A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  Yet suddenly, when they hit their eighteenth birthday, everything changes. By then we have given them license to drive a lethal weapon and smoke as much as they want and have invited them to help select the nation’s president. During times of war, we send them off to protect us, to kill, and to make life-and-death decisions, all in a foreign country. We expect them to make a decision that will shape the rest of their lives by choosing college, work, or the army. Now they can get married if they want to. Last but not least, having kept them powerless long beyond puberty, we demand that they quickly become self-supporting. We ask them to leap from childhood into adulthood. But of course, though our society treats this transition as a leap, the truth is teenagers don’t leap: they stumble, jump, skip, slide, and trudge their way into maturity.

  In describing this gradual and winding path toward maturity, the psychologist Kurt Lewin said that the teenager was “the marginal man,” standing outside, caught between two worlds. Teenagers have left the pleasures and freedom of childhood behind but do not yet have the responsibilities or autonomy of adulthood. It takes time to travel this sometimes circuitous and often difficult route. Yet our high schools have functioned less like a path from dependence to independence and more like a holding pen with a diving board at the exit gate.

  This immobilizing has other bad consequences. By directing them through every waking moment, we all but guarantee that they are unlikely to feel much zeal or drive for what they are learning and trying to do. In the early 1980s the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson wanted to get a detailed, vivid picture of adolescent experience. They gave teenagers in Chicago small beepers to take with them everywhere, and a packet of questionnaires. For more than a week, each teenager in the study was beeped at random times. When the subjects in the study heard the beep, they would take a moment to pause and answer a host of questions about where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they were thinking about, and how they felt (they had a chance even to sketch pictures of their moods). The study offered a gold mine of information about how teenagers spent their time and, more important, provided an amazingly intimate and gritty picture of what it felt like to be a teenager. The answers made it vividly clear that most kids feel listless and disengaged for most of the school day. But there were places and times during the school day when the opposite was true—when kids reported a sense of focus, energy, and excitement about what they were doing. When did those moments occur? When the students were doing things they had chosen: whether it was during a class or not, kids felt much more alive when they had some say in their activity. Sadly, however, these moments were the exception, not the rule.

  What I saw around me, what made me so mad, was that most of my friends were struggling. Many of them were getting bad grades. Sometimes it was because the work was too challenging. But most of the time it wasn’t. They didn’t care about anything they were learning. They weren’t engaged in their classes, because the subject matter often seemed dry, boring, irrelevant, and unrelated to them. And this meant that when they got home, they would usually choose hiking, basketball, making out with their girlfriends, or reading good books over anatomy homework. And I didn’t blame them. Most of what we were learning was boring. Or even if the subject matter itself was interesting, the way we learned it turned it into something lifeless and dull. I’d sit in class thinking about how vapid geometry was. Then, at home, I’d read a book in which the characters were shapes discovering other dimensions, and I’d become totally enthralled. But I’d grow annoyed at the same time, knowing that my friends wouldn’t get a chance to have the same experience. They’d just go on struggling to memorize the Pythagorean theorem.

  Even worse, some of my friends were doing fine, doing really well even, but were just as disengaged as the friends who were struggling. The problem was, the nature of most of our classes meant that you could learn the material well enough to get good grades without ever really engaging with it in any meaningful way. We would learn the periodic table—something I now know to be elegant and fascinating—by memorizing the abbreviations and their places in the boxes. So you could sail by on a test without ever knowing how the periodic table might save lives, or how you would use it to go about designing an experiment to find a new element. So the friends who were getting straight As were doing it without ever becoming passionate about their work or about learning itself.

  The truth is, no one liked school, or at least not the part of school that was supposed to be education. And the result was that pretty much everyone around me was unhappy. Maybe this sounds perfectly normal, like school isn’t supposed to be something kids enjoy. But why? We go to school not just once or twice a year, but seven hours a day, 180 days a year. Why should kids be unhappy so much of the time? Maybe if all of my friends were becoming really thoughtful, enlightened, well-educated people, I might have overlooked the unhappiness (maybe). But that wasn’t the case at all. No one was learning anything either. It was all intertwined—the disengagement, the unhappiness, the lack of real learning—and it all tied together in a vicious feedback loop.

  Nothing unusual happened that day, sometime in September of 2009, when I came home pissed off. It was as good and as bad and as banal as the other days. I went to the farm, Dame tried to kick me; I sat through several boring lessons, had a great argument with my math teacher about prime numbers, had a bad argument with my English teacher about the merit of excerpts, and eventually came home and changed the water in my aquariums. There was no sudden outrage, no particular offense. But clearly it had been slowly accumulating, like a poison leaking into my system, all the letdowns, all the frustrations, all the disappointments, all the failures of our system, and, most of all, all the misery around me. It was all swirling around in my head as I drove home from school.

  And when I sat down at the dinner table with my mom, all that frustration just burst out of me. “Mom, I’m sick and tired of my friends being unhappy in school,” I said, my head in my hands. “I’m sick of my friends not learning, sick of them being disengaged. So much of the way school does things doesn’t make sense. I can’t take it anymore.” Like I said, it wasn’t the first time I had come home feeling that way, and it wasn’t the first time I had vocalized these feelings either. Even if there was a little more venom in my voice this time, she had heard it all before. Which is why, perhaps, I was surprised by how she responded.

  * * *

  When Sam came home with a black cloud hovering over his face, at first I barely noticed. I had spent more than twenty years sitting at that same kitchen table, listening to my kids tell me about their school days. Each afternoon, as the light faded from the sky, my sons would sit down while I cooked and recount their highs and lows. I would hear tales of woe (a Halloween costume outlawed by the school, an unfairly graded paper, a missed shot in basketball, a bad rumor about a girlfriend) and tales of triumph (beating a team from a richer town, acing a test, a prom date with the elusive girl, a poem that garnered praise from a beloved teacher).

  My husband and I had sent all three of our sons to the local public schools in western Massachusetts, where we live. They had spelling tests, book reports, recess, concerts, and tedious homework. The usual stuff. Lots of it seemed fine. There were disappointments and frustrations, missed opportunities and bad teaching, but nothing that seemed particularly outrageous. It’s the stuff most families endure.

  When my eldest son, Jake, was in seventh grade, all the students were told to plan projects that would take several months, something that would demonstrate their skill and effort. They were given wide leeway. It seemed great. Jake chose to study a new translation of the Odyssey and make clay tiles depicting several of his favorite stories. He used an ancient technique for glazing the tiles and retold sections of each story on aged paper, written in calligraphy he learned to do for the project. When his tiles went up in the big gym along with all the other student projects (a boat, a birdhouse, a fashion show), his grade was marked down�
�not colorful enough, the teachers said. When he walked in the door and mentioned this, my ears began burning. I was thinking, “What? This project is bursting with scholarship! He’s twelve and he chose the Odyssey. Are you kidding me? ‘Needs more color’?”

  But I didn’t say any of that out loud. I just shook my head and said, “Well, honey, we love it. Let’s hang it on the wall.” I put the incident aside. After all, I thought, he was lucky to be in a school that gave students the chance to do projects. And Jake was a school lover. He wanted to make every assignment as interesting as possible. Each assignment was a fresh chance to throw himself into something, whether he clashed with the teacher or not. I wasn’t worried about it. He was learning to stand up for his ideals, I thought.

  Jake’s younger brother Will had a whole other kind of high school experience. He was brimming with a different kind of strength and energy. Watching him, I saw how a charismatic and talented kid could navigate his way through high school unscathed. Agile in mind and body, he could get through the whole four years with great grades yet was wonderfully untouched by formal academics.

  For Will, classes were something like a virus, something to keep at arm’s length. When he was good at something (languages, philosophy, math), he did his schoolwork with pleasure and ease. But he was economical with his time—he did the least amount of work possible to get a good grade. He had other more captivating things to do. He found all of his fun in the parking lot (lifting a teacher’s car with some friends and carrying it to another parking spot), on the basketball court, and in the hallways, offering sidesplitting imitations of other students or teachers being ridiculous. As he progressed through high school, he found fewer and fewer teachers to connect to, and more and more of the school day seemed a chore to be finished as quickly as possible. I told myself that it was fine if he spent seven hours a day stifled and bored, drumming his fingers and watching the clock, as long as he came to life when it was time for basketball practice.

  And then there was Sam. From day one, he seemed made for school. He liked spelling bees, math projects, lunchtime, and running for class president. What was not to like? And yet he, too, collected his share of frustrations, and they seemed to mount as time went on.

  In eighth grade he collided with an English teacher. They had read a Rod Serling story: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” He interpreted the story one way, she another. She told him he was just dead wrong, that maybe he’d understand the next story better. They were assigned to write a biography of Dr. Seuss, and he wrote his in verse. The teacher told him not to get carried away with rhymes. One year he found science class so dull he spent his time trying to mentally suss out the origins of various Latinate words. By March he had a full glossary.

  Looking back now, I can see that, though he loved school, by the time he was twelve, he had begun to chafe against all the arbitrary rules and empty academic conventions. He was an ebullient kid, irrepressible. He couldn’t accept the limits they kept placing on him. When his middle school principal reprimanded him for putting an arm around a buddy who had just lost an important soccer game (“No physical contact allowed in the halls,” she said), he considered bringing a suit of discrimination against the school: “Mom, what if we were gay? Wasn’t that homophobia?”

  But for a long time, each story of a disappointing conversation with a teacher, a rule that hindered rather than helped learning, or of assignments that were outrageously superficial seemed like the ordinary obstacles that teenagers stumble over in school. I wasn’t worried. There was so much of value in public schools—people from all walks of life, baseball and concerts that brought families together, now and then a great French or history teacher, a cool project painting murals, and every once in a while a wonderful book or really interesting paper topic. My kids were fine.

  So when Sam walked in that gloomy fall day, sat down at the kitchen table with a frustrated, grim look on his face, and said, “I can’t take it anymore,” I was tempted to offer a glib and seemingly obvious answer. I wanted to say, “They’re teenagers, hon. Of course they’re bored and apathetic. That’s their job.” That was the developmental psychologist in me talking. I’ve read more studies that I can count providing biological and psychological evidence explaining why teenagers are inherently dissatisfied, mercurial, and defiant.

  But his normally blue eyes looked so gray and stormy. And suddenly, a switch flipped in my head. All those many snapshots I had stored about school—small disappointments, assignments that were just a little less than they should be, rules that prevented rather than encouraged teenagers to blossom, lost opportunities—came flooding back into my mind. My old story, that school was good enough, that the pluses outweighed the minuses, that the obstacles were part of the experience, didn’t really make sense. The pictures hadn’t changed. I didn’t remember all those vignettes differently. But sitting there I realized that they told a different story than the one I had been carrying around in my head for twenty years. The small grievances were no longer just aggravating obstacles—they were the fabric that shaped four pivotal years in adolescents’ development. In the new story, which rapidly unfolded in my mind that day, teenagers’ best, most potent qualities were persistently pushed aside or neglected, over and over again. What had seemed to be a long line of unrelated and relatively minor mistakes now seemed to reveal something deeper and off base about the whole structure. That day I realized that high schools are suited in almost no way to what teens are like, or what they really need.

  At that moment I knew Sam was right to be outraged. The turbulent look in his eyes suddenly meant something more than just reasonable frustration that should and would pass. And before I had a second to reconsider, the next words just popped out of my mouth: “Then why don’t you start your own school?”

  And I guess the story could end there. I could have laughed, then sighed, then fixed up a bowl of cereal. Or maybe made some joke, like, “Yeah, one day, Mom, when I rule the world.” Lots of people feel sick and tired sometimes; it’s a part of life. And there was no reason why I would expect anything to change. The public school system hadn’t changed much since it was created during the industrial revolution. So I could have accepted that that was the way it was—after all, I was a junior, which meant only two more years of feeling sick and tired.

  Except. Except that I knew better. I knew that it didn’t have to be this way. I knew that high schoolers could be enormously engaged, passionate, motivated, and committed. I knew that they were capable of being ferocious learners and workers. I knew that they had almost limitless potential. And I knew all this because much of the last three years of my life had been spent in a garden.

  When I was a freshman in high school, in 2007, I had a really simple idea: I would build a garden at my school. It would be run by students and it would grow food for the cafeterias. Less of our food would be coming from far away, reducing our school’s carbon footprint. Students who ate food from a garden they could see would start thinking about where their food came from and would become more connected to the land. Those who worked in the garden would start to care for the natural world. And if I was lucky, teachers in the school district would start using the garden as an outdoor classroom.

  Not knowing who would be the best person to talk to about my idea, I went to my guidance counselor, Joe Huron, and said, “I want to start a garden.” I was only fourteen and hadn’t experienced more than a few weeks of high school. So at the time, his response seemed absolutely normal, just what every counselor would say. He said, “Okay, what do you need from me?”

  I told him a bit more about my idea, and after a little while he said, “Wait here,” and left the office. Five minutes later, he walked in with two older girls—a sophomore named Lily and a junior named Rosa—whom he had just pulled from class. He knew that they had also been talking about getting local, organic food into the cafeteria. He thought maybe we could work together.

  Within half an hour, the idea of Project Spr
out was born. The three of us agreed that a garden that provided both education and food to the schools was the thing to do. It all seemed very straightforward. We lived in a rural area, and the school had plenty of land. They could just hand some of it over!

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. To the administration, the idea of handing over a plot of land to a bunch fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds was ludicrous. It would be a disaster, they thought (and often said). We would dig up some beautiful stretch of lawn, lose interest, and move on to our next fancy (probably a new video game), and the school would have to pay to clean up our mess (not to mention the embarrassment!).

  But our hearts were set. We weren’t about to give up. So we spent six months planning, pitching, arguing, designing, pulling, and prodding, and eventually the School Committee agreed to let us build a small, thousand-square-foot garden on an old soccer field across the street from the high school. It would be a trial year. If we really followed through (they said, secretly rolling their eyes), we could propose doing it a second year.

  What they didn’t realize, what even I didn’t fully grasp, was what can happen when you let a bunch of high schoolers pursue something they are passionate about. The garden wasn’t successful in spite of being completely run by students. It was successful because students ran it. By the time I left high school, we had a twelve-thousand-square-foot vegetable plot, plus hundreds of berry plants, an orchard, two sheds, a farm stand, and a greenhouse. In four years we raised more than $100,000. We planned events for hundreds of people at a time, started delivering vegetables to three schools in our district three days a week, and had hundreds of classes and after-school programs taught in the garden—which, by the time I was a junior, was really more of a farm.