RACHEL HADAS
Visiting Schools
It's a good thing my husband and I can read each other's glances. One
eyeflick is enough. A wink would be hard to manage under these cir–
cumstances, but no wink is required; the first flash of mutuality says it all,
and one of the things it says is that this school won't do. That we might
well go home, now, at nine in the morning, and save ourselves a day.
Nevertheless, such are the moral pressures associated with looking at
schools for one's child that we decide (still in a wordless eyeslant) to
go
through with it. Oh do not ask what is it;! Let us go and make our
visit.
Here we go. This school boasts, to start with, that it has no walls.
Classrooms are separated from one another by more subtle structures that
when necessary do double duty as walls - blackboards, say, or shelves
("or urinals," George accurately whispers). This wall-lessness is what I
remember best, but there must be other things too. Let's see. Well, when
our silent group of prospective parents was still drinking coffee in an of–
fice, the hot-eyed Head said something like this to us: "Present knowl–
edge will be outdated in five years, so obviously the important thing is
process. Traditional schools put too much emphasis on individuation.
Here we cluster."
Cluster. Bees, hives, swarms, a whole Virgilian pastoral swiftly de–
ploys itself as our docile flock follows the guide upstairs. But what's be–
fore us resembles a bare loft, or maybe a pseudo-cave - anyway, it is
space that's been deliberately undifferentiated. The effect manages to be
unfinished and cluttered at the same time. Sparse furnishings leave more
room for an accumulation of detritus. Human habitation has (as how
could it fail to?) created zones. But zones seem to go against the ideo–
logical grain of this place. God forbid the individual self, that poor
pariah, should possess a refuge to which to retreat and slam the door
behind it. For greater tribal unity, the slogan here would seem to go
Whitman one better. "Unscrew the doors from their jambs!" he cries in
Song
of
Myself.
But once the walls have come down, there's no need, no
place for doors anyway.
I wonder if clustering comes more naturally after one has been pent
up long enough in the cell of the self, or whether having known privacy
makes it harder to adjust to the lack of it. The wall-lessness here seems to
carry a double message. First, partitions are not and never were necessary:
welcome to a world without walls! And then the shadow subtext: even
