Paul Copley died a few weeks ago at the age of 67. Everyone thought he would live into his nineties or longer. A scholarship athlete in college, he had remained active and fit, regularly working out, and when he could biking around Europe with his beloved wife Laurie and friends. His death was sudden, his immune system apparently compromised by arthritis medications, and a pneumonia degenerating within mere hours into a catastrophic sepsis. Because it is summer, and because his illness was so swift and his death so unexpected, it is probable that many who would have attended his memorial couldn't, or hadn't heard about it. I'm not an expert at counting crowds, but I would guess there were four or five hundred who did make it.
Paul Copley was a teacher. For more than three decades he taught history and economics and political science at Sunset High School in Beaverton, Oregon, and for nearly as long he also chaired the school's Social Studies Department. He also coached track. For the past sixteen years he also taught graduate courses at Lewis & Clark College, where after his retirement from Sunset he became cohort coordinator and subject area advisor in secondary education. Paul was a teacher and a teacher of teachers. One of the speakers at his memorial had gotten a job teaching Social Studies at Sunset through Paul's determination, and after going back east to finish graduate school, had also with Paul's help gotten a job at Lewis & Clark. As Paul's boss. She said Paul was as a father to her.
I was raised in a political family, but while we sometimes discussed policy, we mostly focused on process. We were active in many different political and policy campaigns, working to support friends and acquaintances and often simply people we respected. I discovered various books about history and politics mostly on my own. Until I met Paul. He mostly taught high school seniors, but I first enrolled in one of his courses as a sophomore. The first day of class he noted that there were some sophomores in the room, and then muttered that he hated sophomores. Wry and acerbic, Paul commanded respect through the power of his intellect, his unwavering support for those interested in learning, his occasional mocking sneer, and the ease with which it could be disarmed into a smile. Everyone had a story about Paul. School administrations drove him crazy, and he repaid them in kind. If he wasn't butting heads with someone, he wasn't happy.
Paul was part of a young generation of teachers at Sunset who had graduated from Lewis & Clark and who were injecting an enthusiastic vitality to a relatively new exurban public high school. Generations of students interested in an advanced Social Studies curriculum enrolled in the junior year classes taught by Bill Pressly and then the senior year classes taught by Paul. Friends since college, Paul and Bill were an odd pair. Bill was a dreamer, with long hair and a long beard, and he lived with his goats in the country. He liked long elaborate essays, and for students to learn to teach each other. I once spent an entire class period leading a discussion on the then somewhat radical idea of gay rights. Paul was preppie, a jock, and he demanded concision and clarity. On one midterm, he had us explain Malthus in five lines. Their different styles so perfectly complemented each other, and they eventually designed and taught classes together.
One of the first things Paul had us do that first year was to learn the map of the world. And the first thing he had us notice was that the maps used even in most classrooms were not geographically accurate. They misrepresented the sizes of land masses, the Northern Hemisphere being disproportionately large compared to the Southern Hemisphere, with tiny Europe particularly enlarged in relation to massive Africa, which was greatly reduced. A geographic lesson about the degree to which our society deemed northern nations and peoples to be more important than southern, and white people more important than black. And then Paul had us study accurate maps. He had us memorize the location of every nation on Earth. When we would later learn about the Suez Canal, or Idi Amin's Uganda, or apartheid South Africa, or the Iron Curtain, or Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, or the Chile of Allende and Pinochet, he wanted us to know without needing to look where they were. He wanted us to know that on this one planet we are all in this together.
Under Paul, I first read Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes and Adam Smith and Karl Marx. He introduced us to the works of Richard Hofstadter and Robert Heilbroner. He gave us William J. Fulbright's The Arrogance of Power, William Ryan's Blaming The Victim, and Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving. It was from Paul that I first heard the names Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It was in Paul's classroom that I first watched Hearts And Minds and Dr. Strangelove. Lines from the latter kept popping up in his lectures throughout the year. By spring, we'd heard him recite almost the entire script.
Paul taught us with numerous examples that the American media were not dispassionately reporting objective facts but were creating narratives to promote political agendas. Paul taught us that multinational conglomerates had increasing control not only over our political system but how we live our daily lives. Under Paul, we first heard about subliminal advertising and planned obsolescence and food additives and overseas sweat shops. He wanted us to expand our perspectives and to question authorities, but he also wanted us to challenge our own preconceptions and presumptions. He wanted us to recognize the degree to which often nefarious political and economic agendas formed the very basis of who we were, and the amount of conscious effort that was necessary in order to have some say as to who we would become. Almost annually, the parents of some students wanted Paul and Bill fired. They never succeeded.
Everything Paul taught had an underlying idealism at the way things could be and an underlying outrage at the way things are. And yet he was joyous and funny, he drank deeply of life, and more than anything he was effusively caring. He praised what was deserving of praise, and when he was critical he didn't need to speak a word. You knew it just by looking at him. But if he did speak a word, it would be but a quick quip, the verity of which was so obvious that it was impossible to take offense. You wanted to do right by Paul because you knew what he wanted from you was right. There is a difference between intelligence and wisdom but Paul was blessed with an elegant balance of both. And to those closest to him he was an endless source of unquestioned loyalty and love. I didn't know it until his death, because he never overtly brought it into the classroom, but Paul also was deeply religious.
My teen years were complicated and often full of pain, and after high school I never really went back to visit; my parents soon left the area and after that there never was a need. But Paul and a few of his colleagues remain with me still. Inside me. They helped me become me. It was an extraordinary group, and all the more so for their being gathered at a public high school in a middle class exurb of a small city in what was then a relatively isolated state. No one in my entire life has had a greater impact on my political thinking than did Paul. At the memorial, a former student whose own teaching career was electrified by Paul recounted the essence of who Paul was and what he tried to do. Paul once told him that through teaching we can change the world. He not only meant it, he proved it.
Paul changed the world. Paul changed the world of everyone who listened to him. He sent people out into the world to change the lives of everyone that listened to them. He taught and lived ideals and values that infuse not only political junkies such as myself, but activists and attorneys and nurses and doctors and artists and laborers and teachers and philanthropists and so many others who in their careers and free time dedicate themselves to trying to make the world a better place for all. From what often ends up being a culturally inculcated dormancy, Paul awakened people to consciousness. There was and is no going back. And only by awakening and expanding consciousness will the world's political and economic systems evolve for the better. Only by awakening and expanding consciousness will humanity evolve for the better. Paul's extended family was mostly conservative, but as one brother-in-law said, if you had lined them up liberal-to-conservative, Paul would have been first in line. Had his extended family been liberal, he still probably would have been first.
The last time I saw Paul was while working out, a year or so after I had undergone brutal treatments for cancer. He was a gym rat, and I was still just trying to regain my strength. We barely had time to talk, but I assumed there would be other times. I jokingly asked if he was still corrupting young minds. Perhaps forgetting that he had once told my brother's best friend that I had gone from smartest to smartass, he seemed momentarily thrown. "I don't think I corrupt minds," he said. But he did, and I wanted him to know. Paul Copley taught the most subversive lesson possible in this society. He taught people to think.