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

 

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