Making the Progression from Learning to Life

by Francesca Delbanco

I was raised during the 1970’s in a small town in southern Vermont, populated largely by mill workers who lived in trailers and hippies who lived in lean-tos. My parents, who didn’t belong comfortably to either category, moved there from New York City to teach at the college that shares the town’s name, Bennington. Life in Bennington was a bohemian affair: the town selectman played in the local orchestra, the campus green featured art installations starring students and professors in various states of undress, and the college president grew prize-winning tubers in his patch of community garden....

There were few residents of Bennington who remained untouched by the creative, avant-garde esprit of the college.... It was only natural that those liberal ideals of higher learning, the educational values that made “Composition for Nonmusical Sound” and “Body Parts Art” viable concentrations at a degree-granting institution, would filter down to those of us at more elementary stages of our academic careers. When the time came for me to lace up my red Keds and hoist on my first backpack, I reported for duty to the Prospect School, a tiny private school in a three-room farmhouse that billed itself as “an experiment in progressive learning.”...

Here are some of the disciplines on the list of educational priorities at Prospect: woodworking, painting, cooking, sewing, gardening, weaving, small worlds (blocks and dollhouses), animal rearing—practical, pioneer-inspired skills I’ve come to think of as the “progressive basics.” The theory behind the Prospect philosophy was that students learn best when they study what interests them most. Functionally speaking, this was a very sweet deal. I was intensely interested in becoming a professional ballerina at that time, an ambition that my teacher, Dirck, encouraged wholeheartedly, though no one else seemed dazzled by my talent. Dirck seized upon my interest in dance as a natural avenue for me to learn about rhythm (progressive math), choreography (progressive composition), and physical discipline (progressive sports). For me, the main dividend was the right to wear a tutu and ballet slippers to school....

While it’s easy to tally the tangible opportunities I’ve gained from my more “prestigious” degrees, part of me has always felt I owe the greatest debt to Prospect. Those first years of school are formative ones, and though I can’t claim to remember much about stained-glass smelting or chick incubation, I know that my confidence and desire to learn flourished under the vaguely supervisory presence of teachers like Dirck, who believed in standing back and letting us discover our own best talents.

After college, I moved to New York City and got hired as a reporter for Seventeen, the monthly magazine read by some 2.5 million teenage girls. The editors sized me up quickly and assigned me to the only beat that had nothing to do with fashion or beauty: a regular feature story called “School Zone.” Every month, I traveled with a photographer to a different American high school, interviewed 50 or so kids, and then returned to the office to compose my article about life, school, and culture in such exotic locales as Salt Lake City and Little Rock.

What I discovered, after the initial thrill of striding through the nation’s largest schools without a hall pass wore off, is that most American high schools are extraordinarily similar.... Month after month, my editor slouched into my office, “School Zone” proofs and grease pencil in hand, begging for something sexier to lead with than yet another state athletic championship or outstanding AP program. The solution, I argued to the editor in chief when she summoned me into her office to apprise me of “School Zone”’s flagging ratings, was to start profiling different kinds of schools....

My own alma mater may have folded, but plenty of schools around the country still churn out enlightened, self-reliant teenagers who know how to chop firewood.... A short afternoon of research led me to the Putney School, a boarding academy in southern Vermont which is one of the most famous progressive schools in America. Sons and daughters of our nation’s intellectual and artistic elite have been bunking in the shabby wooden cabins on the Putney campus since 1935, receiving outstanding educations both inside and outside the classroom. The public-relations officer I spoke with seemed thrilled at the prospect of our story, and she sent stacks of glossy brochures featuring Putney students looking through telescopes, riding tractors, working at blackboards, slopping in cow barns, and making sculpture in the metal-working studio. The metal-working studio! Ah, youth!...

Pulling up the long dirt drive to the cluster of white farmhouses and red barns on the Putney campus, I felt as if I were being reunited with a dear old friend.... The public-relations officer, our administrative contact, greeted me warmly and offered us a tour. “I should tell you,” she said, snapping her down vest as we headed back outside, “some of our students are a bit anxious about your arrival.”...

The entrance hall of the first building she led us to, the dining complex, was plastered in pages photocopied from Seventeen. Scrawled across each of them, in brightly colored magic marker, were angry slogans: Seventeen Hurts Women; Take Your Superficiality Back to New York; This Magazine Is Capitalist Poison!...

“Something’s always being protested around here,” she said, waving her hand dismissively....

That evening, as kids sprawled all over the couches and floors of the main meeting room, our “open forum” on the Putney story commenced. The students voiced their concerns about fashion magazines, the familiar litany of dangers and damages such publications could inflict on girls’ self-esteem. We argued back, citing our intent to include all of them , their real pictures and real words, as proof that we were interested in more than just models and celebrities. It was a debate I’d had many times before, and in truth my own feelings on this subject are more conflicted than they are resolved. But sitting on my metal folding chair that night, fielding suggestions from a bunch of self-righteous, privileged teenagers on how to make my work more palatable to their tastes, I vowed that my own children, should I ever have any, would attend military school.

Faculty members beamed proudly as their intellectual progeny questioned mainstream authority, students applauded each other for sharing their thoughts and fears, and I retreated into an elaborate fantasy about the day each of them would get a job, and have to wear a tie or pantyhose and respond politely when commanded to fax out their boss’s lunch reservations. The conventions of the real world, of discipline and hierarchy, do not receive much respect or regard in the progressive philosophy. The result is charming in a 6-year-old who contributes her own opinion at a dinner table full of adults. It is moderately charming in a 12-year-old who insists on making her parents observe vegetarianism because of her political beliefs. And it is patently uncharming in a group of 18-year-olds who do not understand that their talents at sheepshearing and tractor riding are luxuries underwritten by their parents.

We ended the assembly by promising not to harass anyone who didn’t want to participate in the story, and immediately the goodwill engendered by compromise surged around the room. Over the next days, every student we approached did want to participate in the story—either because we’d defended our mission so articulately, or because at some level all teenagers, even the most staunchly anti-establishment ones, can’t resist an offer to be interviewed and photographed....

Perhaps it’s inconsistent to be both an appreciative produce of progressivism and a critic of it, but returning to New York to write my column, I felt exactly that way. All that focused, individual attention on each student, all those teachers believing every child who passes through their class might be the artistic or intellectual flower of the next generation, all those exhibits and performances and adult-endorsed shrines to blossoming creativity, can combine to create a class of self-important, coddled adolescents who have no idea what will hit them the minute they leave school....

But then again, the value of all that attentive indulgence is perfectly evident: the Putney students were confident and curious and well-spoken, they had a strong sense of themselves and a strong sense of what they believed. Once I got over feeling irked by their protest, I admired the way they chose to question Seventeen.... For the most part, large public schools don’t have the means or resources to nurture independent thinking of that potentially inconvenient sort: classrooms are crowded, teachers have predetermined material they have to get through in order to meet school requirements, and the kid who wants to take time out to ask why, or to disagree, or to approach work from a different angle is a big pain in the ass.

I have, of course, met artistic, unconventional students—the very sort who would flourish at Putney—all over the country, and by and large, they are either reluctantly tolerated, ignored, or, worse, harassed and treated as a threat to institutional order. The urge to drum kids into uniformity has gotten particularly fierce in the recent response to school violence: the rash of strictly regimented dress codes, for example, seems to suggest that every boy in a black coat might be the next Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris. Big schools prize homogeneity for its convenience; the best way to control a crowd is to ensure that it’s a like-minded, well-behaved one, and while that’s a valuable policy for teachers and administrators, I’m not sure how valuable it is for students....

All kids could profit from exposure to the sort of positive, supportive, hands-on school environment that comes with the progressive philosophy. I understand now, rather better, why my own parents took a gamble on experimental education. When and if my turn comes to bet, I’d place my marker on it, too.

—Excerpted from Tales Out of School: Contemporary Writers on Their Student Years, edited by Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve, published by Beacon Press. Reprinted with permission.