The film of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose: "...where are the books?"
The origin of our word "library" (or the French word for "book" or the old European words for "money") all stem from the ancient Indo-European term, "leub,” meaning, "to strip,”"topeel.” The obvious understanding is that information was preserved on - first - strips of bark, of leaves - then of "paper" made from such. But in my adaptation, the concept of "to peel" is the key: the library is a place where we peel apart the known world and begin to reconstruct it, for ourselves, and for our futures.
Image problem? Librarians in Movies - Part 1 (above)'
and Part 2 (below)
Libraries can be vaults, the safekeeping spots, used to preserve and/or to limit access to knowledge. (see Umberto Eco'sThe Name of the Rose)
"Incendie Alexandrie" by Hermann Goll (1876)
The safekeeping thing often hasn't worked out as well as has been hoped, despite current whining about, "what happens if the electricity goes out?" (see Alexandria Library Fire). Libraries can also be the Carnegie-style "supermarkets" of the 20th Century, a place where certain forms of knowledge and information are distributed in certain ways to certain classes of people.
For awhile I lived near Muskegon, Michigan. In the 1890s a "lumber baron" named Charles Hackley decided to reconstruct the then wild lumber town (which had recently helped rebuild Chicago after the Fire, but was running out of trees along the Muskegon River) into a "20th Century City." To do so he built schools, a hospital, started a bank, created parks, even founded social service agencies, but first, roughly alongside Andrew Carnegie bringing his first US library to Pennsylvania, he funded and built a contemporary library.
Muskegon, Michigan's Hackley Public Library
The library was intended to offer informal but effective education to the residents of the city. Certain books could be taken home, others, of course, could not. Certain types of books were on the shelves, but, surely, others were not. The learning might be "informal," but the library spaces were not. They were sacred-styled environments, hushed and reverent. The books were in English - with a few in Greek and Latin but none in the immigrant languages of Polish and Norwegian. Clean hands and clean minds were expected.
I am not knocking this. The Hackley Library, the Carnegie Libraries were huge successes, offering generations of Americans paths to knowledge, connections to culture, and vastly expanded world views. One need only look at the amazing series of gifts the New York Public Library has received from former immigrants who owe their education to the "free lending libraries" and classic library reading rooms provided throughout the last century.
But that was last century, and the tools of this century are different, the needs of this century are different, and the libraries of this century must be different.
Your Life Work: The Librarian "love for books and love for people"
It is common for a certain class of librarians to mistake "library" for a place of physical preservation and "book" for a bound, paper-based, collection of pages with ink stamped upon them.
"Google notwithstanding, good, reliable information is only scantily
present online," Mark Y. Herring, the library director at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, wrote in American Libraries in 2011(!),"The bulk of trustworthy, reliable information still
resides only in aggregated databases, some of which are affordable only
to libraries, since access costs literally as much as a compact car.
While striving to be green, libraries still depend on the printed word.
Moving to an electronic format exclusively (which, by the way, some
libraries have tried) has been unsuccessful so far. “Nothing is more
common" in experiment, wrote the famed late-18th-century chemist Joseph
Priestley, “than the most unexpected revolutions of good and bad
success.” Well, we may get to “electronic-only” one day. But so far our
digital-only experiments have met with “bad success.” When we lose our
physical libraries, where will the great masses of us find
reliable information?"
When this attitude exists, libraries become museums, and sadly, increasingly irrelevant museums. And, in schools, museums usually do not get funded, especially irrelevant museums. If your school library is silent, used by schedule only (or "mostly"), focused on print, categorized tightly, "a place to read," or to "work alone," you have a museum - and you have already been replaced by: the internet, the coffee shop, the public park - you, the librarian, just haven't lost your job yet.
Today's library, especially the single-generation serving school library, must be something essentially different. It must be the Communal Kitchen of Intellectual Creativity. It must be a place of resources and collaboration, of tools and inspiration, of communication and, yes, "making."
It must be a place that is both noisy and which has "caves" for quiet. It must be a place of comfort - from furniture to food and drink - so that users can concentrate on creativity and learning, not rules and discomfort. It must be a place where information flows through every possible tool, in order to create the widest, and most effective, access.
A place of shared creativity, a physical place but one tightly bound to the universe through digital tools. A place of energy and excitement - if we crave solitude and the paper book, well, we have our own spaces for that - books being portable and all. A place of open access - our computers, our tablets, our phones all link us to every conceivable library - why would we enter yours if you offer less?
And a Maker Faire, a place where creativity, learning, and problem-solving are contagious and where creativity, learning, and problem-solving break through boundaries.
Today, the "vault" lies in our servers, spaced strategically around the planet. The supermarket sits in our pockets, we can tap a four or five inch screen and access, well, anything. But the kitchen remains a physical place. A place of creation, of comfort, of human communion.
That is what your school library must be, or it will not be at all in a very short time.
"The island raises another question: Is it real? Is this whole story
real? I refuse to ask that question. "Life of Pi" is all real, second by
second and minute by minute, and what it finally amounts to is left for
every viewer to decide. I have decided it is one of the best films of
the year," Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the new Ang Lee film, Life of Pi.
holding on to the non-Anglo narrative in a way most films refuse to
"I refuse to ask that question," Ebert says... and this is essential. If you approach this tale in traditional, Anglo-American rationalist style, you end up writing the kind of nonsense produced by The New York Times' critic A. O. Scott, who writes...
"No problem! He will go on to embrace Islam
and study kabbalah. Thousands of years of sectarian conflict, it seems,
can be resolved with a smile and a hushed, reverent tone of voice.
“If you believe in everything, you will end
up not believing in anything at all,” warns Pi’s dad, who is committed
to the supremacy of reason and who is, as rationalists often are in the
imaginations of the devout, a bit of a grouch about it. But this piece
of skeptical paternal wisdom identifies a serious flaw in “Life of Pi,”
which embraces religion without quite taking it seriously, and is
simultaneously about everything and very little indeed. Instead of awe,
it gives us “awww, how sweet."'
Scott is so sure of his position as an authority on reason that he ends his review by stating,
"The problem, as I have suggested, is that
the narrative frame that surrounds these lovely pictures complicates and
undermines them. The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose
interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed
to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And
also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the
story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too
much for anyone to handle.
"Perhaps they are, but insisting on the
benevolence of the universe in the way that “Life of Pi” does can feel
more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion. The
movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it
also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes — or even to
wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all."
Oh my, the very idea that one might actually, "doubt what you see with your own eyes." This is the startlingly disturbing concept which The New York Times cannot embrace in this film, and which prevents us from allowing a democracy of reading and writing into our classrooms and schools.
"If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't
love hard to believe? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life
is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any
believer." (Life of Pi, p. 297)
Six months ago I wrote about young students at Scoil ag An Ghleanna at St. Finan's Bay in County Cork, about how those six and seven-year-olds attributed the sinking of the RMS Titanic to (a) "it wasn't blessed," (b) "if you looked in a mirror, it said 'No Pope'," (c) "it was build by the Protestants in Belfast." And I wrote then that, well, who knows what brought that ship together with that iceberg at that moment in that way? "Wrong," is such an absolute word, because, who really knows the whole story?
"We," in that "Anglo-American" conceptualization of the world, crave certainties, as A. O. Scott does. One cannot share religions, because some stories are contradictory. One cannot create a tale based in uncertainty, because it makes the endings too difficult, and the "theme" too personal. One cannot be both moral and a Democrat even in much of America. We believe in hard lines of separation, in linear tales with the climax on page 278, in stories with a specific - instructed - point of view which we can all reconstruct in a summary and, of course, can "compare and contrast" with other similar narratives.
"Tigers exist, lifeboats exists, oceans
exist. Because the three have never come together in your narrow,
limited experience, you refuse to believe that they might. Yet the plain
fact is that the Tsimtsum brought them together and then sank."(Life
of Pi, p. 299)
But for most of the world, the certainties that come from being the favored race in either the British or American Empires remain elusive. The universe is unstable. Often our beliefs are unsure. And thus our stories cannot be linear, and can often simply observe and reflect. That "climax," that "turning point," that "transition where the protagonist changes," well, it just may not happen during the segment of life being reported - or the segment of dream being reported - or the mix of the two which it - any of it - may be.
Because the other thing about the uncertainty is our differing conceptualization of "facts." The English and the Americans - at least as those are understood by FoxNews - believe in the existence of the "reliable narrator," that, if we just find that person, be in Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow or whoever, we will "get the truth." But the rest of us, we cannot certain of that either. No one sees without lenses, no one sees without experiences and education, beliefs and fantasies. No one sees without having both needs and wants. So vision, yes, is always personal, and thus "unreliable."
Pi Patel is an "unreliable narrator" to The New York Times. Of course he is an "unreliable narrator" to both Roger Ebertand myself, but the difference is, The New York Times is troubled by this, and Ebert and I, perhaps our life experiences tell us that all narrators are unreliable, which allows us to listen to the story rather than to analyse it.
When the power is all yours, or you believe that power is all yours, you can, you will, feign certainty. And that certainty will allow you to easily split the world between "fiction" and "non-fiction." That certainty will allow you to easily categorize and label and summarize and simplify. That certainty will lead you to the simplicity of introductions, bodies of content, and conclusions. It will allow you to write five-paragraph essays and believe in hard lines between citation and plagiarism, just as you believe in hard lines on a map of the world.
The "rest" of the world might find all this too simple to be true at all. Memory is memory after all. It is "unreliable." It is always fiction and yet, it is also our only "truth," as Norman Mailer made it clear in that essential explanation of the writing of history, The Armies of the Night.
"She is in my memory her own avatar," John Banville writes in The Sea, which I just finished hearing. "Which is the more
real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the
strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains
of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in
the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine,
and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify
and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We
carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are
borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop,
and so on into the unimaginable generations."
We are uncertain and we are unreliable, and, as Banville adds, we are uncertain. “Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him," Banville's narratorinsists.
“A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,
from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of
recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” - James Joyce,Finnegan's Wake
So that other "we," that non-"academic," that non-white-protestant-power-owning, non-Anglo-American, non-imperial "we," need that democracy of reading and writing which allows our voices, our world views, and our uncertainty to exist fairly and equally within "your" school's walls. For without our voices being truly welcome, "your" schools have nothing for "us."
"You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you
already know. That won't make you see any higher or further or
differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry,
yeastless factuality." (Life
of Pi,p. 302)
It has taken me some time to get words into pixels after a hurricane weekend at the School Library Journal Summit in Philadelphia.
At first I wanted to write about, "What are school libraries for? Who are school libraries for?" because that seemed to be an essential set of questions that appeared as Pam Moran and I presented our "unkeynote" - a challenge to the how, why, and what of the school library in this century. But then, sitting trapped in a hotel room, staring out a window at the magnificence of Philadelphia's Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, I watched some videos of students "reading and writing" in schools, and I found deeper questions.
Sometime after our unkeynote - a set of challenges to existing harmonies rather than a focus on one - and after Chris Lehmann's keynote the next morning, the SLJ Summit arrived at the business of the Common Core. And it was in that shift, from broad conversations on openness to mechanical conversations on closed processes, that the questions began emerging.
Why do we read? Why do we write? How do we bring reading to children? How do we encourage children to write? Will we accept a true democracy of voices? Or do we continue to pursue the colonialism of conversion, the colonialism of standardization?
Umberto Eco, the brilliant European semiologist and novelist, says in the afterword to the English-language edition of his 2010 novel The Prague Cemetery that, well, first that he hopes that readers are not to derailed by his "fairly chaotic" non-linear narrative, and that second,he worries about readers - and in both cases this perhaps applies primarily to English and American readers - getting trapped by "the fatal imbalance between story and plot," or, he offers the Russian literary terms, "fabula and syuzhet," in Wikipedia's description, "The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."' If you read the linked New York Times review by novelist and professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein you will find that fatal tension obvious. Goldstein reviews the plot, and in doing so, misses the entire story. Eco is not, of course, telling us the origins of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Prague Cemeteryanymore than he wrote a history of the 14th Century Church in The Name of the Rose, rather he is writing a highly contemporary tale of the methods of public opinion manipulation by governments and others, something incredibly relevant to all of us right now.
[I probably should have put a note similar to Eco's at the end - or at the beginning - of The Drool Room, but that I didn't perhaps explains why the book is more popular in Ireland than in the US...]
Goldstein, a very smart person, missed the story, but that's not surprising. She's an American educated academic, raised by "school as we know it," so to her, plot is what matters. We know this, it is the heart of how we read in school, of how we want kids to write in school, it lies at the heart of the Common Core, in all the standards in those documents, which are NOT flexible, because they form a rigid frame within which any reading must be jammed... That rigid frame which prevented Rebecca Newberger Goldstein from finding the story in Eco's writing.
What is the plot of Ulysses? or The English Patient? or Sophie's Choice? Sophie's Choice is one of the most powerful stories of the 20th Century, yet the plot? Well, it's - to be blunt - "how I first got laid." Ulysses? a walk through Dublin one day. The English Patient? You know the plot, in order to make a movie for Americans the story was stripped out of the book - leaving just the plot.
the stunningly rich tale of consent to imperialism in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient becomes a simple love affair and cautionary tale about boundaries via Common Core arithmetic
"I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I’d be banished. If I tied the wrong kind of knot in a tie I was out. Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?
"Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world.," says Kipp in The English Patient, as he damns the Common Core idea along with 'the way we teach.' "What do you think will happen next?" we ask our students, focusing on the Anglo-American plot rather than the rhythms, emotions, sensations, evoked memories which drive writing in so many cultures. Can you produce an "accurate and concise summary statement"? one of the teaching videos I watched asked. Really? Who wants the damn summary? What is that for? Why must you imagine what happens next in order to experience a story? What is wrong with the moment? What is wrong with taking something complex in, and not simplifying it?
"You write like a European," I was told early in my doctoral studies, and though i said, "Thank you," in response that was meant as a criticism to be corrected. "They" meant that I do not write in a simple linear form, they meant that I do not adhere to North American philosophies. They meant that my sentences were often crafted with rhythms, not just words. And they meant that all of that is wrong.
We are not usually so obvious in our stated biases, but every day in schools I see students punished for their voices, punished for their culturally ingrained reading styles, punished for refusing to over-simplify, because we teach reading and writing in the same way the English like to teach tea drinking.
So, school librarians, and teachers of the English language, here is a recent story of mine... Can we find an "accurate and concise summary statement"? What do you think will happen next? What is the plot?
In the summer when I turned thirteen I swam across Long Island Sound to the lighthouse on Execution Rocks.
At
thirteen there are nights when you cannot sleep. Not because of actual
reasons for terror in the house, nor because of worries or pressures.
And really not even because the hot, humid Gulf Stream air swamping New
York is too still and sweat coats your skin. But because there are so
many things to hope for, so many wishes, that your brain cannot file
them all away fast enough to let the silence come. This was the morning
after one of those nights, and perhaps, not just for me.
Ten
of us, maybe eleven - it is hard to count or even know all the faces
now - mostly boys but not all, mostly members of the YMCA's Swim Team
but not
all, stood in the long gazebo at Hudson Park which overlooked the beach
and the Sound. Late July, and the early morning light mixed with the
incoming salt of the rising tide, and the seaweed and fish and the
plants of the marshes. The flag in the park hung limp, only showing
flutters of life around its edges.
It began with a
dare, because that is the way stories of thirteen-year-old boys usually
begin. Someone suggested we swim across Echo Bay, the small enclosure of
the Sound which held the city's municipal marina and rowing club, and
which, 280 years before, had seen Huguenot refugees of the St.
Bartholomew's Day Massacre arrive to form a new home in a new land. But
Echo Bay seemed both too easy - maybe somewhere between a quarter and a
half mile - and too dangerous - the other side housed the rich, we'd be
arriving on some rich person's lawn - and too familiar - we swam every
day at the Hudson Park beaches here.
"We should swim
out to Execution Rocks," I then might have said. The kind of crazy
statement I could make at times like this. Execution Rocks, which had
held a lighthouse since the early days of the American Republic, was the
farthest outcropping of the City of New Rochelle, lying more than two
miles across the Sound, much closer to the Long Island shore than to any
point on this side, and marking the shipping channel through our
rock-infested choke point where the Sound became the East River.
Decades
later, I would stand in a gourmet food store before a shelf of various
sea salts and wonder if I could season my foods with memories. Could I
use the salt from this particular branch of the Atlantic Ocean? Or from
the surf off Coney Island? From Lough Foyle or the Forty-Foot in
Ireland? From Cape Disappointment where the Columbia finds the Pacific?
What dreams might those meals awaken?
A
thousand yards out, that's 40 lengths of the 25 yard pool we swam in
under the Y gym, where the low ceiling held the chlorine captive so you
could not smell the difference between air and water, my arms felt fine
but my legs were beginning to drag behind me, and I let myself pause,
coming upright in the pond-flat green water, my legs in a slow bicycle
pump that stretched the muscles in different ways. I was still in
coastal waters, tiny Huckleberry Island, legend told us of an old "Shore
Club" and a great fire but who really knew?, still lay over a thousand
feet away. But here, I breathed as deeply as I could now and saw the
world from that exact point we call "sea level," was a wondrously safe
spot. I could still see and hear my friends on shore, they were waving,
and I waved back - slowly to indicate that I was fine, not frantically
as in a call for help - and thought of not returning. And then I turned
and began swimming toward the little island's rocky point.
They
had said the swim to the lighthouse was "fucking insane," and "really
stupid," and when I had argued that neither of those things were true
they had dared me to try it. So we'd gotten on our bikes and ridden down
the hill out of Hudson Park, turned left onto Hudson Park Road, then
left again to climb the little hill at the start of Davenport Avenue -
we could have ridden the flat route along Pelham Road and Church Street
but it was not going to be that sort of day - and curved around the long
reach of Davenport Neck until we tore down the vast grassy hill of
Davenport Park and came to the giant tumbled rocks at the water. I'd
swim it, but I wasn't going to start an extra half-mile away. We all
knew this was not just the closest spot, but that it also had an island
sort of halfway, a safety factor of importance.
Here,
further out in the Sound, a slight breeze cooled us, but couldn't ripple
the water. And the tide was reaching its top now, creating the calmest
waters. I pushed my Keds off, pulled my socks off, and dropped my jeans,
leaving just the purple Y Speedos most of us wore under our pants that
summer. My shirt had been off and tied around the bike's seat post since
I'd gotten on it that morning. "Scream if you're drowning," Billy said.
"Yeah," I said, and walked to the one spot on the rocks we knew was
safe for diving at this moment, and jumped in. "You're buying me pizza
when I get back," I yelled after coming up to the surface. "Don't race,"
Peter said, kind of softly, "just go slow." I turned and headed south.
Three
weeks or so later there was a meet at Saxon Woods, a huge county pool
up near White Plains, with 50 meter lengths and teams from Ys and
recreation programs from all over and the heavy smell of Coppertone and
girls, lots of girls, even girls we knew. That day too was way too hot,
and between heats the sun would weigh on our skin, pushing against us,
driving us into the narrow strip of shade along the bathhouse. The
girls, we understood, were there to see us, not to see us swim. They
stared at our groins the way we stared at their rapidly growing tits,
with not quite fully defined fascination. We then became completely
aware of our own bodies, in ways that those of us who choose to hide in
the water could not yet deal with. In September of that year, sitting in
Cindy's bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, she put her hand on my thigh
and asked, "What does it take to get you, you know, umm, excited?" As she found out, I remembered her looking at me that day at Saxon
Woods. How had she gotten there? What, exactly, had she been looking
for?
When
I pushed off the Huckleberry Island rocks I felt good, if vaguely
thirsty. From here, a bit more than a mile maybe, maybe more, I guessed
it would depend how far the current pulled me off course - a hundred
little corrections adds up in distance, and the target now was a tiny
spot in the water, still, at this moment in time, occupied by a
lighthouse keeper, and home to deep-voiced steam foghorn which sang me
to sleep on the stormy nights of autumn. And here, beyond that coastal
zone, the water rose and fell, forcing a change in stroke to make
breathing a conscious decision every time, and the smells of land
vanished, and the water temperature dropped, and the world narrowed to
just me and this sea, both my closest friend and my mortal enemy.
I
pulled myself up onto the rocks in full, but not panicked, exhaustion,
and lay gasping for air and feeling like my shoulders could not rotate
one more time. I closed my eyes and felt the sun, and the warm stone,
and listened to the waves splash against those rocks. Those rocks, that
was our Halloween story. It was called "Execution Rocks" our story went,
because the British had chained prisoners to these rocks during the
Revolution and then waited for the tide to rise. When I looked again, I
was staring up at both the lighthouse and a man in a blue uniform, who
held a large green thermos out to me. "Did you just fuckin' swim here?"
there was no wait for an answer, "drink this you crazy moron."
He
gave me a salami sandwich on dark brown bread and lots of water as we
sat on folding chairs in the shade of the island's house. He asked about
my swimming, where I went to school, what I knew about the currents
here. He never asked my name, or where I lived, or why I had just swum
two miles to his spot on the map. I refused the boat ride back, though
there was no doubt that he would shadow me in his launch back toward
Huckleberry. For reasons I could not name this seemed to be alright with
me.
I climbed back out of the water at Davenport Park
three or three and a half hours after leaving. Maybe it was four hours
or more. Time is not a specific thing here. I pulled myself up the rocks
to a lot of whoops and stuff from now impressed friends. And they
wrapped their towels around me, and I looked out, and saw the lighthouse
keeper in his boat, just beyond Huckleberry. He waved. I hope I waved
back, and then I stumbled to the grass. And then I think I slept.
(c) 2012 by Ira David Socol
I asked the questions above this story for reasons both personal and professional. You see, first, though I felt that I really needed to write this story, I do not know why that was so. This is a story - in my mind it is one fully coherent tale - but I know neither plot nor theme. And second, I read and write stories 'like this' all the time. Not just "fiction" either, for I have found that "reality" - whatever that may be - often looks a lot more like this than the writing in any high school history book.
And so I wonder, (a) where does my communication fit into your school? your Common Core? your library? your classroom? and (b) where does that democracy of voice fit in? How do we embrace that and not squash it?
The world is a place of constant reinvention. If we all follow the rules, the paths, nothing changes. There is a reason the books of the colonials so often fill the Booker Prize shortlists, there is a reason Irish fiction and poetry are prized so much more highly than that of the English or Americans.The rules have never fully taken root away from "the Queen's English," and the paths begin in very different places, and it is the uncommon, not the common, which has extraordinary value.
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have
swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of
wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have
hidden in as if caves.
"I wish for all this to be marked on by
body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by
nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men
and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We
are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience." - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
It was in looking at that site, and trying to ask questions about it with Dean Craig Mertler that I began to really wonder about all the questions we do not ask our kids to wrestle with. Because there might be value in a 17-year-old working on: "Reforming the Electoral College:The students will, as a whole class, debate the Electoral College;
examining the merits and problems associated with the current system and
each of the proposed reforms. The students will propose an amendment to the Constitution to reform the system and vote on it as a class," or a 13-year-old practicing: "The voting process: (Common Core - SS 7 C 2 7 Conduct a mock election to demonstrate the voting process and its impact on a school, community, or local level). The students will run for student council elections. They will
campaign for themselves and create a brochure providing information
about themselves and why their peers should vote for them," but I think our students are not just capable of much more, I think they need much more if they are going to be effective citizens of this nation, and this world, in this century.
So, here are five questions you might raise in your school:
(1) Why do Americans vote the way we do? Should we continue to do that?
"The main reason for America's majoritarian
character is the electoral system for Congress. Members of Congress are
elected in single-member districts according to the
"first-past-the-post" (FPTP) principle, meaning that the candidate with
the plurality of votes is the winner of the congressional seat. The
losing party or parties win no representation at all. The
first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major
parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as
Duverger's Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post
elections."—from Sachs' The Price of Civilization, 2011
First Past the Post Voting with three parties gets confusing. The inner circle in this graph shows percentage of the votes British parties received in the last general election, the outer ring shows the percentage of seats won in Parliament.
A few US states - Louisiana is one - use the "French" system of runoff elections for some offices, requiring a majority win. But in most elections in the United States, the more parties, the fewer votes one needs to be elected.
In Canada, for example, in the last election, the Conservative Party received 39.68% of the votes against four left-of-center parties (Liberals, New Democrats, Parti Quebecois, Greens) yet ended up as the "majority" party in Parliament with 53% of the seats in a nation in which over 60% of voters strongly disagree with their policies.
(2) Should it be easier to get on the ballot everywhere in America?
Does democracy require choice? Who gets to limit what your choices are in an election? In Pennsylvania a group called the Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition says they (like many in other American states) are, "seeking more choices for
all of us on Election Day. Current Pennsylvania law makes it difficult
for independent and minor party candidates to appear on the ballot —
much more difficult than in most other states. The result is less
political competition, less political dialog, and fewer choices to vote
for in November. The current system is simply not fair and does a great
disservice to the ideal of democracy and to the voters. In 2006, independent and minor party candidates were required to
collect over 67,000 valid signatures simply to get on the state-wide
ballot in Pennsylvania on Election Day. Legally, Democratic and
Republican candidates require no signatures to get on the state-wide
ballot, and even the 2,000 signatures required for the Primary Day
ballot are ridiculously smaller than the virtually impossible hurdle of
67,000." So, first question, should it be easier to get your name on the ballot because you say you are a "Republican" instead of saying that you are "Green" or a "Socialist"?
Voters in Israel pick between 18 political parties (Wikipedia Photo), what are your choices?
Limited ballot access in the United States is a battle without traditional dividing lines, with everybody from the Green Party to Michelle Bachmann weighing in, from Oklahoma to Georgia, and the inconsistency of these laws mean you may not have the same choices as your neighbors a hundred miles away. As USA Today says, "It is a quirk of American democracy: Your choices for president depend on which state you live in."
(3) Should all votes be counted in every election?
West Virginia, and many other states, refuses to count the choices of many voters: "Only votes for official write-in candidates will be counted" says their website. And an "official" write-in candidate is one who, "submits a Write-In Candidate's Certificate of Announcement to the proper filing officer."
Why would there be a law like this? A law which also has a date limit on when someone can become a "write-in" candidate?
Let's begin with the "ridiculous" - suppose a whole bunch of people decided to write in "Mickey Mouse" or "Bart Simpson," is that "joke voting" or "throwing their vote away" or might it suggest a deep unease about available candidates which should be recorded?
Or, what if people chose to write-in the name of someone who had not chosen to become an "official" candidate? Surely that person has the right to refuse office if elected, but shouldn't voters be allowed that choice?
And finally, let's consider this situation. In my county in Michigan about half the people on the ballot are running unopposed. It is pretty much a one party community (like the old Soviet Union). But what if the only candidate on the ballot dies eight days before the election? (Michigan has a formula for a candidate dying under 7 days before election day)Or gets arrested for robbing a bank? Voters where I live are then deprived of any choices at all.
It gets worse, if you run a write-in campaign ("officially") in a party primary, you can win that election but not get on the general election ballot because you did not get "enough" votes according to th state ["if the office involved appears on a partisan primary ballot, a write-in candidate is nominated to the office if he or she 1) receives more votes than any other candidate seekingnomination to the position and 2) meets a vote threshold provided under Michigan election law. (MCL 168.582)]. If a write in candidate gets three votes and nobody else gets more than two, doesn't that mean he or she won the election? And in seven US states, write-in votes for President are prohibited!
(4) How many people should be in the US House of Representatives? How many in your state legislature? City Council?
So, is the United States Congress too big or too small? You might ask students to start doing some math to begin. How many people are represented by one member of the United Kingdom's House of Commons (62,000,00/650) vs the US House of Representatives (310,000,000/435)? How does that compare to Germany (82,000,000/622) or France (65,000,000/577) or, say Ireland (4,600,000/166)?
How does that compare to your state legislature? To your County or City government? Each "TD" in Ireland represents about 27,000 people, each member of the New York City Council represents 159,000 people. Each member of the Michigan State Senate represents 238,000 people, but each member of New Hampshire House of Representatives represents just 2,350 people - or far less than the members of most local American Boards of Education.
Consider all that this implies. If I, as a candidate, need to get to the voters of a New Hampshire district I could probably drive around and meet almost every voter, but if I want to be in the Michigan Senate I probably need to spend a lot of money on radio, mailings, phone calls, perhaps even television. If I need to spend money I need to either be rich, or I need to have lots of rich friends, or I need to promise things to lots of rich people. None of that is necessary in New Hampshire, where the legislature meets part time and members are paid $250.00 annually. Will that difference allow differing kids of members to get elected?
Who benefits when a legislature is smaller? Who benefits when a legislature is larger? How does size impact function? In what ways? Many questions...
(5) What would happen if the US Electoral College no longer included electors for Senators?
Simple question: Right now each state's electoral vote is based on the number of members of congress - representatives plus senators. What if it was just based in the number of members of the House of Representatives?
Wyoming, its as if all the animals in this photo get to vote for President.
This year, Wyoming gets one electoral vote for every 190,000 people, but California only gets one electoral vote for every 691,000 people. So, every Wyoming voter, effectively, gets more than three times as many votes for President as a Californian.
How might this change things? Consider the contested 2000 election - without those "senate" electors, George W. Bush's electoral vote would have dropped from 271 to 211 (he carried 30 states), while Al Gore's electoral vote would have dropped from 266 to 224. In other words, it wasn't Florida which changed the nation's political course, it was Wyoming, Alaska, and North Dakota.
What would be fair? Who would be hurt? It is important to note that the United States does not have - and has never had - any kind of "national election." All elections in the US are state-by-state affairs, but in this one instance - what is fair when the state's come together? Is the Senate enough protection for small states? Do we really have "one-person-one-vote"?
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, but the difference is, The New York Times is troubled by this, and Ebert and I, perhaps our life experiences tell us that all narrators are unreliable, which allows us to listen to the story rather than to analyse it.
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? Sophie's Choice is one of the most powerful stories of the 20th Century, yet the plot? Well, it's - to be blunt - "how I first got laid." Ulysses? a walk through Dublin one day. 
