129
Separations: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
from archive.org
Separations
For the first three years of my life
I lived in Monongahela. Then we moved to a tiny brick
house in Swissvale, an urban village
despite its bucolic name, a gritty part of industrial
Corporation, a favorite goal of
exploratory probes among the street
urchins on Calumet to which I quickly pledged my
loyalty.
On rainy days I would stand on the
porch watching raindrops. It was a next best to my
lost river, I suppose. Sometimes on
the porch of the next house, two enchanting little
girls, Marilyn and Beverly, played.
Because our porch was somewhat higher than theirs I
could watch them unobserved (at
least they pretended not to see me). Thus it was that I
fell in love.
Marilyn was a year older than me, already
in first grade. Even in 1939 that placed her
impossibly beyond me in every
regard. Still, as my next door neighbor, she spoke to me
from time to time in that friendly
but distant fashion grand ladies adopt with gardeners
and chauffeurs. You would have to
see how humble both our homes were to realize the
peculiarity of my analogy.
Beverly, her sister, was a year
younger. By the invisible code of the young in well-
schooled areas she might well not
have existed. Her presence on the social periphery
merited the same attention you might
give a barking puppy, but at the age of four I found
myself helplessly in love with her
older sister in the pure fashion the spiritual side of
nature reserves as a sign, I think,
that materiality isn't the whole or even the most
important part.
The next year, when I matriculated
at McKelvy elementary, first graders and second were
kept rigidly separated from each
other even on the playground. The first heartbreak of my
life, and the most profound, was the
blinding epiphany I experienced as I hung on the
heavy wire fence separating the
first grade compound from the combined second-/third-
grade play area. From the metal mesh
that I peered through astigmatically, I could see
Marilyn laughing and playing with
strange older boys, oblivious to my yearning. Each
sound she made tore at my insides.
The sobs I choked back were as deep at age five as
ever again I felt in grief, their
traces etched in my mind six decades later.
So this was what being a year
younger had to mean? My sister was two years older and
she hardly ever spoke to me. Why
should Marilyn? I slunk around to avoid being near her
ever again after that horrible sight
seared my little soul. I mention this epiphany of age-
grading because of the striking
contradiction to it Monongahela posed in presenting a
universe where all ages co-mingled,
cross-fertilizing each other in a dynamic fashion that
I suddenly recognized one day was
very like the colonial world described by Benjamin
Franklin in his Autobiography.
Swissvale taught me also that Mother
and Father were at war with each other — a sorry
lesson to learn at five. That the
battles were over differences of culture which have no
rational solution, I couldn't know.
Each couple who tries to merge strong traditions, as
my parents did, must accept the
challenge as vast, one not to be undertaken lightly or quit
on easily. The voices of timeless
generations are permanently merged in offspring.
Marriage is a legal fiction, but
marriage in one's children is not. There is no way to
divorce inside the kid's cells. When
parents war on each other, they set the child to
warring against himself, a contest
which can never be won. It places an implacable
enemy deep inside which can't be
killed or exorcised, and from whose revenge there is
no escape.
I thank God my parents chose the
middle road, the endless dialectic. Dad, the liberal
thinker (even though his party
affiliation was Republican and his attitude conservative)
always willing to concede the
opposition some points; Mom, the arch conservative even
though her voice was always liberal
Democrat, full of prickly principles she was prepared
to fight for, like Beau Geste, to
the bitter end.
For all the hardly bearable stresses
this endless combat generated, their choice to fight it
out for fifty years saved me from
even harsher grief. I love them both for struggling so
hard without quitting. I know it was
better for sister and me that way; it gave us a chance
to understand both sides of our own
nature, to make some accurate guesses about the gifts
we possessed. It prepared us to be
comfortable with ourselves. I think they were better for
the fifty-year war, too. Better than
each would have been alone.
[Interlude while the lump in my
throat subsides]
I remember FDR on the radio in our
postage-stamp living room announcing Pearl Harbor,
eight days before my sixth birthday.
I remember the uneasy feeling I harbored for a long
time over war reports from the Far
East that played out of the old Philco. I thought the
Japanese would cut off my hands
because the war news said that's what Japs did to
prisoners.
The high point of the Swissvale
years for me wasn't the war or the phenomenal array of
wax lips, sugar dot licorice, Fleers
Dubble Bubble, and other penny candies which
seemed to vanish all at once just a
short time after the war ended, like dinosaurs. It wasn't
leaping from a high wall with a
Green Hornet cape streaming behind as I fell like a stone,
scarring my knees for eternity. It
wasn't even Marilyn herself. The hinge in all my years,
separating what went before from all
that followed, was the night sister and I awakened
to the shrieking contralto of
Mother's voice and the quieter second tenor of Father's,
intermingling in the downstairs
entrance hall.
I remember crawling to the upstairs
landing bathed in shadows to find Sister already
there. The next five minutes were
the closest we ever came to each other emotionally, the
most important experience we ever
shared. Bootie was threatening to leave Andy if
something important wasn't done. She
was so upset that efforts to calm her down (so the
neighbors wouldn't hear) only fanned
the flames. With the hindsight of better than a half
century, I'm able to conclude now
that they were arguing over an abortion for what
would have been her third child, my
never-to-be brother or sister.
Mother was tired of being poor and
didn't want to be any poorer. She was tired of
constant work when she had grown up
with servants. She was overwhelmed by the
unfairness of being confined with
children, day in, day out, when her husband drove off
to the outside world in a suit and
tie, often to be gone for days at a time, living in hotels,
seeing exciting things. She would
have implied (because I was to hear the insinuation
many times in their marriage) that
he was living the life of Riley while she slaved.
Bootie wanted an abortion, and the
angry words that went back and forth discussing what
was then a crime wafted up the
stairwell to where two little children sat huddled in
uncomprehending disbelief. It was
the end of our childhood. I was seven, Joan was nine.
Finally Mother shouted, "I'm
leaving!" and ran out the front door, slamming it so hard it
made my ears hurt and the glass
ring. "If that's the way you want it, I'm locking the
door," my father said with a
trace of humor in his voice, trying to defuse mother's anger,
I think.
A few seconds of silence, and then
we heard a pounding and pounding upon the locked
door. "Open the door! Open the
door! Open the door or I'll break it down!" An instant
later her fist and entire arm
smashed through the glass panes in the front door. I saw
bright arterial blood flying
everywhere and bathing that disembodied hand and arm. I
would rather be dead than see such a
sight again. But as I write, I see Mother's bleeding
arm in front of my eyes.
Do such things happen to nice people?
Of course, and much more often than we
acknowledge in our sanitized, wildly
unrealistic human relations courses. It was the end
of the world. Without waiting to see
the next development, I ran back to bed and pulled
the pillow tightly over my ears. If
I had known what was coming next, I would have hid
in the cellar and prayed.
A week later, Swissvale was gone for
good. Just like that, without any warning, like the
blinking light of fireflies in our
long, narrow, weed-overgrown backyard, it stopped
abruptly on a secret firefly signal,
on a secret tragic signal — Marilyn and Tinker, penny
candy, McKelvy school and contact
with my Italian relatives stopped for the next six
years. With those familiar things
gone, my parents went too. I never allowed myself to
have parents again. Without any
good-byes they shipped us off to Catholic boarding
school in the mountains near
Latrobe, placed us in the hands of Ursuline nuns who
accepted the old road to wisdom and
maturity, a road reached through pain long and
strong.
There was no explanation for this
catastrophe, none at least that I could understand. In
my fiftieth year Mother told me
offhandedly in an unguarded moment about the abortion.
She wasn't apologetic, only in a
rare mood of candor, glad to be unburdened of this
weight on her spirit at last.
"I couldn't take another child," she said. We stopped for a
hamburger and the subject changed,
but I knew a part of the mystery of my own spirit
had been unlocked.
Boarding school was a harsh and
stark contrast with my former life. I had never made a
bed in my life. Now I was forced to
make one every morning, and the made bed was
inspected! Used to the privacy of my
own room, now I slept in a dormitory with fifteen
other boys, some of whom would cry
far into the night, every night. Sometimes I cried
with them. Shortly after arrival, I
was assigned a part in an assembly about roasting in
Hell, complete with stage sets where
we dressed up like flames. As the sinner unrepentant
was tormented by devils, I jumped up
and down to make it hot for the reprobate. I can
hear my own reedy falsetto squeezing
out these parentless verses:
Know ye not the burning anguish,
Of thee-eese souls, they-er heart's
dee-zire?
I don't want to beat up on the
sisters as if I were Fellini in Juliet of the Spirits. This was
all kosher according to their
lights, and it made a certain amount of sense to me, too. By
that point in time, although
nominally Roman Catholic, I probably hadn't been to church
more than ten times, counting
Baptism and First Communion. Just walking around,
though, is enough to make a kid
conscious of good and evil, conscious, too, of the
arbitrary nature of human justice.
Even a little boy sees rottenness rewarded and good
people smacked down. Unctuous
rationalizations of this by otherwise sensible adults
disgust little children. The sisters
had a story that gave satisfying human sense to these
matters. For all the things I hated
about Xavier, I actually liked being a flame and many
other aspects of the religious
narrative. They felt right somehow in a way the dead
universe of Newton, Darwin, or Marx
never did.
I carried the status of exile around
morning, noon, and night, the question never out of
mind — what had I done to be sent
here? Only a small part of me actually showed up in
class or playground or dining hall
each day, the rest of my being taking up residence in
the lost Oz of Monongahela, even
though Swissvale should have logically been the more
proximate yearning, since that was
where we lived when I was sent away. I missed the
green river, I think.
Joan was there, too, but we were in
separate dormitories. In the year we spent at Xavier I
can't remember holding a single
conversation with my sister. Like soldiers broken apart
in dangerous terrain, we struggled
alone looking for some private way out of
homelessness. It couldn't have
helped that Sister was two years older than I. By that time
she had been carefully
indoctrinated, I think, as I had been, that every age hangs
separately. Sticks to its own class.
You see how the trick is done?
At Xavier Academy, scarcely a week
passed without a beating. I was publicly whipped
for wetting the bed, whipped for
mispronouncing French verbs, whipped for hiding beets
inside my apple pie (I hated beets,
but the house rule was that vegetables had to be eaten,
dessert did not). Some telltale beet
corner where a brown apple should have been must
have given me away to a sharp-eyed
stoolie — the kapo who bussed away dessert. I was
nabbed at exactly the moment dining
hall loudspeakers blared the wartime hit, "Coming
in on a wing and a prayer. With one
motor gone we can still carry on, coming in on a
wing and a prayer." Most
dramatic of all the beatings I endured, however, was the one
following my apprehension by the
Latrobe police.
The spirit that came over Mother
when she shattered the glass must have revived in me to
set the stage for that whipping. One
night after bed check, I set out to get home to my
river. I felt sure my grandparents
wouldn't turn me away. I planned the break for weeks,
and took no one into my confidence.
I had a dozen bags of salted peanuts from the
commissary, a thin wool blanket and
a pillow, and the leather football Uncle Bud gave
me when he went away to war.
Most of the first night I walked,
hiding in the tall grass away from the road all the next
day, eating peanuts. I had gotten
away full of determination. I would make it home, I
knew, if I could only figure out
what direction Monongahela was in! But by
midafternoon the following day, I
made a fatal mistake. Tired of walking and hiding, I
decided to hitch a ride as I had
once seen Clark Gable do in a famous movie with
Claudette Colbert. I was picked up
by two matronly ladies whom I regaled deceitfully
with a story of my falling out of
the back of Granddad's pickup truck where dog Nappy
and I had been riding on the way
back to Mon City. "He didn't notice I was gone and he
probably thinks I jumped out when we
got home and went to play."
I had not calculated the fatal
football that would give me away. As a precaution against
theft (so they said) the Ursulines
stamped "St. Xavier" many times on every possession.
My football hadn't escaped the
accusatory stencil. As we chatted like old comrades about
how wonderful it was to be going to
Monongahela, a town out of legend we all agreed,
the nice ladies took me directly to
the Latrobe police, who took me directly — heedless of
my hot tears and promises to even
let them have my football — back to the ladies in black.
The whole school assembled to
witness my disgrace. Boys and girls arranged in a long
gauntlet through which I was forced
on hands and knees to crawl the length of the
administration building to where
Mother Superior stood exhorting the throng to avoid my
sorry example. When I arrived in
front of her, she slapped my face. I suppose my sister
must have been there watching, too.
Sister and I never discussed Xavier, not once, then or
afterwards.
The intellectual program at Xavier,
influenced heavily by a Jesuit college nearby,
constituted a massive refutation of
the watery brain diet of government schooling. I
learned so much in a single year I
was nearly in high school before I had to think very
hard about any particular idea or
procedure presented in public school. I learned how to
separate pertinent stuff from dross;
I learned what the difference between primary and
secondary data was, and the
significance of each; I learned how to evaluate separate
witnesses to an event; I learned how
to reach conclusions a half-dozen ways and the
potential for distortion inherent in
the dynamics of each method of reasoning. I don't
mean to imply at all that I became a
professional thinker. I remained very much a seven-
and eight-year-old boy. But I moved
far enough in that year to become comfortable with
matters of mind and intellect.
Unlike the harsh treatment of our
bodies at Xavier, even the worst boy there was assumed
to have dignity, free will, and a
power to choose right over wrong. Materialistic
schooling, which is all public
schooling even at its best can ever hope to be, operates as if
personality changes are ultimately
caused externally, by applications of theory and by a
skillful balancing of rewards and punishments.
The idea that individuals have free will
which supersedes any social
programming is anathema to the very concept of forced
schooling. 1 Was the Xavier year
valuable or damaging? If the Ursulines and Jesuits
hadn't forced me to see the gulf between
intelligence and intellect, between thinking and
disciplined thinking, who would have
taken that responsibility?
The greatest intellectual event of
my life occurred early in third grade before I was
yanked out of Xavier and deposited
back in Monongahela. From time to time a Jesuit
brother from St. Vincent's College
would cross the road to give a class at Xavier. The
coming of a Jesuit to Xavier was
always considered a big-time event even though there
was constant tension between the
Ursuline ladies and the Jesuit men. One lesson I
received at the visiting brother's
hands 2 altered my consciousness forever. By
contemporary standards, the class
might seem impossibly advanced in concept for third
grade, but if you keep in mind the
global war that claimed major attention at that
moment, then the fact that Brother
Michael came to discuss causes of WWI as a prelude
to its continuation in WWII is not
so far-fetched. 3 After a brief lecture on each combatant
and its cultural and historical
characteristics, an outline of incitements to conflict was
chalked on the board.
"Who will volunteer to face the
back of the room and tell us the causes of World War
One?"
"I will, Brother Michael,"
I said. And I did.
"Why did you say what you
did?"
"Because that's what you
wrote."
"Do you accept my explanation
as correct?"
"Yes, sir." I expected a
compliment would soon follow, as it did with our regular teacher.
"Then you must be a fool, Mr.
Gatto. I lied to you. Those are not the causes at all." It was
like being flattened by a steamroller.
I had the sensation of being struck and losing the
power of speech. Nothing remotely
similar had ever happened to me.
"Listen carefully, Mr. Gatto,
and I shall show you the true causes of the war which men
of bad character try to hide,"
and so saying he rapidly erased the board and in swift
fashion another list of reasons
appeared. As each was written, a short, clear explanation
followed in a scholarly tone of
voice.
"Now do you see, Mr. Gatto, why
you must be careful when you accept the explanation
of another? Don't these new reasons
make much more sense?"
"Yes, sir."
"And could you now face the
back of the room and repeat what you just learned?"
"I could, sir." And I knew
I could because I had a strong memory, but he never gave me
that chance.
"Why are you so gullible? Why
do you believe my lies? Is it because I wear clothing you
associate with men of God? I despair
you are so easy to fool. What will happen to you if
you let others do your thinking for
you?"
You see, like a great magician he
had shifted that commonplace school lesson we would
have forgotten by the next morning
into a formidable challenge to the entire contents of
our private minds, raising the
important question, Who can we believe? At the age of
eight, while public school children
were reading stories about talking animals, we had
been escorted to the eggshell-thin
foundation upon which authoritarian vanity rests and
asked to inspect it.
There are many reasons to lie to
children, the Jesuit said, and these seem to be good
reasons to older men. Some truth you
will know by divine intuition, he told us, but for the
rest you must learn what tests to
apply. Even then be cautious. It is not hard to fool
human intelligence.
Later I told the nun in charge of my
dorm what had happened because my head was
swimming and I needed a second
opinion from someone older. "Jesuits!" she snapped,
shaking her head, but would say no
more.
Now that Xavier is reduced to a
historical marker on Route 30 near Latrobe, I go back to
it in imagination trying to
determine how much of the panic I felt there was caused by the
school itself, how much by the
chemical fallout from my parents' troubled marriage, how
much from the aftershock of exile.
In wrestling with this, one thing comes clear: those
nuns were the only people who ever
tried to make me think seriously about questions of
religion. Had it not been for
Xavier, I might have passed my years as a kind of
freethinker by default, vaguely
aware that an overwhelming percentage of the entire
human race did and said things about
a God I couldn't fathom. How can I reconcile that
the worst year of my life left
behind a dimension I should certainly have been poorer to
have missed?
One day it was over. The night
before it happened, Mother Superior told me to pack; that
I would be leaving the next morning.
Strong, silent, unsentimental Pappy showed up the
next day, threw my bag into the car,
and drove me back to Monongahela. It was over, just
like that.
Back home I went as if I'd never
left, though now it was to a home without a father.
Mother was waiting, friendly and
smiling as I had last seen her. We were installed, the
three of us, in a double bed in a
back room over the printing office. Our room was
reached through the kitchen and had
another door opening onto an angled tarpaper roof
from which on clear nights the stars
could be seen, the green river scented. It was the
happiest day of my life.
Where father was, nobody ever told
me, and I never asked. This indifference wasn't
entirely generated by anger, but
from a distinct sense that time was rapidly passing while
I was still ignorant of important
lessons I had to learn.
In her best seller of the 1990s, It
Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton expressed puzzlement over the fact thatWestern
conservative thought
emphasizes innate qualities of
individual children in contrast to Oriental concepts which stress the efficacy
of correct procedure. There are a
number of paths which led to this
vital difference between West and East, but Western spiritual tradition, which
insists that salvation is a
individual matter and that
individual responsibility must be accepted is the most important influence by far.
See Chapter 14, "Absolute
Absolution."
Traditions of intellectual
refinement have long been associated with Jesuit orders. Jesuits were
school-masters to the elites of Europe well
before "school" was a
common notion. Not long ago it was discovered that the rules of conduct George
Washington carried with him were
actually an English translation of a
Jesuit manual, Decency Among the Conversations of Men, compiled by French
Jesuits in 1595.
It's almost impossible these days to
chart the enormous gulf between schooling of the past and that of the present,
in intellectual terms, but a
good way to get a quick measure of
what might be missing is to read two autobiographies: the first that of John
Stuart Mill, covering a
nineteenth-century home education of
a philosopher, the second by Norbert Wiener, father of, cybernetics, dealing
with the home education of
a scientist. When you read what an
eight-year-old's mind is capable of you will find my account pretty weak tea.
Principles
No comments:
Post a Comment