At the top of the walkway sloping up from Chambers Street to the campus of Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), the City University of New York branch at which I teach, stands a work that has been called a “soaring, plunging form” and praised as “one of the most ambitious outdoor sculptures in New York City”: Roy Shifrin’s 1976 bronze Icarus. I have never enjoyed this sculpture. Its ruptured backbone is grotesque; its genitals, although stylized, are indecorously prominent. But I have come to love it, if not for its form then for the way it pushes me to think about what education is for and about what education must be like in order to achieve what it is for.
Ovid, the most eloquent teller of the story behind the statue, relates that the “master-craftsman” Daedalus, an expert at contriving devices that “cheat the eye with bewildering patterns,” makes wings for himself and his son Icarus, seeing in this his latest invention a promise of escape from a place he has “come to detest.” Demonstrating his own wings, he teaches Icarus “the skills that would prove his downfall.” As the two soar upward, fooling earth-bound spectators into thinking they are more than human, Icarus “fall[s] in love with the sky.” You know the rest: as he flies closer to the sun, Icarus’ wax-melded wings melt away, and he falls to his death.
Icarus’s story, we might notice, turns on failures of teaching and learning. Daedalus succeeds in imparting skills to Icarus, but Icarus, like all young people, hungers for something to love. Daedalus’s teaching fails to respond to that need: because he is guided by his detestations, Daedalus cannot show Icarus that a place where he already is can be worthy of his affections, leaving a gap in Icarus’ education that renders him susceptible to falling in love with a place where he could never be at home. The problem is not that Icarus lacks a fear of wings. The tragedy of his story, rather, lies in his never having learned to love the ground.
Although the marketing slogan devised by BMCC’s public relations bureaucracy (“Start here. Go anywhere.”) promises flight, the college’s graduates, to their credit, mostly stay put. Census data on post-college employment shows that at least four-fifths of CUNY graduates remain in New York State. Neither the Census Bureau nor anyone else, so far as I’ve been able to find, sorts graduate-employment data by locality, but any faculty member who has kept in touch with a few BMCC graduates can color in that university-wide and state-wide statistical outline: our students tend to become health care workers, tech operatives, civil servants, police officers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and beekeepers here in New York City, often in the same boroughs and even the same neighborhoods from which they started. (To be honest, I know only of one former BMCC student who became an urban beekeeper, but I am glad there has been one, and I like to imagine that there have been others.) To say “Go anywhere” is to say “Go nowhere in particular”: the slogan is a blank map, a spinning compass, a signpost that doesn’t signify. But a college, thankfully, is more than its advertising copy. It is not unreasonable to hope that BMCC’s students might gain from their time at college something better than wings. Looking at Icarus as I walk onto campus, I have wondered: could a college like this one help its students put down roots?
Wendell Berry is known for his stories about rural places, but one of his novels invites reflections on urban life, and I think that book can help us understand what Shifrin’s statue means and what a college like BMCC is for. In Remembering, a man named Andy Catlett (like Berry himself, a Kentucky writer and farmer), unmoored by a personal crisis, finds himself adrift for a day in San Francisco. Wandering alongside the city’s commuters and panhandlers and dogwalkers, he feels a feathery sort of freedom: “Where might he not go? Who knows where he is? He feels the simplicity and lightness of his solitude. Other lives, other possible lives swarm around him.” Yet as he stands on a pier overlooking the ocean and imagines the anywheres available to him, Catlett recognizes his weightlessness as a betrayal of himself: “All distance is around him, and he wants nothing that he has. All choice is around him, and he knows nothing that he wants.” Over the novel’s next several pages, the reader follows Catlett through recollections of people who made their homes in the place where he is from. As he remembers, Catlett’s sprawling anywheres become somewhere:
“He is held though he does not hold. He is caught up again in the old pattern of entrances: of minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds. The pattern limits and complicates him, singling him out in his own flesh. Out of the multitude of possible lives that have surrounded and beckoned to him like a crowd around a star, he returns now to himself, a mere meteorite, scorched, small, and fallen. . . . Though he does not hold, he is held. He is grieving, and he is full of joy.”
Because a city, unlike anywhere else, surrounds me with “other lives, other possibilities,” I am in a city apt to imagine myself to be a detachable thing, a member of nothing. But in a city, like anywhere else, it is possible for me to know myself caught up in a “pattern of entrances,” like a plant drinking sustenance from below. To help me see, and to fit me for, those patterns that limit and complicate me: that, it seems to me, is among the things that education is for, and may even be the thing that education is for. Only when I am held within limits, as Berry suggests—held by my attachment to a particular place or to particular people or to that common thing, however elusive, that makes a particular group of people in a particular place a community, or held simply by the contours and frictions of work that wants to be done well—am I able to become complicated, to unfurl like a petal or a beanpod or a labyrinth. And this fitting-and-unfurling requires me to refuse sun-grabbing flight, to live another sort of story.
Returning to himself scorched but alive, like an Icarus who has, after all, made it safely back to earth, Andy Catlett will get out of the city to find his place. BMCC’s students, for the most part, will look within it to find theirs. To revel in belonging to a specific place is good. Still, it is no more than a beginning: if we are to be at home on the ground, we—any of us—will need to learn to revel in all the ways, geographic attachments or otherwise, that being grounded allows us to flourish. Convinced that the best we can hope for is an honest groundlessness, Albert Camus once wrote: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” I would rather imagine Icarus landing.
Here, then, are half a dozen thoughts about the kind of education that could incorporate what BMCC’s shattered Icarus could teach us. I am writing about them not because I know how to live up to them but because I want to try, and to find company in trying.
1. Good education begins with, stays within, protects, and enriches that which marks us as human. Because human beings are communal creatures, social and political animals, this means that good education enables one to stay home well, to become a better member than one was before of the communities to which one already belongs. Because human beings need to love and thus need worthy objects for our loves, it also means that good education gives one practice at learning to love experiences that are good but that are not, at first, easy to love.
2. Often, good education will aim to help students better know the needs and better appreciate the character of those memberships—ecological, geographic, cultural, political—which link them to places and people and ways close at hand. In different schools, and in different fields of study, there will be different ways of offering these things, and it is not necessary for every class in every field in every school to offer them explicitly. But sometime within each student’s education there should come some encouragement to commit to and contribute to a somewhere.
3. Always, good education will aim to help students become grounded in what is right in front of them—be it a book or an equation or a lab experiment or a conversation or a city neighborhood—by observing patiently and by reflecting carefully on what they have observed. Thus good education will be mostly defined by the work of looking, listening, reading, speaking, and writing. These kinds of work are difficult, and we are not likely to enjoy them at every moment, but they can become sources of joy as they deepen and order our loves. They are difficult because they require a willingness to confront the limits of one’s capabilities (limits which will hopefully shift as one’s capabilities grow, but which are at any given moment real and resistant) and they can become joyful because they involve giving one’s all to the task at hand without regard to whether one’s effort will produce impressive outcomes. This is true both for the work of students and for the work of teachers.
4. For anyone, student or teacher, to stick with such work until they find the joy in it, the work must happen in places and in ways that protect the one who does it from techniques and technologies designed to free them from having to do such work. To confront the blank page or screen or the complex text or problem, to work one’s own way out of that blankness or into that complexity: that is what teachers and students both need to practice.
5. Just about the worst thing that teachers can do right now is to use, or encourage their students to use, or fail to discourage their students from using, technologies that promise to free human beings from having to comprehend, interpret, wonder about, be perplexed by, ask each other questions about, compose, or revise texts—technologies that promise, like Daedalus’ wings, to make their users feel unbound by ordinary human limits, or that make people seem as if they can and should be detached from their surroundings, their human relationships, and their current capabilities.
6. Just about the best thing that teachers can do right now is to invite students into the kind of work that shows what it is like to enjoy and even love the space within ordinary human limits. And just about the best way for teachers to issue that invitation is by doing that work themselves: facing their own complex problems or blank screens, finding their own places to land.
Image Credit: Materialism
