gat

Where father was, nobody ever told me, and I never asked. This indifference wasn’t entirely
generated by anger, but from a distinct sense that time was rapidly passing while I was still
ignorant of important lessons I had to learn.
1 In her best seller of the 1990s, It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton expressed puzzlement over the fact thatWestern
conservative thought emphasizes innate qualities of individual children in contrast to Oriental concepts which stress
the efficacy of correct procedure. There are a number of paths which led to this vital difference between West and
East, but Western spiritual tradition, which insists that salvation is a individual matter and that individual
responsibility must be accepted is the most important influence by far. See Chapter 14, "Absolute Absolution."
2 Traditions of intellectual refinement have long been associated with Jesuit orders. Jesuits were school-masters to
the elites of Europe well before "school" was a common notion. Not long ago it was discovered that the rules of
conduct George Washington carried with him were actually an English translation of a Jesuit manual, Decency
Among the Conversations of Men, compiled by French Jesuits in 1595.
3 It’s almost impossible these days to chart the enormous gulf between schooling of the past and that of the
present, in intellectual terms, but a good way to get a quick measure of what might be missing is to read two
autobiographies: the first that of John Stuart Mill, covering a nineteenth-century home education of a philosopher,
the second by Norbert Wiener, father of, cybernetics, dealing with the home education of a scientist. When you read
what an eight-year-old’s mind is capable of you will find my account pretty weak tea.
Principles
Five days a week the town turned its children out in the morning to march up the hill to Waverly
or down to the end of town to high school. There was no school bus. Waverly was frozen midway
between the one-room schoolhouse tradition of transferring responsibility to children—we fought
to fill the inkwells, clean the pen nibs, sweep the floor, serve in the lunchroom, clean the erasers,
help our slower classmates in arithmetic and reading—and the specialized procedures and
curriculum of the slowly dawning corporate age of schooling. While this latter style had been sold
as more "socially efficient" ever since 1905, the realities of town life were such that nothing
passed muster at Waverly which didn’t first pass muster with parents and the elders of the town.
School was something you took like medicine. You did it because your mother had done it and
your grandmother. It was supposed to be good for you. Nobody believed it was decisively so.
Looking back, I might agree this daily exercise with neighbors suddenly transformed into
grammarians, historians, and mathematicians might well have been, as Mother said, "good for
me." One thing is certain, these part-time specialists cared a great deal about Mother’s opinion of
what they were doing, just as she cared about theirs in regard to her parenting.
The schoolteachers I remember are few but bear noting: Peg Hill who spoke to me exactly the
way she did to the principal and won my heart for treating me as a peer; Miss Wible who taught
me to sing and memorize song lyrics so ferociously, that my vocabulary and dramatic repertoire
increased geometrically (even if we did whisper to each other that she was reading "love books"
at her desk as we copied the day’s words); old Miss McCullough, who played "American Patrol"
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