It Takes a Village

If we are natural born learners, why do we believe everyone must go to school? Let’s consider a brief history of school.  Where does the idea originate?

The Book of Proverbs in the Bible’s Old Testament contains admonitions that children should pay attention to their teachers, that learning is valuable and there are consequences to suffer for those who do not attend.  In Plato’s Republic, Socrates speaks at length about the power and importance of learning and about the appropriate curriculum for schooling the young. He did not think young boys should be exposed to the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The stories were too violent and showed the flaws of gods and heroes.  By profession, Confucius was a teacher.  The Analects of Confucius is the collected wisdom that Confucius imparted to the children of China’s aristocrats, including the importance and never-ending nature of learning.  All three sources are about 2500 years old, right at the early edge of recorded history. Schooling is an old idea, but it assumes many forms and varying possibilities for who could be teachers and who could be students.

Although the idea of school originates most clearly Jewish, Greek and Chinese ancient cultures, the availability of formal schooling for everyone is far more modern.  In fact, almost all aspects of modern culture pre-date common schooling – mechanical technologies, industry, commerce, politics, government and the arts developed well before schooling became widely available. So, one could argue that formal schooling for everyone is not a necessary element of civilization.

In America, it was not until the 1820’s that the need for wide spread schooling became apparent because commerce and industry needed an educated work force.  The origin of many public school systems and public colleges can be traced to the early 19^th century. Although Thomas Jefferson insisted on the value of education in a democracy, he was an old man before his own state of Virginia committed to building its first state university. Ironically, the driving force behind public education was industry and commerce, not democracy.

The early days of public schooling in America were rather awful.  The curriculum was limited both in breadth and depth; teachers were usually only a little older than their pupils; there was no such thing as teacher training or standards; culture wars were common over everything from who could attend school to the content of the curriculum. In the Philadelphia riots of 1844, churches, homes, and market places were burned and 30 people killed over whether public schools should use either the Catholic or Protestant bible. Girls and young women were either excluded from schooling or assigned to segregated schools.  In southern states it was a criminal offense to teach slaves to read or write.

The American public school took its modern form in the early 20^th century after child labor laws excluded children from being employed in factories and mines and mechanization changed the nature of agriculture. As adults were consumed by commerce and industry, there had to be a place in society for children and adolescents.  School, for better or worse, became that place and it evolved from a five or six year experience to a 13-year experience.

People like me – white Americans over 60 years old – often think of the 1950s as the golden age of American public schooling. Since women of that era were still mostly excluded from higher paying professions, there might be reason to believe that teachers back then were more capable. But, non-whites will certainly have a different memory – of underfunded schools and worn-out textbooks handed down from the white-only school system. And where were the children with significant disabilities schooled? We don’t remember them being in the public schools because they were not there.

Schooling is not a flawed idea, but its execution is flawed. Its effects are not uniformly beneficial, in part because we often ignore the natural agents and mechanisms of learning, and in part because rapid changes in culture have altered the learning environment in which children live. The availability of parents, family and community members to play a role in children’s learning have declined or, in many cases, disappeared. It does take a village to raise a child, but the saying stands in stark contrast to the reality that most children do not live in anything that resembles a village.  They live in attendance zones.  Automobiles, transit lines, patterns of work, shopping and entertainment define the real village. The concept of village now has no geographic center and school attendance zones usually serve several mutually exclusive villages.

Children do not necessarily need schools, but they do need real villages and good teachers. Good teachers could be anyone, anywhere, anytime. But modern culture has lost the capability of providing a wide range of natural teachers. Schooling has not adapted to a world in which the geographic village has disintegrated.  We live in the 21^st century, but the structure of schooling is still based on 19^th and 20^th century models that assumed the existence of coherent communities, supportive parents and the power of self-driven learners. Fixing our schools would be easy if all our children lived in nurturing communities.

Becoming Literate

I was five years old and hazardously bored watching my parents and neighbors play Canasta. My mother tore a piece of paper off the scoring pad and wrote my name in large letters – JOHNNY.  “That’s how you spell your name,” she said. “Go practice writing your name.” I traced the letters, then copied them and from that point on always knew how to spell and write my name.

In the first grade I sat in the small wooden chair in a semi-circle with a few other children.  The teacher pointed to the picture on the flip chart of Dick and Jane.  Below the picture was a word.  The teacher said, “This word is look, l-o-o-k.” She named the letters as she pointed to them. “You can remember this word because the two letters in the middle are round like the eyes we use when we look at something.”

In third grade my friend Richard was reading a book with pages full of words and no pictures.  The book was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, about the first flight of American bombers in World War II over Tokyo.  Richard showed me the few pages in the middle of the book with old black and white photos of the B-17 airplanes and bombs exploding on the city.  When he returned it to the library I checked it out and read it. 

That same year, Kelly and I snuck a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer in his mother’s kitchen.  We took them to the creek behind his house where I smoked my first cigarette. A few days later I suggested we get some of his mom’s cigarettes and go to the creek.  My friend said he couldn’t, that his mama would whip him if she caught him sneaking cigarettes again. I learned something about risk-taking and sneakiness.

Anyone can tell stories about learning – academic and intellectual skills, the behaviors and habits that connect us to our friends, mannerisms that we think are a part of becoming older, more able and more admired – how to wear our hair and our clothes, to walk and talk, to behave sexually and to play sports and music.  We learn by being taught, by imitation and by trial and error. If learning goes well, if we get enough help from our parents, friends and teachers, we learn to think ahead – not just toward tomorrow or next weekend, but further into the future, toward what we want to be and how we want to be.

Learning never stops.  Living is learning.  We may become tired, frustrated and lose confidence in ourselves as learners; but even those are learned beliefs about who and how we are.

Schools exist to promote learning. The learning promoted by school is institutionalized learning accumulated over centuries.  Though it varies slightly from place to place and time-to-time, we all know – generally – what comprises school learning.  It is academic and intellectual – reading, writing, mathematics, the natural and social sciences, the arts, plus other things depending on institutional mission and community values.  School learning is skills and concepts graduated on the premise that learning correlates to the age of the learner, thus we have grade levels based on chronological age.

In many ways, schooling is a strange idea based on faulty premises – that teachers know what to teach and how to teach it, that 20 plus children placed in a room all day with a teacher will cooperate with the teacher’s intentions, that hundreds of children or teenagers in a school will bend their collective will to the charge of a few dozen adults who intend to teach them, that all eight year-olds are enough alike that we can create a third grade curriculum that starts in September and ends in May, and that the next year, all those eight year-olds who have become nine will be ready for the fourth grade curriculum.

I have been a teacher for almost 40 years, but when I step back and shed the history and methods of schooling and consider its purposes and the premises, I am amazed that it actually works – sometimes. 

Virginia Avenue 1

Our house, built of timber cut from my great-grandfather’s farm, was planted on a wooded hill above the intersection of Virginia Avenue and South Main Street.  In a neighborhood of small homes we were perched on the crest of the hill and mostly invisible to our neighbors. Trees protected us on every side.

* * * * *

An overnight snowfall turned the world outside the house silent. No traffic on the roads. The television played in the living room. The aroma of bacon frying in Mom’s cast iron skillet filled the house. I lay with my head at the foot of the bed and watched snowflakes sifting through the trees. A small hemlock at the edge of the woods sagged, its boughs heavily laden with snow. In an oak tree, a squirrel clung to a length of twine that dangled a cob of dried corn. The squirrel spilled more kernels into the snow than he raked into his mouth. The corncob slipped from the twine and dumped the squirrel into snow. He grabbed the whole cob in his mouth and headed up the tree to a main fork, perched there and resumed gnawing at the kernels. A blue jay swooped past, but the squirrel paid it no mind.

Ten minutes later, I stood in sock feet on the floor furnace grate and slipped into my blue jeans.

 * * * * *

From the windows in our small dining room, when the trees were bare, I could see the two gravestones on the hill in the woods behind the house, only a few yards from our window.  I studied their engravings carefully. They were old, neglected and weathered.  Only two names were decipherable – Thomas Davis, who died in 1864 and Jewel Davis in 1857.  Pieces of gravestones lay scattered around the two intact stones – a family graveyard fading into the shadows of neighborhood history. The graveyard fixed my understanding of time. Thomas Davis passed during the Civil War, a hundred years before my childhood. His wife never knew that war unless her ghost haunted his house. Where did his house stand in 1864? Perhaps down in the creek bottom, now lined with houses along South Main and the little textile mill across the creek.

My father owned half the woods on the crest of the hill separating our street from the row of houses behind us.  It was only a few acres, but trees and thickets shielded us from parental supervision. We thought. On the far slope of the hill, just beyond the gravestones, a thicket of mountain laurel spread under the understory of oaks. At six years old, the thicket was our hide-away.  Betty and I crept into the tangle of limbs and found an opening where we played doctor and nurse.  I examined her and she examined me. We confirmed the differences between boys and girls. 

A few years later, Bobby, Steve and I used a piece of plywood and a cinder block to build a table inside the laurel thicket.  In a tin can we kept marbles, matches, an old knife and a deck of playing cards. We played strip poker, but no one ever removed the final piece of cotton.  Without a girl player, what was the point?

We used a wagon and a wheelbarrow to tote loads of discarded oilcans from the service station at the corner into the woods.  It took weeks, but we accumulated enough cans to build a small shed using scavenged planks to keep the lines of cans straight and level.   An old blanket made the roof.  Within days a wind blew down the shed. The phone rang in our house with a grumpy complaint about scattered oilcans in the woods behind a neighbor’s house. Bobby and I spent the next Saturday afternoon hauling the cans out of the woods to the bed of Dad’s pickup. We did not get the pleasure of riding with him to the trash dump.

Bobby and I dug a foxhole at the edge of the yard.  Dad made me fill it in.  We moved deeper into the wood and dug a deeper hole.  We were going to build a tunnel until we discovered how much a little bit of dirt weighed.

Alan showed us how to climb samplings and swing them down to the ground.  When Dad discovered all the bent trees he told us to stop bending his trees. When I was in high school I learned from Robert Frost that it was a boy’s right to subdue is father’s trees.

Over the years we used an old hatchet and a hand saw to cut down trees – one from this acre, one from that acre. There were hundreds of trees.  Who would miss a few trees? Dad did.  Quit digging holes in the ground and cutting down my trees, he said. We quit for a month or so.  Eventually, we cut and trimmed enough trees to build a lean-to shelter. Boy Scouts had to practice lashing limbs together.  We built a three-sided shelter with a sloping back, a ramp to the roof of the shelter, our lookout for fathers.

The shelter was our engineering summit. Enough is enough, said Dad.  We played games, held scout patrol meetings and camped out in the shelter until my brother turned over an oil lamp and set it afire.  The Marion Fire Department, sirens and all,  put out the fire.