A b e c e d a r i a n

The Lives of Children

Walking the streets of Avenue A on his way to work he would stop in front of Grammercy Park with a copy of Tolstoy's "On Education" in the ripped inner pocket of his corduroy jacket. It was a book that he would consult regularly, so much so that it became frayed and worn. Like Dewey, he turned to him for guidance, knowing how critical it was to honor the lives of children. It was America, 1965. He kept listening to Eric Dolphy's "God Bless the Child" because he liked to say it contained all the love and rage that washed around his soul. Reminded him of why he choose to run a school for Jose, and Tyrone and Anita....

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His dream was an echo of something he had read in Whitman and Emerson and kept going back to at different points in his life about the new generation of poets and teachers to come. He thought he was one of them. Not for vanity or for literary posterity. He loved cities, the names of streets, observing school yards and parks, hanging out on stoops taking in the aromas of energy, the lives of children, the life of neighborhoods long ago invaded by the indiscriminate wastage of poverty. He thought he was one of them because it became a calling, as it was for Holt and Kozol, and Herndon and those who came before: Tolstoy, Dewey, and Mitchell. He stopped reading newspapers because they made him angry and left him vacant inside. He wanted parks with no graffiti, libraries open on every other block, schools with no coercion or callousness, that respected the lives, the inventiveness of children.

Riverside Park, 112th Street. Leaves the color of pumpkins and red candied apples. Spending long and leisurely days with his daughter in the park he learned more about child development and language acquisition than his three years at graduate school. He'd sip it in like it was poetry, the marvelous poem of her learning. Playing with sand, with water, with words; interacting with other children: every object and person she encountered was a discovery of immense significance. In Whitehead, he discovered what his daughter was teaching him everyday: to the wise remain miracles. The first tasks of learning were full of remarkable feats. Like when she discovered her name and repeated it the entire length of the New Jersey turnpike. Build on a child's innate desire to learn. Anything which trivialized the growth of a child or the wisdom of teachers was an affront. He would build the first street school on that premise.

What we give to all children is attention, forbearance, patience, care, and above all justice. It was America in the age of Nixon and napalm. Presidents and world leaders assassinated live on tv. In the cities of America poverty spread like the profits of the oil companies. So he opened a private school for inner city kids. He would practice the ideas and values of Dewey and Tolstoy to Latino and African American and Chinese American kids on the lower east side of New York on Avenue A. At the heart of the work was an ecological vision of community: the breadth of education flows to schools directly from the community. Teaching arises in the community. The product of teaching returns to it.

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It was a vision of school not as school anymore but one that conceived and planned it as more a part of the neighborhood, as a living entity, part of an ecosystem sustaining the lives of children and adults. The closer we come to the homes and neighborhoods of the children, the truer, more correct, becomes the motivation of those who work with the young. Goodman and Dewey were some of its architects. They would call them block schools, storefront schools, minischools that would over time gradually replace the K-Mart model of school's structures of bigness and anonymity. They would be schools built into the heart of the community. Schools that would be on constant display, which would welcome people to come in and see what was going on. Resources open in the evenings and on weekends for parents and children. Schools that would banish racial segregation, that would serve as the stimulus for a new society.

Love for and respect of a child's innate desire to learn.

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Like his colleagues Herndon at Berkeley, Kohl and Hentoff in New York, Kozol and Holt in Boston, they shared a collective rage against testing, grading, seating arrangements, predigested textbooks, public address systems, guarded corridors and closed rooms, attendance records, punishments and anything else which enforced an environment of coercion and control.

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Discipline by devotion. The highest value on ideals...never...in final truths...Always collaborative...this social effort we call education.

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His tradition was progressivism as a philosophy of living that began with Rousseau and Whitman.

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He always said that the question "How can we improve our schools?" was too technocratic and missed the mark. Instead, his life project, as it would be for others was: How can we educate our young?

The passive reception of disconnected ideas...that have no spark or vitality, will lead to boredom. Let the ideas...introduced into a child's education be few and important and thrown into every combination possible. Let her make them her own. Understand their use in the here and now of the circumstances of her actual life....Let her experience the joy of discovery. The discovery...is that the ideas...give an understanding to life. (Whitehead, 1934)

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He wanted to believe this more than hope, more than love. He thought about Whitehead as he walked down First Avenue and passed by those K-Mart like schools that resembled the parks and the projects that these kids lived in. Why did every school have the look of an old age home? Can you imagine a people who fortify their souls by passively reviewing disconnected ideas? Ideas which are not utilized are...harmful. He'd see them as he walked home in the early afternoon, not menacing, but lost. In packs of four and five. Having no place to go. Or on the subways, heads tucked under hoods looking to terrorize ladies with large purses.

Beginnings generated by questioning, curiosity, and wonder. He wanted to provoke them to act. He wanted them to practice mindfulness, in the way that Dewey saw it, as a verb and not a noun; a way of taking action, a way of attending to the details of their everyday lives, to aspects of the natural world.

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To awaken in children a sense of presentness, to teach them how to notice, how to hear; to make them active and conscious human beings in touch with the energies of perceiving and imagining and feeling. The business of school...should not be mere instruction, but the life of the child. So he got small grants to build a community garden with elders and artists from the neighborhood. So the kids could see how tomatoes grew and the colors of squash with the yellow blossoms they sprouted and what compost mixed with earth smelled like when it was turned over and mixed. So that their learning was also a doing, a contributing to the life of their neighborhood.

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He honestly believed that schools could be used in powerfully regenerative ways. Educative experiences were located everywhere, but not in isolated bits of instruction. So he'd call musicians and ask if they'd come and perform and talk with his children. He found dance troupes with whom he'd barter the school's dance studio in exchange for performances and workshops. He invited the seniors from the Y to take art classes with the children and in some cases have them teach a workshop themselves. He got small grants from private funders to commission artists to construct wall murals with his children as summer projects. So that the back of Gristedes on Avenue B and the billboard on 4th Street that used to advertise cigarettes became works of public art that celebrated the cultures and lives of the community.

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He filled the First Street School with pieces of music, paintings, worlds of literature. He wanted to create a space for children to engage with their worlds. Grasp them, suspend their habitual ways of seeing things, their habitual frames. Art mattered the same way breathing did. Work with a medium of whatever kind involved the cognitive and the affective. Mindfulness was as significant listening to Paul Robson as it was in the math room. The point was to provide opportunities for them to be used, more occasions for the expression of a wide range of capacities.

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To awaken in children a sense of presentness, to teach them how to notice, how to hear; to make them active and conscious human beings in touch with the energies of perceiving and imagining and feeling.

Out of the work of projects like the First Street School would emerge schools like The Beacon School, The High School for Social Responsibility, The Harvey Milk School, The Frederick Douglas Academy; networks of small and successful schools that would proliferate across America in the last decade of the 20th Century. His work like Goodman's and Holt's and Weber's would prophesize what we see now: schools that honor the resourcefulness and intellect of children and adults; that maximize wide and expansive contact with community. Schools should be based on relationships, respect for experience, faith in the inherent sociability of children. ...The community must be empowered for the work of educating the young....

What he tried to do at the First Street School was the work of Sisyphus. Every stone of it. At the heart of his work was love. In the end it would be his Achilles heel. By 1967 his energy went up like a roman candle and expired. After 2 years he had enough. The seascapes and fog of Maine were balms. If he could not reinvent schools at least he could write books with peace of mind. But he would never really leave it. Even when the air was full of salt and wind and the echo of fog horns, he saw the coquito stands, heard the jingle of the Good Humor trucks, saw the grandmothers cavorting in front of fruit stands on 2nd Avenue.