Jane Tompkins's A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned is a scrupulous assessment of the author's career in education. She presents a clear-eyed look at her life from grade school to graduate school, and her professional experiences culminating in her spiritual rites of passage while Professor of English at Duke University. Like some of the best stories, the ending, in this case, the current state of her inner life, presents a plot twist that compels her to re-read the entire tale through a different perspective.
Tompkins's book is tinted with the memoirs of Thoreau, Rousseau and St. Augustine. Like Thoreau, her cabin and lake are the schoolroom and the campus, and despite the ravages suffered there, they appear pristine in her account. Tompkins can afford to let even the most painful moments return to memory because she has chosen her weapon against them: a dire criticism of the underlying causes and principles of suffering in school. While Thoreau descries the loss of innocence in the accumulation of capital in America, Tompkins mourns the loss of her vision of what school can be. At every turn, she is disappointed at the preference for schools and teachers for training the intellect at the price of regimentation, orthodoxy and a disregard for the person. Yet, she is a patriot, still believing that the genuine schools can emerge from beneath the schmerz if only people would have the courage to allow it.
As a Rousseauean lover of the primitive, she writes in the mode of one who is not yet civilized and has much to learn. She longs for the time before time began. As a preschool loner, Tompkins was content and secure. School and socialization rapidly turns her education ugly. Her book is dedicated to her mother, her "first teache," but her first formal teacher, in kindergarten, emphasizes only the polished public performance. The result on the class and on Tompkins is, alternately, boredom, alienation and fear. A series of deferrals of fulfillment comprise her other school experiences. Not surprisingly, Tompkins gains satisfaction not in teaching, but in scholarship, where her imagination and creativity are rewarded. The lesson that appears repeatedly is that teachers teach as they have been taught, just as abuse is perpetuated by the abused. Tompkins's ultimate crisis occurs when she is told by one of her Duke students in explanation for silence and inattention in class, "I hate to read."
Rousseau is stoned on the streets of London and is unable to comprehend what he could have done to create such animosity. Long story made short, this crisis prompts Tompkins to revisit her life in school where she discovers her neglect of her inner life and its consequences. Her purification of ethereal intellect from the dross emotions has cut her off from essential elements of herself and made her numb to these elements in others. The rest of her book is the story of her experiments in humane teaching, approaching students as "whole persons," simultaneously being a "whole person" herself, also assessed with scrupulous honesty. Like St. Augustine after his conversion, she is acutely aware that backsliding is more the rule than the exception.
Tompkins's experiments are not spectacularly successful. Success at incorporating the inner life into the classroom depends on the personae of teachers and students, themselves corrupted by capital, civilization and the weight of past habits and abuses. Yet, she has the courage to see that there are simply no choices remaining. The remarkable thing about Tompkins and her Life in School is that, after all the difficult personal work she has undergone, she is neither self-satisfied nor censorious of others. Though the book ostensibly discusses Tompkins's personal journey, she is too much of a professional not to aim at the bigger picture. She discloses the roots of school experience by showing its incidental effects on her and her students. The universality of her observations is reason for anyone teaching or contemplating teaching to read and reflect on A Life in School.
Patricia Turrisi,
UNC Wilmington