This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 25, 2011 - The public elementary school I attended from 1966 through 1969 was an L-shaped building of red brick designed around a large open yard. Located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it had a red front door. My school was called P.S. 6.
Beginning in first grade, I walked 10 blocks to school every morning with a girl who was never ready on time. When I arrived at her apartment, she was always wolfing oatmeal.
What I remember most about my first three years of formal schooling are rows and rules.
- And having sharp pencils.
- And the color-coded reading assignments packaged by SRA that we "advanced through" at our own pace.
- And saying the pledge.
- And arranging my numbered spelling words along the pale red line down the left margin of my paper.
- And having to write "because" 20 additional times because I kept getting it wrong.
- And maps.
- And half-pint milk cartons sold for a nickel.
- And bulletin boards, on which were tacked news of labor strikes, civil rights marches, riots, strife in the Middle East and assassinations of our leaders and heroes.
There were 30 children in my class.
And I remember recess, strolling the yard arm-in-arm with my two best friends, and playing hopscotch, and jumping rope, and hearing the yelling and shouting of schoolmates running around like crazy until the teachers brought us all back to order. Then we would line up in what they called "size order," shortest to tallest. I was always somewhere in the middle, but closer to the front.
How hard it is to recollect this stuff and not sound nostalgic! My memory of first, second and third grade is made rosy by time and distance. Why did I take such comfort in inflexible routines? I cannot say, but for sure those first three years of school established a kind of template in my soul about "what school ought to be." At least for those years, and at least for me. School seemed perfect.
I must not have craved too much personal attention, because we hardly got any. What educators know now about the benefits of small group work, and constructivist practices, and collaboration, and cultural relevance -- none of this existed at P.S. 6. What we had were middle-age white female teachers behind a large desk at the front of the room, bossing us all around. Some smiled more than others, one wore sandals even in winter, another liked to chop the erasers off our new Number 2s. Still, they were pretty much indistinguishable, pedagogically speaking.
Interestingly, what people like me experienced in school in those days would have looked familiar to a certain kind of Assyrian child 4,000 years ago. The rows, the rules, the expert adult at the front of the room. Sure, the school child of antiquity would have been a boy, never a girl, and he would have been using wet clay to write on instead of soft white lined paper. But, like me, he would have been middle class, with parents who understood the social, economic and political value that comes along with reading, writing and manipulating numbers. As it did for the student scribe in Assyria in 2000 BCE, as it does for some children today, institutionalized schooling assured me of a place of relative power in the community.
What nags the conscience is the idea that this whole way of doing elementary school -- the way formal schooling has been arranged for thousands of years -- is designed for the minority who can adapt well to (and learn in!) standardized environments where one person is teaching many novices at one time in one place, for the minority whose home habits, customs and culture are affirmed by what their children experience between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day.
P.S. 6 seemed like a perfect school to me because it was perfect for me. It was perfect for the person I was, for the family I came from, for the destiny my community had in mind for me.
Note to self: Every child deserves such a place, and these places do not need to be exactly, or even remotely, like P.S. 6 in the '60s.
Question to self and others: How else might they be?
Inda Schaenen is a writer and teacher in St. Louis.