7: “It’s All One Meditation” (1999)

I utilized this passage from David Smith’s essay “Children and the Gods of War” in a recent course on the ethics of teaching. The attempt was to break through crusted notions of ethics-as-rules-and-regulations, and to invoke something of the notion of ethos as the characteristic sprit of a people, a place or a community. What ensued was painful for us all—an odd shock of recognition, that very little of our school experience (university and otherwise) involved any joy or any deep recognition of the ways of things. Children had devolved into either preciousness or monstrousness, and the disciplines of the world had devolved into “fun activities for the kids.”