Providence (11 page)

Yes, this is a question that has been posed in various ways by many people. Why didn’t I turn to some denomination in which divorce and remarriage is countenanced? This misses the point. My quarrel was not with the rules but with God. Do the Episcopalians worship a different God from the Catholics? Do the Lutherans worship a different God from the Catholics? There’s no doubt about the answer to that one. No one would disagree: They all worship the same God. What separates and distinguishes these sects is not the God they worship but their take on what he permits and what he forbids. The issue is always rules, whether it’s strict rules, lenient rules, or even no rules at all. If you’re gay, you can join this denomination because, according to them, being gay is permitted. If you believe women have a right to abort an unwanted child, you’d better not join this denomination, because, according to them, abortion is definitely forbidden except in rare cases.

No, I hadn’t the slightest interest in shopping around for a denomination with rules that suited the way I
wanted to live. I turned my back on that God entirely and have never missed him for a single moment.…

I understand the urgency of that question, and we’ll definitely get to it eventually. All I can say right now is that I didn’t say, “There is no God.” What I said was, “If there is a God and he’s the way the Christians say he is, then I renounce him. I despise him and will have nothing to do with him.”

And of course there remained that hour at Gethsemani. Turning my back on the God of the Christians gave me no insight into that at all. Why would it?

N
INE

         
By the time
I was three years out of college, I was the head of the biography and fine arts department of APE—the American Peoples Encyclopedia. My dream of becoming a fiction writer began to lose some of its allure as I saw a career in publishing open up before me. I was working with two astonishingly competent and knowledgeable people: Francis Squibb, who had been the biography and fine arts editor before me and was now the managing editor, and Ruth Hunt, who had been the managing editor before Francis and was now the editor-in-chief. From these two I’d learned more about writing in six months than in all my years in school.

I had the absurd idea that the pattern of my life was set;
in another five or ten years, we’d all move up another step—Ruth to a vice presidency, Francis to editor-in-chief, and I to managing editor—and five or ten years after that I’d be the editor-in-chief myself. I was innocent of the ways of the publishing world. In less than two years, the encyclopedia had been sold to Grolier and moved to New York, Ruth had been let go, Francis had been invited to come along to New York in an indefinite capacity, and I’d declined a similar invitation. I couldn’t have imagined it then, but in the nearly twenty-five years that followed I would never again work in an environment where administrative competence was the rule rather than the exception, where supervisors could be relied on to know more than their subordinates, where ability counted for more than having a good front or standing in well with the right people.

Ruth Hunt had taken a job in the math department at Science Research Associates and invited me to join her there. I accepted, though moving into educational publishing struck me as a lackluster and disappointing career step. As had happened so many times before and was to happen so many times afterward, however, the step that seemed to lead away from my life’s work ultimately proved to be a direct step toward it.

If ever there was a golden age in educational publishing, the early sixties was it. Federal funds were pouring into the schools, and, since the rule is “Use it or lose it,” the schools were spending prodigiously. Fortunes were being made by materials producers, and by the mid-sixties, all
the high-tech giants like Xerox and IBM would be looking for educational subsidiaries.

The age was golden for other reasons. The fact that the Soviets had beaten us into space with Sputnik put a world-size spotlight on the backwardness of our school programs, particularly in math and science. Sweeping changes were needed, and innovation was the rallying cry. Incredible new media and technologies were going to revolutionize the classroom. B. F. Skinner was hot stuff, and programmed instruction was practically going to make teachers obsolete.

The old-line, big-name publishers of the past were not really comfortable with all this, though they had to sound as though they were. They were used to developing highly traditional materials at a stately and gentlemanly pace. By contrast, revolutionary times were perfect for Lyle Spencer, the founder of SRA. He was an innovator by instinct, and he didn’t see any virtue in dawdling. In a period of a few years, he had moved from being a small specialty publisher to being the industry leader that everyone had to struggle to keep up with.

I wasn’t aware of any of this at the time, so I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be there. Ruth and I were rather like the mandarins of Broadway who went out to Hollywood in the early days of filmmaking; it all seemed a bit crude and slipshod to us, and it was. The received
wisdom of the industry was (and is) that you hire teachers to design and write your materials, which is rather like hiring musicians to design and build your opera house. Some have a talent for it, but most don’t, and why should they? The skills you need to put ideas across in a classroom are entirely different from the skills you need to put ideas across in a book or a motion picture or a set of visuals and tapes.

May I ask when you started school? Yes, that’s what I figured. You came too late to have a taste of what was then called Modern Mathematics. That’s what I was working on at SRA: the Greater Cleveland Mathematics Program, one of the first, best, and most ambitious New Math projects of the sixties. The whole New Math movement was intended to flush down the drain the old-fashioned rote-learned mathematics that I’d grown up with. The idea was that the old math was okay for farmers and salesclerks, but if you wanted to produce mathematicians and scientists, you had to teach math in a way that made
sense
to the kids who were learning it. As far as I was concerned, this was a terrific idea. Kids brought up on the New Math were obviously going to be vastly better prepared for the modern world than the kids of my generation, who were mostly mathematically illiterate—and rather smug about it as well.

It turned out, however, that there was a fundamental flaw in this idea. As expected, a lot of kids really thrived on the New Math (as I would have done, as a child), but an equally large number of kids were just being left in the dark by it. They were neither making sense out of it nor learning it by rote (since it wasn’t being
taught
by rote),
so they basically weren’t learning anything at all. So the New Math ultimately went on the trash heap of discarded ideas.

What people failed to consider was that, just as there are two fundamentally different ways to teach math, there are two fundamentally different kinds of kids trying to learn it. But no, you can’t have two different ways, our educational system won’t accommodate that; it has to be one way or the other. This was my introduction to one of the fundamental concepts that drive our culture: the concept of the One Right Way. There can’t be
good
ways of teaching something, there has to be a
right
way—one and only way, with all other ways
wrong.

I hadn’t till then given much thought to the way we educate our kids. Who does? For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course. These are only important to the extent that they contribute to putting you in a good college or university. Now that I began to look at it critically, however, I began to remember what it had been like: the tremendous excitement of the first couple of years, when kids imagine that great secrets are going to be unfolding before them, then the disappointment that gradually sets in when you begin to realize the truth: There’s plenty of
learning to do, but it’s not the learning you wanted. It’s learning to keep your mouth shut, learning how to avoid attracting the teacher’s attention when you don’t want it, learning not to ask questions, learning how to pretend to understand, learning how to tell teachers what they want to hear, learning to keep your own ideas and opinions to yourself, learning how to look as if you’re paying attention, learning how to endure the endless boredom.

The child isn’t capable of asking, “Why is it like this?” School is the way it is, the way parents are the way they are. This is the universe. This is the given.

Now, approaching age thirty, I
was
capable of asking it. It has always been my special gift (and my special curse) to ask the questions no one else seems to need an answer to.

After five years in educational publishing I found myself dedicated to the task of overthrowing a school system that seemed to me inhuman and unproductive. Religion wasn’t the future, science wasn’t the future. Education was the future. Education was salvation for mankind—which is to say for
us,
the people of my culture; I was a decade away from realizing that it’s a cultural solecism to speak of the future of mankind as
our
future. What I was thinking at that time was, if we could break free of the tyranny of the schools, we had a chance of finding that paradise we’d all been trying to fashion for ourselves here for thousands of years.

As you can see, I was beginning to grope my way toward a vein of radical ideas uniquely my own, and the field of educational publishing, which I had at first taken for a side track, now began to look like it might be the main track after all.

T
EN

         
Forgive me.
I haven’t been asleep, I’ve been groping for a direction, and it appears to be this. The next decade, roughly 1965 to 1975, served only one real purpose in my life: It deranged my habitual expectations.

I grew up a charter member of the Silent Generation. You’ve probably never heard of it. I think the name was coined in an article in the
Atlantic
in about 1955, but, characteristically, there was no rebuttal from us, so the name didn’t catch on in any big way.

We were the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the first generation to grow up with the knowledge that all of this could be gone in an hour—and probably
would
be gone, one of these days. It may be hard for you to imagine, with the Cold War receding
into the distant past, but nuclear holocaust was on people’s minds then the way AIDS is now. It was right there. One day you’d be looking out the window, and there it would be. People like Malenkov and Bulganin and Khrushchev were practically lunatics, who might well be willing to destroy the entire world for the satisfaction of destroying us. And we had lunatics of our own who would have been happy to push the button. Unless you lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, you can’t have any idea of what it was like.

We of the Silent Generation were like children tiptoeing through a roomful of sleeping mad dogs. This is almost literally true. We kept our mouths shut and hoped for the best, and the best we could think of was a few years in which to collect some modest toys of our own. We wanted a nice, safe career, a nice, safe family, a nice, safe house in the suburbs, a pair of television sets, a pair of cars in the garage, and a well-stocked bomb shelter in the backyard. We weren’t looking for adventure or for fun or for self-realization, we were looking for
security.

I was no exception. The first thing I did on leaving college was to get married. That was essential. And within five years, by God, we had that house in the suburbs. Given a few more years, we would’ve had the rest as well. By then we were miserable, of course, but I could have endured years more of that, for the sake of a quiet, safe life, all planned out and getting a tiny bit better every single year. But not Katherine. She opened her mouth and shattered the silence. As much as anything else, it was the need to resume the fantasy of a quiet, safe life that drove me toward remarriage within a couple of years.