714
PARTISAN REVIEW
if you were used to walls, or thought you were, learn to do without
them now.
Since our son starts kindergarten next fall, we've already visited a
couple of schools this December. Both featured brands of cant that
struck me as milder than this wall-less business - not that they aren't also
doomed, dishonest, at the very least depressing. A teacher in a Gifted and
Talented program mimes excitement at the sight of eggs hatching, of
cocoons on twigs - projects the class may well be following with an
awe the teacher mayor may not truly feel. Let me give this woman the
benefit of the doubt: she probably is galvanized by the processes it may
be both her vocation and avocation to demonstrate. What disconcerts
me is the way it seems obligatory that she mime a rapt response (the
children's? hers?) to prospective parents. I sense an unspoken imperative -
not merely not spoken out loud but not even silently formulated in
words. Nevertheless, it's in the air, and it goes something like this:
Impersonate for visitors the childlike gifts of exuberance, concentration, innocent
wonder.
A liverish thought, too early in the morning of our visit to this
Gifted and Talented group: it's shabby the way we grownups simultane–
ously (or is it successively) stimulate, take the credit for, and ape a child's
perceptions. But isn't it something that we've been guilty of at least
since the Romantics? Looking around, I see that some of the parents opt
to mimic amazement back at the teacher (in a strange way she
thereby becomes for the moment their teacher). Thus a mutual mirror is
set up, which excludes eggs, cocoons, terraria, and certainly children.
Other parents are simply silent - stolid or sleepy or just beyond amaze–
ment.
I'm among those who cannot jack open their eyes far enough at
this hour, in this classroom. Not that nature's not amazing. I'm not in
kindergarten, and for me reading and thinking precede and foster the
sense of wonder - a sense which I experience more as an occasional
achievement than a course requirement. Careening between subatomic
particles and a galaxy-looped universe where space curves like a girdle
laced with time, the choice of focus confronting us would seem to be
macro or micro, not whether to cluster while we pulse in our cosmic
nunun.
Still dutifully touring the sprawling school without walls, chewing
the cud of how to group the educable young, I realize with a spurt of
irritation that whether or not it's a good thing to do, of course people
cluster. Walls, that invention maligned here, both result from and en–
hance our instinct to go into a huddle. Unhesitatingly we form little
groups that foster warmth and language, social roles, families, exclusion,
territory, war. Shrinking with trepidation, some maverick does
