The Yellow Footprints and the Diploma

The Yellow Footprints and the Diploma

On formation, technology, democracy, and the meaning of graduation

It has become almost reflexive to say that education is in crisis.

Test scores dip and the crisis deepens. Graduation rates rise and the crisis shifts form. Special Education budgets expand and the crisis becomes fiscal. Technology proliferates and the crisis becomes cognitive. Political debates intensify and the crisis becomes ideological.

We seem unable to speak about public education without invoking emergency.

The language of crisis has power. It mobilizes reform and attracts attention. But it also flattens complexity. It reduces institutions to metrics. It tempts us toward dramatic solutions for problems that are structural, slow, and philosophical.

And yet, when I stood on the yellow footprints at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, I felt something entirely different from crisis. I felt clarity.

The yellow footprints are painted on the pavement where recruits first stand at attention. They are instructed not to move. They are instructed to listen. In that moment, civilians begin the transformation into Marines. The shift is not toward specialization but toward formation. Discipline, accountability, shared identity. These are not electives. They are foundational.

Boot camp is not about producing pilots or mechanics. It is about producing a basic Marine.

I left that experience asking a question that has grown more urgent with time:

What is the equivalent in public education?
What is our yellow footprint?

Graduation and Metric Drift

Graduation attainment continues to rise across the country. At the same time, standardized assessments show declines in reading and mathematics. Commentators warn of generational cognitive erosion. Some parents withdraw into homeschooling. Others advocate a return to “basics.” Legislators question the cost and legitimacy of Special Education. Technology becomes both culprit and cure.

The conclusion many draw is blunt: standards have fallen. The diploma has been inflated.

Perhaps.

But it may also be that we have lost clarity about what the diploma signifies.

Graduation measures completion of institutional requirements. Standardized assessments measure performance within specific frameworks. Neither captures the deeper question: What transformation is high school designed to produce?

When that question is unclear, every fluctuation becomes evidence of collapse.

Hannah Arendt once wrote, “The aim of education is not to make them experts but to prepare them for the task of renewing a common world.” If we cannot articulate the world we expect our graduates to renew, then no metric will stabilize public trust.

Portraits Without Architecture

In response to this uncertainty, many districts have adopted “Portrait of a Graduate” frameworks emphasizing traits such as integrity, collaboration, grit, communication, and problem-solving. These are admirable goals. They resist the reduction of schooling to test preparation and signal that character matters.

But portraits name dispositions. They do not describe intellectual architecture.

Communication is admirable, but communication of what?
Problem-solving is valuable, but grounded in what habits of reasoning?

If we do not define the intellectual scaffolding beneath these virtues, they risk becoming slogans.

A society can affirm collaboration while neglecting logic. It can praise grit while ignoring clarity of thought. It can celebrate communication while eroding grammar.

Virtue without structure becomes sentiment.

Education for Freedom

My own intellectual commitments lean toward a classical liberal arts model, not from nostalgia, but from conviction.

The purpose of education is to be educated.

Not merely trained.
Not merely credentialed.
Educated.

The Trivium—grammar, logic, rhetoric—was designed to cultivate disciplined thought. Grammar disciplined attention to language. Logic cultivated coherence and non-contradiction. Rhetoric trained persuasive clarity anchored in truth rather than manipulation.

The Quadrivium extended that formation into numerical and structural reasoning.

These were not career tracks. They were foundations for intellectual freedom.

John Dewey warned that when education becomes subordinate to narrow economic ends, “we are likely to conceive of it as a means of procuring a livelihood rather than as a means of life.” A democracy cannot afford that narrowing.

A free society requires citizens capable of reading complex arguments, evaluating evidence, understanding constitutional structure, interpreting both qualitative and quantitative claims, and recognizing rhetorical manipulation.

These are not workforce competencies. They are civic foundations.

If the diploma does not signify some version of this formation, it risks becoming procedural rather than transformational.

Technology and the Illusion of Repair

In the midst of this confusion, technology has become both scapegoat and savior.

Some argue that smartphones and laptops have hollowed out attention. That constant notification and digital fragmentation have eroded deep reading and sustained thought. The proposed remedy is simple: return to pencil and paper. Restore blue books. Assign physical texts. Remove screens.

There is wisdom here.

Nicholas Carr, in The Shallows, observed that “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Attention is not infinite. It must be cultivated.

Even the presence of a smartphone, silent and unused, can diminish cognitive capacity. The device need not ring to exert influence. It invites possibility. It fragments focus.

But returning to paper alone will not restore formation.

Marshall McLuhan warned that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Technology shapes habits, but habits are guided by purpose.

If education is unclear about what intellectual habits it seeks to cultivate, removing devices will not restore depth. It will merely change the medium of distraction.

The question is not paper versus screen.

The question is whether we are forming minds capable of sustained thought at all.

Technology magnifies confusion. It does not create it.

Formation, Participation, and Democratic Honesty

A classical ideal confronts a democratic reality: not every student will reach intellectual formation in identical form.

Special Education forces us to acknowledge variance: cognitive, neurological, and developmental. Some students, even with extraordinary support, will not independently master abstract reasoning or complex texts.

To say this is not to diminish their worth. It is to describe the world honestly.

The moral temptation in democratic systems is to blur this distinction. When outcomes diverge, institutions quietly redefine success. Graduation rates rise. Language softens. Legitimacy erodes.

Perhaps the answer is differentiation of purpose without differentiation of dignity.

For some students, education centers on intellectual formation toward independence. For others, it centers on supported participation: communication, practical reasoning, social regulation, civic belonging within assistance structures.

Inclusion cannot mean pretending that thresholds do not exist. But thresholds must not become gates that deny worth.

A democracy cannot adopt the exclusivity of the Marine Corps. It must remain universal.

But universality without clarity becomes drift.

Withdrawal and the Fracturing of the Common World

When public education loses clarity, families withdraw.

Homeschooling increases. Private alternatives expand. Charter systems grow. Parents, wary of politicization or academic dilution, seek environments that feel coherent.

I understand this instinct.

But withdrawal carries a cost.

Public education has always been more than academic training. It is one of the few remaining institutions where children from diverse backgrounds encounter one another within a shared civic structure. It is imperfect. It is often strained. But it remains a common space.

If families retreat into ideologically curated environments, the shared civic world fragments. Exposure to difference diminishes. The habits of democratic disagreement weaken.

Homeschooling is not inherently anti-democratic. Many families pursue it thoughtfully and responsibly. But the broader trend of withdrawal often signals eroding trust in shared institutions.

When trust erodes, crisis rhetoric fills the vacuum.

The question is not whether public education is flawless. It is whether we are willing to repair its clarity rather than abandon its universality.

The Practice Field

Early in my teaching career, I coached seventh-grade football. On the first day of practice, I ran my boys to exhaustion. I believed discipline was forged in strain.

Afterward, my mentor pulled me aside.

“You don’t know what they’re going to become.”

He reminded me that adolescence is not destiny. Potential unfolds unevenly. The awkward seventh grader may flourish at seventeen. The distracted sophomore may mature at twenty-five.

That lesson reshaped my teaching.

Rigor without patience becomes cruelty.
Patience without rigor becomes drift.

Education must hold both.

The Threshold That Cannot Be Repeated

I often tell my students that there are very few moments in life that can only happen once. High school graduation is one of them.

You walk across that stage once.

You can earn an equivalency later. You can build a life without the ceremony. But you cannot reclaim that threshold.

Rites of passage matter because they signal transformation.

If graduation becomes procedural, it loses gravity. If it becomes unattainable, it loses justice.

It must mark readiness, not perfection or specialization, but foundational capacity for freedom.

Immanuel Kant described enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Education prepares students for that emergence.

A diploma should signify that a young person stands at a civic threshold equipped with foundational habits of thought: capable of reading critically, reasoning coherently, communicating responsibly, and choosing deliberately.

The Marine Corps can define itself through selectivity. Public education cannot. Its legitimacy lies in universality.

But universality requires clarity.

Without clarity, we will continue oscillating between crisis and nostalgia, between blaming technology and inflating credentials, between retreat and reform.

The problem is not that too many students are graduating.

The problem is that we have not clearly said what graduation means.

Until we do, no ban on smartphones, no reform of standards, no new portrait, and no rise in metrics will restore trust.

A free society does not merely need workers.

It needs citizens.

And citizenship requires formation.

Trees (1961)

Standing before Trees, I experience first a kind of visual hush. The image is spare in palette, black branches against a pale, almost luminous sky, yet it is dense with articulation. The trunks rise vertically from the lower register, evenly spaced but not mechanically so, and then, above eye level, dissolve into a lacework of interlacing lines. The upper half of the composition becomes nearly all branch, an intricate filigree that both reveals and conceals the white ground behind it. The sky is not painted so much as it is allowed to remain. It is negative space as presence.

Martin Heidegger once wrote that “the work of art sets up a world and sets forth the earth.” In Tomioka’s print, I sense precisely this tension. The black carved lines “set up a world,” a forest, a rhythm of trunks, an architectural canopy, while the untouched white of the paper “sets forth the earth,” that which withdraws even as it grounds the image. The white sky is not empty; it is what resists capture. It is what remains uncarved. I find myself drawn to that resistance.

What arrests me most is the tension between individuality and collectivity. Each tree is distinct in trunk and primary branching, yet at a certain height the forms entangle becoming a single image. Identity gives way to network. I cannot easily trace a single branch from root to tip without losing it in the thicket of lines. The self becomes porous. In psychological terms, I am reminded of object relations theory and the idea that the self is never fully discrete but always constituted in relation. The trees, though standing apart at their bases, participate in a shared canopy that dissolves strict boundaries.

Here I hear an echo of Hegel’s insistence that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another.” Recognition is mutual; identity is relational. These trees, taken together, form something like a visual dialectic. Thesis: the solitary trunk. Antithesis: the encroaching branch of another. Synthesis: the canopy in which separation becomes interdependence. The forest is not a collection of isolated beings but a system of reciprocal acknowledgment.

The work’s medium intensifies this meditation. The woodblock print demands decisiveness. The carved line cannot be endlessly revised; it is committed, cut into the matrix. There is an austerity here that aligns with Japanese aesthetic principles such as ma, the generative power of interval. The white is not background; it is pause. It is breath. The trees stand within silence rather than upon it.

This silence recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous closing proposition in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The print does not attempt to narrate. It does not moralize. It simply presents. In that restraint, it achieves philosophical force. The image feels less like an argument and more like a clearing. What Heidegger might call a Lichtung, a space in which beings can appear. The narrow vertical opening in the sky becomes, for me, precisely such a clearing. It is tempting to read it symbolically, as transcendence, as an axis mundi, but the work resists overt allegory. The opening is restrained. The sky does not blaze; it breathes.

There is also an unmistakable existential undertone. The trees are bare. No leaves soften the network. We are placed in winter, or perhaps in an eternal late autumn. Albert Camus observed, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Tomioka’s forest embodies this paradox. The apparent barrenness reveals not lifelessness but structure. The absence of foliage exposes complexity. The winter forest is not dead; it is waiting.

In my own life, particularly as I continue to negotiate the tension of being religious but not spiritual, I often feel this stripping away. What remains when the leaves of inherited certainty fall? What is the skeleton of belief once ornament dissolves? Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.” The naked branches feel like that difficulty. They refuse easy comfort. They demand endurance. Yet they also reveal the intricate architecture that was always there beneath the lushness.

Phenomenologically, the image de-centers me. The repetition of trunks stretches laterally beyond the frame, suggesting continuation. I am not positioned as master of the scene but as participant within it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes perception as an intertwining, a “flesh” shared between seer and seen. In Tomioka’s forest, the intertwining is literalized. Branch touches branch; line answers line. I become aware of my own thoughts branching in sympathy. The work does not stand opposite me as object; it envelops me as field.

There is something quietly democratic about the composition. No single tree dominates. The rhythm is steady, almost liturgical. The vertical trunks evoke the columns of a nave; the branches form vaulting ribs overhead. Nature becomes architecture; architecture becomes sanctuary. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Yet the silence here does not terrify. It steadies. The forest’s repetition creates not dread but humility.

Historically situated in 1961, amid Cold War anxieties and accelerating technological modernity, Trees feels almost monastic in its restraint. It neither rejects modernism nor indulges spectacle. Its modernity lies in reduction: flattened depth, graphic starkness, emphasis on line as structure. Yet its sensibility is ancient. The forest as motif runs through East Asian ink traditions as meditation on impermanence. Here, impermanence is not sentimentalized; it is rendered structural.

What ultimately lingers is the sense that complexity need not be chaotic. The branches interweave without collapsing into disorder. There is hidden coherence. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously contrasted the “arborescent” model of hierarchy with the “rhizomatic” model of multiplicity. Tomioka’s forest intriguingly resists easy categorization. The trunks suggest hierarchy and rootedness; the canopy suggests network and rhizome. The image holds both logics in tension.

As I dwell with the print, I feel less compelled to decode it and more inclined to inhabit it. The trees do not ask to be solved; they ask to be seen. They invite a slowness that is increasingly rare. In that sustained looking, I become aware of my own branching questions, my own entanglements, my own desire for a clearing of white sky at the center of things.

Perhaps that is the quiet philosophical achievement of Tomioka’s Trees: it reveals that the clearing is not elsewhere. It is already within the forest. It appears not by escaping entanglement but by attending to it. The white sky is not the negation of the branches; it is their condition. And so I stand before the image, held between trunk and canopy, solitude and network, winter and promise, aware that what appears spare is in fact inexhaustibly intricate.

ART IV: Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks

ART IV: Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks

By Haki R. Madhubuti

For David  J. Steiner, artist and filmmaker, December 26, 2016

art has its own language, name, and questions,

   has clear talk, justice, and motivation.

art does not create itself,

   does not escape the daily windstorms,

   fires, gun blasts, ignorant mumblings,

   or cruel misrepresentations of the

   rulers and their gatekeepers.

artists and their art are liberated souls

forever sprinting and searching in the world.

they do not see borders, walls, or can’t do possibilities,

and when confronted with such,

they quietly and questionably,

loudly and deliberately—with

pens, paper, computers, film, cameras, paint,

canvas, phones, creative ideas, and feet—

run toward fear

without hesitation or limiting doubts,

with good and loving intentions, struggle

to move all of us into the yes community of

life-centered people

as directed by their art, conscience, and culture

while intentionally

advancing quality definitions of a

kind-based civilization and world.

A Vision of Vygotsky

Monty Python and the Holy Grail