Ed. note: This piece was posted on Eliza’s blog on September 1, 2023.
Today is King’s Cross Day. Time to board a train and head back to Hogwarts. The kids in my town started school on Wednesday. My niece in Indiana has been in class for weeks. New Mexico started in early August as well, though when my kids were in school and when I was teaching geology to undergrads, the start date was closer to the end of August, usually hovering around the 20th. In youth market book sales, this first Tuesday in September is one of the biggest days of the year, second only to the first Tuesday in October. Nearly all the interesting titles come out in the fall to drive fourth quarter — holiday — sales. So what with the start of school and a decidedly autumnal cast to the book covers in my shop, the beginning of September became the true beginning of fall for me.
For much of my life, I lived where fall is measured and noted in chile roasting, corn mazes, and the New Mexico State Fair (which also begins this weekend). In September, there is a slackening of the monsoon into weaker, daily showers with little of the theatrics of the summer storms. The temperatures cools, only a bit at first, then rapidly toward the end of the month. But there is little visible change. There are few trees that turn colors in the high desert. Most are like apples — the leaves turn brown, but most stay on the trees until winter winds scour them away with the tumbleweeds. Even the mountaintops remain green until around Balloon Fiesta in October — when the scrub oaks, sumac and aspens blaze the Sandia Crest in brilliant orange and gold.
There are also fewer hibernating and migrating animals in New Mexico. The hummingbirds head south and the mountain birds move into the back garden. Lizards become less active, there is less rabbit romance in the arroyos, and bears do actually hibernate. But for most animals, there is little reason to slow down in the autumn because the growing season carries right on into November, especially on the steeper slopes (especially in these days of warming climate). The valley may have to contend with pools of frigid mountain air, but the foothills only feel canyon breezes as the cold, denser airs rush downslope, leaving the soil frost free. But that’s not a function of autumn. That happens every night in summer as well, as the atmosphere releases the day’s heat, creating the famous Albuquerque box convection currents that balloonists so adore. In any case, there is no strong break in the weather or the land that indicates autumn’s arrival. So I set my seasonal clock to school and books.
And I still do to some extent. Much of that is just old habit, but there are reasons to tie the beginning of fall to the school year. Actually, it is the inverse — the beginning of the school year is tied to the fall, the end of the annual agricultural cycle, the end of the season of frenzied work. School breaks for summer because in summer there is a desperate need for labor to tend to the growing season. Farms and all the enterprises tied to farming and food production need all the help they can scrounge. So kids are conscripted. Those not ready for field and shop manage kitchen and barn work, with those barely able to walk and talk watching over the infants in the nursery. This was the way the intense work of the summer was managed in all societies before enclosure, mechanization and urbanization — it still is the usual way of things for most of the world — and the school year is a fossilized skeleton of that annual waxing and waning of the work year.
I have no doubt that kids complained about the work in these cultures, because kids will complain. I’ve also no doubt that there was and is abuse, but this happens more where the goal is profit rather than sustenance. But in all traditional societies, kids work in the summer — and through this labor, they enter adulthood with all the skills necessary to build a life. All the young adults I’ve known who grew up around farming are competent in the kitchen, in the shop, and in the fields. They can feed themselves, make their clothes, keep a house warm. Most can balance the books, rewire an electric fence, and fix the plumbing. Nearly everyone can build a sturdy, if simple, structure. And contrary to what is written in books (mostly by urban men with no direct experience), the task list is not and never has been particularly gendered. Households don’t have the luxury of keeping all the girls in the feminine home and sending all the boys out to the masculine world. Most families only have one or two children and can’t be bothered with silly ideas of ascribed roles. Everybody has to help with everything, whatever needs doing. Girls are just as capable of fixing the tractor engine and slaughtering the pigs as their brothers. Boys are just as adept at canning tomatoes and nursing their little sisters back to health. There are some tasks that tend toward segregation. Girls may be less inclined to take up hunting, and boys don’t seem to be much involved in fiber arts. But for the most part, what needs doing is done by whoever is present — because you can’t flail around trying to find help of the proper gender when you need the corn harvested now.
In sensible economic systems, those focused on meeting needs, education is similarly focused on learning the life skills necessary to meet needs. This doesn’t mean that they don’t learn to manipulate words and numbers. Kids learn maths and language through using these toolkits, just like they learn to use a screwdriver or a shovel. This is what maths and language are for, why they exist, to be used in the service of passing on skills and knowledge. But kids are not primarily passive receptors. Kids are active learners. Learning is the primary function of childhood and they engage with it fully and bodily. They watch and do; they don’t sit and listen. They don’t read about the world; they experience their part of it and they come to know their place intimately.
I like school. I like books. But I think we’re not teaching our kids very much of what they need to know. We blast facts and theorems at them and expect them to make sense of these data, without relationship and context and direct contact. We encourage them to pursue learning about the world, and particularly about the human bits. We don’t let them immerse themselves in the world. We don’t allow our children to sense the world, coming to firm knowledge of how things work and how they fit into that working. They learn about something called nutrition. They don’t learn how to grow a healthy garden and turn that produce into delicious food. They learn about physics. They don’t learn how to build a stone wall, placing each stone so that weight is distributed evenly over the center of gravity, creating a stable structure that will stand for generations. They learn about biology. They don’t learn much of anything of actual living bodies — from the ecology of their own bodies to the geology of Earth. There is little to sense in the classroom, so it is hard to make sense of the world in a classroom setting.
Still, I love the classroom and I firmly believe there is a need for school. In fact, were I in charge of the world, there would be no graduation. We would go to school our entire lives, refining skills, exposing our minds to new ideas and perspectives, and learning more of the world beyond our direct experience. I don’t think school should have a goal except the expansion of knowledge and skill, and there is no reason to confine that to childhood. On the other hand, there is much learning that is beyond a child’s intellectual or physical capacities. It is the height of cruelty to force a teenager, one who has never experienced age or loss or fierce love of this world, to read and comprehend poetry. But I suspect there are many older people who would become ensnared in the poetical if they could experience it as adults, as it is meant to be experienced — if they were not turned off of poems for life by forced exposure before they were ready for it.
I love the classroom, but I love being in the world even more so; and I think most kids are like me. In fact, most research on pedagogical methodology indicates that all kids are like me. Kids learn better by being immersed in the world of being. Classroom instruction and book learning is actually the worst way to reach a child’s mind. It is a very adult mode of passing on information, being invented for that purpose, not for the instruction of young children. So I would leave the books and classrooms for those who are ready for that process of learning. Youngsters might spend an hour or two a day learning the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic. But most of early childhood should be spent doing, experiencing, mastering many kinds of skills, not just what can be gleaned from books. Then when they have thoroughly learned how to be humans in this wondrous world, they can take on more mediated forms of education. And this process should never end, as long as a human draws breath. Most learning should be experienced in the world; refinement and exposure to things outside direct sensation can be found in books and classwork.
Hogwarts is a fairly good example. The First Years are already competent at many things. They’ve learned the basics at home. One gets the impression that those in wizarding families have never even been in a formal classroom setting. They come to Hogwarts to refine their skills, to be exposed to specialized knowledge and techniques, and to experiment with the oddities of their world in a controlled setting. I’m not sure I would want to learn anything confined in a Scottish castle with hundreds of other teenagers, nor do I think I could. But I would love having a castle of experts and experimental equipment and labs nearby, a place I could take a class or two every term, learning all manner of things that I can’t teach myself out of books and my daily life. I would go to Hogwarts for the rest of my life. I might even teach now and then.
And that’s the other problem with confining education to the classroom, especially at a very young age. Children learn that they are not the arbiters of the truth of their own lives. They learn to lean on experts that hand packaged truth to them. They don’t learn to think for themselves or learn the confidence necessary to think for themselves. They learn that they are the students, the unwise and uninformed masses who need guidance from books and mentors. And there is no release from this lesson at graduation. Few adults ever become the knowledgeable experts that are allowed to have ideas. Few people experience the mind-altering wonder of teaching others.
Teaching, passing on the knowledge and skills you have acquired in your life, is the best learning experience humans have invented. And that might actually be a human invention. Other beings observe and learn by mimicry. Humans actively and intentionally pass information and techniques on to others. We teach our children. And as we teach, we learn. As we shape what is in our hands and minds into a form that another body can absorb and use, we understand better what we know and what we do because we know and do it with new perspective.
I like school and books and learning, but I love teaching. Teaching others a skill refines my own skill. Teaching others to observe and experience the world shows me new ways to see and be. Teaching others how to take in information and what to do with that data enables me to glean new knowledge from the world. Teaching also grants me the grace of humility — because a good teacher knows that she is also always a student. Teaching teaches you that there are no experts. Only experiences.
It is sad that we have pulled so far away from experiential learning that we think summer is for vacationing and autumn is when we go back to the grind… that school is a grind confined in a classroom… that learning is confined to childhood. In sensible societies, summer is for hard work, and all of it comes with learning experience. In cultures that make sense of their world, autumn is for celebration after the hard work of food production. And that too is laced with learning. For most humans, life is learning and learning is life-long. But some times are for busy doing… and others are more reflective.
Autumn is the ending of annual growth. It is a process, another doing and being. But it is an inward turning process, turning to sleep and decomposition, a relaxing of the rules of being, a time of rest and reflection. Humans used to turn inward and fall into dreaming as autumn took hold, just like the bears and the trees and the monsoonal storms. Now, we don’t experience enough of our world to know what autumn is. But our bodies still remember. And for our bodies, those autumnal cues — be they weather or leaf color or State Fairs and school and dark mystery books — mean that it’s time to slow down.
It’s fall. And the work of summer is finally over… but the learning never ends!
