The Teacher who opened my Mind

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This condition Frank Lears changed. That now, however imperfectly, I can say what’s on my mind, and that I know what kind of life I hope for, I owe not to him alone, of course, but to many. Frank Lears pushed open the door to those others, though, other worlds, other minds.

For three months, Lears did his best with Will Durant and The Story of Philosophy. We barely gave him an inch. Dubby O’Day (Donald O’Day on his report cards and disciplinary citations) made enormous daisy chains out of the rubbber bands he used to bind the advertising circulars he delivered on Saturday mornings or sat, his body tight with concentrated energy, inking in all of the o’s in the textbook. Tom Vincents pried tufts of grass off the soles of his soccer cleats; Michael de Leo and Tom Cappalano, wide receiver and quarterback for the Medford Mustangs (I blocked for them, sporadically), contemplated pass plays and the oncoming game with Newton, or Somerville, or Everett. Nora Balakanian was high school beautiful. Sandra Steinman, the school’s only hippie—she wore wire-rim glasses and work boots and was, by her own choice, of no social consequence at all—conversed with Lears on subjects no one else cared about.

Lears thought well of himself. And we all wondered, if unspokenly, where this guy might have gotten his considerable lode of self-esteem. Teachers, as we could have told him, were losers out-and-out. And this one in partiticular wasn’t strong or tough or worldly. He wore ridiculous clothes, old formal suits, and that weird paper clip in his lapel; he talked like a dictionary; his accent was over-cultivated, queer, absurd. Yet he thought highly of himself. And not much at all, it

wasn’t difficult to see, of us. He mocked us, and not always so genially, for never doing the reading, never knowing the answer, never having a thought in our heads. We were minor fools, his tone implied, for ignoring this chance to learn a little something before being fed live to what was waiting. For our part, we sat back, and waited to see what would turn up.

One day in mid-December or so, Lears walked in and told us to pass back our copies of The Story of Philosophy. Then he told us that he had some other books for us to read but that we’d have to pay for them ourselves. Lears, it turned out, had asked no one’s permission to do this; it just struck him as a good idea to try to get people who never picked up a book to do some reading by giving them work that might speak to their experience. At Medford High, this qualified as major educational innovation, real breakthrough thinking. And, of course, there were plenty of rules against using books that hadn’t been approved by the school board. The books that Lears picked were on a theme, though I had no idea of that at the time. The Stranger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Siddhartha: The first three were about the oppressions of conformity (among other things), the last about the Buddha’s serene, fierce rebellion against it. For the first few weeks, since virtually no one but Sandra would read a book at home, we simply sat in a circle and read the pages aloud in turn. Periodically, Lears would ask a question, and usually, in the beginning, it was he who would answer it or decide finally to let it drop. One day, when we were reading The Stranger, Lears asked us about solitude. What does it mean to be alone? Is it possible? What would it mean to be genuinely by oneself? Sandra Steinman raised her hand, no doubt ready to treat us to a description of Zen meditation and its capacity to melt the ego beyond solitude into pure nothingness. But Lears must have seen something ripple across Nora Balakanian’s beautiful face. He gestured in her direction, though she hadn’t volunteered.

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