Back to School

There are 41 million elementary and junior high school students in this country, and each fall these kids get handed cards, and the cards say, "Miss Ames, Room 201, is your teacher," and with that their fates are set. Teacher is either hard or she's easy; pretty, and nice; or she's too strict, in which case a kid consoles himself with finding her an apt nickname, like Old Hickorystickbitch or The Bosom Lady. In any case, kids have to take what they get.

For their sakes, every Teacher Ames in the country should be made to read How to Survive in Your Native Land, a quietly radical book about the public schools in America. Its author, James Herndon, is a junior high school teacher describing his loose and open-ended classes in San Francisco, where his students choose how to spend their time in school. Herndon is not one of those new jargon-spouting teachers hell-bent on encouraging their youngsters' creativity with some or other technique they were exposed to, but never understood, in graduate school. Those teachers mistake novelty for innovation, and spend a good deal of their time contriving projects to stimulate their classes. Let the children choose, they say but only if they choose from a set of "officially-(approved) creative" activities: for instance, writing a fake Peace Corps journal instead of having geography class; or making an avant-garden environment form Daddy's old cigars and cigar boxes, instead of painting a picture of the most exciting day of the summer vacation. Not that Herndon didn't put in his time dreaming up far-out schemes to hold his student's attention. He had his class pretend to be Tutankhamen's favorite embalmer, and also write an account. But Herndon is among the first to see that kids find such gimmicks just as odious as the "busy work" of former days.

Like most of the little revelations in How to Survive, Herndon came on this one by accident. About nine years ago, which was early-on in the movement for freer classrooms, Herndon and a fellow-teacher got permission from their school to organize a daily two-hour unstructured class, which students could elect to take in place of their study halls. They planned it blithely assuming that the chance to make King Tut journals and cigar boxes instead of wasting time pretending to be busy, would thrill the kids. And besides the fun and games prospectus, they went a step further and assured the kids that there would be no grades, and that the students would be allowed to leave the classroom at any time, without asking teacher. With these ground rules, Herndon quickly discovered that his kids would rather leave his Creative Arts (CA) class and hit the bathrooms to smoke, than play around with his contrivances. CA might have been better than "reading dull texts, answering questions on ditto sheets, Discussing, making Reports, or taking tests... But that only applied to a regular class where it was clear that you had to (1) stay there all period and (2) had to be doing something or you might get an F." Herndon's conclusion--he was making the mistake of expecting the kids to enjoy things which only he wanted them to enjoy, when, in fact, he had no interest in simulating the poverty of Haiti in his Alliance for Progress log. And if he didn't like the games he made up for his classes, his kids weren't likely to love them either.

And so, Herndon decided to make a movie, and let his charges join in or go off as they chose, because that's what he wanted to do with his time. He proceeded without worrying about What The Kids Would Do With Film. Nor was he interested in making some film about Attitudes and Relationships, or The Question of Authority and-or Democracy In The Classroom. "(I) really wanted to make a Tarzan film," he said. As it turned out, the movie was "Son of the Hawk," the story of a mysterious hawk-faced intruder who terrorizes a junior high school and turns the students and principal green. "Son of the Hawk" was not a very "responsible" lesson in film-making, but Herndon and the kids in his class had a great time with their fantasies, while incidentally learning how to use a camera.

No doubt How to Survive was written in part to educate parents and save children. But fighting the (school) Establishment is Herndon's problem as much as anyone's, and the book is for him as much as for anyone's, and the book is for him as much as for anyone else. Herndon writes:

"To know what something is (within the stream of life) you ought to be able to know what would be the case if it were not.

Alienation is such an expression. Within that particular tributary which is a school, it has the meaning that an individual gives up his Self (denying what he knows to be so in favor of what the school says is so) in order to achieve success and avoid failure."

And he adds:

"But by the time anyone remembers that, he is 40(as Herndon is) and reduced to writing about it...In practice they (we) do or don't do things as a matter of reaction--as if we came into school each day as so many blanks, having wiped ourselves clean of desire between breakfast and getting off the bus or getting out of our car...Once officially in the school, we dispose of our cans of Coke and our smokes and await the presentation of our daily (streams of) lives by the school, and it is to that presentation that we respond..."

For instance, how long, he asks, are we going to allow ourselves to be told that reading has to be and should be taught in groups, and with texts composed entirely of short paragraphs beginning out of nowhere and ending in the middle of nowhere? "Who has red hair?" and "Why didn't the man stop when he ran the puppy over?" seem the only questions the schools care for--and not because they show whether a child can read, but because teachers and administrators can use scores to place children in groups for easy classification. The reading texts and tests have nothing to do with real books. Herndon says that reading is not a skill (to be measured) but an art which changes (and is best taught by someone who can already read and is willing to sit down with a child and read to a child and listen to the child read, while pointing out things which are pertinent to the sounds and words they are reading). Herndon's assumption is that being literate is a human facility, and everyone can do it, and you teach one child at a time how to do it, if the child needs to know.

This defense of the little guy may not be original, but it never has been better said. Without playing on the cuteness quotient of his kids, or moralizing to parents and teachers about The Way It Spozed To Be, he makes readers of his book really know why the Johnnies of America don't respond to their teachers and learn to read. And fortunately, where it would have been easy to pain his audience with his own deep pessimism, he doesn't play the bogeyman. At the same time that he is writing. "Look, the situation is hopeless: my manual instructs me to encourage creativity, but my kids would rather take the salamanders meant for our science show-and-tell and fry them on the classroom radiator," he is working us into believing that if we would give a damn, things might be different.

Not that he ever says just how things might be. His whole point about teaching, and writing a book about schools and teaching, is that it's all improvisation. Herndon refuses to number his points and draw lines of methodology. He only provides some riotous scenarios in which you'll find the intelligible course of action unstated, but more than obvious. Without formalizing a philosophy here. James Herndon is espousing one which goes: keep loose, fly kites and be nice to salamanders and lizards, but while you're reading this book, man, keep an eye out for bees flying in the classroom, and for edible plants along the road.