Sherry Chandler » The way of education…
The way of education…
The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order tomove up, you have got to move on.
from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter
Not fair to hold an author responsible for the musings of his characters, especially Hannah Coulter who is grieving for her lost children. And yet this attitude turns up other places in Wendell Berry’s writings. Jayber Crow, for example, rejects upward mobility, the city, and the university in such a panic that he braves the 1937 flood in order to get back to Port William. Once there, he becomes a sort of barber priest for the “membership’s” white male farmers. Eventually he lives a Harlan Hubbard existence in a primitive cabin on the Kentucky River, with barbering as his art instead of landscape painting. The happiest people in Hannah Coulter are the Branches, who view schooling as an inconvenience and education as learning how to cobble together farm equipment, to makedo, and subsist. The most miserable is Hannah’s son, who makes a fortune in Silicon Valley but loses his soul.
I have trouble differentiating this anti-modernism from that of people who take their kids out of public school so they don’t have to learn about evolution. Or sex. I spend a lot of time arguing when I read Wendell Berry, and I usually fight myself to a draw.
Meanwhile, Chris Offutt has remarked (and I paraphrase because I can’t remember where I saw the quote, maybe in Ace magazine) that I-64 was supposed to bring the world to the mountains, but in fact, has emptied the mountaineers out into the world. I think most of them are living in housing projects in Scott County and working for Toyota. A better place?
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1 Comment
1. Georgia replies at 21st February 2005, 10:13 pm :
As Larry Webster once famously said, I’ve always been “in” with the “out” crowd. Contrary to Offut’s generally accurate observation, my husband and I took I-64 east, from central Kentucky into the mountains, to seek our fortune as young college graduates. Come to think of it - so did Larry Webster. The point is, people will go wherever the jobs and economic security lead them. Wendell Berry may fret over that, and question everyone else’s values, but that is the way of humans.
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