Inspired by my reading of The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford (which I am absolutely loving, and I want to write more about soon), I’ve been thinking about lies a lot lately, specifically the many lies that we have to wade through in our days, beamed at us through social media and ubiquitous advertising on every surface.  Mr. Crawford has a great intro to his book in which he says that the inspiration for writing it in part came from noticing advertisements in places he had never considered possible before.  He says:

Such intrusions are everywhere.  Taking a flight recently to Chicago, I pulled down the tray from the seat back in front of me and discovered that the entire tray top was devoted to an advertisement for Droid, the multimedia smartphone.  At O’Hare International Airport, the moving handrail on the escalator was covered in an endlessly recurring financial message from the Lincoln Financial Group: You’re in Charge. © When I got to my hotel, I was handed a key card that was printed on one side with an advertisement for Benihana, the restaurant. Somehow, the fact that such a key card presents about five square inches for inevitable eyeball gazing had gone unnoticed, or rather unmonetized, until recently. 

The entire reason for being of these intrusions is to capture our attention, and even if we don’t believe the portrayal of how great the product is, or how much better your life will be if you go to that vacation home, or get that medication, we often still get our attention diverted for those crucial seconds.  Many ads these days are hyped-up ultra-colorful tongue-in-cheek wink-wink facetious plays on our attention, in which they are implicitly acknowledging the falsehoods of their portrayals, and are simply doubling down on their fantastical claims and wild gesticulations, presumably for our entertainment while we are forced to be exposed to their product.  In a flash, we have had our thoughts directed away from what we would otherwise pay attention to, and toward the product.

Advertisements are all lies, and everyone knows it, and everyone tolerates it and/or comes up with ways to mitigate its effects.  Vermont is the only state in the union that I know of that bans billboard ads along the interstate and, boy oh boy, does it make a difference for the better when I'm driving down the road! Nope, I looked it up and Hawaii, Maine and Alaska also have bans. Good for them.

Crawford’s book takes this introduction much farther as he explores the very reasons we have created a society built around grabbing one’s attention with what he calls “representations.”  I like Crawford’s use of this word, as it’s very similar to one used by another of my favorite philosophers, Owen Barfield, who calls them by the same name. Barfield calls those consensuses that a society currently agrees on “collective representations.”. 

Since it’s “back to school” season, I’ve also been thinking about schools, and lies.  The lies that really bother me in advertisements are the ones that people mostly seem to not to question; I suppose these would be collective representations that most of my fellow humans still ascribe to, that I do not.  In the world of education, I think one of the most prevalent unquestioned lies these days is “preparedness”.  This is the idea that sending your kid to school, or going to school yourself, “prepares them/you for something” in the imagined future.  I’ve previously mentioned my annoyance with billboards and other ads for colleges, universities and schools of all kinds in which the claim through some catchy slogan or other is “we will prepare you for a new job/life”.  This strikes me as such a blatant lie that does not stand up to experience, I am constantly amazed that anyone falls for it.  

I was talking with a couple Waldorf teacher friends, both of whom have children (five, collectively) that have reached college age or beyond (my daughter is ten, so I haven’t reached that threshold yet).  We shared a good laugh together when one of our number reflected that, for all of the individual intentionality around child-rearing that had been brought to bear with their kids; the fact that they attended Waldorf schools, that they had been given the benefits of a rich and artistically-infused education driven by a philosophy and pedagogy that (we believe) is superior to the norm; that they had their parents intimately involved in their daily lives and educations;  these parents still felt, based on the goofy actions they saw them engaging in, that their adult children were not by any means “prepared” for the world!  They were just as lost as every twenty-something is today. It was nice we could laugh about it.

Some more savvy school billboards have now changed their message to be something more like “you will find yourself here”.  I’ve noticed this change and I think it means that advertising companies are getting wise that the lie of preparedness is wearing thin with folks.  But, the lie of “finding yourself” by going away from your community to another, constructed one, is just as false.  We’d better get more truthful about what school is for, since it’s not for preparedness, and it’s not for finding yourself.  If you’ve read any of my stuff, you know that’s a big puzzle I’m trying to figure out. What is school actually for?? I’ve proposed some possible answers so far, and I’m sure I’ll do more of this.

I do believe there are benefits to going away from home to study particular things for prescribed amounts of time.  The example I can think of that from a distance seems most effective is how the military sends a soldier to trainings of 4-8 weeks of “preparedness,” and then sends them out into the field. But, as someone who spent many years away from home, chasing an illusory “preparedness” for “real life” (there’s another collective representation that needs unpacking: “real life”) and eventually, slowly, realizing that real life was happening to me the whole time, I think our unwavering trust in this approach as one that leads to wisdom, agency, or settledness in the world should be questioned.  Otherwise, we will spend our entire lives “preparing” for. . .what exactly?  We’d do better in most cases to wake up and just start living, rather than pretending we are getting ready for something else than what we are doing right now.  And, if we apply this lie overmuch to our kids, we will be keeping them far too long in “training,” expecting them to someday be “prepared” and will inevitably be disappointed since life, it turns out, is something you live, not something you prepare to live, even if you are in school.  Hopefully, we can laugh about it when we discover we will never be prepared, but life in all of its inevitable surprises (if we don’t hide from those surprises by interminable preparing) still comes to meet us, ready or not, every day.

Photo of the waiting place from the Dr. Seuss book Oh the Places You’ll Go! found here