Sixth-graders, bootleggers and Utopia
Tell me to organize a utopian society, and I’ll find somebody else to do it, specifically an elementary school teacher. They know how to put things in order.
Think about it. If you’re a teacher in the lower grades, you’re given a disparate set of somewhat malleable little human beings. You tell them what to do. The classroom is like a society. You’re bent on perfection.
But by the time the children hit the sixth grade, they get minds of their own. The ship of state springs leaks.
Is that a good metaphor? I think I made it up.
GOOGLE PAUSE.
Believe it or not, I got it right. Plato famously said it in his “Republic.” He likened the task of running a city-state (whatever a city-state is) to commanding a ship. Just substitute classroom for city-state.
But what about those sixth-graders? Are they mutiny-prone? Per my memory, yes.
The somewhat dictatorial fourth-grade teacher was umpire for a softball game that pitted us fifth-graders against the sixth-graders. It was obvious that the sixth-graders resented the way she was handling the game. Hmmm, I thought. She’s treating them like fourth-graders, and they aren’t taking it. What nerve they possess! As fifth-graders, we were still going along with whatever.
I found the sixth-graders’ behavior a bit unsettling, especially with a game to play.
Utopian societies are like that. As time goes by, not everybody goes along with the well-meaning ideas of the organizer. If the society allows no alcohol, expect distillation to happen at the local level. Expect bootleggers to thrive.
Nope, utopias just don’t ever seem to last. Regular people, especially the older and wiser they get, generally resent anyone who wants to control all aspects of their lives. They have a way of undermining a utopia, not that any utopia is really going to work anyway.
No, I’ve not made a study of utopian dreams. All I know is that if they didn’t all eventually fail we’d be able to point to one that has worked.
If the leader has charisma, things can rock along impressively for quite a while. They threw bouquets at Hitler in those early years. He had a certain charm and persuaded people to believe in his dreams for the “Fatherland.”
Politicians routinely promote utopian-like dreams to get votes. I’m thinking of the New Deal, the Great Society and Make America Great Again. I’ve probably left some out.
Humans, by nature, like to pin their hopes to someone’s convincingly great vision. Strangely enough, the captivating vote-getting message may be that there will be handouts or just the opposite – no handouts. Either way, amid life’s difficulties a bold message gets a following.
Our third-grade teacher made handouts work. I remember that big jar of hard candy at the corner of her desk. She also had an ideal fair-minded system for assigning tasks, eraser dusting being the best because you got to go outside.
Sometimes I think I’d like to go back and live in third-grade utopia. It worked.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Sixth-graders, bootleggers and Utopia
