Spluttering with Otto, splattering with Roy

by David Benjamin

“Once you have learned how to ask questions — relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”
— Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner

PARIS — There’s a persistent and popular prejudice, particularly in America, that formal schooling pumps into naive youngsters a load of falsehoods, propaganda and disinformation. Depending on the moment’s political mood, this canard veers wildly from right to left and back again. The late James W. Loewen is unjustly deemed guru of this faith, based on his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me.

To correct the record: Loewen wrote an eloquent diatribe against the practice, among U.S. textbook publishers, to sanitize a legacy of racism, slavery and genocide exercised against Black folks, Native Americans and non-white immigrants whose place, role and anguish in America’s past have been systematically glossed over and suppressed in schools both public and parochial.

I experienced this phenomenon in spades because my first exposure to “textbook history,” as opposed to actual history, was at St. Mary’s School among the German Catholics of Wisconsin. There, my “history” texts referred to the Reformation as the “Protestant Revolution” and my geography book judged the virtue and worthiness of a nation by its percentage of Catholics. Poland, even under Soviet rule (which was not mentioned) was a pious and saintly place where 80-90 percent of folks were Catholic. Norway, on the other hand, which teemed with Protestants, was a portal to Perdition.

Fortunately, even as a wide-eyed fourth- and fifth-grader, I wasn’t taking all this indoctrination at face value, because my home and family life was infested with Lutherans, skeptics and ironic himor. By the time I was in Mrs. Ducklow’s fourth-grade class, I was reading jokes from The Saturday Evening Post to my classmates, listening to Spike Jones on the box, and learning mock-Yiddish gags from the writers of “The Garry Moore Show.”

Above all, I was figuring out that, although not all authorities are lying to me, there’s a difference between a trusted source and bullshit. Also, luckily, after six years of Latin liturgy, rote recitation, eight o’clock Mass and the Baltimore Catechism, my mom ran out of money and sent me back to public school.

By the time I landed, in tenth grade, in Cecil Keilly’s world history class, I understood — most of us did — that our texts were not so much lying to our upturned faces but were merely incomplete. Mr. Keilly, maybe the kindest man ver to stand before a room full of sophomores, assured me that any schoolbook is not Gospel but merely a guide to richer, deeper sources — better books that tell me more while steering me toward more books containing more knowledge.

He would stand aside. My job was to find the books.

In Carol Arnold’s eleventh-grade English class, where we read T.S. Eliot and Bill Shakespeare, the lesson that lingers is nothing that was written down. It was Mrs. Arnold’s style. Poised on the edge of her desk with her beautiful, distracting legs, she seduced us with Socratic guile, asking questions. She plied us with her curiosity, asking what we thought, asking what Eliot might possibly mean by that, coaxing from our granite brains little drops of teeming, living, thinking blood.

When we deny the value of structured, disciplined, obligatory education, we tend to dwell on the information — my lost algebra, my forgotten Latin declensions, my flirtation with mechanical drawing — that has faded from memory and seems, in retrospect, wasted time. Indeed, I forget every insight elicited from us in Mrs. Arnold’s interrogation on “The Hollow Men.” But school is the rare popular milieu that — in spite of its distractions (football, bullying, girls, boys) and distortions (all those mendacious history books) — fosters learning while actively discouraging ignorance. School is an immersion into a realm of curiosity, eclecticism and knowing for knowing’s sake that ends — for the majority of Americans — at age seventeen. It’s where all of us, often against our will, learn the odd lesson that sticks, like gum under the desk, for the rest of our lives.

Example: In my junior year, gym class consisted of swimming lessons — three days for six solid weeks — taught by Otto Breitenbach, widely regarded as the scariest teacher in Dane County. Having been afflicted — from my earliest formative days — with a paralytic fear of the water, I did not swim for Otto. I drowned. Tossed mercilessly into the drink, I sank like a ball bearing dropped from a helicopter and abraded my knees on the bottom of the pool. I imbibed toxic quantities of chlorine for fifty minutes every other day for an eternal six weeks.

Otto offered scant relief. Whenever I spluttered, hacking and gasping, white with terror, to the pool’s edge, clawing for purchase on the tile, Otto would stoically goad me back into the deep end. Each day, at class’s end, I crawled out stiff with trauma, trembling and spent, spewing a gallon of pool. I did not suspect then, but know now, that Otto followed vigilantly my every foray into aquatic death. He was poised to dive in fully clothed and rescue me if my struggles turned into true mortal distress. It never occurred to me, despite my inability to perform a single noticeable swimming move, that I was — through sheer screw-you-teach! obstinacy— keeping my head above water and surviving.

Otto could see this. I had no clue.

A year later, in a lake far away from Otto, I discovered that I could do everything he had seemingly failed to teach me. I knew the sidestroke and managed the “survival float.” I could backstroke. I could not only do the Australian crawl, I could regulate my breathing while flutter-kicking myself halfway across the lake and back. I was not afraid. I gave swimming lessons to eleven-year-olds.

Example: In my senior year, I took Art, with a madman named Roy Liddicoat. I was not a good artist in the conventional sense, nor will I ever be. But in that class, I found the Art Room and made it my after-school office.

That year, I’d been named, inexplicably, chairman of the Student Council’s publicity committee. In fact, I was the entire committee, with no idea what to publicize. My solution was to publicize anything, everything happening around school. Somehow, as I formed this plan, Mr. Liddicoat intuited both my needs and my potential. He led me to a back room where massive rolls of white paper, five feet tall, stood dormant and unwanted. He introduced me to bottles of sticky fluid called tempera. I sensed his implication. I began to trumpet every event, especially football, basketball, hockey, with posters that stretched across twenty feet of the school’s blank vastness of brick facade. If we were playing West High, two words would be screaming all week from the walls of the Commons: “WHITEWASH WEST!” If it was Beloit High: “EXPLOIT BELOIT!” If the goal was to beat East High, my four-foot message, in red, black and purple tempera, in a ragged serif typeface of my own design, was “EAT BEAST!”

After unleashing me, Mr. Liddicoat uttered not a word of counsel or correction. Crazy himself, he regarded my lunacy, perhaps, with a sort of fatherly pride. In a way, he had encouraged a new art form. Before me, “publicity” had always come in the form of date/time/place 18×24 posters in neat, formal fontage, which no student ever paused to read. After me, the standard was eighty square feet of shrieking orange splatter that no one could avoid.

“TRAMPLE TREMPER!”

After the first day or two, Mr. Liddicoat backed away. He would often depart while I was still flinging paint and using up all his masking tape. I didn’t know it then, but he was doing what good, truthful teaching does best.

Stand aside and let the kid rock and roll.