Peripheral Visions

children recruited to privileged schools from the ghetto and then isolated, Muslim children in the Philippines, or Armenian children in Iran have no ready escape from ambivalence. There is a thread of betrayal in schooling of every kind.
    I have never been anywhere that education was more hotly pursued than in the Philippines when we were there. The American colonial administration put its emphasis on economic and educational improvement and public health. Already in 1901, a shipload of six hundred American teachers had fanned out across the country to establish a free system of public education. They were called the Thomasites after the name of their ship and are praised and excoriated by turns, for they were both a boon and a curse, muting the sentiments for resistance and independence. The Thomasites were like an early version of the Peace Corps, opening schools in rural areas and beginning a wave of literacy affecting the whole country. In the Philippines literacy and knowledge of an outside language are still extraordinarily high for a third world country.
    The Republic of the Philippines has been independent since 1946, but it relies on English as a lingua franca alongside Pilipino. For children beginning school in their home dialects outside the Tagalog area, then, literacy involves at least three languages. As in India, there is a distinctive form of English filtered through generations of locally educated teachers: fine in context, it requires modification for export, suggesting the need to learn still another form. Here is a sequence of language learning that in principle follows the pathway from identity to adaptation. When languages are separated by context, children can master more than this; when they are muddled or disaffirmed, the whole process can be inhibited. Some African Americans can move skillfully up and down the scale of variations, from a deep southern black dialect virtually unintelligible to white northerners to BBC English, playing with the music of the differences. Others feel trapped in a pattern of speech that labels them as ignorant, wounded in their sense of who they are and ill equipped to adapt to others. Standard English, so useful for many purposes, has come to seem an imposition to many for whom it could offer a useful second string to their bow.
    Persuasion or coercion? Proprietary higher education became one of the most profitable businesses in Manila, sometimes superb, sometimes a shoddy and exploitive product. In spite of unemployment in many fields and mismatches between the supply of graduates and the need, everyone seemed to believe that education was the key to advancement. When the Marcos government was overturned, there were students in the vanguard.
    The experience of the Jews has been very different, because for them schooling and study have been central to identity for millennia. It is among Orthodox Jews that the joys of learning are most vividly affirmed. In Israel little boys in black with skullcaps and side curls, growing up in the Orthodox enclaves that most nearly replicate the ethos of the Eastern European shtetl, can be distinguished from the children of secular families by posture and coloring, for these are children who do not play in the sun. The poet Bialik described the house of study as a prison, as something rotten and emasculating, yet he wrote, “who are you, adamant, who are you flint, to a Hebrew boy occupied with Torah?” Whereas the popularity of study in the Philippines is largely instrumental and education and certification are pathways to prosperity, in the Jewish tradition, scholarship has been an end in itself: the Torah was not to be used as “a spade with which to dig.” Learning Torah is pure delight. Wealthy men coveted scholars, the true aristocrats of the community, as sons-in-law and were ready to support them in a lifetime of study. In Israel today a reinvigoration of traditions of Torah study is a central theme of the resurgence of Orthodoxy. Learning Hebrew and Old Testament were, even for me as a non-Jew, formative intellectual experiences of self-discovery, made possible because when Hebrew was revived from scholarly use to become the living language of Israel, this meant the creation of a community that welcomed and supported the language learning of adults.
    Learning as a tool. Learning as an act of worship. Learning as a betrayal. Learning as play. Learning as servitude. Learning as a way of life. Education in the