Boyhood
Almost no memories remain to me of the
many Texas schoolrooms and teachers--oddly, I do remember the sometimes
melancholy walks to school, especially the encounters with
bullies. Sometimes I can recall a playground, but so soon as I came inside my mind must
have drifted. My grades were acceptable,
and I surely must have learned a little something. Alone much of
the time, I may have had an active imagination. I certainly was
willing to tell pretty tall tales about myself. I discovered that
what I could induce others to
believe could condition my own
reality. I think this may not be uncommon. As
an individual, one can hope to outgrow it. But the proclivity is
so
characteristic of our species that it shapes entire societies and may
be recognized only by outsiders, or in
retrospect, because even the most horrid liars have to be firm
believers in what they represent. In my own case I think few
people believed me, and my lies did not go very far.
The war brought aircraft manufacture to Texas,
and my father joined others in opening a trade school in Houston.
My mother kept books for him, and the family's financial situation
improved. Still, I did insist on taking a paper route when I was
eleven. I remember the horror of awakening to the alarm clock at
3:00 A.M., and I have grateful recollection of an older boy, Billy
Gupton, with whom I folded papers in the dark pre-dawns. He would
hold down the front of my bike on Sundays, when the papers on the back
had too much leverage for me to mount it alone. I could bike very
fast and throw the papers with joyful accuracy--I can still behold the
graceful forward arc of their trajectory. At last in Houston I
spent two years in one grade school, and another two at the
junior high there, but still my recollection remains empty. My
sister also began school in Houston. A lithe and graceful girl,
she became an accomplished dancer. She had a lot of friends and one of
them, a pretty little girl from her dance or piano class, did take a
shine to me.
The end of the war brought good times even for
the farmers. My father bought into the Ford tractor dealership in
Texarkana, and the family moved into my mother's home place, a few
miles south in Arkansas. I attended high school in Texarkana,
Texas, conveniently located just across the street from the tractor
dealership. My only memory of that institution are incidents in
ROTC (the military program), where I performed very poorly. I
respected the obese English teacher, Mrs. Crane, but was a little
shocked one time when she corrected my language. High-school
students are said to be characteristically gregarious, enjoying group
experiences like pep rallies, even cliques, team boostership, and so
on. I experienced none of that. I must have acquired a
certain centrifugal character, and lent a willing ear to contrarian
views. I may have given the impression of being, to use the
language of that place and time, "stuck up" and "conceited," because of
my shyness. I claimed not to care what other people thought.
Since I have spent my life teaching and
thinking about teaching, I have sometimes wondered about my own
schooling, or lack of it. Now that I have grandchildren, I am
apprehensive about the schools' potential to harm young minds.
One can become learned without going to
school (as we know from many examples). Can one learn better if
shielded from the schools? The biological strategy for
passing
down successful mastery of environmental challenges is, of course,
instinct.
Instincts are evolved by whole species. The human mind evolved, on the
other hand, as an
organ
by which individuals master new experiences. It develops on unfamiliar
territory, and in devising ways to deal with new situations. How
can a
schoolroom
replicate such a process? Unfortunately, the schools are set up
to do
the opposite: to inculcate received methods. Who among us
has not found red marks on an arithmetic paper where one came up with a
solution, but neglected to "show your work"? What more effective
way could be found to arrest normal development? Spontaneity is
the mind's characteristic quality. Schools are notorious for
inventing
motivations. Instead of
allowing the young mind to cast about for its own peculiar answers,
schools inhibit
that normal drive by imposing their obligatory method, sometimes
even imposing their own beliefs, the "facts." In the schoolroom,
"science" thus ceases to denote a way of dealing with the unknown, and
becomes the repository for received opinion.
Nor dare we forget that it was the most
advanced school system in the world which fomented not merely German
patriotism toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
twentieth, but then also prepared the intellectual ground for the
popular
political movement associated with Adolf Hitler. Excellent
Japanese schools produced an even more dedicated generation. After that
catastrophe, worldwide revulsion then raised new waves of sentiment,
again fostered and mythologized by the schools, but with as yet
imponderable consequences. Not caught up in these swells, I
remained sometimes embarrassingly uninformed or worse, skeptical.
My good fortune was hunting and fishing with
Russell Jones, the husband of my mother's slightly deranged
sister. He was a livestock trader well-loved throughout Miller
County. In a day when few Arkansas farmers had the means to
transport their cattle and hogs to market, Russell dreamily wandered
the back roads in a clattering pickup truck which he was willing to
take most anywhere, even right out through the woods and down through
the swampy bayou and river bottoms. He was a devoted fisherman
(mostly crappie and cat), a raucous story teller, a most sensitive
lover of the outdoors. It may have been from him I learned my
love of the woods, and of solitude. There is no point, you know,
in telling lies to the trees and the birds. I think Augustine
addresses his Confessions to
the dear Lord as
demonstration of his utter sincerity. Intellectuals of my day
dismiss this extended prayer as devotional reading. I think it
Augustine's way of reminding his reader that
anything we address to mankind has to be judged in the light of our
motive for saying it--but what could be the point in our lying to the
good
Lord?
When Russell's own son had been just a little
older than I was now, a falling limb had injured the boy's kidney, and
he had suffered a lingering death. Russell's love for me was a
mysterious amalgam of paternal vicariousness with an eros which Russell
would have been the last to comprehend. He taught me to dress a
squirrel or a catfish, took me to the Nashville, Ark. peach harvest
when he bought a truckload to sell in Texarkana, let me accompany him
and the Fouke men on their annual deer hunts in the Ozarks. I
naturally emulated Russell's closeness to nature and to the country
people. I was especially susceptible to his sharply accurate,
somewhat archaic English, as for example, "I reckon that boy just can't
pass a stump without setting for a spell." It was for using
"reckon" in this sense that Mrs. Crane chastened me.
I suspect I was sensitive to language. I
tried to write poetry, that is, to imitate Lord Byron, but I cannot
recall reading very much. I believe my mind was slow, and I was
probably more pensive than others my age. I was quite without
direction or goals, partly because of ignorance, but also because of my
solitude. This remains an accurate description of me right on
through high school and indeed through college, too. By the time
I was about nineteen or twenty, circumstance would determine my further
path.