| This became so much more than I’d bargained for. The fundamental driving force behind what has become a Web topic in my collection was simply the fulfillment of an obligation abandoned nearly 35 years ago. I had agreed to create a set of photographs, and for reasons too distant to know any more, nothing came of that. I rediscovered the negatives, and have digitally printed them. But making sense of more than 400 pictures taken over a period of several months 34 years ago was a formidable task. I kept attacking the problem from different angles, eventually letting the materials themselves determine where everything should go. I wasn’t excited about trying to choose n number of pictures from the total, but when I saw that choosing single photographs wasn’t even a reasonable chore in this particular case, I just threw up my arms. More than once. And where was David? Dead. Just like him—anything to get out of making really hard decisions. |
| In other comments you might have seen already, I note the discovery of sets of photographs, and I’ve realized that that has become quite a metaphor for my understanding of the experience I was photographing. What is school, what is education, anyway? |
| About the time I started getting serious developing this Web topic, I both saw and subsequently read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. At one point, a snooty old aristocrat asks Elizabeth who her governess was. ’Liza replies that she and her sisters didn’t have one. “But how did you become educated?” the old bag asks in disbelief. “We just read whatever we felt like,” Lizzy answers, “Each to her own liking.” |
| That was important to see. Education needn’t involve anyone else at all. You can learn all the skills you need for life on your own. People did it for thousands of years before our modern era. So, why do we stick kids in schools, even force them there? Because we want to make them citizens of our community. It is no longer a question of an individual surviving but rather of a community, a society. In the old, old days, it didn’t matter what you did to survive. That was your business. Now, we make it our society’s business that what you do to continue your life at least does not harm the rest of us and, ideally, fosters our own interests. |
| For society to see to the continuation of its own interests, it must educate its children. Leaving it to individuals ensures only the transmission of individual values, not necessarily those of a community. In all of Pride and Prejudice, I don’t believe the word ‘England’ occurs even once, and one never gets a sense of what constituted an English society. Just one particular aspect thereof, and that only from our own historical understanding of what was depicted in the novel. The reading of Lizzy and her sisters gave them more of a perspective on things outside their family than could earlier man have experienced before the invention of writing. But the way they learned the rules of their society—which, admittedly, was only a subset of the community that constituted English society—was through extremely informal means. |
| As most societies throughout the world have grown more complex over the past couple hundred years, they have to take the matters of education to a more formal level to ensure the preservation of societal values, especially in the face of pressure from increased contact with other cultures. School—and what is taught there—has become all important. The oft-mentioned “family values” are simply not good enough. Your family values might be different from my family values, but we both have to live within the same society. |
| Looking at these pictures, you can see how it happens, how contact with peers (and older guides) goes so far in transmitting those values to the members of our society. When you see the apparent laxness of an American classroom, do you think such a picture could be taken of a Japanese classroom? Simply put, despite our frequent cries for more order, we don’t value that in our society. And so we don’t teach it. |
| I grew up again, watching these kids do so. School wasn’t always fun, but then neither has life been. School prepared me for the life I encountered, to a degree that was hard to be aware of as it happened to me. I could see that here. And I hope that at least some of these kids think back on David the way I (and my friends) do, and the way I think of great teachers from my past. They weren’t part of my family, but they were part of my society. |
Michael Broschat, Arlington Virginia, May 2002