Among School Children

by Tracy Kidder

  In the book, a slave was getting whipped. Side by side at their desks, Judith and Alice looked at each other. Alice nibbled a fingernail. Judith went back to looking at Mrs. Zajac. With steady, solemn brown eyes, Judith watched Chris read. Judith was listening hard.

  "Why do you suppose prices for slaves went up in autumn?" Chris asked.

  "Because they could work harder?" suggested Irene.

  "Because they had to pick crops then," said Judith softly. She looked in repose, her cheek resting on a hand, but her eyes hardly wavered from Mrs. Zajac and the book.

  Judith understood the potential disadvantages of being Puerto Rican. She said that she never felt prejudice from Mrs. Zajac, but had from one or two other teachers—nothing overt, no ethnic slurs, but a pattern of favoritism that seemed to coincide with a "white" surname and the right address. Occasionally, a kid from another class—it hadn't happened in this one since Clarence, who had sometimes made remarks about Puerto Ricans—would use the term "pork" for "Puerto Rican." Sometimes kids of Puerto Rican descent would refer to children in the bilingual rooms, disparagingly, as "those Spanish kids." Judith thought that was pretty stupid. She could more than hold her own among other children. One time, down in the library, working there with Alice during spelling, she actually went looking for a little trouble. Judith and Alice were shelving books. A white sixth-grade boy stood nearby in the stacks. The boy asked the girls where they lived. What boy wouldn't try to make conversation with girls as pretty as those two? Judith put a hand on her hip and pushed the other one out. "I come from the Hispanic ghetto," she said.

  The boy grinned uneasily.

  "I do," said Judith. She turned to Alice. "He doesn't believe me." Judith went on, moving down the stacks, "I've come a long way. At least I'm not flunking, like kids from good neighborhoods."

  The boy started to pretend that he was busy.

  Judith went on airily, laughing now and then. "Hispanic kids are smart. We had to overcome obstacles. Our ancestors were slaves. That doesn't bother me. I don't care. I wasn't there. I'm one of the lucky ones. When I grow up, I'm going to live in the Spanish ghetto."

  Having said all that, Judith turned her attention to the boy again. "When you were born, did they take you out the wrong way, or just throw away the wrong thing?" She grinned.

  The boy muttered under his breath.

  "They shot him in the head," said Alice. She and Judith giggled.

  The boy, who hadn't deserved such harsh treatment, but apparently was wise beyond his years, didn't try to fight back. He moved away out of earshot.

  Judith and Alice had tried eating lunch together, first Alice at Judith's table of Puerto Rican girls, and on another day Judith at Alice's table of blond girls from the Highlands. But each had missed her other friends, and they'd agreed to eat lunch separately. Judith had gone home with Alice to the Highlands several times, much to Chris's delight. But Judith had never asked Alice over to her apartment in the Flats.

  One time, at Alice's house, Judith asked Alice, "Do you like my neighborhood? You want to live down there?"

  Alice looked at Judith and said softly, "Not really."

  "I live down there," said Judith. She laughed. "I know the streets and the situation and the people. It's not a gold mine." She laughed again, that laugh she offered Mrs. Zajac to say she was just joking. "Maybe copper," Judith added.

  Alice said, "My mother used to drive kids down there who didn't have a ride, and—"

  "Don't say any of them looked like me!" Judith interrupted, laughing. "Don't say anybody down there looks like me!"

  Judith thought Alice's house was pretty. She didn't think that she felt envious. "I have everything I need, and I'm satisfied with what I have. I think I got a great ... a great future, and I don't really care about material things." Judith remembered fondly her early years in Pennsylvania. Her family had lived in a quiet neighborhood in a small, neat house. There were many children on their street. Judith thought Alice's neighborhood suffered by comparison. The Highlands was too quiet, Judith thought. She often spoke mordantly about the Flats. "Where I live is exciting. You can look out the window and see people coming down the street, fighting and shooting each other." In a more serious mood, she would say that at least the Flats was lively. If there was defensiveness in Judith, it took an extremely intelligent form, and was infinitely preferable to the pathetic shame of the Puerto Rican boy at Holyoke High—the story was well known and true—who had told everyone that he was Samoan, and had begged his teacher not to reveal his true nationality when she'd found him out.

  In about two hours, two hours after Mrs. Zajac finished reading aloud, Judith would return to a barren, littered street where she played Double Dutch by the hour; to a housing project where insecurity took the manifest form of front doors without locks; to her family's cramped apartment where summer had already arrived. Judith had an older sister who took her on car trips, but she didn't regularly go farther than the K Mart and Ingleside malls. She shopped there with her parents and interpreted for them at the cash registers. At home, when she got tired of TV and reading, Judith amused herself by making scrapbooks of clippings about movie and rock stars. Volunteers from other parts of town showed movies for the children of the project down in a basement room. Judith said, sardonically, that the end of the movies was exciting, when the lights came on and the rats and mice scurried for cover.

  Occasionally in her neighborhood Judith saw sights that troubled her much more than rodents and roaches. One morning this spring, she had come out of her apartment in the project, heading off for school, and found a family on the stairway—a mother, a father, and several small children. The family had been evicted from their apartment and had spent the night on the landing, without blankets. They had managed to save some bowls and spoons, a box of cereal, and some milk, and when Judith came past them, the family was gathered on the filthy staircase eating breakfast.

  That sight had inspired Judith's latest essay, which was about the homeless. It began, "I live in the Hispanic ghetto, and I've seen people sleeping on the stairs." In it, she scolded Ronald Reagan. The other day Judith had read the rough draft aloud to a couple of classmates over near the social studies bulletin board. This was what, in Room 205, was called an "editing conference." Claude served as one of Judith's editors, and Claude seemed to understand the irony of his situation.

  "That was so great!" said Claude when Judith finished reading. "She didn't get nothin' wrong! Hey, Judith, if you ever become a businesswoman, you could use that in your speech. You could run for President with that thing."

  "Claude!" Judith said. She smiled, the sick-looking smile that Claude himself wore when classmates teased him.

  Claude didn't seem to know that he was mocking his best friend and protector for being smart. He just thought he was having fun. The idea of Judith's being President pleased him. The hyperbole must have diminished for him the distance that he felt between him and Judith. Claude couldn't stop. He turned to a classmate. "She could run for President." Robert walked by. Claude said to him, "Oh, man, you shoulda been here when Judy read hers. It was awesome! She could run for friggin' President!"

  It is dangerous to be smart. Still wearing that sickly smile, Judith reached out with both arms toward Claude, hands opened as if to shove him away, and Claude desisted.

  A few days earlier, Chris had read the rough draft of Judith's essay, and had chuckled over it.

  Judith had lowered her eyebrows. "What's funny?" she had asked Mrs. Zajac.

  "Oh," Chris had answered. "It's wonderful, Judith. It's just that I don't think I could have written anything like this at your age."

  Perched against her front table now, springtime at the window of her classroom, Chris read aloud a passage about slave traders wrenching children from their parents. It was exciting to feel Judith's eyes on her. Chris had a recurrent fantasy about waking up one day to find that a former student had become an admirable and famous personage. She felt ready to settle for som
ething less grandiose. She hoped for confident, "well-adjusted" children. But Judith gave her one of the best feelings she had experienced in her fourteen years of teaching, the sensation that came from knowing that she had a child in the room who, with a little luck and guidance, would certainly surpass her.

  Among Schoolchildren

  Thomas Jefferson imagined an aristocracy of intellect, made up in part of "youths of genius" who would be raised by public education "from among the classes of the poor."

  Horace Mann, the great spokesman of the Common School Movement, imagined in the mid-nineteenth century a system of universal education for America, which would make "the wheel of Progress" roll "harmoniously and resistlessly onward."

  John Dewey imagined schools that would provide for every child "an embryonic community life" and, for the nation, "the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious."

  W. E. B. Du Bois imagined that education would someday help to bring about "the treatment of all men according to their individual desert and not according to their race."

  James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard and a leading voice for educational reform from around the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, imagined that public schools would answer the threat of Soviet Russian competition and "secure the foundations of our free society."

  What great hopes Americans have placed in formal education. What a stirring faith in children and in the possibility and power of universal intellectual improvement. And what a burden of idealism for the little places where education is actually attempted.

  The history of education in the twentieth century presents a picture of a nation perennially dissatisfied, for one reason or another, with its public schools. But maybe if less had been asked, less would have been done. America has greatly increased the quantity of education. When Horace Mann got started, only a small percentage of American children finished grade school. Now virtually every child has to go to school until the age of sixteen. In the 1980s, about a quarter of all Americans, adults and children, are actively engaged in education in one way or another. The nation spends about $150 billion a year on public elementary and high schools. America spends a larger percentage of its gross national product on education than Japan, Germany, France, and England, and a slightly smaller percentage than Canada. Many state governments have at least begun to try for a rough equality in financing between poor and wealthy districts. (For the first half of the 1980s, Holyoke ran its schools entirely on state money; on occasion, a former mayor used some of the funds for fixing potholes, too.) Against long odds, school districts all over the country have been desegregated.

  And yet while public schools have always helped a relative few rise out of poverty, they have not proven to be the "great equalizers" that Horace Mann dreamed of. Many schools, of course, remain desegregated only in theory. Many high schools are segregated internally, thanks to "tracking," a system Conant helped promote, which in theory sorts students according to natural ability, and in practice most often sorts them along lines of race and economic class. John Dewey did more than any other individual before or since to bring new air and light into classrooms, but the deep changes he dreamed of never came to pass, and he lived to criticize pedagogical practices carried out in his name. Some commentaries from the left doubt that idealism has ever been much more than a cloak for darker purposes in educational reform, such as the production of a tranquilized workforce that would learn enough but not too much in school.

  The history of education in America is the history of attempts to reform it. The latest movement deplores high dropout rates and declines in the College Board scores of new teachers. Many tests and surveys show that large percentages of American youth come out of high school and even college incompetent in the three R's and ignorant of basic facts about history, geography, science, and literature. The bad news has inspired many commissions and from them many reports that make use of the word "crisis." As in the late 1950s, these reports often invoke an external threat—not Soviet competition now, but Japanese economic power. "Public education has put this country at a terrible competitive disadvantage," a corporate leader was quoted as saying in 1987. "They're the suppliers of our workforce, but they're suppliers with a fifty percent defect rate."

  On the whole, the reform movement of the 1980s lacked the moral and emotional force of the movement of the late 1960s. The cries of alarm from that earlier campaign still echo, particularly from one group of books that comprise, collectively, a literature of rage.

  In an often used metaphor of the 1960s, children were dying in their schools. Changes weren't just desirable; they had to happen right away. Yet to the critics, change seemed impossible within the walls of urban public schools. Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, the manifesto of the movement that called for the dissolution of all institutions of formal education, was published in the early 1970s. It nicely caps the literature of rage. A number of books in this genre were firsthand accounts by reform-minded teachers. Most could have been written in the late 1970s or the 1980s—conditions in many urban school systems have not improved, and in some have gotten worse. A surprising number of the writers were men. According to one view, they'd never have written their books if there hadn't been a war on with draft deferments for teachers, but that overlooks the genuine strength of feeling in many of the books.

  In Death at an Early Age, published in 1967, Jonathan Kozol describes a year of teaching in Boston, in a school where children were beaten in the basement, and the students were black and the teachers white and, by Kozol's account, deeply racist. Kozol got fired for having his class read a poem by Langston Hughes.

  According to the era's "free school movement," public schools were prisons; no change was possible within them; a different sort of school was needed. In The Lives of Children, George Dennison describes a "free" school that he helped to create in New York City. Dennison writes with an enormous certainty, and, in keeping with the temper of the times, he gets carried away when describing the enemy. Dennison holds that public school teachers, even ones he's willing to assume are "fine," can't possibly avoid hypocrisy in imposing discipline on their students. "On the contrary," he writes, "it was only too evident that in accepting their jobs they had given away their integrity, for the truth was that they could not make moral judgments and implement them."

  Herbert Kohl (36 Children, also published in 1967) makes it plain that he at least did not give up his integrity during the two years he spent teaching in a public school in Harlem. But during his second year, Kohl received discouraging news about students from his first class. He began to feel that other teachers and omnipresent racism had started to undo whatever good he'd done. He writes, "I was no longer sure of the value of my work to the children. That it helped me was undeniable." He felt that teaching had forced him to confront the worst parts of himself, and had helped him to improve: "I fought to be more human and feel I succeeded."

  By the end of his second year, Kohl writes, he lacked "perspective": "The thought of twenty-five more children the next year, twenty-five that might have a good year yet ultimately benefit little or nothing from it, depressed me. I wanted to think and to write, to discover how I could best serve the children." More than poor pay and lack of status make teaching hard. Kohl did what many teachers would always like to do:

  I decided to take a year's leave and go to Europe. As hard as it was to part from the children, it was necessary, and so I spent a year in Spain, thinking, mostly, and writing, avoiding until the last moments the decision to return to work with the children and still remain outside of the system. I have never stopped teaching, but I no longer have a classroom.

  2

  Chris made up delinquency lists over Memorial Day weekend, which followed the Science Fair, and on Tuesday she got right back to work. "Ashley, you owe me a story. Kimberly, you owe me social studies. Claude, come here, please. Claude, you got a twenty-five on the last spelling test. Claude, I thought you
were on a roll. I don't think it's too much to ask that you study your spelling every night." She interrupted the Civil War when half the class could not explain what she had just taught, that the Emancipation Proclamation was partly a political act and not something humble Abe Lincoln did just because it was right. Chris said cheerfully, "In case you people haven't noticed, I'm not letting you sit here for the next four weeks. I'm not letting you come with your bodies and leave your brains behind. So remember to pack your brains when you come to school."

  The North, they figured out, had strategic advantages. And it was on to Bull Run. "People with picnic baskets! To watch people going to war! They were going to have a picnic and watch people get killed!"

  "People got killed?" asked Robert.

  "Robert, in a war, people get killed," said Chris.

  "My grandfather was in a war, and he didn't get killed," said Robert.

  "Did I say that everybody in a war got killed?" asked Chris. Afterward, she resolved, "I'm not going to let my little fifth graders leave me thinking war is fun, like on TV."

  She didn't want them to leave ignorant about the future either. She wanted to tell them that their lives did not have to include welfare. These lessons sprang from local reality; they would never have occurred to her if half of her class hadn't come from families on some form of public assistance.

  She started the story of Reconstruction, and then for several days in a row she got waylaid by the subject of school segregation, which led her and the class to muse on why, in a segregated system, most of the money for education would go to all-white schools. "What was wrong with that?" she asked. "Why is it important that everyone get a good education?" They talked for a long time on that subject.