The Teacher who opened my Mind

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So there I was in a well-lit room, wearing, no doubt, some sharp back-to-school ensemble, pegged pants and sporty dice-in-the-back-alley shoes, mildly aching from two or three football-inflicted wounds, and pondering the Nietzsche quotation, which I could barely understand. I felt dumb as a rock, a sentiment with which I, at 17, had no little prior experience. But by putting the quotation on the board, Lears showed me that, in at least one department, his powers of comprehension were a few notches lower than mine. He had misunderstood Medford High School entirely.

The appearances had taken him in. No doubt he’d strolled through the building on the day before students arrived; he’d seen desks, chalkboards, supply closets stocked full of paper and books, all the paraphernalia of education. He had seen these things and he’d believed that he was in a school, a place where people quested, by fits and starts, for the truth.

But I had acquired a few facts that Lears would not have been primed to receive at Harvard, or at prep school, or at any of the other places where he had filled his hours. Medford High School, whatever its appearances, was not a school. It was a place where you learned to do—or were punished for failing in—a variety of exercises. The content of these exercises mattered not at all. What mattered was form, repetition, and form. You filled in the blanks, conjugated, declined, diagrammed, defined, outlined, summarized, recapitulated, positioned, graphed. It did not matter what: English, geometry, biology, history, all were the same. The process treated your mind as though it were a body part capable of learning a number of protocols, then repeating, repeating. If you’d done what you should have at Medford High, the transition into a factory, into an office, into the Marines would be something you’d barely notice; it would be painless.

Before Lears arrived, I never rebelled against the place, at least not openly. I didn’t in part because I believed that Medford High was the only game there was. The factories where my father and uncles worked were extensions of the high school; the TV shows we watched were manufactured to fit the tastes for escape that such places form; the books we were assigned to read in class, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, The Good Earth, of which I ingested about 50 pages each, could, as I saw it then, have been written by the English teachers, with their bland, babbling goodness and suppressed hysterias (I’ve never had the wherewithal to check back into them). Small bursts of light came through in the Beethoven symphonies my father occasionally played at volume on our ancient stereo (the music sounded like it was coming in over a walkie-talkie) and the Motown tunes I heard on Boston’s black radio station, WILD, but these sounds were not connected to any place or human possibility I knew about. So I checked out. I went low to the ground, despondent, suspicious, asleep in the outer self, barely conscious within.

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