DragonBlog

We were in the Museum of Modern Art, my younger son and I. We were on the escalator, going up, talking animatedly about the exhibit we’d just seen, “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.” Morris is a student of Interior Design at Ryerson, so you can imagine that he had a strong response to this exploration of the pre-fabricated house. On the escalator, going down, another pair in animated conversation came into view, a woman of about my age (which is 56) and one of about Morris’, whose strong resemblance to each other suggested a mother and her daughter. The mother was wearing the most original garment, a snowy white cross between a jacket and an architectural structure with enormous shining black buttons tracking diagonally across it. We smiled at each other. “Great blouse!” I said. “I love your earrings!” she replied. Morris was sporting that Cheshire Cat grin he has. “What?” I said, aware that none of my children think I know how to behave in public. “I just really liked what she was wearing.”

“Well,” he said, “you would.”

“Meaning?”

“She was wearing your native costume. Didn’t you recognize it?”

“Give me a hint.”

“The barbarian jewellery, the kind of offbeat who know what you’d call it, a coat? A caftan? All black and white?”

“Well, the kid was dressed like you. The funny headgear, the skinny pants, the quirky shoes.”

“Exactly. An art girl. Doing the museum scene with her art mom.”

After that, we began spotting our tribesmen everywhere. They went to P.S.1, and the Whitney, they were going through the Louise Bourgeouis retrospective at the Guggenheim. They sat in front of us in Central Park where we went to see the fortieth anniversary revival of Hair. They had breakfast at Pain Quotidien, and wandered in and out of Soho galleries. They took each other’s pictures on the rooftop of the Met, and stood next to us in the ticket line for the play at the Public Theatre. They stayed up late listening to jazz in the Village, and they ate ice cream in Washington Square Park. They carried little moleskine notebooks, and diligently recorded their impressions, the art moms writing, the art kids sketching.

Sometimes there were even art dads, their hair a little long, sporting Navajo jewellery and black tee shirts. But mostly it was the mothers who you saw, touring with their kids, wrapped in a remarkable closeness.

And I thought what was it about them that made this possible, what was it the art moms did which freed their children to be art boys and art girls, and to enjoy their company so freely? I remember the many happy hours I spent with my own art mom, strolling through galleries, sitting next to each other at great performances, eating ice cream in the park. The first remarkable thing is that she was so alive to all that was beautiful and surprising, so open to everything ambitious, no matter how experimental. She was never inattentive to the world. Or to me. She wanted to share what she saw and felt with me, confident that I would be sensitive to it too. Look at that dragonfly, she’d say. It looks like an enameled jewel. Do you see that funny couple? Did you hear what he said? Here, in the Corot, what makes the painting come alive is the little touch of red in the wash of green, there, the hat of the tiny figure he’s painted under the tree. Close your eyes and listen. We have to get tickets, Laurence Olivier is playing the Colonel! You bring the coffee and meet me in the lineup outside the box office. You have to read the book. I want to know what you think of it. She pointed out the shapes in the clouds, the first bluebells, the woman walking a poodle she’d dyed bright pink. She listened and looked when I had something to share with her. She loved it that I was writing, but she was a shrewd critic too, who respected me enough to tell me the truth. She sang while she vacuumed the rug, Cole Porter. She danced a little when she heard music she liked.

And in that wonderful unconscious way of real teaching, that gets under your skin, and finds expression through you, it seems like breathing to you to say to your own kids, look at the hummingbird, there, in the morning glories, listen, someone’s playing the saxophone, look at the way Matisse does the goldfish with just a smear of orange. And even if I can never be as amazing as my own mother, I did try to hand on her great gift, to encourage them to be really alive to the world around them, to cultivate their sensitivity, their aesthetic instinct, their creativity. And what do you know? There I was, in the museum, riding up the escalator with my art boy.

Going up the escalator in MOMA—the mother in the quirky linen blouse with the huge black buttons and the chunky black bead necklace, the daughter with the funny hat, the weird shoes.. . Recognising the native costume, then the types, the pairs who haunt museums and performances, the pleasure in an intimacy which has little to do with hallmark sentiments, and what I learned from my own mum, to see and hear, to use my senses, to be alive to beauty and significance. The taking of kids round to temples of culture, the religion of the aesthetic, and the way this fertilizes the ground for the growth and expression of artistic tendencies.

Parenting as educating (home schooling literally?) what my mother taught me about teaching and what that means for museum based education…

“Our children have been wrapped in cellophane by well-meaning adults, they have been carefully and overzealously protected from the unpleasant. Now they can no longer be.”

–Alice Dagliesh, author.

Good, thoughtful teachers have many questions about the way education is being delivered in our public and private schools, which is, after all, how I came to start The Dragon Academy as an experiment in learning otherwise. So I have grown used to being contacted once or twice a week by a colleague who is curious about my programme, or wishes to visit, or is hoping for a job. It was when the fourth c.v. listed Leo Baeck as current employer, that the penny dropped. “What is it about Leo Baeck?” I asked her. “Where have you been?” she answered.

If you, like me, were distracted by the foofarah over the Facebook study group at Ryerson, here is the Leo Baeck story in a nutshell. The Board of Leo Baeck (a Reform Jewish day school for some 800 students from junior kindergarten through grade 8 ) imported David Prashker from Britain to be the Director of the school because of his administrative chops. He was also a poet and writer, and it turns out had a website of his own, on which he published some explicit, violent and sexist “poetry” (which, as a person of some literary discrimination, I must note was God-awful, narcissistic and imitative). In due course, someone sent a mass email to all the parents of the students at Leo Baeck, pointing this out. A hue and cry, Mr. Prashker resigned, and the Chair of the Board expressed, rather bafflingly, his dismay that the privacy of the parent email list had been breached. I can only presume he is the single person in the country who does not receive junk mail.

The champions of artistic freedom and those who draw a sharp distinction between public and private actions argue that what Mr. Prashker writes or posts on his own time is irrelevant to his public role. The defenders of childhood innocence and the protectors of public decency argue that what Mr. Prashker writes and posts is in the public domain, and that he has therefore assumed a second public role which is incompatible with his day job.

This is a big issue. Schools at all levels from elementary through graduate, and libraries, not to mention most wired workplaces, are struggling to control the things that swim like lampreys down the broad conduit of the internet. Firewalls are crude, and predators subtle. Our children have ready access to the very things from which we would like to protect them, for which they are unprepared. And meanwhile, the case of the unfortunate Mr. Prashker illustrates another danger. We are in a new world where the public and the private are confused, where impulsive postings have a lingering afterlife in cyberspace, and boundaries can be breached by clever eight year olds. Password protection frustrates the rule-following and forgetful middle-aged, but is a joke to the criminal and the child equally. Nothing is safe, nothing restricted. And yet cyberspace feels curiously intimate. Like someone talking to a stranger on a train, the blogger becomes dis-inhibited, and the unguarded foolishness that might have stayed locked up in a diary (and even those are dangerous, as Philip Roth knows) is there for the world to see, and stays there long after the writer has forgotten it or even imagined it deleted. Because, apparently, nothing is deleted.

And here is the role for education. We need to construct new rules for conduct, new definitions, new boundaries. We have to carve out a private space in the world wide web. We need to make ourselves and our children aware of the potential both for freedom of expression and the repercussions it may have if we are not wise. It used to be very clear what was the public space, because it was physical. It contained what others could see, hear, find. The private space was behind closed doors. To breach the private was to bring it out into the public sphere (newspaper coverage, photographs, physical reality). But now you can feel private, behind closed doors, alone in the darkness broken only by the eerie glow of your computer screen. And yet be literally broadcasting on the world-wide web, presenting yourself to strangers in your most intimate manner. The best way to learn is through experience. Let us learn through Mr. Prashker’s experience. Does anyone even make cellophane anymore?

“Our children have been wrapped in cellophane by well-meaning adults, they have been carefully and overzealously protected from the unpleasant. Now they can no longer be.”
–Alice Dagliesh, author.

Good, thoughtful teachers have many questions about the way education is being delivered in our public and private schools, which is, after all, how I came to start The Dragon Academy as an experiment in learning otherwise. So I have grown used to being contacted once or twice a week by a colleague who is curious about my programme, or wishes to visit, or is hoping for a job. It was when the fourth c.v. listed Leo Baeck as current employer, that the penny dropped. “What is it about Leo Baeck?” I asked her. “Where have you been?” she answered.

If you, like me, were distracted by the foofarah over the Facebook study group at Ryerson, here is the Leo Baeck story in a nutshell. The Board of Leo Baeck (a Reform Jewish day school for some 800 students from junior kindergarten through grade eight) imported David Prashker from Britain to be the Director of the school because of his administrative chops. He was also a poet and writer, and it turns out had a website of his own, on which he published some explicit, violent and sexist “poetry” (which, as a person of some literary discrimination, I must note was God-awful, narcissistic and imitative). In due course, someone sent a mass email to all the parents of the students at Leo Baeck, pointing this out. A hue and cry, Mr. Prashker resigned, and the Chair of the Board expressed, rather bafflingly, his dismay that the privacy of the parent email list had been breached. I can only presume he is the single person in the country who does not receive junk mail.

The champions of artistic freedom and those who draw a sharp distinction between public and private actions argue that what Mr. Prashker writes or posts on his own time is irrelevant to his public role. The defenders of childhood innocence and the protectors of public decency argue that what Mr. Prashker writes and posts is in the public domain, and that he has therefore assumed a second public role which is incompatible with his day job.

This is a big issue. Schools at all levels from elementary through graduate, and libraries, not to mention most wired workplaces, are struggling to control the things that swim like lampreys down the broad conduit of the internet. Firewalls are crude, and predators subtle. Our children have ready access to the very things from which we would like to protect them, for which they are unprepared. And meanwhile, the case of the unfortunate Mr. Prashker illustrates another danger. We are in a new world where the public and the private are confused, where impulsive postings have a lingering afterlife in cyberspace, and boundaries can be breached by clever eight year olds. Password protection frustrates the rule-following and forgetful middle-aged, but is a joke to the criminal and the child equally. Nothing is safe, nothing restricted. And yet cyberspace feels curiously intimate. Like someone talking to a stranger on a train, the blogger becomes dis-inhibited, and the unguarded foolishness that might have stayed locked up in a diary (and even those are dangerous, as Philip Roth knows) is there for the world to see, and stays there long after the writer has forgotten it or even imagined it deleted. Because, apparently, nothing is deleted.

And here is the role for education. We need to construct new rules for conduct, new definitions, new boundaries. We have to carve out a private space in the world wide web. We need to make ourselves and our children aware of the potential both for freedom of expression and the repercussions it may have if we are not wise. It used to be very clear what was the public space, because it was physical. It contained what others could see, hear, find. The private space was behind closed doors. To breach the private was to bring it out into the public sphere (newspaper coverage, photographs, physical reality). But now you can feel private, behind closed doors, alone in the darkness broken only by the eerie glow of your computer screen. And yet be literally broadcasting on the world-wide web, presenting yourself to strangers in your most intimate manner. The best way to learn is through experience. Let us learn through Mr. Prashker’s experience. Does anyone even make cellophane anymore?