The Future is Unwritten

“Tell your maw, tell your paw, I’m gonna take you back to Arkansaw”

—Ray Charles

We started with Wislawa Szymborska’s question: “How should we live?’ In her poem “The Century’s Decline,” she gazes upon the wreckage of the 20^th century, when we were supposed to have the means to end war, poverty, hunger and disease, but instead created the worst wars and most mass-human suffering in history.

A little bleak, maybe, but to ask the question here and now, with liberating naïveté and hope and faith, is to take a step towards something else, an alternative, a different way to walk into the future. To quote Joe Strummer: “The future is unwritten.” So we begin our quest in the attempt to begin to write that future, to erect a Eutopian scaffolding—though our own seeking and questioning and our innate powers and creativity.

My question: What do we need to know, see, feel, do, realize, or discover, to live a good life? Who is this “we”? Humanity? Our school? Our individual selves?

How do we carry ourselves with purpose, even as we admit that we have so much more to find? How does our knowledge and experience as an “I” relate to the collective “we?” How is the experience of one of us connected and relevant to all of us? What is a good life? What is “life?” What, even, is “good”—do we mean a good life in a mansion and a heated pool and some sweet technological gadgets and a new Gibson Sunburst Les Paul? Or do we mean good as in “moral”—authentic, true, pure, striving? Are we talking about the guitar—shining but inanimate—or are we talking about what we do with the guitar, whether we can awaken in it something that is really ourselves, something that flows from us, played over the strings with soul and a wild hunger to shake the world.

Tal told the story of Mozart’s antagonist, Salieri, from the film “Amadeus.” Do we want to fill all of our actions with love and fury in the quest to make something great, or will we be satisfied to play safe, hum-drum ditties that can barely reach the walls of the emperor’s court? Do we really want to be the Patron Saints of Mediocrity so long as we get what we think we want? Do we really want to be slugs, a low species of Teen, whose only by-product is a thin silvery stream of evaporating slime? Or, do we want to evolve into giants of the best that is in us?

Tal told another story:

“A student here once climbed the forty-six 4000 foot mountains in the Adirondacks. A great act of endurance and commitment. She excitedly told us about the upcoming day when she would climb the final one. ‘So what?’ said another student? ‘Why would you want to do that? What’s the point?’”

Tal continued: “She was so apoplectic that she could not answer. She sputtered and fumed and raged. ‘What kind of imbecile would ask such a moronic question?’ she bellowed.”

The question was not “Why would you do that?” The question was: “Why would you NOT climb the 46 mountains? Why would you ground yourself in some dark hollow with your eyes nailed to the tops of your shoes, rooted there in decay and short-sight. See, she was mad to live, and she was mad that her classmate seemed NOT mad to live, or at least, she was mad that he could not see in her the ferocity of someone who WAS mad to live.

We have found that this madness to live, to be close to life, to see what it has to teach, is infectious. It can be a kind of glorious unsettling chaos-inducing illness. A Dis-ease. And how should that dis-ease spread? How should we become dis-eased with never standing still? Or dis-eased with the knowledge that there is a time to stand still and a time to rise up? How, as peers and teachers, can we make a place where we shake things up a bit to become dis-eased into to wanting to seek more? To become artists of ourselves, as Stanley Kunitz wrote: “The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.”

Other Stories: Samson, who would not stand there being mocked, but was willing to bring the whole temple down—to exercise his power, to strike back at his antagonists and oppressors, to even die doing it. We looked at this story as some thing noble and beautiful, perhaps a bit scary—that to become one’s true self, to demonstrate one’s faith in the highest good and the absolute expression of one’s soul—one must be willing to destroy, to become unsafe, to feel the weight of things crashing down.

In order to discover all of this, in order to begin writing the future, I asked them to work backwards, often through tears that ran down their faces this very first week of school: “What in your past has instructed you to these ideas you hold now?” Yes, you want a safe place, emotionally and physically, and you need that to live a good life, but what in your experience, in your life’s history, makes you chose that here and now as the expression of a “good life?”

Then I remembered how that very morning, as I was leaving to come to school and start another year, our durn family cat Garfield got out. The rascal thinks the good life is outside—due to dangerous and blissful ignorance he doesn’t know about the Foxes and Fishercats.

“This morning my cat got out and went under the deck,” I told the students. “I couldn’t get him out. I am worried when our cat gets out. He might get eaten.” I looked at the expressions of my students as I told this story: no one seemed to care. They just stared at me, waiting for meaning. They were not moved, their hearts untouched.

So I re-told the story, the way it happened. “My cat got out, like I said. But here is what I didn’t tell you the first time. We have had two cats in the past who died in September when they got out. This morning Garfield was sitting under the deck where we couldn’t get him and we had to leave for school. He was looking for mice. As I called him through the lattice and tried to get him to come to me, I looked in the shadows behind him. There, in those shadows, I saw a cat skeleton with a patch of matted orange hair, the bones scattered in damp dirt and the body draped over a wire cable. It was our old cat, Elgin. He had gotten lost in a storm a few years earlier, and that was him, and he had come back to the house to die alone, under the deck, with his body splayed over a loose wire. That skeleton was resting there behind Garfield, who was only intent on finding mouse to bat around.”

I looked at them.

“How do you feel about my story now?” Their mouths were open. Some of the kids seemed to have been transported to a place of authentic pain.

The students were unanimous in their feeling that the second version was a better.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the skeleton. We could feel that. That was the reason you were scared. You were scared of Garfield becoming a skeleton. The skeleton made you and us feel what you felt.”

“It was right behind him. The living form and the dead form. But the dead form had a bigger kind of power. So what are we saying?”

“The skeleton has to be shown. In the shadows. The past history.”

“Yes, the bones, the guts. The reasons behind. The story that preceded the present.”

Then we came to their stories: Can we make chaos fly from our fingers? Should we control chaos? IS there beauty in chaos? Is there too much control? Can distortion, feedback, and dissonance be heard as or made into something beautiful? How do we hold onto the past AND move into the future simultaneously Why should we want to live closer to life? How do we get closer to life? What has taught me that I should need to mend my ways? How do we fill the space, or are we even responsible to fill the space, when somebody leaves? Do we talk to our parents? Why is it important? A good life must include being loved, having a safe place—physically and emotionally—and have someone we can call or go home to. What happens if we are happy but people we love are not? What if we expend too much energy on worrying about others but we feel a nagging sense of incompletion in ourselves? How can we be happy and thoughtful of others at the same time? How can we be selfish and selfless at the same time? How important is having a place to make huge mistakes? What is the importance to learning in being forgiven for our mistakes, and understanding why we made them in the first place? What do we want from our peers or parents when we make mistakes? When we are confused and upset, but do not have the power or means to change our state, how should we live? How can we live or function in a state of confusion and doubt? Can we tell those who are important to us that we love them, appreciate them, understand them? Do we have the courage to call down our antagonists? And when we do, do we have the capaciousness of heart to understand and seek a solution to the reasons for why the antagonist antagonizes? If we are jealous, what drives the jealousy, what’s missing in ourselves? What happens when we project our fear or insecurity ahead of us instead of what is most tender and proud inside of us? Do we play small ball or long ball? What, even, does the life and death of a baby, sightless mouse—so briefly loved by one of my students—have to do with living a good life?

Can we go inside the whale and come out, or do we cower there? Who is responsible for bringing us out? Ourselves? Each other? Or God? Or luck? Are we passive or engaged? If we are passive, why? When we are engaged, and spitting out our lines with passionate intensity, what feelings do we create in ourselves? What controls us? How do we lift the chains? Are we saying the meaningful things we need to say to the ones who mean something to us? And always, are me making the most of time?

****

At Lake Pleiad we enacted a nine year-old ritual, the making of fairy houses and sculptures in the woods in the first Friday. As math teacher Rose so aptly noted, we went up to the woods together, along the narrow channel of Rout 125. That, she observed, was like the trunk of the tree, having been rooted in and sprouting from our three and ½ days in our brown schoolhouse. Now the trunk was rising up, going up and into the wood, the nearest height, and once to that height, we all spread out, like single limbs, each of us walking into a solitary space to make a new thing. Yes, we were within proximity of each other, but we could only see movements out of our peripheral vision and hear the sound of twigs snapping and the breeze blowing though the trees. In one hour thirty original sculptures erected under tree trunks and limbs, in the crooks of saplings and on the flat pine-needly floor. Mosses heaped into altars; imperfect, knobby sticks arranged into geometric perfections. Docks and landing jutting into the future, someone calling out the words of a song: “Wishful Thinking:” -- “Fill up your mind with all it can know.” A Eutopian soccer field. A hiding place. A chamber to protect what is holy. A monster with two mushrooms for eyes. A pyramidal tower. Writing in charcoal on the sun-heated granite. Colors of leaves spiraling in or out and a peace sign spread out like a great, fleeting mandala laying before us on our path—all of these our collective wishful thinking that we write as we go, as we write ourselves into our very own future.

About A ROOM FOR LEARNING

“Race to the Top” –  or “Something Closer to the Heart”?

Published in Vermont Commons, Number 31, Fall, 2009

By Ron Miller, PhD., author of What Are Schools For?

I was inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency. When I readThe Audacity of Hope, I was convinced that he was a genuine visionary, one who might lead us beyond the stale ideologies of our time. I thought my colleagues in the Vermont independence movement were a little too cynical to dismiss him as yet another, more slickly packaged, builder of empire. Sadly, except for a few history-jarring moments, such as his speech in Cairo, I’m coming to believe that their cynicism is justified. Nothing has driven this home to me more than the imperial educational policy that he and his technocrat Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have unleashed on American youth. They call it “Race to the Top.” The damage this approach will do to genuine learning and children’s lives is contained in its very name. To conceive education as a “race”—a competition forcing schools, teachers, and students to contend for some sort of victory—is to poison the inherent human striving for understanding and meaning. Defined as a competitive race, education is not a collaborative art of mentoring and nurturing the young, but a frenzied scramble to succeed according to some external measure of success—to reach some goal line established by those in authority. While “No Child Left Behind” was a dishonest, deceptive term for a similarly draconian policy, at least we can embrace its literal meaning, which is the polar opposite of “Race to the Top,” as the goal of a truly decent and democratic education. “Race to the Top” essentially consists of the federal government dangling $4 billion in front of the states and awarding it to those that conform to national curriculum standards and link teacher pay to student achievement as indicated by standardized test scores. States are expected to promote charter schools as well (semi-autonomous, publicly funded experiments, which Vermont does not yet have), but these too will be assessed according to quantitative measures. The fundamental problem with all this is the abstract, clinically objective, and externally imposed definition of good education at the root of the policy. Teachers and schools are considered to be successful if students score well on tests. Period. The actual quality of their knowledge and understanding, and the moral, emotional, and cultural meanings of what young people experience in schools, are irrelevant and disregarded. Education is defined as mechanical academic performance, diminishing the possibility of providing a meaningful journey toward ethical maturity and democratic citizenship. President Obama, like his disreputable predecessor, justifies the national takeover of schooling by asserting that educational success will enable young people to survive in a competitive global economy. High standards qualify students for rewarding jobs. This argument exploits—indeed, deepens—every parent’s anxiety about their children’s livelihoods, and our society’s (spotty) commitment to equality of opportunity. Without standards, it is claimed, young people will struggle in life, and the poor and marginalized will struggle the most. Surely we don’t want that. But we need to deconstruct this argument. We need to ask, as Wendell Berry once did, what are people for?, and the question that should follow from it: what are schools for? Standardization endorses the ruthlessness and rootlessness of the global corporate system, and insists that young people dutifully play their roles as producers and consumers to keep the system functioning. Standardization rewards robotic learning, not creativity or imagination or critical thinking or self-awareness or moral judgment or compassion or wisdom or loyalty to community or place. Is this what people, and education, are for—to run an endless race to survive in a global corporate game that, by the way, is inherently rigged to favor the wealthy and powerful elites who control it? There is a fundamentally different way to define education, success, and the purpose of a life well-lived. As Berry and many others have described it, it is the way of authentic human encounter, collaboration, and fellowship, not the way of empire. It is the way of community, stewardship of place, and human scale. It is the way of decentralized power and authority, of partnership, not domination. In recent decades, in response to an increasingly technocratic and authoritarian system of schooling, many thousands of educators and parents have sought to practice this understanding by starting alternative schools or turning to homeschooling. Young people thrive in these learning environments, and come out brimming with self-confidence, multiple competencies, and a strong sense of purpose. They consistently prove that abstract, rigidly imposed standards are not necessary for equipping youth with essential life skills. A few years ago, an idealistic teacher named Tal Birdsey started such a school for young adolescents in Ripton, Vermont, called North Branch School. He tells its story, with delightful wit and penetrating insight, in his inspiring new book A Room for Learning. We see how an authentic teacher builds a caring, loving community of learners. Every page, every incident and observation Birdsey relates, is a gentle but firm repudiation of technocratic schooling. “The first parents gravitated to the school,” he tells us, "because something entirely different could be made. . .  [C]urrent political debates about accountability or state funding fell far short of meaningful discourse about the education of children. These parents, no matter their income, education, or political views, were seeking education that involved something closer to the heart. In particular, they seemed to want something more creative and free. . . in contradistinction to schools tethered to right, standards-based approaches or school officials bombarded with federal mandates to test (pp. 31-2)." A Room for Learning shows exactly what “something closer to the heart” looks like in education. Birdsey sees each of his students as whole persons, with their own challenges, inclinations, learning styles, quirks and insecurities. Most of them have been “wounded by school” (as Kirsten Olson systematically documents in her recent book by that title); they are afraid of ridicule and rejection, suspicious of adults who judge them and peers who band together in cliques to exercise power. They are reluctant to open themselves to others, to test their own limits or pursue their deepest dreams. Birdsey tells how he created a safe, nurturing space in which these young teens could find and test their best, authentic selves. “I asked them to embrace the personal pronoun Iso that we might come closer to what was sacred inside of them. Those truths—their truths—would bring us closer to what mattered” (p. 59). Ultimately, what really matters to Birdsey and his students is a community where everyone feels cared for, a community rooted in love. This, not triumph in the corporate race, is what people are for. Educational policies based on standardization, authoritarian control, and competition for abstract goals only support the continuation of empire. People don’t much matter—systems do. Education dictated by corporate and political elites is oblivious to the lived reality of children and youths struggling to define themselves and find their place in the world. “Race to the Top,” like “No Child Left Behind,” and every other federal educational mandate, imposes a brutal efficiency on schooling that has no place for visionary educators, like Birdsey, who honor the essential personhood of their students. One vital goal of Vermont independence is an educational culture that respects and encourages learning on a human scale, that supports caring and loving communities of learning. National educational policy is one more reason why we need to challenge the burgeoning power of the American empire. Because Vermonters value genuine democracy, treasure individuality, and hold as precious the local land and community, we ought to decline the federal government’s inducements to participate in any “race to the top.” References Wendell Berry, What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990. Tal Birdsey, A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont. New York: St. Martins Press, 2009. Kirsten Olson, Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009. Also visit www.northbranchschool.org and Ron Miller's website, www.pathsoflearning.net

A ROOM FOR LEARNING Excerpt in Fall issue of Yankee Magazine

In advance of my my book A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont, Yankee Magazine has published a 2500 word excerpt from the book in YM's new Fall issue. The excerpt focuses on the the day one of my students wrote and submitted his first-ever poem. Yankee Magazine is available in most New England grocery stores, book stores, and old fashioned general stores.

Release date for the A Room for Learning is Sept. 29, from St. Martin's Press. Pre-orders can be made through your favorite bookseller, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble. 

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

 

Tal's book to be released September 29, 2009

Tal's book to be released by St. Martin's Press

The book comes out September 29, 2009. Tal will be doing a reading and book-signing at the Vermont Book Shop on October 29th.

Booklist Review of "A Room for Learning"

A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont.

 Birdsey, Tal (Author)

 Oct 2009. 288 p. St. Martin's, hardcover, $24.99. (9780312547301). 373.110092.

 Birdsey had been a stay-at-home dad for three years when he was approached to start an independent school in the small town of Ripton, Vermont. His 10 years of experience teaching seventh and eighth grade at an independent school in Atlanta gave him the kind of background his neighbors were looking for to extend the homeyness and free-spiritedness of the grade school into adolescence. Birdsey recounts the journey from that idea to the creation of a one-room school with 12 students from seventh through ninth grades. With an eclectic mix of personalities and skills, Birdsey’s students helped to guide the school year, pondering the music of Coltrane and the poetry of Yeats and Bukowski, the meaning of personal ethics and the mystery of science, and the typical adolescent angst of any school. In this absorbing and often-humorous account, Birdsey chronicles the growth of his students as well as his own personal development as together they searched for the real meaning of education and its power to transform the individual.