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Either way, academics fight over what is and isn’t Romantic and when, if ever, Romanticism ceased. One of the greatest threads of Romanticism was a desire for self-articulation and a belief that the world needed people free to articulate themselves — to say what made them “them” and not somebody else.
If self-articulation is a litmus of Romanticism, the American Constitution is hopelessly and eternally Romantic. Especially in its first 10 amendments — the Bill of Rights — people’s rights to express themselves in words, in religion, and by association are made primary responsibilities of government. Good government is there to protect and encourage self-expression and self-articulation.
We’re two centuries from the Bill of Rights today. But as I look around me in America, I see no lessening of our firm Romantic belief that good government is there to respect and encourage self-expression. Moreover, American school systems have sought in a seemingly infinite variety of ways to allow students to get in touch with, to know, and to articulate themselves.
Which brings me to the fact that a recent First Amendment Center poll showed the number of Americans believing that “teachers or other public school officials should be allowed to lead prayers in public school” was rebounding toward its highest level, set in 2000.
As someone who went to junior high, high school and college where led prayers were typical and often, I’m opposed to such practice as a violation of students’ conscience, typically a violation of almost everyone’s conscience on a rotating basis.
By that I mean that one day I’d go to school and be led in prayer that was perfectly consonant with my own faith — this was probably a significant majority of the time. Jews and Christians — who were virtually the only prayer leaders — finding it easy to fashion prayers to the same recognized God in inoffensive ways.
Often, people led us in the Psalms as prayer — hardly likely to offend either Jews, Catholics or Protestants.
But then, I’d go to school and someone would decide that for balance there should be a prayer from a tradition with which I could not possibly agree.
We’d be half-way through the prayer before it became obvious that we were praying to a god I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. For example, I was led in prayer to peas and other harvest vegetables. I’d seen enough of that sort of thing in my study of Greek and Roman paganism.
The American constitutional Bill of Rights is there to stand strongly against forcing of conscience.
On the other hand, many students and parents believe that starting with prayer is the only way to ensure reasonably good things happening in academic studies or in any other activity. In writing these columns, I have consistently believed exactly that.
So, here’s my modest, if Romantic, proposal.
Let’s allow the school day to start with, say, five minutes for self-articulation. All students get out their notebooks and take five minutes to write about themselves and where they’ve been lately, in their studies or elsewhere. This is a private journaling assignment, typical of many college English classes. There’s no reason it can’t start early in elementary school.
Early in the semester, the teacher instructs the class in self-expressive journaling and specifically suggests to students that they probably should not just sit down and start writing, but should take perhaps a fifth of the time to plan what they are going to say so that it is a good reflection of them when it is written.
The teacher then additionally says that some students may wish to use this pre-writing time for meditation, which is a reasonable way to get in touch with oneself for writing.
And the teacher concludes that other students may wish to use the time for prayer, getting in touch with their sense of Divine Power — both for self-understanding and empowerment as students. This too is a typical practice of good writers over many centuries.
All students are reminded to keep quietly on task, both for their own learning and out of respect for their fellow students’ attempts at self-understanding and self-articulation.
Paul Grawe has taught American literature, Shakespeare, and technical writing longer than he cares to remember. He has done various types of government relations, and as an ex-economics major, armchair quarterbacks everyone who makes economic policy. He also made a run for the First District Congressional seat against Tim Penny in 1986. He can be reached at pgrawe@hbci.com.
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better yet wrote on Sep 23, 2007 10:54 PM: