Welcome friends! After raving about At the Trough, it is my immense pleasure to host author Adam Knight for an interview! If you missed my review, let’s do a quick refresher about the book before we dive into the chat. At the Trough looks at what education will look like in the 2050s America. As I read the book, I compared my education in India to what I have taught here in Canada with the future that Adam depicts so vividly in his book!
At the Trough by Adam Knight
In a future where schools have no teachers and no classrooms, Jennifer Calderon is the perfect student. Every day she watches her video modules, plays her edu games, and never misses an answer. Life is comfortable in the Plex, a mile-wide apartment building. Corporations and brand names surround her and satisfy her every want and need.
Then one day, her foul-mouthed, free-spirited, 90’s-kitsch-wearing girlfriend Melody disrupts everything. She introduces her to a cynical, burned-out former teacher, who teaches them the things no longer taught in school. Poetry. Critical thinking. Human connection.
But these lessons draw the attention of EduForce, the massive corporation with a stranglehold on education. When they show how far they are willing to go to keep their customers obedient, Jennifer has to decide what is most important to her and how much she is willing to sacrifice for it.
Content Notes include Profanity, Suicide, Abuse, Violence, being in the foster care system, and Death.
Let’s welcome Adam and learn more about the book from him!
Hi Adam! Thank you so much for taking some out for me and my readers. Since this is your first time on Armed with A Book, please tell us a bit about yourself!
Hello! It is a pleasure to be here. A little about me? I grew up in upstate New York, but I have lived in New Jersey for fifteen years now and have no plans to leave. I teach middle school Language Arts, which gives me a daily reminder of how hard it is to be a teenager. I have loved reading and writing for as long as I can remember, and I have tried to pass this love of stories to my two sons. My wife runs a craft studio. I have two cats who ignore me unless it’s time for me to open my laptop, and a dog whose nose gets her into trouble constantly (as I write this, she is recovering from being skunked…again).
What do I enjoy doing with the few minutes each week when I’m not teaching, writing, or parenting? I love running, which I’m pretty good at, and playing the bass guitar, which I am definitely not.
How did the idea for At the Trough form in your mind? Do you have any memories from the preliminary stages of the book when you hadn’t quite put anything on paper yet?
My colleagues have said to me for years “Knight, you should write a book about this!” I think they meant some sort of memoir about the shenanigans that happen while teaching. But that’s not where my imagination went. I was too angry about the direction the entire field of education was headed.
See, education is something that everyone seems to agree is broken but no one can agree how it’s broken. Are teachers too complacent? Are parents too intrusive? Are administrators too incompetent? Are students too lazy? Everyone blames someone else. This has allowed government and corporate powers to take over. In order to “solve” the educational crisis, governments implement standardized testing. Who designs the tests? Large, powerful educational companies. Who designs the instructional and practice materials to prepare for the tests? Those same companies.
As a result, teachers lost a lot of autonomy. Their role becomes more of a “test prep facilitator” than a valued expert. That’s when my imagination took over. How long would it be until teachers and schools were seen as unnecessary and expendable? If the goal (of politicians and educational companies) is to get the products— er, materials— in the hands of consumers— er, students— as efficiently as possibly, why not eliminate the middle men? And what about schools? Isn’t it awfully inefficient to build a massive building where children from all over the neighborhood gather? Why not deliver the education to them at home instead? Once I had that idea, the characters and plot began to emerge pretty quickly.
It is our pandemic situation which made my connection to this book even more solid. How has it been observing the changes in schooling over COVID after writing this book?
Honestly, it’s been spooky. The predictions I made for changes in education— students learning remotely from their homes, heavy reliance on videos, online games, and other tech-based forms of learning— essentially, the replacement of teachers— were supposed to occur over several decades. But starting in March 2020, they happened in a matter of weeks. I swear I did not start the pandemic to boost book sales!
Tell me more about the curriculum taught by EduForce in your book. As I reflected on online education during my review and my struggles with learning how to knit from youtube videos, I am also curious about the arts in the EduForce curriculum. If it existed, how was it taught?
That’s a great question. EduForce’s aim is to create a never-ending need for more materials, which is why they always expand lessons, increase requirements, and do whatever they can to ensure that people keep doing their lessons and generating ad revenue. You’re right; there are some skills that are very hard to learn by just watching a video. What EduForce does is create a facsimile of authentic learning, and that’s what students would learn. So for instance, if they took a music lesson, they would watch a video on some music theory, then play a game to test their knowledge. Performing music, making art, things like that I think would be reserved for the ultra-elites who could do whatever they want.
There is so much to the society and its values in At the Trough and you did a phenomenal joy showing the foundations and their cracks through the characters. What was the biggest challenge of writing about such a society? As a reader, I felt quite stuck and helpless at times and I can’t imagine living in that headspace, especially knowing how different our current society is.
Thank you for saying that. To me, the biggest challenge was reflecting how this education system would change thought patterns. All “learning” would just be recalling, which is the lowest level of cognition on Bloom’s Taxonomy. There is no room for analysis, evaluation, synthesis, or any other high levels of thought with EduForce.
How did I reflect this in the story? Well, Jennifer, the main character, has been raised with this style of learning. She has mastered it. As a result, all of her speech and thought in the first parts of the novel are literal and surface level.
To achieve this, when I was revising, I scrubbed every bit of metaphorical or figurative language from her words and thoughts. Even a sentence like “She was flooded with emotion” I would change to “She felt a number of emotions all at once,” because “flooded” would make no sense to her brain. Jennifer struggles mightily with poetry because poetry functions figuratively, and to her, it is nearly gibberish. It is only as she learns about poetic thought from her girlfriend, Melody, and her mentor, Charles, that she starts to express herself in creative modes.
Where do you see education going after At the Trough? The education system in At The Trough looks nothing like ours today but that is not to say that we can’t get there ever. What do you think education would look like another 50 years from 2051?
Ooh, that’s tough. On one hand, technology shifts so quickly that I don’t know if we can even imagine what it would look like in the twenty-second century. On the other hand, our current model of education has changed remarkably little in the past hundred years. We still place desks in rows and move with the bell and have a teacher at the front of the room. So maybe it wouldn’t be that different.
I suspect that the pandemic has been a long-term game-changer. Schools discovered how to utilize remote learning. Right now, students, teachers, and parents are sick of it and want things to go back to traditional classrooms. But it opened a door that won’t be shut again. I suspect that rather than abandoning remote learning, schools will strive to improve it, to create more flexible learning models. Will it look like Plex life in At The Trough? I’m not sure. But I expect there will be at least a mixture of remote and in-person options, with a lot more tailoring to individual students’ needs. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t actually think of the world of At The Trough as a dystopia, but rather, a mixture of nightmare and hopeful possibility.
Was there a particular character that you saw yourself most in?
Haha. Well, Charles is a cynical, burned- out version of where I could see myself in a few decades. When I wrote the passages from his book, The Trough, for the epigraphs to each chapter, I basically wrote an unfiltered rant of thirty pages, then tweaked it for the book. He and I aren’t identical (his personal life is in shambles, and mine supports me), but his wariness about the creeping powers of corporations and the use of advertisements is something I identify with. Also, he’s a man of fiery ideals but tepid action, and that sounds like me, too.
Are you working on a new story? Can you tell us more about your next project?
Weeeeeell, I’ll start by saying that I have two completed books for which I am seeking publication. One is a memoir about a Holocaust survivor I got to know through a former teacher. I have a strong personal connection to that work, and have fought for years to find the right home for it. The other is a cosmic horror novel about the sinking of the Titanic. I won’t give away too much, but I’ll just say that the actual cause was not an iceberg, but a black magic cult bent on world domination. I was afraid to write it because I thought it was too weird. Then I went ahead and wrote it anyway and let it be as weird as it was going to be. If there is an intersection between Titanic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft (minus the racism), this novel sits there.
I also wrote a novella set in the world of At The Trough but set a few years earlier. The main character is a construction worker who is facing the loss of his job when drones take over the industry. I took the logic I applied to education and applied it to construction. I’m still looking for a home for that.
But I still haven’t answered your question. My current project is indeed a sequel to At The Trough. It’s still in its first draft and I’m still unsure of how it will look. But I will say that it follows most of the original characters, fifteen years later. The tech and the laws have changed some, but the same troublesome forces are at work. I anticipate more adventure and relationships than in the first novel, and less angry ranting. But not too much less.
Last question, for someone who enjoyed your book, are there any books you would recommend them to read next?
I can point to a couple of classics that inspired this book. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a major influence. I borrowed from Huxley’s Brave New World the idea that a life of pure comfort and wish fulfillment, which is what Plex life touts, is actually a nightmare.
For a more contemporary recommendation, I would love for more people to read M.T. Anderson’s Feed, which hits a lot of the same notes as At The Trough with a bit more of a punk feel to it. And the writings (in books, articles, and blogs) of Diane Ravitch are thoughtful and knowledgeable examinations of the education field.
Thank you for answering my questions, Adam, and for writing At the Trough. It is brilliant!
Thank you for reading my book, and for having me here! You know, this book was born out of anger— anger at the way that education was being taken over by people who didn’t know about teaching, and who were making lots of money off of it. But now that the book finished, and people are reading it and responding to it, the book is a work of love. I hope this sequel I’m working on can live up to what I wrote.
Thank you for hanging out with Adam and me! Connect with him on his website, Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Instagram.
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