To Prove Our Brilliance

Note: Welcome Dylan Alexander Smith, DSC board member and new blogger.


This was the seventies. I grew up in a shotgun shack on a tract of land barely more than a whisper, at the bottom of a wooded slope at the end of a forgotten tongue of county asphalt. Our address was officially “unincorporated”—adrift between the fringes of one small town and another, tinier one. We were transplants to the rural scene—the Pacific Northwest, in this case—from the modestly sized city of Portland, Oregon. The bucolic lifestyle was grand in terms of wild, rambling spaces, but not intellectual scope. I was an only child at this point. When it came time for me to begin my formal education, my parents discovered that our home fell on the Podunk side of the school district divide. The school I was destined to attend was an economically-depressed, anti-intellectual catchall of boondock foundlings in a one-stoplight crossroads of a burg. My parents, a union of young earnest free-thinkers, got wind of an experimental school that seemed to align with their sensibilities in the larger of the two small towns. The school was a kind of starter school, limited to 1st – 3rd grades. It was in the basement of a church, but without religious affiliation, and maxed out at thirty students across the three grades. Supposedly it was a private school, though it couldn’t have cost any money, since we were living on food stamps at the time. Faced with otherwise sending me off to the woolly yonder, they went for it.

The teachers were real hippie types, of the benevolent, sprout-eating, corduroy-and-flannel-wearing variety. They fit with the images of do-gooder “safe” adults I saw on Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The only male, Mike, had a scraggly beard and ponytail. Another teacher, Barbara, was a round woman with a massive poofy Afro that wobbled and shook about her head like an ectoplasmic halo. These were large-hearted, fully-formed humanists.

I hadn’t gone to kindergarten, but I’d been to preschool, and Open Community School had a similar feel. There were no desks or classrooms. Learning was a kind of constructive playtime. Problem solving. Project completing. Emphases on creative development. We spent a lot of time outside, adventuring about the property, which was a lumpy, hilly, wooded, swampy wonderland. A stagnant creek at the edge of the grounds was a source of great interest for the hunting of small water creatures. We climbed trees. We played chasing and kissing games. One boy, Adam, terrorized me every day, and I couldn’t stand up for myself because I didn’t have any violence in me. (As with a lot of the mysteries presented by the kid-centric social milieu, I was totally confused by this tough-guy development.) The school newsletter published a bit in which I opined freely about “explicit” aspects of human anatomy. The faculty apparently wasn’t interested in glossing children’s immunity to arbitrary social taboos. My mother was mortified though kept a sense of humor about it.

The setting and atmosphere of the school were about as natural and comfortable as could have been hoped for in an otherwise foreign environment. I loved it there. I thought I did, anyway. I learned to read there. I learned basic math. One of the teachers read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to us, which confronted my imagination head-on and forever changed my life (as Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH would four years later). But apparently, I wasn’t becoming properly socialized. I was too sensitive, circumspect, and clingy with the adults instead of running wild with my roustabout cohort. Maybe I worried irrationally about my bully, Adam. Whatever the reason, the teachers were concerned that I might be headed for a brooding, depressive future. Partway through 2nd grade, they suggested my parents remove me to a more traditional environment. Structure might remedy my social challenges, thicken my skin so to speak. Exposure to the “normal” world. Sink or swim.

My parents finagled a waiver out of the Podunk crossroads school and landed me a spot in the next-closest district, which had a lot of suburban middle-class tax money going to it. The schools were new and vast and full of well-nourished, mall-clothed, housing-development-reared kids. In this new world I had my own desk… in a row of similar desks… in a matrix of the same—all stuffed with kids robotically facing the same direction, hushed into stilled silence. I cried for weeks. No kidding.

The other kids watched me and whispered. I was a distraction from the design of this space, with its demands on attention and underlying withering atmosphere of perpetual censure (despite teachers’ often cheerful attempts to sabotage it and keep our chins up). Two girls—best friends, dressed identically—repeatedly asked if I was all right, which made me cry more, not knowing how to accept fellow seven-year-olds’ sympathy.

It was the tradition of “school” that cowed my spirit: the cold contrivance passing itself off as a natural circumstance. Obviously, I didn’t possess the language to articulate the fact of my experience, but I was facing the philosophical crisis of my time: how does one intellectually reconcile imposed behavioral structures absent of meaning? And who were all these children so fluent in the incumbent rituals? What was the secret to their knowledge? How had they come to participate so easily? To me the classroom was as clinical and alien as a waiting room at a doctor’s office—laden with a similar foreboding. Here was none of the pleasantness of a native human habitat. I’d been bounced from my moon rover onto a bleak stretch of airless rock. The teachers were friendly, nice. My fellow students were too. But they were aliens. Friendly aliens. Breathing alien air, organized in alien formation. Like seven-year-old “associates.” How could these kids ever be friends?

It turned out, not knowing how to deal with me—a creature from some exotic nether-region—my new school had put me into the “slow” second grade class. After a week of covert assessment, however, they moved me across the hall to the “accelerated” side. I continued to bawl incessantly, not knowing what to do amidst these strangers—now a whole new contagion of them, with a new overseer. I was having a very natural response to the very unnatural phenomenon of being institutionalized. Instead of simply adapting to my new surroundings, I was reacting.

After about three weeks, I began to calm down, having no doubt convinced the other kids that I had some kind of mental illness. Eventually I managed to assimilate, meaning my tears dried up and I blended as best I could with a kind of practical, intuitive mimesis, biding my time like a cat in a cage, internally pacing and alert. As time passed—first months, then years—as any imprisoned person is apt to do, I found room within the institution to express and explore my creative impulses, through writing and art and performance. But, of course, these foregrounded impulses of my person-ness were relegated to the background of my so-called scholarly priorities.

In high school we were tested to identify plausible career paths; my results recommended me for menial labor, things like “maintenance” and “small engine repair.” This because I undoubtedly (though I certainly don’t remember) penciled in the bubbles on the form pertaining to interests in the arts, and at the time—the late 1980’s—the importance of the humanities was losing hold on the public consciousness in a big way—as it has continued to do so in our culture of unbridled capitalism. I have since, in my adult life, dedicated much of my energies to the arts in many forms, from illustration, to writing, to music and acting, even garnering some decent, if brief, success in some of these enterprises. In other words, I did not bury my creative impulse despite the institution’s designs, and though I may not be able to claim rich rewards in calculable wealth, I can certainly claim rewards in character, wisdom, and life experience. But I digress…

It’s important to point out, in light of common notions and biases and fears regarding the failures of our public schools, that I went to a “good” school. My school was not one of the derelict, ignored, defunded, or fraudulently-managed schools that seem to be a widespread feature of our—especially “urban” (code for black, Hispanic, inner city or ghetto)—public school system. Ours was not a catchall for ill-equipped teachers. We had smart, active, involved, dedicated, and innovative teachers overall. By all accounts, the school district I came up in was well above average in terms of the quality of the general education it provided—something I didn’t understand until I got out into the world and saw firsthand the foreshortened education my workforce and college peers had been graduated with. Nevertheless, for some of us (perhaps the more sensitive among us), the institution itself undermines our ability to best learn, represses rather than promotes our talents and intellectual skills, thereby curtailing our abilities to excel in a world that ultimately demands independent thought to achieve excellence.

My intention in writing this is not to condemn our school paradigms per se, rather to comment on what should be obvious: (1) what appears to “work” doesn’t necessarily qualify as the best method or even good enough, and (2) what works well for some doesn’t work so well for others. Indeed, the obdurate structure of the traditional classroom, with its emphasis on behaviorism, may provide a feeling of welcome safety for some children, as a respite from chaotic home life. And surely there are overworked parents who appreciate the agrarian-rooted instruction on manners and respect that may not otherwise feel suitably reinforced during the brief moments they are able to share with their kids. I believe the argument worth having comes down to the notion that a functional, sophisticated citizenry needs to address the realities of just how brilliant and diverse our human imagination is proving to be: do we continue to imprint a culture of obeisance on our kids as a priority above all else, or do we give fascination a front seat and tell formality to wait out in the hall?



-- Dylan Alexander Smith