“Okay.”
“At age four the child begins to widen his acquaintance of life. Are we going to posit one hundred percent illiteracy for all his neighbors? I think that would be going too far, but let’s do it anyway. At age five the child’s range extends even farther, and I think it’s asking too much to suppose that his whole neighborhood is totally illiterate. He’s surrounded by written messages, bombarded by written messages—all of which are intelligible to people around him, especially to his peers, who are not at all modest about flaunting their superior expertise. He may not instantly learn to read at graduate-school level, but at this age in your schools, he would only be learning the ABC’s anyway. He learns enough. He learns what he needs to know. Without fail, Julie. I trust him to do this. I trust him to manage to do what human children have been doing effortlessly for hundreds of thousands of years. And what he needs right now is to be able to do anything his playmates do.”
“Yeah, I can believe that.”
“At age six and seven, as the child’s range continues to expand, he’s going to want to have a little money in his pockets, the way his playmates do. He won’t need to go to school in order to learn the difference between pennies, nickels, and dimes. And he’ll take in addition and subtraction like the air he breathes, not because he’s ‘good at mathematics,’ but because he needs it as he moves farther and farther out into the world.
“Children are universally fascinated by the work their parents do outside the home. In our new tribal system, parents will understand that including their children in their working lives is their alternative to spending tens of billions of dollars annually on schools that are basically just detention centers. We’re not talking about turning children into apprentices—that’s something else entirely. We’re just giving them access to what they want to know, and all children want to know what their parents are up to when they leave the house. Once they’re loose in an office, children do the same things they did at home—they dig up all the secrets, investigate every closet, and of course learn how to work every machine, from the date-stamp machine to the copier, from the shredder to the computer. And if they don’t know how to read yet, they’ll certainly learn to read now, because there’s very little they can do in an office without reading. This isn’t to say that children would be prohibited from helping. There’s nothing children like better at this age than feeling like they’re helping Mommy and Daddy—and again, this isn’t something learned, this is genetic.
“In tribal societies, it’s taken for granted that children will want to work alongside their elders. The work circle is also the social circle. I’m not talking about sweatshops. There are no such things in tribal societies. Children aren’t expected to behave like assembly-line workers, punching in and
punching out. How else are they to learn to do things if they’re not allowed to do them?
“But children will quickly exhaust the possibilities of their parents’ workplace, especially if it’s one where the same tasks are performed over and over. No child is going to be fascinated by stacking canned goods in a grocery store for long. The rest of the world is out there, and our supposition is that no door is closed to them. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with a musical bent could learn at a recording studio. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in animals could learn at a zoo. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in painting could learn in an artist’s studio. Imagine what a twelve-year-old with an interest in performing could learn in a circus.
“Of course there would be no prohibition against schools, but the only ones that would actually attract students are the ones that attract them now—schools of fine arts, schools of music and dance, schools of martial arts, and so on. Schools of higher learning would doubtless attract older students as well—schools devoted to scholarly studies, the sciences, and the professions. The important thing to notice is that none of these are merely detention centers. All are dedicated to giving students knowledge they actually want and expect to use.
“I would expect a common objection to be that such an educational system would not produce ‘rounded’ students. But this objection merely reaffirms your culture’s lack of confidence in your own children. Given free access to everything in your world, children would not become educationally rounded? I think the idea is absurd. They would become as rounded as they wanted to be, and there would be no presumption that education ends at age eighteen or twenty-two. Why would there be? These particular ages would become educationally meaningless. And in fact it would appear that very few people yearn to be Renaissance men and women. Why should they yearn for such a thing? If you’re content to know nothing beyond chemistry or woodworking or computer science or forensic anthropology, whose business is it but your own? Every specialty that there is somehow manages to find candidates in every generation who want to pursue it. I’ve never heard of a single specialty disappearing for lack of candidates avid to pursue it. One way or another, every generation produces a few people who burn to study dead languages, who are fascinated by the effects of disease on bodies, who yearn to understand the secrets of rat behavior—and this would be as true under the tribal system as it presently is under your system.
“But, of course, having your children underfoot in the workplace would seriously reduce efficiency and productivity. Even though sending them to educational detention centers is terrible for children, it’s unquestionably wonderful for business. The system I’ve outlined here will never be implemented among the people of your culture as long as you value business over people.”
“So,” I said, “you would be in favor of something like home schooling.”
“I’m not in the least in favor of home schooling, Julie. It’s not merely linguistic whimsy that connects the schooling of children with the schooling of fish. Schooling of any kind is unnecessary and counterproductive in human children. Children no more need schooling at age five or six or seven or eight than they need it at age two or three, when they effortlessly perform prodigies of learning. In recent years parents have seen the futility of sending their children to regular schools, and the schools have replied by saying, ‘Well, all right, we’ll permit you to keep your children at home, but of course you understand that your children still must be schooled, you can’t just trust them to learn what they need to learn. We’ll check up on you to make sure you’re not just letting them learn what they need to learn but are learning what our state legislators and curriculum writers think they should learn.’ At age five or six home schooling might be a lesser evil than regular schooling, but after that it’s hardly even a lesser evil. Children don’t need schooling. They need access to what they want to learn—and that means they need access to the world outside the home.”
I told Ishmael I could think of another reason why people wouldn’t go for the tribal system. “The world is too dangerous. People wouldn’t let their kids wander around loose in a city these days.”
“I’m not at all sure, Julie, that most urban business districts are any more dangerous than schools, these days. From what I read, children are much more inclined to go to school armed with deadly weapons than office workers are. Not many businesses need to have security guards in the hallways to protect executives from being attacked by workers and to protect workers from each other.”
I had to admit that he had a bunch of points there.
“But the main thing I want you to see is that it’s your system that is Utopian. The tribal system isn’t perfect, but it isn’t a Utopian scheme. It’s completely feasible, and it would save you tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars every year.”
“I don’t suppose you’d get many votes from teachers, however.”
Ishmael shrugged. “For half of what you’re spending right now, you could retire every teacher in the system with a full pension.”
“Yeah, they might go for that. But here’s something I know people will say about all this: There’s so much to learn in our fabulously terrific culture that we have to send them to school for all these years.”
“You’re right that it will be said, and those who say it will be right in the sense that there is a tremendous amount available to be learned in your culture that was not available to be learned in any tribal culture. But this misses the point I’m making here. Your basic citizen’s education wasn’t expanded from four grades to eight in order to include astronomy, microbiology, and zoology. It wasn’t expanded from eight grades to twelve in order to include astrophysics, biochemistry, and paleontology. It wasn’t expanded from twelve grades to sixteen in order to include exobiology, plasma physics, and heart surgery. Today’s graduates don’t leave school with all the advances of the past hundred years in their heads. Just like their great-great-grandparents a century ago, they leave with enough in their heads to start at the bottom of the job market, flipping burgers, pumping gas, and bagging groceries. It just takes today’s graduates a whole lot longer to get there.”
Wealth Taker Style
The next day, Sunday, I wanted to get my weekend homework out of the way before meeting again with Ishmael, so it was mid-afternoon by the time I got down to Room 105. I had my hand on the knob when I heard someone on the other side of the door say, very distinctly: “The gods would have it.”
The dork had gotten in ahead of me.
For about ten seconds I considered hanging around for a while then decided against it. Feeling pretty bleak, I turned around and headed home.
The gods would have it.
I wondered what conversation that reply was part of. Certainly not one about school systems and teacher pensions. Not that the subject matter made any difference. I would’ve felt the same if what I’d overheard was “The supermarkets would have it” or “The Green Bay Packers would have it.” You understand what I’m saying—I was jealous.
I suppose you think you wouldn’t have been.
“I’d like you to see, Julie, if you can penetrate to the core of my message to you,” Ishmael said when I was finally able to get back, on Wednesday. “See if you can discern what I’m saying to you again and again and again, every which way.”
I gave it some thought and said, “You’re trying to show me where the treasure is.”