People in a liberal democracy often try to justify exclusion by pointing to some personal limitation in the individual. Thus exclusion is not supposed to be based on group membership whether by race, gender, class, age, disability, or even sexual orientation (wealth may be a different matter of course); instead, it's just some idiosyncratic difference, or better yet, some kind of difference of talent or competence, especially of an academic variety. In the end, we partition the world in an infinite number of ways--from honor students and football teams to nursing homes and private clubs--hoping to gain some advantage in finding areas where we belong, but others don't. In doing so we think to ourselves, "I can exclude you, but you can't exclude me."
Democracy disrupts the finality of such partitions. Customs and beliefs that divide are gradually supposed to become anomalous as society continues to evolve. Democracy encourages a regular examination of the inequities involved in arrangements of exclusion. However justified a particular grouping may appear to its beneficiaries, those concerned with democratic relationships keep raising issues of fairness and parity as they try to look beyond the indulgences of selfish profits and short term gains. This as opposed to a fixed conservative position that nostalgically clings to the privileges of the past, viewing any changes that involve more inclusion as yet additional evidence of the continuing decline of authority. Persons with such sentiments fiercely resist letting more people onto the playing field.
Arguments for freedom of association, and the fact that distinctions make for a rich variety of opportunities within our culture, should not be used to confuse the exclusion issue. Individual groupings of citizens are supposed to occur on the basis of positive avocation rather than negative personal prejudice. As John Burnheim contends, "In such a community rights to exclude others would be less valued than rights to be included in those groups one wanted to join" (182). But it's not so easy to support such open access once we've grown up and come to reify the differences we see around us. Generally it's too late to overturn a prejudice slowly ingrained over the years. Thus we must expose the habits of exclusion early on. In schools we need to live by a code of conduct that explicitly confronts the private tendency of students to fence others out. We must affirm that in this public space we proceed by inclusion, not by exclusion.
You Can't Say, "You Can't Play"
The simple wisdom and courage of such a radical position is dramatized in yet another of those remarkably unpretentious books by Vivian Gussin Paley. In You Can't Say You Can't Play, Paley tells the story of how she went about trying to change the rules of interpersonal groupings within her Kindergarten class. Struck one day with the deep unfairness of the pattern of social relations that allowed one child to reject another child's request to play, she decides to work carefully at shifting the understandings and scripts that make such exclusionary behavior acceptable. Having reached a decision, Paley moves firmly and deliberately, yet she also is careful not to be authoritarian. Thus she does not set down her new rule, "You can't say you can't play," dictatorially with no discussion or dissent allowed; instead, she gradually generates support by educating the children in her care to understand its benefits and to explore ways to enact it. In a questioning and invitational manner, she slowly builds consensus. As she tells one girl, "This wouldn't be the sort of rule you'd get punished for breaking. If you don't follow what the rule requires, then. . .well, you just think about it and talk about it some more. It isn't a matter of punishing someone, it's more a case of protecting someone" (113). Sensitive to the conflicting feelings surrounding issues of exclusion, Paley also invents a serial story about the adventures of a magpie in a magical kingdom. During the course of the year, she tells her children this myth as a means of reparation for the particular concerns they are feeling.
Paley expresses her democratic social agenda explicitly. She's concerned with fairness, but the core of her faith goes back to feelings and relationships:
Certain children will have the right to limit the social experiences of their classmates. Henceforth a ruling class will notify others of their acceptability, and the outsiders learn to anticipate the sting of rejection. Long after hitting and name-calling have been outlawed by the teachers, a more damaging phenomenon is allowed to take root, spreading like a weed from grade to grade. (3)
Children, she knows from long experience, "yearn for explanations of sadness," and therefore they welcome an open consideration of how people are being treated in school, even though initially only four of twenty-five children--the rejected ones--find the new rule appealing:
Being told you can't play is a serious matter. It hurts more than anything else that happens in school, and distractions no longer work very well. Everyone knows the sounds of rejection: You can't play; don't sit by me; stop following us; I don't want you for a partner; go away. These would be unforgivable insults if spoken at a faculty meeting, but our responses are uncertain in the classroom. (14-15)
Arguing that the classroom belongs to every child--and therefore is not a private space, like home--Paley sees what happens in "free play" as violating the democratic ideal of equal participation in our public places. "In truth, free acceptance in play, partnerships, and teams is what matters most to any child" (21). Thus she sees a fundamental value contradiction within her classroom as she has allowed it to be run over the years:
We vote about nearly everything in our democratic classrooms, but we permit the children to empower bosses and reject classmates. Just when the old-fashioned city bosses have all but disappeared and the once exclusive dining clubs are opening their doors to strangers, we still allow children to build domains of exclusivity in classrooms and playgrounds. (22)
The label "rejected" is something children have to learn; being rejected in play foreshadows all the later rejections of life. "Of course," as Paley acknowledges, "the feeling begins much earlier, in life's first separations. We are so vulnerable once we are alone at school" (27). But should children be left alone to figure out rejection for themselves? Is this the way we want to build a child's character in preparation for living in a rejecting world where wants and desires will often be frustrated?
As Paley's rule becomes inserted into the flow of behavior in the Kindergarten, it begins to conflict with the idea that someone should be "in charge." Is it possible to rid ourselves of needing a boss? As one fourth grade girl remarks, "Do away with owners and the rule could work" (95). But this is hardly an easy task when throughout the culture hierarchies are rigidly enforced. Take, for instance, the super-hero dolls that my five-year-old nephew, Nicholas, plays with avidly, like so many others his age. On one of the packages for "a member of the Cobra Infantry group named Vipers" appears this directive:
If you want to get anywhere in Cobra, you have to start out as a Viper. That's the bottom of the pyramid, and serving in the Cobra infantry is a small price to pay to gain access to the glittering prizes at the top. Cobra doesn't reward success with parades and medals. They offer material wealth, power and an outlet for the terrible urges that drive the greedy, the envious and the cruel. If that doesn't make a Viper a dangerous opponent, nothing does!
Of course, kids don't read these messages, they just play the games. Yet the game is very much about where they fit within the vertical social structure and what kinds of adversarial urges they must have in order to climb the ladder over the bodies of others.
In short, the real opposition to Paley's plan stems from the general unfairness that exists in the world and the way children already imagine themselves preparing for future disappointments and rejections. In a crucial exchange with some fifth-graders, Paley uncovers this form of reasoning from one boy, "In your whole life you're not going to go through life never being excluded. So you may as well learn it now. Kids are going to get in the habit of thinking they're not going to be excluded so much and it isn't true." Paley responds, "Maybe our classes can be nicer than the outside world," but still the boy contends, "But this way you won't get down on yourself when you do get excluded." Nevertheless, Paley concludes, "Too often it's the same children, year after year, who bear the burden of rejection. They're made to feel like strangers." What she's come to understand is "that although we all begin school as strangers, some children never learn to feel at home, to feel they really belong. They are not made welcome enough" (100-103).
Able to stay with the children's objections, Paley talks openly about feelings and social relationships without condescending. Opinions are engaged directly in a caring way. The boy's conventional argument has long been an excuse for keeping people in their place, yet Paley boldly keeps asking the impossible. For instance, what if people actually expect to be treated properly by those in authority and so get angry and protest when this doesn't happen? Following this boy's logic, discriminatory policies would never change, nor could we ever expect conditions to improve for marginalized groups.
Meanwhile the Magpie story has been progressing to a crisis point. The exploits and adventures of this bird have served as a continuous thread throughout Paley's account. Having himself been saved by a kindness, the Magpie has gone on to share his kindness with others. Paley allows her myth to confront the feelings and behaviors engendered by acts of exclusion and to explore new scripts that turn the tables to everyone's satisfaction. The tale is about much more than getting along nicely with each other; it seeks a larger vision of what binds people together. The serial story of the Magpie provides a way of emotionally, aesthetically, and ethically dramatizing what the children are struggling with. In doing so it emphasizes how engagements with literature potentially foster democratic concerns and attitudes. For these children, this will not happen without Paley's direction, without her commitment to the dispersal of authority and her caring concern for expressed differences.
The final testing of the rule occurs during story acting--where children get to play out the parts in a story someone else has made up. This becomes a useful arena for acting out systematic favoritism and yet hiding it behind the reasonable request that all children ought to have the right to control their own stories and how they are presented to the group. Further, deeper dislocations arise here, such as is it acceptable to invite a boy to play a girl? Yet having struggled with the rule for some time now, its presence in story acting frees the children to begin taking on
implausible roles, shyly at the start, but after a while with great aplomb, as if accepting the challenge to eliminate their own stereotyped behaviors. Girls take on boy's roles and boys accept girl's roles. Not everyone, to be sure, but enough children are willing to throw off their shackles to make these role reversals acceptable. Those who have never taken roles as bad guys, witches, and monsters are saying yes to such assignments, and the Ninja Turtles are agreeing to be newborn babies. (127)
Sheltered by the imaginative power of literature, these children were able to throw off the normal constraints of what was possible and so sympathetically take on the perspective of the other.
Paley understands that her achievement cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, only after a year-long campaign of gentle persuasion and consciousness raising do her children come to alter some of their original assumptions about what is acceptable interpersonal behavior. Where will they find such a rule practiced again once they leave her protective care? Still, her goal of moving her children beyond exclusion remains central to any democratic vision:
we have our work cut out for us, in every grade, if we are to prepare children to live and work comfortably with the strangers that sojourneth among them. And should it happen that one day our children themselves are the strangers let them know that a full share of the sun is rightfully theirs. (129-30)
Unfortunately, as Paley realizes, the conduct that we learn from an early age often persists with us throughout our lives. All aspects of the society contribute to the climate that makes certain "unacceptable" behaviors acceptable. If, for instance, governments can't show restraint, can we expect individual citizens to act any differently? A lack of concern for the conditions of human life at any one level affects attitudes at all levels. When violence predominates as a solution to conflict, or bigotry as a response to personal discomfort, the most insidious kinds of exclusion grow and prosper. Only by taking an early stand, as Paley shows, can we begin to question the deep-seated and supposedly innocent privilege and status that individuals try to construct for themselves at someone else's expense. Democracy shoulders every citizen with the responsibility of preventing any particular "advantage" from leaving us a nation of strangers.
Encouraging the Pleasures of Ironic Involvement
One central purpose of reading literature with students of all ages in a democracy is to give them space for their unique responses--everyone included. When responses are drawn out and shared in the midst of a democratic ethos, students learn to distinguish between the kind of authority that controls from positions of power and exclusion and the kind of authority that influences from positions of reason and caring. By expressing rich forms of ambiguity, poems and stories offer a primary means for each person to learn how "point of view" or "perspective," while initially supporting exclusion, eventually provides a basis for overcoming it.
All voices uttered from the vantage point of privilege in any hierarchy naturally want the existence of their perspective to remain invisible to others. People are supposed to remain tethered in their place, not develop and change. Reading literature can resist such stasis. In experiencing the tension of opposites expressed in myths, students can begin to appreciate the pleasures of irony and so have a basis for rejecting one-sided views. Ironic involvement--as opposed to the ironic detachment that isolates us from others--grows when we realize that we're inevitably bound to hold more than one position at once. Playing within communities of commitment and trust, we begin to acknowledge the relativity and intersubjectivity of our own perspectives. This cautions us against cynicism, which in due course only breeds self-exclusion.
Ironic involvement values connections. It sees across the gaps and contradictions that comprise our mutual desires. It tries to transcend the fragmentary, the antagonistic. It works at uncovering the paradoxical procedures of the institutions we've constructed to both realize and constrain caring relationships. But how to replace confrontation, which by its nature seeks to exclude or silence someone, with conversations that develop ironic involvement?
One difficulty lies in the forms of competitive discourse primarily associated with males. When this preemptory way of talking prevails in classroom discussions of literature, power and control are at issue, not equal access. If the goal is to keep building toward mutuality, then as teachers we will reject winner-take-all approaches to whatever controversy arises. A caring rhetorical style provides an important way of refiguring how literary response talk might proceed. Such response talk would not render any participant silent. No one would have to yield to the dominant voice or voices in order to avoid the risk of ending up alone. Rather, everyone works to weave reciprocally dependent spaces that thrive on the riches of harmony and counterpoint--we fill in the score together. In this sense the connecting and non-competitive aspects of what has been labeled woman's talk provide a script for how playful democrats might proceed when they engage with others in the work of response and interpretation. As Paley suggests, the discourse of inclusion serves to mediate what we previously allowed to divide us.
A discourse of inclusion reminds us that the measure of any reading event must finally reside in its satisfactions. For as Robertson Davies concludes, unless reading "brings pleasure first you should think carefully about why you are doing it" (100). The pleasure of the text is more than the immediate thrill of "appreciation" or "aesthetic gratification"; it represents an awareness of intentionality--that imaginative leap made by the mind as it recognizes correspondences between designs of coherence and closure in the text and internal body states of feeling and order. The satisfaction comes from a sense of "I get it!" and the savoring of the reverberations that arise from this "getting it." In responding to texts we too are given a voice, we too are included.
Pleasure indicates that the reader is holding the reins, not someone else, and so to teach literature democratically is not about the "correct" interpretation, but about fostering innovation--the endless novelty of new stories waiting to be told. Innovation always exists at the expense of authority; it's a kind of declaration of independence. The reading commitment most central to a democracy is the one that breaks a student's solitary dependence on the teacher. This includes everything from text selection to text meaning. Inquiring publicly into alternate readings, in order to distinguish those that are more satisfying from those that are less satisfying, can only take place after we feel pleasure in our own readings. This pleasure begins with being connected to our own knowledge and ends with some appreciation of the irony of another's contrary perspective.
Opening Texts that Find Us Out
I don't want to be threatened or unsettled any more than the next person--so why open my own story up to scrutiny in the classroom? One threatening episode in my quest to discover my identity as a teacher occurred in a class session being used to assess student accomplishments during an eight-week summer program. All students were supposed to prepare a presentation that in some way captured what they had learned and how they had gone about learning it. On the second day of presentations, I continued to sit silently, nodding approval, allowing Marlene, my co-teacher, to be the one actively participating in the ongoing commentary with the students. In my mind, I was contemplating what form our teacher "evaluation" story might take, because, although publicly only the students had taken on this assignment, I too intended to make a presentation that captured how important the summer learning experience had been for both of us as teachers.
Then suddenly, George, one of the students, addressed me before the entire group, "Well, are the instructors going to give an assessment performance too?" At that instant I felt blind sided, my feelings hurt. Why was I so angry and defensive? Why did I almost start sulking like a small child instead of responding in a light hearted manner, "Yes, of course, and we can hardly wait!"? After all, I'd already begun planning my performance. Yet by some twisted logic, I felt George should have known that, he should have known me. What authority gave me the right to expect students to be mind readers?
On reflection, it seems that the privilege and status from which my good intentions spring had been struck a near fatal blow. How dare anyone think of questioning what I was going to do, let alone what I was silently feeling. Everyone should have taken for granted that I was naturally operating in good faith. Further, George's request prevented me from exhibiting an act of generosity, of displaying sensitivity from my place of authority--by having my good intentions preempted, I was accordingly diminished. Being called to account made me face a secret about myself. How inadequate I suddenly felt inadequate, having been found out as less than perfect, as falling short.
Because the sources of my privilege and status often remain invisible to me--from my WASP culture to my male gender--I was startled to discover how strongly I clung to the idea that only I was allowed to hold secrets, only I was allowed to exclude those around me by failing to disclose what I was feeling. Despite all my words to the contrary, it's hard to live in openness with students and not also expect instant allegiance from them. At least on this occasion, the shock caused me to reconsider my perspective. I needed to stop avoiding the risks of openness that I in turn was asking each student to take.
There is a widespread fear that openly questioning authority will ultimately lead to all values being viewed as radically contingent. Thus, one will no longer be able to promote the good or oppose the bad. The relativity of the teacher's perspective is supposed to contribute to this general moral decline. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, however, sees such relativity as a positive development: "acknowledging the fact and partiality of one's perspective" should not "in itself undermine someone's authority over her students, children, or native parishioners." In fact, such acknowledgement mighty make authority "more subject to interrogation." By contrasting perspectives, one with another, instead of presenting absolutes, the teacher displays a firm belief in democratic practice. Again, what is valued and respected is authority's reason, not its force. As Smith continues,
the securing of authority from interrogation and risk could hardly be thought an unqualified or intrinsic good. On the contrary, it might be thought there was some communal value to ensuring that all authority was always subject to interrogation and always at risk. All authority: which must mean that of parent, teacher, and missionary as well as that of tyrant, pope, and state flunky. (160-61, italics in original)
Viewing authority in this way does not denigrate standards. When students claim "ownership" of their own texts, this does not isolate them from comparisons with the texts of others--it, in fact, encourages dialogue. Publicly owning their texts helps validate the students' own intentions and in turn establishes for them a significant zone of rebellion--one which can serve as the basis for committed and responsible action because it is never far from reason and reflection.
Authority must always be in decline, if the world is to go on living, to go on being born anew. The only thing the adult world can ever temper is the pace, the rate of transition, and how I as a teacher meet students openly with stories contains my particular contribution to their process of maturing. Giving up the old-style authority of the teacher, no longer remaining inscrutably in charge, keeping myself included in the present flow of classroom events--this will never be easy. Yet, might not the ironic pleasures of a text, brought alive in a democratic classroom, provide a testing ground, a kind of "walkabout," for each student's emerging moral imagination? Might not literature allow students to grapple with a world buzzing with ideas and opinions not their own, buzzing with conclusions that deny those they've reached separately? By sharing and then relinquishing my ownership of poems and stories, how might I help create a social forum in which students' rebellious attitudes toward authority are critically voiced and fostered?