If Holden Caulfield Were In My Classroom

 Book Review

 If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom: Inspiring Love, Creativity, and Intelligence in Middle School Kids

By Bernie Schein

Sentient Publications  (ISBN 978-1-59181-076-6)

Reviewed by Tal Birdsey

John Dewey’s great teacher George Sylvester Morris believed the essential spirit of education was “a free teacher face to face with a free student.” Bernie Schein’s book If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom: Inspiring Love, Creativity, and Intelligence in Middle School Kids demonstrates what happens when that rare occasion occurs: an impassioned master teacher, unburdened by political mandates, bureaucratic entanglement or administrative control, free to build structures of meaning relevant to his students’ lives. Schein advances the potent pedagogical belief—in opposition to Cartesian rationalism—that “emotion, not rationality, the heart and soul, not the brain, feelings rather than thought” are the keys to liberating love, creativity, and intelligence in young adolescents.

Schein received his Masters Degree in Education from Harvard in the late 1960’s. A principal and teacher in public schools in Mississippi and South Carolina and then a lead teacher at the independent Paideia School in Atlanta, Schein spent forty years in classrooms immersed in his students’ emotional, intellectual, psychological, and creative lives, working, as he writes, to discover, as his students do, that “the history of the world—the great, classical, universal themes of history and literature—is in the heart of each child.” If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom places us in a class unlike any other, with a teacher unlike any other—“a man on fire,” as Pat Conroy writes in the preface.

On the first day of school, with the students ringed around the “big room” table, Schein tells his students to open their eyes wide.  All thirty of them strain with their eyeballs bulging out of their heads. “Let them hurt. Good, Betsy,” he tells the protagonist of the book.

Much better. It hurts to see. Ultimately, however, it will bring you joy and respect, it will enrich your lives because it will enable you to see what you’ve never seen before. And because you’ll be able to see far more than anyone else your age, and be able to express what you see, it will make you smarter than you could ever imagine, smarter, for example, than them. It’ll make you the smartest kids in the world: socially, artistically, and intellectually. Just please don’t give me ‘school.’ I hate school. I’ve always hated school, ever since I was a kid. Give me your heart, your soul, and you’ll be able to give to your world anything, everything.

 We see Schein possessed by his faith in his students, demanding, urging, cajoling and inviting them to look further, to trust that they already hold the keys inside them.  From such beginnings Schein opens up a classroom dialogue bursting with creative revelation and authentic exchange, one that his students, it appears, enter willingly.

The book assiduously avoids educational jargon and academic theorizing. Schein gives the impression that he doesn’t care a wit about any theory—rather, he only cares to listen to and know the students before him.  If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom is an attempt to show what happens when a teacher continually insists there are more depths to probe, about what happens when students surrender to a teacher and a teacher surrenders to his students; about how a teacher can lead students to create meaning, wisdom, and beauty from the stuff of their own lives. “My program—art, creativity—if nothing else might serve to place feelings where they ought to be, in the natural order of things, in learning, for example, in the home, among friends, in the classroom,” Schein writes. 

Schein was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, a middle-class Jew among rednecks and racists. He describes his own education as a “drab, dreary process, largely rote and mechanical. School had nothing to do with life; intellect had nothing to do with personality; art was basically dissociative. What was important, then, was to say nothing original, meaningful, or dangerous. There was no emotion.”  As the narrative makes clear, Schein’s teaching and discourse with his students is Socratic, electric, therapeutic, radiant, ribald, tear- and laughter-filled, full of risk, tenderness, poetry, revelation, intimacy, honesty, argument and debate, and raw, surpassing creativity—everything his own education wasn’t.

In If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom Schein has composed a “class” of disguised composites of actual 7^th and 8^th graders he taught over many years in his mostly self-contained, mixed-age classroom. The book is set in 1990. Schein’s curriculum—intensive autobiographical writing, a class court system (civics), acting, literature seminars, and class counseling sessions, or “conferences”—appears at first glance to be reasonably conventional. What happens in Schein’s class—a community, we discover, of unsurpassed openness and intimacy—is anything but conventional. The most useful things his students can learn, he demonstrates, are born from their own actions, behaviors, neuroses, fears, and emotions. Every topic, conflict, feeling, gesture, reaction, motive, and idea is explored; nothing is taboo—all to serve the pursuit of answers to questions alive in his students, the same questions, incidentally, that have animated philosophers and artists throughout time: Who am I?  What do I need? What is happiness? What is beauty? What is knowledge? What power do I have and how do I use it? What is human? What is love and how do we get it?

At the center of Schein’s narrative is Betsy Robinson, her parents recently divorced, becoming increasingly distant from her father, dropping her friends, and flirting with self-destruction. When Schein asks the class how they feel about Betsy’s actions most of the class are “uncomfortable and wondering.” At school she has spread the rumor that her best friend wears a padded bra. Betsy is charged in the class-court under the class constitution—a document twenty-five years in the making by generations of Schein’s students—for the crime of slander, defined as a “false and malicious statement.” Meanwhile, one morning in literature class, Betsy’s story takes a decided step into the center of class discussion.

Finally, to make sure she captured everyone’s attention, she placed her elbows on the table, the tank top falling dangerously low, and she remained that way, as if it were nothing unusual to be sitting in class, discussing Asher’s Lev’s motivation for terminating his artistic endeavors, with one’s breasts spilling all over the table.

            “Betsy,” I said, “Your tits are sticking out.”

            “I’m not certain that has anything to do with the book we’re discussing,” she said.

            “Oh,” I said, “but it does. Always. Who can tell me how?”

Such exchanges, though initially discomfiting, show how Schein engages his students at the level that matters to them most: the personal and emotional, on the grounds of their own actions and experience.  It does not take long for Schein and the class lawyers to begin piecing together a path to the truth—through Betsy’s trial, class conferences, congressional debates in the class government, and hundreds of pages of autobiographical writing by every student.  A verdict is rendered and the trial comes to a close. But the real treasure is what Betsy discovers about herself, and what the class discovers, not only about Betsy, but themselves, the deeper truths of their relations to each other, their parents, and their place in the world.

In conventional practice teachers may primarily act as technicians, quantifiers or depositors of knowledge, asking, “What do these students need to know?” Schein aims for something more urgent and elemental: “Who is this student?” We are witness to “Bernie,” as his students called him, going to outrageous lengths to discover who his students are so they may, in turn, discover the hidden parts of themselves as they learn to see, write, work, feel and speak.  He leaps across a table to challenge one student who is lying; when another student, Ian, does “fairly good” work, Schein expels him for six weeks until Ian returns with a “skyscraper” of magnificent work. When Norman, the class-district attorney, has been caught stealing from his classmates, Schein clutches his own wallet and shouts, “Norman, I love you. I love you. Is my money safe?” When another boy, Warren, is accused of bullying and demeaning kids in the class, Schein and the students confront Warren directly. The class discovers that Warren wants to talk about it: he wants to know himself, to see better, to understand the feelings behind his actions. Schein asks if the accusations are true, then pivots:  “No, wait; you tell me first, Warren. What’s the truth? I promise, whatever it is, you’ll feel better afterwards…All I’m asking for is the truth, Warren.  I’ll believe you, whatever you tell. You won’t regret it.”

We can hear Auden’s hope hovering close by: “In the deserts of the heart,/ Let the healing fountains start.” As each student is involved in the unfolding of Betsy’s story, so too do their stories unfold—Amy, who has been sexually abused; Riley, a compulsive putdown artist; Raquel, whose father died and who is paralyzed by the feeling that his death was her fault; Pasha Zybinski, immigrated from Russia, trying to liberate his artistic power; Danny, suffering in school with Attention Deficit Disorder but whose liberation lies in his learning that he is nevertheless gifted beyond measure; Jamila Cade, an African-American girl who is not sure whether she should act “white” or “black”; and Marvin Pazol, who, Schein writes, “suffered a universal American dilemma: he had lost his authentic voice, which was too frightening and painful for him to hear. To find it, courage was required. ‘I’m afraid I’m gay,’ he told the class.”

These are not uncommon problems in schools. What is uncommon is the ferocity, faith and openness with which Schein addresses them. Through intense dialogical engagement he enacts the Freirian concept of conscientization, demanding that his students see that the ways they carry themselves, the ways they speak to each other or avoid each other are ways of making or unmaking the world.  The more honestly the students learn to be, the more fully they face what frightens them, Schein asserts, the more powerfully they discover that they can direct their lives with integrity and transform the world around them.

Schein’s humor and antic clowning are on display, but he more potently reveals himself as a teacher who by turns is gentle, open-hearted, demanding, cunning, inquisitive and loving.  He models what it means for a teacher to have the humility to be taught by his students; to trust that they know something of the great passions that animate mankind; and to believe that they can express it. He lets his students talk for pages, class discussions so heartbreakingly profound and comically brilliant that one will not recognize it as a classroom of thirteen year-olds. In class debates and creative writing discussions Schein lets his students meander, but when they begin to confuse or bore or become overly logical, he calls them back, usually, if not always, by asking them to tell him not what they think, but what they feel. Then we can imagine Holden Caulfield, and we can imagine Schein telling him to cut to the chase, demanding that Holden rewrite the description of his brother Allie’s baseball glove, rewrite it until he can see and feel what his brother’s glove truly means. When we imagine Holden, we can see all of Schein’s students, struggling along, trying to find a way to express what is inside of them.

Throughout If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom we watch Schein bringing his students face-to-face with indifference and cynicism, leading them, sometimes following them, as they confront loneliness and alienation—the very emotional state in which Holden was ensnared. Of Holden, Schein writes, “Blind to himself, he’s blind to his world. So are my students initially. Blind to themselves, they are blind to him.”  Schein’s aim then, simply and essentially, is to teach his students to see themselves—“in my mind, the ultimate form of intelligence. To see, and be able to express what you see.”

More than book burnings by reactionary school boards, self-censorship, I’ve learned, presents the greatest threat to kids’ freedom and happiness—in fact, to democracy in general. But I’ll tell you this: even if I had to pry my students open with a crowbar, they were always grateful and appreciative because it always made them happier. Kids want the truth, for the simple reason that, as the old saying goes, the truth sets them free.

  The actual stories written by the students in Schein’s class—the truth—are interspersed liberally through the book. These stories demonstrate that something miraculous consistently occurred between Schein and his students, underscoring Schein’s belief that emotional fluency and honesty is the prerequisite for great art and meaningful intelligence. The voices of his students are distinctive, authentic, wise, and, as often as not, hilarious. Teachers, academicians, and parents who read this book may have difficulty believing it—incredulity directed either at the way Schein taught or at the exquisite beauty of his students’ writing, thoughts, and epiphanies. Like Doubting Thomases, readers may wonder if the dialogue constructed in Schein’s classroom is possible in any classroom. For that reason alone this book should be essential reading for new teachers and veterans alike so that notions of what is possible in the middle-school classroom can be expanded. Most helpfully, a section is included at the end headed “For Teachers,” in which Schein explains how his classroom was structured, how much time he allotted for curriculum, how he collaborated with parents, and what kinds of boundaries are necessary for such a direct method of teaching.

Dewey wrote: “Failure of man to be himself. I can imagine no deeper ruin.”  This is the looming tragedy which underlies Holden Caulfield’s search for authenticity and love. But what would happen if Holden Caulfield were in Schein’s classroom? “I think he’d have a blast,” answers Schein. And not because of standardized testing or an enlightened curriculum. Holden would have a blast, it appears, because he would to learn to see himself. He would become unafraid of the source and power of the emotions surging in him.  He’d come alive and his heart would enlarge.  Given time and space, Holden, like Schein’s students, might learn to write and speak with beauty, clarity, and passion, pass his exam on the history of the ancient Egyptians, and, at long last, pick up the phone and call old Jane Gallagher.

Schein concludes the book and forty years of teaching middle-schoolers: “Hell, I think I love them all. How could you not, particularly when you truly get to know them?” This is the hope-filled challenge he offers: how to know the students in the classroom and put them, and their hearts, truly, at the center. 

This review appeared in a slightly different form in "Education Revolution" (Summer 2009)

www.EducationRevolution.org