educate.mem EDUCATE MEM 7956 1-22-03 9:10a My early education was spectacular, because my parents taught me so much, although they refused to teach me to read, even going so far as to forbid me to learn to read on my own, for fear of my being so well educated when I got to school that I would irritate the teachers; something I could not understand at the time. Somehow, in my continuing naivete, through great numbers of years, nay decades, I always thought a teacher should/would be welcoming highly advanced students in the same manner a sports coach will welcome a highly advanced athlete. Hey, I SAID I was naive, but. . .I am forced to admit that I still think this is the way it should be. *Not sure I should include the next paragraph here, or even elsewhere.* If schools recruited for academic performance the way they recruit for an athletic performance, things would be much different. As it was Deans at the University of Illinois thought I made the university look BAD because I was doing so well, rather than making them look GOOD. They even tried, and failed, to stop me from graduating in two years. So, while I learned HUGE amounts about all sorts of things, from cultures throughout the expanses of world history and learned all fundamentals for the sciences and mathematics at a VERY young age: literally before I can remember, and I can remember knowing arithmetic up to the decillions when I was one [see my godfather: Jim Siberg]. I didn't actually learn a lot in school, not just because I had learned so much at home, but because it was not the model in our schools at the time to teach very much. It must be said it was mostly a socialization process, one that continued all the way through college, as I will mention later on. School in the US was mainly created to mesh the immigrants from different places, with different languages and customs. In those deepwater seaport cities such as Tacoma, with such a wide variety of immigrants, this is an important, nay primary, feature of the departments of education, as it is and was in many placed throughout the US. The purpose was to rub off all the differences, and homogenize the new generation, and thus I was not at all encouraged to be "different" other than to excel at sports, but not a bit in scholarship or the arts. Oh, they SAID that good grades were nice . . .but that was about it, there was no push for excellence. Until Sputnik, that is. . . . In October 1957, on the 40th anniversary of the "October Revolution," the Russians [USSR] launched the first satellite to orbit the Earth, and "The Space Race" began. . .only 40 years, from a revolution that was basically fought on foot and horseback in 1917 to starting space exploration. This was much more shocking at the time than you might think, following a quick progression from the A-Bomb to the H-Bomb for both the US & USSR in only the previous decade. [Footnote: it would now appear that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were very far from access to the H-Bomb [then called "The Super-Bomb"] infomration, and did not have access to the information they were convicted, executed, and publicly vilified for supposedly having given the Russians. Media is not saying much about this, as it is still considered "bad form" to say a gevernment convicted the wrong person, as IS much in the media right now, as per legislation in North Carolina to free those wrongly conviced. One example, sorry I missed the name, as of a man convicted of rape, 20 years ago, but who may have been proven innocent about half that time ago. The media are heaviliy involved with both sides, some wanting no convictions, none at all, to be overturned, some wanting justice, no matter the delay. I find it interesting that no one ever speaks out against justice delays when it takes 20 years to catch someone, but that the do when the person was caught and convicted 20 years ago.] [Should I move this to the end?] The US school systems BURST into action to created a generation that must be prepared to catch up, nay surpass, the Russian threat. Finally, the US educational system had something to fear more than bright students. . . . This is a premise some, even many, of you may find hard to accept, _I_ am only just now learning to accept it, even after people telling me for all of thirty years and longer. . .teachers, scholars and administrators were and still are deathly afraid of bright students who don't fit into cookie cutter molds that were used to create a school system whose primary focus was the homongenization of the student population. I had to be told by large groups of people on the threshhold of PhDs in a quite psychology department. . .over and over. . .for weeks on end, month after month, before I finally even considered the idea. . .and still that idea kept escaping me. . .it was just not in my mental model of the world that professors in famous colleges could be frightened by a student. . .. Perhaps more about that some other time. Much of the time I was labelled as not as bright as I thought I was. . .and at the same time was labelled as a classic underachiever. Hee hee! Luckily _I_ knew who I was and was not about to accept anyone else's label of who I was. Later. . . . L8r. Shift now to the beginning of the first post Sputnik school year in 1958. I'm not going to pull any punches here, I am going to include things that I could have left out, things that may allow you an escape from the truth of the situation. . .and many of you may use just such escapes. First, I was in a different school system, 2,000 miles further east: BIG differences being noticed between East and West. . .and these people were Easterners to me: even though they called themselves Midwesterners. The place was nearly 200 miles east of the Mississippi and I'd never been out of Tacoma more by more than 300 miles except for a couple trips to Canada which even included one trip on my own, when I stayed for three weeks, at the age of 8. The world WAS different back then. Before I ever even got to class on that first day I was literally grabbed and dragged by the collar to the office, to be summarily thrown out! Had I done anything to deserve this? I had only asked for directions to find my classroom. I was told in no uncertain terms that I would be sent home . . .several times, before I could finally get them to tell me why. I was wearing "bluejeans!" "The Horror. . .The Horror. . .The Horror" [Apocalypse Now!] [There is a separate memoir called bluejean.mem about all the details.] [I have been asked to include more of the details here, now expanded.] So, we'll skip most of that, other than to say that my Levi's, and _I_ am speaking of genuine Levi's, were NOT blue, but were wheat and I *refused* to go home, threatening to call the police and sue them all if I they did not leave me alone and let me go to class. ["Wheat jeans" = "chinos."] [These were a West Coast thing, and like my Frisbee, had never been seen] So, even while _I_ didn't yet realize I was not the average everyday kid, THEY probably realized it. Instead of just going home and putting on slacks, I, who had never heard, in my 11 years, of any kind of "dress code," demanded to see it, written, before I would blindly obey. . .I just wasn't brought up to blindly obey anyone, particularly a stranger, no matter how authoritarian. The dress code was written down, but it said "bluejeans," not jeans, and I told them that I wasn't wearing ANY blue and that I already knew where the courthouse and police station were, and that I would go straight for them if they didn't let me get to class ontime. / I didn't realize how important this evet was until the third revision of this document, when I realized that I probably would NOT have gotten the special classes mentioned below if they had not already put me in a mood to threaten going to court beforehand. / At any rate, back to the Sputnik train/rocket of thought, later that day, the University of Illinois sent over one of their most promising graduate students, as part of the beginning of recruitment of my generation as the weapon to counter the Red Threat. This took the form of the person doing a 10 minute announcement in each class, looking for "best and brightest," as the movement began to be known, with particular emphasis on science or math interests, and, luckily for me, also asking for volunteers. "Lucky for me?" Why? Because, without even realizing it, I had just run headlong into "fear of the unknown". . ."not invented here". . .and all that jazz. . . . My teacher, close as we became later [I was also her paperboy] was afraid of letting me into the "special section" simply because I was an unknown. I tried and tried to get her to put me on the list, and when she wouldn't I finally had to forcibly remind her, in front of the class, that we were being also asked to volunteer, not just those teachers recommended, and I threatened to take her to court if she blocked my admission. Once again, I had to read back what was actually said to get in. Remember, first thing that day, I had had to read the dress code. . .must say I had never even HEARD of a dress code before. . .things just weren't like that on the West Coast. . .not much in the way of repression, least, INSTITUTIONALIZED REPRESSION. . .I actually had to threaten to go back to the office. . .again. . .to invoke the "volunteer" category as read to us by the graduate student. . .and also to go to court. I reminded them the fact was that I only knew where the courthouse and police station were as part of my Boy Scout orientation, but apprently they didn't think highly, as least as highly as where I came from, of the whold Boy Scout thing. I should probably add that while I went through the whole Boy Scout thing from Cub Scounts to Explorers, from Bobcat to Eagle Scout, and was even a counselor at the second largest Boy Scout camp in the United States, that I was/am a revolutionary, something I reminded my Eagle Scout Board, when I told them I was revolutionary, and that they might not want me, as I am not the standard cookie cutter Eagle Scout. I was rather surprised, 1964 was not at time being revolutionary was popular with the system. Back to my first day at school, after my second threat of court action. And yet I felt no hostility about either case. . .this behavior was soooo outside my experience that I had no way of knowing what it was. . .yet. There's yet another couple stories that end up with me threatening office personnel, even a vice-principal, with calling the cops and suing them if they didn't obey their own rules. . . . I wasn't a renegade or a juvenile delinquent, heck I was on my way to get my Eagle Scout award, and much more. . .but I was soo far OUTSIDE THE BOX that they couldn't see me. . .and I couldn't see them. . . . So, when it comes down to it, without the experiences of that first day-- and being threatened with being thrown out of school for the jeans--maybe I would never have made it in time to catch the wave I surfed all the way through from grade school, to junior high school, and through the kind of college programs that allowed me to think up Project Gutenberg. ***Some extra notes that didn't fit in well in the above*** I was truly a child of the Atomic Age, so much so that when my mother said, "Up and at 'em!" in the mornings, I thought she was saying, "Up and Atom!" Because atom/atomic was synonymous with high energy back in those days.... Being a kid with LOTS of energy wasn't regarded as a bad thing back then.