,
in the absence of either or?

And so we ask—
for example,
at Harper High School
in the South Side Chicago,
where 29 current and former
students
were shot
in a single year—
we ask, disdainfully,
How do we Learn
when we can’t Breathe?
On the question of need—
at a beautiful school
with 16 security guards
4 social workers,
and more than 15 surrounding gangs—
we refer back to Maslow.

I went once,
to a high school full of
“at risk” students
and discussed dropout rates—
as high as 80 percent in some parts.
We gave them cards and figures,
and asked them to contemplate futures,
for example,
as a janitor or an NBA basketball star!
Questions so self-righteous in their ignorance
my cheeks burned,
asked to faces
six generations descended
from slavery
& six decades from
Brown vs. Board.
Are we not awed by the
logic in their response
to a system with little
historical or contemporary
evidence of their success?

We are sustained more by the
business of answering,
than asking
the right questions.

So maybe the question of
basic needs versus pedagogy
was always a false dichotomy.
Maybe, in fact,
general revenue funding &
destandardization of curricula,
universal prenatal care &
a rebirth of the arts,
do not exist in hierarchy.

Do we dare ask the question,
to everyone,
“What would you do
to make your heart sing,
if you knew you could not fail,
if you knew you could not disappoint?”