Ecotopia (21 page)

The woodlot is a main focus of activity, especially for the boys, who tend to gang up into tribal units of six or eight. They build tree houses and underground hide-outs, make bows and arrows, attempt to trap the gophers that permeate the hillside, and generally carry on like happy savages—though I notice their conversation is laced with biological terminology and they seem to have an astonishing scientific sophistication. (One six-year-old, examining a creepy-looking bug: “Oh, yes, that’s the larval stage.”) There are some projects, such as a large garden and a weaving shed, which seem to be dominated by girl children, though some of the girls are members of chiefly male gangs. Most of the children’s study and work time, however, is spent in mixed groups.

By “work,” I mean that children in Ecotopian schools literally spend at least two hours a day actually
working.
The school gardens count in this, since they supply food for the midday meals. But apparently most schools also have small factories. In the Crick workshop I found about 20 boys and girls busily making two kinds of small wooden articles—which turned out to be birdhouses and flats for seedlings. (The flats, mercifully, are uniform in dimensions and style. The birdhouses assume fanciful shapes and many different sizes. This double standard is not by accident.) The system is intended to teach children that work is a normal part of every person’s life, and to inculcate Ecotopian ideas about how work places are controlled: there are no “bosses” in the shop, and the children seem to discuss and agree among themselves about how the work is to be done. The shop contains a lot of other projects in one stage or another of development. In working these out together, as I watched them do for a half hour or so, the children need to use concepts in geometry and physics, do complex calculations, and bring to bear considerable skills in carpentry. They marshal the necessary information with a verve that is altogether different from the way our children absorb prepackaged formal learning. The children also, I am told, dispose of the workshop profits as they please. Though some of the money seems to be distributed (equally) among the individual children, some is
used to buy things for the school: I was shown a particularly fine archery set that was recently bought in this way.

It was sunny during my visit, but Crick School must be appallingly muddy in the rainy winters. To provide some protection, and also to give a place for meetings, parties, films and video shows, the school possesses a giant teepee-like tent. The white canvas covering is no longer new and carries many charming decorative patches. Usually the lower rim of fabric is rolled up to head height, making the teepee into a kind of pavilion. Here the children sometimes play when it is raining heavily. (They are never forbidden to go out in the wet, and learn to take care of drying themselves off.) A large pit in the center is the site of occasional barbecues, when a deer (or one of the school pigs) is roasted and eaten; and a kitchen at one side of the teepee is often used by groups of children making themselves lunches or treats.

Does this extremely unregulated atmosphere lead to wild conduct among the children? So far as I could tell, not at all; in fact, the school is curiously quiet. Small bands of children roam here and there on mysterious but obviously engrossing errands. A few groups play ball games, but the school as a whole has little of that hectic, noisy quality we associate with our schoolgrounds. Indeed at first I could not believe that more than 30 or 40 children were present, considering the lack of babble. The tribal play groups, incidentally, are not all of an age; each contains some older kids who exercise leadership but do not seem to be tyrannical. This is perhaps encouraged by the teachers, or at least not discouraged, for they work with groups at one general level of development but do not object if an older or younger child wishes to join in or just watch one of the class sessions.

Some of the teachers, especially those occupied mainly with the younger children, apparently teach everything. But other teachers specialize to some extent—one teaches music, another math, another “mechanics”—by which he means not only that branch of physics, but also the construction, design and repair of physical objects. In this way they feel free to indulge their own interests, which they assume will have an educational effect on the children. Certainly it seems to keep their own minds lively. All the teachers
teach a lot of biology, of course. The emphases and teaching loads are flexible, and set by discussion among the teachers themselves.

This, like the general operation of the school, is possible because of the most remarkable fact of all about Ecotopian schools: they are private enterprises. Or rather, just as most factories and shops in Ecotopia are owned by the people who work in them, so the schools are enterprises collectively but personally owned by the teachers who run them. Crick School is legally a corporation; its teacher members own the land, buildings and reputation (such as it is) of their school. They are free to operate it however they wish, follow whatever educational philosophy they wish, and parents are free to send their children to Crick School or to another school as
they
wish.

The only controls on the schools, aside from a maximum-fee rule and matters of plumbing and safe buildings, stem from the national examinations which each child takes at ages 12 and 18. Apparently, although no direct administrative controls exist, the indirect pressure from parents to prepare children for these exams—as well as for life—is such that the schools make a strong effort to educate their students effectively. The exams are made up yearly by a prestigious committee, comprising some educators, some political figures, and some parents—a partly elected and partly appointed body whose members have tenure for seven years and are thus somewhat insulated, like our senators or judges, from short-term political pressures.

Indeed there seems to be a brisk competition among schools, and children switch around a good deal. On the secondary level the situation is apparently a little like ours; one school near San Francisco, which has produced a large number of scientists and political leaders, consequently has a long waiting list.

It is hard to tell how the children themselves react to the competitiveness that exists, on some levels, along with the laxity of Ecotopian life. I often saw older children helping younger ones with school work, and there seems to be an easy working recognition that some people know more than others and can aid them. But greater ability doesn’t seem so invidious as with us, where it is really valued because it brings rewards of money and power; the
Ecotopians seem to regard their abilities more as gifts which they share with each other. Certainly I never saw happen at Crick School what I have seen in my daughter’s American school: one child calling another “stupid” because he did not grasp something as fast as the first child did. Ecotopians prize excellence, but they seem to have an intuitive feeling for the fact that people excel in different things, and that they can give to each other on many different levels.

Do Ecotopians accept the idea that poorer parents might not be willing or able, given the tuition costs, to send their children to school at all? In this crucial area, Ecotopians have not allowed their thinking to revert to that of harsher ages. Rather than a scholarship system, however, they give outright sliding grants to families with incomes below a certain level, and one component of these is marked for tuition. Thus the Ecotopian state, while not willing to lift the burden of education entirely off the parents’ backs (thus perhaps encouraging larger families!) is still willing to force citizens to educate their children in
some
manner. The possibility of “kickback schools,” such as arose in the U.S. when tuition vouchers were first tried, does not seem a great worry in Ecotopia, where the welfare of children is discussed constantly—and where the children themselves generally run school newspapers that are, if anything, ridiculously critical of their own schools, and would surely spot anything sneaky going on.

Judging by my brief visit, the fact that no formal curriculum prevails does not mean that Crick students miss the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, though they tend to learn them in concrete contexts. But they also learn a great deal of sideline information and skills. An Ecotopian 10-year-old, as I have observed, knows how to construct a shelter (odd though some of the boys’ shacks looked); how to grow, catch, and cook food; how to make simple clothes; how hundreds of species of plants and animals live, both around their schools and in the areas they explore on backpacking expeditions. It might also be argued that Ecotopian children seem in better touch with each other than the children in our large, crowded, discipline-plagued schools; they evidently learn how to organize their lives in a reasonably orderly and self-propelled
way. Chaotic and irregular though they appear at first, thus, the Ecotopian schools seem to be doing a good job of preparing their children for Ecotopian life.

(June 6) This morning Red and I went out to a hidden scrap yard south of San Francisco. There, piled in formidable heaps as we pile autos in our junkyards, were hundreds of wrecked U.S. Army helicopters, most of them badly damaged. Had been gone over by salvage crews—instruments, cables, motors, and so on were missing from most. But undeniably U.S. aircraft, every last one. I phoned Marissa with this crushing piece of information. “Well, did you
really
doubt it?” she asked. “Do you still think people would try to deceive you?” “I don’t know what to think, anymore. Except about you.” “And what’s that?” “I’ll tell you when I see you.”

(June 7) Just came from the War Ministry, where I tried to get the official Ecotopian view on the Helicopter War. The whole Ministry occupies only three floors of what used to be the Federal Building in San Francisco. No press information section at all. I was just taken into an office and introduced to a young man by his name, with no rank—discovered later that he’s some kind of general. He confirmed outlines I’d been given earlier, and offered 7,679 as the precise number of copters shot down, “although some of the count had to be made from rather fragmentary pieces, you know.”

What he really wanted to tell me about was the militia system Ecotopia adopted after Independence. Regarded it as a great social innovation, seemed not to be aware we had tried it in 1789 and couldn’t make it work. (And if we tried it now the units would probably turn into gangs of armed looters!) Local arsenals; men “train” yearly, do work projects for a couple of weeks. Their organization sounds more like guerrilla bands than a real army, but they evidently have excellent radio communications and a very efficient national command system. Denied that heavy fortifications exist on the borders, though they are mostly mountainous and
could be made virtually impenetrable. “Remember Dienbienphu!” he laughed. Would not disclose locations of armaments research, which is evidently highly decentralized. Citizenry said to be the source of many usable military ideas: “An ordinary person invented one of our cheapest anti-helicopter weapons—a simple rocket trailing wires. He was a bad shot, and his idea enables you to bring down a copter even if you miss the body of the thing.”

Says they would like their military establishment to wither away further (it’s now about the size and relative cost of Canada’s) but can’t trust the U.S. enough yet. Seemed a very smart and hardworking officer. Not a trace of the kind of bureaucratic featherbedding mentality that plagues our armed services, either. I bet they
do
have Washington mined.

(Later) Have finally decided not to file a story on the Helicopter War. Can’t see any useful purpose being served, at this late date. Yes, the
Times
was wrong not to pursue and print the story while it was happening. And I suppose, hard though it is for me to admit it, there may be other unknown chapters of similar enormity in our recent national history—things that were mistakes, or at any rate grave risks, and should have been exposed, attacked, debated. But I can see what would happen if I re-opened all those old sores now. (Assuming, of course, that Max would print the story if I sent it, which is, to say the least, uncertain.) I would be the agent of new rancor between our people and Ecotopia. I’d be attacked by our rightwingers as a turncoat, “giving away our secrets.” And I confess this charge would hurt a little, silly as it seems. Whatever seeds of mutual understanding my series of reports may be generating would be killed. The resulting tension would be sure to make it impossible to have any kind of serious opening conversations with President Allwen—or even to remain in the country, for that matter! (Responses from her secretary are a little warmer these days—he even commented favorably on that column about the economy. Still, nothing definite about seeing her.)

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” I remember the chill that motto used to be able to send down my
back. Then I had to learn that truth was not some single easy thing you could “know” automatically, but an uneasy and always tentative compound of facts, inferences, balances—inherently hypothetical even when it seems altogether obvious: like science, I suppose. We go on refining it, through the years, but we never ever really reach it. (And so our freedom is conditional too?) Someday I
will
write the Helicopter War story. But it is not part of this assignment.

Now must go downstairs and face the goading from Bert and the rest. Lucky bastards.