by Walker Evans
Or again on the curriculum: it was unnecessary to make even such search into this as I made to know that there is no setting before the students of ‘economic’ or ‘social’ or ‘political’ ‘facts’ and of their situation within these ‘facts,’ no attempt made to clarify or even slightly to relieve the situation between the white and negro races, far less to explain the sources, no attempt to clarify psychological situations in the individual, in his family, or in his world, no attempt to get beneath and to revise those ‘ethical’ and ‘social’ pressures and beliefs in which even a young child is trapped, no attempt, beyond the most nominal, to interest a child in using or in discovering his senses and judgment, no attempt to counteract the paralytic quality inherent in ‘authority,’ no attempt beyond the most nominal and stifling to awaken, to protect, or to ‘guide’ the sense of investigation, the sense of joy, the sense of beauty, no attempt to clarify spoken and written words whose power of deceit even at the simplest is vertiginous, no attempt, or very little, and ill taught, to teach even the earliest techniques of improvement in occupation (‘scientific farming,’ diet and cooking, skilled trades), nor to ‘teach’ a child in terms of his environment, no attempt, beyond the most suffocated, to awaken a student either to ‘religion’ or to ‘irreligion,’ no attempt to develop in him either ‘skepticism’ or ‘faith,’ nor ‘wonder,’ nor mental ‘honesty’ nor mental ‘courage,’ nor any understanding of or delicateness in ‘the emotions’ and in any of the uses and pleasures of the body save the athletic; no attempt either to relieve him of fear and of poison in sex or to release in him a free beginning of pleasure in it, nor to open within him the illimitable potentials of grief, of danger, and of goodness in sex and in sexual love, nor to give him the beginnings at very least of a knowledge, and of an attitude, whereby he may hope to guard and increase himself and those whom he touches, no indication of the damages which society, money, law, fear and quick belief have set upon these matters and upon all things in human life, nor of their causes, nor of the alternate ignorances and possibilities of ruin or of joy, no fear of doubtlessness, no fear of the illusions of knowledge, no fear of compromise:—and here again I have scarcely begun, and am confronted immediately with a serious problem: that is: by my naming of the lack of such teaching, I can appear too easily to recommend it, to imply, perhaps, that if these things were ‘taught,’ all would be ‘solved’: and this I do not believe: but insist rather that in the teaching of these things, infinitely worse damage could and probably would result than in the teaching of those subjects which in fact do compose the curriculum: and that those who would most insist upon one or another of them can be among the deadliest enemies of education: for if the guiding hand is ill qualified, an instrument is murderous in proportion to its sharpness. Nothing I have mentioned but is at the mercy of misuse; and one may be sure a thousand to one it will be misused; and that its misuse will block any more ‘proper’ use even more solidly than unuse and discrediting could. It could be said, that we must learn a certitude and correlation in every ‘value’ before it will be possible to ‘teach’ and not to murder; but that is far too optimistic. We would do better to examine, far beyond their present examination, the extensions within ourselves of doubt, responsibility, and conditioned faith and the possibilities of their more profitable union, to a degree at least of true and constant terror in even our tentatives, and if (for instance) we should dare to be ‘teaching’ what Marx began to open, that we should do so only in the light of the terrible researches of Kafka and in the opposed identities of Blake and Céline.
All I have managed here, and it is more than I intended, is to give a confused statement of an intention which presumes itself to be good: the mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes. But let what I have tried to suggest amount to this alone: that not only within present reach of human intelligence, but even within reach of mine as it stands today, it would be possible that young human beings should rise onto their feet a great deal less dreadfully crippled than they are, a great deal more nearly capable of living well, a great deal more nearly aware, each of them, of their own dignity in existence, a great deal better qualified, each within his limits, to live and to take part toward the creation of a world in which good living will be possible without guilt toward every neighbor: and that teaching at present, such as it is, is almost entirely either irrelevant to these possibilities or destructive of them, and is, indeed, all but entirely unsuccessful even within its own ‘scales’ of ‘value.’
Within the world as it stands, however, the world they must live in, a certain form of education is available to these tenant children; and the extent to which they can avail themselves of it is of considerable importance in all their future living.
A few first points about it:
They are about as poorly equipped for self-education as human beings can be. Their whole environment is such that the use of the intelligence, of the intellect, and of the emotions is atrophied, and is all but entirely irrelevant to the pressures and needs which involve almost every instant of a tenant’s conscious living: and indeed if these faculties were not thus reduced or killed at birth they would result in a great deal of pain, not to say danger. They learn the work they will spend their lives doing, chiefly of their parents, and from their parents and from the immediate world they take their conduct, their morality, and their mental and emotional and spiritual key. One could hardly say that any further knowledge or consciousness is at all to their use or advantage, since there is nothing to read, no reason to write, and no recourse against being cheated even if one is able to do sums; yet these forms of literacy are in general held to be desirable: a man or woman feels a certain sort of extra helplessness who lacks them: a truly serious or ambitious parent hopes for even more, for a promising child; though what ‘more’ may be is, inevitably, only dimly understood.
School opens in middle or late September and closes the first of May. The country children, with their lunches, are picked up by busses at around seven-thirty in the morning and are dropped off again towards the early winter darkness. In spite of the bus the children of these three families have a walk to take. In dry weather it is shortened a good deal; the bus comes up the branch road as far as the group of negro houses at the bottom of the second hill and the Ricketts children walk half a mile to meet it and the Gudger children walk three quarters. In wet weather the bus can’t risk leaving the highway and the Ricketts walk two miles and the Gudgers a mile and a half in clay which in stretches is knee-deep on a child.
There was talk during the summer of graveling the road, though most of the fathers are over forty-five, beyond road-age. They can hardly afford the time to do such work for nothing, and they and their negro neighbors are in no position to pay taxes. Nothing had come of it within three weeks of the start of school, and there was no prospect of free time before cold weather.
Southern winters are sickeningly wet, and wet clay is perhaps the hardest of all walking. ‘Attendance’ suffers by this cause, and by others. Junior Gudger, for instance, was absent sixty-five and Louise fifty-three days out of a possible hundred-and-fifty-odd, and these absences were ‘unexcused’ eleven and nine times respectively, twenty-three of Junior’s and a proportionate number of Louise’s absences fell in March and April, which are full of work at home as well as wetness. Late in her second year in school Louise was needed at home and missed several consecutive school days, including the final examinations. Her ‘marks’ had been among the best in her class and she had not known of the examination date, but no chance was given her to make up the examinations and she had to take the whole year over. The Ricketts children have much worse attendance records and Pearl does not attend at all.
School does not begin until the children shall have helped two weeks to a month in the most urgent part of the picking season, and ends in time for them to be at work on the cotton-chopping.
The bus system which is now a routine of country schools is helpful, but not partic
ularly to those who live at any distance from tax-maintained roads.
The walking, and the waiting in the cold and wetness, one day after another, to school in the morning, and home from schools in the shriveling daylight, is arduous and unpleasant.
Schooling, here as elsewhere, is identified with the dullest and most meager months of the year, and, in this class and country, with the least and worst food and a cold noonday lunch: and could be set only worse at a disadvantage if it absorbed the pleasanter half of the year.
The ‘attendance problem’ is evidently taken for granted and, judging by the low number of unexcused absences, is ‘leniently’ dealt with: the fact remains, though, that the children lose between a third to half of each school year, and must with this handicap keep up their lessons and ‘compete’ with town children in a contest in which competition is stressed and success in it valued and rewarded.
The schoolhouse itself is in Cookstown; a recently built, windowy, ‘healthful’ red brick and white-trimmed structure which perfectly exemplifies the American genius* for sterility, unimagination, and general gutlessness in meeting any opportunity for ‘reform’ or ‘improvement’ It is the sort of building a town such as Cookstown is proud of, and a brief explanation of its existence in such country will be worth while. Of late years Alabama has ‘come awake’ to ‘education,’ illiteracy has been reduced; texts have been modernized; a good many old schools have been replaced by new ones. For this latter purpose the counties have received appropriations in proportion to the size of their school population. The school population of this county is five black to one white, and since not a cent of the money has gone into negro schools, such buildings as this are possible: for white children. The negro children, meanwhile, continue to sardine themselves, a hundred and a hundred and twenty strong, into stove-heated one-room pine shacks which might comfortably accommodate a fifth of their number if the walls, roof, and windows were tight.† But then, as one prominent landlord said and as many more would agree: ‘I don’t object to nigrah education, not up through foath a fift grade maybe, but not furdern dat: I’m too strong a believah in white syewpremcy.’
This bus service and this building the (white) children are schooled in, even including the long and muddy walk, are of course effete as compared to what their parents had.* The schooling itself is a different matter, too: much more ‘modern.’ The boys and girls alike are subjected to ‘art’ and to ‘music,’ and the girls learn the first elements of tap dancing. Textbooks are so cheap almost anyone can afford them: that is, almost anyone who can afford anything at all; which means that they are a stiff problem in any year to almost any tenant. I want now to list and suggest the contents of a few textbooks which were at the Gudger house, remembering, first, that they imply the far reaches of the book-knowledge of any average adult tenant.
The Open Door Language Series: First Book: Language Stories and Games.
Trips to Take. Among the contents are poems by Vachel Lindsay, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc Also a story tided: ‘Brother Rabbit’s Cool Air Swing,’ and subheaded: ‘Old Southern Tale.’
Outdoor Visits: Book Two of Nature and Science Readers. (Book One is Hunting.) Book Two opens: ‘Dear Boys and Girls: in this book you will read how Nan and Don visited animals and plants that live outdoors.’
Real Life Readers: New Stories and Old: A Third Reader. Illustrated with color photographs.
The Trabue-Stevens Speller. Just another speller.
Champion Arithmetic. Five hundred and ten pages: a champion psychological inducement to an interest in numbers. The final problem: ‘Janet bought 1¼ lbs. of salted peanuts and ½ lb. of salted almonds. Altogether she bought ? lbs. of nuts?’
Dear Boys and Girls indeed!
Such a listing is rich as a poem; twisted full of contents, symptoms, and betrayals, and these, as in a poem, are only reduced and diluted by any attempt to explain them or even by hinting. Personally I see enough there to furnish me with bile for a month: yet I know that any effort to make clear in detail what is there, and why it seems to me so fatal, must fail.
Even so, see only a little and only for a moment.
These are books written by ‘adults’ They must win the approval and acceptance of still other ‘adults,’ members of school ‘boards’; and they will be ‘taught’ with by still other ‘adults’ who have been more or less ‘trained’ as teachers. The intention is, or should be, to engage, excite, preserve, or develop the ‘independence’ of, and furnish with ‘guidance,’ ‘illumination,’ ‘method,’ and ‘information,’ the curiosities of children.
Now merely re-examine a few words, phrases and facts:
The Open Door: open to whom. That metaphor is supposed to engage the interest of children.
Series: First Book. Series. Of course The Bobsey Twins is a series; so is The Rover Boys. Series perhaps has some pleasure associations to those who have children’s books, which no tenant children have: but even so it is better than canceled by the fact that this is so obviously not a pleasure book but a schoolbook, not even well disguised. An undisguised textbook is only a little less pleasing than a sneaking and disguised one, though. First Book: there entirely for the convenience of adults; it’s only grim to a child.
Language: it appears to be a modern substitution for the word ‘English.’ I don’t doubt the latter word has been murdered; the question is, whether the new one has any life whatever to a taught child or, for that matter, to a teacher.
Stories and Games: both, modified by a school word, and in a school context. Most children prefer pleasure to boredom, lacking our intelligence to reverse this preference: but you must use your imagination or memory to recognize how any game can be poisoned by being ‘conducted’: and few adults have either.
Trips to Take. Hips indeed, for children who will never again travel as much as in their daily bus trips to and from school. Children like figures of speech or are, if you like, natural symbolists and poets: being so, they see through frauds such as this so much the more readily. No poem is a ‘trip,’ whatever else it may be, and suffers by being lied about.
The verse. I can readily imagine that ‘educators’ are well pleased with themselves in that they have got rid of the Bivouac of the Dead and are using much more nearly contemporary verse. I am quite as sure, knowing their kind of ‘knowledge’ of poetry, that the pleasure is all theirs.
These children, both of town and country, are saturated southerners, speaking dialects not very different from those of negroes. Brother Rabbit! Old Southern Tale!
Outdoor Visits. Nature and Science. Book One: Hunting. Dear Boys and Girls. In this book you will read (oh, I will, will I?). Nan and Don. Visit. Animals and Plants that Live Outdoors. Outdoors. You will pay formal calls on Plants. They live outdoors. ‘Nature.’ ‘Science.’ Hunting. Dear Boys and Girls. Outdoor Visits.
Real Life. ‘Real’ ‘Life’ ‘Readers’ Illustrated by color photographs.
Or back into the old generation, a plainer tide: The Trabue-Stevens Speller. Or the Champion Arithmetic, weight eighteen pounds, an attempt at ingratiation in the word champion, so broad of any mark I am surprised it is not spelled Champeen.
Or you may recall the page of geography text I have quoted elsewhere: which, I must grant, tells so much about education that this chapter is probably unnecessary.
I give up. Relative to my memory of my own grade-schooling, I recognize all kinds of ‘progressive’ modifications: Real Life, color photographs, Trips to Take (rather than Journey to Make), games, post-kindergarten, ‘Language,’ Nan and Don, ‘Nature and Science,’ Untermeyer-vintage poetry, ‘dear boys and girls’; and I am sure of only one thing: that it is prepared by adults for their own self-flattery and satisfaction, and is to children merely the old set retouched, of afflictions, bafflements, and half-legible insults more or less apathetically submitted to.
Louise Gudger is fond of school, especially of geography and arithmetic, and gets unusually good ‘marks’:
which means in part that she has an intelligence quick and acquisitive above the average, in part that she has learned to parrot well and to respect ‘knowledge’ as it is presented to her. She has finished the third grade. In the fourth grade she will learn all about the history of her country. Her father and much more particularly her mother is excited over her brightness and hopeful of it: they intend to make every conceivable effort by which she may continue not only through the grades but clear through high school. She wants to become a teacher, and quite possibly she will; or a trained nurse; and again quite possibly she will.
Junior Gudger is in the second grade because by Alabama law a pupil is automatically passed after three years in a grade. He is still almost entirely unable to read and write, and is physically fairly skilful. It may be that he is incapable of ‘learning’: in any case ‘teaching’ him would be a ‘special problem.’ It would be impossible in a public, competitive class of mixed kinds and degrees of ‘intelligence’; and I doubt that most public-school teachers are trained in it anyhow.