Meshing the Old and the New

We went to Lincoln’s Boyhood Home on Friday with the kids. It was, as it always is, SPECTACULAR. I’m sure the kids think it’s a great walk, but they can’t quite see what the attraction is, and neither can Miss Molly and Miss Stacey who are very modern young women. It was hot, it was buggy, it was smelly, and the attraction was a simple example of primitive pioneer life. What could be duller.

Of course, I could move up there and live as is. So could Mrs. St. Louis, but Edith and I are very fond of do it yourself ways of life. We like the quiet, the wait and see kind of living you used to get years ago. We like to make our own food, grow our own houseplants from single leaves, and make our clothing occasionally.

We think our attitude towards making and doing is why our kids at the Garden School learn as much as they do; because we introduce things slowly and from scratch, and we build slowly and we repeat over and over. But that’s not popular. New teaching models itself on a flash in the pan kind of presentation – a quick glimpse at the text, an inane example and then presto bingo, the kid memorizes it for the test and forgets it tomorrow.

That’s not knowledge; that’s stupidity.

The older I get, I realize that old vs. new is producing a real cultural clash. As I watch the conservative and liberal teaching titans battling it out in the public childcare arena, I see how the old more traditional ideas are quickly being suffocated to death with cries of “unnecessary, forgettable, and certainly not doable.”

While conservatives are yelling that nothing should ever change, that values from the eras of their own growing up should satisfy everyone, liberals are screeching that everything should change, change, change, now, now, now. It never worked anyway, and we need a fresh breath of air.

Who’s right?

Neither, in my poor thinking. Neither because you can’t grow without change, and you can’t change without substance. Substance comes from tradition. With a rejection of all things that are traditional, or an ignorance of all things traditional, there is no platform, no starting point, no way to obtain and retain substance.

That’s why I was fired from the paper; I had too great a love for tradition. It’s become my platform, and I was not supposed to draw from such non-real things as experience, expertise, or what I knew to be true. In the editor’s eyes, everything was true and tradition unnecessary, forgettable and certainly no longer doable or reproducible. Throw it all away and put on new clothes whether or not it’s true or has substance. It’s an ideology that doesn’t work for me. Sounds a little like modern dress – 25 cents of fabric on a stick.

Yet I must admit that a steady diet of old can also be as foolish. I once worked with a woman for whom tradition was more than a platform. It was a whole religion. While we were planning a new school curriculum, she fidgeted with great hostility. Her main focus was on school dress uniform not a policy on reading, not how to teach math, not science or history or even foreign languate. She was interested in resurrecting the old blue serge starched dress uniform from yesteryear that would dignify the student, and curriculum would follow this traditional gear.

So I asked her the big question: are students dignified by what they are wearing or what they know? Shouldn’t the curriculum tilt toward a plan that would teach a child to love reading rather than focusing on how the student would look?

Her answer was to lose it. That’s when Edith and I started the Garden School.

So how much of tradition does one keep and how much does one allow to change?

That’s a personal preference, a tradition we find in our culture perhaps more than other cultures. Personal preference is another name for free will. Free will, however, is only free if it serves right cause, and it is only free if it’s trained, otherwise it’s license and chaos.

Training begins in the beginning with parents and teachers who have at least and interest in knowledge. Collected knowledge, like a library, is not a new idea. It’s an old idea that can be traced to Babylon and ancient Egyptian libraries. What’s new under the sun is the Internet. If you use the Internet as a library, you are combining tradition with change, and it works. It certainly is easier to go on line and find out something than go to the library and sift through scores of old books.

Yet, if a teacher rejects the new, and only uses old texts to teach, and snubs all new works, what he is doing is taking the child from the modern culture. Eventually, the child will be made to choose between old and new. Children are sensitive, and they will choose an allegiance, and that allegiance should be to sense not nonsense. No one lives in old times. We all live in the present. Old texts have value, and some new works do too. Finding a balance between the old and the new is a useful search.

This week, The Garden School kids studied pioneers. We also made root beer. Originally, root beer was made by the pioneers as a treat. It is made originally from the root of a sassafras tree, sugar, water and yeast. The yeast grows in the sun and carbonates the drink.

Today we have learned that sassafras root is a carcinogen and not for human consumption, but the flavoring that can be bought at Wal Mart is just as good. That’s old and new coming together - and it works.

So why make it at all. Why not buy a couple of two liter bottles of root beer? Why all the fuss? Because doing teaches and so does making something, but you have to know that it’s possible, and how to do it, and be willing to do it. Kids should see teachers work, because the work of your hands is a form of saying “I love you; you matter to me.”

Check out the Lincoln link.