Ask the Kids How to Transform Education

"Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects."

— Paulo Freire

Since my book A Room for Learning came out, I have received numerous calls and emails from fellow educators of all kinds. I have heard from graduate students in California; students just out of college; students in college. Veteran teachers in rural South Carolina. Rookie teachers in west Texas. Kindergarten teachers in South Florida. Public school ESL teachers in the Bronx. School disciplinarians patrolling the halls and stopping fights; former eight-grade algebra teachers; teachers of English and economics in suburban high schools in Massachusetts; parents and grandparents; and librarians in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.

All of them are dying to transform education.

They have thought long and hard about education, about what works and what doesn't. They all care about what happens. They are almost all working "within" the system, or at least they have a deep understanding of the system. They are committed to children, education, their communities, and our greater society. These teachers represent, to borrow the phrase most often applied to America's soldiers, the best of our country.

I would even venture to say they these educators are making sacrifices of themselves on behalf of children. Because, without exception, these educators are doing the best work possible in a system that is inhospitable to the art of teaching.

Increasingly, to be a teacher is to be required to be a mere technician; to prepare kids for batteries of tests that, in theory at least, can measure achievement and "fitness for the workforce."

To be a teacher today is to be a pack-mule in a bureaucratic maze; to be held to strict "pacing" schedules which dictate how much time each teacher spends on a topic; to be a pawn in a corporate structure where demands are passed down from Department Chairs, Principals, School Boards, School Commissioners, Governors, and now the Federal Government.

It has come to this: President Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan has recently released Race to the Top, the "new" education "initiative," which is, more accurately, a competitive-ized money grab; each state is allocated an amount of dollars, and each school system can submit proposals aimed at proving they deserve some of that state's money.

The money is being granted primarily to those school systems which can best demonstrate, statistically, that their ideas are working. That is to say, the money is granted based on testing results and the accumulation of data. The grantors reserve the right to define the terms for which data support "success," "improvement", and "achievement." Let the race begin!

The guidelines for filling the application as posted in the Federal Register are 34 pages long. It has been estimated that it will take a school system on average 680 hours to complete a full application. The Administration's plan is simply a refinement of the current system. It is small-ball tinkering with the status-quo. It is nothing more than an inducement to encourage rats running in a metal cage to describe how that cage is working and then, if they are lucky, they may get the money to make the old cage into a golden cage.

If it were up to me the last thing I would do to improve my school would be to spend 17 working weeks filling out an application for an unknown someone in another state to read so that he or she might grant me money, with chains attached.

I have a better idea for transforming schools. Call me naive, call me radically innocent, but here it is: ask the kids. Ask them what they want their schools to be like. Then give them the autonomy to change the school. Let them set the standards. Ask the kids how they would like to feel in their schools, and then let them work toward making the school be a place where they can feel freely things that matter to them. I promise you, they will rise to the challenge. Because shaping the environment is far more interesting and meaningful than being passively shaped by it.

It means making schools into human-sized communities. Something larger than a family but smaller than a system. It means listening to the kids. It means looking them in their faces, listening to their voices, understanding their actions, laughing with them, pushing and cajoling them. It means not repressing them, but letting them be free. It means believing in them.

A student can not be known by his or her test result. More to the point, kids feel insulted and demeaned when they know their progress is being measured by a test. They are diminished and wounded—and, ultimately—their growth is retarded when they are not known as human-beings. Because no test, no matter how well intentioned, can show us the beautiful, nuanced thoughts of a student's mind; no test shows us the contours of a student's heart, or the shape of a child's dreams.

My former students, who were marvelously motivated and inspired when they were in our small middle school, tell me that high-school grinds away the "meat on their souls." My former students think that the high-school feels like a joke most of the time; the highlight, if a student is lucky, is one great teacher occasionally brightening the landscape. My former students tell me that they don't love school, because it is not their school. They tell me they don't like walking through the school-doors; that they are enduring; that they can't wait to get out. They tell me they are bored. They are bored because a system based on testing, control, repression, ever increasing homogeneity of instruction, and a balkanized curriculum is, well, boring, if not patently stupid and counteractive to authentic learning.

The school is a system, a deeply flawed one, and the kids know it. The size of the system requires that it be run like a giant business. Business and economies of scale do not foment the environment necessary for something as marvelously rare as open and free interaction between teachers and students. The system is the creation of well-meaning adults who have wrested control from the kids, because the brilliance of children is messy and wild, and there is nothing school administrators fear more than messiness and wildness. But if you kill that wildness, that questing life-spirit yearning for expression, then you kill the brilliance, and then you obliterate the child.

Transforming schools means admitting that rules, protocols, mandates, tests, bureaucracies, and a system predicated on authoritarian and corporate control is an insult to children and damages them in virtually every respect. It means admitting that if you want to change the schools, you have to change the system, a

nd that means letting the kids into the game.

It may be true that out of all the applications for the Race to the Top money that some success may be found out in the vast landscape of the schools of the land. However, a competitive education funding system modeled after corporate innovation strategies will not deeply or lastingly transform the hearts, minds, and souls of children.

Transformation in education happens between a teacher and a student. It happens when two students get to know and respect each other. It happens when the soul and personality of a teacher can enter into the classroom so that the souls of the students will emerge. It happens when teachers are given autonomy over what and how to teach. It happens when students and teachers realize that the "system" or "units" can be discarded for something more important. Transformation happens when a student has a thought or solution of his or her own and finds recognition and value in that discovery. Such transformation is subtle and impossible to measure. But it is the very heart of the educational enterprise.

A former student of mine once wrote me after she was in high school. She said that finally, in April, after a stultifying year of 10th grade, that something interesting had finally happened. Her substitute teacher had stopped the lesson he had been handed and told them about his experiences in Vietnam. And it was not that this girl was a great student of war or fascinated by history; no, she wrote ecstatically, "It was real. He was telling us about him. For a whole hour we had a real conversation."

She told me she then wrote him a page-long letter thanking him for that class.

I am sure that what he told her that day will not be part of the battery of testing that might demonstrate to a Race to the Top application assessor or funding grantor that my former student's school is closing the achievement gap. I don't know if it will prepare her for the workforce. But I would wager that the conversation she had that day will matter to her for the rest of her life.

If we want kids to love going to school, to be excited by what happens there, to believe it is a place for them, then it must me made into their place. That means letting them name it and rename it, form it and re-form it. It means clustering them into rooms where they can talk about what matters to them. It means allowing teachers the time to listen, to let conversations and ideas grow and mutate and expand. It means getting down on the "floor," as a parent might play with a small child, to understand what it means to be a child, not to only ever think of how we must make them grow up to be like us.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

...I'm gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yellow hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everybody with kind fingers

And touching each other natural as dew...

—Langston Hughes, "Day Break in Alabama"

We discussed the famous artist Allan Kaprow’s notion of “breaking the fourth wall.” Kaprow believed that the “wall” between a person looking at or “reading” a work of art and the work of art itself could be broken by involving the viewer in the work. We discussed this notion as getting to that place of writing where the feelings are so direct and true that the wall between the maker and his story dissolves. We go inside, break through the screen between how we read our thoughts, our past experiences, our fears. We go into the feeling, the time, the place the memory, the thought, and become it again, sit with it, touch it hold it, replay it. And when that happens, and the story is read, the wall between the maker and the listener also dissolves, and we (the listener) can feel ourselves living in the story ourselves. We want our work to be so full and involving that we begin to forget about artifice and separation between what we know and feel and what another knows and feels. The story, written by someone who has embodied his own feelings and thoughts, brings us into the same feelings and thoughts. We can touch their knowledge.

This happens at various points in a story. We called it the “cave of love," the sixth gear, the fifth dimension, cloud ten, and the soul groove. We hear it and feel awe it when it happens. We feel transported. We feel new knowledge opening inside us.

We discussed what should happen in a class, during, say, a project, or a discussion, or a story.

1) Lower order thinking: our base, animal needs. For the time of our learning we must forget about food, cold, comfort, territory. In order to be involved here on a daily basis, we have to learn how to put these aside.

2) Civilized Functional Thinking: to use our well-developed brains to listen, perceive, talk, write back, take notes, put things in order on paper, to ask questions, record and remember data, dates, make observations, work out problems, respond to questions.

3) Higher Order Thinking/ Meta-cognition: thinking about the data we take in. Thinking about our thinking. Reflecting on it, sifting, wondering about it, asking questions about it, extending it beyond the sphere of the classroom and into ourselves; or connecting our own thoughts with the great flow of human thought.

When kids come to NBS, we assume that they can set aside, or not focus strictly on their base needs; or, at the very least, they know how to function and take care of those base needs.

Then, the expectation in class will be that they can all do, to varying degrees, civilized functional thinking. That in class they will do the things that make them be following and listening and being activated by what happens. If a student does this, they they are “doing their work.”—getting along, fulfulling the deal, getting some skin into the game.

The higher goal, with varying ranges of intensity, is to get to the point of being able to think noble thoughts, make deep connections, attach the new information that is encountered to things beyond the matter at hand; to make larger generalizations about ourselves, humanity, or history, based on specific info encountered in class. When this happens, the learning should not stop when class stops, but should be continuing at every waking moment. One’s thought flow carries on continually, while driving in a car, while playing a game, while discussing something at dinner. When this happens the learning is growing and multiplying in a sort of individual Petri dish of thoughts, where all things keep getting reconsidered, re-combined, and new thought combinations keep emerging like a rapidly reproducing virus (a GOOD virus).

Poem read by Isabel

"Advice to a Pregnant Daughter-in-Law"

by Charles Darling

Avoid sharp things like corners, scissor points,

words and blades and cheddar cheese. Eschew

whatever's heavy, fast, and cumbersome:

meteorites, rumbly truck and stinky bus,

hockey players, falling vaults, and buffalo.

Steer clear of headlines, bank advices,

legal language, papal bulls, and grocery ads.

Every morning, listen to baroque divertimenti,

romantic operas, Hildegarde von Bingen hymns.

Evenings, read some lines from Shakespeare's comedies;

do a page of algebra; study shapes of clouds

and alchemy; make fun of your husbands feet.

Practice listening like a doe at the edge

of the earth's deep woods, but learn to disregard

most everything you hear (especially your father

and father-in-law). Learn some Indian lullabies;

speak with magic stones beneath your tongue.

Finally, I wish, avoid all tears—except

that the world and time will have their way

and weep we must. Perhaps enough is said

of grief and happiness to realize

that any child of yours will live a lifetime

utterly beguiled (as my child is)

by your bright smile, your wild and Irish laugh.

We decided that this was a great poem for us: but that the poem was wrong on one count: hockey players should NOT be avoided. We like hockey players.

WE heard a great project on the Great Migration of African American—the two main movements from 1910-1940, and then again from 1940-1970. As a set up Yared also told us about the “grandmother migration,” Harriet Tubman leading slaves to Freedom and the promised land. We learned about this later “Negro Exodus”, the movement of a people set on finding a better life, the movement away from a dystopian situation, the human need to find what is good and right, and the efforts and risk involved in looking for that. From Yared we learned about Mississippi floods, the boll-weevil, the crash of cotton industry, racism, lynchings, Muddy Waters, “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Mannish Boy,” “Sad Letter Home Blues,” unemployment, and how a huge segment of the population went looking for jobs, a better life, education, opportunity, and who also encountered difficult living situations, cramped urban tenements, whites resisting the loss of job security, and race riots.

In addition, we learned about the GREAT things that were born from this migration, such as Jazz, the blues, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the art of Jacob Lawrence, and the Harlem Rennaisance in general. Yared let us read two Langston Hughes poems, the first a very famous one, the second one not as famous.

“A Dream Deferred”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

“Daybreak in Alabama”

When I get to be a composer

I'm gonna write me some music about

Daybreak in Alabama

And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it

Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist

And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it

And the scent of pine needles

And the smell of red clay after rain

And long red necks

And poppy colored faces

And big brown arms

And the field daisy eyes

Of black and white black white black people

And I'm gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yellow hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everybody with kind fingers

And touching each other natural as dew

In that dawn of music when I

Get to be a composer

And write about daybreak

In Alabama.

This poem expresses an exquisitely beautiful vision of a world of harmony and equality. It is about the remaking of the world in the form that a just god would wish: in that dawn of music where all hands touch with kind fingers and no thing is excluded.

In addition, we discussed Education policy in the United States, No Child Left Behind, “the Race to the Top” (the current political administration educational policy); Tal’s view of it all—“No Administrator Left Standing;” the spirit of man in 1984 and Winston’s noble fight; we began writing and plotting our own play, in which we hope to figure out what the spirit of man is; Wislawa’ Szymborksa’s poem “No Title Required,” in which she asks us if we can tell what is important from what is not; and her poem, “The Joy of Writing”, in which she describes writing as “the power to preserve, the revenge of the mortal hand."

And finally, Reed read Pablo Neruda’s “Falling”, which includes these lines.

I am a naked pilgrim

traveling to the church of the sea:

I crossed the salt-encrusted stones,

I followed the discourse of rivers,

And I have felt myself joined to the bonfire

Not knowing what my destiny would be.

We don’t know yet what our destiny will be, but we are going to come close to finding out and we will do it by exercising our power to preserve with our mortal hands.

Education Revolution

Dear Tal,

I've been teaching for over forty years, in Ohio and currently in Florida. At present, I am teaching kindergarten and, respectfully, I think you are out of touch how strange things really are in today's standards based, test based climate. My children are allowed a whopping five minutes a day for recess. We have no blocks, no dress up areas, no legos, and no easels. I am constantly frustrated by what I call the annihilation of childhood. I am to maintain rigorous instruction from "bell to bell". I would like, before I no longer teach, to have some opportunity to bring children together in a way that you have done. I figure that about one in one hundred politicians and educators think like you. I know what really matters for children, I would love to find a way to do what you are doing, with young children. Is there any hope for me? Is there anyone in south Florida that wants to start something in education that is noble and personal?

Tom Tenerovich (Mr. T.)

P.S. As I read your book I alternately laughed and cried as you and your middle schoolers worked through the process of living and learning. Also, is it possible for me in Florida to both work within state law and start something like you did? I can't wait to try some things out in my classroom tomorrow.

****

Dear Mr. T,

Thank you for contacting me and for your generous words.

I have nothing but admiration for you and your life-long efforts to teach well. I also have hope in the fact that you say that "you can't wait to get in the classroom to try some new things..." That means the hope is alive, and you are doing your work nobly.

My knowledge of the system in FL is limited. But I believe that there must be someone out there trying new ways.

My suggestion: contact Jerry Mintz at "Education Revolution." He regularly visits classrooms around the country to assess what they are doing and how to help teachers like you.

here is the website,

http://www.educationrevolution.org/

It appears that there is a lot going on Tallahassee.

Keep up the good fight, my brother.

With respect, Tal

****

Tal,

I am overwhelmed that you responded so quickly and with such a good heart. Thank you for your encouragement and links to people that I can connect with to investigate my dreams and desires. I really don't want to complain anymore about standards, rigor, and incessant testing. I long for the chance to be the joy, inspire the joy, learn the joy from humble and sincere growing with children as we explore who we are and what we want to be. If it's okay, I'll let you know what happens. I'm finishing your book now and I wish the chapters never ended.

Yours, Mr. T.

And We Speak Our Names

...these recent memories of future dream/ these perhaps who have lost their shadows if/ which did not do the losing specters mime/ until out merely not nothing comes/ only one snowflake(and we speak our names

—e.e. cummings

Now is the time when we begin to write our stories. I mean, the longer autobiographical stories, pages and pages, scene upon scenes, some dialogue, some setting, some characters, all set in motion on the page, in the room, in the mind, causing, on many levels, mental transformation, creative stress and energy, sifting, digging, and ordering.

Though this is the dark time of year, and the sky is gray and we go inside, this is also when the connections between us begin to become more dense and numerous. The future dream we uttered in the beginning is far behind us; we try to lose our shadows. Or step out of them to become embodied. Two dimensions begin to rise toward three dimensions. Winter, and first merely flakes of snow? Our story ideas coming out of merely not nothing? This is how we begin to speak our names. We lose our shadows, we gain ourselves.

We do this now because we know ourselves and each other better, and because of that we can begin to write what we know into the forms of our stories. Something falls from a white-gray sky. The first snow-flake. White on white, gray on white, white on gray. Black lines on white pages, white pages piling up. If we are lucky, out of many gray days comes a day of snow and morning sunlight, a radiant story that is the Truth.

On Wednesday Eric took some of the school down into the strata of the OMYA rock quarry where the stone is 190 million years old. We move among those strata and our own. In ourselves, in history, in a pit of the earth. So I ask them: What’s the idea? No, tell me first, what’s the feeling? Where does or did the feeling live. Close your eyes, remember backwards. Go down in the strata, to where thought and actions and circumstance fused together in great heat by time and weight. What was happening there? Where do you seeyourself? On a swing set? Kneeling on the floor with Playmobil and Lego. Staring at a clock at ten minutes before three. Remembering the bones and the stones of an old field. Stacking up pinecones in a fort. A dream of birds eating grain at dusk. Ice clinking in a glass. These are the first places, where we find the seeds of ourselves waiting to be uncovered, resituated, or resurrected and given a little light. There is a lot of talking to ourselves that goes on in this, talking to ourselves and each other, a lot of looking for good answers.

The seventh graders are reading the poems of Wislawa Symborska, in the collection View With a Grain of Sand. The assignment this week was to have a conversation with a rock, mimicking Szymborska’s “Conversation with a Stone.” After class I sent them out to collect their rocks, which they kept with them during the week. The were to talk to the rock, sleep with it, carry it around, and try not to lose it. One of the kids realized the simple idea in such a seemingly silly assignment.

“I was talking to my rock last night and I realized that it was not like a conversation with a person who I can rely on to talk back to me. I realized that I had to give the answer, so it was like having a conversation with myself.”

This is what we are doing. Learning to have the right conversations with ourselves—an ongoing process that takes a lifetime to master. The conversations the seventh graders had with their rocks were filled with innocent and profound questions:

“Rock, what is the meaning of life?”

“Rock, I think we should live loving every little thing, because every little thing is beautiful.”

“Rock, You never make friends if you hide yourself away.”

“Rock, when I have time to think about all the things I hear from my friends everything starts bouncing off each other and I can’t control it. I feel like I need to shout it all and get rid of it.”

“Rock, can you impart any great knowledge to me?”

“Rock: Yes, you can hate. But what do you get out of that? Do you get a good feeling when you have found a new hate? No. But a new love? Yes.”

“You humans can’t memorize a conversation without writing it down. We rocks remember everything.”

When we begin asking questions we don’t know what the answers will be. If we know, what would the point be in asking? So we begin asking, an arduous, strange, vexing process. I don’t know how many times I have heard the words, “I don’t know what to write. What should I write? I don’t know where to go. How should I start?” Though it is difficult for them and for me, we have to try to keep ourselves at this outer edge, just a step beyond what we know, but still moving forward to new knowing. We know what we have to do, and to do it we have to learn to shut out the distractions and the clutter and the static. We have to put ourselves in a state of mental solitude so we can hear. Being willing to go into a state of mental solitude can be the most difficult thing we do, because in that self-imposed quiet we may hear things we don’t want to hear, or that make us uncomfortable, or that confuse, that are strange.

****

In the clay studio we made clay orbs, shaped vessels, spheres holding space. We also shoveled sand onto the Labyrinth paths. We made models of the earth and the layers of the earth out of paper and papier mache. All of these hands-on activities mimic what we are trying to do with our stories. Making, holding, containing, digging, turning.

We heard two fantastic projects, the first on Capitalism as a kind of Utopia/Dystopia, the second on “Utopia as Celebrity, Luxury, Advertising, and Consumerist Culture.” We heard about Charlie Chaplin and Adam Smith, Marilyn Monroe and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, Suburu ads and the tax rates of socialistcountries. We heard about the flow of capital and the flow of luxury goods, the interconnections of economy and the inter-connections of our own soul-hunger and the ways products are marketed to us. Individualism versus collectivism. What Brad Pitt gives us versus what Rumi or Thoreau gives us; Personal wealth versus healthy communities; luxury value versus sentimental value; “needs” versus needs.

These projects, back to back, gave us an enormous field on which to see our own pursuits, our own inner desires, to compare our own visions of how we should live with images of how we, as a culture, currently live—or how we are encouraged to live by our overwhelming and numerous forms of media and cultural inputs. And following that, or in the middle of all that, trying to grow up in it, we find ourselves writing our stories, which implies a very different set of needs and imperatives, none of which are completed or answered by the material of material culture. Our stories are about the things of the spirit, mind, and psyche. Our stories lead us to a very different place that the one placed before us by executive producers of consumerism. In truth, we find most of what we need in our own unique, strange and single “trufala” trees, which could be said to be our own souls, our most rooted selves, the things that grow up in us that we try to preserve.

Calder volunteered to read a Mary Oliver poem to the class on Wednesday that Sophie had chosen. But Sophie wasn’t at school so she asked Calder to read the poem, called “The Journey.”

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

If we connect Oliver’s poem to our own stories, we may see that sitting down in solitude may be the first good thing that should happen. “But little by little / as you left their voices behind,/ the stars began to burn though sheets of clouds,/ and there was a new voice/ which you slowly/ recognized as your own.” We try to find and recognize our own voices. We try to speak our names. That’s all the stories really are: the boldest, most concrete flourishing of ourselves that we can muster. The stories put us forth into the world. The stories claim territory, assert being, bring shadow into shape.

The Only Good Fight There Is

“if you’re going to try,/ go all the way./ there is no other feeling like that./ you will be alone with the gods/ and the nights will flame with/ fire./ do it, do it, do it./ do it./ all the way all the way./ you will ride life straight to/ perfect laughter, its/ the only good fight there is.”

—Charles Bukowski, “roll the dice”

On Monday Aylee presented her project on Bronson Alcott and the “Fruitlands” community. Before you laugh about a place called Fruitlands, you have to know that it was actually a pretty amazing place, situated near Boston during the height of the Transcendentalist Movement in America. The founding of Fruitlands itself is evidence of the human willingness to break away from society and try to live life in absolute accordance with one’s values; and also a demonstration of the virtues and difficulty of living in such an extreme manner.

Bronson Alcott, Lousia May’s father, has been ridiculed in time’s backward gaze. (A lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking if you ask me). Alcott was an amazingly high-principled man. First, in “The Dial,” a literary magazine central to the Transcendentalist movement, he wrote his “Orphic Sayings.” Some of us might take a cynical view of the scribblings of a religious ecstatic; on the other hand, if we are open-minded and non-judgmental, who could not be inspired by a man who said: “Love designs, thought sketches, action sculptures the work of the spirit. Love is divine, conceiving, creating, completing all things. Love is the Genius of Spirit.”

Then he started the Temple School, a radical experiment in education. He believed that his students had genius in them, and his job was to find it. Unlike other teachers of his time, he didn’t practice corporal punishment on his students; he even had students hit him when they were bad. In accordance with his values and the values of the Temple School, he admitted an African-American child into the school. When parents protested, rather than back down, he held firm; however, the school then fell apart.

From Aylee’s presentation, we saw how miserably his next experiment, Fruitlands, failed. They ran out of food and had to disband the community within seven months. However, they were going to try and, to borrow Bukowski’s words, “go all the way.”

Sometimes going all the way like that means one will be alone with the Gods, or simply desolately alone. We weren’t sure if they made it to the place where they were alone with the gods, but they did go “all way all the way.” Aylee asked us if we would have wanted to live there. Many of us said yes, it would have been a great chance to see an alternative way to live, but that living like that has drawbacks. One view held that if you go that far way from the society of which you are a part, you no longer have the input of conflicting ideas. On the other hand, going all the way to live out one's highest intentions also could mean that one has found the core of one’s deepest ideas and no longer needs the input of outer society. The question then became: do we want to live in a society, or a classroom, that is filled with conflicting ideas and opposing thoughts? Or do we want to live in a purely harmonious place where we all agree in our core beliefs and in the way we each live out our lives?

Bryn wrote: “I think I would love to be free of society and the life that I lead here. It would be a chance to live away from the world, but together with people who wanted to be free too. To try to be different and to step away from the earth for a while, to know how to live with nothing, but to try to find what is in that nothing. To find truth in the smallest, hardest things is actually what I want to find.”

On Wednesday Sarah presented her project on the life of Henry David Thoreau, who said what we have been proud to think about here this year: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” She told us about his childhood, his schooling, his teaching, and his “going to the woods to live deliberately” at Walden. We read aloud two children’s books, “Henry Builds a House” and “Henry Hikes to Fitchburg.” She sketched out his life, his ideas, his influences, the list of those he influenced, and his critics. At the end of the project she sent us outside to be Thoreau-esque, to go sit in the woods and contemplate a single small thing. Everyone scattered into the woods to contemplate what he or she could find. When we all came back in, we brought back a pinecone, a pine-cone seed, a piece of bark, a leaf with droplets of dew, a green fern leaf, a dead fern, a red berry, a pebble, a beech leaf, and, in the palm of Bryn’s hand, a seed-weed flower-pod thing. Sarah asked us: What do the small things we brought in from the woods have to do with Utopia? What does Thoreau’s life have to do with Utopia?

Each student put into words his or her understanding of what Sarah had told us and had us do. Get to bare essentials. Make small things “be what we need.” He did not think or talk about it, he did it. He believed in looking at the things he had, not what he thought he needed to get. He looked at things outside of the normal “groove. Going “away” to look a things. Look at something insignificant to see more, to see how much more can be seen in a small thing. HDT showed us how to look better. “Television” for him was nature. He took his self out of the complex world. A showed how a “room full of people crowding and talking at once is not as important as a room of two people where the words have room to bounce around to be heard.”

He made his own utopia in the woods and in his mind, and he inspired others to see and try to replicate the process. He was a patron saint of original thinking. He did not try to organize a squad to do his action, he just did it. A how-to guide for a minority to oppose the system. He found the god in little things. He left life to live. Focused on one single fragile thing. One can understand something by getting away from it or by living in the absence of it. He cold not change the way things were, but he changed the way he looked at things. Or, as Rider put in the terms of the little objects we brought in from the woods: “This pebble is not just one thing, or one color, it is many things, and many colors.”

I don’t know if Bronson Alcott or Thoreau rode life straight to perfect laughter. But we are trying to learn that there is always something else better than we could imagine. Finding it means mostly learning how to look better. Looking better, and going all the way.

Wild Men Who Sing the Sun in Flight

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When we watched “Amadeus” on Friday everyone, it seemed, was open to receiving the meaning of the story, or if not the meaning, then at least the pleasure of an exciting story well-told. In the movie we see a wild genius who appears, to Salieri at least, to have been chosen to be the voice of God. Mozart’s genius is multi-dimensional: it is bawdy, profane, tender, bold, unpredictable, relentless, disciplined, and original. His vision is open to everything. But it has at its core neither logic nor reason, but something wild and untamed and infinite, which is embedded in his own true words: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

His character is, without a doubt, that of a wild man. Earlier in the day Yared had read Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas speaks of another Wildman, the “Wildman who caught and sang the sun in flight.” The poem is an exhortation to live possessed of wildness and “blazing eyes.” In “Amadeus” Mozart lives with blazing eyes. Winston lives with blazing eyes, and they both live to know what it means to be human.

At our best, we live with blazing eyes, too, and when we do, we rise up from mediocrity to greatness. In the classroom it comes in little flashes of word or deed, moments of greatness, of profundity, as when a student can see what a fellow mate is saying: or when a fellow mate can say what another student is seeing. When we see that we build protective shells around the best things in us because we want to protect those things. When we realize that the shell is a barrier which keeps us from living and feeling. When one of us asks the question that breaks the shell another of us has built. When we break the shell ourselves and find ourselves living more fully, more able to apprehend the sights and sounds around us. When we are able to apprehend the nature of the world we live in, the corresponding rise in our feelings of love for the world.

These moments happen in the course of a morning, when the lights are still off, before the dust has risen. Or while discussing the sound of the thrush in 1984. Or creating a metaphor to describe Annie John’s metaphor of the black ball covered in cobwebs deep in her center. Or when Yared leaps from his chair to get a poem he has been carrying around for six weeks. Or when Rider tells Luke that he is proud of Luke. When Rio’s football logo comes in finally and it is an image of a sitting Buddha under a strange tree in the light of the moon; or when Aylee draws an image of the Proles fighting over a sauce-pan; or the symmetrical, wild beauty of Anneke’s mandala. Or Henry prodding his mates to work harder, commit more, and his mates rising the challenge. When Rider pushes himself to consider how much love he does has to give, and brings forth the question: is the love in me infinite; when Nathan uses the old intergoogle device to debate and write a definition of the word “love” which he shares with the class. When Cassie responds to a beautiful character sketch of her by Reed Me., with seven “points” of response; when Henry’s character sketch of Cassie, in which he says he wants to get to know more of her, is answered by Cassie’s in which she says she wants to give more of herself. When Lydia, Hannah, Bryn, and Cassie take on the challenge to be the Ninety Girl Bakers and make the school three purple cakes from scratch, with “NBS” messily written in icing patted on with the end of a plastic fork; Jesse saying that she wants to have close friendship, and she wants that others to have the same; when Luke writes a sketch about a girl whose beauty he admires; when Bryn works steadily for hours on a watercolor mandala and then decides it’s not right and starts again; when Reed Ma. uses her hands to describe the layers of thoughts and feelings inside Sophie, showing Sophie where her best thoughts lie, and Sophie can see it too, finally; when, in Anneke’s character sketch, Anna’s face lights up with understanding—at either math problem or the interactions of her classmates, or both at once; when Miles runs to help Tal set up the digital projector; When Ollie penetrates to the core of a conversation with insight that is at once wise and original; When Isabel condenses a four page sketch to one page, leaving only the feeling, reduced but clarified into intensity; when Claire knows that her feeling is not resolved so she keeps pushing late after school to get it clarified, and later her sculpture by the North Branch River is made by laying up thin panes of clear ice in front of the cave made by a large boulder; when Calder says he does not want to be friends only with one person, but with every one; when Evan remembers being able to be friends with a girl and it wasn’t strangely awkward; when Edgar sees that Tal is worn down and despairing at his task, so Edgar mimes everything he can think of to make Tal laugh; when Kiley offers Tal a mint because he is tired; when Sarah, in a fit of feverish hallucinations, pushes herself to finish reading Walden, and comes into school bubbling with ecstatic excitement because she did; or when Rose talks about Utopia, that it comes when we are able to act out our highest ideals, or, conversely, dystopia, which comes when we act without awareness of our highest ideals—and then she has everyone make Peanut-butter clay football teams. When Eric pushes and urges and gives us the time to make our greatest physical sculpture—the clubhouse of fire, earth, and wood—the bread-oven; or when Tal realizes that he only has time in his life to read 480 more books, give or take a few, and this numerical fact impels him to read more deeply, to mine with greater intensity, to savor every word. When we are all thinking that what we leave behind can be a trail of slime or of gold.

These moments all occurred in one week; this all happens in one day. All of this is what is in us, is what we are tying to bring out. It comes out in the way we arrange rocks into sculptures, or make nests out of dead ferns, in a collective sculpture down by the river; or in the way we try to hold ourselves together when 1/3 of the class is sick; or in Simon’s project on Emmett Till, where we have to learn how to look at difficult event in order to understand how the course of history changes for the good; of the hyper-delight in making 35 fantasy football teams which are really assertions of 35 personalities, organized into 5 haphazard divisions: Food, Social Tribes, Animals, Misfits, and Music (which could sort of describe our collective essential being). It happens when we realize that we do have moments where, like Winston Smith, we live in a clear glass sphere and we are touching the red coral of love; It happens when we hear a poem, understand a theorem, understand the way that heat is generated beneath the crust of the earth, and we realize that what we are doing here is a way of creating a human heat which is slowly changing us, transforming us under the surface of our days. It happens when we realize that we are making our own Golden Country, right here. It happens when we try to speak words that have the power to fork lightning, when we cry fierce tears and rave at the close of a day, or see the brightness of our deeds dancing in a barren wood. It happens when we hear our writings about each other, when we hear that John Adams, no more or less than any of us, simply wishes to do a little good.

And Where is the Sweet Harmony, Sweet Harmony?

"And as I walked on/ Through troubled times/ My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes/So where are the strong/ And who are the trusted?And where is the harmony, Sweet harmony?"

-Nick Lowe/ Elvis Costello

Last week, in connection to our reading of 1984, I brought up a story I had recently read in the Wilson Quarterly.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany the protest movement, the loose association of individuals opposed to the oppressive communist government, sometimes met in the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig.

A renowned dissident, looking back on that time and discussing the efforts resist government control, said, “It wasn’t always easy. Once a participant said to me, ‘we shouldn’t give up, because if we do there won’t be any hope at all.’”

At one point there were sometimes only ten people showing up at the Monday evening “Peace Prayers” in the cavernous St. Nicholas Church, most people staying away for fear of being black-balled or fired from a job. These were the strong, and these were the trusted, because they kept their eyes on a still-living beautiful thing—spiritual freedom and individual truth.

But people kept coming. And by 1988, attendance had grown to 600. “The church was the one space someone could express themselves,” said the dissident. We had a monopoly on freedom, physically and spiritually.”

In 1984, Winston imagines the Proles expressing their collective power to overthrow Big Brother’s government. The problem, he realizes, is that the Proles exhibit no hunger for complex intellectual considerations: the Proles' concerns revolve around gambling, football, and pints of sour beer. They do not care about politics, poetry, philosophy, or truth. Winston is alone with his thoughts, his hopes, and dreams. He has no one with whom to talk agree, share ideas, or feel his feelings. This aloneness and entrapment in the cell of his own thought, is part of the terror and tragedy of “comrades” like Winston. And it leads to his despair—that he could be in a world where no one can be trusted.

Winston then discovers an antique, a glass paper-weight, which serves no purpose, except for one thing: "It’s beautiful," he says. The shopkeeper, Mr. Charrington, replies, “It is beautiful.” Finally, for the first time, Winston has someone who can reflect to him his deepest feelings and impulses. This is the dialogue of trust. For Winston, Mr. Charrington is a kindred soul, a man with a connection to beauty and a hunger to preserve the past, and this lifts Winston to such heights of light-heartedness that he begins to hum a song and forgets to check for the thought police.

This longing for beauty, this hunger to share it, to touch it—he is looking at the world, and seeing textures than what he knew before. Before he knew the stink of cabbage, the sour smell of beer, the clogged drains. The red coral encased in the paper-weight reminds Winston of the beauty he wants but has yet to touch, the truth that absolute beauty does exist This is a great turning point in his own inner revolution and reminded us all, in our little school, of the great blessing it is to have freedom of expression and thought, to be able to move towards what we feel is beautiful in us and around us, to have a space of spiritual and physical autonomy.

But when we are angry, our vision of what is beautiful is obscured. I see this again and again: when anger, disgruntlement, or confusion, or the feelings which breed those surface feelings, are coursing through the classroom, it is difficult for us to apprehend beauty or complex ideas. We become unable to see, listen, or speak. The natural joyous agitation becomes muted and stilted, sometimes deadening.

So we always try to make the school be a place to create, or discover, or say what beauty is and express it freely. Sometimes, of course, we run into difficult strands that have to be untangled. This is our work. Being a seer means looking at the good, the bad and the ugly in ourselves, and not only what pleases or comforts. It is always complex, no matter how much we try to simplify what we do.

Thoreau said: “Will you be a student merely, or a seer?” We spent some of the week talking about how we see, what we gather in from our direct observations. We did this for character sketches, and on Thursday we did the same thing, but this time for drawings. We went out into the woods to collect some leaves and stems and then came inside to study them and then to try to draw what we saw, or felt, in the looking. We are working toward the time when we will be able to see as much in the veins of a leaf or the delicate hairs on a beech tree stem or our own thoughts as Winston sees in the coral; toward the time when we become like those who could listen to the song of a thrush and understand the volumes there filling up the branches above us. Then we will truly be seers.