The Youth
"Does anyone know where Gandhi went to pre-school?"
Benjamin Samuels is a 19-year-old professional chef and amateur writer. He is a recent graduate of Deep Springs College and now lives in New York City.
Compared to the offspring of other mammals, human babies seem kind of unfinished: they come out slimy and fragile, unable to walk, talk, or think. As the months go by, and they acquire more of the trappings of humanity, it only becomes clearer that something is wrong. Their eyes are unfocused, their thoughts blurry, their attachments superficial. They are very nearly human, but not quite — as if a relative, perhaps a great-grandfather, was a tuna fish. In fact, a popular Enlightenment-era theory was that our physical development from infant to man re-enacted our evolution from amphibious lizards to thinking primates.
Today, the preferred explanation for our prolonged infancy is that it gives us the time to develop larger, more complicated brains. Most other mammals literally hit the ground running and must quickly concern themselves with the responsibilities of self-preservation. But our species inherits very little, not even the ability to recognize poisonous foods. Every day, our young confront dozens of people, objects, and sensations for the first time, without very little help from any in-built biological apparatus, and must decide what to make of it all. They are parties to an interesting evolutionary bargain, wherein they relinquish all natural and physical advantages in order to be built from nothing by wiser adults. In this way, they resemble spiritual or religious seekers.
In exchange for our pains, us adults receive the rare opportunity to consciously select our society’s most valuable fruits for preservation — an accelerated version of natural selection. But as philosophers since Plato have realized, this arrangement makes us somewhat uncomfortably reliant on the race of half-humans with whom we share the earth. Without children, every one of our human institutions — from Apple to the Catholic Church — would have a maximum lifespan of eighty years. “Democracy must be born anew in every generation,” sighed the American philosopher John Dewey, “and education is its midwife.”
This transfer of power leaves adults very vulnerable, even if children do not realize it until many years later. Teaching a child your entire way of life, both deliberately and by example, exposes all of its inner contradictions and conceits. Anyone with a younger sibling has had to answer the question “Why?” several more times than they were comfortable — I myself have been stumped by the children more often than I would like to admit. Why do we say “Good morning?” Why are some people religious? Why do we eat dessert last? Why does a fan make you cooler?
But all of these questions pale in importance next to their single, chief concern, which they voice every morning on most days in most weeks of the year, never to receive a good answer. “Do I have to go to school?” they ask. “Why?” And every morning, regardless of whatever answer their parent can or cannot come up with, the average American spiritual seeker is forcefully woken, dressed, and plopped down among a dozen drooling babies — who can, like him, neither talk nor walk and have had no formal training in education. Bizarrely bright cartoons flash quickly at him from screens and stickers. Everything he touches leaves Lysol on his fingers. Reviewing his new friends, most of whom are wallowing in plastic diapers full of poop, he looks around in disbelief. What is this place? Why am I here? What the hell is going on? And he starts crying for his parents, but they are gone.
Do you remember this zoo of gross sensations, dropped into the tender years of your youth like a hydrogen bomb? Probably not — hence your indifference. This phenomenon is referred to as “infantile amnesia,” and is what separates your self-perception from the very period of its formation. It inclines you to over-emphasize the years you can remember, worrying over the events of your adolescence as if they were anything but the chemical varnish on a finished product.
So hidden by memory, screened from sight, obscured by the mushy tongues and amnesiac minds of quasi-conscious children, pre-school is allowed to work unbelievable weirdness on the youth. Over the first six years of their lives, they are swung feet-first through a hall of mirrors of a kind they will never encounter again, through haptically stimulating baths of shaving cream and Styrofoam, past mosaics of bright, chemical colors, whimsically commanded and cajoled in loopy, lunatic-grade shrieks by an army of underpaid teenagers and old women. When the carnival is over, they are whisked off and sat at a desk, there to learn mathematics and never to see their pre-school again. I was never bothered by any of this. Pre-school struck me as belonging to a different world, with different rules.
And anyways, I am not generally squeamish about far-out educational experiments: about a year ago, I graduated from Deep Springs College, a cattle ranch and two-year college in Death Valley. There are only twelve students in a Deep Springs class, and each is responsible, in addition to his or her studies, for a small corner of the ranch. For one hundred years, Deep Springs has, through the meditative practice of alfalfa farming, purported to train young people in self-discipline. Its students have developed a system of government by which all the events on the farm, from droughts to break-ups, can be diplomatically resolved. For most of my time there, I was thrilled to practice what our founder referred to as “a life of service to humanity.”
But after graduation, without cows to herd or alfalfa to water, I felt adrift. My desire to lead a life of service, while ardent, had no obvious application, and I found that my classes on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations did not in fact qualify me to work in Washington, D.C. For months, I bounced between jobs.
Sometime around then, I got the funny feeling that my education had gone by too quickly. I felt top-heavy — I was uncertain why I did things the way I did. I felt I had another whole human being inside of me who had escaped education. So, out of a partly regressive desire to understand myself, I went to work in a pre-school. I felt that there I could examine learning as a spiritual practice, divorced from its familiar preoccupations and rewards. I wanted to better understand the mystical internal transformation that a good education is supposed to effect — that I felt it had accomplished only incompletely in me.
“No one will call any child his own, and no child will call anyone father or mother”
– Plato
Very young children pose an odd problem. Since they are still halfway between human and amoeba, they must be prepared for adulthood while still being protected from its dangers. They must be given independence, but never left alone. They must make their own decisions, but only so long as they never matter. They must bear the consequences for their actions so long as they are not painful. They must be punished but not frightened, rewarded but not spoiled. Even when they seem most mature, they are moments away from collapse. But if you treat them like children, they will remember it, and nurse a terribly sophisticated grudge. How do you manage them during this delicate period, which can last from three to six years?
The required combination of love and formal distance often seems impossible. So modern parents generally give their children over to “professionals” for as much of the day as they can afford. These professionals usually associate themselves with an organization devoted to childcare — somewhat fancifully referred to as a school.
Schooling the youth, as an institution, is not new. The ancient Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Sumerians all had formal colleges. But these were meant for young adults: spiritually or scientifically inclined men pursuing a particular interest. Elementary school — the practice of educating children before they came to maturity — was a nineteenth century invention, credited to several dozen American, English, Italian, and German reformers. It was not until the next century that public opinion moved further, and began to favor “pre-schooling” children — that is, placing infants in a classroom-like setting in which they might accustom themselves to learning even before they became mentally capable of study.
It is easy to see why this setup did not occur to the Sumerians. Not only do children lack the ability to make contributions to any field of human knowledge, they even lack the more basic mental faculties required to receive information. Supposedly, we educate children parallel to their developing abilities, teaching them only what they can understand. But young children can understand very, very little. Mentally, they are forgetful, ignorant, and easily bored — even compared to college students. Physically, they are restless and clumsy. Socially, they are selfish, careless, and rude. At least, they don’t seem like good candidates for formal schooling.
Besides, why not wait? One famous study, conducted in 2009, found “no difference in reading achievement between children who had been given early instruction in reading and those who had not.” I’ve found this to be true in my own life: due to a gap in my high school education, I never had the occasion to learn biology. But a few months ago, I decided that I wanted to become certified as an EMT, so I bought a biology textbook and began studying. I have found it engrossing — much more than physics, chemistry, and calculus, all subjects which cost me years of grief. What was the rush? Whither those lovely spring days I spent trapped in a classroom? Why compel children to learn through years of annoyance and confusion what their older self will soon be able to breeze through in a weekend?
And yet for me, and most likely for you, it is hard to shake the suspicion that those years are somehow necessary. Is it strange that we give our youngest, dearest children nine-to-five jobs in places they routinely tell us they hate? Maybe, or maybe their prefrontal cortex is not developed enough to make those judgments in the first place. Maybe an endless summer would have bored me. There is after all some part of a child — the mature element — that seems to love structured, directed activity just as strongly as another part — the amoeba element — is repulsed. The child’s dual nature does not resolve easily either way.
The problem first attracted the attention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose book Emile, published in 1792, remains an invisible textbook for most pre-school educators. To illustrate his objections to modern society, Rousseau imagines tutoring Emile, a child uncorrupted by “civilized” influence. Emile is not valued for his maturity in science or the arts, and so he is not groomed for public displays of virtuosity or taste. What is essential about Emile is his status as a free human being — as a result, his education must begin immediately, training his body and soul in addition to his mind. The invention of “pre-schools” (the first of which appeared in Germany just a few years after the publication of Emile) is often credited to this shift in focus.
Rousseau himself was not very interested in this consequence of his book. Emile is transparently a vessel for Rousseau to explain his own ideas — Rousseau’s version of Plato’s interlocutors. But whereas Plato’s interlocutors are crude, mean, confused, sensual, thoughtless, and generally malformed, Rousseau’s child is meek, innocent, vulnerable, and essentially good. Socrates must brutally embarrass his victims, physically dragging them out from their ignorance, but Emile requires only fellowship and gentle guidance from his mentor. This contrasting depiction of humanity’s natural state is perhaps the only reason for Rousseau’s choice of subject. For when reading Emile, one is struck by how little it resembles either a manifesto or a guidebook. Emile himself is often forgotten in favor of asides on other subjects. In other words, it does not really seem very interested in children themselves. “I have myself attempted to raise children,” admits Rousseau, “and have failed. I shall never do it again.”
So Emile does not offer much in the way of practical suggestions. It is, however, an articulate record of its author’s annoyance with the problem of raising children. Rousseau, like many of us, sees children as symbolic of an adult’s angelic inner nature, and so understands teaching as a highly sacred, easily botched responsibility. Children are a more “natural” version of ourselves: simple, trusting, devoid of neuroses.
What frustrates Rousseau is that Emile, being young, lacks the ability to discern what within himself is natural. He is unable to recognize the influence of civilization, and certainly unable to discriminate between civilization’s good and bad influences; he imitates whatever he comes into contact with. Therefore, contrary to what you might expect from the father of progressive education, the world that Rousseau builds for Emile is carefully architected to preclude any contact with human society. Rousseau refuses to give him toys, books, or playmates, and carefully censors his own behavior so as to limit Emile’s exposure to vice, stupidity, and intemperance. In his free time (which is all the time) Emile plays with sticks, plants vegetables, and goes on lonely walks. At times, Rousseau appears embarrassed by his own contortions.
“Forgive the paradox,” he writes. "If children could spring at one bound from the mother's breast to the age of reason, the education given them nowadays would be suitable; but in the due order of nature they need one entirely different. They should not use the mind at all, until it has all its faculties… The earliest education ought, then, to be purely negative… If you could do nothing at all, and allow nothing to be done; if you could bring up your pupil sound and robust to the age of twelve years, without his knowing how to distinguish his right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would from the very first open to reason.”
Two centuries later, Rousseau’s “pre-school” has become universal, but his embarrassment has disappeared. In its place are elaborate curricula on geology and the universe, taught in dreamlike technicolor classrooms pasted everywhere with paintings and high-res photographs; filled inside with hundreds of buckets of puzzles, games, toys, tools, and electronics; an artificial world resembling nature.
“The human mind is mathematical by nature.”
– Maria Montessori
Over this past academic year, I have gotten to know sixty or so young children across two different pre-schools. Since graduation, I’ve slowly forgotten their faces and even how big they were. I remember them instead by their distinctive gestures, phrases, and accents. Some of the children copped these from their parents, but others made them up. One of the children, whom I’ll call Toby, spoke in what sounded to me like a working-class British accent. I asked Toby’s father, who was from Vermont, where his son could possibly have picked up an accent like that.
“Beats heck out of me,” his father said cheerfully.
The immanence of these mannerisms within their “character” seemed impossible to doubt, as did certain social postures. Certain children were always excited by command; others by obedience; others by solitude. As early as two years old, the children build primitive social orders on the basis of these preferences. There is very little coercion involved and very little force. Children are obedient before there are police; studious before there are books; industrious before there is work; entrepreneurial before there is capital; and it is very tempting to imagine that you are watching the whole country in utero.
Then again, it is silly to imagine these attitudes will be preserved exactly through adolescence. How long could my young Vermonter introduce himself to his junior high school classmates as “Tur-beh” before begging his parents for speech therapy? It is similarly hard to imagine that the simple social roles in a classroom will never be overruled — in fact, adults who are overly enthusiastic about power, servitude, or isolation are often called childish.
The status of that word as an insult should clue us in to the danger of identifying a child completely with his future self. A child and the adult he will become are more like cousins: possessing certain resemblances which are charming mostly because they are so scarce.
And for this we should be thankful, for consider the magnitude of what awaits our nation’s newborn children. Today, they are petted and cooed to sleep; tomorrow, they will go eighty miles an hour down interstate highways. They will be expected to start a family, and they’ll have to start filing taxes. Prolonged suspension of disbelief in this incredible magic trick can wear on an educator. I had fretful daydreams of my two year olds peeing themselves during interviews and first dates. What would become of them?
In those moments, I had to remind myself that most children grow up sane, or at least potty-trained. It is helpful to notice the striking regularity with which children achieve age-appropriate milestones — walking at one, talking at two, counting at three, reading at six, writing at seven, and so on, with less variation than you might think.
At a basic level, teaching children is very easy, as it consists in winning battles that have already been won. The effect of the teacher on this process is debatable. For several weeks I oversaw the three year-olds alongside an old woman who had been teaching pre-school for forty years, Her faith in the magic had clearly snapped; she now saw herself standing, vigilante-style, between her children and a padded cell. “You wouldn’t believe it to look at them,” she would tell me proudly, “but just a year ago, most of these kids were still in diapers.”
Sometimes the child’s silent inner biological machine, at which a teacher may shout and cajole and make weird faces to no effect, fills a person with a comforting faith in the supernatural forces that shepherd the course of our lives. But the impassivity of the machine can just as easily give a pre-school a haunted feeling. One four year old, who we’ll call Irene, would pretend to be asleep, waiting patiently until all her classmates had been put down for a nap, before jumping up and stomping on their hands. Irene had a nasty smile ironed on her face as she did this. She had passed through kind teachers and strict teachers, had been treated by doctors and therapists, had been prescribed medication and taken off to no effect, and she was spoken of by the teachers with a familiar, bottomless dread.
Again: I was once cutting strawberries for a class of one year olds when a long-time teacher — we’ll call her Manjula — called an autistic girl away from her snack to go to the bathroom. Normally, the girl was very cooperative. Today she refused. Manjula took her snack away and dragged her, howling, to the toilet — but the girl would not pee. From around the corner, I heard the girl shrieking painfully. “Jula, no! No, Jula! Jula, no!” The girl made herself hoarse by screaming “Jula, no!” But Manjula was quiet. After several minutes, alarmed, I stopped cutting the strawberries. And then the bathroom door crashed open and Manjula, sobbing, tumbled out, clutching the terrified girl to her chest.
I understood Manjula’s reaction from similar episodes with my brother, whom a genetic disorder has frozen at the mental age of four. Two dozen family members, educators, nannies and specialists have tried to teach him to say the alphabet, but after ten years, he can recognize only a few letters. If you persist in nagging him, or if you prod him and stroke him and otherwise try to annoy him into submission, he might bite you, hard. A bite from a human being is an emotionally charged attack, which can provoke crazed, even violent responses from polite people. I have seen family members break down in tears, like Manjula, when bitten. These episodes are utterly overwhelming. They break the benevolent trust we have in nature to deliver us ultimately from fear, stupidity, and savagery towards intelligence, tranquility, and self-control.
“Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, and the quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group.”
– John Dewey
Somewhere along the line, someone or other coined the phrase “natural consequences” to describe the preferred response of an educator to misbehavior. The idea is that, as much as possible, the educator is to trust in the nature-spirit that guides a young child from milestone to milestone. Since this process is internal, and seems to work with or without the teacher’s encouragement, modern-day teachers adopt a laid-back attitude towards their pupils. This attitude is most difficult to maintain when a child does things which are deliberately designed to destroy their teacher’s peace.
One morning, one of the three year olds in my care refused to put on his shoes. It was a hot day, and the heated cement on the playground was sure to hurt his feet. My fellow teacher tried to reason with him — he began to yell. So, in line with a “natural consequences” philosophy, the other teacher disengaged.
“Go right ahead,” she said suavely. “Go right on ahead.”
When the children went out onto the playground, the kid was dismayed to find that the cement was too hot. He looked around at his classmates, befuddled, then back at his teacher, who had a delighted smile on her face.
“Well, well,” crowed the teacher, as the kid began to cry. “Look who’s facing the natural consequences of their actions!”
Implicitly or explicitly, gloating is the unfortunate climax of most “natural consequences” sequences. This is not quite in line with Rousseau’s philosophy, which holds that the defining emotional experience of childhood is of the child’s sense of themself as “master of the universe.” When an adult enters this universe, it must therefore be either as a fellow tyrant or a slave to the child; either way will accustom the child to thinking of social relationships as chains of command and obedience. Gloating therefore breaks the spell of the “natural consequences” by reintroducing the teacher as a tyrant — albeit a tricky one. It was because of the fragility of this situation that Rousseau threw up his hands and left the young Emile alone, in silence or in nature, as much as possible.
Then again, it is strange to even consider applying Rousseau’s principles to a modern pre-school, where a child is never alone and never in nature. He is continually being transitioned: inside to outside, snack to potty, chair to mat, waking to sleeping and back again. During his thirty-minute long play periods he is pushed to socialize with his random, pre-arranged collection of “friends,” who often whack him and whom he often whacks.
And anyway, it is surprisingly difficult to leave a kid by himself (let alone “in nature,” wherever that is). As a routine, it makes him bored and restless. As a punishment, it doesn’t work. “Let him cry it out,” advises the doofus with no kids: once, I listened to a five year-old child scream continuously for three hours, at the end of which “it” was as firmly lodged as when he started.
My personal experience has been that, as a general rule, children cannot consciously change their behavior. What upsets them now will upset them indefinitely. They are not eventually embarrassed of their behavior, or apologetic for the disturbance, or tired of performing: these are only feelings that adults would have, if they were told to fake a tantrum over something trivial, whereas for the child the incident is not trivial. A toy car bores us, since we own other things. When someone bumps into us, we ignore them. But this is not a sign that our desire for attachment, control, ownership, and privacy has disappeared — it has only migrated elsewhere. The symbols of safety and love attach to bigger and more complicated things. Burn someone’s house down, wreck their car, punch them in the face: they will feel rage, confusion, sadness, panic, and loss before they assess the damage.
So the teachers who are really serious about finding and respecting a child’s inner “nature” generally do additional training. The character of their training depends on what they think children “naturally” do once unlocked — liberated, or loved, or left alone — and they fall, predictably, into two camps.
The first camp holds that children are naturally drawn to music, art, nature, movement, imagination, community, and free-play. Its ideas were first articulated in 1907 by a popular Austrian mystic named Rudolph Steiner, the clairvoyant founder of the international Anthroposophical Society, whose supporters included Saul Bellow, Vassily Kandinsky, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Several years after the publication of his educational treatise, Steiner was called to build a school for the children of employees at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany and the methods employed at the “Waldorf school” quickly became famous, especially in Europe. Today, there are over thirteen hundred Waldorf schools worldwide.
The second camp holds that children are naturally drawn to reading, writing, math, and other patterned activities requiring extended private concentration. This view was formalized by an Italian professor of hygiene named Maria Montessori, whose success in reforming inner-city Roman children was partly responsible for legitimizing naturalist pre-schools in the public eye. Her 1909 book The Montessori Method was a massive bestseller, especially in America, aided by the vocal support of celebrities like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. In the intervening decades, Montessori schools have produced a surprising number of our nation’s entrepreneurs, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé. A governing body, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) recognizes fifteen thousand schools worldwide, but the number of un-certified Montessori programs may be as high as sixty thousand.
Magic or analysis, spontaneity or order — as far as I can tell, a teacher’s affiliation depends largely on their own desires, which are generally taken, in line with the “inner-child-within-all-of-us” idea, as an acceptable stand-in for a child’s nature, which can otherwise be difficult to determine.
This rule of thumb is only permitted because the hard data seems to go both ways. Even controlling for wealth, graduates of both Montessori and Waldorf systems have higher test scores — in fact, this is true for all alternative education systems, including homeschooling, and seems to do less with the school’s philosophy and more with the emphasis that a given family places on education. More specifically, the outcomes for both systems neatly reflect their priorities: Waldorf students tend to be more creative, physically healthy, and politically active; Montessori students tend to have higher motivation and executive functioning.
Being American, and having very advanced executive functioning (time management and that), I decided Montessori was the place to be. So, in addition to my duties at the traditional pre-school, I signed myself up for a few shifts at the local Montessori, where I was pleased to join a clean, well-lit classroom with no shaving cream and only a few tasteful prints on the wall.
This setup was no accident. The defining feature of the Montessori philosophy is its belief that children are easily confused, agitated, and overall hyper-excited by most stimuli: noise, mess, and, most of all, other people. When children enter this state of overwhelm, their minds shut down and pause development; or, worse, begin to develop in completely delirious, off-the-wall, even dangerous new directions.
This belief is condensed into the mantra that children only learn from their environment. This means that Montessori classroom has a sacred, almost pagan feel. It is very orderly: calibrated to target what Dr. Montessori referred to as the child’s “mathematical mind,” a proto-rational drive for organization and precision that lies behind formal disciplines like reading, writing, and science. Its toys, which are called “works,” may only be handled through a ritualized sequence of steps, and often only as part of a “progression” with other works.
One work involves ten wooden pegs of increasing size that must be placed in corresponding wells. This work can occupy a three or four year old for nearly a half hour. When the child has mastered this work, another set of pegs will be introduced, these increasing only in height, not width. Eventually, the child will manage forty pegs — a set increasing in width, a set in height, a set in both at once, and a set in reverse; that is, increasing in height as it decreases in width. For the forty-peg version, children are encouraged to find a friend with whom they can discuss. Montessori schools usually group three years of children together in each classroom, so if they are really stuck, they can ask a six year old. Nearly every minute of the day is regulated by the children, with teachers stepping in only to keep order.
At the beginning of the day, for example, two children cut the cheese, core the apples, spoon the peanut butter, and count out forty crackers for their classmates. Another child retrieves the dishes from the dishwasher, another feeds the fish, another takes out the recycling. When a child feels sleepy, they take a nap. When a child wants to play outside, they simply walk out the door. When a child wants to listen to music, they may pick up a pair of blue headphones and listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Otherwise the children glide in silent concentration from work to work.
Since there are no transitions in Montessori, there were no opportunities for cunning or tactical force of the kind I was used to, and I was unsure how to distinguish myself as an educator to my students. But naturally that was the point: “The greatest sign of success for the teacher,” wrote Dr. Montessori, “is to be able to say, ‘the children are now working as though I did not exist.’” So I stood, watchful, in a corner, as the children went about their business.
But the thing about jobs requiring your nonexistence is that they suck. After a couple weeks, I began to dread coming to work and had weird, sad dreams about playing blocks with the kids. I felt ghostly, low-class: like a servant to a rich family. Which in some ways, of course, I was. My benefactors appeared around eight, looking busy, and then reappeared at five, looking tired. I spoke to them about their children. They nodded. Then they left.
The children themselves seemed indifferent to the whole system — they treated it as neither a privilege nor a nuisance but as a fact of reality, like eating breakfast. However the system certainly seemed to delight their parents, who, every June, receive a very impressive folder full of goods that their child has produced that year. These range from color-coded maps of Asia to anatomical diagrams of insect species. From the teacher, they receive steady reports of their child’s mastery over successive works, which reassure them of their child’s continuing normalcy. The quiet, clean Montessori classroom — vacuum-sealed against distraction — produces excellent conditions in which to monitor a child’s development.
My job as an assistant teacher was to keep the children quiet, which was easy, since they were quiet already. So I did a lot of observation (a term that Montessori cosmology favorably contrasts with “intervention”). I observed that children naturally seek out friends and associates, but not enemies. I observed that none of the children seemed to have been born anti-social. I observed the striking similarity between the behavioral patterns of children and animals. I observed that very young children do not particularly enjoy eating, though they prefer bread, fruit, and sweets to everything else.
I also observed that, contrary to a theory of Rousseau’s, there are in fact bona fide geniuses among the child population. I had the pleasure to befriend one at the Montessori school and two at the traditional school. Their genius was so obviously not a question of normal human intelligence, but rather of some freakish neuro-chemical mutation, that I am certain that each of the three geniuses is destined to change the world dramatically — destined in a way that is obvious to any observer, even one who like myself does not usually believe in destiny.
Their genius manifested differently. The first student at the traditional school, a three year old whom we’ll call Leo, had a genius for imagination, which could be triggered only by deep physical relaxation. Usually, Leo was distracted, sleepy, and limp, almost to the point of concern. But after several minutes of play, Leo’s eyes would widen and he would begin narrating long, eerie stories, sometimes from memory and often in rhyme. He was rarely open to suggestion or improvisation — the stories were apparently very real to him. He spoke in a low, urgent voice as he relayed them. The deeper the trance, the more sophisticated and surreal the imagery became: one story, about a tribe of eyeless, long-haired women, still occasionally makes me shudder.
The second student, a one year old we’ll call Josephine, had a genius for fun. Whether physical, social, or imaginary, she discriminated very precisely between fun games and boring games. On the playground, she designed obstacle courses for me and her classmates. At snack time, I would ask after her family and she would ask after mine. During free play, whenever she got bored with one of my games, she would politely tap my shoulder and lead me towards the couch, where she would rearrange the pillows to look like a train, or the blankets to look like a mountain, or whatever. Sometimes as I changed her diaper, she would murmur her favorite lines from Moana, chuckling. It was a weird talent. But of all the students of all ages that I taught, she was far and away the most fun to spend time with — I often imagined her as a comedian or an actress, despite the fact that her vocabulary was only about thirty words.
The Montessori genius, a five year old we’ll call Sammy, had a genius for organization. Upon being released into the playground for recess, most of the Montessorians continued the same quiet study they had conducted indoors, only now with grass, rocks, and worms. This did not interest Sammy, so, every day, she gathered all of the other girls and sat them at her feet.
“Today,” she would shout, “we are going to play The Lions Visit Their Neighbors The Deer. Everyone on my left will be a Lion, everyone on my right will be a Deer. Lions, you must bring over all the materials for teatime. Deer, you must be very afraid of the Lions. Then we will see what happens.”
Sometimes someone would object to the game. “I don’t want to be a Deer” or “I’m tired.”
Then Sammy would shake her head, tossing a huge mane of hair back and forth. “Whoever is tired can take a nap on that bench. And not everyone can be a Lion, or else the Lions wouldn’t have any neighbors. So in fact let’s scrap the whole thing and play Several Rocks Tumble Down a Hill, Only To Find Themselves In A Magical Wonderland, Located Somewhere in Mexico, Where The Popcorn Grows From Jujube Trees. Look — here’s a jujube tree now!”
And so on. Every day she would conduct the adventures, followed by a small mob of girls, changing the game just as soon as she got bored. Her high degree of self-control, combined with remarkable social awareness and an immense vocabulary, became the magnet around which the playground revolved. She calmly transformed the reality through which she walked. The other girls trailed her in a daze, and followed her instructions as far as they could understand them. In other words, they treated her as an adult.
Were Leo, Josephine, and Sammy’s gifts the fruits of the philosophies of their respective schools — Leo and Josephine’s tending more towards free play, Sammy’s towards structured activities? Certainly not: to meet any of them was to be knocked out by an explosion of their inner force, which rushed continuously out of their bodies and into their surroundings. Does anyone know where Gandhi went to pre-school? My three students treated the world distantly but politely, as religious ministers sometimes do, and rarely displayed fear or fascination unless it was with a game of their own construction. I felt as if they had already accomplished a number of important things. So, as we habitually do with important adults, I treated their childhood as a curiosity.
In fact, whenever any student displayed a similar spark, my overwhelming instinct was to treat the gift as indigenous to the child. This was partly because the students never seemed to care less about the classroom than during their moments of brilliancy. One four-year-old Montessori student once took it into his head to design the engine room of a steamship, down to every vent, gasket, and exhaust pipe, and so he did so for several hours straight, despite a particularly noisy classroom. One day in the traditional school, a particularly timid, clumsy three year old suddenly learned to throw a baseball with damn near Little League accuracy — and he did so over and over again, gleefully smashing paintings and denting toys, right in the face of his teacher’s furious disapproval.
In those moments, it was difficult not to detect a certain tired resignation, on the child’s part, with the school “rules” — similar to the resignation that you or I might experience in, say, prison. Usually they followed the rules. But the spell was clearly broken. The teacher’s authority derives from their mediating position between the child and reality. If the kid is young enough, then this looks like magic: the teacher makes food and toys appear, darkens and brightens the classroom, leads them to exciting places, and tells long stories in rhyme, apparently from memory.
Even to older children, adults are at a permanent advantage. Sometimes, when I was at a loss with an especially troublesome five year old, I would use slang words that he did not know.
Holding a bucket of sand above the head of a terrified classmate, he would say: “Butthead! Dare me to do it!”
Then I would calmly say something like: “Man, you’re tripping.”
“Tripping?”
His body would go slack — his pupils would softly dilate — and he would cock his head with shocking gentleness.
“Sure, ‘tripping.’ It means, like, you’re buggin’ out.”
He would put the sand down and sit at my feet.
“Bug… buggin’... buggin’ out…?”
“Uh-huh.”
This trick operates on the same principle as other similarly handy classics. “I’m going to count to five…” plays on the child’s bottomless uncertainty about crossing the pale of the normal. They have no idea what happens after “five.” You could leave forever. You could bite their head off. Or you could do nothing. They don’t have enough experience with you or any other human being to decide conclusively one way or the other.
But periodically the child’s fear disappears and the world’s infinite possibilities, of which the teacher was master, collapse into a pinhole. The feeling is usually temporary — yet as long as it lasts, they are beyond the teacher’s reach. The feeling can be induced in one of two ways. The first is the kid genius’s excess of self-confidence, which leads them to believe that they do not need their teacher.
The other type of feeling is more dangerous and in my experience almost universal to kids with a mild mental disability. Where the geniuses see their teacher as harmless, the “problem kids” see the teacher as malicious, and their rules as instruments of domination. They believe they are inhabiting a Matrix expressly constructed to keep them down, and that no one around them is awake to this fact. Once a kid gets this idea in his head, it’s hard to get it out, because, unfortunately, it’s kind of true: most of the classroom “rules” are designed to stifle a child’s natural impulses towards speed, noise, and destruction (all of which are more pronounced in children with disabilities), and those rules are typically not (as the teachers claim) actually in the interest of the child’s safety. By and large, the rules have an innocent motive, namely, to make the teacher’s job more comfortable, but the problem children don’t see that far. They are crushed on all sides by rules — and punished more aggressively than their classmates for breaking them — so they suspect something sinister. Their suspicion tends to run away with them. They are unfazed by punishment. Kindness they take as weakness. If they can’t be brought back to earth, then they are prescribed medication. But by that time they are out of pre-school, and the vengeance they exact on the world for their treatment will be somebody else’s problem.
The existence of these two extremes beyond the reach of authority gives any classroom a paradoxical feel. Schools for young children have a big, eventful, almost holy aura around them — even today, no politician advocates cutting funding for public school. For the last two hundred years, the childhood of every living American has been coextensive with their elementary or pre-school, making it difficult to discuss the education of young children without a certain tenderness. Like democracy, we feel possessive even over its errors. We feel that the idea is good, whatever the mistakes in execution, and feel grateful for the existence of a Department of the Future to which we can at least direct our complaints. On the whole, children who are scholarly can have their talents nursed, and problem children can be socialized and taught discipline.
And yet these two groups for whom school is theoretically pivotal — the intelligent and the underdeveloped — are in fact the two groups who care the least for its influence. Reliably, upon entering a pre-school classroom, you will find the state-approved sensory tables, play mats, and writing stations manned by friendly, industrious mediocrities; the problem children sneak under the tables, looking for things to break, as the geniuses shuffle, bored, between the books and the crayons. And this middle class of children, you suspect, is enjoying its “learning” just about as much as they would a park or a public pool, if not a little less. Then the fear grips you. Not that pre-school is traumatizing or malforming the kids — everyone from the state legislature to the janitor is on guard against that — but simply that it is wasting their time. It is executing Rousseau’s original fantasy of “doing nothing and allowing nothing to be done.”
After all, if the “school” bit was dropped, you would not find the kids at home but at a daycare or with a nanny. This is pre-school’s original sin: whatever its promises and attractions, it is fundamentally a holding pen, into which children are wishfully disappeared so their parents can go to work.
Even happy, well-adjusted kids find this setup confusing. “Do I have to go to school?” they ask their parents in the morning. “Why?” At drop-off, they get quiet and their eyes go big. They grope half-consciously for bits of cloth to suck on. Both of my schools had developed the same routine to manage the transition: the parents left quickly, while their child was still stuck, comprehending the classroom. Then the teacher brought the child to the window, where they could wave goodbye as their parents drove away. “Quick, they’re leaving,” we would tell them. “You have to say goodbye!” The ritual acquired a compulsive logic of its own. Some younger children would tearfully refuse their parents’ hugs, rushing to the window so as not to miss the goodbye.
Teachers, like parents, come in different stripes. Both groups can be cruel or friendly, careless or attentive. But one is paid by the other. Teachers cannot be left alone with children. They learn how to resuscitate infants and administer epinephrine. They are taught the legal ratio of teachers-to-children for each age group. They speak calmly. They do not yell. They do not tease the children. Several problem children, mostly boys, tried many times to provoke me to wrestle them. But this kind of game — “body play” is the condescending and obscene technical term — is illegal. This broke my heart, because I had witnessed firsthand with my brother the liberating effect of wrestling on children who feel physically constrained. All the same, I was not ready to explain an injury to a parent. I was a professional, and my job was to watch children while their parents were at work. Like any professional, a good teacher delivers the parent a series of useful, conservative wins — potty-training, counting, etc. A bad teacher hurts their kids.
This — the daily substitution of parents for professionals — is pre-school’s great contribution to our culture’s social education. The transfer is ritualized and acceptable emotions are established. It’s an emotional model of a day which will be recognizable to any college student: every morning, the children are put on hold, and every evening they resume their real lives.
Is that so bad? It’s the kind of loss that is hard to quantify. Perhaps the tuition? A $15,000 investment in nothing? But it’s not nothing: it’s a safe, clean classroom, with cots and snacks, in which the child can learn a series of tricks which are fun and useful besides serving as an early-warning system for autism. What’s the alternative, anyways? Would you rather they go to a cheap daycare? Would you rather they sit at home alone?
No, the loss is something else. It’s easy to miss, and barely matters. It happens a dozen times a minute in every classroom I’ve seen. A teacher raises a finger, or sends a glance across the classroom. A child puts out a hand and then jerks it back. He opens and then closes his mouth. The classroom stays quiet — some minor disturbance is averted.
It’s nothing catastrophic, but it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. It’s the manufacturing of a reflex that will later be treated as organic. The teacher’s admonishing voice prints onto the child’s mind like a diamond on vinyl. You can hear it playing back, in a ghostly, indistinct way, for years and years and years, whenever they do something strange or shameful. For a few years before the superego becomes something complicated, it’s a person named Ms. Jessica.
One of my earliest, deepest memories is of dismissal in first grade. Everyone had been picked up except for me and another kid named Nate. For what felt like an hour, Nate and I sat alone, silently, in metal chairs, feeling neglected. The classroom was empty except for our teacher.
Idly, Nate began scraping his chair across the tile and into the table. I did the same thing. Scratch, bang. Then Nate got up and shoved his chair at mine, charging behind it like a bull. Wham! Our chairs collided — I tumbled to the floor. I gazed at the teacher in shock. But something had gotten into her. I don’t know what: she was pregnant at the time and about to go on maternity leave — maybe a surge of parental compassion for me and Nate. She smiled and then deliberately looked away. The superego disappeared.
So Nate and I ran berserk around the room, ramming each other, flipping and wheeling the tables, stacking chairs and banging the stacks together, shooting markers over the walls of tables, hooting like gorillas and screeching metal on the tile. I remember thinking, “This is the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Now, what’s the point of stuff like that? After all, life has just as many little sources of joy as it has bummers. For every moment of freedom, there is a moment of self-doubt. For every accomplishment, there is a failure; for every friend, a critic. For every person who wants to help you, there is also someone who wants to “teach” you. These things add up and cancel out, but eventually they will sum together. And what will you remember of your life besides this mass of little freedoms?
Another example: I once listened to the head teacher of the Montessori classroom give a presentation on the climate zones of Mount Everest to the whole class. Daisy, a very shy, reserved girl, was sitting on my lap. Daisy began to get bored as the head teacher classified the geological patterns present in each zone and described the altitude’s impact on plant and animal life. Even though Mount Everest is very high up, the teacher explained, and therefore closer to the sun, low atmospheric pressure impedes the transmission of heat, a condition similar to outer space.
Daisy was not having it. She groaned and squirmed.
“This is boring,” she whispered to me.
“I know,” I told her. “Please be quiet.”
Daisy rolled off of my lap and glared at me.
“This is boring.”
“Daisy,” said the teacher, “please control yourself. We are almost done with the presentation. Will you sit down until we are done?”
“No.”
“Very well. Are you ready to be dismissed for lunch?”
“Argagragabrag.”
“Is that a yes?” the teacher asked. “If so, please tell us one fact that you have learned about Mount Everest. Then — and only then — may you be dismissed.”
“Booger!”
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Wow
excellent. thank you for this!