Bill Kauffman

A novelist and man of letters, is the associate editor of The Family in America, published by the Rockford Institute. His books include Every Man a King, America First! and Country Towns of New York. He is an historian of forgotten political and social movements and a fierce defender of local identity.

I live in the rural western part of New York State: a land of dairy farms and finger lakes, of proud lady ghosts and the desolate beauty of winter. It is unlike any other place on earth, except that, like every other place on earth, it is beleaguered by Strangers Who Know Best.

The latest assault is a bipartisan collaboration--as mischief usually is--between the Republican lieutenant governor, Betsy McCaughey Ross, whom the New York Post once described as having the "brain of Henry Kissinger and the body of Jessica Rabbit," and Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who, alas, possesses the brain of Jessica Rabbit and the body of Henry Kissinger.

The tandem of Silver and Ross propose to make all-day kindergarten mandatory for New York’s alarmingly unregulated five-year-olds. And taking a cue from the Carnegie Corporation’s Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades, which recommended the incarceration in school of every three and four-year-old in America, Silver and Ross urged the enrollment of New York’s four-year-olds in what the speaker infelicitously terms "a regiment of educational exposure."

Well, this is awfully generous of the state, offering to take our tykes off our hands. True, the unspoken assumption behind herding tots into government factories is that, if left to the tender mercies of mom and dad, New York’s black kids will grow up to be menacing felons, and the whites will mature into slack-jawed cretins. Neither group makes very good soldiers or Microsoft employees. And if we’re going to be cynical about it and look this gift horse in the mouth, we might recall Henry Adams’s statement that "all State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes."

What else could explain the current nationwide campaign to confine preschoolers in school, which if nothing else makes the word "preschooler" an anachronism?

Utopian and dystopian novelists have a notion. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, fire captain Beatty explains to the late-blooming rebel Montag: "Heredity and environment are funny things. . . . The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle."

Overstatement in the service of art, you think? Maybe not. Several years ago Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, worried that feckless parents weren’t up to the task of prepping little Jamal or LaTisha for the challenge of 21st-century burger flipping, proposed that the Los Angeles school district "take them as early as we can get them in that school setting, that formalized training and motivational setting, away from their parents, because that’s what it’s going to take." Mayor Bradley saw 24-hour-schooling as the logical extension of "child-care centers. It’s the same concept. Simply you would extend that child-care treatment . . . for enough time that those youngsters are not going to be exposed to their home environment where they are destined to fail."

What do Bradley and Ross and Silver and the education establishment mean by "fail"?

Consider a pair of colloquialisms. "You’ll go far," we say to bright young people, and the implication is that success can be measured in the distance one has traveled from home. If, on the other hand, we say of a boy, "He’s not going anywhere," we are not praising his steadfastness but damning him as an ambitionless sluggard. He’s no Henry Kissinger, so to speak.

Too often, education is the instrument by which the young are lured from their families and communities. In Wendell Berry's novel Remembering, the narrator says:

Years ago, he resigned himself to living in cities. That was what his education was for, as his teachers all assumed and he believed. Its purpose was to get him away from home, out of the country, to someplace where he could live up to his abilities. He needed an education, and the purpose of an education was to take him away.

 

I submit that the purpose of an education should be to keep him where he is--to help make the student at home at home. We have quite enough deracinated degree collectors roaming the land; we need to teach our children to stand on what they stand for. And the family--and the network of families that make up a community and that ought to run the community and neighborhood schools we need to revivify--is where we must begin.

For too long we have removed our children from the human scale--the home, the local school--and sent them out to be folded, spindled, and mutilated in strange places by strange people. The cost of such uprooting is measured by the wise Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s great novel The Grapes of Wrath:

They was the time when we was on the tan’. They was a boundary to us then. O1' folks died off, an’ little fellas come, an’ we was always one thing--we was the fambly–kinda whole and clear. An’ now we ain’t clear no more. I can’t get straight.

 

Families are strengthened immeasurably--and the state and transnational corporations likewise weakened--by having one fixed location--whether a farm, a home, a business--upon which generations of memories are balanced and around which children are resident. The schools that free men and women produce in such circumstances enrich, educate, and root.

As a boy I attended John Kennedy Elementary School, which was named not for the recumbent president but for the turn-of-the-century superintendent of Batavia schools. Our John Kennedy was a fanatic on the matter of teaching local history, for as he wrote in his history of the Holland Land Office, "Grandfather’s chair may be a very humble piece of furniture, but it is prized beyond all price because it is grandfather’s chair."

It is for that same reason that those who seek the eradication of the most immediate ties will use grandfather’s chair for kindling. And the bonfire made by a million burning grandfathers’ chairs lights the skies over the wasteland.

Adam Smith, of all people, noted the pernicious effect of "the education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding-schools." This is still the practice of the upper classes in my country, and it explains the attenuated loyalties to place and family which one finds among the wealthy. It also explains, I believe, the disastrous imperialist course of U.S. foreign policy. The so-called "wise men" who steered our dreadnought into the bottomless seas of empire were the products of boarding school educations: loyalty to family, hometown, region, even country died on the playing fields of Groton. In turn, the wise men made war on the rest of us, on familial knowledge and local affection, for the empire makes dislocation a virtue, separating millions of 18 and 19-year-old men from parents and siblings and shipping them off to transoceanic garrisons. Our schools began teaching a patriotism of megatonnage, not love. (I would say, parenthetically, that most of the solvents of American families, from government-subsidized mobility to daycare, are the spawn of militarism; and while I am loath to make recommendations to anyone, let alone a room full of people whose countries I respect but do not understand, one family-fortifying political act that people of all nations can take is to refuse to support wars waged by their governments outside their borders. Do not hand over your children to murderers.)

The subordination of American life to the demands of military empire sapped the vital link between families and their neighborhood schools. Consolidation--the merging of small district academies into large schools to which rural children must travel by bus--was one of the biggest saps. The king of consolidation was James Bryant Conant, the Harvard University president who had been a major in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service during the First World War and an administrator of the Manhattan Project during the second.

After devoting the best years of his life to devising ever more horrific methods of slaughtering people he’d never met, Dr. Conant turned his attentions upon American schoolchildren. Feasting on a fat grant from the Carnegie Corporation (whose thumb prints always seem to be at the scene of the crime), Conant recommended "the elimination of the small high school"; no school with fewer than 400 students should be allowed to exist. "Not many years ago," Conant marveled, "a considerable body of opinion in this country . . . thought that what happened to children was a matter for the parents to decide. The state should not come between a father and his son. . . . These arguments would sound archaic today." The fewer the schools and the more uniform the curriculum, as Conant understood, the more desultory parental input would be and the easier it would be to break down America’s stubborn regional differences and create a standardized Cold War kiddie.

The Conant view, if I may be permitted a slight caricature, is that the child belongs to the state, not the parent: he is a little soldier in a 13-year boot camp who will, if necessary, be bused 50 miles to gleaming, soulless, hyper-efficient super schools, where he can be programmed to be a "productive worker" who can "meet the challenges of our global responsibilities/the space race/the 21st century/the interdependent economy" or whatever will-o-the-wisp our rulers have us chasing today. The child is a cog, a drone, a spoke--all in all, he’s just another brick in the wall. He or she is everything but a son or daughter.

Conant the Barbarian succeeded: the number of school districts in our United States fell from more than 127,000 in 1930 to barely 15,000 in 1980.

What did we lose? (Other than parental control of schools, that is, for after all, as the Nebraska superintendent of schools remarked in 1873, "Parents are often very poor judges of what a school should be.") We lost the world of our fathers.

The only good evidence, I believe, is anecdotal; statistics lie, trust the eye. So I will tell you about my mother’s one-room schoolhouse in the tiny hamlet of Lime Rock, New York, and its 200 mostly Northern-Italian-descended quarry-workers and their families. The Lime Rock school was shut down in the late 1940s over the vigorous and impuissant objections of the parents--what did a bunch of illiterate dagos know that James Bryant Conant did not?

My mother’s memories of the Lime Rock school are warm and pleasing; her new school, in the larger arch-rival village of LeRoy, was "terrifying" in its bigness. She also found that she had learned LeRoy’s fifth-grade lessons in Lime Rock’s fourth grade. Of course she adapted, as children do, but Lime Rock suffered a loss from which it never recovered. Of the three community institutions that gave Lime Rock its identity--the school, the town baseball team, and St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church--only the third survives. The old folks recall, with hearty laughs and significant quavers, the Christmas plays and the outhouse and the lore of the school, just as they have retold into legend the apical event of Lime Rock’s history: its defeat of hated LeRoy in an epic baseball game and the all-night horn-blowing raucous celebration that followed. But the young people of today’s Lime Rock, who board the bus for the long ride to LeRoy every morn, will never know that kind of pride. The school is gone, high grass obscures the ballfield, the children leave when they turn 18, taught as they are that Lime Rock is nothing, not even a spot on a map. Lime Rock was killed--and for what?

Lime Rock’s children will go far . . . tragically.

Once there was a way to get back home, as a mop-topped lad sang some years ago. But how?

Again, clues are hidden in dystopian novels. Edward Bellamy, in his 1887 fantasy Looking Backward, imagined that in the year 2000 the family would turn over most of its functions--schooling of the young, cooking, entertainment--to professionals and strangers. A young woman is shocked when Bellamy’s l9th-century time-traveler asks her to play the piano. "Professional music is so much grander and more perfect than any performance of ours," she replies, "that we don’t think to play."

Bellamy’s inert heroine found a real-life counterpart in the feminist-statist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who, in her 1903 book The Home: Its Work and Influence, sighed "that the care and education of children have developed at all is due to the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, [and] teachers." Gilman imagined a world in which children would no longer be raised by ignorant mothers lacking college degrees; they would emerge "from the very lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad level of common citizenship. That which no million separate families could give their millions of separate children, the state can give."

The state can give. Four fateful words. The state giveth, and the state taketh away. The state giveth alms, and the state taketh away the mutual aid of the community. The state giveth a form to fill out, and the state taketh away autonomy. The state giveth security, and the state taketh away love.

The fatal flaw in the visions of the Gilmans and Bellamys, and of their modern incarnations--the politicians and parchment-hangers who want universal preschool for three-year-olds–was captured by Marcet Haldeman-Julius, niece of the famed Chicago social worker Jane Addams. Haldeman-Julius told of visiting her "Aunt Jenny" at Hull House and finding her distant, impersonal, cold:

"She isn’t a very auntly person," I (aged six) complained to my mother on one of our visits.

"That," I was informed in a tone of rebuke, "is because she is aunt to so many. She hasn’t much time for each of you."

Child-welfare crusaders have usually been childless, and while I leave psychological explication to the Freuds and frauds, something is amiss when women who choose not to be procreative leapfrog the messy pangs of childbirth to become government officials and act, backed by the tanks and prisons that keep nonconformists in line, as mothers to children they have never even met. As Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho predicted in 1912, upon the creation of the Federal Children's Bureau, "The unmarried of the country who know how to raise children" will be loosed upon "the class that is most helpless in their hands--those who toil for a living."

As is so often the case as this bloody century winds down, the divisions are not between liberals and conservatives, or socialists and free marketeers, but between the local and the remote, the village and the globe, the flesh and blood and the abstract. The child welfarists are not interested in one measly girl--where’s the glory in that?--but rather in the plight of all girlhood, which is to say everything and nothing at all.

But then this is where the cult of impersonality–of mass education controlled by the central state, of empire and imperialism, of Disney and Time Warner--leads. By destroying the family of husband, wife, children, and kin, and substituting an ideal under which a man loves a complete stranger as he loves his daughter--the dystopians deliver us unto what the novelist Henry Olerich called A Cityless and Countryless World: one in which the flickering image of a poor wretch halfway around the globe is more immediate to us than the plaintive cry of the hungry girl down the road; a world in which Madonna, unattainable and incorporeal, is more alluring than the girl next door.

So what do we do? I have at home a globe, which I can spin with the flick of a finger. Prague is denoted by a star on this globe; but Batavia, my home, is not. My wife and daughter, my parents, my brother and his family, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my ancestors and the cemeteries in which they rest--none of these is on the globe. The same, I will bet, is true for each of you. So we must reject the global--in our daily lives and in the education of our children.

Of one of the towering American statesmen of our century, the Nebraska populist and three-time Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, the court historian Richard Hofstadter sneered, "Intellectually, Bryan was a boy who never left home."

What high--albeit unintentional--praise. We must teach our children to not leave home, for home is where wisdom begins and where our journey ends.

Our children must learn the old stories--the histories that are peculiar to each family, to each community. Remembrance is an act of love. I began with one of Ray Bradbury's nightmares so I shall end with quite the reverse. In Dandelion Wine, the great-grandmother, on her deathbed, tells the boy Douglas Spaulding, "No person ever died that had a family."

Not me. Not you. Not ever.