Make It New by John Whittier-Ferguson

  MAKE IT NEW by John Whittier-Ferguson (CFS 73) Fall, 1984

One of the first things we'd do each year that I was a student at Friends School was paint the UKs.  "U.K.," newcomers to the school discovered, stood for "United Kingdom," the small, wood-framed buildings had been made for use during World War II by the British (I think).  Somehow, CFS had gotten a deal on four of them, and there they were, set in a row along the edge of the parking lot, where the art buildings now stand.  I always wondered if they had actually been lived in during the Second World War, and, if so, where and by whom.  I know they looked lived in by the time I came to them from Rogers Herr Junior High School in the eighth grade.

That was for junior high school.  Carolina Friends had no high school then; it was growing year by year, as Erika Klopfer and the other handful of students her age needed a little more room to learn.  The "senior class," though no one would have called it that at the time, was gradually stretching Friends School to fit it, the way you slowly break in a new pair of leather boots.

But the UKS and the painting: The paint didn't peel so much as crack into thousands of little chips, each about the size of a fifty-cent piece.  These chips stayed on the wall just fine, unless someone poked a foot or a chair leg or a broom handle through the wall, in which case the paint and the fiberboard beneath it gave way completely.  There were by 1970, holes here and there in each of the UKs inside and out that had been made since WWII.

'The UKs, then, were always in need of painting, which was wonderful for us, because for 35 or 40 junior high school students, there could be nothing more fun to do during a school day than paint our own school.

Each homeroom group, of course, had decided the previous week exactly what color they wanted their UK to be.  We reached our decisions by consensus--everyone had to like the colors chosen--and if you have ever tried to choose a paint color, even by yourself, you can imagine the length and difficulty of the process our homeroom groups of fifteen adolescents went through.

The walls were always some shade of white --looking back on it, I suspect the teachers came to consensus on limiting our freedom of choice somewhat, well before they opened up the decoration process to us); the trim was what made it all worthwhile.  Bright day-glo, late sixties colors, green (not a green that you would find in walks through the woods around the school); blue (absolutely primary, vivid blue);orange (that special shade of orange that used to be somewhere in every black-light poster); and a red that shouted at anyone driving into the school parking lot: "Here are the UKs!"  Somehow I remember a purple too, though in smaller quantities.  And maybe a brown, though I doubt we used too much of that can. Yellow, of course; yellow that vibrated, yellow without a touch of cream in it.

We would roller the walls quickly.  They would crack again soon enough (by the next fall).  But I remember how fresh they looked when we'd come in to start work on the trim the next morning.  We'd each claim a window or a door jamb or a cubby-hole area of a cabinet above the sink or a spot outside--on the roof, perhaps, leaning over to work on any part of the buildings that was wasn't fiberboard.  And, in another day or so each homeroom would have finished its UK.  Our houses fit us.  They were beautiful.  Now we could really start to have school.  

We had you see "made it new."  The places where we had our classes, our meetings, our lunches, our time with each other, were given to us, rough and somewhat shabby, with the message: "Work on these places.  Fix them up.  Make them yours.  Let's begin the year by preparing our school buildings."

Carolina Friends School has gone through, does go through this "repainting of the UKs," this renovation by the community of the community every year in every unit since it was founded in 1961.  And, though the illustration I chose occurred at the start of each year efforts to make the School new--to start, once again, from the beginning--are year long  They happen every day, ideally, in as many different ways as all those associated with the School can invent.  They keep us all guessing:"What color will the UKs be when I drive up the driveway this morning?  What will this next class be like?  What will my kid do out there today?"

My thesis, that CFS is passionately committed to an educational program that is perpetually remade by everyone in the community must be necessarily embodied in anecdotes.  This is not simply because I take any chance I can to tell stories about my time at this school.  Quakerism in general, Carolina Friends School in particular, resists theoretical explanation.  You have no doubt discovered this yourselves when you have tried to answer questions about "what it's really like out there at the Friends School?  After you've tossed out a few nebulous phrases like "it's ungraded" "it's a sort of a Summerhill kind of a place," " it's dedicated to bringing out that of God in every person" (if you try that last one you'll need some sort of divine help to take the conversation any further), you stop yourself and begin over: "Well, just last week. . . " It is worth noting that most Quaker doctrine is similarly embedded in journals, in recollections of journeys taken to establish meetings, and in the records of the events that transpired on those journeys.  Quakerism is a faith that is founded upon extremely personal searchings, and Quakers, always trying to "make it new," avoid constructing a detailed theology because they would then in some sense be bound by it, and they would also be likely to encourage people to follow a system of belief rather than a living example.

I realize, at this point, that I have probably created an image based on the word "beginning" of a school where students and teachers are always getting ready, continually starting out but never getting anywhere.  I have said that beginnings are crucial to education.  Yes, but so are completions.  I remember as a student getting nervous when Don or Phil or Cal would say that there was no single truth we were going to learn  "I know,  I know,"  I'd think, "but how about if I can just figure out how to simplify both sides of an equation?" (My examples of educational frustration, you'll notice, are entirely personal)  That kind of "truth" did count for something, to them as well as me.  People do finish books at this school  They do learn foreign languages and factoring and biology.  They do write papers, perform plays, put on dance concerts, take tests, graduate from Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools.

But always, as they are working their way through these projects--as teachers or students--they are engaged in an unending complex series of inquiries about their progress, the nature of the task itself, the ways in which their changing lives make it necessary for them to rethink their aims, and the reciprocal effects those aims have upon their lives.  Everywhere in the Friends School community you will find people committed to reflecting both upon their own growth and upon the process of their education as it occurs.  And this reflection on self and school must make education "new" because it forces the student to confront the immediate circumstances of his or her schooling and to reconcile those circumstances with a changing self.  Every time you look at the same slide under a microscope, if the School has taught you well (and you have tried to understand yourself as well as your biology text), you will see a profoundly different image.

I know I just promised I'd go easy on the theory.  Let me be more particular.  From their first years in Earth, Fire, and Water to their last years in the Upper School, students are taught to work at their own rates.  There are, of course, agenda for each year--syllabi, lesson plans, sequencing of texts--but the student at Friends soon learns that he or she will be asked almost daily to help set the pace of his or her work.  This means that, in addition to doing math or learning to read, you must also take stock of yourself regularly: How much reading will you do this week? What are your weak spots in math, and, given those weaknesses, how much can you realistically expect to accomplish by Wednesday?  How many days will it take you to finish The Phantom Tollbooth?  Teachers not only help their students overcome academic problems; they also are trying to teach self-education--something that requires an accurate, honest appraisal of oneself as a student.  It is a difficult thing to teach--moments of honest self-evaluation are terribly rare--but even the attempts, in countless conversations with teachers, advisors, friends, and parents, in writing reports on your own progress and reading similar reports from the staff, in parent-teacher-student conferences, in the responsibility rating system in the Middle School, in silent moments during settling-in--all these attempts keep students remaking their perceptions of themselves as students and the nature of their school.

  I mentioned the responsibility ratings in the Middle School, fully aware that this system may not be in effect this year.  When one returns to Friends, one is never sure what will be the same, what will have changed.  I can think of virtually no program or policy at this school that has gone unquestioned or unrevised for longer than one academic year.  The staff in every unit, every year, throughout the year asks itself just as many questions as it asks the students, and changes educational tactics to fit new perceptions, new students and staff, new circumstances beyond the school.  This commitment to questioning can be exhausting.  I remember driving home at 5:30 or 5:45 on dark winter evenings after staff meetings sometimes thinking, "Why can't we just have someone tell us 'this is how we do things here, and we will keep on doing them like this for the next year too."  Or, as one teacher here recently said to me with a sign (also at the end of a long day in meetings), "We start all over every year."

But when I went to teach at Baltimore Friends School, an excellent, very firmly established Quaker school that just celebrated its bicentennial, one of the things I missed most intensely was the sense of virtually endless possibilities that I used to have, morning after morning, as I came up the crest of the driveway by the Lower School  "Almost anything could happen here today," I thought to myself.  It was actually a physical excitement, a sudden flow of adrenaline, as thought I was about to begin a race.

I'd walk into my first period class and my students and I would arrange the chairs and tables, generally creating a semblance of a circle or square, but the shape was always only an approximation of geometric order because each person would move things around a little as he or she sat down--trying to get situated just right.  I'd start talking about our reading with the class, turn to use the board and would find, perhaps a yellow crumb instead of a fully tray of chalk, or would realize that I would do all my erasing that day with the heel of my hand.

Students at CFS, do not, as a rule, sit quietly waiting for a lecture; discussions begin frequently and swell rapidly like waves, and teachers are often carried along by the class.  I remember one afternoon, immediately following a memorial service held in the main room of the Upper School for Misi Polgar's father who had just died.  I went into room six to talk about Romeo and Juliet with my Shakespeare class.  A few minutes into the period we came to Juliet's farewell to Romeo: "parting is such sweet sorrow."  The line resonated for all of us.  A few of us talked about the sorrow and the sweetness that we had just felt in the main room.  All of us had come closer to understanding Romeo and Juliet--a play in which love in a mysterious sense is most fully realized in death--and to understanding something more about the memorial service we had just left.  Teaching Shakespeare, in particular, has never been as rewarding to me anywhere else as it was at CFS, primarily because in this School Renaissance drama does not stay stuck in the Renaissance" "making it new," in this case, means trying, through discussions papers, acting, reading aloud, to make the play address the reader directly.  Students at this school, on the whole, do not have to be tricked or cajoled into this receptive state; they expect it t happen.

The staff at Friends School is always trying to think of ways to keep CFS new for old-timers, the students who have here since Early or Lower School.  Transitions from unit to unit are deliberately made dramatic: you may know how things work in the Lower Schoo, but you'll have to make readjustments in your first year in the Middle School.  Teachers also work on getting each year's new students to make an impact on the community, to change the mix in some way.  Not that they have to work at this very hard.  This group of people, while remaining very loosely knit, is extremely receptive of new members.

I often felt, in fact, during my first year of teaching here, that the students were also holding meetings--about how they could get new staff to fit into the School.  I know, for example, that my education into the mysteries of the VW engine began with one student in particular: Todd Cook. I'll never forget being stranded out here late one afternoon after cleaning the Lower and Middle Schools.  I couldn't find the key to my VW.  Todd, who made a point of parking his VW next to mine (I think because my bug set his off to particular advantage, just happened to be hanging around, and smiled, delighted, when I told him I'd lost my key.  "Oh, that's no problem," he said, "all you have to do is touch these wires together like this . . ."  As I pulled out of my parking spot I realized that we had simply traded places, since earlier that day I had been working with him on one of his essays.

I did a lot of trading places that first year, as does everyone who goes to this school.  Phil Fitzpatrick and I team taught Intro to Literature.  Remember, Phil had been the first English teacher who showed me how exciting reading and writing could be, way back in 1970-71.  Now I was his colleague, but as I watched Phil work in class, I felt, more often than not, that I was taking "Intro to Teaching."

Mark Goodwillie never had me in the classroom, but he and I held a Post Session (Is that what it's still called?) together--an auto mechanics workshop in which we rebuilt his Opel and my VW, and I felt every day of those two weeks, like an excited freshman going to a favorite class.  Perhaps no one in Mark's shop--students, Mark, or myself--fully realized then how profoundly the redefinition of roles was affecting all of our notions about where teaching comes from, when learning stops, where school and classes are held.  None of us really went back into classes after that Post Session.  We simply moved from the classroom in Mark's garage to the classrooms on the Couch Road campus.

Nor were classes confined to the stretch of time between 9:00 and 3:00 o'cock.  I remember coming out one weekend to borrow the school's old grey pickup truck (the one with the column shift and the indeterminate gear locations.  Sometimes first was up and back, sometimes down and forward, sometimes it vanished altogether) and there was Cal Geiger just opening up the hood to put a can of oil in the engine.  I was in a hurry to get going: the day was already too far gone and, when you used the grey truck, it was always best to allow a good deal of extra time.  But Cal--I can see him right now; it's one of my most vivid  pictures from all my time at Friends--methodically opened the can with a church key, bent over the crankcase, and slowly, carefully poured that an in, spilling as little as was humanly possible and waiting longer than I have ever seen anyone wait for that last stream of oil to slow to a trickle, then a few drops, then nothing.  As I watched him, I realized that here, in action, were all the Quaker tenets about conservation, about care with resources (both truck and oil), about the patience it takes to allow a process to be competed, about waiting, cheerfully (Cal was talking fondly about the old truck as the can empties) until the time is right to start something new.  That kind of teaching happens with remarkable frequency out here; it leaves the students (whoever they may be at the time) with a new image of what school is.

Now that we're in the parking lot (that's where the truck was parked), we should look at the education of Friends School parents, since the drive out to this school and the experiences one has in the parking lot are major parts of the parent-teaching program at CFS.  From the parent's point of view, the general confusion in the parking lot is disquieting.  You are trying to find your daughter at 3:00, convinced that the enrollment of the school has tripled since the morning, that all students, teachers, and staff, are running, at top speed by your car (which is stuck behind six others), and that your child is doubtless somewhere on one of the nature trails leading off in all directions from the center of campus.

Or perhaps it's not your day to carpool, and you greet her at home with a question about what she did in school that day.  She is likely to tell you about something that happened in class, but she is just as likely to say that she caught a black rat snake, helped build a treehouse (all of these things that have, in fact, happened out here), collected mud from the Klopfer's pond for science class (by wading thigh-deep in the end nearest the school), played in the creek (this will be only the beginning of some creek saga which you may or may not get in full detail, built a solar shower (that wasn't done in a day), picked up rocks on the upper field, planned an advisee trip to the mountains, made lumber for the new building, split wood for the stove, stuffed Don as he was going for a layup, had a meeting about Annie, the Lower School dog and mascot who was killed by a car, had a meeting about what the school rules should be, had a meeting about drugs in the school, learned how to throw a forehand in frisbee, took a walk with her advisor. . . 

As you contemplate your response to each of these reports, you are joining your child and your child's teachers in an effort to define what a school should be.  This does not happen often when an institution is set up along traditional, established lines.  But you will be tested regularly as a Friends School parent.  Questions that the staff and students debate in meetings out here will generally end up, one way or another in your living room.  Is working to insulate rooms in Durham an appropriate part of a high school program?  How about the school offering an option for its students to demonstrate against the Vietnam War? (That was a favorite in my house in 1970.) Should Lyle Snyder (my biology teacher) go to jail for refusing to support the military by paying his income tax?  Should his students go to see his trial?  What's wrong with having no grades?  What's good about it?  Should students spend time every day cleaning bathrooms or sweeping floors? (When I was on the staff of this school, we sometimes phrased that last question a little differently: "Do students spend time very day cleaning bathrooms or sweeping floors?")

I have overheard or been a part of literally hundreds of discussions on these and  other issues relating to CFS in Chapel Hill, Durham, and at houses in the country in between.  The next time you're at a party and have run out of interesting conversation, tell someone that your kids goes to the Friends School.  Odds are that you will immediately find yourself at the center of a debate about some aspect of education. 

I remember when I was in ninth grade  and the School was weighing the merits of the Guilford program, in which a handful of the oldest students would take classes at Guilford College for two years while CFS worked on finishing its own Upper School program at Couch Road.  The prospective students and parents were asked to meet, more than once, with the school staff to talk through all the aspects of the plan.  I might have spoken once or twice myself, but what was even more important to me then was seeing my parents and my friends' parents and my teachers all earnestly debating issues relevant to my education.  I realized how much school meant, how serious the whole enterprise was, how many questions there were about the best way to be educated, and how much all these folks cared about schooling  All of you here tonight share that concern; I have yet to meet a Friends School parent who was simply sending his or her child to this school because it was the easiest way to meet the state's education requirement.  And you should realize how profoundly this concern affects your children, though they may not get around to telling you this themselves for the next decade or so.  You are teaching them, by the act of your caring, by your talks, your disagreements, even your fights about school, that education is full of complex issues that anyone being educated should ponder, and that these issues are worth getting worked up about.

Being a Friends School parent finally requires a good deal of faith.  "Making it new" involves, as I have tried to illustrate briefly, continual questioning of every aspect of school life and the consequent, at times bewildering metamorphosis of CFS programs.  The school holds its positions passionately but not permanently.  As parents you realize that this is not a place where you can "put your kids" for twelve years, picking p the finished product just in time to whisk it off to the college of its choice.  Being a student, a teacher, or a parent here is often risky business, and it's hard work.

I recall the summer after my first year of teaching here.  Tom Keyserling, also a first-year teacher in the Upper School, five students and I took a bike trip to Vermont.  We had met several times with the parents of the students before the end of the year, discussing everything about the trip all of us could think of.  The morning of our departure, about a week after school got out, those of us who were cycling were overjoyed to be finally on our way.  It was the parents, my mom told me later, who had gathered at the corner of Old Chapel Hill and Garrett Rods to bid us farewell, who were really being tested.  There was a moment of absolute silence, I understand, as we seven disappeared over the hill of Garrett Road.  It is a silence, I believe, that is repeated often as Friends School parents, after they have had their say about what should occur out here, take a deep breath and trust that this unusual institution will do the best for everyone.

As an alumnus, I now feel as though I am standing with my parents, involved but also watching as this School goes on its way.  It is 23 years old, still trying to "make it new," to remain willing to experiment in a community, indeed in a country, no longer as sympathetic to such an endeavor as it was when I was a student here.  Parents and other long-time supporters of the School now find themselves more open to criticism from the society at large, frequently disagreeing with an increasing number of educational theorists.  They are perhaps also more open to their own doubts about this being the appropriate education for their children.  For now, it's 1984 rather than 1971.

CFS, I have emphasized throughout this talk, is a "new school" in many ways, and yet, when I look again at Friends, I realize that, in a crucial sense, it is deliberately not new, not keeping up with the current trends in education.  Because it is not simply computers that are being introduced in schools across the country.  I understand that we have those out there too.  It is a way of thinking that is often at odds with Cal pouring oil in to the grey truck, at odds with settling-in in silence every morning, at odds with taking the time to ask how and why you are being educated rather than working furiously to master a field in the fewest number of semesters possible, at odds with teaching people how they might as a group, arrive at a satisfying decision about what color they are going to paint their school rather than working primarily to teach them how to compete tenaciously with each other in a test-oriented, high-pressure world.

To have faith in this School today does not mean that you accept its programs without question.  I hope I've shown that no one does that around here.  It does mean I think that you believe in the necessity for renewal in education, that you recognize the energy and honesty with which this place pursues that renewal, and that you help this School in its search for a vital program by your own earnest consideration of what happens here.  I am convinced that the continued health of our society requires the entire thoughtful, somewhat idiosyncratic Friends School community--more now in fact when this school is slightly out of step with the majority of schools around it.  CFS is not following the prevalent "back to basics" trend in primary and secondary education, but is instead trying to conserve a less secure, more exciting tradition of progressive education: "progressive" in the sense that this is a school that grows with the people it teaches.

And I do not believe, from observing myself and the rather large number of graduates I've kept up with, that a person from this school leaves here skipping naively into a "real," cruel world, I do think that almost everyone who is brought into this community (and this incudes parents, since it is hard to stay uninvolved in this school) will do whatever they do afterwards somewhat differently--differently from the way they did things before they came to Friends, differently, often, from the majority of people around them.

I find that graduates of this place tend to be more than usually thoughtful about their situations.  They are often able, if asked to say not only what they are doing with their lives but why they are doing it  And when they don't know, they have had lessons from their first days in the Lower School, in how to wait and how to search.

These are some of the things I've thought about CFS during the past week as I was working on what I was going to say tonight.  But come out to see this School for yourself sometimes during the school day if you can.  You will probably be more than a little thoughtful abut your own life as you drive back down the driveway at the end of your visit  You may, after only a few hours on the campus, decide that it's time to pick up the paint brush again.  Maybe a good strong orange this time... I know that whenever I come back to this School I leave recentered--seeing my work and its place in the world more clearly.  And having just seen so many people--I mean all of you here tonight--working on projects of renovation, I am reassured that all of us will go out and start painting again, with exuberance.