I am just the substitute

“You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.”
--The Brothers Karamazov

Maybe the school day is already too long. So much wasted time, husbanding resources of focus and keeping protected the inner life, the still-growing identity that can’t be shown all the time to just anyone and is liable to be jostled, to overcompensate, to be spooked by glimpses of its own grandeur. Afraid of not living up to it, not finding it again, maybe, kids prefer to conspire for mediocrity, to find excuses.

If kids realized that school is open—that they need not be there if they don’t want to learn, or if for what they want to know about they can learn it better someplace else—would any still come? What would classes look like then? (But it takes a long time to learn just how wide open is life, and it's easy to unlearn.)

The old admonitions uphold less and less. Whether because there’s any less correlation in reality between hard work in school and a good job post-graduation than there ever was, or because it has become more acceptable to question the way of life that holds up hard work and good jobs as its chief end—at any rate the kids can’t be forced to do this work that seems to have little or no bearing on their life, and they have every right to act like it.

‘Did your parents ever read to you when you were little?'

'No.'

'Really?'

'No, we don’t do that, that’s something other people do, not us.’

And then I should have read to them. In the other class where the kid was ‘in the bathroom’ an awful long time, then when he did come back let go some evidently pestilential farts, sending everyone scattering and laughing, all appearance of decorum abandoned, I said something like,

‘What would happen if every time someone farted everyone dropped what they were doing and ran off laughing, acting like this? Nothing would ever get done, people could hardly have a serious conversation, or plan an event. It would be so much worse than terrorism, so much more disruptive, and anyone could be responsible, your own body could betray you. In fact, that’s probably how the dinosaurs went extinct, they kept farting and laughing so much that they ended up never going out to get food or doing any of their dinosaurly chores, (or evolving for that matter), and finally their world collapsed and they all starved.'

'No, that didn’t happen to the dinosaurs!' said a girl, catching on I wasn’t actually mad at them.

'Yep. Look, what I’m saying is there’s a time to have fun and there’s a time to do work,’ and that’s what school is now, a time to do work so boring it is rent asunder all the time by bursts of mindless fun or destructiveness. But so,

‘Is there anyplace you wouldn’t act like this? A place you respect?'

'Church.’ Then again, school shouldn’t be too much like that. Nobody said the library, that place that should seem magical in reality before it reduces to being so merely metaphorically. Now it’s mostly computers in there taking up all the space, pressing the books back even more than ever into the corners and obscurity. Still a place the homeless can go, but they shouldn’t have to. No one should be homeless or jobless who doesn’t want to be (can’t forget, though, that that threat or pressure to conform by the possible loss of these things, homes, jobs, could be seen, from a certain perspective, as the invitation to a great freedom. A great, smelly freedom).

Talks with teachers, and with students

An oral history proposal, a project preliminary to and in conjunction with drumming up support for a new school. Getting in touch with some recent high school and college graduates, talking about crazy stuff they’ve done—me, I’d never do much but read at school, which I know now is hardly typical, so what did they do, and how do they feel about it looking back? How would they change it for their little brothers and sisters? Also talking to teachers, hearing about how they imagined the job before they started, how they could imagine improving it now that they know; and about their own schoolday memories, how nostalgia is tempered by dealing with kids every day, and vice versa.

Imagining, perhaps, a school where all the teachers being old friends, they rely on a different kind of tenure, a different kind of union, a less contrived community, trusting in results without hierarchy. A school where the kids notice things, and can be trusted to ask questions. Where they'll learn to want to learn, for the enjoyment of understanding more than they did before. (It might sound elsewhere like this new school is something for Gifted or otherwise Above Grade Level students—it's for anyone who wants to be there.)

But this, again, is exactly the sort of moonshine I'm always spouting, going traipsing around the trackless places of my own voice. It's this that talking to real teachers and students will help keep me clear of, while bringing the new school closer to reality.

Pat suggested doing a film documentary with it. Maybe later, but first I'll want just audio, Studs Terkel style. Call it, like we've said, To learn to want to learn.

The example of the boy from Havana

But you have to love the unpredictability of human hypothesis, the resilience of a free mind defying imposed guidance for its own good. Talking about Waiting for Snow in Havana. The kid immured in that mean religious education and exiled to America growing up to write such a book, working hotels and factories through high school, learning English beyond fluency, and remembering or imaginatively recreating so much—the pastry man, the firecrackers, the pews and the ocean.

So much, as to argue for the hope that it is not too late to start after childhood itself, so long as the extra, less tangible approaches to knowledge have their room to play out early and often—the roaming the neighborhood, going into town and to court, hearing stories, watching movies and reading comic books.

The reflective capacity, the expressive verve with which to transform this into the evidence of a self-aware life can only come after, and the steps to make it there can be covered at the very highest level quite rapidly if the will is real. And if it is not crystallized in such a beautiful way, open and shut in a book, still we’d have to suppose it is all there in the people who have not written and might never have a chance to write the testament to their truths and stories; yet they have their own ways of expressing themselves, and behind them all a life worth living. It reaches deep to the heart of this belief that we can learn to be something more than bowed heads or sycophants or cogs, that we can get there by books and discussion and thinking, and that they are connected—meaningful life and the words with which to give life meaning. Beyond subtle analysis of a text or its style or comprehension of its internal logic or even its themes, going right to the recognition of something human worth preserving there, worth dwelling on and learning from, imitating, rejecting, or somehow negotiating and adapting.

A good book is not essentially different form all that looser, livelier life—the roaming the neighborhood, the stories and jokes with friends, the whole framework of society adumbrated in our encounters with this or that stranger; it is not better or worse than any other form of expression, artistic or commonplace—but it does tend to raise all the rest to our explicit attention, to achieve some perspective on it, and to begin to make connections.

In this aspect of patterns, connections, allusions and relations Eire is ingenious, full of poetic coincidence with an attuned spiritual expertise brought to bear. He deploys simultaneous irony and innocence, pulling the reader along to those very concrete details from which the elaborate semantic constructions first spring. In the narrative, these details and their extrapolations form circles of meaning, waves of meaning that we have to at last permit ourselves to drift in, weightless as he says, in that aching, laughing, burning and disinterested, above all honest immersion and suspension in paradox, mystery, unjust and right, the world and God, a space suffused with light and lingering by the abyss—that space at the end of a chapter’s last page. The incredible evocations of the smells, sights, sounds of the beach, the park, the houses of the privileged and the wretched poor, ring out and are converted in this brilliant play of hindsight thought and literary artistry, and in lieu of anything more than associative motifs arranged from them, they are allowed to end up once more the ocean, the light, the street, the thing in itself, as far as that is possible. Simultaneity, that’s the effect of great poetic work, reflection and immersion, thought and feeling, all referring to action and experience anterior to them, made still more immediate when shared vicariously, along with a whole set of totally unexpected and free association which we as individual readers bring to the text, and yet never quite capturing, either, all that their author had in mind, all the real thing.

But the dream of education is that we approach that reality, that we share and receive enough of it as to enrich our own experience. And this can be done quietly, I hope, and in fewer words and shorter, plainer ones than these. Just trusting in that beauty, that aesthetic experience first of all, and becoming unashamed of the freedom to do everything, and to choose sometime to read and write, and to know when the time is ripe for each thing—that’s the tall order, and yet the simplest thing of all, if we institute a new school.

If there can be said to be an end beyond the learning itself—really it is more like the same thing seen in another setting—then it would be peace. Do you see how this is the corollary? Through learning, a tending toward peace; through understanding, forgiveness; through creative activity, the sublimation of violence; through the courageous opposition to ignorance, the cultivation of those able to question its most terrible outgrowths, and to nip them in the bud?

I talk too much. Read Waiting for Snow in Havana, and those other books I've listed in the column to the right.