Hanging

“You can get used to hanging, if you have to,” my father would say so often, when I was a boy.  I grew up in the era of free love, but my Father was of a different era, of the Silent Generation.  

He had grown up in Kentucky, in an extended family generations of whom worked on the railroad, as Laborers, Shop Foremen, Section Supervisor, although his Father had risen to be an Engineer.  The saying is “beneath every railroad tie lies a dead Irishman” and I can only imagine how hard those times must have been.  My Father was silent on that. 

My Father’s oldest brother, Danny, broke the mold, at the age of 26, when he became the Business Manager of the Calumet Farm, in the thoroughbred bluegrass region. During the championship years when the legendary Whirlaway ran like the wind, Danny managed the operation, winning the Triple Crown – the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes – in 1941.  While Danny worked, my Father, age 13 (my son’s age now), would idle away the hours, reading under the Bur Oak, Blue Ash, or Kentucky Coffeetrees towering overhead; an idyllic, wildly exciting, and defining era at the iconic racing stable.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in December of 1941, Danny enlisted in the United States Army Air Corp.  Old enough not to go, he volunteered, such was his Code of Honor.  Eventually he was sent to Iwo Jima where he was killed, stabbed while he slept, on March 26, 1945.  Japanese kamikazes were hiding on the island, and struck in the dead of night, when the Marines’ guard was down. 

The US Army Messengers drove to the family’s house, then walked to the front porch to deliver the news.  My Father, home alone, would have greeted them, his world crushing down upon him, his world slipping away.  Danny had been like a father to him, they shared a very close bond, and this news must have been devastating.  Which he received in solitude, standing on the front porch, in Paris, Kentucky.  

“You can get used to hanging, if you have to,” my Father would say so often, but I could not fathom the generations of pain that lay buried behind those words.  My Father never spoke of Danny.

Even during the “make love, not war,” era when I came of age, the ethos still, voiced by every male authority figure – coaches, Priests and teachers – was “no pain, no gain!  Play through the pain!”  My generation’s masculinity was forged in a cauldron not so very different from my Father; among alpha Boomers, dominance seems on steroids these days.  

For countless generations a set of unwritten, unspoken rules have largely defined masculinity, with the emphasis upon toughness, stoicism and emotional suppression.  Referred to as the “Boy Code” its core tenets are:

• The Sturdy Oak: be not vulnerable and project strength
• Give ‘em Hell: aggressive, competitive risk taking is the key to success
• The Big Wheel: the alpha male, driven to dominate, and achieve status and power
• No Sissy Stuff: thou shalt not show emotion, nor any feminine traits
• The Cowboy: self-reliance needs no help

Increasingly I am convinced that this Code, and its dominant alpha males are the dinosaurs, flailing as their “no pain, no gain” and “money is the measure of the man” ethos begins to crack, fail, and fall.  The “Copernican Moment” of multi-dimensional consciousness is coming.  

The futurist Alvin Toffler famously argued that the public educational system was designed during the Industrial Revolution, training obedient, punctual workers for assembly lines, rather than creative, independent thinkers.  The industrial model used three symbols: the bell, the authoritarian teacher, and repetitive work.  The bell taught when to begin and to end, like a factory shift.  The hierarchical top-down model of authority taught obedience, not to question authority.  Straight rows, grouped by age, rote memorization taught to the standardized test, molded children to an imposed order.  Such was my generation’s educational model.  I vividly recall in my 8th grade, the smell of mimeographed math worksheets, a teacher who smelled of whiskey endlessly passing the damp purple pages down the straight line of desks, her worksheets replacing engagement with rote repetition.  

Toffler famously said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”  As to what this “continual learning and relearning” means I turned for advice to Our Aristotle, who provides the annual assessment for my son’s homeschooling.  

Our Aristotle works on the front lines of the local public school system.  Over six years, he has worked in three different local school districts, teaching all ages from K through middle school.  He values connection, and holds the high distinction of being fired 30-minutes before the end of the school year, for refusing – at the order of an authoritarian Assistant Principal – to abandon his students on the last day, their final minutes, refusing to change classes to be mere marshall for a different class.  Our Aristotle stood his ground, and so the Assistant Principal fired him, but gained nothing.  

At his most recent position Our Aristotle was chastised for being not stern enough, not “cracking the whip,” being too playful. He values connection, empathy and relationship, but the administration wants to impose order, strict rules, shaming.  

In his first teaching position he was a “Special Needs Ed Tech,” lowest on the totem pole, which also meant closest to the front line; working daily with children on the spectrum of ADHD, ADD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder.  His mantra was:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, …to me.

He learned patience.  He taught connection.  He got on the floor and played.  He saw, and sees, the educational system as a broken and outdated model, teaching to the test, to metrics designed by accountants and economists, to inculcate ever-increasing efficiency from the next generation of worker bees; pliant cogs in the industrial machine.  

His approach is relational, emotional, about belonging, to which he explains, “…students will not care about things unless they seem relevant to their lives. Like learning about probability via poker or … about elements of the periodic table alongside welding.  School should provide opportunities for students to see how their learning applies to their reality, and it can also be used to connect students with their communities. That’s impossible when they feel that school itself is alien to their lives, and it feels alien because they have to learn about concepts and ideas in a vacuum in order to score well on assessments. All that knowledge goes out the window post test since it isn’t grounded in anything real.”

Our Aristotle’s approach is grounded, historically, in the writings of Lev Vygotsky, from the 1930s, whose sociocultural theory emphasized the role of social interaction and culture in learning.  Vygotsky taught that the “More Knowledgeable Other” guides the learner forward, along their path.  The role of the Other is to observe and find the optimal spot where the young student can proceed independently, while receiving guidance and encouragement from the avuncular Other.  Not an authoritarian dominant master, but one offering encouragement, a sense of belonging; agency in a cooperative affirming way.  

In terms of my family, Great Uncle Danny – stabbed as he slept on the black rocks of Iwo Jima – was the “More Knowledgeable Other” shaping my Father’s childhood. 

The old guard of stoic accountability and testing continues to hold sway.  Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education when the No Child Left Behind Act was signed, advocates to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” 

“The Nation’s Report Card” shows that 8th-grade reading scores on national assessments are currently at their lowest point since 1990.  But metrics of failing accountability are vastly different from a student flourishing.  Danny was there for my Father, but many children today – boys especially – lack the “More Knowledgeable Other.”  

The Center for Disease Control data shows that 40 percent of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.  One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. 23% of students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, far above the pre-pandemic rate of 15%.  The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Zoomers believe political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of Boomers. 

Science and history support the fact that life and learning are cooperative.  Suzanne Simard is the groundbreaking forestry scientist whose Mother Tree Project teaches forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just Darwinian collections of individual trees.  Yuval Noah Harari is a historian trained at Oxford University, whose books have sold forty-five million copies in sixty-five languages.  His core thesis is simply that cooperation is the key to human societies; our ability to create collective stories is unique among animals thereby guiding diverse humans to cooperate flexibly.  

When compassion becomes key, then “spare the rod and spoil the child” will no longer pertain.  The change from the “Cowboy Big Wheel” to a cooperative culture will be a long slow transition, its realization not preordained.  Certainly not in my lifetime, maybe not even in my son’s, but a cooperative nurturing culture is a goal worthy of pursuit.   

I am homeschooling my son.  My task is to prepare him for his future, not my past; I can be as a hinge, this moment a fulcrum, my role as “Knowledgeable Other” to provide my son with a grounded sense of belonging, in a culture when competition gives way to cooperation, to continual learning and relearning, to a shared flourishing. 

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