Polities Junior High School

WE ALL come from junior high schools. We were weaned and scrubbed in their vinyl bassinets and many of us haven't been able to dirty ourselves ever since. Last week, I returned to one of the scenes of our collective baptism, a junior high on Long Island. I didn't formerly attend this particular school, but what reason was there to suspect that it was any different than my own, a thousand miles away?

Here were the narrow tan lockers, the light green and brown tile floors, the closely shaven mathematics teachers, the Art Deco furniture-all preserved through the years an unwitting museum of redolent nostalgia. The scaled-down desks, the dwarfed nation of students, the knee-high urinals-all attested to the passage of time. The clots of eighth-grade hoydens with their manila complexions and pink eraser thighs attested to my eternal puerility. Most of the boys, however, still on the verge of their powerful pubescence, still four feet eleven, flitted unsuspectingly down the corridors like little frightened birds.

There were definite signs of modernity. Everyone wore mod clothes, girls came in blue jeans and transclucent blouses through which boys could see their over-the-shoulder boulder-holders. The girls had more make-up; the boys, it seemed, fewer braces. The girls obviously had no idea how seductively their mothers had dressed them. Neither did the boys. Only me and the mathematics teachers, who loitered by the drinking fountain between classes looking for fresh talent.

I HAD BEEN asked to read some poetry and discuss that art with classes during the day, but found myself sitting in on an English class first module. The PA system clicked on overhead and in an instant the entire class was on its feet, facing the flag. After that, we all settled back to listen to Leslie's oral report on Greek mythology. Leslie was one of the bigger boys and hardly used his note cards.

"First there was Chaos," he began. "Anybody don't know what Chaos is? OK. Then there was Erebus, you know, Chaos gave birth to Erebus. What came from Erebus was love and the banishment of confusion, and everywhere that love would go it was beautiful and there was light."

"What's Chaos?" a pretty girl asked, chewing on her Papermate.

"Jesus, Karen," a guy said. "he already asked if anybody didn't know." Then, without warning, Robbie and Stewart started slugging it out in their chairs.

"Robbie! Stewart! Stop it this instant!" the teacher cried from the back of the room.

"I still don't know what chaos is."

"Jesus, Karen." the guy shrilled.

"There was a regard," continued Leslie, "for the earth and for the grain, but there was a conflict. Both the earth and the gods couldn't be the base for life. . ."

"How long is this report supposed to be anyways?" someone whined.

"Three minutes," Robbie replied.

"He's only been up there for an hour an a half," Stewart said.

"Well," said a boy in a hippie vest. "The Creation takes longer."

"Yeah, but he's been up there for an hour an a half." In a matter of minutes, Stewart and Robbie were quieted, Karen learned what Chaos meant, and the boy in the vest resumed his baroque sketches in the margins of his notebook.

"I don't understand," Bruce said. "If Atlas was big enough to hold up the world, how could he fit on the world when he was on it?"

"Jesus, Bruce," the guy said. "It's only a story; it's just a myth. A lot of things aren't explained. It's mythology. "

"Oh," Bruce said, and the bell rang. After talking to a few morning classes about poetry. Hunched with the faculty in their dining room. The meatless aroma of Bar-B-Q beef on buns called me back seven years to my junior high. Here, though, they sold a-la-Carte Matzoh at 5c a sheet. Here, the students wore peace buttons and knew the names of their senator. They wore "Make Love Not War" buttons, but the boys still sat on one side of the cafeteria and the girls on the other.

During the last four modules of the day, I was sent to the school auditorium to read and talk poetry to a group of a hundred students. As soon as I perched myself on the stool in front of them with my notebook of poems, they responded by taking out paper and pencils. "Put your paper and pencils away." I said in mock anger. "You can't learn anything when you're taking notes." They turned tentatively to their teachers to see if that was OK. I read two poems that concerned a white suburb, similar to theirs, hoping that the proximity of the verses to their own lives would open the poems up for them. Some made it half-way inside, but most resided too close to their own growth to scrutinize it. As I sat before a hundred hairless faces in the aqua and ochre and, I thought I should try to undo, in the hour and a half I had, the things that had been done to them in their short lives on Long Island. It would be wonderful if I could only soil them a bit, but my messianic pretensions soon gave way to the simpler chore of taking apart a poem for them.

I told them how Robert Frost had written Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in a few minutes, yet how many hours and pages were spent torturing it in classrooms. I read a poem about baseball. And one about the Top 40. "What do you do," someone asked, "when you don't write poetry?" I paused. "I play football, talk on the telephone, kiss girls," I said. A light snicker. "Poetry isn't a forty hour week."

"If there's something you don't like about this poem." I said after reading a pretty bad one, "tell me, I'll change it around." No one protested. "Look," I argued, "a poem isn't a sacred thing. If you don't like something in a poem, even if it's by William Shakespeare, you should say it's stupid. Don't be afraid to hurt the poem. It's not something you simply hold up to the light and investigate. It's an experience you share with the poet." There was a long silence. Girls in wet jackets and boys with gawky legs looked up at me. "For God's sake," I pleaded, "don't be afraid of the poem. Please." But my audience held on tenaciously to their silences. I read a short poem about lunch, sweeping them with my eyes, trying to let them know that the poem cared.

"Why do you always write about food?" a girl finally asked when I finished.

"Well," I fumbled, "there are two things I think that defy death." No. No good. "There are two things," I began again, "that seem to be the opposite of death. Love and Food. Since I can't always write about the first, I write a lot about the second, so I know that I'm alive." The poems suggested other topics and we talked about Nixon, the war, and the Kiwis Club.

"I have a question," a seventh-grader said. "You always write about things you don't like. But why don't you do anything about them?"

"I don't know why," I replied. "I really don't."

THEY ALL know what is wrong with things. They don't know how or why they are wrong, but they sense the world's difficulties as a vague and unapproachable collage of images. When we were in eighth grade, we slept along with the somnambulant decade. But, thanks to an increasingly intrusive media system and the awakening of their older brothers, the enormity of the world cannot be hid from these students.

But like us, these junior high school kids continue to fight (perhaps suffer from) American education's mystification of the world. The world was kept out of our reach no less than aspirin and the facts of sexual intercourse. An educational version of it was, in fact, invented for our "benefit." The world was made disproportionately small by our teachers and our textbooks, its inequities ignored, its differing cultures approximated, its messages equivocated, its complexity reduced to a sacrosanct canon of saccharine passages and colored pictures. It was a world from which textbook writers had effectively exorcised all inferiority and superiority, all ethical dimension. In our history books, other cultures were dealt with almost secondarily: America, like its TV heroes Ward Cleaver and Garfield Goose, survived all calamities and obstacles, fashioned mediocrity into national grace by way of an obtuse patriotism. Other cultures were compared to Amerika's, but with no sense of cultural relativity. From texts and Weekly Readers, we learned a national solipsism and irremedial egoism that made it possible for our soldiers in Nam to tape the severed ears of V. C. victims to their jeep antennae as if they were so many dried apricots.

When I was in junior high I suspected, I think, that the history book Kodachromes of contented, milk-drinking families and bovine pastures, shots of smiling Poles, concealed a different truth. But I was not strong enough to force those examples into my life. For all our multiple choice exams, we never had a real selection.

Fortunately, these students are better off, more enlightened, inquisitive, truly troubled. Maybe they find it hard to reconcile the world of their textbooks with the one outside. As always, they are addled by puberty, bad grades, small injustices. But their awareness is already unwieldy; they have not been allowed to be themselves. Although the vicious secrets of Amerika have not been kept from even them they are still too young and too niggered to provide either cures of intelligent concern. They only feel, numbly, and they will have to be untaught in order to relearn why they fell. Their real world is still both circumscribed and defended by the familiar: their parents, their teachers, their neighborhoods, the Pizza Hut. If they walk all the way home from school on a warm day, they have traversed their universe. They have no idea what an unusual future they are stalking.

New and uneasy thoughts occur to them: My Lai, Bobby Seale, Cambodia, King, Fred Hampton all rattle in their heads like identical stones. They already hear a war on the other side of the world. Next year, they will discover that a few blocks away there are places they never dreamed of.