How to Have Freedom from Compulsory Education and Freedom to Pursue One's Own Interests

The following excerpt is from Remem- bering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age, by Ralph Berton. Bix Beider- becke was one of the greatest jazz music- ians of the 1920s who died tragically of alcohol- ism at the age of 28 just as the Jazz Age came to an end.

Walking back this time, a thought struck Bix. It was bound to come up sooner or later; it always did. "Say, Frenchy, don't you go to school?" "Huh uh," I said, shaking my head. He blinked. "How come?" Where shall I begin, a grownup might have begun. I gave the simplest answer. "The truant officers don't know about me," I said, which was true, but raised more questions than it answered. For the first time I saw Bix pursue a topic (other than a musical one) with aroused interest. I had evidently touched a nerve. It was a topic I myself had never really analyzed though the bare facts were, I knew, sufficiently bizarre. Then and in subsequent conversations, Bix succeeded in eliciting most of them. I think the very first one floored him as much as any: that, in all my thirteen years, perhaps two - scattered among various schools here and in Milwaukee - had been spent in schoolrooms; despite which, I had nevertheless graduated at the age of eleven (W. G. Goudy Elementary, Winthrop Avenue at Foster, Chicago, June, 1922). My diploma was not earned by any burst of academic brilliance. "They were happy to see me go," I said, smirking. Unlike poor Bix, I had never considered it my place to placate the authorities; I was determined to make them pay dearly for the crime of having imprisoned me, and my teachers bore the brunt of my vengeance. I don't know what they'd done to deserve me, those poor hardworking maiden ladies. I regaled Bix with tales of my exploits, now appalling in retrospect: correcting their English in front of the class (All right, children-everyone take their seat. Uh, Miss Hattrem, shouldn't it be 'Everyone take his seat'?); asking trick questions on subjects I knew they knew less about than I did (Miss Pierce, is air a compound or a mixture?), "innocent" questions on embarrassing subjects - remember this was 1920 (Miss Clark, what's the difference between an ox and a bull?) (Miss Deely, what's a strumpet?) ... for good old Shakespeare was a gold mine of painful passages, though I never quite had the nerve to tackle my harried instructresses on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V, Scene 5: "Send me a cool rut-time, Jove," cries Falstaff, "or who can blame me to piss my tallow?" Needless to say, I was a hero to my fellow captives, but it may be imagined how glad the authorities were to hand me that precious bit of ribboned paper and say, with Groucho Marx, "Go, and never darken my towels again." How well I succeeded in conveying all this to Bix is questionable. That there could be any way around the long torment of going to school, never in a thousand years could such a thought even arise. What wouldn't Bix have given, as a boy, for such a deliverance? All of us, in fact, Vic and Gene too, had grown up outside the walls of school and church, had got whatever education we got at home or at work, and by hanging around with complaisant grown-ups. We were also spared other sacred institutions we saw imposed on all other kids, such as "dressing up" and taking medicine. Even vaccination had been inflicted on us over my parents' strenuous protests, at gunpoint, as it were; for Pa and Ma had a rooted mistrust of that other priesthood too, the one in white, with its pills and its needles. ("Did you ever see a deer take a pill?" Mummy would ask triumphantly, adding the crushing sequel, "Or use a can opener?") "Nature" was their religion, meaning lots of raw foods, fresh air, etc. (Papa died at eighty-six of a pneumonia he got swimming through the Lake Michigan ice in January - a good fourteen years short of his expectations; the week before, he'd swum his usual nine miles.) My nonschooling explained both the woeful holes in my education (if that's the word) and my precocious "vocabulary" (my admirers' favorite word), as well as my remarkable repertory of remembered music, my familiarity with college-level astronomy, chemistry, etc., and my surefooted ability to get around any city by myself after a few days' investigation. No doubt my eidetic memory helped, but it was afforded unusual opportunities for use: the time other kids had to waste in school, learning Palmer Method Penmanship and catalogues of dates and battles that would be gratefully forgotten two days after the "tests" for which they had been memorized, I could spend learning, or doing, exactly what I wanted. If I wanted to read the entire collected Works of Thomas Hardy (I did, during one of my childhood illnesses), that was O.K., and if a month later I felt like rereading the whole set (which I also did), I could do that too. I could spend all day and evening listening to Le Sacre if I chose, or the latest New Orleans Rhythm Kings record (I did, for three days, when Leon Rappolo, their clarinetist, became my Hero of the Month). Was it surprising that I soon knew them by heart? So would you, if you weren't packed off to school for 30 hours a week. I said as much to Bix, who asked, "What about your pa?" I was also blessed with a delightful schlemiel of a papa who would rather go exploring with his little boy any day than bother about such trivia as making a living. He took me for star walks until all hours, igniting my infant interest in astronomy (of which, however, he could tell me little); days we often spent poring over maps of whatever town we were in, marking promising sounding places and then, by God, going there (usually on foot), a practice that equipped me with a lifelong love of walking and of finding my way about - all this before I was six.

This passage says it all. Obviously a brilliant man who wrote this excellent biography of Bix Beiderbecke, a man who wouldn't have been so tortured if he had been blessed with parents like Berton's, Ralph Berton was able to pursue from an early age those subjects which really interested him rather than having to digest the bullcrap one has to to succeed in the educational system in order to get the proper credentials and degrees. My contention is that most people would be better off pursuing in life that which really interests them than in having to meet educational "requirements," which not only cause a lot of unnecessary frustration but even downright torture, and also that the educational system holds people back to their "grade level" whereas someone like Berton pursued his interests at an early age up to and beyond the college level without unnecessary prodding.

The only learning that sticks with a person is learning he or she has pursued on his or her own, in other words, autodidacticism, and this is true in or out of school because one cannot learn a subject just by listening to a teacher or professor expound on it. One must do the reading oneself; one must work the problems oneself. You might as well read the class notes or a text or, better yet, original sources as have the professor try to inject his knowledge into your head by bloviation. It's not going to happen. As for credentialing, I'll learn the subject on my own, thank you, without student loans and educational requirements and pass any credentialing test you can throw at me. One should have that option, but then the educational institutions would be out all that money.

Comments

[AllAboutVoting]

The format of this post is hosed. Please fix. Maybe a 'br' tag after the image?

[John Lawrence]

The format looks good on my computer. Can't please everyone.

[John]

I think I fixed the format problem.