Boyhood
Almost no memories remain to me of the
Texas schoolrooms and teachers--oddly, I do remember the
melancholy walks to school, an occasional encounter 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 might induce others to
believe could condition my own
reality. I think this may not be an uncommon frailty. As
an individual, one can hope to outgrow it. But the proclivity is
so
characteristic of our species that it shapes entire societies.
Social deception 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. Nonetheless,
the phenomenon loomed large for me in later years, as an admirer of the
great German heritage.
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 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. 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, I 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. But I was viewing the schools
in the narrow context
of my own
development. Now that I have grandchildren, and appreciate their
schooling, I become
apprehensive of how schools may harm young minds. As we know
from many examples, one can become learned without
going to
school at all. But might children
actually
learn better if
shielded from the schools?
It is probably a mistake to
identify learning with the schools. The American historian
Bernard Bailyn deplores equating the "history of education" with the history of schools. I come back to this topic.* It does seem fair to say that
learning comes natural
with boys and girls, as with all creatures. Why not help them
along?
*when discussing
indentured servants
frontier school
Sam Houston
But where do we learn? As to what might be "natural," the
biological
strategy is
instinct. All baby lemurs know to suckle.
This important mammalian ability has been passed down
to them genetically. It is an instinct perfected by whole
species. Instinct is a near perfect strategy for transmitting
hard won mastery of new challenge--perfect, but costly. Instinct functions only through the
suffering and dying out of countless individuals, over many
generations. Natural selection is a
tedious and costly process of trial and error. Still, that is
nature's way of transmitting knowledge.
Some more recently evolved
mammals
teach their young. Teaching may engage the individual
mind, among humans anyhow. Even though "mind" may defy
definition, it clearly lends a quality that goes beyond
conditioned reflex. Mind
may itself be a product of slow, cruel genetic evolution, but in our
species it becomes a new organ for adaptation, lodged in the individual
and not across
species. But like a new species, this organ develops
and thrives on
unfamiliar
territory, by working out ways to deal with new situations.
Within
each
individual life, a mind creates new abilities in a way
reminiscent of what natural selection
does for the phylum.
If in the natural world learning is adaptation and development, then how
can a
schoolroom
replicate such a process? How might an individual mind acquire the capability to originate new
behaviors?
Schools are established for the opposite purpose: to inculcate
the proven methods. In order
to educate a large number of children for the benefit of the whole
society, schools revert to generic replicating.
Who among us
has not found red marks on an arithmetic paper where we came up with a
solution, often intuitive, but neglected to "show your
work"? How else can a
teacher check to see that the correct method
has been accepted? Yet
what more effective
way could be found to arrest mental development? Spontaneity is
the mind's characteristic quality. Learning relishes random conjecture.
Educators, on the other hand, are notorious for
devising their essential, nefarious schoolroom element: motivation. Instead of
allowing the young mind to cast about for its own peculiar answers,
indeed for its own useful questions, schools inhibit
that normal drive by imposing their obligatory method,
sometimes
even imposing their own beliefs, the "facts."
"Science" then, in the schoolroom
and lecture hall, no longer denotes a way of dealing with the unknown,
but reverts to the authority of received opinion.
"A
scientific fact" is no less than an article of dogma. Acceptance
is obligatory and is "correct," whether the fact be right or wrong.
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 mass devotion toward National Socialism. 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 own 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
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 for this reason. Intellectuals dismiss this
extended prayer of his as devotional reading, but I think it
Augustine's way of reminding his reader of his sincerity.
Anything we address to mankind will be judged in the light of our
motive for saying it, but what could be the point of 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 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 intimacy with nature and 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 sittin' 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, tried 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 the boy 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.