Daniel Wolff's Blog - Posts tagged "lincoln-"
Mid-day, we drive up into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland. It rains hard, off and on. Great strands of white waterfalls tumble off the basalt walls on the Oregon side of the river. They pull tourists in: parking lots and asphalt paths let us walk right up, throw back our heads, and try to see the source high in the mist. It’s wet on wet: drizzle and mist watering ferns, little maples, beds of lush moss.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
Farther upriver is the Bonneville Dam: an astonishing testament to the species’ ambition, ingenuity, stubbornness. The Columbia rages past, white and black from a season of rain. It easily takes down huge Douglas firs and whips them away, but humans have somehow forced it to pass through this massive concrete structure. It’s beyond me how the first abutment was laid, never mind the turbines and gates rising out of the boil.
Homo sapiens, seeing the power of the water, felt the urge to use it, to tame it. And learned the skills to do so. It’s a giant, roaring library, this dam – storing all kinds of knowledge, good and bad.
Meanwhile, in the basement of its visitors center, through thick plate glass, you can make out the shapes of steelheads and Chinook salmon, fighting their way upstream against the fierce yellowish current (or, up the fish ladder, really). They seem to be all muscle. Which is all desire. Which is all instinct, we’re told. The drive to spawn.
That drive doesn’t involve learning, right? Just checking on how we view the world from the basement of a huge, man-made impediment: an electricity maker that the fish have to swim around. What the steelheads feel as an urge to get upstream is not what humans feel seeing the rush of the Columbia, right? Our impulse to harness the energy, to do something with it, is a thought, right? Not an instinct? Not a drive up against the force of the world?
**
The reading that night at the University Bookstore in Seattle is on University Avenue, which has a string of bars, Vietnamese restaurants, tattoo parlors, and students on bikes. My audience is older: 40 and up.
There’s a couple in their sixties out of South Carolina who took two buses across Seattle to get here this evening. They checked How Lincoln Learned to Read out of a local library and decided to keep it, paying the cover cost. Later, they talk about a radical past – an involvement with the civil rights movement when it was dangerous for Southern whites to take that stand. They’re reading Lincoln as a kind of instruction manual: studying history to learn how we messed up and, maybe, can make things better.
A woman in her 40’s asks questions based on her research of the Seattle school system. She cites its history of busing and private schools, the exodus out of the city and out of public education, the high incidence of home-schooling.
An older guy who listens hard says he picked this reading over a city school board meeting that was also tonight. At the meeting, they were voting on a new teaching method, Discovery Math, which he clearly thought was bogus. He’d rather be here, trying to get some larger perspective on the issues, than seeing whatever adjustments the system was making to curriculum. I hope Lincoln helped.
And there was a grandfather whose “extended family” was doing a lot of home-schooling, and it made him curious about how and where we learn. A home-schooled niece had just put on a student version of the musical, “Wicked,” from scratch. When he declared she seemed to be getting a good education, another woman in the audience said recent statistics were showing home-schoolers excelling in all areas.
There’s a definite feel out here in the Northwest that to ask the question Lincoln asks – how do we learn what we need to know – is to enter the discussion of alternative education, of kids learning from parents and other kids outside of formal school. I haven’t heard nearly as much about that in the Northeast.
**
There are only a couple of people waiting in the funky bookstore in Olympia, Washington. I talk anyway, trying to describe how the history of learning that Lincoln traces includes a history of how we treat the environment: from New England farmers “mining” the soil with corn crop after corn crop to Rachel Carson’s childhood in the industrial Allegheny River valley and her need for nature as a kind of curative.
The store clerks love it, and both buy a copy! I sign a handful of others. It seems like a silly pursuit in a world full of burning issues: talking to a couple of people on a cool, damp evening in a little college town off Puget Sound. The orange-brown Douglas Firs stacked on the loading docks seem more important – more solemn, certainly – than the thin, wood-pulp pages of a book.
On the other hand, driving the wet valley between Portland and Seattle, I heard an interview on the radio with Pete Seeger; it’s his 90th. He declared all real change came about through a series of small, incremental shifts and adjustments. If so, mebbe this little bookstore and the few people inside are part of that. I fly home the next morning.
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
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
