Beyond School

*

In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males

Artifact: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Dates: 1980-present

I escaped high school and the American South the summer after I graduated. I arrived in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, educated in comic books, Tolkein and Frank Herbert, album-oriented rock music, the Ten Best Reasons to Escape the South, and the effects of a few popular recreational drugs. I also had the high school diploma I’d earned by not quitting school. I’d never seen a big city before. I’d never even been out of the South.

It took me a year to settle into Los Angeles enough to enter college. Midway through my first year I left class one day and didn’t go back. I don’t remember why, though I’m sure life got in the way somehow. So much for higher education.

My education in the literary classics actually began, true to pattern, outside of school. Beth, a girl in my apartment complex, was infatuated with an English grad student who to me seemed pretty infatuated with himself, judging by the reading list he gave her. Next to his entry on the list of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” he had written some cryptic note to the effect that if Beth understood this story, she would understand him. She thought he was so important that she asked me to read the recommended books with her. Maybe I would help her unlock the mystery of this sage’s being.

I didn’t have anything better to do. Looking back, though, it’s hard to imagine Hemingway as a grad student.

Anyway, first on the list was Kerouac’s On the Road. This was fateful for me–fateful. I read it in complete, unguided isolation. Beth was too star-struck to read anything on this list critically, and all I knew, equally uncritically, was that I was reading a classic, I was reading Literature—and classic literature meant wisdom to me, and wisdom meant truth. So my first taste of truth and wisdom came from the seductive pen of this drug-addled hedonist’s glorification of the great speed-freak Neal Cassidy, as the two of them hitch-hiked across America seeking alternately mystical or sexual kicks. I bought it. Soon I was dressing like a French Beatnik unstuck in time, and writing narcissistic free verse poetry bad enough to make the angels weep.

I shared Kerouac with John, an L.A. surfer dude I worked with who had never read anything. But he enjoyed my influence (and I his), and off we went. We devoured the Beats that year and, as soon as I wrote his final junior college essay for him and he was out of school for the summer, we strapped on backpacks and hitch-hiked across America. And back. (It was the first of many such summer trips that decade, usually alone.)

Hitch-hiking didn’t work so well in the Yuppie ‘80s as it did in the post-War Beat ‘50s. The first day out of Los Angeles, we covered about 100 miles to the Mojave Desert, where we spent the next two days stranded on the side of the highway under the desert sun, sunburnt and sandy-eyed, watching hundreds of cars pass us with no interest at all. We were Beat alright. We split up at that point and crossed the rest of the country solo to meet on the other side. I was amazed at how many male drivers of blue and white collar backgrounds—husbands and fathers as a rule: a Mormon preacher in Utah, a real estate executive in Omaha, hard-hatted tobacco-spitting construction worker in Kentucy, truck-drivers from Nowhere and Everywhere—took me as a safe opportunity to slip out of the closet and suggest a little sex of one sort or another. Kerouac never wrote about that. Luckily, in the end they were all gentlemen who took no for an answer. (I was especially glad this was true of the rodeo cowboy in Colorado who wrestled bulls and broncos for a living. At 6’5” or so of steel-framed beef, he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two if he’d wanted to. Instead, he began sobbing, apologized for any offense, and told me that he would be rope-tied and castrated by the other cowboys if they ever found out. I wonder how many cowboys would actually have embraced him instead.)

At any rate, two or three years went by delving deeper into classic Beat wisdom. John and I starting smoking cigarettes as a stamp of culture. We were bona fide existentialists. We started reading different stuff—introductions to Buddhism, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and such. Each book was wise and right and we had no doubt about it. We were young enough (only 20) to know that we knew everything.

At about that time, I sat one night in a Ship’s coffee shop (the closest thing to an intellectual French cafe L.A. had to offer at the time),  chain-smoking with a bottomless fifty-cent cup of coffee, and improving myself through literature by reading, I believe, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In walked a striking young African-American man (who turned out to be a fashion model, the son of a famous singer from the Jazz Age, and brother of another famous R&B female vocalist), who noticed me reading and struck up a conversation.

“No, no, no,” he said, “you’ve got it all wrong. Why are you reading all this 20th Century crap when you could be reading Homer and Shakespeare, the Bible and Spenser and Milton?”

“Tell me more,” I said. And he did. And did. And did. For several months he did. (He finally dismissed me to find a pupil who wasn’t straight, essentially.) He gave me a copy of Homer’s epics and we discussed them (rather, he talked and I listened). He gave me Plato, which was such a revelation and a joy that I took immediate action to create the maximum free time to study his works. I moved out of my apartment and into my beat old VW bus—it had a comfy bed in back and good closets and sound system—and I reduced my schedule at the restaurant I worked at to provide just enough money for gas, food, coffee shops, two types of smokes, and the complete works of Plato (plus savings for the next summer’s hitchhiking). My Beatnik influence was powerful enough to sanction this unconventional move. I parked on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu every night and read, and woke in the morning to emerge from my van onto the literal sands of my prime beachfront property. (It really wasn’t bad–I had a cooler and a beach chair. What more did I need?) I got through the complete works and left hazy marginalia on every page. I had a couple of mystical experiences becoming one with Plato’s forms.

My elitist mentor/suitor also gave me Beethoven symphonies, Mahler, Wagner (“Why are you listening to that modern, plebeian rock crap?” my mentor said. “Really, Clay.” He literally clucked as he shook his head). I sponged them up, and passed them on to John (who lived with his parents but often spent the night parked next to me in his own van). We discovered that Beethoven and Mahler - good god, Mahler! - were gods. We listened to them on the beach with double headphones in one Walkman. The finales would crank us up so much we’d normally run into the surf and clash like sumo wrestlers. We couldn’t imagine how our culture had cheated us of these treasures all our lives, and given us Ozzie Osborne instead. We pretty much abandoned rock and pop at that point, and I’ve never been able to get into it again since–though Jazz has long since eclipsed classical for me.

The awareness dawned on John and me that, if literature roughly began with Homer around the 7th Century BCE, we should be able to start there and just read right through until we reached our time period (thank god for the ‘Dark Ages’). So we tried it. It wasn’t easy, of course. It was impossible. We finally surrendered and admitted that we needed a framework and an experienced guide to give us context and titles so we’d get ‘the’ ‘whole picture.’ This gave us a reason to go to college. John changed his mind and decided to travel around the world that year, but I had no savings so I couldn’t join him. I went back to college alone.

I loved it. I finally had that love of literature—not just comics and science fiction anymore. It made me want to study literature and want to write about it. (It is worth repeating that it was not the university but rather reading as a shared social act that made me value the classics.) I loved meeting students who also wanted to study literature, who were there voluntarily like me. We did little else but read, talk, write, and dream literature. We were all still goofy young boneheads, sure, mistaking traditional authority for truth and beauty, but by god it often was at least profound, and as often stunningly beautiful.

I took a Survey of Western Philosophy course under a woman of mystical bent who led us from the Pre-Socratics to Kant over a full year. She was hip, smart, enthusiastic, and beautiful. When she assigned papers on these philosophers, we all leapt to the task because we saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of the internal argument of the philosopher. We were proud to be able to demonstrate this because I think we were all surprised that middle-class students like us could ‘get’ this stuff. Never mind that one week I fully agreed with Thales that motion and change didn’t exist—I remember riding my bike home from school one day convinced that everything was an illusion and all was a changeless monistic One, so my getting hit by a truck was not really my getting hit by a truck—and the next week agreed with Heraclitus that we can’t step into the same river twice and all was flux. Never mind that Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s materialism were both true. Let Augustine prove God’s existence and Nietzsche announce His death.

The redemptive fact in this comedy of confusion is that we boneheads were unconsciously preparing for the moment when all these contradictions would impress themselves on us consciously, and we would recognize the historicity of all human knowledge and values. I am so thankful that this professor didn’t do what later, and to me misguided, professors did: introduce these texts as tools of oppression to be mistrusted and opposed. Instead, she let us suckle these creeds outworn and search for truth through them, trusting all the while, I suspect, that their collective incoherence would speak for itself eventually, and we would reach that conclusion ourselves through experience.

John came back from the world the next summer and we took a ride in my van so I could fill him in on the history of Western philosophy. That fall he enrolled in college as a philosophy major. Again we were off.

Eventually we both transferred to the University of Oregon. I loved too many subjects to consider abandoning any of them, so I declared Interdisciplinary Arts and Letters as my major. The first year in the program required survey courses in at least four disciplines, all chronologically taught. This meant that all five of my classes in term one were devoted to Greece and Rome from different angles (eg, literature, philosophy, history, art, religion); the next term treated the Middle Ages in the same interdisciplinary way; and the final term surveyed the Renaissance to the Modern Age. I had found that framework for ‘the’ big picture I was looking for. (At the end of Term 1, I wanted to be first a Classicist, then a monk after Term 2, and finally a Marxist revolutionary by the end of that year.)

I didn’t realize it then, but the curriculum at the time was embattled by feminists, Marxists, traditionalists, and post-Structuralists. I’m glad it was a hidden battle, because the inclusion of Other perspectives in our canon—primarily Marxist and women thinkers and artists—was not surrounded by controversy. Instead, we students experienced that inclusion as natural.

By the time I took my upper division classes, however, the tone changed radically (literally). Ideologues of every sort in the most extreme cases unapologetically bashed the works we had earlier studied with the categorical baseball bat for “Dead White Males.” This type of generalization was unspeakably thoughtless to me: were Oscar Wilde’s homo-eroticism, Defoe’s feminism, Blake’s liberalism, Nietzsche’s ecstatic critique of Christian history and metaphysics all to be tossed because of their sires’ gender? Were the wisdoms of only late-20th century far left thinkers to be studied, when their knowledge too is historically constructed and determined? (Wasn’t I still smoking because of the classic modern wisdom of the Beats and Camus and Sartre?) Was indignation to be the only respectable motive for research and exploration? Was all of that pleasure of the mind I’d so come to love from my earlier studies suddenly invalid and unwelcome? Couldn’t I do good simply by being a conduit for Keats to all students who want to love him? Was aesthetic rapture banned by the new regime? I know these are gross generalizations. But that was my impression of American intellectualism in the mid-‘90s. I didn’t have the stomach for it. I graduated as quickly as I could and left academia.

Looking back on this now, it seems to me that the problem I had with the new –ists was not with their –isms, but with their pedagogy. Simply put, they were uncivil. They showed no concern for, and made no attempt to learn about, my background. Instead they attacked what I loved and consequently as much as told me I did not belong. They were radical Gradgrinds in post-modern hard times. They often employed the same traditionalist pedagogy they theoretically opposed by deciding for me what they must teach and I must learn, when constructivist explorations could well have succeeded in bringing me to see and experience something probably close to their perspective. They often seemed to accept that all truth was constructed - except their own.

In short, they forgot about the learner in their zeal to be teachers. This is why their teaching failed to win me. And this makes me reflect, while looking at the Holistic Circle of Learning, that a teacher can be dazzlingly interdisciplinary, can teach for all the multiple intelligences squared, and can be impressively perspectivistic and multi-modal and multi-cultural until the cows come home—they will still probably fail. Unless…they start with knowing their learners, with respecting and esteeming them, and whatever cultural scripts those learners bring into the class.

—

*The Legacy Series So Far:
1. Fear and Trembling: Goodbye to Christianity
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite School
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years

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Of Jocks and Fags

Dates: 1976-80 (-present)

Picture a boy growing up in the same home from birth to the end of Junior High at age 15. The friends he made in first grade remain his friends, and his world, for the next nine years. He is blissfully secure in this world, in which nothing social or environmental abruptly changes and everything and everyone is familiar. He academically excels in grade school and in junior high, he plays Little League Baseball, then junior high baseball, basketball, and football.

His teammates are his friends. They are and always have been teammates in life as well as sport: together they begin as shiny boys playing spaceship and avoiding girl-germs during elementary recess; the seasons roll by until, suddenly, their voices crack; they experience an unexpected stirring at their cores until puberty rips from its cocoon like some mad, winged demon and deranges them all; they read the troubling runes of new hair on each others’ bodies as they shower in the locker room after football practice, and they laugh and kid each other to beat back their fears.

The demon drives the boys to haunt the local mall in search of girls. The boy meets a girl from a distant suburb. They exchange phone numbers and spend the next months talking so late into the night that they usually fall asleep with the receivers next to their ears. They see each other at the mall on weekends only occasionally. It doesn’t matter: the conversations intoxicate them for months. Then he—or she, it doesn’t matter—meets someone else and life goes on. The break-up doesn’t hurt.

Because the boy doesn’t realize it, but he is blessed. Yes, he is backing into the future with no view of the road ahead, and it’s unsettling. But his friends are doing the same, and they are all there for each other. Their camaraderie steadies them, like soldiers joking in the trenches, knowing that, at any minute, the order to charge the enemy lines will come.

That order comes when the boy’s family decides that it is in his son’s best interest to move to a new community in order to go to an all-white school, rather than the desegregated, predominantly ‘black’ school he is currently zoned for. The boy dutifully packs his belongings—his comic books, his varsity jacket, his “Most Popular” award from junior high graduation—and unpacks them in his new bedroom in the suburbs.

The only person he knows in his new community is the girl from the mall. It has been years since they have spoken.

Summer football practice begins two weeks before he starts classes at his new school. He signs up. He doesn’t know a soul. But on the first day he sees the first girl-friend’s best friend and she is excited to hear that he is joining their school.

Football practice poses problems for him. He has never been a new kid. He has never had to introduce himself to others. He knows nothing about the rituals involved in gaining acceptance to a group. Somehow neither his parents nor his school equipped him for this. So he does nothing, expecting acceptance to just happen.

He doesn’t understand why an upperclassman walks by him before practice and throws such a powerful roundhouse punch to his shoulder that it immediately forms a knot. The boy has observed that the attacker, the fierce star line-backer on the team who always has a lower lip swollen with snuff, is very popular. And that this line-backer seems to be the best friend of the other team star, who is held in almost godlike esteem by all the players for his bodybuilder’s massive, well-sculpted frame, for his two State Championships in wrestling, and his two state records in football rushing yardage—all while a freshman and sophomore. This god is now only a junior, so he has not one but two years remaining at the school to add to his miraculous record. The boy, having come from his old school, which ends at junior high and has no high school, has never seen or known that high school boys could look so much like grown men. He still feels like a boy himself. He has no script for dealing with this new social breed, the high school upper-classman.

So when the god, muscles bulging and lip trollishly stuffed with tobacco (the disfiguration of the face from this was a new visual experience for the boy, and it triggered gene-deep fears) approaches him in the locker room and says with no smile so you’re the new guy, the boy says yes and offers his hand and gives his name. The god looks at the boy’s hand and back into the boy’s eyes and offers no hand in reply. The boy doesn’t understand what is happening but he begins to fathom that it is not good.

The god says I hear you know my girlfriend. The boy doesn’t like the god’s slow, deep, emotionless drawl. The boy says and who would that be. The god pierces him with a gaze strangely menacing and pronounces his girlfriend’s name. It is the name of the girl from the mall that the boy had known in sixth grade. The god gazes deeper into the boy’s eyes as he pauses for effect. Then he says, and I don’t like you, faggot, and walks away. The boy watches him go, and notices that all the rest of the team has stopped to watch this encounter. They all look at him with the same impassive expressions as the god. At that instant, inside the boy a new cocoon breaks and a new demon emerges. It will fill his high school years with one ceaseless chant: Escape. Escape. Escape.

The boy doesn’t quit the football team. Nor does the football team quit sucker-punching and insulting the boy—except for one player, a wrestler and student council member who the boy would learn many years later was gay. This player treats the boy kindly. But he cannot help the boy. The boy is too busy over the next two years with his daily strategizing for survival: how to pass from class to class without crossing the athletes’ turf in order to avoid the choruses of faggot they would hoot. How to disguise his depression and act normal when girls he likes try to get to know him. How to prove himself to the football coach he overhears at practice telling the one friendly teammate, who had nominated the boy for a position, you know that boy doesn’t want to play football, and saying this in the midst of a huddle of almost the entire team. How to care about geometry. How to care about his sudden decline to a C and D student. How to skip school. How to find the students who sell pot and quaaludes. Whether to fight the group of tens calling him faggot every day. How he can alter his face by maybe paying someone to pummel the prettiness out of it. How to find an adult who can help (he never does). How to express himself in art class with a block print of a boy hanging from a noose. For which he earns a B, and teacher feedback suggesting how he can improve his technique, and praise for the print’s title: Escape, Escape, Escape.

Where are the boy’s parents? They are working more hours than ever in his life because the economy has taken a downturn due to the OPEC oil embargo. Interest rates for home-buyers have skyrocketed, his father’s real-estate sales have dried up and threatened the family with foreclosure on and loss of their new home in a safe suburb with all white students. One day, however, the boy’s father seems to get wind of the boy’s troubles, and pulls him aside and offers his solution: we’ll just go up there together and whip those boys’ tails. This was a noble possibility in the time of Odysseus and his son, but the boy is not interested—there are dozens of them, and there are laws against such things too.

“Self-medication” and a few unpopular country-boy friends get the boy through the first two years at the school, and the god graduates. Maybe the final year will be easier.

It is, somewhat. The god’s devotees in his class are still around to carry on the tradition, but the boy is not so scared of them. One day he picks a fight with one of them in the cafeteria. After his suspension ends, the boy returns to school and the best friend of the guy he fought invites the boy to join the jocks at lunch. The jock means it. All of his group seconds the invitation. The boy realizes that this must have been the ritualistic key to acceptance from the start. But he hates these boys now, and their type. He declines that sick ceremony. He also decides against playing sports with these fools his senior year.

In the first month of his senior year the guidance counselor holds a transitional session with the boy. The counselor congratulates the boy for scoring the highest SAT score of all the boys in his class, but regrets the boy’s GPA is in the bottom third of the class. What does that matter, the boy says. Look at my SAT. The counselor explains that GPA is as important for scholarships and admissions into good schools. This is the first the boy has heard of the practical value of the GPA.

It doesn’t matter anyway. The demon has decided the boy’s future. As soon as he graduates, the boy will escape, escape, escape, on a one-way Greyhound bus to Los Angeles and never look back. He will never again live near his family and his friends from childhood.

He will he never again find it easy to like athletes and popular, group-oriented people. He will like the solitaries, the dreamers, the readers, the rebels. He will always, often unfairly, harbor a certain skepticism sometimes bordering on scorn for officials of all stripes and people desiring power. He will always be somewhat aloof and never assume goodwill in others. He will always be uncomfortable in groups, and feel that he never did learn the social skills that other people use to escape that discomfort. Often he will find himself wishing that he had.¹

But he will go on to study, to discover a home in literature and philosophy and history and art and religion and classical and jazz. He will make his way into college, despite his guidance counselor, and even graduate Phi Beta Kappa. He will go on to experiment with his life, to see lands torn by war, to see Michelangelo in Florence, Mahler in Prague. He will kiss Wilde’s tomb in Paris and lay a flower at the graves of Abelard and Heloise. He will play hacky-sack with saffron-robed novices in Laos, swim a species-bridging five-second spiral with four wild dolphins off the coast of New Zealand, hike bamboo forests in Thailand with a simple Buddhist guide who seemed the most perfected human being he’d ever met.

This boy from a respectably middle-class, all-white suburban high school in Tennessee will even go on to trust a few people, though awkwardly.

In his 38th year, he will meet a woman beautiful and intelligent and kind beyond his wildest expectations, and be unable to understand how she could agree the following year to marry someone like him. He will follow her career path and become, like her, a teacher.²

And he will come to understand, late one night in Spain while writing a story about a boy, that he owes it to that boy to always watch over the new student, and the one who doesn’t fit because he is too pretty or she is too large, and the one who doesn’t fight, and the one who doesn’t know how the present shapes the future. And he will try to help them learn what he was never taught.³

The Spanish Moon

—

¹Funny, five years later he has found that comfort, that confidence, that pleasure in good society.
²The marriage ended in benevolent divorce; “irreconcilable difficulties” indeed.
³This was written years before the “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story” podcast post. It was my first attempt to write the story. I’d change the tone now.

–

*Earlier Years:
Legacy 1: Baptist Childhood
Legacy 2: Comic Books

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Reading Despite Teaching

or,

How the hulk led me to Hamlet

Artifact: 1976 Killraven Comic Book (final issue)
Date: 1969-1980
Cultural Element: Education: Standardized Curriculum; Aesthetics of Class: ‘High’ v. ‘Pop’ Culture
Commentary:

Old Skull (seated) and Killraven on Lookout Mountain

I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, we had a family Bible on dusty display; a lonely edition of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet I found shoved out of mind in my father’s closet, and enjoyed; a set of Encyclopedia Britannica and another of The Great Books that I imagine some salesman twisted my parents’ arms to buy for the sake of their children’s educations and of 1950s middle-class respectability and which, oddly enough, we enjoyed rummaging through as children).

My schools had books in the library, which I recall using briefly in fifth grade to read a series of boys’ action mysteries and a few baseball dramas—but overall, school libraries meant homework, and homework meant no play, and play was fun and homework wasn’t. In short, I didn’t read books because I didn’t like what they were associated with: reports.

I did, however, read comic books. Devoured them. The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Thor, Spiderman…these and other titles constituted my first library. I started reading them in grade school, under my big brother’s influence, and evolved into a connoisseur. I knew the names and styles of the authors and illustrators, the colorists, even the letterers. I suffered when my favorite titles underwent changes in writers or artists. Would the new team maintain the character subtleties and personalities I’d come to love from their predecessors? Could the new artist match the galactic or subatomic vistas the old one drew me into? Would Valhalla still sparkle? Would Daredevil’s deltoids still look so cool?

The first of every month was an event to pine for, because that was when the new issues hit the racks. I made pilgrimages three miles on foot to the nearest convenience store to buy or, funds being unavailable, steal the latest installments. Keeping them in mint condition was important: I would roll seven or eight comics into a cylinder and slide them very carefully into my sock and under my pants-leg, carefully walk to the cashier to pay for one other one, then hobble stiff-legged behind the store and uncoil my loot from my legs, checking for damage.

The hours of reading these books in my room once back home were my earliest experience of that reader’s pleasure known as “flow.” Everything environmental disappeared, everything personal, emotional, physical. I recall one month reading an episode of an obscure but brilliant title based on War of the Worlds called Killraven, which happened to be set on Lookout Mountain…in Chattanooga, my home town. I was elated to discover that my locale was known to the authors, that it had significance, that I belonged to a larger world.

Better still, it was the only comic I recall ever reading that attained such aesthetic heights that I wept and wept: Old Skull, the bald, brawny, but kindly and simple sidekick to Killraven—very much a sort of loyal Kent to Killraven’s Lear—enjoys an idyllic moment appreciating butterflies and childishly chatting to squirrels by a mountain stream (my mountain!). It is lyrical perfection, it brings fond laughter, and the illustrations are so lovely…I remember the artist’s name, P. Craig Russel, and his ornate and elegant art nouveau signature on the title page of every issue, and I haven’t seen or discussed these books since the late ‘70s…and then there is a sound from the forest that breaks Old Skull’s reverie, and out steps a Martian who breaks all conventional comic serial rules by killing a main character. Old Skull died on Lookout Mountain, and I wept on its foothills.

My Favorite Artist in high school: Craig Russel, Illustrator of Killraven

My neighborhood friends (also Killraven fans) and I could not get over our amazement at all of this. We often discussed the stories from the Marvel Universe, but this was the high point. (It turns out Old Skull could be killed because Killraven’s circulation was so low, attempting as it did to pioneer new territory in comics, that it was discontinued with this issue.)

I would hope that the pedagogical implications of my formative experience with reading are self-evident: My public school’s curriculum and pedagogy failed to make me a reader. I became a reader despite, not because of, book reports and assigned readings. This is the strongest personal confirmation I can offer of the value of free voluntary reading time at school, and of letting the students bond with whatever literature appeals to them—and I hope I’ve succeeded at showing that Killraven, for instance, was literature. The experience of flow is part of what lifelong readers read for; it constitutes one of the central aesthetic pleasures of reading (traditional aestheticians describe it as ‘absorption’ of the self by the work of art; politically suspect as this may be, I think its an essential stage of aesthetic development); and I believe it should be the primary aim of reading classes. Once students have experienced that, their desire to repeat that experience will motivate them to read for the rest of their lives. I soon graduated to science fiction in high school, and dropped comics altogether in college in favor of a new Valhalla containing my new gods: Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wilde, and Nietzsche—all owing to my start in comics. Only after reading for flow creates the reading habit will exercises in critical reading and writing about/of literature be significant for them, as opposed to aversive exercises to be dashed off as quickly as possible in order to do other, ‘fun,’ things.

The fact that I remember the authors and artists of these comics, and was critically aware of their stylistic differences without ever doing homework about them, further suggests that even critical reading skills develop independent of instruction. The fact that I remember Old Skull’s death scene so vividly—more so than most books I was ever assigned in my education, college included—almost thirty years later is a revelation even to me. And traditionalists, take note: as a child, I very likely would have enjoyed writing a report on this scene, if only I’d been invited. I never was.

A multicultural note of a different sort—because pop culture could be seen as a multicultural category—is the significance of my personal-local connection to the story I described. This encounter in text with my own soil and sky—could this be why I haven’t forgotten it like I have practically all the other comics I read? This can’t be known. But there’s no doubting the intensifying effect this local-cultural connection had on my relation to the text. This points yet again to the vital importance of student choice and relevance in reading curricula.

Finally, my public school teachers probably had no idea that their desperate attempts to make us students engage in sincere reflection about books through book reports were so futile because we were naturally reflecting on our own cultural texts in authentic social reading groups—normally in the woods in our neighborhood. If my goal as a language arts teacher is to make good book-reporters of my kids, then I should keep assigning book reports; but if I want to make them lifelong readers who read like we adults do—we read books and discuss them with others—I’ll allow authentic book chats in class.

[Part 2 in the autobiographical "Web Legacies" series. Part 1: Ambivalent Apostasy (or, Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy)]

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Gloucester: O! let me kiss that hand!
Lear: Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.
–Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.vi.131-2

I don’t mean to get morbid here, it being summer and all, but I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately in the Intensive Care Unit with my mother-in-law, and the sights there of “old age, sickness, and death” are as forceful today as they were when they slammed into the mind of the young Buddha 2,600 years ago.¹

They put me in mind again of Will’s post, “My Blogging Legacy,” about how all his digital offerings may one day serve, as Will put it,  “as a piece of my brain [that] lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.”

To cut to the chase, this post is offered from that angle. It’s the first of about ten pieces that I wrote for a multiculturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain about six summers ago. The professor, Dr. Tonya Huber, assigned us to select any “artifact” from our lives, write about it as a piece of our culture, and connect it to the pedagogical issues of the course. Because I love to write, because I was alone in an apartment with a balcony under soft Mediterranean moons perfect for writing, and because I was there alone with nothing to stop me from writing midnights to sunrises on that balcony, filling coffee cups and ashtrays and pages and pages (my wife was Stateside at the time), I ended up writing ten pieces that pretty much formed a skeletal autobiography.

I want to post those here, simply because I don’t write on any space but this one. (As a side-note, I wonder how many other people chafe at the pressures to “stay on topic” because they’ve somehow been pigeonholed as “edubloggers,” when really, they never signed any such contract. And maybe it would be fun for other people to spend the summer giving edu-topics a rest, and turning to personal narrative to make this ’sphere a little more, well, personal. You never know what affinities we may discover for each other as a result.)

So to steal a line from Petrarch, one of the coolest dead white males I know, consider this the first of ten “Letters to Posterity“ á la Will’s “blogging legacy” theme. Here’s clip one:

Ambivalent Apostasy

or,

Fear and Trembling at “Camp Joy”

Artifact: King James Bible

Date: August, 1972-present

From preschool to sixth grade, my maternal grandfather was my closest extended family relationship. I remember taking walks with him in my neighborhood before I was old enough to go to school—he always carried a walking stick that he would swing rhythmically in full circles as he walked, and I would pick up any old stick and imitate him as I walked beside him. He was an extremely handsome, curly-haired, square-jawed man with a glint in his blue eyes. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he had quite the womanizing past—but around the time I was born, he was rendered impotent by testicular cancer.

Apparently this was the trigger for his conversion from womanizing to proselytizing: he converted to the Southern Baptist faith and became a fervid evangelist to all, including me, his grandson. Visits to his house always found him with the Bible in his lap—he read two chapters a day, and claimed he’d read it through in its entirety several times. I remember one visit when I was apparently, in his eyes, overdue for a haircut. He opened the Book in his lap to chapter and verse which spelled out in no uncertain terms the absolute wrongness of a man (and boy) wearing long, womanly hair. The message was clear: get a haircut to be right with God.

So my Tennessee upbringing included in its macroculture the evangelical perspective. It didn’t require that my family regularly attend church—mine didn’t—for me to be gripped, one evening when I was maybe five years old, with such terror that I tore down the stairs from my bedroom to my parents’ bedroom and leapt sobbing into their bed. When they asked why I was so upset, I told them that I knew that I would go to heaven, but they would go to hell, and I would never see them again through all eternity.

At any rate, when I was 11 years old, my grandfather persuaded my parents to enroll me in the largest Southern Baptist summer camp in the American southeast: “Camp Joy.” Each night, the 400-odd campers, pubescent boys all, were herded into an outdoor revival tent, captive audiences for a sermon that fed us such vivid images of the sufferings of eternal hell that, when the call to come forward and be saved was issued, I was among the first to answer (again, that pubescent bit is key: what healthy 11-year-old boy isn’t guilty of epic “self-abuse” on the scale of Solomon, but without, unfortunately to the lad, Solomon’s thousand concubines?). I came forward, almost trotting, as all closed their eyes in prayer, was taken outside by a camp counselor, and instructed to repeat the magic formula that would save me from the torments the speaker had taken such trouble to invent for us. Tears streaming, I sputtered the formula in total fear and trembling, and was told by the counselor that I was saved.

I went back to my cabin that night and compared notes with another boy in my group, Lance, who was also saved. We both noted that we felt different since accepting the Lord in our hearts.

Later that week, all who had come forward were baptized. After the baptism ceremony (the baptismal water of which was suspected as the cause of a severe case of empitigo, a breaking out of scabs on my face and body, the week after camp, which is the best rorschach scene for medievalism - “It was demons leaving him!” - or modernism - “Didn’t they use chlorine in that tub?” - that I can imagine), awards were given for “Camper of the Week.” After announcing the second and first runners-up, they announced the winner.

Though they mispronounced my last name, I realized I had won. They awarded me with this Bible, inscribed with my (misspelled) name. Looking back on it now, I think I won because a) I ran fastest to the altar; b) When converting, I cried more than the other boys; and c) I was a real goody-goody at that age.

On the last day of camp, some Southern Baptist radio station - the biggest in the Southeast, I was told - interviewed the two “runners-up” and me, in that order, beauty pageant-like. The second and first runners-up, when asked about the experience at Camp Joy, answered in ways any healthy boy would: “Oh, it was great! I rode horses, played baseball, shot bow-and-arrow, made lots of new friends,” etc.  I picture my father at home nodding his approval as he listened.

Then it was my turn.

My voice was always deep, even as a child, and slow. Call it a drone (massive doses of caffeine became my remedy for that in recent years). So when asked the same question, drone I did:  “Well, I wuz saaaved, and I took the Looord into mah heaart, ‘n’ I wuz Baaa-ptiiized….”  I’ve always pictured my dad, the sports buff and former football coach, dropping his head and shaking it back and forth slowly, wondering what his father-in-law had done to his boy; I would have done so if I were him. But he was a good sport and never mentioned anything. (My grandfather died shortly after that, in true Faulknerian fashion, of a self-inflicted shot to the chest from a 12-gauge shotgun, and so, thus, did his influence upon my development. For a brief spell I pictured him watching me from heaven behind my locked bedroom door, an uncomfortable experience that soon, thankfully, passed as well.)

I took this Bible home and read it cover to cover in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. Since it’s a crazy-quilt of tracts cobbled together for the Roman emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea three entire centuries after the life of Jesus (if indeed he was an historical character at all, which scholars debate), and without any sort of editors’ introduction to tie all those chapters together so the reader knows what the heck it’s all about, it’s not something I’d recommend anybody try.

When I reached adolescence shortly after, in my junior high years, my circle of friends and I started experimenting with what I’ll euphemistically call “expansive thinking.” One conversation we had concerned what our reactions, as a planet, would be if Martians were to come to earth and reveal to us their divine revelations in a book entirely devoid of God, Jesus, and all that we ‘knew.’ This and similar conversations (not to mention the tendency I noted of my Christian community to justify hateful treatment of certain groups by virtue of Biblical authority) shortly led to my disavowal of Christianity.  Call it my hillbilly Rastafarian stage.

In my twenties and thirties, I would develop an interest in world religions and out of philosophical interest read the Bible again, as well as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other key theologians. But I never considered rejoining the Christian faith.

Then a funny thing happened. I was forty years old and living in China, and my then-wife and I were in the States sifting through my library to decide what books to donate to Goodwill, and which to ship (at exorbitant cost) to China. I put the prize Bible from Camp Joy in the “donate” stack, but my wife, though not a Christian herself, urged me to keep it because it was “part of my story.” So I kept it.

I only kept a few other books. Most of them, it turns out, are in the Christian tradition: William Blake’s poetry and etchings and John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions particularly.

Why would Christian works still loom so large in my preferred reading, when there was little chance of me ever returning to the faith? First, I think it reflects my discomfort with living a life completely devoid of a routine and communal spiritual/moral focus. Though I cannot rationally (or, after reading Deuteronomy and Joshua, among other books, morally) accept the tenets of Christianity, I am at the same time uncomfortable with the alternative of having no spiritual community or fellowship at all. I still desire the inclusion in the structure of my life of regular, communal reflection on spiritual matters—the weekly church meeting on Sundays structure is very appealing to me. My rejection of Christianity unfortunately means, in American culture, that there are few if any substitutes to replace it. Consumerism and hedonism do not fill this vacuum—and unfortunately, the one satisfying alternative I have found, Unitarian Universalism, does not exist in Shanghai.

Second, the Bible is ironically a source of the concern for social justice that infuses the radical elements of progressive society. As such, I won’t categorically condemn its followers. I prefer the company and the agency of many good-hearted Christians I have known to that of many non-Christians I have known, while I have also known many non-Christians who are better practicing “Christians” than professing ones. I also note the incremental gains made for multiculturalism and tolerance within its tradition: a case in point is the recent nomination for arch-deacon of an openly gay cleric in the Anglican Church.

Third, my experience of apostasy turns out to be part and parcel of the cultural script of “Aggregate Individualism,” in which “individuals are strongly encouraged to separate from their ascribed relationships such as family, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi, 234).  Would I have been better off never to have encountered evangelical Christianity? Though the full answer to this would be “in many ways, yes, and in many ways, no,” I think that the engagement with moral and religious questions this experience gave me prepared me for later, culturally-transcendent explorations of non-Western religions—above all, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Native American Sun-Dance and Peyote religions. While I may regret the monolithic hold of Christianity on the environment of my childhood, and wish that Buddhism or any number of naturalistic spiritualities had captured me first, Christianity nonetheless allowed me to cut my teeth on it, and developmentally wrestle with its doctrine and its paradigm. I would be spiritually skinnier without that encounter.

Related to this is the issue of the value of Aggregate Individualism itself. We Westerners—including, perhaps especially, the intellectuals—pride ourselves on transcending and leaving behind our “families, relatives, community, and religion” (Choi). Such accomplishments would be frowned upon by collective cultures. There is a curious irony in the fact that the Western intellectuals of the classic Aggregate Individualistic pattern very often valorize the ‘relational,’ culturally-conservative collectivism of ‘other’ cultures — cultures that would never dream of approving of individual separation from culturally sanctioned affiliations with traditional familial, communal, and (religious-) institutional structures. Culturally atomized, we very often valorize cultural conformity—toward non-Western cultures, at any rate. I only observe this irony…I don’t know what to make of it.

So how is this relevant to culturally responsible pedagogy? It makes me aware that I should respect “even” the Christian roads that my students may be traveling, and strive to communicate with them in terms of their own scripts, rather than condescendingly “tutoring” them from my own. Whether they renounce or affirm their faith is immaterial to the real issue, which is whether they become conscious shapers of their scripts toward their fellow human beings. In the final analysis, we can’t wish Christianity away. Pragmatically, the best we can do is to try to foster a critical and reformist impulse toward it—and within it.

—

References: Kim, Uichol and Choi, Soo-Hyang: “Individualism, Collectivism, and Child Development: A Korean Perspective,” Cross-cultural Roots of Minority Child Development, Patricia Marks Greenfield, Rodney R. Cocking.

—

¹Speaking of the Buddha, here’s a clip from the BBC’s The Life of the Buddha that I’ve used in Asian history classes. It’s brilliant, and my students loved it. You’ll see why in this segment, in which Gatauma, under the Bo Tree, faces the twin “demons” of Fear and Desire and, with some wicked good special effects, vanquishes them both to attain Englightenment.  I made a viewing guide that I’ll share with anybody who’s interested in using it in their classes. The whole show is available here:

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Alrighty, Mr. Meyer - you’ve won me.  What you’re doing with video is worth it for everybody to watch.  I’m enjoying your questions and explorations, and you’re certainly upping the game. This one’s my favorite so far:

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I’m hoping to be ready to plunge into upping my own game in a humanities-guy sort of way. Just bought a Canon HV30, soon to install FinalCut Express.  What’ll it take to get you to share your know-how?

Seriously - great stuff.  I hope everybody’s watching.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)