Be a Heavyweight Champion

There is a great story about John L. Sullivan who was once the heavyweight prizefighting champion of the world. It's related by John Holt in Teach Your Own.

"Late one afternoon he and a friend were riding standing up in a crowded New York City streetcar. At one stop a burly young man got on who had had too much to drink. He swaggered down the center of the car, pushing people out of his way and as he passed John L, he gave him a heavy shove on the shoulder. John L. clutched the strap to keep from falling, but said nothing. As the young man went to the back of the car, John L.'s friend said to him, " Are you going to let him get away with that?" John L. shrugged and said, "Oh, I don't see why not." His friend became very indignant. "You're the heavyweight champion of the world," he said furiously. "You don't have to be so damned polite." To which John L. replied, "The heavyweight champion of the world can afford to be polite."

The world is full of people bristling at the slightest offense, jumping up to defend themselves ferociously. We need more people around that can afford to be polite. We ourselves need to get to the point where we can afford to be polite: to each other, to our children, and to ourselves. It is one of my objectives as a parent to raise a heavyweight champion, who can afford to let the insults and the bumps and pushes slide, because he is secure in his own worth. The best way to teach children things is, of course, to model them yourself. And not just to model the values you want him to hold, but to really be the kind of person that you want your children to grow up to be.

The world would be a lot better off if parents stopped lecturing/punishing/worrying about our children's behavior and worked on our own.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[She said she wanted to write 500 words on the United States. He (the teacher) said maybe she should start with the university's town. She came back with nothing to say. So he told her to write just about the main street. She still had nothing to say.]

He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. ... The more you look the more you see. She wasn't really looking and yet somehow did not understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The opera house. Start with the upper left hand brick."

[She handed in a 5,000 word essay.]

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants, you get a bad grade. Here in college it was much more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand got you anything from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

He discussed this with a professor of psychology, who lived next door to him, an extremely imaginative teacher, who said, "Right. Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you'll get a real education."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I love this book. I loved it the first time, the second, and now the third time, it has hooked me again. I think I could read it a hundred times, and still get more out of it. And one of my favorite parts is when he talks about eliminating grades and his experiences trying to teach rhetoric/writing to his college students.

Grade eliminating schemes are assumed to be for the benefit of the weaker students. To make them feel better or something. And I do believe that lower grades are harmful too. But as a top student, grades served not to encourage excellence from me, but complacency. I would hand in papers written in no time, with no rewrite, and get A's. I almost never studied or did homework, and I still got A's. At the time, I didn't understand it.

Eliminating grades from schools would ultimately benefit the best and the brightest the most. Because, unfettered by mediocrity, they would be free to excel. They would be free to learn as much as they could instead of as little as they could.

Because that's what grades really encourage: to learn as little as possible. Bullet points, headlines, italicized print, that's what is on the test. But the most interesting stuff is in the middle. Or rather, in between the lines. Textbooks are a function of this [little as possible] mindset. That's why they are so repugnant.

School teaches children to learn as little as possible -- and it is what turned me off from school, though I thoroughly learned the lesson.

And that is why my son will never go to school. I want him to learn as much as possible. I want him to feel free to completely not know anything about a subject, rather then think he knows about something because he took a class on it and passed the test. And if he does desire to go to school one day, he will be prepared to use school, rather than have the school use him.