Providence (13 page)

And that was that. That was how it began between Rennie and me.

One week after making the discovery that I didn’t need all the women in the world, I only needed one, I found the only one I needed. A week earlier I wouldn’t have been ready for her, I would have been no better off than that dumb printing salesman. A week earlier I would have been incapable of simply walking up and issuing an invitation. A week earlier I wouldn’t have dreamed of inviting her to anything but the most extravagant restaurant in Chicago. A week earlier I wouldn’t have had nearly enough self-confidence to tell the printing salesman to get lost.

One week. One week makes it Providence.

That I was ready for Rennie was providential not only for me but for her. Ours was a great love story—but a story for another time. Dawn is soon going to be making itself felt out there.

Removing the dominating handicap of my emotional life didn’t free me of problems. Rather, it freed me to recognize that I had a different sort of problem to solve, which was to find a direction for my life.

You need two points to determine a line. Fixed only at
its pivot point, the needle of a compass can do nothing but spin round and round uselessly; it must have a second point to fix its direction: magnetic north. The point I was spinning round and round was that hour at Gethsemani. That was my pivot point. I didn’t see that I had another point, which was that mysterious and compelling dream I’d had at age six. But even if I’d been able to guess that these two points determined a line, I would not have been able to see what the line was pointing to.

I was wandering around in the middle of my life without a compass. I needed someone to show me the way. I needed a guide, a teacher—and this is what I told Madame Saichy, whom I was still seeing even though I was clearly no longer in need of psychotherapy. This was the first she’d heard of this, and she asked me what I needed a teacher for. I don’t remember how I explained it. The model I had in mind was rather like a spiritual director. I wanted someone who would assume a genuine
responsibility
for my future, the way Father Louis had. I wanted someone with superhuman insight who would be able to look at the compass of my life and know how to stop the needle from its endless, meaningless spinning. Who would be able to say, “Here. Here is the second point that fixes the line. Here is your direction. This is what Providence has been shaping your life toward.”

Well, Madame Saichy listened patiently, and when I was
finished she said, “You don’t need a teacher. You will be your
own
teacher.”

I’m sure I must have laughed at this notion. I explained that to talk about being your own teacher is like talking about being your own parent. To try to be your own teacher is like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. No matter. When I finished rolling out all my objections, she said again, “You will be your own teacher.”

Madame Saichy made only two predictions in the time that I knew her, and, though I scoffed at both, both came true.

In another five years or so, without having the least idea that that was what I was doing, I would set out to become my own teacher.

Before this could come about, however, it was necessary to put paid to my illusions about using educational publishing as an instrument of change in the world. (I think I can safely begin to speak more openly in this vein.)

One of the great, persistent myths of education in our culture is that children become reluctant learners as they grow older. In fact, what they become reluctant about is going to school, where they’re bullied, regimented, bored silly, and very effectively prevented from learning. The learning curve of small children is simply phenomenal during the first five years of their life. They learn the language of their parents—several languages, if several are spoken. They learn four fifths of the vocabulary they’ll use in their everyday activities for the rest of their lives. They easily learn to walk, run, skip, swim, ride a bicycle, draw,
print, count, and hundreds of other things they’ll do for the rest of their lives (including reading, if parents will give them a little help). But as soon as they enter school, this learning curve begins to level off, and within a few years it’s practically flat. And the
children
are blamed for this. In effect, the educators say, “See? If it weren’t for the hard work we do, these kids wouldn’t be learning ANYTHING!”

One of the absolute principles of education that every teacher learns is that children learn something very easily when they’re
ready
to learn it, which is to say, when they
want
to learn it. The classic example is batting averages. Kids who become interested in baseball learn to figure batting averages without the slightest effort—without being “taught” at all. It’s as though they take it in through their pores. Children find this operation
extremely
difficult to learn when it’s taught as a subject in class, but if they have a
reason
to learn it—their
own
reason—they learn it in no time.

As I say, everyone in education knows this—but they would never dream of allowing children to learn this way as a general rule. That wouldn’t do at all, because of course how would you
organize
such a thing? How can you possibly know when a given child will develop a
reason
to learn how to read a map? And what would you do when you found out? No, the only way to
organize
learning is to give children
a reason to learn
all at the same time.
This is called
motivating
them. You have thirty children in your class and the curriculum says it’s time to teach them some map-reading skills, so now you
motivate
them to learn about maps. You try to manufacture something that approximates the interest kids have when they learn to figure batting averages.

Of course it doesn’t work, that goes without saying. No one
expects
it to work. When kids learn to figure batting averages, they’re responding to a motivation that arises within
them.
This is something
they
want to do. Map reading is something
you
want them to do. No matter. Your task is to “motivate,” so you “motivate”—the more the better.

Our entire program is based on this argument: “We know kids learn effortlessly if they have their
own
reasons for learning, but we can’t wait for them to find their own reasons. We have to provide them with reasons that are
not
their own. This doesn’t work and we
know
it doesn’t work, but it’s the only
practical
way to organize our schools.”

What? How would
I
organize the schools? To ask this question presupposes that we
must
have schools, doesn’t it? I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn’t work, they don’t say, “Well, we
must
have valves, so let’s try
two
valves.” If a valve doesn’t work, they say, “Well, what
would
work?” Their rule is, if it doesn’t work, don’t do it
more,
do
something else.

We know what works for children up to the age where
we ship them off to school: Let them be around you, pay attention to them, talk to them, give them access to as much as you can, let them try things, and that’s it. They’ll take care of the rest. You don’t have to strap small children down and
teach
them to speak, all you have to do is talk to them. You don’t have to give them crawling lessons or walking lessons or running lessons. You don’t have to spend an hour a day showing them how to bang two pots together; they’ll figure that out all by themselves—if you give them access to the pots.

Nothing magical happens at the age of five to render this process obsolete or invalid. You would know this if you observed what happens in cultures that we in our arrogant stupidity call
primitive.
In primitive cultures, parents simply go on keeping the children around, paying attention to them, talking to them, giving them access to everything, letting them try out things for themselves, and that’s it. They don’t herd them together for courses in tracking, pottery making, plant cultivation, hunting, and so on. That’s totally unnecessary. They don’t give them history lessons or craft lessons or art lessons or music lessons, but—magically—all the kids grow up knowing their history, knowing their crafts, knowing their arts, knowing their music. Every kid grows up knowing
everything
—without a single minute spent in anything remotely like a
school. No tests, no grades, no report cards. Every kid learns everything there is to learn in that culture because sooner or later every kid feels within himself or herself the
need
to learn it—just the way some kids in our culture get to a point where they feel the need to learn how to compute batting averages.…

Yes, I understand—believe me, I do. What you’re saying is exactly what our educators would say: “That system might work in primitive cultures, but it won’t work in ours, because we just have
too much to learn.
” This is just ethnocentric balderdash; you might not like to hear this, but any anthropologist will confirm it: What children learn in other cultures isn’t
less,
it’s
different.
And in fact nothing is too much to learn if kids want to learn it. Take the case of teenage computer hackers. These kids, because they want to, manage—unaided!—to achieve a degree of computer sophistication that matches or surpasses that of whole teams of people with advanced degrees and decades of experience. Give kids access and they’ll learn. Restrict their access to what you think they should learn, and they won’t—and this is the function of our schools, to restrict kids’ access to learning, to give them what educators think they should know, when they think they should know it, one drop at a time.

Are you able to remember yourself at age five, seven, nine, ten? Do you recall yearning to be allowed to sit in a classroom for six hours a day? No, neither do I. Do you remember where you wanted to be? Or can you imagine where you
might
have wanted to be? Well, yes, certainly out-of-doors, not in a school, but …

Here, let me imagine a place for you. It’s a sort of
circus, a collection of acrobats, jugglers, animal trainers, high-wire artists, clowns, dancers—the whole thing, every kind of performer you’d expect to find in a circus. And this place is parked nearby and it’s open round the clock and the idea is anyone can walk in and say to any of these performers, “Hey, I’d like to learn how to do that!” and they say, “Well, of course! That’s what we’re here for!”

Of course there’d be room here for a lot more. Maybe a small zoo where you could learn to take care of the animals yourself. Maybe somebody would have a pretty good telescope and could show you what’s what in the nighttime sky and lend you some books if you’re interested. And maybe there’d be a photographer with a bunch of cameras and a darkroom, and somebody with a printing press and a bindery. And while we’re at it, why not a weaver and a potter and a sculptor and a painter and a pianist and a violinist, and maybe even someone who knows how to build a piano and how to make a violin? And indeed there would always be building projects under way, so you could learn how to use all the tools and read the blueprints and all that. And someone who was always prepared to take a bunch of kids out into the wilderness to learn whatever there is to learn out there. And maybe an archaeologist who could take some kids off to a dig someplace. And you could even have a writer on hand in case someone was crazy enough to want to find out what that’s all about. And a roomful of computers, with someone who knew
how to use them. And somewhere in there someone who could teach you any math you wanted to learn, and someone else who could teach you any electronics or physics you wanted to learn, and so on. And gee, everybody has books they can lend you. For your young entrepreneurs, you could even have people around who could help them make and market their products.

Are you getting the idea here? I could go on for hours this way.

Anyway, the rule is, you can come and go as you please, do anything you please, study with anyone you please for as long as you please. How does this sound as someplace you might rather have been than in a classroom?…

Exactly, exactly. It’d be a never-ending feast of learning, and if you wanted to keep kids out, you’d have to put up a razor-wire fence.…

Oh, well, of course educators would hate it. Educators would be superfluous in such a setup: functionless. They’d say: “Sure, everyone’s having a wonderful time, but how do you know they’re getting a rounded education?” My answer to that is, “Rounded according to whom?” and “Rounded as of when?” Who says education has to end at age eighteen? Or at age twenty-two? If there were a place like that in my neighborhood, I’d be ensconced there right now, teaching writing, teaching editing, teaching publishing, teaching word processing, teaching everything I have to teach—and learning, getting that “rounded education” I certainly didn’t get in sixteen years of schooling.…

No, don’t call this a school. Didn’t you hear what I just said? It isn’t a school, it’s a city. It’s a place where people
live who are willing to let their children have access to them. People who are willing to let the children of the community hang around, willing to pay attention to them, willing to talk to them, willing to show them how things work, willing to show them how to do things, willing to let them try out things for themselves. Nothing difficult, nothing very demanding, just the ordinary things people did on this planet for the first three million years of human life.