Some Observations After Crossing the Atlantic

I returned a few days ago from visiting family in Switzerland. (From my nephews, I picked up a nasty Swiss cold, so this will be brief.) Why is so much of my family in Switzerland? My brother moved there first, over fifteen years ago, the result of a job offer. My sister and her husband joined them two years ago; they were living in London and were unhappy with the school options for their small children. Smitten with the Swiss public education system, they resettled in Switzerland. As for my mother, with two of her three children in a small village a few miles out of Lucerne, she sold her place in Connecticut and joined them. All this to explain why German-Peruvians with American college degrees end up in Switzerland.

Nursing my cold, I've been ruminating about the following:

The public school in that village is at the center of why both of my siblings and their mates live there. My brother and brother-in-law have had lucrative job offers in other cities, other countries, the US. Nothing thus far has tempted them to leave.

With this in mind, I found myself reading to my six-year-old nephew. He's an imaginative builder of Legos and Brio trains who is about to enter first grade in August. The book he had brought home from the school library seemed to me at at a fifth-grade reading level--eons above The Cat in the Hat. The story was simple enough, how a friendship began between a lonely old farmer and Findus, a cat, but the sentences were long, full of $10.00 words. I stumbled reading--my German is a bit rusty. I thought to myself, these Swiss throw a lot of complexity at a Kindergarten kid.

Remembering what I used to do with Simon when he was little, I tried to get my nephew involved in the reading.

Pointing at the F in Findus I said: "What sound does this letter make?"

"I don't know," he said. "Lese weiter bitte, Tante Claudia." Continue reading please, aunt Claudia.

I was struck by his politeness--at that age, Simon was mostly given to one word commands. But I was also worried. If a kid in the States does not know that F makes the sound "ffff" by the end of Kindergarten, he will be held back.

I said to my sister, ever so gently: "You know, I had a feeling he doesn't know his ABCs."

She laughed: "I don't think he does. They don't teach them any reading or writing in Kindergarten here. Can you believe it? We attended a meeting at the school last year where we were told not to teach them at home, not to force it in any way. If, and only if, our child was craving learning to read, only then could we work with him a little bit. The truth is that at this age the school discourages reading or writing."

"So, what do they learn in Kindergarten?"

"They play and learn to get long with others. They're big into social skills; they learn to shake hands like diplomats." She chuckled, imitating a handshake, palm outstretched, firm grip, vigorous shake, bowing her head slightly. "I'm not kidding. I know--the kids are so little. And they do it with each other, before and after play-dates--looks really funny. Besides that, they draw; they get stories read out loud; they make stuff; they go for walks in the hills," she pointed to the Alps rising up steeply behind her house, "in any frigging weather. Snow, steady rain. Every week they march up, up, up into the hills for half a day. Crazy Swiss." She laughed. "But the kids love it. Sometimes they come back soaked."

I looked into those hills. I've been on that trail. I'm always grateful that I stopped smoking decades ago.

From my many visits to Switzerland I know that elementary school kids, at least in this village, must walk to school every day and back. Through Kindergarten, they can be accompanied; after Kindergarten, they must walk on their own. From my brother's, it's a 20 minute hike. The children have to huff it on a sidewalk that boarders a road that has a stunning view of the Alps and Lake Lucerne; however, cars steadily whiz by at 50 miles per hour. By second grade, kids are encouraged to peddle their bike on that same road, carrying on their backs their heavy school-packs. The parking lot in front of the school fits four cars. There is no pick-up lane. If you drop off your kid by car, you get called in for a conference.

And here are some other interesting details: They barely get homework. 10 minutes in first grade. 20 in second. And yet, whatever they do in the classroom works. By the end of first grade, they all know how to read and write. By third grade they introduce English as a foreign language; in fourth grade they add French. High-school students are encouraged to pick up yet another language, if they are planning to go to university.

Back home, I'm finding myself demanding more independence from Simon. I say to him: Do it yourself. Cut your own nails. Fold your own laundry. Make your own breakfast. Stack the dishwasher. Cut the cucumbers. Vacuum your room. Toss the salad. And remember, shake hands. Sometimes I make my requests in German: Setz den Tisch, bitte. Set the table, please. Gotta push the languages.

There're no steep mountains in Miami, but I'll come up with a suitable challenge. And then maybe we'll do it in the rain.

Dear All,

I am out of town visiting family and will post again on 2/28.

Last weekend, the New York Times Magazine carried an article that might interest you all: "How Christian Were the Founders? History Wars: Inside America's Textbook Battles" by Russell Shorto. Many of the players in these textbook wars are homeschooling evangelicals.

If after you've read that article, you want more information on providential history and its symbiotic relationship with the (Christian) homeschooling movement, you might want to also read an article that appeared in Harper's in 2006: "Through the Glass Darkly--How the Christian Right is Re-Imagening U.S. History" by Jeff Sharlet .

As ever,

Claudia

Hijacking Norman Rockwell

Some weeks ago a friend passed around an e-mail titled: Norman Rockwell. She was organizing a field trip to Fort Lauderdale to see his work. Who would like to join her and her kids?

Although I don't care much for Rockwell's work (surprised by his success, Rockwell used to describe himself as only an "illustrator hack"), I immediately wrote back that yes, we would join them; Simon and I would be there. This is is South Florida; Vermeer and Rembrandt exhibits don't come down here; we are lucky to get Rockwell. Moreover, it occurred to me that it would be a great opportunity to point out the distinction between fine art and illustration, to talk about the great age of newspapers and The Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell did the covers for many decades. Furthermore, it seemed to me that his pictures were thoroughly accessible and uncomplicated, full of images that alluded to the Great Depression and the World War II in ways breezy and light--Simon might like them.

A week before the field trip, my friend sent out some links to videos about Rockwell on Youtube, as well this tidbit of information: one of the main pictures featured in the exhibit was the painting he did of Ruby Bridges. We might want to see the movie by the same name, she wrote. It was made by Walt Disney but quite good, great to watch with kids.

From one minute to the next, our visit to the exhibition had very little to do with teaching Simon about illustration and newspapers, or about Norman Rockwell, for that matter. It suddenly was singularly an opportunity to discuss segregation.

It happened that the past two weeks we have been talking about the beginning of systematic segregation in the South. After the Civil War, federal troops were sent to the South to oversee the fair and equal treatment of former slaves. The South hated having Union troops hanging around, checking every move. At the beginning of the administration of Rutherford Hayes, in 1876, twelve years after the end of the Civil War, the troops were removed. Hayes thought the South had been occupied long enough and that the war and reconstruction had altered the South in foundational ways.

Not so. Immediately after the troops started marching north, the South began to strip blacks of their rights. Black elected leaders were voted out of office while schools, restaurants, hospitals, bathrooms, stores, beaches, etc. were segregated. Black citizens found themselves not much better off than they had been before the war.

"All those people died for nothing," said Simon.

"Six hundred thousand," I said. "But Simon, it wasn't for nothing. Slavery did end."

"Yes, but it was a long time until Martin Luther King."

The mail brought the movie about Ruby Bridges in its crisp red Netflix envelope, and we spent one afternoon last week on the couch watching it, or trying to watch it. The scenes in which Ruby, all of six years old, walks toward her white school through a throng of crazed white protesters are hard to watch. Maybe because I had a cold, and maybe because I wasn't ready for so much hate and viciousness, my voice kept faltering when I paused the movie to explain what was going on. To protect me, and maybe to protect himself, Simon took over the remote and pressed the mute button whenever scenes were washed in hate.

"Mom, we know that they are saying--just mean stuff. We don't have to listen."

Wise as Moses, Simon refused to give the remote back and said calmly over the muted image of yelling white folks: "I'll tell you what they are saying, Mom. Just bad stuff: hang, die, kill--words like that."

This son of mine, who loves watching sci-fi movies in which people, building, cities, whole planets and galaxies blow up, couldn't handle those words shouted in New Orleans in 1960.

At the exhibit, Simon found most of the work "boring," however hard I tried to ask him questions, to help him find the soldiers, the cheerful children, the happy families. We spent some time in front of the Ruby Bridges painting, noticing the hurled tomato that missed its target and splattered against the wall behind her. We talked about how tiny she was, how courageous, and why Rockwell painted her in a white dress, white socks, white shoes, with a white ribbon in her hair. However hard I tried, I couldn't get Simon interested in anything else hanging on the walls at the exhibition.

"Can we go home now?"

* * *

I've been persevarating this weekend about whether I had done Simon a disservice. I had hijacked Norman Rockwell to teach Simon about segregation.

If I'm honest, I have to admit that I do this sort of thing all the time, to almost every topic we touch upon--I'm an equal opportunity hijacker. I use stories, novels, biographies, history, art, music to teach Simon all that I know about the world. Who cares about dates and details and that Norman Rockwell was a terrific illustrator who did covers for The Saturday Evening Post during the great age of newspapers? Instead I teach him once more about suffering and injustice, and about dignity, valor, patience, kindness, and respect. I focus on a small area of a large canvas at a spacious exhibition to point out a stinging injustice and the unstinting courage that is its match.

Is this a pedagogical favor, or isn't it? Am I helping Simon shape his responses, or am I preempting them?

So here's my answer, arrived at with some hand-wringing and more than a few late night talks with George: I want Simon to care. I want him to have an opinion about everything. I want him to think critically and then take sides. I want him to learn all the facts and then decide who was right, who was wrong, and what was at stake. I want him to know that is not only his right but his duty. History, like anything else he will encounter, is not just a matter of dates and names and locations and body-counts. It demands a critical response. In the case of history, the body count alone obliges an opinion, not just any opinion, but a well-thought out strong opinion, a resounding response. Responding is a sign of respect. It means you care.

So, am I shaping and preempting Simon's responses to the material we cover? You bet. I'm doing both. But I hope that in the process he's learning that everything that his mind encounters--including everything that comes out of my mouth--gives him not only the opportunity but also the right to sharpen his critical skills. Obviously, he needs to use his judgment as to what opinions he keeps to himself, and which ones he voices out loud. But he must take the time to shape them--out of respect for the world around him, but also out of respect for himself. I've come to realize over the last couple of days that cogito ergo sum is, in part, an ethical statement.