Insightful?

I give the middle school boys a lot of flak for… just about everything. Being late, asking repetitive questions, failing to exercise common sense, failing to exercise common hygiene, moving their mouths faster than they move their brains, and jumping out of bushes at people, just to name a few. However, there are surreal moments when they have flashes of insight…or something very close to it.

 

Let me set the stage a bit. In history class we’ve been talking at length about early societies and the hallmarks of civilizations. All civilizations have certain basics in common; a system of writing, divisions of labor, surplus food etc. The kids in my class have basically been accepting of all this. Although I think I stretched their brains a bit when I claimed that everything they know as ‘civilized’ is the result of agriculture. I’m moving through this material quickly because, to be honest, studying Sumer and Egypt is much more…lively (more on that later). I do get a bit excited about agriculture but that’s just because I grew up in the middle of nowhere full of small farmers who had nothing better to do than be literal and figurative touchstone for a society that has no idea they exist. But I digress.

One of the requirements of civilization following a division of labor is a government of some sort. My classes briefly talked about what the first governments might have looked like, and I was prepared to move on when a hand went up. I almost ignored the hand, which happened to be attached to a 6th grader in the back row. Fairly often I call on one of the boys who has raised their hand for the sole purpose of asking me what type of cheese I favor as a hair treatment or something equally inane. Hopefully you’ll forgive me for my tendency to ignore the questions of adolescent male minds in my class. One can only take so many questions about cheese and bodily functions (sometimes in the same question). But I digress.

I did (eventually) call on the 6th grade boy, who had kept his hand up for several minutes. This is a good tactic for teachers; If questions or comments are forgotten or dropped after being ignored for more than a few minutes they were probably not worth answering in the first place. Cheese questions are amusing but soon fade. This question had endured, however, and when given the chance to speak I realized why. “Mr. Wilson? Government is a necessary part of civilization? What does that mean about our government?” At first I didn’t quite see what he meant and started to explain that our government serves the functions of all governments. And I began to list off what those some of the functions are but realized mid-sentence that our federal government wasn’t doing those things at the moment. That was the point of his question all along. Realizing that I told him that, yes, part of our government was ‘shutdown’ but other parts definitely continued to play their role and we have local and state governments that are operating like usual.  Still the question was apt and timely and persistent. What does it say about the state of our civilization that we voluntarily undid a part (small or large) of what makes up our civilization?

I thought I’d take a line or two to inform you all that the Library of Congress website is back up and running. You probably didn’t notice, but the first two days of the shutdown saw the LOC website disabled. I use that resource a lot at times throughout the year and I’m glad to see it accessible again. Through some miracle of bureaucracy the website is back but the Library of Congress buildings are still closed. The library is the single biggest public repository of knowledge and civilization in the world. Closing it is worrisome. But I digress…