Julia’s Class

The basic facts are: Julia hadn’t been teaching very long, she was learning to do it, and it was a mixed first and second grade, so they were semi-literate. There were some kids who obviously couldn’t read at all, but most could read a little bit. What really knocked me out was that instead of sort of glorifying the teacher’s role, giving out apples or being very smiley……You’ve got a lot of power, and you’ve got a lot of conspicuousness, and it would be very easy to build the role.

What she did was to deconstruct the job in such a way that the role, as usually thought of, disappeared. She provided every kid in her classroom with a couple of sheets of paper stapled together, and at the top it said: “Animal I am going to Study” and then it had categories of ideas about this animal. So she had given them a topic and a place to record it which was their own personal piece of paper, and I think that was important. Then she provided them with resources. She had gone all around borrowing books about animals, so the place was full of stuff, and so what she had done was to make the class into a collaborative, collective, thing, and the kids were running around thrilled, and helping each other. “Here’s something about aardvarks for you!” sort of thing; she had just totally reconstructed the thing from the top-down dominated-by-the-teacher kind of thing, to one having a totally different structure.

The kids could and did come and ask her questions, but she was a facilitator, absolutely just a facilitator. I thought it was just brilliant. The kids were enjoying it, but that’s not the only reason I thought it was great. It was putting things where they ought to be. The mental energy had been transferred to the kids, and then she provided the resources so that they could do something about it.

 A Newsletter from the time:

Miss Adams

Of the very many teachers I have had in my long life, one sticks out in memory:  Miss Adams, my kindergarten teacher. Her kindergarten class was quite famous, and rightly so

She had, in the first place, lots of energy, and in the second place, what she did with it was to give herself two rooms, a sitting-down classroom and a block room. In the block room sat piles of commissioned blocks made out of two-by-fours. So they were big blocky blocks, they weren’t these little chintzy things with letters.

That’s what made me think about the culture of the period. I remember that we used to have a record, or maybe it was a whole album, called “Building a City”,[Hindemith’s “Wir Bauen Eine Stadt” ?] and it’s all physical construction: “We’re building a city, We’re building a city, digging and pounding, we’re working all together.” It was Popular Front Socialism. The workers of the period were physical workers. I’m thinking of the politics of early childhood then, which were intense, really. You wanted the kids to attach to physical construction. For ages they had been trying to get kids out of the dirt, and to sit down a practice their penmanship; that was the big Victorian period kids’ activity. Here there was the reverse. You didn’t want the kids fiddling around making nice curves, you wanted them building, building. And then I was thinking about what got lost out of that. It wasn’t just penmanship; it was politics, and money, and banking, the less physical parts of the whole process, which we have come to realize (to our sorrow), are quite important, and that was willfully kept out of it.

I don’t know what Miss Adams thought about it. Maybe she would have been creative enough to think of something to do about it, but she wanted the kids to look at the city as a physical thing. I think in those days, and always, there’s a big thing about taking kids out to see the Firemen. They adore the fire truck, and the firemen, who generally have very little to do, are quite pleased to show off the fire truck, so a trip to the firehouse has been a standard for ages, but Miss Adams’ walks included all sorts of other stuff, but nothing politicky or banky. They were things like stores and loading docks and stuff like that, but she did like to take the kids around the city.

It was also the state of mind. Rather than stressing the excitement of the fire truck, (which has got its problems for young kids, because you want them to love the firemen because they are the quintessential first responders, but on the other hand you don’t want them obsessing away about fires). What they did was to take the kids out (and these were very young kids} in a gaggle, to look at the city, and then (and I don’t know if she realized how clever this was) the kids took the blocks and built, in blocks, a replica of what they’d seen, so that she was also teaching them how you abstract and represent something in another medium.

It was the University of Chicago Lab School, and that’s relevant too. It was thought of as a laboratory for practicing practical thought. It was founded by John Dewey, a major American philosopher, and the quintessential American philosopher, because he had this pragmatic, this useful information thing. The Laboratory School was, maybe not his creation, but something that he commanded. He had some idea that it would lead to practical intelligence. How you would do it, I doubt if he had much of a clue, but Miss Adams was the perfect person for the job. I don’t know if Dewey picked Miss Adams, or if they were just at the same point in history, but they were on the same wavelength. I came to understand that she really was a genius. What it really takes in early childhood education (besides resources, and it helps a lot to have twenty kids in the room instead of forty, and stuff like that) you need a decisive idea. Miss Adams had a strong and correct idea, and a thought of how to put it to work.

I’m trying to think of why it left such an impression. One reason was, it was a good idea. It was a good idea partly because it gave the kids something that they could do but it was also a good idea because it was powered by an ideal, an ideal which was the popular leftism of the period. Without that, the blocks by themselves wouldn’t have stuck in my head so much. I think that I understood that I was a part of something moral.

Peter Rabbit and Peter Schumann

“The Tale of Peter Rabbit”:  I have no idea what its appeal was; it sold, and it continues to sell.

It occurs to me that the appeal of Peter Rabbit is like an element of the appeal of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet.  Simple folk are living under the roots of a big fir tree, not causing any trouble (except stealing some lettuce).  It’s sort of a Schumann plot: simple folk, dressed in their simple rags…… That’s the way the story gets started: the mother takes off;  “I’m going out.”  It’s so old-fashioned that we don’t even dump on her for failing to get a baby-sitter. The dead father is just part of the package  “Whatever you do, don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden.  Your father had an accident there:  he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”  It’s part of the lay of the land, and as in Peter Schumann’s scenarios, these simple folk, or simple rabbits as the case may be, are not set up to argue.  It’s the way things are, and Peter is the same about his anti-war plots.

But Beatrix Potter just sees it as the obligation of rabbits to stay away from McGregor’s garden.  She’s truly peace-loving.  She wrote it in a child-like spirit, but I don’t think that they thought much about what was good for children at the time.  Then the children’s book industry, or what became an industry, was taken over by the early childhood experts.  It got very bland.  Then they had a new wave:  “Where the Wild Things are”, “In the Night Kitchen” which wanted to reintroduce the sense of mystery and danger back into children’s books.  It’s become a whole industry of children’s psychic welfare which didn’t exist in Potter’s day.  It’s gone through various incarnations, alarm about baking people into pies, then the concern that it had gotten too soporific, but that was all after Potter’s time – lucky woman, she missed it!

Anyway, the time of Peter Rabbit has come and gone.  Beatrix Potter had married her publisher, as it remember, and never wrote another line.  The kids who read this story, and heard about father being baked in a pie seem to have survived, and if they were traumatized, people didn’t worry about it in those days.

“And Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had milk and blackberries for supper”…  “Under the roots of a very big fir tree,” that’s where they were situated.