I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects. And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica, Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows, Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
Many years after the publication of this thirteen-lined genius of a poem, Roethke reflected on its meaning. He writes:
This poem is an exposition of one of the modern hells: the institution that overwhelms the individual man.
The “order,” the trivia of the institution, is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted. It’s truly a sign of psychic health that the young are already aware of this.
How far-reaching all this is, how subtle its ramifications, how disastrous to the human psyche—to worship bigness, the firm, the university; numbers, even, let me say, the organized team effort.
The human problem is to find out what one really is: whether one exists, whether existence is possible. But how? “Am I but nothing, leaning toward a thing?”
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
Ivan Illich
So many families, post pandemic, have elected to stay with home-schooling.
The forced homestay freed them -- exposed them to the freedom of un-schooling.
I rejoice, having freed my children when bullying tormented them, I found that nature, and small groups studying at home with friends and loving parents and people who loved learning gave them a new lease on learning.
Learning because they wanted to learn -- learning to love learning! Learning how to learn and research and be curious rather than learning to test. Now my daughter, as she and her kids work with others in an online school setting, are gradually rejecting what the teachers try to enforce, and are finding their way to the unschool atmosphere. I read that the numbers of homeschoolers grow yearly, as parents have the courage to speak out against the boredom, the tedium, the institutional violence against children. Tedium is not learning. Institutions are not learning. Creativity thrives in free environs.