The education discussion tends to focus on big issues: human nature, relations between the biological unit of the family and social units like the nation, the values that ground personal and collective behaviour, the good society, the demands of citizenship. When I was a kid in the 1950s, writers like Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd ) and Edgar Z. Friedenberg (Coming of Age in America) went into schools like classical anthropologists searching for the noble savage or like anarchists who travelled Europe in the late nineteenth century, stirring up revolution whenever their train stopped long enough. Starting in the 1960s, Jonathan Kozol wrote bestsellers about US ghetto classrooms, like a war correspondent at the front. For twenty years, I worked for an alternative journal now called This Magazine, which began life as a homespun publication called This Magazine is About Schools. That was when education still engendered grand, resonant debates.
One effect of the deficit hysteria and budget slashing of the late twentieth century was to throttle discussion about public education. People with a passion for it were reduced to fighting rearguard actions to save what they could, holding bake sales so the kids would have textbooks or pencils. People who would have been happier attacking the system in order to humanize it were forced to fight for its mere existence. It has been everyone’s loss. Education is always a mess; it’s always damaging kids and others. It needs critics even more than it needs defenders.
Gideon is my only kid. He started attending private daycare at ten months. It seemed tragically early, but he thrived. There were kids of many ages and they looked after each other. Some, like Gideon, attended all day; others, after school or just for lunch. (“Graduates” dropped in sometimes because they still felt attached to the place.) For Gideon, daycare may have helped compensate for not having siblings or an accessible extended family. He formed intense friendships, many of which he’s maintained. I deduce from this that you never know what value a kid will glean from a setting. In that way education is like dating: no one knows what they really want until they get it.
Gideon went to a Montessori school for kindergarten. There, each kid works separately, on skills such as math and geography or a physical task such as pouring. The teacher deals with one student, teaching a new skill until the kid grasps it; then the kid continues alone, or aided by an older kid, until he’s mastered it; then the kid moves on to something new. For the teacher it looks exhausting. She keeps glancing around to check on others. Occasionally, a kid comes to her with a problem, and she deals with it. There is no lockstep learning, no time-limited and testing-based units of study. It is total decentralization. Kids work at their own pace, and eventually everyone covers the same skill sets. The teacher keeps track. It is collective and individual, and there are few discipline problems since there is no attempt to keep everyone on the same track. It only looks anarchic; it’s actually highly structured and task-driven. The kids respond positively, and I see little reason why this approach couldn’t be applied to public systems.
Maria Montessori designed her teaching style for slum kids in Italy a century ago, though at Gideon’s school suvs lined up at the end of a day to pick up the kids. He loved his first year there but not the second; the difference was his reaction to two different teachers. Other kids had the reverse experience with the same teachers. From this, I deduce that regardless of method, the teacher is central. I mean this as more than the pablum it sounds. I’ll return to it.
Gideon went to Clinton, our local public school, for grade one. Some of his old daycare friends were there, he wanted to join them, and there was a financial consideration, but the main point was educational. What you learn in the public system is what the world you live in is like and that you are a part of it. That’s because the public system must let everyone in. Some kids might bully you, and the school should help you cope with that. In the yard after school, a wayward kid might kill a butterfly that your class carefully raised from pupa stage — enraging parents, but the kids understand because, after all, so-and-so did it, and he’s sort of like that. Sending a kid into the public system, for those who can afford otherwise, isn’t an altruistic choice to support public education, or it shouldn’t be. I think Gideon sensed that Clinton was a “real school,” in the sense of a public institution that was a part of the larger world in which we live, and that’s why he wanted to go. He strutted through the halls in a way he hadn’t at Montessori.
But the mystery that is teaching is most striking for me at Gideon’s karate classes. I’ve sat through hundreds at Northern Karate Schools, twice a week, never bored, rapt each time trying to figure out why this teaching is so good. Gideon went briefly to another karate school that was quasi-military — lots of Sir, yes sir — but it didn’t take. Northern Karate has none of that, though it’s disciplined and highly structured. He can attend any of several classes each day of the week. Teachers vary along with the composition of each class, so his experience doesn’t depend on one teacher. Classes are brief: usually thirty minutes, and drills shift often, so attention doesn’t flag. But at bottom, it’s the teachers.
They have vastly different personalities. Dominic is stocky and ebullient, with a voice like Aaron Neville’s. Ricky Bonaparte (great name) is intense and demanding. “Ricky makes you want to work hard,” says Gideon. Vince is methodical. Claire is maternal. They were well trained in conveying specific karate techniques but, says Andrea, another teacher, they each had to work out an underlying approach for themselves. This is a kind of teaching where the teachers are taught to find their own way.
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