A short history of my strange and motley bouts with education
I entered the venerable halls of Clegern Elementary loaded for bear. Armed with the preternatural ability to read, a natural-born gift of discernment, and an inordinate amount of self-confidence for a six-year-old, I was prepared to take on all comers. I was ready to make my mark on the world, for I was entering the first grade, and no one was going to keep me from my day in the sun.
I don’t recall a single friend at school that year, but I remember the day I met Charles. He was a short, dark-haired kid with round glasses and a nerdy demeanor. I had been previously unaware that such a creature existed. Everyone I knew was at least mildly athletic and spent their days running around the countryside, turning over rocks, and killing things. Charles was different.
Decidedly more of an indoor person, Charles resented recess, considering it an unpleasant distraction from tribal politics and unnecessary physical activity. I found him on our first day, sitting inside a concrete tube, a sort of makeshift bit of playground equipment generally reserved for drainage ditches.
“Hey. Watcha doin’?” I asked him.
“Shhh. Get in,” he told me, and motioned for me to crawl inside with him. Once I was settled next to him, he explained. “I’m watching the other kids to see who breaks the rules, and I’m keeping notes.”
“Why,” I asked.
“For the teacher,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure what rules the kids were supposedly breaking, but I didn’t want to ask. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the teacher had any idea what Charles was doing, but I had no reason to doubt him either. It was all possible.
Charles had a small spiral-bound notebook, the kind a reporter might own, and a small, stubby pencil about the length of what you might use to keep score in golf. I had a whole pack of brand-new pencils in my school bag, but they were all seven inches long or so. I had never used a pencil down the nub before losing it, and couldn’t imagine the amount of scribbling it would take to get there.
While I didn’t understand what he was doing or why, I think it’s safe to say that I was impressed with Charles, and his short pencil, reporter’s notebook, and mission from on high. He wasn’t chasing girls around the yard. He was working.
I wanted in.
My mother, on the other hand, was less impressed with my tales of Charles’ clandestine deeds or my need for my own short pencil and a little notebook.
“I don’t think you should be writing down the names of other students,” she explained. “What he’s doing is being a tattletale. Nobody likes that. Not even your teacher. Trust me on this.”
I sat looking a little dejected.
It’s true, I thought. Nobody likes a tattletale. In all my years of spying on my sister and her friends, my cousins, or even the neighbors, I’d never seen anything worth reporting, and if I did, I was told to mind my own business and find something more productive to do. Maybe my life as a spy was not the life I wanted for myself.
But I still wanted that pencil.
“There’s a pencil in the drawer,” my mother said.
Angie Debo (1890–1988) was an American historian who wrote thirteen books and hundreds of articles about Oklahoma and its history. She came to the Oklahoma Territory by wagon and settled in Marshall, Oklahoma.1 She often struggled to be seen in a profession dominated by white men, but she managed to get a doctorate from Oklahoma University. She often wrote about Native Americans, and her ethnocentric approach riled many local business leaders and politicians.
Debo writes that Clegern Elementary was located southeast of downtown Edmond on a three-acre tract of land that was donated to the Edmond School District by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Clegern in 1928. The gift stipulated that if the school was not built within five years, the land would revert to Mr. and Mrs. Clegern.
The reason for their donation, according to Debo, was the Clegerns’ concern for children having to cross Second Street, a busy avenue even when I was young, to get to Kingsley Elementary. The north wing of the Clegern School was built in 1931, with only one room completed for use.
Today, the student body is made up of roughly 370 students over grades Pre-K through the fifth grade and is ranked as the #1 elementary school in Edmond and the #2 elementary school in the state of Oklahoma. Students there regularly perform above state averages, with 77% achieving at or above the proficient level for math and 87% for reading.
I began reading at home long before I ever attended school. My mother worked in those days, teaching ballet and gymnastics, and I participated in various daycares, nursery schools, and kindergartens before officially entering first grade. By the time I walked through the door at Clegern, I was an old hand at navigating the internal politics of the classroom.
The books in our classroom library were color-coded according to difficulty. Green books were for beginners, blue was for more intermediate readers, gold was a step above that, and red was for teachers only. I guess not even the teachers were reading at my level because they sent me to the third grade—to read.
My teacher that year was named Ms. Thomas, and this was to be her very first year as a fully-licensed educator for the state of Oklahoma. I honestly don’t remember a whole hell of a lot about her, so she couldn’t have made much of an impression. I could probably tell you at least a few stories of just about every other teacher I ever had after that, but she remains a bit of a mystery in my mind. Even so, she is instrumental to the mythology of my youth.
It was picture day, and I was attempting to orchestrate the ordinary bedlam of a dozen or more six-year-olds into some semblance of order, with the taller kids in the back and the shorter kids in the front. This is how my father always did it, and it seemed to work for him. Why reinvent the wheel?
We were in the gymnasium attempting to organize ourselves on a small section of bleachers. I’ll be honest with you; I don’t know where the hell Ms. Thomas had gotten to, but someone had to get these kids in line. Since I was the best reader in the group, clearly in my mind, making me the most intelligent of the class, I decided I should be the one to lead. We were getting nowhere at this rate.
I used to have the class picture somewhere, but it’s since been lost to time and many residential moves. But it did exist once, so we must have gotten it together well enough to have our picture taken. I imagine Ms. Thomas was in there somewhere.
I really do have some vague recollections of this day, but most of the meat of the story comes from outside my personal experience. It seems that sometime after the photographer finally snapped the picture, and we were released back into the wild, Ms. Thomas contacted my parents and asked to meet with them. I had only just begun the school year, so they must have wondered what I’d done to upset the teacher this early in my educational career.
My parents came to school to meet with the teacher, my father no doubt having to take off work, and sat in little chairs in our first-grade classroom, directly across from Ms. Thompson. They would have been about her age, maybe a little older, somewhere in their mid to late twenties.
I can’t tell you exactly what was said because I wasn’t there, of course, but the gist of the story is this. The teacher was upset about picture day. It seemed that my parents’ fair-haired child had been directing all the other children on where to stand.
My parents sort of stared at her blankly.
“They were listening to him,” she implored. “He took over and was telling everyone what to do, and they were listening to him.”
My parents were quiet, midwestern folks raised to respect their elders and not question authority. It may have been pandemonium socially in America in the early 1970s, but not in Edmond, Oklahoma, and certainly not in Clegern Elementary. They apologized to the teacher for my disruptive behavior and assured her that I was only trying to help and that they would speak to me about making sure I did not usurp her authority in the future.
When they got home, I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing.
“We met your teacher, Ms. Thomas,” my mother said. “She seems nice.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She told us about picture day,” she said, waiting for my reaction. When none came, she continued, “She said that you were telling the other kids where to stand.”
“Nobody knew what to do,” I said, “so I told them where to stand.”
“Don’t you think that’s something your teacher should be in charge of?” my father asked.
“Dad,” I said, looking up. “She’s a teacher, not a photographer.”
“But you’re not a photographer,” he said.
“Yeah, but I know how tall everyone is,” I said.
“He makes a fair point,” my father said.
“You’re not helping,” my mother said. She sat on the chair beside me and looked me in the eye. “No one likes a know-it-all. You don’t always have to be the smartest person in the room. Not even when you are the smartest person in the room.”
“Always be respectful of your teachers,” my father said. “And you should never correct your elders.”
“Even when they’re wrong?” I asked.
“Especially when they’re wrong,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, but it didn’t sit right with me.
It never would.
My parents may have been raised to be reserved, polite, respectful, God-fearing conservatives who followed the rules and went with the flow, but they somehow raised a radical who distrusted authority, questioned everything, and invariably marched to the beat of his own drummer.
When they talked about Christians being sheep, I always imagined being the shepherd. Who the hell identified with the sheep? Sheep are stupid, defenseless, cowardly animals that are nothing but prey unless they are constantly guarded. If you don’t shear them, they’ll die.
I wanted no part of that.
The following year we went to an experimental Christian school that was a bit of a mashup between the homeschooling ethos of the hippies, along with the righteous indignation of evangelical Christians. Our teachers were mostly parents of students, and maybe a few were qualified somehow, but mostly they were some mix of volunteers and paid babysitters.
We had one teacher, a man, who had spent a good portion of his life in the Navy. He supposedly taught Science and Social Studies, two subjects I guess, they thought anyone could teach, but mostly we learned about the natural world and his time in the Navy. I don’t ever remember taking a test or doing any sort of assignment. He talked, and we listened. At least he was interesting. My main takeaways from that year were the anthill we dug up and kept in a jar, and his stories of shark-infested waters.
Most of our schoolwork was done in a single room with multiple grades per room. We had the kids in kindergarten through the fourth grade, while my sister was in the auditorium with the 5-8th graders. We all worked from state-approved textbooks and workbooks, but were allowed to work at our own pace, according to our grade and level of knowledge. I learned how to write in cursive, I learned my multiplication tables, and I continued to read voraciously.
If you had asked me at the time whether or not we learned anything all day, I would have so no. Decisively no. But the following year, I would attend yet another school, and once again, I would find myself far ahead of the other students.
The year I entered the third grade, I began attending a Mennonite school in eastern Pennsylvania. I went from Presbyterians to pacifists, right-wing conservatives to conscientious objectors, suburban middle America to rural Pennsylvania Dutch. It was a bit of a culture shock—maybe more so for them than for me, because as was my way, I came loaded for bear.
One of my early memories at Penn View Christian School was telling my fellow third graders that they spoke strangely and had very disturbing pronunciations for all manner of words. It wasn’t just that they said the words funny; they were pronouncing them wrong. Of this, I was sure. That was definitely not how you said pecan, radiator, roof, creek, route, or water. Look it up in a dictionary, I told them, with my Okie twang.
Being in a fairly rural, isolated community, I probably seemed otherworldly. They lived on multigenerational farms where their great-grandparents had been born. I had just moved into my seventh home in nine years. They figured I must know something. Maybe they were saying it wrong.
I attended this Mennonite school in kindergarten, third and fourth grades, then left to try out a different Christian school that my parents fancied for a while before coming back and completing sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. I went to school with farmers, many of whom had hours of farm chores before they made it to school. They milked cows and slopped hogs, bailed hay, and fed the chickens. They did all this while I slept.
If you’re unfamiliar with Mennonites, they are Anabaptists, a religious sect that began in the German and Dutch sections of Europe in the 16th century and later fled to the Americas to avoid persecution by the Catholic Church. Menno Simons, the founder, was originally a Catholic priest who began to rethink his faith.
By the early 18th century, the Anabaptist movement had splintered into various groups, ranging from Amish to Mennonite. Outside of their traditional Protestant Christian beliefs, such as adult baptism, there remained a few distinct differences between themselves and other Protestants, namely their pacifism and the intentional separation of themselves from the world by means of plain dress and living simply.
We learned about all this, of course, and of Christopher Dock, who had emigrated to Southeastern Pennsylvania in the early 18th century and was a teacher with a unique approach. He valued character-building and discussion in lieu of the typical physical punishment of the day. Dock was seen as the founder of the educational movement I was a part of, and indeed the entire school system from nursery school through 12th grade is now known as the Dock Mennonite Academy.
Christopher might have shunned the paddle in place of a healthy debate and foundational character-building, but by the time I came along, I think they were beginning to rethink the whole corporal punishment thing. It was already becoming a thing of the past in public schools, but most parochial schools still used a wooden panel as part of student discipline.
Our teachers didn’t hit us, which is always nice, but a few kids did get paddled in the years I was there. For the first several years, I was a good student, albeit one with a rebellious streak, but by the end, it was a battle of wills to see who would break first, them or me. With the knowledge that they weren’t going to kick my ass, kill me, or otherwise hurt me physically, frankly, I didn’t think they had a lot of leverage.
If it was going to come down to a battle of wits, I felt like I had the upper hand. This was a community that valued turning the other cheek, walking an extra mile for a stranger, and quiet indifference for the world around them. They were no match for a strong-willed toe-headed Irishman from Oklahoma.
I became an aficionado of the logical argument to defend my criticism of their many hypocrisies. I challenged them as no student had ever challenged them. They had met and dispatched plenty of troubled youth in their day. If I had merely been breaking the rules or disrupting class, they would have just kicked me out of school. Instead, I chose to challenge them intellectually. I felt I was more than a match for them.
I was learning how the world worked.
Years later, when I was working for Universal Records, I developed a theory that you could get backstage to just about any show as long as you were willing to employ bullshit and an attitude. Most people working in music venues have little to no personal power and are often surrounded by famous people and their entourages.
They are not in a position to throw their weight around with most of the people they come into contact with. All you really needed to do was convince them you were more important than they were. They were almost always low man on the totem pole. It wasn’t that hard.
The summer after I graduated from Penn View, I was shipped off to Colombia, South America, for a mission trip that someone thought would be a good idea. In hindsight, if the Mennonites had begun to make me question my faith, the religious zealots from Missouri proved too much to continue. I returned pale, malnourished, and suffering from dysentery, but still ready to take on the world.
I entered the local public junior high school as just another faceless, nameless soul and wandered the halls in search of purpose. I had no idea who I was or who I wanted to be, but I was developing an informal list of things I did not want for myself.
I had always hated bullies. While I was on the smaller side growing up, I learned to avoid the attacks of bullies by outwitting them on the playground. I turned out to be a double threat because while I was more than happy to make you look stupid in front of a crowd, I was also willing to scrap. Big kids begin to trust that no one will bloody their nose, until someone shows them how easy it can be done. Then they become a bit more cautious.
It was about this time that I found myself sitting in the junior high lunchroom reading George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” I didn’t become a radical overnight or anything. I still believed in the basic tenets of Christianity, that it was reasonable, and even logical, to be a socially liberal and fiscally conservative Republican, and that America really was the greatest country on earth. I hadn’t understood how deep and dark the rabbit hole could go.
Looking back, I don’t think I was alone. This was not just a factor of age and inexperience. America was still largely asleep, secure in the mythology of exceptionalism. Voices were calling out from the wilderness even then, but it seemed like Chicken Little and the falling sky. We’ll be fine, we all thought.
We should have known that once the swine started wearing pants, it was only a matter of time before they sold Boxer, the loyal workhorse who pledged to work harder, to the slaughterhouse in return for more whiskey.
It wouldn’t take long before we elected an actual pig wearing human clothes, and even while he was preaching the glory of American exceptionalism, he was preparing to sacrifice the workers on the altar of gluttony and greed.
I began to see the futility of war and the logic of peace. I better understood the persistence of our own hypocrisy and the overwhelming gratitude for grace. I took notes in a little notebook with a short pencil, documenting the savagery of pigs in suits. I discovered the power and peril of a sharp tongue. I finally realized there is more to life than documenting its many evils. I hope Charles made it out. I hope he found something more, something better. I wonder if he ever wrote about it.
I hope so.
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