Never Walked In High Heels

Not long ago I sent out an email asking for help regarding a dilemma I was facing. Most people emailed me back offering suggestions or saying that they were stumped, except for one woman who was in my masters program last year. She wrote me the following:

“I can appreciate what you are going to do, but it’s only going to result in costing you more money. You’re better off quitting while you are ahead. After all, you can’t change the world, so why do damage to yourself while trying?”

I realize, of course, that no single person can change the world. Indeed it is arrogant to think otherwise. The economic philosopher F.A Hayek once wrote “Nothing has brought as much hell on earth as people trying to make it a paradise.” And indeed, my generation is particularly culpable of running around attempting to justify the action(s) of that behavior by persuading ourselves that if only this one thing was different the world would be exactly as it ought to be.

But I can save someone’s world, even if it is my own. By nature, I am not particularly a small-scale thinker. When most people in college were volunteering to teach a single school child how to read, I quickly found myself working in three different ESL classrooms. The truth is I was never very effective in any of them because I was spread out so thin

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This, I suppose, is the deity of human interaction, because to change the world simply means to change the world of one individual. Simply teaching a child how to do long division radically changes his world. And when that individual’s world has changed, he is able to press on and teach someone else the same skills which you have taught him. Thus you have greatly altered not the child’s world, but those he taught as well.

Metaphysics talks about a problem which is briefly titled “Possible Worlds”. The idea, though somewhat strange, is rather simple. In this world, my nail polish is bright red, but there are a million possible worlds out there which we may or may not be aware of in which my polish is bright green, purple, orange, or even black. Simply because we are not aware of these possible worlds in our own world does not mean that a world where I have chosen to paint my nails black, does not exist. It just means that in this world, we are not aware of it. When we take the time to touch each other’s lives, and to improve the world that we are aware of, we give each other glimpses of what better worlds, that is what possible worlds, are out there.

The family of a girlfriend of mine decided over the course of about ten years to adopt eight Russian children, all of them related in various forms. When I tell this story, particularly to people in the UK, I often get a comment that my friend’s family “over-adopted” and thus most likely spread themselves so thin that they will never be able to take care of all of those children adequately. It’s true, those children will not have as much individualized attention from their parents as an only child living under the same conditions. I was appalled when someone said “What are they trying to do, adopt all of Russia? Change the entire problem? The entire orphan problem?” No family in their right mind is ever that arrogant.

What they did try to do was change the world for eight Russian children who would otherwise be facing a bleak existence separated from their siblings in orphanages spread out across a massive country. And the parents themselves say that as much they managed to changed the world for their children. But their children have enhanced their world. That’s the way that great ideas work. Someone who improves the world of someone else in need will surely become the recipient of a changed world. And, unlike my friend who insists otherwise, perhaps will so much easier say that worlds, when looked at on an individual level, are much easier to say than we might think.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

I was in a small group this week where we were studying historical intricacies of the Bible. In many Christian circles, one is never given the opportunity to ask about what facts there are available from the resources of archeology and history which can bolster our faith on the days when all reason points to doubt. Much of the modern church seems to take the idea that we have been ‘saved by faith’ as a reason for us to keep our eyes closed the rest of our lives.

Turns out, there’s a lot of evidence I never heard about in my Sunday School education. And I can think of no reason why this would be so. Much of this evidence would help me to understand theological debates better, rather than shaking my beliefs. Why then have I never heard of these sources which can act as corroborating evidence, or translations which would help me to understand nuances in the Bible that people point to as contradictions. Why was I never even taught how the Bible was put together in the first place?

When I went away to uni, a theologian who was also a member of our congregation got wind that I was planning to take a philosophy class my first semester at school. The man begged my father to dissuade me from doing so, citing the plethora of young people who had lost what they believed in university classes. Thankfully, my father refused to take his advice. Why would any theologian, who knows what he believes to be truth, be afraid that his beliefs would not stand up to questioning?

The irony of the entire situation is, of course, that if students are never challenged in their faith, it will never grow strong enough to stand up to a debate or even an honest question. As is the case in any field, if something doesn’t stand up to questioning, what exactly is the point of fooling yourself into believing it? Challenging one’s own beliefs is like taking a hammer to the hull of a boat: you may learn where the boat is going to spring a leak… but you might learn that the entire boat was a lot stronger than you had originally thought. Either way, the boat needs to be checked over well before you send it out to sea.

So why don’t we bother looking at the common challenges raised by any of our beliefs rather than examining them fearlessly? This is one of the many places where organized religion as a whole fails miserably. Dostoyevsky argues in his The Grand Inquisitor that it is because most people are afraid of responsibility and freedom that they would rather run to a mind controlling church. To a point I think he’s correct, but there’s something more insidious than feeble going on as well. If our believes don’t have to stand up to the challenges placed before us, then everything is under control and whatever we base our world around is completely tame. The leap of faith becomes a bunny hop, and we understand the universe completely.

What we miss in that flat world which we think we understand, is the breathtaking intricacies in which faith is rooted.

“He who says it cannot be done should not be the person doing it” –Chinese Proverb

I used to think that every man wanted to see progress in the world. When I was little, I simply saw things getting continually better. Computers got better, sleeker, more responsive, we celebrated men like Martin Luther King Jr. and learned about the appalling slave trade of the South. History for me was a progressive march towards finding man’s rights and making the world more livable for all. And so I thought, this is what everyone wanted—that we all work together to make the world a better place.

A friend of mine this week told me that my dream was impossible. Just flat out no, if, ands, or buts, it was never going to happen, so I should quit trying now, impossible. And though it was the first time, coming from him, it was not the only time in my life that I had heard that something was, “impossible.”

People who say things are impossible are more often than not proven wrong. The company IBM used to say that someday there would be a market for as many as 5 computers in the world, and at the time I can see why people would think having multiple computers in one home was impossible. It’s not that I believe they were vicious; it’s just that they didn’t know any better. Can you imagine what folks said to the Wright brothers as they built their airplane or NASA for that matter? Again, ignorance and a lack of imagination are often two of the greatest things inhibiting progress.

However, I didn’t realize until recently that most people are really quite comfortable remaining ignorant and having no imagination. This is the newest disturbing fact I’ve found in my adult life. Rather than reaching beyond what they think they are capable of, people stay stuck, sometimes for perfectly good reasons like putting food in their family’s mouths, but they are stuck nonetheless and then resent others who fight to remain unstuck. Change does happen beyond the wildest dreams. If you could go back in time and tell Harriet Tubman that we would one day have an African American president, she would probably have been shocked. Or what about someone recent as Martin Luther King Jr, who made his “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 40 years before Obama received the democratic nomination at the national convention. He probably would have laughed—they both would have, and chances are they wouldn’t have believed it. My entire life, people have told me that things are “impossible,” and recently I heard it from a close friend—someone who I thought would never say that word to me. After 25 years, I would think folks would know better then to begin to tell me that something is impossible. Everything is possible, and particularly for those of us who are willing to sacrifice what it takes to reach for it. Dreams of justice and equality, honest representation, and balanced creativity for tomorrow, must always survive the inadequacies of today. Dreams worthy of coming true will always come true.

I will close by addressing the men against innovation and progress. Perhaps you are one of the people who insist on living in fear, or perhaps your horizons stop with the limitation s you see before you. Either way your world is small. And while people with small worlds have an important and practical place in society, you do not know the entirety and vastness of the universe. None of us can. How can you begin to say that something is impossible when you’ve simply never seen it and never dared to explore what it would take to achieve it? Just because it is something you have never seen does mean that it does not exist. You have chosen your world and it is compact and probably serves you well, but please let us choose ours.

Back in the classroom, Socrates was relentless towards the mind of sixteen year olds.

“Can we ever be untied? Look on a map, America is huge. Alaska, Kansas, New York all in one country. Let’s be reasonable.” Now he was doing his best to push everyone’s buttons.

I’ve been out of college a short while now and already two of my friends have needed to apply for handicap parking placards. Two years ago it was unthinkable, now they are applying for the blue placards which are permanent, rather than the temporary red ones. For someone who has found how we are all alike more interesting than how we are all different, the connection is striking. For most of us, as we age, America will be shrinking. What is different about disability rights from most civil right battles is that nobody will wake up suddenly being a different race, gender, or creed than when they went to bed. Life can change in an instant in that going for a jog one morning may be the last time we ever do it. This may be as simple as a bad knee or as traumatic as a car accident, but everyone’s body will fail him. Moreover the inaccessible America you  permit today is going to be the same one you will inherit tomorrow when your body breaks down. I’m not just advocating for my rights. I’m advocating for yours

But even the politicians, the ones who are supposed to be directly enacting the Constitution, remain blissfully unaware of how small America is on this issue. In between welfare reform and environmentalism, gay marriage debates and school vouchers, when was the last time you heard a story about disability rights on a news station? I can think of only one politician who consistently brings up the issue in her platform. Other than that, I feel like everyone else’s issues get debated in Washington except mine. Even though all men are ultimately feeble, the needs of all men are ignored.

What I learned that day in the classroom, took an additional six years to finally reach its full meaning. Like so many other things in life, you don’t realize what rights are until they are taken away. It’s as simple as someone in the grocery store insisting that I really want skim milk when I’m reaching for the two percent. Most people when they think about disability rights think of assisted care or special services. I don’t need that. I just want to get where I’m going unimpeded by a staircase, someone who thinks they know my limitations, or even an overbearing special service. Don’t give me add on’s until you’ve figured out how to fully give me my unalienable rights. This doesn’t mean I don’t have those rights yet. I still have them, America (or anywhere else I’ve lived) just hasn’t figured out how to respect them. Special care facilities, special education, even special funding is no replacement for freedom. Any revolutionary in American  history could’ve told you that. They could also tell you that sooner or later, that freedom eventually came. Even after living in the real world, I cannot give up hope that I will join them.

“I’m still waiting for an answer.” He looks at what we are all looking at… the clock. Our books are still being clutched to our chests in anticipation. “Miss Stevens, you’ve had your hand up for some time now.”

“Maybe the phrase all men expands as civil rights expands… Uh… It could’ve meant all males with property then but now it means all humans… or-or at least it should.”

“Go on.”

“It just expanded to incorporate more and more people until today, everyone is equal.”

“So the history of America-“

“The history of America is the story of the phrase ‘all men’ expanding.” He looked at me and nodded approval. The bell rang.

That’s what I said one rainy August morning when I was sixteen. It would take me years to learn the weight of what it meant.

The preceding is a narrative from Athena’s book The Perfect Sole due out this winter.

“What  kind of kooks would claim equality as a birthright? I mean the idea’s insane. Can anybody in this classroom, in 2000 give me any absolute proof that the man who wanted to wash my windshield for a buck this morning and Bill Gates have an equal chance in life? Anybody?” The teacher was already passionately walking around in circles and raising his voice. “You can’t do it, just look at the world.”

People who pass me on the street tend to see what I can’t do when really, they don’t know the half of what I can do. The idea that God made all men equal is great in theory, but hard to believe in practice, particularly at first glances of other people’s conditions. We live in a world, I came to find out later, where most people will define you by what your abilities are not, not what they are. Oddly enough, this way of defining humanity is precisely what splinters people so that we question the meaning of “all men.” By categorizing everyone so that “we are all different” there is no longer a solitary unit of mankind. If there was, nobody would question what was meant by “all men” in the first place. Thus we do not allow Jefferson’s ideal to be fully accomplished.

“I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what ‘all men’ means,” he says after a brief tangent about the Civil War. “Did the constitution change when we freed the slaves? Don’t think you are getting out of  here without answering the question. I don’t care if the bell does ring.”

I realize now, that my so called “America” ends with the first unramped sidewalk  I come across, regardless of what the law says. Certain doors, both metaphorically and physically, remain impossible to open and you can recite what lawmakers say until you are blue in the face, it doesn’t mean anything. If America is a place where people are “endowed by their creator to certain unalienable rights,” then you don’t realize how small America actually is when your are sitting in your high school U.S. History class in your wheelchair. You can’t know that, because all the same teachers see you everyday, they know you for you, meaning that there is nothing to prove, and every day you open every door, even if it means asking a janitor, in Spanish, how to unlock it. Then when you get through the graduation line and out into the public you’re shocked by how many variable friction door handles there are which, of course, you can’t hold onto, how many huge cracks there are in public sidewalks from endless cycles of ice freezing and melting, and how many oblivious people there are out there who don’t listen and can’t stand the thought of either themselves or me being independent . Outside of a classroom, American progress rarely goes in a straight line.

Jefferson’s promise was scrawled across the board in half dead dry erase marker. Circled were the words all men. Our first day back for junior year of high school, the man in a sports coat at the front wasted no time in making us think. He demanded to know,  who was classified under the term “all men?” Did that include women, minorities, every age, creed? What about the fact that when these men wrote the Constitution, they clearly didn’t mean slaves, or women, or for that matter any white male who didn’t have the good fortune to own land? I looked out of the window at the rain pelting down, as it did every August to discourage us from even wanting to be outside. Summer was, without a doubt, over.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time I realized that I was entitled to certain rights, even if society refused to grant them.

Speed ahead six years and I’m in the so called “real world”. And I have discovered that certain bus drivers refuse to let me on their buses, in public there is a very vocal, albeit small, amount of people who don’t think I’m educated enough to go shopping on my own, and I am constantly plagued by experts telling me that they know more about my life than I do. A concerned teacher is continuously calling me and insisting, not suggesting, that I move out of my newly unpacked flat on the fourteenth floor of a high rise I love and into one that’s on the ground floor for “health and safety reasons.” When I try to tell her that I couldn’t find a ground floor flat which suited my needs, she told me I “don’t know how to go about looking properly.”

At twenty three, I’m wondering how to go about declaring my independence from the people out there who can’t stand the thought of me being independent.

Being a disabled woman these day is like living in your own private American Revolution without the petticoats and bayonets. It means starting from square one and having to convince every person you meet that you are, indeed intelligent, capable of making your own decisions, and deserving of being listened to. It means finding subtle ways to display your capacities. There are numerous daily examples of this. Calling a waitress by their name on the tag alludes to the fact you can read. You bring up current events and dare to debate where disagreement is uncommon (citing your sources of course). And if you can see from the onset that a person is going to be over bearing, you avoid them at all possible costs, even at the expense of being slightly aloof.

Not that I knew any of this my first day of junior year. Sitting, listening to the bald man at the front, I thought the idea that God made all men equal was just a given to Americans, excluding the bigoted idiots of course. We had the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights marches, and every amended law in between so that America was the land of opportunity for all people. I never thought that I would be one of the ones still having to fight for Jefferson’s promise to be fulfilled.

              Missy unpacked her book bag in front of me. School hadn’t even been going on for two weeks and there were already crumpled bits of paper at the bottom of her bag, even a permission slip she had forgotten about. It was easy to see why her mom hired me as a temporary math tutor. She then pulled out her math text book, dropped it in front of me, flipped it open to the answer pages in the back, and started copying down the answers. I quickly asked her what she was doing.

              “If I don’t have the answers, how do I know if I’ve done it right?” I can’t help but smile at this honest and yet completely practical answer. Its a question I’ve wondered at often in my own life, now that I’m older. If I don’t know where I am supposed to end up, how am I ever going to get there?

              I want to look in the back of the book all the time. What flat should I move into? Will I be fortunate enough to get married? To whom? How can I make my dreams come true? Will I ever have to bare the pain of being abandoned? The list of questions keep me up at night as I see the worst possible epitaph engraved on my tombstone: Athena Stevens – reached her zenith at eighteen. Died at age ninety nine.

              I would have thought that by my age, all of my insecurities and questions would have disappeared or at least I would know how to answer them as I would an algebra problem. I thought that was the entire point of education, to learn how to solve for Z when all you have is X and Y. Problem is, once you have Z, who’s to say you wouldn’t be better of with Z+1 or Z+3? In truth, a person in real life rarely has all the variables needed to solve the equation by the time a decision is needed. You don’t know how many children you’ll end up with when you buy the three bedroom rather than the four bedroom house. You can’t know Cancer wasn’t included when she said “in sickness and in health.” And there’s never a guarantee that something better won’t come along after we’ve made a commitment… or that it will after we’ve rejected one. You can’t skip steps. All you can do is work with the variables in front of you.

              If I had all the answers from the back of some book, I would set out to complete life rather than live it. I guess I’m hoping that I would be able to save time by making all the right choices the first go round. I can’t figure out why else I’d want to do get to the last page without taking in the whole book. Maybe I see it as running into the supermarket just to buy milk. If I get in and go straight to the back, I will get home faster. Or maybe I see life like homework, if I get all the answers right the first time around, I can go outside and play sooner. Then again, being “done” with life rarely gets equated with a sunny afternoon on a swing set.

              At the end of Our Town Emily cries out, “oh World, you are too beautiful for anyone to ever notice you!” Leave it to Wilder to make us notice what we should’ve known all along. If life was about reaching some finish line as quickly and as flawlessly as possible, why do we dread death? Life is about living in the moment, and doing what that time calls upon you to do. Its about waiting to see the final product, while taking all the steps needed to get there. Because any good Algebra 1 student can tell you, you need to cover all the steps, even the counter intuitive ones, if you ever hope to understand how to do the problem correctly.

One of my best friends and I have been following a Supreme Court case which has recently completely engrossed our dinner time conversation. Last month they reached a verdict, but we still can’t let it go. A middle school-aged girl, suspected of hiding painkillers, was strip searched in front of the school nurse and another female teacher after no prescription drugs were found found in her locker. The US Supreme Court fortunately has ruled that the search was unconstitutional and went against an individual’s right to privacy. The student, and if I might say victim, in this situation is now in college and although the decision brings closure, it cannot begin to undo the damage brought on by the incident.

There’s something about being in a school setting, which forces individuals, who are otherwise quite pleasant, to come under the false assumption that there is no governing body higher than there own and nothing any parent or student can do to complain will ever have ramifications on an administrative career. The situation that invoked the Supreme Court case was of course every parent’s worst nightmare. You send your child to school to educate them in  reason and logic. You expect faculty and staff to treat your student with decency, showing them how a moral upright person is to behave in a larger society. Students are taught that they should trust their teachers, and I think the relationship with those in front of the classroom can often prove to be as important or as detrimental as a relationship with a parent. What happened was of course a breech of power, but it was so much more than that as well. What the students learned is that there is no law, and in this particular situation, that might makes right. Is a classroom full of young people where we want to call this into question? Forced to strip down to her underwear and shift her breasts to prove that there was nothing in her bra, the teachers who observed the strip search actually advocated for her to turn off her mind, her conscience, and her self-respect for their own suspicions.

What disturbs me about this case is that I know this abuse of power and manipulation of students happens on a daily basis. I have seen it happen in my own education, which is why I find the case so angering. If our teachers are responsible for educating and molding the next generation, what does it mean to teach children that there is no right to privacy and that any official can demand a strip search and must immediately be complied with? How can we ever teach that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her own body when this occurs? Such is a recipe for a rampant abuse of power particularly when brought upon a student who has no prior history of using any harmful substances. What is obvious about this situation is the fact that the faculty who administered the search were used to living in fear and thought that such mandatory complacency was perfectly acceptable. I wish more parents were involved in their children’s education to the extent of being willing to take the school administration to court when they are severely in the wrong. I am fortunate enough to have parents who were willing to do so and who taught me to do likewise. The greatest education that can be received often comes from the mistakes of the teachers who are supposed to be offering it freely. Battles with school administration are unfortunately an everyday occurrence if you are a student with a disability and critiquing though they might be, they teach you never to turn of your mind, always to question authority, and how to really be an aware individual, even if it means always being suspicious of those in charge.

In the list of the few teachers I didn’t get along with, there has been one name that has come back to my mind in recent months. He was loud, obnoxious, and arrogant, always interrupting students the second we got off course. He used to strut, yes strut, in front of a classroom full of seventeen year-olds, waiting to write the next discussion point on the board. Looking back, he was the only teacher I remember from high school who dared to grade papers in red pen. I’m sure I had more teachers like him, but this Economics teacher was fiercely Capitalist, supremely self-righteous, and made Ayn Rand look like a soccer mom. 

These days, I wish he taught kindergarden. 

Why do we insist on not teaching our children the basics of Economics? In between the Maths, Sciences, and Phonics, all the building blocks which are supposed lead to a full functioning member of society, there is no time to learn about the basic bedrock of what holds society together: money. The word problems in arithmetic class aren’t enough. “Sally sells seashells at seventy cents” only serves to teach young people the value of numbers, not the value of money. We give them no concept about how taxes work or how money stabilizes a society until they a practically full fledged members themselves, and even then the value of money is rarely discussed. In the affluent public schools we teach that charity is done by giving money away, not by acting on the problem. We teach to give to the poor without question, rather than teaching that even alms can be an investment. And in doing all this we teach that the best way to solve a problem is by throwing more money at it, rather than seeing where the money is already going.

This form of financial education only serves to create a bigger schism between classes. We divide the world into haves and have nots, keeping the latter dependent on the former. Resentment naturally becomes a two way street.

There is a common thought, I suppose, that often leads young people astray in the first place: “Let kids be kids,” we say, rightfully protecting the innocence of youth.  But there comes a point where a chick has to battle with his own strength against the reality of the shell protecting him. If you break the egg for him, the chick never develops his own strength and dies in a relatively short  time. To intentionally keep a child ignorant about the basics of life represents a grave failure as a parent.

If you think I’m overreacting, I’ll make it concrete. I recently spoke with a young woman who is currently getting her masters. She graduated from one of the top liberal arts colleges a few years ago at the top of her class. And she was horrified to learn that when she makes a deposit in the bank, the actual cash doesn’t just sit there until she is ready to take it out. She didn’t understand what it meant to be FDIC insured and had never heard of some stocks going up in a recession.

How is it this student went to some of the best schools in the world and managed to miss this information not only in Economics class but also in History, Math, Government, Art History…

We should be teaching the basic principals of saving, credit, and interest from the day children are able to understand that money exists. We should be teaching teenagers how to follow investments in a mock stock exchange competition. And nobody should be allowed to graduate high school without knowing how to do taxes, set up a long term savings account, and handle APR. Failure to do so creates a system that combines two of the most crippling elements in the world: fear and guilt. Fear, from not knowing how to handle money, and guilt from having it in the first place. 

My teacher was a man who, sadly, didn’t have many of the qualities a good teacher has. I’m sure he drove the school administration nuts. (More power to him for that!) But he understood the fact that if people didn’t appreciate and even respect the value of money from a young age, economic chaos was certain. 

As I remember this teacher’s behavior whenever a student finally conceded that he was right, I hope we don’t give him a chance to strut during this modern economic period.