Good Friday afternoon to you, plebes, and I hope you're all set for your well-earned weekend. First, though, we must trot over to the New York Times, where it's always Paywall Day, and have a look-see at what David Brooks has done to one of your PoliticOlogist's top three Shakespeare plays.
Brooks, last seen chiding us all for not being Good Followers as our Leaders led us off a moral and financial cliff, and then penning a few hundred inscrutable words about something named Bruce Springsteen (or, as Brooks would probably prefer him, The Boss), has scribed another one of his inspired columns—you know the type, the type comprised entirely of invalid generalities and illegitimate assumptions, the type barren of any evidence that might confirm that even an iota of what he's talking about occurs outside of his own noggin.
Let's get started!
Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s most appealing characters.
So far so good.
He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older.
True, but kinda fourth grade book reportish. You're supposed to interpret, not just reiterate the text.
But suppose Henry went to an American school.
Here we go.
By about the third week of nursery school, Henry’s teacher would be sending notes home saying that Henry "had another hard day today." He was disruptive during circle time. By midyear, there’d be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry’s parents should think about medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it, and they find school much easier.
By elementary school, Henry would be lucky to get 20-minute snatches of recess. During one, he’d jump off the top of the jungle gym, and, by the time he hit the ground, the supervising teachers would be all over him for breaking the safety rules. He'd get in a serious wrestling match with his buddy Falstaff, and, by the time he got him in a headlock, there’d be suspensions all around.
First, Henry would withdraw. He'd decide that the official school culture is for wimps and softies and he'd just disengage. In kindergarten, he'd wonder why he just couldn’t be good. By junior high, he’d lose interest in trying and his grades would plummet.
Then he'd rebel. If the official high school culture was über-nurturing, he'd be über-crude. If it valued cooperation and sensitivity, he'd devote his mental energies to violent video games and aggressive music. If college wanted him to be focused and tightly ambitious, he’d exile himself into a lewd and unsupervised laddie subculture. He'd have vague high ambitions but no realistic way to realize them. Day to day, he'd look completely adrift.
I'll leave the true de-Brooksing to the professionals. Is it enough here to point out that Henry, Prince Hal to those of us who've read the play, does withdraw? To a pub? A pub where he hangs out with the exact sort of people David Brooks thinks have a followership problem? And that his doing so takes up three acts of the play and is in fact central to both the plot and the character of Hal? Or to point out that Hotspur, Hal's foil, is similarly rambunctious, but takes well to authority, and as his reward gets killed by no-recess-having Prince Hal?
Or to point out that Prince Hal does rebel, against his father, who doesn't want him in said pub, as fathers have generally disapproved of their progeny's drinking-instead-of-working since the dawn of time, a practice that did not stop upon the advent of the touchy-feely Western education David Brooks invented in his head? Henry Bolingbroke wants Hal to put down the mug and pick up the sword, which Hal eventually does, round about Act IV. In the context of Brooks' column, this makes Bolingbroke a meany who's stepping all over his kids' Self, which needs to, like, grow. But if David Brooks ever hung out with King Bolingbroke—which he absolutely would have had he been born 500 years earlier—do you think he'd advise the battle-bound monarch to "engage people as they are"?
Oh, and if David Brooks ever ran into a modern-day version of "his buddy" Falstaff at a tavern, what are the odds he'd wee his Dockers? Falstaff? Now that guy had a followership problem.
Brooks ain't done:
This is roughly what's happening in schools across the Western world. The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don't fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling. Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys.
Totes. Rebellious young men date back to circa 2004. Before that, males had no problems with authority, nurturing or otherwise.
But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can’t pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping he’ll sit quietly at story time. If schools want to educate a fiercely rambunctious girl, they can't pretend they will successfully tame her by assigning some of those exquisitely sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas. Social engineering is just not that easy.
It's not? Huh. I swear a read a biweekly column predicated on that premise. By the way, who on god's big dumb green earth has ever proposed "rambunctious girl + Newbury book = obsequious honor student"? This whole column absolutely reeks of those smug pundits who strawmen up whatever they think they don't like about the education system solely to disapprove of it. Has David Brooks ever seen a public school? Apparently not:
Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.
The basic problem is that schools praise diversity but have become culturally homogeneous. The education world has become a distinct subculture, with a distinct ethos and attracting a distinct sort of employee. Students who don't fit the ethos get left out.
Little Prince Hal has a lot going on inside. He's not the unfeeling, uncommunicative, testosterone-driven cretin of common boy stereotype. He's just inspired by a different honor code. He doesn’t find much inspiration in school, but he should.
This guy's out of his goddamned mind. I went to a public high school just like the one David Brooks thinks he's describing. It was full of Prince Hals, upper middle class "rambunctuous" aggressive males who did not respond well to the structure of education, mostly because, like Hal, they didn't really have to, as their futures were fairly assured. Remember, Hotspur is the hardworking guy here, because he had to earn his glory; Hal just hung out in the bar until it was time to take his crown down from the shelf, where it was waiting patiently for him. Long story short: Prince Hal wouldn't be the type to sit through second-period Geometry, not because modern education didn't speak to his male temperament, but because he wouldn't freaking have to.
Anyway, those Prince Hals of my high school? They owned that place, top to bottom. There was no withdrawing; they stalked the hallways like the little kings that they very much were. Like Hal, they acted the rebel, with spiked haircuts and Blink-182 t-shirts and an occasional fistfight, and, like Hal, when the time came, they took up a sword put on a collared shirt and went to work at a well paying job, the existence of which was never, for a moment, in question. What education policy, particularly of the sort David Brooks thinks exists, has to do with this is beyond me. It's called privilege, and it's been going on since well before the fifteenth century.
By the way, I seem to recall a recent gentleman who fit the description of Prince Hal to a T. Things turned out well for him. He must have gone to a good school.
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