Quinn, who I’ve mentioned here a few times, is an author who has spent much of his life writing books that try to show readers a different way of looking at the world and the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. In Write Sideways, Quinn essentially tries to answer the question, “once you have seen the world from a different perspective, how do you help other people see that same new perspective in a way that’s meaningful and lasting for them?”

As a man who often puts himself in the role of a teacher, Quinn also seems to be ever in pursuit of ways to explain his methods and process, perhaps in the name of passing on the practice of opening eyes and changing minds (his approach to world changing). But as he tells in Write Sideways, he seems to have some difficulty doing so effectively, at least based on the wild and strange questions he gets from his readers. This is not the first time he’s told his own story in an attempt to provide some context and background to his approach; in Providence: The Story of a Fifty Year Vision Quest, he recounts his life leading up to the publication of Ishmael, his most famous and impacting work. I was worried that Write Sideways would be a recycling of that information or of other parts of his writings, but despite some re-hashing of parts of the Ishmael novels, I would say it’s a self-contained and fresh take. (It’s not necessary to have read his other books, but you’ll get more out of it if you have.)

The book is structured as a conversation between Quinn and one of his readers, Elaine, who visits him for a few days in his home. It’s essentially a slightly edited transcript of the conversation, and so it reads quickly, as though we are sitting in on the conversation, turning our heads back and forth between Quinn and his guest. I thought one of the key points in the book came early on, when Quinn admitted that while he’s always avoided looking at himself as anyone special, he’s come to accept that he has a unique frame of reference on the world, and that getting to that frame of reference is a kind of skill and wisdom in itself. From there, Quinn guides Elaine through challenges and exchanges that attempt to help her do the same, often with questions from readers as exercises.

Each time I have encountered Daniel Quinn, he has always inspired me. At first it was Ishmael and his other earlier books that inspired me to look at the world in a different way, and to find other people who were doing the same. Since then, when I’ve met him, talked to him on the phone or heard him speak to groups, it’s been his process and approach so some of the world’s most vexing problems that have inspired me, as someone who seeks to do some eye-opening and mind-changing in my own life and work.

I’m not sure anyone will ever be able to truly replicate what Quinn does, but as I’m sure he would say, it’s not really about him, it’s about finding new ways for humanity to live that are sustainable. To that end, Write Sideways is a helpful contribution from someone who’s been pioneering those efforts in his own special way for quite some time.

• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. A great, compelling story that is so rich and enjoyable. Reminds me of how I felt reading A Prayer for Owen Meany or To Kill a Mockingbird. I can also recommend Monk Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.
• The Soul Tells A Story: Engaging Creativity With Spirituality In The Writing Life by Vinita Hampton Wright. I couldn’t enjoy this one as much, perhaps because it seemed to define spirituality a little too differently than I do, and the resulting instructions/advice just didn’t feel as applicable. It also wasn’t as tightly structured as I would expect a book on creative writing to be.
• Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier. My review of Secrets and Lies is at the Summersault Weblog.
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Another really fun book that will appeal to fans of the “Narnia” and “Harry Potter” style of adventure-telling. Also coming out in December on the big screen as a motion picture starring Dakota Blue Richards and Daniel Craig – worth a see.
• The Assault on Reason by Al Gore. My review of The Assault on Reason is in my last weblog entry.

Now reading:

• Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision and Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea, both by George Lakoff. If you read this blog with any regularity, you already know I’m a fan of his stuff.
• Codes, Ciphers, Secrets and Cryptic Communication: Making and Breaking Sercet Messages from Hieroglyphocs to the Internet by Fred B. Wrixon. Nothing gets me up in the morning like a Bifid Cipher.
• The Woman and the Ape by Peter Hoeg. Highly recommended by Anna Lisa, and I’ve always enjoyed books with large primates as main characters.

I’ll post reviews of these as I can. Your own reviews, recommendations and comments welcome!

But the bottom line for me is that that our system of education in the US is almost entirely broken, ill-conceived in the first place, and that calls to make incremental improvements to a broken system feel largely like a waste of time.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be improved or fixed, it will be with new minds, not new programs put in place by old minds.

A hundred and fifty years ago, when the United States was still a largely agrarian society, there was no reason to keep young people off the job market past the age of eight or ten, and it was not uncommon for children to leave school at that age. Only a small minority went on to college to study for the professions. With increasing urbanization and industrialization, however, this began to change. By the end of the nineteenth century, eight years of schooling were becoming the rule rather than the exception. As urbanization and industrialization continued to accelerate through the 1920s and 1930s, twelve years of schooling became the rule. After World War Two, dropping out of school before the end of twelve years began to be strongly discouraged, and it was put about that an additional four years of college should no longer be considered something only for the elite.

It seems like urbanization and industrialization would have the opposite effect – that the system would be trying to put kids ON the job market. But imagine what would happen today if educators suddenly decided that a high-school education was no longer needed. There would suddenly be tens of millions of kids out there competing for jobs that don’t exist. The unemployment rate would go through the roof.

It would be catastrophic. It’s not only essential to keep fourteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off the job market, it’s also essential to keep them at home as non-wage-earning consumers. This age group pulls an enormous amount of money – hundreds of billions of dollars per year — out of their parents` pockets to be spent on books, clothes, games, novelties, music, and similar things that are designed specifically for them and no one else. Many enormous industries depend on teenage consumers. If these teenagers were suddenly expected to be wage earners and no longer at liberty to pull billions of dollars from their parents` pockets, these youth-oriented industries would vanish overnight, pitching more millions out onto the job market.

We all know that most of the modern education system forces students to spend many years of their lives learning things they instantly forget once they’ve passed the tests. People don’t remember things they have no use for. So why do we force our kids to go through this exercise? Because we have to give them something to do during the years they’re being kept off the job market. And it has to look good, like it really matters.

What do people think about the failure of schools? They think the schools are incompetent and underfunded, and that kids are lazy. What stories do we tell ourselves about what the schools would do if they had more money? They could get better teachers and pay teachers more, and more money would inspire teachers to do a better job. The lazy kids? More money would be spent buying new gadgets and better books and prettier wallpaper, and the kids wouldn’t be as lazy as before. And so these new and improved schools would turn out new and improved graduates.

But what happens when these new and improved graduates arrive in the workforce and start competing for jobs that the rest of us are trying to hold onto? The answer shows us why schools do such a poor job of preparing graduates for the workplace (or graduating students at all): they’re doing what we actually want them to do.

People imagine that we want to see our children enter the workplace with really useful business skills, but if they actually did so, they’d immediately begin competing for jobs with their older siblings and their parents, which would be catastrophic. And if graduates came out of school with advanced skills, who would bag the groceries? Who would do the sweeping up? Who would do the filing?

Instead, we produce workers who have no choice but to enter our economic system, presorted into various grades. High-school graduates are generally destined for blue-collar jobs. They may be intelligent and talented as college graduates, but they haven’t demonstrated this by surviving a further four years of studies (that are generally no more useful in life than the previous twelve years). Nonetheless, a college degree wins admittance to white-collar jobs that are generally off-limits to high school graduates.

What blue-collar and white-collar workers actually retain of their schooling doesn’t much matter, in either their working lives or their private lives. Very, very few of them will every be called upon to divide one fractional number by another, parse a sentence, dissect a frog, critique a poem, prove a theorem, discuss the economic policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, define the difference between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets, describe how a bill passes Congress, or explain why the oceans bulge on opposite sides of the world under the influence of tidal forces. Thus, if they graduate without being to do these things, it really doesn’t matter in the slightest. Postgraduate work is obviously different. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, scholars and so on actually have to use in real life what they learn in graduate school, so for this small percentage of the population schooling actually does something besides keep them off the job market.

The deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people, not the needs of our children. They exist to serve the needs of our economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits our economic needs perfect. What we’re seeing at work in our schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency.

In grades K through three, most children master the skills that citizens need in order to get along in our culture – reading writing and arithmetic. These are skills that, even at age seven and eight, children actually use and enjoy using. Millions of years of natural selection have produced human creatures who are born with a ravenous desire to learn anything and everything their parents know and who are capable of feats of learning whose boundaries are literally beyond imagination. Toddlers growing up in a household in which four languages are spoken will learn those four languages flawlessly and effortless in a matter of months. Kids will learn anything they want to learn, anything they have a use for. To make them learn things they don’t have a use for, you have to send them to school. That’s why we need schools – to force kids to learn things they have no use for, which in fact they do not learn.

Our schools have been failing for many decades. What do you call a system that’s built on the presumption that people in this system will be better than people have ever been? Everyone in this new and improved system is going to be kind and generous and considerate and selfless and obedient and compassionate and peaceable, and THEN we’ll beat those low graduation rates? What kind of system is that? Utopian.

Old minds think “how do we stop these bad things from happening?” New minds think “how do we make things the way we want them to be?” If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be fixed, it will be with new minds who want to create a mode of education that truly serves the kids we are educating, not us and our economic systems.

(Many of the concepts and phrases in the above rant are quotes or paraphrases from Daniel Quinn’s book My Ishmael, and I have merely transcribed them here in a format relevant to the local news. Still, I take responsibility for any interpretations or mutations made.)

So, here I am, answering the questions from this book meme:

1. One book that changed your life?

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Though I have since come to reject most of Rand’s philosophy and writings, at the time it was an incredible eye-opening experience that taught me how to look at the world in new ways I hadn’t even dreamt of as possible. That experience probably laid the groundwork for being able to digest and internalize other works that were life-changing AND that have stayed with me in terms of usefulness, like…(see next question).

2. One book you have read more than once?

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, to help me keep my perspective.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Naked by David Sedaris.

5. One book that made you cry?

Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus.

6. One book you wish had been written?

How to Be a Reasonably Educated and Well Rounded Person Without Going Through High School

7. One book you wish had never had been written?

That one bestselling tome that so many people read and base so many life decisions on without really fully understanding what it’s saying or why they should take it so seriously anyway.

8. One book you are currently reading?

Endgame by Derrick Jensen

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

The Woman and the Ape by Peter Hoeg

10. Now tag some other people.

Okay:

• Derric Watson
• E. Thomas Kemp
• Evan Agee
• Damon Hearne
• Justin Simoni

After reading just the first sentence of After Dachau, I was sure I had identified the major themes, direction, and message-delivering vehicle that Daniel Quinn would use in his new book. This was slightly comforting; I’d read that his latest work was radically different, obtuse, and unrelated to its predecessors. Given that his other books had significantly challenged the way I look at the world, and that I’d become (too) comfortable with that challenge, my initial reaction was my own attempt to tie everything together, to find central, comfortable ideas that I could hold onto, nod and agree with, and make my own.

But that, of course, is not the point. Quite the opposite, actually, and the book is anything but formulaic.

The story told takes quite a few twists and turns, so many, in fact, that one often has to stop and check if a few pages might have been forgotten in that particular printing. Quinn does not disappoint, however, as all mysterious matters are explained at one time or another, but often the book does take on the quality of a pop culture mystery novel. This is part of its appeal, I think, as a fresh approach to Quinn’s previous messages. Those who might not have made it through Ishmael and the others cannot now use this as a sole justification to avoid After Dachau — it is a literary experience unto its own.

Jason Tull is the son of the rich and famous who has devoted his time to studying and investigating reports of reincarnation events. Mallory Hastings experiences a crisis of identity that is triggered by, in this case, an apparent reincarnation event. The two are drawn together thusly, and set out (reluctantly at times) to answer each other’s questions about what has transpired.

At various points in the story, we get a glimpse of the styles of interaction from previous Quinn writings: the logical, Socratic, experienced one pushing the impassioned, skeptical, confused one towards an answer that feels impossibly distant and then suddenly clear. But it is clear that Quinn avoided the atmosphere of preaching, intensely focused, extended dialogue, and similar methods – the main characters are always equally vulnerable to mystery, incomplete understanding, and frustration. There is a sense of balance that, ironically, comes from the ongoing reversals of “power” between Jason and Mallory, each one assuming the upper hand of “understanding the big picture” at various points through the story.

One could, I suppose, compare the players of After Dachau to those of previous Quinn writings. Jason Tull takes a journey similar to that of Alan Lomax in Ishmael, Julie Gerchak in My Ishmael, and Jared Osborne in The Story of B. Mallory Hastings mirrors some qualities of Shirin in The Story of B as well. But the differences are significant enough (even without Jason and Mallory) that one cannot easily lump them all in together as self-contained bearers of Quinn’s message. This is significant to his purpose of representing that message through the eyes of a largely varied group of characters, in a manner that appeals to an equally varied readership.

Identifying the messages in this particular book would, it seems, depend largely on one’s level of existing experience with the ideas from previous Quinn novels (even if one hadn’t read those novels). There are several themes that are more or less apparent depending on this variable:

• the frog in the pot of water, dying slowly but comfortably as the water warms over time.
• the modern version of human culture as a self-destructive, inherently oppressive force
• the illusion of control that so many so heavily depend on, however unconsciously
• the important enlightenment that comes with dissolving that illusion
• the dangerous power of self-perpetuating myths
• the clarity and strength that can come from deep consideration of basic premises
• the compatibility and necessity of multiple perspectives (“there is no one right way to live”)

If one were unfamiliar with “the teachings of Ishmael”, one might come away from After Dachau with a sense that the central focus leans more towards identifying the illusions of identity and control, removing them, and acting on the enlightenment (or other experience) that follows. This is not a bad thing – Quinn has certainly succeeded in creating a new, subtle “entry point” to the discussions and ideas that were so explicitly presented previously. And it really is an entry point – I think that one could potentially have a smoother transition into the “so let me tell you about this thing called Mother Culture” conversation with a friend who has understood After Dachau than with the same friend who had not.

On the other hand, if one were an avid follower of “the teachings of Ishmael”, the book might present itself as having three different focuses: an affirmation of the notion that we all have some “waking up” to do; an insight into the power of the myths we are taught to accept unconditionally; an inspiration for action on any level possible. These purposes might be subtler than many Quinn fans would desire – there are few long, drawn out explorations of an idea that culminates in newfound, radical discovery – but affirmation, insight, and inspiration can be as equally important as information and advice.

Quinn recently wrote on his website that a primary intent of all his books is to “shine a light on the secret nobody wants to hear.” In typical Quinn style, the nature of that secret is never explicitly defined or stated. But, it is perhaps the process of shining the light that Quinn enjoys and excels at most. After Dachau succeeds as the Quinn book that relishes that process most deeply.