If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

- Albert Einstein

Do you know the value of silence? Is that why you keep silent?

Speak less, listen more!
Start less, finish more!
Plan less, do more!

Please please please, just shut ur fuckin’ mouth! It’s disgusting to listen to ur unreasonable, ridiculous, and irritating complaints. Hate urself as much as u hate me. U know what? Ur alter ego is filled with all the faults that u have disclosed from others!

Please, keep what Hesse said in mind before u shoot off ur mouth!

Lena와 Kate가 마침내 돌아왔다. 한국을 떠나기 직전까지 하루라도 더 머무르기를 바랐던 그들이 결국 돌아왔다. 인천공항에 도착한 첫 순간부터 하바로프스크에 도착하는 마지막 날까지 나를 가슴졸이게 했던 나의 첫 러시아 학생들이 어제 서울에 도착했다. 클럽을 좋아하고, 여행을 좋아하고, 담배를 피우고, 가끔씩 지나칠 정도로 노출이 심한 옷을 입고 , 피어싱을 하고 캠퍼스를 누비고 다녔던 … 그들이 마침내 나에게 두달동안 서울에 머무를 것이라고 전화가 왔다.

그 아이들이 자유분방한 건 생활방식의 차이나 문화의 차이가 분명 아님에도 불구하고 (이 아이들보다 더 난잡한 생활을 하는 한국의 아이들이 얼마나 많은가?), 그들을 문제아나 골칫거리로 낙인찍었던 몇몇 분들의 태도가 사실 나를 더 가슴졸이게 하고 불편하게 했다. 20대라는 것 자체만으로도 그 시절을 이미 지나쳐온 사람들에게는 그들이 사회에 대한 도전으로나 혹은 위협으로 느껴지는 건 당연할는지도 모른다 (물론 나도 그런 생각이 조금씩 들기 시작한다). 그러나 젊은이들에 대한 지나친 기우(杞憂)는 아이들을 조금이나마 이해할 수 있는 작은 여지마저 박탈해 버리고, 결국 두 세대간의 의사소통의 단절에 다다르게 한다. 물론 젊은세대에게도 분명 잘못은 있지만, 그들을 바라보는 시선이나 태도의 변화를 우리가 먼저 선도해 나가는 것이 20대를 지나온 세대가 해야할 일이 아닌가 생각해 본다.

역시 Liya는 돌아오지 않았다. Lena와 Kate의 이번 서울생활이 지난번보다 조금 더 나아지기를 바란다. Lena, Kate, Liya! Я Вас Люблю!

More and more as the corporate culture exercises more control over schools, teachers are reduced to the role of imposing “an official truth” predetermined by “a small group of people who analyze, execute, make decisions, and run things in the political, economic and ideological system.” In order to achieve this teaching task (which ironically is a form of dumbness), teachers must treat students as empty vessels to be filled with predetermined bodies of knowledge, which are often disconnected from students’ social realities and from issues of equity, responsibility, and democracy. This type of education for domestication, which borders on stupidification, provides no pedagogical spaces for students, as Chomsky insightfully argues in this book, “not to be seen merely as an audience but as part of a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively.” Instead, students are rewarded to the degree that they become complicit with their own stupidification and become the “so-called good student who repeats, who renounces critical thinking, who adjusts to models, [who] should do nothing other than receive contents that are impregnated with the ideological character vital to the interests of the sacred order.”

In this education-for domestication perspective, a good student is the one who piously recites the fossilized slogans contained in the Pledge of Allegiance. A good student is the one who willfully and unreflectively accepts big lies, as described in Tom Paxton’s song “What Did You Learn in School Today?”

What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody’s free.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
I learned that war is not so bad.
I learned of the great ones we have had.
We fought in Germany and in France.
And some day I might get my chance.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

Fortunately, not all students willingly and uncritically embrace a pedagogy of big lies, and some are keenly aware of the lies their teachers tell them, to borrow a phrase from James W. Loewen. For example, history teachers try to engage students by using textbooks that “portray the past as a simple-minded morality play. ‘Be a good citizen … you have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has accomplished.” This form of false optimism, according to Loewen, “can become something of a burden for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who notice the dearth of female historical figures, or members of any group that has not achieved socioeconomic success. No wonder children of color alienated.” In their alienation, they refuse to accept the received knowledge from the ideological doctrinal system that falsifies and distorts reality in the hope that students will accommodate to life within a lie. It is for this reason that a very large segment of subordinated students resists the doctrinal education by dropping out. It is for this reason, perhaps, that many of these students resonate with Pink Floyd’s song “Another Brick in the Wall” (pp. 4~6)