Ave Marion: My Miseducation

I can name the things that taught me what America is. I read A Dream Deferred in 7th grade. I watched Roots in 8th grade. I read Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in 9th grade. I read their Eyes Were Watching God in 11th grade. In 12th grade I read the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. I saw the images of the dead at Wounded Knee as a history of photography student in college. I walked around exhibits of folks like Cyndie Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Walker Evans, etc. I heard Laurie Anderson's O Superman lying with my head in my lover's lap. And one day I turned on the car radio to "Ave Maria" sung by Marion Anderson.

I wonder, in earnest, what the rest of my education was about. Why we were asked to read text books? How is it that as a young person I got off from school for Martin Luther King day, but never sat and listened to a recording of I Have a Dream? How is it that we learned about the Scopes Monkey Trial without ever listening to the Americana music recordings about the case?

My point: my education on the whole wasn't very liberal or artsy. If it weren't for a few moments, mostly outside of class, when I connected with a work of art I would have no concept of the country or the world I live in. No concept of what it might mean to be a human, or to be black or a woman or a person who lives in anyplace other than my house and my town. Of all the things that we droned on about in school, all the gross generalizations and glossy scene setting and the outlines for Regents essays, the things that really moved me where the things that were considered peripheral; original texts, paintings, photographs, songs and moving images.

Does anyone else remember the painting of George Washington crossing the Potomac? Of course. How about the diagrams for how slaves were to be packed into ships? John Hancock's signature? These things should be the primary texts our young people learn from in school.

What I would like for my children is this. Each day they go into class. The teacher puts up a picture on the wall and introduces a subject. Then my kid listens to some folk songs, or audio recordings or watches film reels, then they are asked to write or draw or act out something about what they have learned. It works for math too, why not talk about Euclid while learning geometry? That is my dream. That my child will grow up with the image of Marion Anderson singing in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of 75,000 people. I dream that she or he will know that Miss Anderson wasn't allowed to sing in Constitution Hall and that the bi-sexual first lady wife of a polio-stricken womanizer organized a free concert in the nations capitol so that anyone could hear her voice in beautiful protest. And when she or he stands to sing the national anthem it won't be because of some juvenile nationalistic sentiment, but rather it will be out of the sad-joy (there is a word for this in german) that comes with knowing that we are imperfect, capable of great beauty and great sorrow.