Not Going "Back to School" for the First Time

This time of year, for the past thirty years, I have started getting ready to go back to school. I have certain rituals: posting the poetry slam masterpiece "What Teachers Make" by  Taylor Mali

and the "anyone, anyone?" scene from Ferris Bueller's Day off, and then I start thinking about my introductory lectures and lessons and readings for each of my classes.  Not that I ever stopped thinking about teaching, as I sometimes joke about “teacher brain” and how whenever I see something, no matter how horrible, my mind starts working to figure out how to incorporate it into the classroom.  For the first time ever, at a museum, I just looked at the exhibits without thinking about where to fit the material into the curriculum.  I simply wrote about it in my blog instead.  I’d love to do a lesson on historiography, comparing different treatments of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism and how it has been dealt with by the Ford Museum, the City of Dearborn, the Anti-Defamation League, etc.  But no more – I have left my teaching job and am traveling the world for a year before going “back to school” myself, to Seattle U, where I plan to pursue a M. Div. and hope to become some kind of chaplain.

I am thrilled to be switching gears at this time in my life.  Matthew spent more than a year undergoing treatment for colorectal cancer, and is now cancer-free.  What better time to take a year off and travel the world? I am turning 56 this year; what better time to step back and re-examine my life, and return to a lifelong dream of divinity school?

I want to be very clear, however: if not for the changes at my former workplace over the past several years, there would be NO WAY that I would be taking these actions.  My original intention was to live and die at the school I loved, the school founded by three legendary teachers, the school that made me the person I am today, that gave me my living and my vocation, my dearest friends and my sense of purpose, for the past almost 30 years. I would have been like my own high school English teacher, Meta O’Crotty, who taught (literally) up until the day she died.  Legend has it that one day, at the age of 70-or-80-something, she said to her students, “I’m not feeling very well” (probably in the middle of a lesson on Virginia Woolf) and went home early.  Later, they found her seated in a chair, with the Oxford English Dictionary open on her lap.  She was dead. Some wags have inquired, “What word was she looking at?” If only we knew.

That would have been me.  Instead, I spent this week in New York, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending a performance of “A Fidler Afn Dakh,” the Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof.  At the show, I struck up a conversation with a fellow theatergoer, a fifty-something woman who happened to be another teacher who had also just left her job at a formerly radical independent school in New York.

When a school styles itself a “progressive” independent school, they usually mean (according to their website) that they are committed to social justice, inquiry-based interdisciplinary education, and all that good stuff that educators like John Dewey believed in. The website boldly proclaims that the school "remains faithful to the spirit of its founder,”  who created an experimental public school in 1921 on the Lower East Side serving mostly Yiddish-speaking children of Jewish refugees who narrowly escaped the pogroms. My new friend had just returned from a Yiddish summer camp https://yiddishsummer.eu/, where she had been learning Yiddish protest songs and klezmer music for several summers in a row. She told me this was one of the most radical acts of resistance possible these days – to preserve and speak the Yiddish language, to become a living Holocaust memorial. This explains why she was attending the “Yiddish Fiddler.”

She told me that Angela Davis had attended her school. I learned that Rank Smith, who became director of after the founder passed away, was brought before the HUAC. In his testimony, Rank told the committee, “We are a private school, but essentially we don’t believe in private education…in a democracy the main scheme of education has to be public education. We are a private school by accident rather than intent. We would prefer to have a public school system where every citizen would take pride.” Eleanor Roosevelt was a supporter of the school and served on its board for decades. Anne and Abel Meeropol, who adopted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s children after they were executed, sent them to the school as well. Later, under the pen name Lewis Allen, Abel wrote the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” made famous by Billie Holliday. In 1964, students participated in the Congress of Racial Equality protests for a fair world at the World’s Fair in New York that year. After a group of protesters that included Bayard Rustin and James Farmer were arrested for blocking the entrance to the New York City pavilion, students from this school volunteered to replace them – and were subsequently arrested also.

With a legacy like that, what radical, subversive, progressive teacher wouldn’t want to teach there until the day she died?

Unless, as my friend and I found, there is no “there” anymore, because the school has been reshaped by the board and the head of school into a very different institution, a place that actually stands in the way of teachers doing the work they love, and more importantly, prevents them from following the school’s original mission, which was centered on faculty who modeled thinking and acting with integrity.  The current administration of a school like this has very little connection to the original vision of a rigorously compassionate, fiercely intellectual community dedicated to a life of integrity and service. Radical teachers do not “retire” from or even “quit” such a place. What happens is this – the school disappears, and the institution that replaces it in the same building, usually contemporaneously with a fancy remodel, is not a place for such teachers, is not kind to such teachers so they must leave, or be forced out, to seek out other communities, perhaps a younger school, perhaps to found their own school, perhaps to try their hand at something else.

I can’t begin to fathom all the reasons why these types of institutions change over the years, but I am guessing it has to do with a change in the parent and student population, the political climate, the overall culture of the area they live in (Yiddish speaking Reds and granola crunching professors move out; Microsoft and other moneyed types move in) and above all, of course, money. True progressive education is hard. Really hard. And most private school parents today don’t want their children to have a really hard time. They don’t pay forty or fifty thousand dollars a year so their kids can feel uncomfortable and angry and get arrested for putting their bodies in harm’s way for the sake of social justice. They want their kids to go to good colleges – to think critically just enough for that, and no more. Not too much critical examination of their society a la James Baldwin, more learning how to excel in such a society. Heck, last year's senior parents didn't even want their children to spend 20 hours working on a political campaign, because it might interfere with college applications or worse, get in the way of sports.

The original Northwest School was founded by geniuses who were also teachers, and who knew what genius teachers needed to do their best work. I recently read a short entry from the writings of Paul Raymond, in which he described an original student-centered classroom:

“The teacher I love above all others, however, is a young man – just 24 this year – whose field is biology….The first class he ever taught began with him absent. There was a note on the blackboard:

            ‘Hi! This is biology 1-A. I’m Mark Terry. This is a lab. Look at any of the equipment or magazine or books, if you wish. Please put things back as they were at the end of the period. This afternoon and tomorrow morning I am going to the mountains to get some stuff. Up to 5 people may go each time. Sign up below, then meet me here at the right time.’

The ‘stuff’ he brought back were roadkills: skunks, possums, cats, etc. His next class began with a few words about how sad it was that the animals were killed, but, at the same time, how fortunate, because Mark wished to add them to his skeleton collection. He then enlisted the students’ assistance in recovering the skeletons.

            That, of course, was by no means the end; it was the beginning, not only of anatomy, but physiology and even animal behavior and many other wonderful things, all charted along lines eventually determined by the students.”

I was very pleased and honored that the seniors asked me to speak at their graduation this year. I loved teaching them, especially the International Students and my philosophy class, and wanted to keep the focus on the “kids,” while at the same time making it very clear that the instantiation of the Platonic Form, the spiritual vision of the founders, is no longer in the physical building very much. I based my speech on a Platonic Ideal  as I understood it, as I learned it from the founders, and also on The Grapes of Wrath, the part where Tom Joad gives his famous speech to Ma about how “when there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be around.” (I just quoted that from memory, so it might be inaccurate, but if you’ve read that book, you know what I’m talking about). I am including the video of my speech, if you care to watch it here.

I was honored to learn my teaching craft from Paul Raymond, Mark Terry, and others who, like Thomas Merton’s great teacher, Mark Van Doren, “would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had ‘educed’ them from you by his question.” Merton writes that Van Dorn was able to ennoble his students, and in turn was perfected and ennobled by his vocation. This is what is meant by the original founding statement of the school – the quality of education is dependent on the quality of the faculty, and that old Northwest School “offered a faculty.” This new iteration of the school simply offers a program, a program offered by just about every other run-of-the-mill progressive, liberal arts-based independent school in the whole system. There are still some genius teachers there, but they get the message, in no uncertain terms, that they are interchangeable and replaceable and expendable, like the interchangeable blocks in the new schedule. I wish them well today as they go back to school, to try to honor and ennoble their students, and their profession, for another year.

sic transit gloria mundi, right?  #embracetheconstant