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>From the issue dated July 26, 2002
 

  A Philosopher Comes to Town
By MARK EDMUNDSON

I see Franklin Lears now, through the long prism of time past, shambling
into Medford High School on the day before classes begin. He climbs the
sadly worn steps, enters the building, and begins walking down a passage
that connects the two wings of the high school that are still intact. He
walks with back bent, dressed in a tropical suit, two sizes baggy, lugging a
briefcase loaded down with a small library of books that, though he will
probably have no occasion to read them in the next few hours, provide a sort
of companionship for him. Except for his copious buzzing thoughts, except
for the books, Lears is now, as he almost always is, alone.

But he is also in a state of high expectancy. He has stored his energies all
through the summer and he is ready to begin. Students arrive tomorrow. Lears
has drawn up the plan for what will be the gemstone of his course offerings
for the 1969-1970 school year, his class in philosophy, designed for a
select group of seniors. Together with these bright, if perhaps slightly
under-prepared, youngsters (Lears knows that Medford -- pronounced "Me'ford"
by the majority of its inhabitants -- Massachusetts, is a working-class
city, not renowned for its cultural life; it's not Concord, home of Emerson,
home of Thoreau; it's surely not Cambridge), he will ponder the eternal
questions: beauty, truth, free will, fate, reality, and appearance.

The class will start out reading The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant,
then go on to Plato's Dialogues, some Aristotle, Spinoza (a particular
favorite of Lears's), maybe a little bit of Kant (he's a challenge, to be
sure, but with the right sort of background and the appropriate
introduction, one never knows), then maybe on to Bertrand Russell's efforts
to clear everything up with an injection of clean scientific logic. Lears
has just graduated from Harvard; all of his intellectual aspirations are
intact.

Medford High, at least until Frank Lears came and did what he did, was not a
school at all. It was a place where you learned to do -- or were punished
for failing in -- a variety of exercises. The content of these exercises
mattered not at all. What mattered was form, repetition and form. You filled
in the blanks, conjugated, declined, diagrammed, defined, outlined,
summarized, recapitulated, positioned, graphed. The subject was of no
consequence: English, geometry, biology, history, all were the same. The
process treated your mind as though it were a body capable of learning a
number of simple choreographies, then repeating, repeating.

Our bodies themselves were well-monitored. When the bell rang, we were
expected to rise and file into the corridor, stay in line, speak quietly if
at all, and enter the next class, where we were ordered to sit down, sit
quietly, feet beneath the desk; we were, all day long, presided over by
teachers, a significant fraction of whom were going, at greater or lesser
velocities, ending sometimes with a bang, sometimes with subdued,
heart-emptying sobs, out of their minds. The place was a shabby Gothic
cathedral consecrated to Order, and maybe it was not without its mercies. If
you'd done what you should have at Medford High, the transition into a
factory, into an office, into the Marines would be something you'd barely
notice; it would be painless.

But Medford High students did not, at all times, do what they were supposed
to. We knew little of the world, little, in general, of ourselves. But we
did sense that we'd been tossed into a decrepit penal colony, and we fought
back with whatever resources came to hand. When the teachers and
administrators, the turnkeys and wardens, were vulnerable, we went at them
with a fury. Those close to going off the deep end got a hearty push from
us. It was a battleground that Franklin Lears was walking onto -- us against
them, and us against ourselves, against, that is, our own interest in
learning something, on the off chance that Medford High had anything of
value to teach.

It took Lears a while to figure out what sort of rabbit hole he had fallen
into and in what kind of Wonderland he'd be spending time. But eventually he
pieced things together. And during the course of that year, he became a
great teacher, though of a singular kind. Free in himself, he tried to make
us, his students, free as well.

He brought us the spirit of Socrates -- the homely Athenian, who never
accepted anything on faith, questioned all matters under the sun, took no
crap, ever, and knew how to laugh. He turned us into Socratic questioners,
strangers in our own lives, who stopped gulping down general opinion (doxa,
Socrates called it) or, nearly as bad, rejecting all received ideas without
pondering them. He taught us what thinking was, which is to say that, in the
beginning at least, when his ways were just taking hold, he made us
miserable.

When I encountered Franklin Lears, I was a high-school thug. I was a
football player, a brawler, who detested all things intellectual. The first
time I saw this meager guy with his thick swinging briefcase, I wanted to
spit on the floor. He was absurd, a joke. If you had told me that in eight
months I would have decided to live my life in a way that was akin to his, I
would have told you that you were crazy; I would have spit, perhaps, at you.
But that is exactly what took place: I went on to become an incessant
reader, a writer, a university professor.

Teachers who matter sow seeds like this all the time. Some land on the
rocks, some in sand, some flow away with the river, as the Bible assures us.
But some take root, too, and they produce and yield. The sad part is that
often it takes the seeds 20 years or so to break ground and produce green
shoots, and because the beneficiary doesn't remember who tossed them from
his bag, or because the sower's sped away to some other world, he never
knows. He acts simply on faith, knowing that someone did it for him, and
that, maybe, he can do it for another. Lears did that much for me.

The book that conquered me and my classmates was Kesey's One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest. Cuckoo's Nest is now something like an American myth: You
know all about it; you've read it, even if you haven't turned a page. It's a
little like the Frankenstein story; you seem to get the basics simply by
virtue of living for a decade or so.

Everyone knows the story of how Randle Patrick McMurphy -- initials RPM to
denote force, dynamism, unruly power -- turns up in a mental hospital
dominated by Big Nurse. Big Nurse is the queen of the Combine, the system
that keeps the patients (that keeps us all?) docile and cowed. She uses
fancy psychiatric diagnoses; subtle humiliation; head-on ridicule; and, when
need be, electric shock to keep the patients in line. Big Nurse and McMurphy
recognize each other as blood enemies from the start. The opposition is
nearly Manichaean, as though a couple of comic-strip antagonists, or maybe a
pair of warring deities, are facing off. Big Nurse is all for order,
routine, submission, the dream of all-conquering Apollonian perfection.
McMurphy is a throwback to an earlier, rowdier, more righteous time. He's
grit and self-reliance, a two-fisted Emerson, scarred, sexy, always ready
for a brawl, made to rumble. He's a high Romantic avatar, who wants to be
all in all in himself. He spits where he feels like, pisses where he
pleases.

It was on about the fifth day of reading Kesey aloud in class and discussing
him (I and the most of the rest of the group would still read nothing at
home) that a chance remark that Lears made caught my attention. He said that
prisons, hospitals, and schools were on a continuum, and that Kesey, with
his bitter portrait of the mental hospital, might be seen as commenting on
all these places at once.

The idea, elementary as it was, smacked me like revelation. Here was a
writer who was not on the side of the teachers, who in fact despised them
and their whole angelic apparatus. Here was someone who found words --
gorgeous, graffiti-styled, and apocalyptic -- for what in me had been mere
inchoate impulses, unheard groans of the spirit laboring away in its own
darkness.

I can hardly express how I savored that novel. When McMurphy and his crew of
sickos broke free and went fishing and partied and got drunk, and thumbed
their noses at Big Nurse and the pipsqueak shrinks she controlled, I had to
throw the book in the air and holler. They were rebelling against Medford
High as well as against that hospital. And when they put McMurphy on the
gurney and wheeled him back to the ward after his lobotomy, I was stunned
with grief. This is what they would do -- the omnipresent they -- if you
stood too squarely in the way of their machine, the ever-threshing Combine.
When the Chief smothers the "fake" McMurphy and sends the humongous tub
through the window, breaks out of the institution, and goes sane, I myself
jumped up and danced around the peripheries of my room, gleeful that for
once, if only in someone's roaring imagination, the Combine had lost.

I had no idea such books existed. I thought that all the volumes on the
library shelf had been written by the MHS teachers or their surrogates. They
were put there to enforce good manners and proper deportment, or simply to
bore us to death. But here was someone who was clearly on my side. And
perhaps there were more like him.

I asked Lears about it one day. "Are there other books like this?" For I
feared, truly, that Cuckoo's Nest might be the only one of its sort, and
that I would have to read it over and over again for the rest of my life.
Lears caught what I meant immediately. "Sure, sure. Try Allen Ginsberg, try
Jack Kerouac, you might even like William Burroughs."

What he didn't say was nearly as important as what he did: He gave me a few
more addresses where similar enlighteners might be found. But he didn't
start talking about a group called the Beats, whom we all already know and
understand, and can discuss in dispassionate prose. No, these were,
potentially, liberating gods, however flawed he himself might take them to
be (and from some later hints I suspect that he took them to be more than a
little), and he wasn't going to try to dispel their powers. He wanted us to
be influenced by books -- to face them as nakedly as we could, and to see
what would happen. The results might be dangerous; they might send us down
the wrong road as well as the right. Good, then: Human beings are meant for
danger, and for failure, sometimes, too.

I've often thought since then that much of what passes for literary
criticism and the teaching of literature has an effect just the opposite of
the one that Frank Lears tried to create. The unspoken and, to be fair, the
often uncomprehended objective is to inoculate students against great
writing. By setting the work in context, placing it in history, assigning
analytical essays of whatever level of sophistication, the teacher is
demanding distance, detachment: Don't, whatever you do, be influenced by
this. Don't go adapting it to your own situation, using it as a map of your
world, then going somewhere with it.

Lears simply helped unfold the visions of these writers, and he trusted us
to make what use of them we might. If you want to go the Buddha's path -- we
read Siddhartha, after all -- then by all means, try it. Sure, we'd ask a
question or two before taking a step. But the questions always bore on life.
What would it be like to believe this book? What would happen if you used it
as your secular Bible? Could you live it?

In general, teachers do not ask these questions, in part because they are
afraid of what will happen if they do. They do not want to be "responsible"
for students screwing up their lives because they go over uninhibitedly to
Whitman, and try to live as the old queer anarch would, or to Dickinson, who
created her own God, her own cosmology, and lived with them. Most teachers,
I suspect, don't trust kids to sift these matters for themselves. Nor do
they even really trust other adults to do it. The idea of a society full of
people running amok, using the poets and artists to remake their own minds,
individually, and with only their own judgments and disasters and
disappointments as inhibiting walls makes the majority of teachers crazy.

Lears, aloof and benignly superior person that he could be, was much more
democratic than most of his ilk. He believed, on some level that never
needed articulation, that if you impelled people to imagine boldly and judge
with some rigor, then they could recast their lives a little, maybe more
than that, and that the collective result, despite plenty of disasters along
the way, would be to the good.

If he did not develop this sort of trust, he would have flopped utterly as a
teacher of working-class kids. We would have seen that really, despite all
appearances, he was an ambassador from his class and his university, neither
of which have ever given much of a damn for the people who clean the streets
and the dorm rooms. Lears was willing to unfold visions, to kick back, and
then to see what would happen. When an elitist meets up with this kind of
openness, he says that it is a recipe for chaos. Lears seemed to feel that
his approach was a recipe for change, growth, wonderful mutations, quirky
shifts and slides.

He didn't want to turn us into little Thoreauvians, or make us love SDS, or
the splinter wing of the Democratic Party. Though he might have vaguely
approved if these things had happened, he would have recognized that
approval as the trivial thing that it was. Really all he wanted was to make
us look at ourselves from new angles, become judgmental aliens in our own
lives. And then to show us a few alternative roads. If we took them, all to
the good. If not, who knows, maybe something else would turn up for us
later. Of all the teachers I have had -- some of the world's best known, in
fact -- Lears was the purest in his wish to make his students freer. He
would be sorry about the costs, for relative autonomy can have many, but
nothing would deter him.

And it is Lears's sense of what books can be that I took from him at
midlife, in the midst of my own teaching crisis. I had, as I say, become an
infinitely diverting guide to the intellectual territories -- a "superb
lecturer," as my students liked to call me, who could describe, analyze,
interpret literature with no little flair. But none of my students seemed
changed by all that pyrotechnic interpretation -- on the contrary, it seemed
to make them (and me) more complacent then ever.

What I was failing to do was to take Lears's second step. All well and good
to ask, What does this book mean? But one also needs a follow-up question:
Is it true? Can it be the basis for a life? Does Proust know something about
jealousy and eros that should change us? Does Wordsworth's sense of the
origins and cures for depression, or melancholia, as he develops it in
"Tintern Abbey," have any value, any use, in this, a moment where brutal
despondency, most often administered to by drugs, has become unbearably
common?

It's a technique for causing trouble, this kind of questioning, now just as
much as it was when Frank Lears used it on us in his subdued way. But I'm
convinced -- and experience has borne me out -- that if the reading of
secular books is going to matter we need to look at them as Lears did, not
just as occasions for interpretive ingenuity, for showing how smart we might
be, but as guides to future life, as occasions, sometimes, for human
transformation.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. This
essay is excerpted from Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, to be
published next month by Random House. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Edmundson.