When our daughter Faith was born, my wife Lorena and I lived in New York, in a two-bedroom apartment on the lower East Side. In fact, it was much more New Yorky than that. What we actually had was a pair of one-bedroom apartments, side by side. To throw a dinner party was to lead our guests from drinks in the living room of one apartment, out the front door and ten feet down the hall, to the dining room of the other.
But it was a good place for us at the time, only five blocks from my work and inexpensive by Manhattan standards. And the best part was the access we had to the roof, up the iron staircase between our apartments. Over the trees, you could see the yellow pile of Stuyvesant Town to the east, the dip in rooftops that marked Gramercy Park to the west, the river’s edge to the south, and the foothills of thirty-story buildings and peaks of sixty-story buildings marching northward like Himalayas to the horizon.
It was there on the roof, back and forth on the silver-painted tar, that I’d walk with Faith on my shoulder after Lorena had fed her. Sometimes I’d try to comfort her by singing in the tuneless croak no one else has ever been willing to endure (folk songs seemed to work best, the more lugubrious the better). Sometimes I’d try reciting long, droning passages of Victorian parlor verse (Tennyson worked fairly well, but — and this still worries me a little — Swinburne was unfailing). And sometimes I’d just mumble rhythmic nonsense in that low, reassuring voice that seems to bubble up naturally in nearly every man suddenly presented with a colicky baby and told to walk with her until she’s calm. Eventually it formed into a mantra, chanted over and over while I patted her back: “She’s such a good girl. Such a good girl. And she’s very, very brave. True-hearted, pure-minded, and she spends her days thinking high and noble thoughts.”
I’d nearly forgotten those words, but they’ve come back to gnaw at me a little, as Faith approaches three and the question of her schooling begins to seem slightly less, um, academic. From the ceaseless conversation among other parents, my wife and I have learned all about education in Washington, D.C.: the good schools and the bad schools, the exorbitant and the merely expensive, the orthodox Catholic and the heretical Catholic, the hippie and the traditional. I would have thought we had plenty of time to decide, but one concerned friend points out that if we don’t act soon, we’ll never get Faith on a first-class waiting list. Another advises immediate enrollment in preschool so Faith will have some credentials for her applications.
But even to our fellow parents I have trouble posing the questions that come to mind when I think about schooling — and I can’t imagine how to ask them of principals and teachers. Where, after all, does one send a child to educate her in bravery and pure-mindedness? What school offers instruction in true-heartedness? Who now teaches the nobility of thought?
The trouble is that I know exactly what I want Faith’s education to provide her. I want a daughter who can do metaphysics and play the lute. Who can ride a horse and recite Shakespeare. Who gets a little teary-eyed at John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie.” Who can bake a cherry pie and shoot a six-gun. Who would dress up as a highwayman and ride out to steal the death warrant from the king’s postman to save her father’s life. Who can balance a checkbook and dig through the toolbox to find the missing three-eighths bit for the variable-speed drill. Who says her prayers at night. Who is equally at home (as Robert Graves boasted he had been) dining with kings and selling lemonade on the streets of Haifa.
Over the past two years, Lorena has become interested in teaching our daughter ourselves, and she’s investigated all the data about reading ability and math scores. But a single fact has brought me around to think she’s right about home-schooling Faith. In the midst of America’s endless argument about charter schools and vouchers, parental choice and teachers’ unions, I hear almost no one asserting that one of the things education should aim at is to produce children who have what Aristotle called a great soul.
I can’t pretend my wife and I have much idea of how to go about that. But home-schooling still seems worth trying, if only because we haven’t discovered many professional teachers who have much idea either — or many who believe even in the possibility of great souls anymore. Lorena can teach Faith baking and horseback riding, and I can teach her “Barbara Frietchie.” All we really need is some help with the lute.
J. BOTTUM
