#9
Circumstances converged on me from more than one direction. When I left The New School in 2001 the culture of the school was moving in a direction I did not want to go—toward “distance learning”—the replacement of the classroom and campus with computers and online teaching, so I was not entirely unhappy to leave. I spent a brief time at New York University, where the threat of guruhood was immediately reduced due to the fact that I was not known there.
And there was the lure of teaching youths. During the time I was teaching at The New School (which was always a part-time job) I continued to teach (part-time) at The Hudson School, which had expanded into a high school in the 1990s. During almost all of my time at The New School, teaching afternoons and then evenings there, my mornings were spent at Hudson, and for a few years I was teaching from the seventh grade through the post-graduate level.
When I finally settled in teaching high school I experienced at last an immersion in the role of a (mere) teacher. (This, recall, was the level at which I had initially aimed to teach after banging my head against the wall in Rio). While the knowledge of sexuality still provides a common connection or bridge of understanding with students in high school, the tension and ambiguity that qualify the teaching of adults due to the potential for actual contact is, or should be, completely relieved. And while most young people like to conform to the crowd, there are those who are different, and who have difficulty feeling comfortable in large school environments. Hudson High attracted such students (among others) and such students are likely to value independence of mind.
This might be an elite situation academically: The school is private, but it is inexpensive compared to other private secular schools, and it supports low-income students with scholarships. And, by design, there is a strong diversity in ethnicity, reflected in the variety of religious backgrounds, so there is no doctrinal pressure of any kind—fertile ground for me. (And there was a strong contingent of students with special needs of many kinds, for which the faculty received no special training, inadvertently providing the teachers with opportunities for pedagogical exploration and experimentation.)
(By the way, adolescence as the transition from childhood to adulthood, which is understood to occur between puberty and about 18, is not a biological stage but a cultural one, suggesting the difficulty of that transition here, in contrast to traditional societies in which the transition is comparatively easy while significant (Margaret Mead’s major discovery from Samoa).)
There are many angles by which a discussion can legitimately be directed where a teacher wants it to go, but I did not have to be very clever because the courses I taught provided as dynamic a field as one could reasonably imagine—World History (to the 9th grade), U.S. History from 1900 to the present (11th), and an elective course from a rotation of Philosophy, Anthropology and Comparative Religion (10th-12th). A problem for me was sparing the students the repetition of joke lines; there was no problem finding a context in which to insert virtually any kind of content I chose. And if I had any special influence, I believe it was because every idea was inserted with the accompanying understanding that it was not a truth but rather an option that some people choose, the implication being that every idea is on the “menu” in life, each student to decide for otself.
While kids in high school are eager to think for themselves, they are also more open to ideas. In this regard they have not yet totally gotten past the innocence of youth, so they are especially fascinated by the exotic, and anthropology is perfectly ready for that. Not to cast the gauntlet at subjects such as literature, but the old sayings such as “truth is stranger than fiction” and “you can’t make that shit up” are true. So in their ardor to think for themselves they are naturally drawn to topics such as primitive peoples and their beliefs. The anthropologist can teach about the fantastic ideas of many religions as true, at least in the sense that people actually believe them (and it is not for me as anthropologist (or simply as a person, in my view) to say they’re untrue (no matter how much I might dislike or disagree with those beliefs)). This absence of judgment comes across in the classroom explicitly and implicitly.
I say the students are eager to think for themselves, but they don’t necessarily realize that. For example, kids don’t want to be seen as odd among their peers, so they commonly wear things, for instance, that “everyone is wearing,” yet more deeply, they interpret that conformity, confined as it is to their peers, as an assertion of singular identity! And revealing that to them, subtly of course, becomes itself a revelation that further intensifies their independence of mind.
When it comes to openness to ideas among students, the concept of magic is a draw, of course, although I did not discuss the New School experiments at Hudson. The same is true of the concept of spirit: The equation with consciousness seemed perfectly appropriate in the classroom, but I might only allude to cognitive consonance out of consideration for the fact that they are in the stage in their lives of trying to piece things together anyway, and the principle of consonance might simply seem obvious to them.
As for the whys, younger children are intrigued and treat it as a game rather than an introspective tool, which does not at all diminish for me the fascination with their thinking, “simple” as it might be logically. (I included some elicitations of middle-schoolers in the guide because they illustrate the process so clearly in some respects.) I introduced the whys only in the Philosophy elective, and the elicitations of those students were on a par with those of adults in terms of complexity.
No Guru 