Reduplication

I think I would like to try and get the students to write a little bit every day. It is a fine line between instilling a good habit and making a chore out of it, but I will be sure not to collect them often, never to grade them, and to encourage the students to include clippings, pictures, photos, and any other little objects that bear on what they are writing or that they just find interesting. Little scrapbooks are very appealing to me right now, they seem to be the antidote to all this vain blogging, and leafing through them later would be a great way to pass an afternoon. Didn’t they used to sit in the parlors looking through photo albums and scrapbooks back in the 19th century? That and writing letters by hand are two of the things I would revive from the past culture.

Have students write to pen pals, some abroad, some in one language, some in another, some nearby. It is an activity that persists as an exercise, writing letters, but I would breathe the life back into it. In their books students can keep the letters they receive, the notes they pass in class, stories, questions, drawings, quotes. The benefit of a paper book is that it is physical, and that it preserves things as they come; if they wanted, they could have computer scrapbooks too, whose benefit is that it may be rearranged easily, searched, linked, accessed from anywhere and never lost. It can also keep things like music and animated clips, voices, which paper cannot. So maybe both would be best, the computer not a straight transcription of the paper, but a companion. The students, after all, will have to learn computers, typing, security, and the best way to learn is not by drilling but by doing, doing something they are interested in—and life, especially one’s own, ought to be ‘infinitely interesting.’

Second nature, firsthand

Enough of that, what are some more cool things we can talk about? We could have daily lessons on botany, that’s a much too forgotten subject anymore, and one whose I absence I feel keenly. Each day we could discuss a different plant, if possible one that grows on the school property so we could go out to look at it. We could talk about its relations, varieties, properties; what animals eat it; when it grows and dies; how it has been associated in folk or classical thinking. We could have a school garden, each class could be responsible for a row; this would introduce discussions about agriculture, its history, the division of labor and rise of free trade, or at least a measure of security, with surpluses, the domestication of animals, the idea of private vs communal property or no property, the fortified city and government; about the weather and seasons, the world being round, the different climates, the layers of soil, geology, ice ages and catastrophes, evolution; and after the harvest, whole new discussions about food and medicine, cuisine, thanksgiving, rituals and religious beliefs, health and diet, fermentation and preservation, table manners.

Between the garden and the school, there is almost nothing important the students would not learn. The garden encompasses so much, and the rest may be brought up in terms of a contrast—its symbol being the wilderness, and anterior to both of them the sea, the waters. Hunting and gathering, shamanism, parallel universes, migrations, cave paintings, in-groups, speech, song, and written language, fishing, life expectancy, traditions, and as with the civilized societies, always going back to the myths, not merely describing, but telling the stories they told.

And asking questions: is it possible to go back? At what point is it impossible? Is this sin? Is this ignorance, innocence, experience, dread, what? Have you heard of the gypsies? Of the dreaming? Why would some people become monks while others were Vikings? What is the value of a material object? Of money? Of honor, or integrity? Do you ever think about death? There are so many things to talk about.

Fist stick knife parkour

Besides drawing and music, another kind of art, one that bears closely on these questions of culture and valuation, has got to find its way into the new school. It’s the martial arts, specifically the ancient Chinese forms which are commingled with Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought, but which have been popularized in the west by Hollywood, new-agey mystification and scientific skepticism.

I took karate for a couple seasons but ended up quitting because I liked soccer better. I remember a lot of stretching and a little sparring, a way too heavy punching bag that I have conflated with the piñata at Billy Ensor’s birthday party, and a talk by the Master, who only came on the occasion of changing belt colors, about the power of habits, good and bad. That isn’t really the kind of martial arts I mean, some strip mall storefront converted into a section of a gym. The kind I mean does not appeal to kung-fu movie aficionados and little boys who want to break boards, but to the same kind of bodily delight as in music and dance, and to the mind which knows health is its prerequisite. Martial arts would be excellent for schools, though, precisely because they clothe the exercise and concentration-building within that attractive mask of pugilism. As students got older they would have the basics in their muscle memory and hopefully have developed the patience to begin studying breathing and meditation.

These things greatly interest me, and I know very little about them. I would have much preferred to have done martial arts in school than to play made-up games involving bean-bags. We played actual sports surprisingly little, but they will be done on a rotation or preference basis in the new school: basketball, baseball, football, soccer, tennis, hockey where applicable, rowing ditto. We’ll do jogging to warm up and sprints and mile runs every so often, calisthenics, and gymnastics if a qualified instructor can be found. But hopefully whoever is at the school teaching philosophy will have experience with martial arts and sports both—I feel like they all go together, and the differences in the two may be traced in the philosophies of the east and the west.

Concentration and self-discipline seem inseparable, besides the benefits of concentration for intellectual work of any stripe—discipline is an area I haven’t discussed yet, but as you may guess, the whole purpose of it will be to teach self-discipline, to draw on the kids’ natural tractability by persuading them that what they are being asked to do is worthwhile. Here I perceive emerging a question as to whether I have not perhaps completely misunderstood the temperament and capability of the child who will be a student at the school. Isn’t it asking too much to suppose he can read the classics, learn a second language by immersion, think philosophically about life, and keep himself in line by reason of doing all this willingly? I honestly don’t know, but I feel like the possible benefits for him are such that it is worth trying, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.

As I’ve said before, his experience is an idealization of my own, which, put another way, means I am only treating my students as equals, having faith that we will all of us live up to the high demands of the school. I myself was far from a self-disciplined little scholar—I fully expect the younger kids to be very energetic and unfocused, or else I would be no better than the Ritalin-perscriptors. The tacit design of the new school, especially at the elementary levels, is to slowly direct those energies into an interest in something, anything, beyond the students’ own momentary pleasure or their more destructive impulses. For me this was books, but if it is art, or dance, or animals, or comedy, anything that can be pursued, rather than the opposite avenue, constantly distracting oneself from all worthwhile pursuits, then the elementary levels have succeeded, assuming the child can read, write, figure, and speak coherently, of course.

I wouldn't try to impose focus on them before they are capable of it, and certainly not at all times. I wouldn’t lecture for more than a couple minutes at a stretch without asking questions or expecting to have to coax back the stragglers, but I certainly will expect that they be able to sit still for half an hour at a stretch, working individually or listening to me explain a complicated idea. So though I see the natural waywardness of attention, I also see the interest in learning new things that will slowly bring it around, not killing it, as so much school discipline does, but capturing it for awhile.