Will Mr. Stickfigure Ever Wake Up?

I am so used to being mistaken for an idealist that I often forget to be insulted. Idealism is an accusation, a charge of infantilism leveled by self-appointed realists. Accordingly, reality is that which reduces an ideal to mere illusion. Idealistic children are often told by realistic adults that they will find out, one day, how it works in the real world. Idealistic adults, it follows, have it worse—grown people who still harbor childish hopes.

As children, idealists are irked by the flat promise of a practical fate. Still, we learn to bite our tongues in the presence our pragmatic elders, knowing that we still have more imagination than experience. Quietly, we set our will against the impending doom of the so-called real world. Quietly, we promise that our own experience will prove our dreams and defend our ideals against the onslaught of the future.

Realistic adults do not mean to be such ghouls of fate. Their hearts are attuned to the idealist’s looming disappointment. At worst, they are frustrated by our unwillingness to accept their hard-earned experience as an antidote to our easy faith. Generally, they see themselves as doing a dirty job that must be done. Better to talk someone out of a dream than for experience to crush it without explanation. And, as irksome as they are, these realistic adults are not wrong.

Children who wish to carry idealism into adulthood must come to grips with reality. Reality, in turn, grips back, crushing childish ideals, leaving behind the next generation of realists. Most of us find it easier to submit our imagination to reality than to infuse our experience with dreams. Slowly, the only remaining idealists are children again.

When I started teaching, I felt like a child all over. Veterans told me that I was idealistic and that I would come to learn the reality of teaching. They were not wrong. I have learned enough to know that mere childish idealism does not survive in a ghetto school. Three years. Three years is all a mere idealist can stand. But here I am at seven years, so what I tell you is not hope or conjecture, it is scarred in blood and bone.

Only my best, worthiest ideals have survived. Only the dreams that were never dreams. I hoped, when I began, that all children could be taught, and that I could be happy teaching them. I hoped that the study of language would prove infinitely deep, deep enough for us all to sink into, deep enough for us all to search out the secret currents of love and power. I hoped that everyone was the same as I was as a child—deep thoughts, native action, pure energy. Seven years have tested these hopes and found them strong. These ideals are my surest reality, proven by the very force that was supposed to dispel them—the real world. So if you are still waiting for Mr. Stickfigure to wake up, you have forgotten that he was never sleeping.

Nor does he disrespect his elders. The realistic veterans who told him he was too idealistic were not wrong. Mr. Stickfigure has watched the city deny his ideals for seven years. Seven years witnessing relentless disrespect leveled against his children, their parents and their communities. Seven years of scraps thrown to the ghetto, so that classrooms become like the city itself—block by block—good teacher by bad teacher. Good parent by bad parent. Good people by bad people. Seven years watching people pretend that a few inspiring teachers could ever account for a system and institution in disarray and millions of hearts in the wrong place.

Mr. Stickfigure is here to report that your own kids are being miseducated. Whoever you are, they are your own kids. No, they are you, yourself. They are only ever doing what you would do, or what you could understand doing if you cared to know. That’s the truth, and it cannot be denied due to a lack of experience. But the reality is also a chilling kind of anti-ideal; it is the inextricable assertion that some kids are different enough that they need only be fed scraps. As though if we found a reason for their miseducation, such a reason could excuse it.

What happens in a ghetto school is that people forget who the adults are and what they are supposed to do. This is true both in the school and in the minds of Americans when we think of such a school. What we all forget when we think of ghetto schools is the prime directive of adulthood: “Because I said so.” We forget that the absolute line between adults and children, the boundary that allows us to fall back on our authority as experienced persons, the trump card of the realist, this line cuts both ways. It reflects the ultimate responsibility back on adults, the responsibility of knowing what’s best for our children. Because we said so means that we must take care of those we speak to. We abdicate our authority as adults when we explain our students’ failure as if it were theirs alone.

And yet explaining failure is one of the duties of the realist. With the same voice, we explain the failure of our kids and excuse ourselves from it. We allow the reality of failure to pollute the reality of perfect equality, making of equality an ideal suitable only for children. We count ourselves mature by virtue of pessimism, but relinquish the actual responsibility of adulthood when it comes to our schools. Our realism has become its own reality, not by virtue of being true, but by virtue of having consequences.

The reality of a ghetto school is the reality of lies and appeasement. We lie about the purity of the children we are crushing or allowing to be crushed. We lie in order to appease our adult souls with logic and explanations, excuses for the evidence of our eyes. Mr. Stickfigure has spent seven years in a cyclone of excuses, at ground zero, where the storm touches down and shows just how much damage a bunch of hot air can do. The only reality that has withstood his experience is this: Children want to learn, and they’re just like you. The rest has been the default reality of excuses, lies told loud enough to slander hope and justice, making them mere ideals.

It is in the definition of an ideal that there is really no such thing. But we apply this definition sloppily, politically and selfishly. To call something an ideal is to banish it from reality. To call something an ideal is to prophesize its doom. To call someone an idealist is to dismiss them like a child. So if Mr. Stickfigure sounds idealistic, that’s just how he sounds. This is a grown-up you’re talking to, and as real as it gets.