126. I Hung Around A Lot In Monongahela: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

I Hung Around A Lot In Monongahela 

The great destructive myth of the twentieth century was the aggressive contention that a 
child couldn't grow up correctly in the unique circumstances of his own family. In order 
to avoid having you finish this essay with the feeling it might have been all right for my 
family to influence my growth so intensely, but for many children with worse families 
that just wouldn't do, fix your attention a minute on the less savory aspects of my people, 
as they might be seen through social service eyes. Both sets of grandparents and my 
mother and father were seriously alienated from one another, the men from the women 
and vice versa. 

On the Zimmer side, heavy drinking and German/Irish tempers led to one violent conflict 
after another, conflicts to which my sister and I were fully exposed. We grew like weeds 
as children, with full run of the town, including its most dangerous places, had no 
effective curfew, and tended to excess in everything. Did I forget to mention the constant 
profanity? By up-to-the-minute big city standards my family skirted the boundary of 
court-ordered family dissolution more than once. 

Since a substantial number of the families I worked with productively as a schoolteacher 
had rap sheets similar to my own by social hygiene standards, I want to offer you my 
Monongahela years as a case study of how a less than ideal family by social work 
standards can still teach courage, love, duty, self-reliance; can awaken curiosity and 
wonder; can be a laboratory for independent thought, well-rooted identity, and 
communitarian feelings; and can grow in memory as a beloved companion even when it 
is composed of ghosts. 

The city of Monongahela itself is offered as a case study of a different sort, showing the 
power of common places to return loyalty by animating the tiniest details of existence. 
The town is a main character in my personal story, a genius loci interacting with my 



development as a schoolteacher. I invested an extreme amount of effort in the physical 
presence of my classrooms, I think, because the physical presence of my town never left 
me even after I was far removed from it. I wanted that same sort of ally for my kids. 

Gary Snyder once said, "Of all memberships we identify ourselves by, the one most 
forgotten that has greatest potential for healing is place." The quiet rage I felt at bearing 
the last name of a then socially devalued minority, the multiple grievances I felt off and 
on against my parents for being a house divided, at my sister for making herself a 
stranger to me, at my dad for staying away so I grew up with only a distant 
acquaintanceship between us, the bewilderment I felt from having to sit nightly at dinner 
with grandparents who hadn't spoken to one another for fifteen years and for whom I was 
required to act as go-between, the compounding of this bewilderment when I discovered 
my Italian grandfather had been buried in an unmarked grave, perhaps for taking a 
mistress, the utter divide geographically and culturally between Mother's family and 
Father's — the fantastic gulf between the expressive idiom of the Germans who treated 
rage and violence as if they were normal, and Dad's people, the quintessence of decorous 
rationality, the absolute inability of Mother to face the full demands of her maturity, yet 
her inspiring courage when her principles were challenged — all these made for an 
exciting, troubled, and even dangerous childhood. Would I have been better off in foster 
care, do you think? Are others? Are you insane? 

What allowed me to make sense of things against the kaleidoscope of these personal 
dynamics was that town and its river, two constants I depended upon. They were enough. 
I survived, even came to thrive because of my membership in Monongahela, the 
irreducible, unclassifiable, asystematic village of my boyhood. So different from the neo- 
villages of social work. 

All the town's denizens played a part: the iridescent river dragonflies, the burbling 
streetcars, the prehistoric freight trains, the grandeur of the paddle-wheel boats, the 
unpackaged cookies and uncut-in-advance-of-purchase cheese and meat, women in faded 
cotton housedresses who carried themselves with bearing and dignity in spite of 
everything, men who swore constantly and spit huge green and yellow globs of phlegm 
on the sidewalks, steelworkers who took every insult as mortal and mussed a little boy's 
hair because he was "Zim's nephew." 

I hung around a lot in Monongahela looking at things and people, trying them on for size. 
Much is learned by being lazy. I learned to fish that way, to defend myself, to take risks 
by going down in the abandoned coalmine across the river full of strange machinery and 
black water — a primitive world with nobody around to tell me to be careful. I learned to 
take knocks without running away, to watch hard men and women reveal themselves 
through their choices. I cleaned Pappy's printing office daily, after closing, for a silver St. 
Gaudens walking-goddess-Liberty fifty-cent piece, the most beautiful American coin ever 
made. I sold Sun-Telegraphs and Post-Gazettes on the corner of Second and Main for a 
profit of a penny a paper. I had a Kool-Aid stand on Main and Fourth on hot summer 
days. 



Shouldn't you ask why your boy or girl needs to know anything about Iraq or about 
computer language before they can tell you the name of every tree, plant, and bird outside 
your window? What will happen to them with their high standardized test scores when 
they discover they can't fry an egg, sew a button, join things, build a house, sail a boat, 
ride a horse, gut a fish, pound a nail, or bring forth life and nurture it? Do you believe 
having those things done for you is the same? You fool, then. Why do you cooperate in 
the game of compulsion schooling when it makes children useless to themselves as 
adults, hardly able to tie their own shoes? 

I learned to enjoy my own company in Monongahela, to feel at ease with anyone, to put 
my trust in personal qualities rather than statistical gradations. Anything else? Well, I 
learned to love there. 

Just across the river bridge and over the river hill was open farm country, and anyone 
could walk there in thirty minutes. Everyone was welcome, kids included. The farmers 
never complained. Mother would walk Joanie and me there in the early morning as mist 
was rising from the river. When she was seventy-two, I wrote to her trying to explain 
what I'm trying to explain now, how her town had given me underpinnings to erect a life 
upon: 

Dear Mom, 

I think what finally straightened me out was memory of those early morning walks you 
used to take with me up River Hill, with mist rising from the green river and trees, the 
open pits of abandoned coalmines producing their own kind of strange beauty in the soft 
silence of the new day. Coming out of the grit and rust of Monongahela, crossing the 
clean architecture of the old bridge with its dizzy view to the river below through the 
wide-set slats underfoot, that was a worthy introduction to the hills on the far shore. 
Going up those hills with you we startled many a rabbit to flight. I know you remember 
that, too. I was amazed that wild things lived so close to town. Then at the top we could 
see Monongahela in the valley the way birds must but when we turned away, everything 
was barns and cornland. You gave me our town. It was the best gift. 

My best teachers in Monongahela were Frank Pizzica, the high-rolling car dealer; old Mr. 
Marcus, the druggist wiser than a doctor; Binks McGregor, psychological haberdasher; 
and Bill Pulaski, the fun-loving mayor. All would understand my belief that we need to 
be hiring different kinds of people to teach us, people who've proven themselves in life 
by bearing its pain like free spirits. Nobody should be allowed to teach until they get to be 
forty years old. No one should be allowed anywhere near kids without having known 
grief, challenge, success, failure, and sadness. 

We ought to be asking men and women who've raised families to teach, older men and 
women who know the way things are and why. Millions of retired people would make 
fine teachers. College degrees aren't a good way to hire anybody to do anything. Getting 
to teach should be a reward for proving over a long stretch of time that you understand 
and have command of your mind and heart. 



And you should have to live near the school where you teach. I had some eccentric 
teachers in Monongahela, but there was not a single one didn't live close to me as a 
neighbor. All existed as characters with a history profiled in a hundred informal mental 
libraries, like the library of her neighbors my grandmother kept. 

Shooting Birds