Peripheral Visions

are learned by play and experience, as when a little boy takes his own dugout canoe out on the reef; others by observation, watching the grown-ups operate the elevator in an apartment building. Everywhere there is some teaching, mostly by family members who, like Parvaneh and Joan, are not teachers and have no systematized knowledge of the material they are passing on. There is tremendous variation in formality, in the demand that a performance be correct the first time, in styles of reward and punishment—“He’s just a child; he doesn’t understand”—and the list of individuals who are allowed to play an active role.
    My classroom at the University of Tehran, where the students were confronted with strangeness and asked to behave in unfamiliar ways, is a metaphor of the world we live in today, pressed by change and by contact with other ways of thought to question premises learned even before language. The students knew, almost as deeply as Shahnaz knew the meaning of the transition from carpet to floor, without ever having put it into words, what was supposed to happen in classrooms, and that knowledge limited their capacity to learn by observation.
    The problem of an outsider as teacher is to enrich students with new learning skills, not to replace the old ones, and this demands an awareness of differences. At Damavand College, American teachers struggled to convey their rules against plagiarism without being aware that the notion of ideas as property that underlay them was itself foreign and unfamiliar. They believed they had no wish to disrupt the society they were working in, yet they tried to persuade students that it was appropriate in the classroom to question the expertise of the professor. On the other side of Tehran, my husband and his colleagues were teaching students of management to learn from case discussions rather than by memorization. The most basic assumptions are rarely made explicit by either teachers or students.
    If children learn, even before words, that the unfamiliar is inimical, this will affect their approach to differences of all kinds, even those forays into the unfamiliar that we take when walking into a forest or a meadow, and they will never be comfortable in unfamiliar social worlds. If they learn that their way—or any single way—is always best, they will never see, and use, the alternatives, however widely they travel. To get outside of the imprisoning framework of assumptions learned within a single tradition, habits of attention and interpretation need to be stretched and pulled and folded back upon themselves, life lived along a Möbius strip. These are lessons too complex for a single encounter, achieved by garnering doubled and often contradictory visions rather than by replacing one set of ideas with another. When the strange becomes familiar, what was once obvious may become obscure. The goal is to build a complex structure in which both sets of ideas are intelligible, a double helix of tradition and personal growth.
    I was a schoolgirl when I first went to Israel, a young wife when I went to the Philippines, and a new mother when I went to Iran. The landscape and I were both different at every turn of the spiral, almost decades apart; because it is impossible to step into the same river twice, one can learn from each return.

Something Blue
    R ECALLING CHILDHOOD makes it possible to experience it again, to discover another way of seeing within one’s own skin. Even though children begin very early to fit in with adult expectations, they continue to be enigmatic strangers, so the visions of childhood could be treasured as alternative ways of seeing. The perceptions and experiences of childhood continue to be visible out of the corner of the eye in daydreaming, in free association, and in sleep. Some become the defining foundations of later learning, built up into the shared understandings of society, while others are disallowed in the adult culture, so that not only episodic memories but whole modes of consciousness are buried.
    When I wrote a memoir of my parents, With a Daughter’s Eye , I found myself able not only to recover a wealth of memories but also to reconstrue those memories with the help of adult knowledge, to infer the motivations underlying mysterious adult behavior, to empathize with the adults in their puzzling world and with my earlier self. There is today a whole range of psychotherapies based on the idea of communion with an inner child,