Here is one of my many favorite parts of this amazing book:
Chapter 3: Fat Stanley and the Lancaster Amish
Let me tell you a little about fat Stanley, whose path crossed mine when he was thirteen, Stanley only came to class one or two days a month, and I knew that sooner or later he would be caught in the truancy net and prosecuted, I liked Stanley, not least because he never whined when other kids bothered him because he was fat — he simply punched them so hard in the head nobody ever bothered Stanley a second time, I hoped to spare him the grim experience of becoming a social service case.
So I asked him one day what he did on all those absences? What he said changed my life, I never saw school the same way after Stanley spoke. It seems Stanley had five aunts and uncles, all in business for themselves before the age of 2i, His aim was to follow in their footsteps. Even at 13, he had been made aware of times winged chariot hurrying near, that he had only eight years to make the miracle of an independent livelihood. One of the relatives was a florist, one a builder of unfinished furniture, one a deli owner, one had a little restaurant, one owned a delivery service, Stanley cut school to work without pay for each these relatives, bartering labor in exchange for learning the businesses — and a whole lot more — working in the company of men and women who cared for him much more than any professional stranger would have.
It was a better educational package than whatever he missed cutting school, hands down. As he put it to me, man to man: “This way I get a chance to see how the different businesses work. You tell me what books I have to read and I'll read them* But I don't have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like you — working for somebody else. " When I heard that, I couldn't keep him locked up in good conscience. Besides, his mother agreed with Stanley. So I began to cover for him, logging him present when he was making floral bouquets or building furniture. None of his other teachers ever asked; I think they were glad to be rid of him. To illustrate the powerful energies at work under his fat, deceptively cheerful exterior, Stanley crossed his "t"s with a pointed spear formation, not a simple line. Right then and there I adopted his "t" cross as my own, to remind me what I learned from a truant that day.
A big secret of bulk-process schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn; a bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach selfdirection at all. Stanley-style is verboten. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if even And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phony. School is the first impression we get of organized society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers; like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us. Work in classrooms isn't important work. It fails to speak to real needs pressing on the young. It doesn't answer burning questions which day-to-day experience forces upon young minds.
Problems encountered outside school walls are treated as peripheral when in truth they are always central. The net effect of making work abstract - “subject'-centered — external to individual longings, fears, experiences, and questions, is to render students of this enforced irrelevance listless and indifferent. The causes of sluggishness in the young have been well understood for a long time. I'm tempted to say forever. Growth and selfmastery are reserved for those who vigorously self- direct, like Stanley: planning, doing, creating, reflecting, freely associating, taking chances, punching the lights out on your tormentors. But this is precisely the agenda school is set up to prevent.
Think of school as a conditioning laboratory, drilling naturally unique, one-of-a-kind individuals to respond as a mass, to accept continual ennui, envy and limited competence as only natural parts of the human condition, The official economy we have constructed demands constantly renewed supplies of leveled, spiritless, passive, anxious, friendless, family-less people who can be scrapped and replaced endlessly, and who will perform at maximum efficiency until their own time comes to be scrap; people who think the difference between Coke and Pepsi, or round hamburgers versus square ones, are subjects worthy of argument.
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