Reading recent postings here, I appreciated Yeats' _Among School Children_,
a rich work that can be read to many purposes.
It seems to have come in through the discussion of transaction as a notion
striving to reunify the separation of agents from actions, participants
from processes -- a separation that often derails our reasoning with
concepts of simple mechanical causality, or interaction in the narrow sense
we imagine for rebounding billiard balls cut off from the game and its players.
How can we tell the dancer from the dance? Are we indeed meant to do so at
all? Yeats comes to this famous climax line after several stanzas of
reflection on the trajectory of life: from our youth as schoolchildren to
our old age as scarecrows, each looking at the other, and along the way
remembering, imagining, praying, giving birth and panging regret, always
asking questions.
Is there a theory of education here? of development and activity? of
meaning for life? Certainly there is plenty of raw material we could
reflect on for these interests.
When Yeats wrote this he was older than I am now ... by reading and talking
to and living with those older than ourselves, do we come to partially
embody, as we come to be able to respond to them, something of what it is
to be older than the calendar counts us? Are we ever just one age, living
among people of all ages? Is age transactional? not as the calendar
reckons, but as we reckon someone's age from their behavior, their
attitudes, their habitus and style of living? If we long to build wiser
communities in which the meanings and feelings specific to classes and
cultures and genders teach us all, shouldn't we wonder also about how hard
it may be to share viewpoints across differences along our life
trajectories? We do it, I'm sure, but with what limitations and
misconstruals? And how much effort do we make to really hear those much
younger and those much older than ourselves? How well do we educate
ourselves to learn among schoolchildren and scarecrows?
The children, as Yeats sees them, learn to be neat in everything in the
best modern way. Forgive me if I doubt that Yeats meant to sound approving
of modern ways. In what ways is the modern penchant for neatness, for neat
categories, neat concepts, neatly separated classes and genders, neat
concepts and neat answers to neat questions deeply unsatisfactory to the
imagination of a poet and an old man? How many neat formulations that we
started out from in our own younger years have already proven deeply
unsatisfying to us?
Our two natures blent ... into the yolk and white of the one shell. Youth
is not just a time of neatness, it is also a time when we are full of the
capacity to blend ourselves with another; two natures, here one male and
one female, blent. Yeats recalls Plato's Symposium and the parable of the
hermaphrodite, the original human form, split into incomplete male-part and
female-part, ever yearning to re-unite. By biological sex, by sociocultural
gender, by every difference that seeks its opposite or its complement in a
myriad of ways ... perhaps also by age that seeks youth, and youth that
seek age ... how many not-so-neat differences we feel between ourselves and
others propel us toward what we feel we lack? propel us as
individuals-in-community to restore the conditions of wholeness, in
ourselves and among ourselves?
And what happens as we age? do we turn more inward on ourselves? do we come
to feel more separated from others? do we fear blending? or do we just
specialize in the kinds of Otherness that attract us, and the kinds that
repel us? We know that most prejudice is culturally developed with age, the
hatreds of specific kinds of others, whether the capacity for that
antipathy to the Other has pre-human antecedents or not. What is the
developmental history of the capacity to love and to hate? of the eagerness
to blend with another and the fear of becoming lost in another? Of the
temperamental preference for neat separations or ambiguous fusions? If we
share something of every paddler's heritage, how do we feel about that?
Can we feel sadness and doubt in this poem? What else is a man of sixty, a
scarecrow full of poignant and painful memories of a lifetime, to think
about Among Schoolchildren, but how soon they will be old like him, and how
soon he will be too old for life? The mother giving birth ... could she but
see not the promise of a child, but the old man headed for death that her
child will be ... is there then still a point to birth's pain? Philosophers
are supposed to give us answers (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras), but all
they say still means we are scarecrows in the end. Religion gives its
comforts, but every saint above the candles also mocks our worldly enterprises.
But as the stanzas began in questioning, so they end in questioning. They
began in language that seems straightforward and simple in its meanings,
neat and modern, and perhaps innocently simple as we wish our youth was ...
while they end in language that is so deeply metaphorical that it could be
read as marxist, christian, or pantheist. The last stanza is still speaking
of the travail of the human condition, it is still asking if there is a way
of making sense of experience that transcends the neat separation of part
from whole and actor from action. Yeats is suggesting, it seems, that there
is a way of seeing life that does not make death a mockery of our
enterprise. But the point of the poem, I think, is to help us feel rather
than simply hear what he is saying. How do we feel those last lines? with
how much anguish and longing? with how much much hope? with how much doubt
and despair?
Should schoolchildren be learning more about ambiguity and the un-neatness
of human experience?
Should education be bringing people of widely different ages together
instead of segregating us apart?
Should we be learning how to outgrow theory?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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