by Daniel Quinn
We know what works: Give them access to as much as you can. Nothing magical happens at the age of five to render this process obsolete.
Yes, I understand—believe me, I do. What you’re saying is exactly what our educators would say: “That system might work in primitive cultures, but it won’t work in ours, because we just have too much to learn.” This is just ethnocentric balderdash; you might not like to hear this, but any anthropologist will confirm it: What children learn in other cultures isn’t less, it’s different. And in fact nothing is too much to learn if kids want to learn it. Take the case of teenage computer hackers. These kids, because they want to, manage—unaided!—to achieve a degree of computer sophistication that matches or surpasses that of whole teams of people with advanced degrees and decades of experience. Give kids access and they’ll learn. Restrict their access to what you think they should learn, and they won’t—and this is the function of our schools, to restrict kids’ access to learning, to give them what educators think they should know, when they think they should know it, one drop at a time.
Are you able to remember yourself at age five, seven, nine, ten? Do you recall yearning to be allowed to sit in a classroom for six hours a day? No, neither do I. Do you remember where you wanted to be? Or can you imagine where you might have wanted to be? Well, yes, certainly out-of-doors, not in a school, but …
Here, let me imagine a place for you. It’s a sort of circus, a collection of acrobats, jugglers, animal trainers, high-wire artists, clowns, dancers—the whole thing, every kind of performer you’d expect to find in a circus. And this place is parked nearby and it’s open round the clock and the idea is anyone can walk in and say to any of these performers, “Hey, I’d like to learn how to do that!” and they say, “Well, of course! That’s what we’re here for!”
Of course there’d be room here for a lot more. Maybe a small zoo where you could learn to take care of the animals yourself. Maybe somebody would have a pretty good telescope and could show you what’s what in the nighttime sky and lend you some books if you’re interested. And maybe there’d be a photographer with a bunch of cameras and a darkroom, and somebody with a printing press and a bindery. And while we’re at it, why not a weaver and a potter and a sculptor and a painter and a pianist and a violinist, and maybe even someone who knows how to build a piano and how to make a violin? And indeed there would always be building projects under way, so you could learn how to use all the tools and read the blueprints and all that. And someone who was always prepared to take a bunch of kids out into the wilderness to learn whatever there is to learn out there. And maybe an archaeologist who could take some kids off to a dig someplace. And you could even have a writer on hand in case someone was crazy enough to want to find out what that’s all about. And a roomful of computers, with someone who knew how to use them. And somewhere in there someone who could teach you any math you wanted to learn, and someone else who could teach you any electronics or physics you wanted to learn, and so on. And gee, everybody has books they can lend you. For your young entrepreneurs, you could even have people around who could help them make and market their products.
Here, let me imagine a place for you. It’s a sort of circus.…
Are you getting the idea here? I could go on for hours this way.
Anyway, the rule is, you can come and go as you please, do anything you please, study with anyone you please for as long as you please. How does this sound as someplace you might rather have been than in a classroom?…
Exactly, exactly. It’d be a never-ending feast of learning, and if you wanted to keep kids out, you’d have to put up a razor-wire fence.…
Oh, well, of course educators would hate it. Educators would be superfluous in such a setup: functionless. They’d say: “Sure, everyone’s having a wonderful time, but how do you know they’re getting a rounded education?” My answer to that is, “Rounded according to whom?” and “Rounded as of when?” Who says education has to end at age eighteen? Or at age twenty-two? If there were a place like that in my neighborhood, I’d be ensconced there right now, teaching writing, teaching editing, teaching publishing, teaching word processing, teaching everything I have to teach—and learning, getting that “rounded education” I certainly didn’t get in sixteen years of schooling.…
No, don’t call this a school. Didn’t you hear what I just said? It isn’t a school, it’s a city. It’s a place where people live who are willing to let their children have access to them. People who are willing to let the children of the community hang around, willing to pay attention to them, willing to talk to them, willing to show them how things work, willing to show them how to do things, willing to let them try out things for themselves. Nothing difficult, nothing very demanding, just the ordinary things people did on this planet for the first three million years of human life.
People in this city wouldn’t get as much “done” as people in New York City, wouldn’t have as sharp a competitive edge, but they’d have a hell of a lot more fun and they’d find out what it’s like to live like human beings instead of workers—and they wouldn’t pay a nickel in school taxes. It would be costly in terms of time, of course, but how many hours does the average worker spend right now paying for a system that doesn’t work?
Joe Hagan, another SRA alumnus, had been hired as editorial vice president at The Society for Visual Education, which had recently been acquired by the Singer Corporation. SVE had traditionally specialized in audio-visual materials—filmstrips, cassettes, overhead projectuals, and so on. In addition to continuing this supplementary line of materials, Joe wanted to start a new line of multimedia systems designed to support basal curriculum objectives. To give you an example of the difference, the AV side of the company might produce a series of six filmstrips on six key judicial decisions of current importance—Miranda, Roe v. Wade, and so on—which a school might buy for its AV library and which social studies teachers at various levels might use in any number of contexts. The systems Joe had in mind would be multimedia programs designed to supplement basal school programs. For example, all first-grade teachers have a pretty well-defined set of objectives to meet in mathematics. The materials they’re given to work with are almost always printed: textbooks and workbooks. The guides that accompany these materials suggest a myriad of things that’ll help: activities, games, and practice materials they can assemble cheaply. Lots of companies offer supplementary materials of various kinds that teachers can buy, often with their own money, but what Joe had in mind was to assemble a complete and completely coordinated supplemental package: filmstrips to introduce basic concepts, taped lessons to reinforce the concepts, games to provide practice with essential skills, and so on. Joe offered me the job of overseeing the development of this product line, with the title of editorial director, and I leaped at it. This was work I was born to do. I understand media and their instructional uses and in the years to follow was surprised to discover how rare a knack this is.
What Joe was offering me was more than work I was born to do. At last I was going to be in a position to decisively affect materials being put into schools by a major educational publisher. And there was more. Joe had accepted his vice presidency with the understanding that the presidency would be his when the present president retired in three years. It was highly likely that, unless I screwed up, I would then move up into Joe’s job.
The next three years were tremendously exciting times. I was doing the best work I’d ever done and was trying to create an environment in which others could do the best work they’d ever done. The products being developed under my direction were a tremendous success—among the most successful in the history of the business, according to Joe. Naturally this was too good to go on for long.
Joe was a bit like me—he had the silly notion that what counts in business is achievement. He had plenty of that to show for his time at SVE; he’d doubled the company’s income in three years. But what counts (and is rewarded) in big corporate business is standing in w
ell with the right people, and this Joe had badly neglected, so that when the president retired, the folks at Singer decided they wanted one of their own sort to take that job. For the man they promoted from corporate headquarters, it was just a convenient stepping-stone to greater things. He stayed barely long enough to fire Joe Hagan and install his own editorial vice president (not me, of course).
One day after he’d been in the saddle for about three months, the new president took me aside for a little talk about the stuff I was putting out. “You’re making it too good,” he told me gravely. “You don’t have to make it so good, because it’s just for kids, and kids can’t tell the difference.”
“You’re making the stuff too good,” the president told me gravely.
I replied in some fashion or other and walked away. This was not an expression of mere philistinism and ignorance on his part. It was an insult to my intelligence. This smoke screen of talk was in fact transparent: He intended to cut my budget, which meant that I would not be able to make the products so excessively good. This cut in expenses would produce a pretty little jump in profits, which would make him look good with the folks at the head office. A few days later I sent round my letter of resignation. I could easily have stayed and put up with it (and within two or three years probably been rewarded with a vice presidency), but there are times when one must be a fool for the sake of making a foolish gesture.
I didn’t leave bitterly. In fact, I left very well, with a contract to write twelve filmstrips for twenty thousand dollars, almost certainly the highest fee ever paid for a work-for-hire in that medium and industry. It was clearly a sort of golden handshake, though why they thought they owed me one is a mystery. The filmstrips would take about a month to write and storyboard—not bad money for those days (or even these).
This gave us time to set up Daniel Quinn & Associates, a development house, devoted to creating products for educational publishers to publish as their own. It’s a feasible business for an aggressive entrepreneur. For someone like me, who is nothing like an aggressive entrepreneur, it’s just a sure way to go broke. Nevertheless we did some good things, Rennie and I. Some were still being marketed ten years later. Some are still being marketed today.
One project that was a lot of fun was a set of thirty “read-along” books (books to be read while listening to a taped reading or dramatization of the text) for a publisher in Florida. The objective of the series was to give students the experience of reading as an enjoyable activity. (A typically subversive Quinn notion; school people get nervous when their charges start having fun; school is supposed to be serious, unpleasant business.) Accordingly, half the series was devoted to genre fiction, which is what most people read for fun: science fiction, mystery, suspense, and even horror. In writing these books, I discovered that (thanks to experience and reading) fiction was no longer a mystery to me.
This project was followed by a lull, which is to say we were out of work. While our sales rep was out trying to find customers for products I’d conceived, I had some time to fiddle with the pieces of a puzzle I’d been shuffling around for the past fifteen years. At this point, I didn’t have any idea how they fit together or what they added up to.
When people ask me about the origins of Ishmael I usually talk about one or another of the pieces of the puzzle I was exploring.
One was the mystery of how and why we happened to mislay the first three million years of human life. This mystery was composed of several different puzzles. For example, why doesn’t human history begin with the birth of humanity?…
Ah. Well, of course. That’s just my point. History is defined so as to begin at a certain arbitrary point, and what came before isn’t defined in its own terms but only in terms of its beforeness. It’s not history, it’s a separate special thing called prehistory …
No, that’s not quite what I’m getting at. Look, let’s do this. Let’s take all the names you know of literary and dramatic forms of the past and abolish them. I want you to expunge from your memory words like epic, ballad, saga, tragedy, ode, mystery play, allegory, fable, biography, and essay. I want you to gather them up in your mind and erase them. Okay. Now I’m going to give you a much improved way of thinking about this whole matter of human communications. Television came into being in the late 1940s, as you know. Well, before that there was a long, undifferentiated period of pre-television. So, just as you have history and prehistory, now you have television and pre-television.
The key word here is undifferentiated. That’s what prehistory is. History, by contrast, is a teeming mass of highly differentiated material: movements, leaders, technological and social developments, and so on. Prehistory is simply the great undifferentiated nothingness that existed before history—our history—began. This is the universal understanding of how it was. Prehistory was there; it went on for a long, long, long time. We all know that. But if you’re going to write a text on history, if you’re going to teach a class on history, then you’re going to start with something called the agricultural revolution, about ten thousand years ago. That, by definition, is the beginning of history. For some strange reason, human history doesn’t begin with the birth of our species but rather with the birth of a technology. Why? How did this very odd state of affairs come to be?
It took me several years to figure it out. When the people of our culture began to have the leisure to wonder about human origins, it never occurred to them to wonder if man had been born anything but an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder. Indeed, why would they? As far as they knew (or could imagine), man was innately a farmer and city builder the way that bees are innately honey-gatherers and hive-builders. Thus, for them, agriculture, man, and history all began at the same time, just a few thousand years ago. When Darwin and his followers came along with evidence that man had been born millions of years ago, not thousands, the elegance of this scheme was spoiled, but historians didn’t care to give it up. They were used to teaching the story of man as beginning just a few thousand years ago, with the development of agriculture, and they wanted to go on teaching it that way. What difference did it make that man had been around for millions of years? Clearly he wasn’t doing anything during this time that was worthy of the notice of historians. The historians therefore washed their hands of it and turned it over to archaeologists to think about. Historians stuck to history, and they stuck to their ancient definition of it as beginning just a few thousand years ago, with the very special agricultural revolution that marks the birth of our culture.
When Darwin came along, the elegance of the ancient scheme of history was spoiled, but historians didn’t care to give it up.
In his autobiography, Malcolm X said that at one point the role of the white race in human history came to him with great clarity: The white race is Satan. I was very struck with this way of thinking about things, though I knew that his identification was not a good mythological fit. Satan is inherently an outsider—the common enemy of mankind, to be hated and feared as much by white people as by any other. His objectives are spiritual and otherworldly, totally unlike those of the white race. We didn’t go to Africa to turn the natives into sinners, we went there to turn them into slaves. Satan isn’t interested in wealth, territory, or temporal power—and the white race is interested in almost nothing else. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that Malcolm was onto something.
A few years before, I’d had an illuminating conversation with a young black man I met at a private sale of African art. He’d come to the sale more or less out of curiosity and didn’t know what to make of the things he was seeing. He was startled when I told him most of them were fakes—fakes in the sense that they’d been made for export rather than for tribal use. In effect, they were just a fair grade of tourist goods. He asked how I knew this, and I had to think about it. How did I know it? There’s a profound difference between a piece of work that is strange to our eyes but fresh and beautiful and lively, and a piece of work that is strange to our eyes but crudely wroug
ht and ugly and lifeless. He’d come expecting to see “primitive art” and it all looked equally “primitive” to him, and I had to show him how to see it in a new way—how to see it the way the artist saw it, how to “think primitive.” I was in the odd position of revealing to him the values of his own heritage, which white culture had taught him to despise.
One thing led to another. Finally, deciding I could be trusted with this secret, he confessed to me that he didn’t really understand how all this had come about and how it fit together. He knew, of course, that there were prehistoric times and Stone Age peoples, but … where had it all started and how had it gotten to be like this? Talking to him—and he was not an uneducated person—I realized that this uncertainty about the fundamental outlines of the human story must be very widespread. I couldn’t imagine—can’t imagine—anything sadder than a whole sapient, conscious race of people being unable to pass on to their children even the crudest understanding of their own origins.
When people ask about the origins of Ishmael, I tell this story, as I tell the story of Malcolm identifying the white race as Satan. I tell this one as well. At that time Erich von Däniken was minting money with a book called Chariots of the Gods?, in which he proposed that alien astronauts were responsible not only for building the pyramids and all the wonders of the ancient world but for producing the human race itself, by kindly condescending to interbreed with our apelike ancestors. It isn’t enough to say that only very gullible people would swallow such nonsense; profound ignorance is required as well. The gullible millions who swallowed von Däniken’s proposal would not have swallowed the proposal that alien astronauts were responsible for building the Queen Mary and Hoover Dam.