A week in the mid-west, doing readings and having discussions, reconfirms that this is the real pay-off from writing a book: the talk that follows, the agreements and disagreements, the issues raised. It’s like the book continues to be written – in public – person by person.
There was the school teacher, a veteran of twenty-plus years in the public system, who asserted (grey hair, pink cheeks, thick glasses: the picture of the teacher you remember): “Schools were designed to create factory workers. And there aren’t any factory jobs left.”
There was the quiet in Winnetka, a rich suburb north of Chicago, when I’d finished a talk on Abigail Adams and John Kennedy: how they illustrated that America’s wealthy have always been able to buy a “better” education. Quiet, and then one woman asked what my qualifications were for writing “How Lincoln Learned to Read.” Good question. My qualifications are mostly curiosity but include having been a student and the parent of students and a citizen. But her larger question was really what we need to know to discuss education. Do people need to be schooled to discuss school? And if we’re trying to have a democracy, where does that leave the “unqualified” -- who are, after all, the majority of us?
There was the drive south to Springfield, Illinois to speak at the Lincoln Museum. Mile after mile of yellow-white corn with the occasional green John Deere reaper, the occasional orange sugar maple. It was as man-made a landscape as any city block. It made me think of Emerson’s declaration: “The farm the farm is the right school.” These farms were hundreds of acres cut into squares, further divided into straight rows, then planted with a single crop to be harvested by men in machines. So when I arrived and spoke about Lincoln to a large, eager crowd -- his hunger to learn, to stop being a hunter/farmer and settle down -- it was colored by this glimpse of what we’ve settled into. The 21st century farm is the right school for what? Teaches which values? And what are the consequences to the family, the land?
There was the evening class full of adults trying to get back into the educational system – most of them black, all of them low income. They started raucously debating what a “good” education might be. Whether the “best” schools taught you how to survive in South Chicago or the tough sections of Madison, Wisconsin. Where and how books fit into a life of single mothers, food stamps, and working at McDonalds. We went from shouting to laughing: the question of what we need to know hot and personal.
There was the early morning University of Wisconsin lecture hall – three hundred undergrads – being asked why they were here: what did they expect to learn? How they looked up sleepily from their laptops and grinned. It struck them as a funny question: asked in the middle of a recession, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a class that would segue into the next and eventually turn into a diploma. Then they talked about the maze of college, what sustained them, the music they loved. And later – at a local bookstore – the U of W education majors who wanted to talk about alternative schools and seemed to bloom at the idea that we might learn what we need to know both in and outside of the classroom. How to set up an educational system that recognized and somehow credited that? How to hash out the implications on a local level?
There was a quick chat after a reading in Hyde Park, where a middle-aged white man described dropping out of college and spending a season on the ore boats in the Great Lakes. Then coming back to school and for the first time in his life being hungry for knowledge, needing to know how the world worked.
I’m leaving some out: the radio interviewer describing how he tries to give his five year old time to just wander around, to look at rocks and flowers, and how hard that is – how strongly he feels the pressure to “educate” her instead. The discussion about how schools fit into present day capitalism: that they offer the Horatio Algier hope that education can help anyone (everyone?) succeed! And how people don’t much want to hear if that’s not true.
And then there was the “failed” reading in Milwaukee: a single, elderly woman surrounded by empty chairs. And her explaining that both her boys had dropped out of high school. And how she attributed it to the elementary school teacher who had refused to hang her son’s drawing because he’d made the grass red, not green. “He never forgot it,” she said, not bitter. And both sons are doing fine, thanks.
It was a great pleasure to meet these people, introduce them to W.E.B. DuBois, Lincoln, Rachel Carson and others from “How Lincoln Learned to Read,” and then listen to the dialogue – no, the debate really; the wrestling match – that followed.
How Lincoln Learned to Read Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them