Peripheral Visions

fluctuates through a lifetime and even through the day, altered from without by changing relationships and from within by spiritual and even biochemical changes, such as those of adolescence and menopause and old age. Yet the self is the basic thread with which we bind time into a single narrative. We improvise and struggle to respond in unpredictable and unfamiliar contexts, learning new skills and transmuting discomfort and bewilderment into valuable information about difference—even, at the same time, becoming someone different. Clarity about the self dims and brightens like a lamp in a thunder-storm or a radio signal from far away, but all our learning and adapting is devoted to keeping it alight.
    The cost of exposure to another system of certainties is a bruising risk to clarity about the self. Taking on a new role or entering a new institution are both transitions when the self is put at risk: school systems are often particularly violent in their attack. Thus, children who fail to learn in school may simply be unwilling or unable to put a fragile sense of self or of membership in a group at risk, while adults who decline to learn do so in self-defense.
    To become educated, one must concur with the implication of ignorance—and in many traditions one must also concur that one is evil, a sinner. In societies with immigrant communities, many children have to concur that their parents are ignorant, while members of minority communities may get the message that ignorance is their permanent condition. These are very expensive agreements to give. Traditionally the definition of oneself as ignorant has been compensated by the promise that, at the end of some number of years of submission and deference, one will be allowed to become somebody—a pillar of adult society. For the many children who suspect that this promise is false, the bargain is unacceptable. Even in private schools, with their constant message of selectivity, the insults of schooling are barely tolerable. Even when we try to build up the self, we subvert it for the sake of discipline and conformity. It is almost as if schools demanded, Leave your self, your self-esteem, the confidence accrued from learning to walk and speak, at the door. And do that without the genuine confidence that in the end you will have a share in your society and that being an adult is desirable. This is what many children are asked to do in school. I can’t think why anyone puts up with it.
    When Vanni was approaching the end of secondary school, one of her teachers warned the parents that he would soon be assigning personal essays of the kind that students write to project their personalities and talents for college admissions. Vanni turned to me in some distress, and said, “Mom, I don’t know how to write an essay in the first-person singular.”
    In many schools, children are disciplined from early on not to do what is called personalizing. Not to use the word I . Not to give their opinions or use school essays as a vehicle for self-expression even while they continue to be vehicles for competition. What I suggested to Vanni, since her primary interest is acting, was to shift to a different medium, where her capacity for expression had not been deformed by classroom conventions. She developed and taped a dramatic monologue and edited the transcription. But what an extraordinary thing it is that in a society where we regard the self as central, we are so often engaged in silencing its expression or putting confidence at risk. Volumes have been written about the miracle represented by learning to use the word I , yet that capacity is under constant attack.
    Children learn skills and information in school. These are the issues when we complain that they cannot use decimals or give the dates of the Civil War. More significantly, they learn how society is organized and where they fit into that organization. They learn notions of authority and truth and the limits to creativity. These are the underlying communications of school. For a very large number of children they have been basically negative, a progressive stripping away of dreams, an undermining of confidence. Western societies and their imitators use competition to improve performance, beginning in the classroom, paying a price in the loss of collaborative skills. For every child whose confidence is enhanced, there are half a dozen for whom it will be reduced, and some of those will grow up to inflate their own