"THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE"

My Alma Mater:  Jefferson High School, Portland, Oregon

About 500 in my graduating class.

It’s always good to do something that no one else can do but that is worthy of time and effort.  One of the ways I have chosen to take a stand is to live in a small town.  It has a deep history, including some of my relatives; it is shrinking; it is white and Indian (to some degree); and it has infrastructure problems.   I don’t really fit, but it’s familiar.

I spend time speculating on how it is that I’m different.  What is it that makes a small town the way it is?  I suggest it is high school.  The standards and skills and preferences of small town people are developed as they themselves mature in high school and persist mostly through their lives.  There is another step of development -- real organic development as in brain expansion and integration -- that is the business of college.  And then another step called “graduate school” which becomes post-grad and a way of life, a profession.  Of course, people find variations and have crises in their lives that steer them into different paths than these, but those who don’t go to college -- even two year feeder community colleges -- hang on to their high school assumptions.  What are they?

Numerous education theorists point out that high school is AFTER the time of learning the basics -- reading, writing, arithmetic, and -- these days -- keyboarding.  In the beginning, 8^th grade graduation meant joining the work force.  Still does for Hutterites where the whole colony is already the work force. The assumptions fit the Industrial Age when jobs were very much like the schools that prepared that work force -- they were interlocked.  An eighth grade education was good enough for the servant and farming class.  Maybe the keepers of small shops.

Sex, coming of age, changes everything.  In the past, tight social pressure kept adolescents within some bounds.  Now everything is up for grabs and the typical family, as someone has pointed out, is a too-young and relatively uneducated mother, her children, and a check from the government.  Forget moral judgment: the system of passing on whatever culture there was has been blown away.  Kids who cannot stay clean, polite and on-time are unemployable no matter their grade level.

A contemporary twist is the GED, developed during WWII to help soldiers, revised every so often to keep up with changing skills necessary for employment.  It is NOT for the student, but for the employer.  The newest change, due next year, will be moving to a computer-administered test, so that one cannot pass the test without learning to keyboard and operate a computer -- skills never actually on the test.  It has not been specified whether a computer tablet might be an option.  All states are urging people to hurry to take the paper version, because any unfinished tests will be junked in the transition.  This is NOT a government developed, administered, or controlled test but a PRIVATE contracting agency, like those who supply IQ tests, various tests of learning styles, emotional tendencies, and college admission tests -- all of which actually test nothing but one’s ability to pass that particular test.  Validity is about like that of lady’s magazine tests predicting compatibility, quite apart from examining the assumptions about the goal.  What tests skills for law school depends on what you think being a lawyer is about.

Any credible (or, heck, INcredible) body could develop an exam and then certify the results, the way the GRE or SAT do.  The usefulness would depend on -- let’s be frank -- how convincingly it advertised the relevance and reliability.  For instance, the Blackfeet Community College could develop and offer a survey of one’s knowledge of the tribe and issue a Certificate saying you were an expert.  In fact, I have a certificate saying that I passed a short workshop in Blackfeet language.  What usefulness such a piece of paper has in finding a job is arguable, particularly since the tribal constituency varies widely in what they think is true and important.  But IN TRUTH that’s no different from assumptions about a Ph.D. or an M.D. or all the various certificates that physicians earn from boards of examination.  They are illusions maintained by those in power.

Part of getting past the high school level of education is seeing that a piece of paper is exactly that.  Nevertheless it CAN signify a body of knowledge and skill.  In a small town people know the skills and temperament of neighbors, but outside that known identity mostly based on high school performance, the standards and requirements of others can be far more abstract.  What labels someone a nerd in high school is a prerequisite for Silicon Valley.   Still, there is a tension between negotiability and non-negotiability in the larger world.  You pile up your chips and then try to play them well.  Game theory is crude, but it probably is a better predictor than any copyrighted test.

In my personal case, since I value creativity and humanities far more than the larger culture does, it’s difficult to “certify” myself.  The fact that I’m regular in habits, pay my bills and comb my hair (mostly) counts far more here than my MA in Religious Studies, which is invisible to everyone except the pastor of the conservative Baptist church next door, who earned the same degree from the University of Chicago but holds opposite faith convictions.  How surprising is that?  We’re probably the only two with that “degree” in the state and yet our life paths and our religious concepts are radically different.  What piece of paper would describe that?  But we took mostly the same courses and passed the same tests.

Small town high schools provide the community with an identity often based on their sports teams.  The outside world has some impact on that.  Title 9 girls’ teams were forced at the federal level.  Letting Indian caricatures go has been more difficult.  But the sports world, even at the college level, can get pretty problematic.  Maybe it’s the showers, maybe it’s the long bus journeys, maybe it’s the “red blood” coaching full of abuse, maybe it’s the encouragement of competition that becomes hatred at the low end.  More and more, sports are connected directly to sex, violence, drugs, huge amounts of money that could have gone into academics -- a great American corruption in my opinion, which is NOT high school or small town.  Or is it?  Superintendents tend to be former coaches and to be re-employed on the basis of how successful the local teams are.  This ethic has crept even into our “humanities” university in Missoula.

Developmentally the human being has its last major surge in the twenties.  By that time one is presumably able to draw education from life itself.  No longer does society have to take responsibility for making a functioning citizen of you.  Some people are not up to it.  High school remains the limit as far as they go.  Is there something wrong with that?  Only if you want more.  These days you don’t need college to learn much, much more.