Now, Children

By Melvin Maddocks

SPEARPOINT by SYLVIA ASHTON-WARNER 224 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

"What about picking up your blocks, Henry?"

"I dowanna...and I don't have to."

"Well, who else is to pick them up?"

"Not me, you dum-dum!"

Once upon a time into the country of the doubly young--five-year-olds, American five-year-olds, living like some future race at an experimental school in the Rockies--there came an elderly stranger. She was doubly alien, a grandmother and a New Zealander. Yet Sylvia Ashton-Warner had her visas in order, even her special credentials. Or so she thought. Had she not written a book called Teacher (1963) expounding her progressive principle of "organic teaching"? "Release the native imagery of our child," she preached, "and use it for working material." Was not her proudest boast that she was still very much a child herself? As a lifelong dreamer, why was she not eminently qualified to participate in the dream of "a perfect open school, providing both learning and freedom"?

The admirable Mrs. Ashton-Warner worked on for seven months, until money for the open-school project ran out. In rhetoric favored by educational revolutionaries, she still insists that "spiritually speaking, millions of children are murdered annually" by conventional teachers who stuff their innocent minds with adult "imagery" instead of appreciating that the point of education is to keep a child "as interesting as he was when he was born."

A certain carefree brio has gone out of her ideological flights these days. The "perfect open school" turned out to be as tooth-shivering a case of reality as fingernails scraping against a blackboard. As far as "learning and freedom" went, Mrs. Ashton-Warner may well have learned more than her rather frightening charges ("the advance guard of technology, with their long legs, proud faces"). And what she learned was mostly about the nature of freedom. Spearpoint is the often oblique but always fascinating account of what "Teacher" was taught, hung up between "the ruling ogres: Authority and Equality."

New Hope. Authority, the spirit of do it my way, is the clearly identified villain of education (and everything else) nowadays. On the other hand, Equality --the attractive notion of teachers and students becoming full partners in the educational process--is all the new hope. But Mrs. Ashton-Warner's trials among the sandboxes of the Rockies, where even "coax" is a dirty word, taught her that Equality can lead to a subtler, more dangerous tyranny than Authority.

"The collective energy in a group of children," she writes, may be "at its best, sympathy" but "at its worst, mob rule." Her "wanna-dowanna" Montys, Rockys, Odiles and Candys thump the piano, whack the guitar and slam down their Cuisenaire rods with sublime disregard. There are days of disaster in the clay room. Attacked by American central heating and the tribal chant, "I wan my snack," organic teacher finds herself in full retreat toward old-fashioned values: order, privacy, silence, a decent cup of tea.

Gamely, Mrs. Ashton-Warner demonstrates her Maori dances and shuffles her Key Vocabulary cards. She is an experienced teacher, a combat veteran, and she throws everything she has into what she calls the "passing on" of culture. "New leaves need the tree" she has said, referring to the need of the future for the past. But these new leaves do not seem to need her. In fact, she decides, she has never gone against any body quite like these junior frontiers men of the Rockies. "Why don't they like handwriting?" she asks in future shock. "Is it going out?" But her ultimate nightmare question is this: "Why do some blush at the word 'love'; is love going out?"

Speaking collectively, she reports:

"Our child no longer feels with love or with hatred. He does not feel at all."

Feeling -- Mrs. Ashton-Warner's be loved "third dimension of personality" -- is what she believes education is all about. Does affluence cause this deadness at the center? Is the villain the ubiquitous TV? Mrs. Ashton-Warner does not pretend to know. But she feels her self in the presence of "a new man evolving," a mutating personality, whom she refers to as a "Muperson."

In contact with Muperson, her slightly complacent progressive formulas shatter. How does one inspire a Muperson -- and still get all those troublesome blocks picked up? Mrs. Ashton-Warner's dilemma is every bit as old as the first teacher. What is new is her evident confusion, her unfortunate paralysis.

What is valuable is her hard-earned sense that freedom is not the answer but the new problem. "Life is authority," she counterprotests. "You've got to pay for life. Take what you want from life but pay for it." Upon this old but still valid conclusion, she builds erratically but eloquently her case for all new beginnings.

Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.