On the Expectation to Fly

How much harm can I inflict to achieve another person’s good? How much mental and emotional injury can be done to an individual—and by extension the community that individual is a member of—to achieve an end the individual didn’t consent to?

As a teacher and parent, I’ve struggled with this question to no end. There are many moments in each role that I wish I could take back because I failed to consider the question, believing my expectations for who someone should become came from a position beyond questioning. I knew best, and I was in power.

It’s an impossible tension. When does honoring autonomy become neglecting a responsibility? When does encouragement become coercion? When does guidance become manipulation?

I’ve thought so much about this topic that my first (and so far, only) work of fiction, the philosophical fable Steven Sparrow & the Shade of a Great Tree, is an exploration of a life defined by the blind rejection of an expectation everyone believes beyond question. In this case, it’s that all sparrows learn to fly.

What if a young sparrow doesn’t want to fly? What if he doesn’t for no other reason than he’s expected to?

The above scenario sounds preposterous, but I believe many of our expectations for young people have become similarly unquestionable. How many young people struggle to become authors of their own lives because of our seemingly benevolent insistence on what their opening chapters should be? Later chapters, after all, are written in the shadow of earlier ones.

After decades teaching in compulsory schools, I’ve become quite sensitive to the related concepts of compulsion, coercion, and expectation. Maybe I’m sensitive because I have always abhorred being on their receiving end. I can admit that much of my life has been defined by my rejection of what others wanted of me, often (always?) without considering the value of what was being expected. I experienced great difficulty moving through school systems to earn the credentials necessary to do what I do, at each level calculating how little I needed to do to satisfy the requirements, my calculations costing me time and wasting energy. As a student, I never much cared for school.

In my strong desire to be the author of my becoming, I have often mistaken rejection of the expectations of others as an authentic act of creation. I have also infused compliance with too much evil. I don’t believe myself unique on either front, as many of my students share a kindred streak of youthful rebellion.

I am not dismissing the many positives of expectation. They have tremendous power, as I am sure we have all benefitted from someone else’s belief in our ability to become someone greater than we were, their belief and support integral to our becoming. But does the goodness of the expectation automatically grant the means necessary to achieve it?

It’s one thing to point to an open door, to allow another their moment of discovery, and to offer to walk alongside them as they go willingly. It’s something else to shove someone through it.

How much of what ails society is the result of unquestioned shoving?

We in schools are generous in our counting of those we get through the door, and less so in our examining of what happens on the other side to those we shoved through. I believe it’s time we pay closer attention to this group, and to the practice of shoving itself.