The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Which brings me back to my struggles in school. What was I supposed to learn? There is the obvious answer to that question—the times tables, spelling, grammar, the facts of American history—but I’m not so sure. Every year our school system turns out straight-A students who have taken the same foreign language for years and yet can barely communicate with native speakers of that language. And that is because they do not study the language to speak it. Instead, they study the portion of the language that is most amenable to flashcards and pop quizzes: conjugations, vocabulary, declensions. This amenable portion of knowledge has great value, but removed from everyday life, it’s just theory. Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool. Why do we teach our students this way? I return to the idea that seeing the world clearly allows for clearer action. I taught “The Really Big One” for its craft because it does a hard and necessary thing: It fuses beauty and politics in a way that clarifies our view and clarifies our action. Now that I can see the full scale of this disaster and the terror that will inevitably ensue, and now that I understand this as the eventual fate of a large swath of the western coast of my country, it is natural that I also now ask what our government is doing about it.