Reading Madame Bovary (17 page)

Tony had looked at her sideways and she knew what he was thinking. His irreverent streak was already roused. A doctorate? To teach
preschool
?

They settled on their low wooden chairs at the back of the classroom. Feeling vaguely foolish on the child-size furniture and with their knees almost up to their chins they prepared to ‘observe'. Nancy leaned over to whisper that she would leave them to it and they were welcome to return to her office, when they were ready, to discuss what they had observed. At the door, she turned and waved at them encouragingly.

As she waved, Tony leaned across and whispered in Frances's ear. ‘This place is so clean and tidy, so organised. It gives me the creeps.'

‘For heaven's sake, you work in a lab.'

‘That's different.'

‘It
is
only the beginning of the day,' she murmured. What did he expect? Chip packets all over the floor?

They counted sixteen children who ranged, according to the notes, from two-and-a-half to six years old, and who sat in a circle on a large mat, quiet and composed. This, it appeared, was Circle Time, the first session of the day. There were two teachers in the room, both women. The first teacher sat at the top of the circle, cross-legged, a young woman in her late twenties, slim with shoulder-length black hair and dressed in baggy black cotton pants, leather sandals and a long, faded aqua shirt in Indian cotton. She looked very serious, and the first thing Frances
observed
was that she chewed her nails. It seemed out of place, an unsightly flaw; an unexpected symptom of anxiety on the sunlit surface of calm and order. The teacher's name was Clara, and she began by asking the children, one at a time and working clockwise, to stand up, walk into the centre of the circle and take a card from the neat stack resting on the carpet. When each child had performed this task (in complete silence) Clara spoke in a low sing-song chant. ‘If you have the number five, please stand up.' A child rose, holding a cardboard square. ‘Thank you, Jesse. If you have the number two, please stand up.'

And so it went on, until all the children had stood for their numbers. Then they were directed to sit again in their circle.

‘Tim, will you go over to the Geometric Solids shelf and bring us back the rectangular prism, please.'

The boy, about four, tip-toed over to where a group of polished wooden shapes were arrayed on a ledge. He lifted the five-inch prism and began his return walk, stepping with exaggerated – almost ritualistic – slowness. Perhaps it was the sing-song tone of Clara's instructions but the children all seemed to be operating in a kind of trance.

‘It's good how carefully Jesse is carrying that over to us,' Clara intoned.

The children did not move, fidget, or sigh. Their faces were solemn, or blank. Were they usually this subdued, Frances wondered, or was it because they were under observation?

Tony leaned in his wife's direction and grimaced. ‘It's as quiet as a cathedral in here.'

She ignored him.

‘Good little guinea-pigs, aren't they?' he persisted.

She felt in her husband his characteristic resistance to authority.

‘Maybe it's just a quiet poise that we're not used to seeing in children.'

She sounded sanctimonious. Clara's tone was catching.

After all the shapes were assembled on the mat, Clara placed a white cheesecloth over them and the children were invited to the front, one at a time, to kneel and shut their eyes while they felt under the cloth for a particular shape. This they did in perfect quiet.

Frances glanced again at Nancy's notes. ‘In order that your observation may be more meaningful we suggest noting the following.
Order in the classroom
: physical order; the order in the design of the materials; order in the sequence in which the exercises are accomplished; order in a child's use of materials …'

Yea, verily, there was a love of order here.

‘This has a horrible fascination,' muttered Tony.

‘Don't be such a cynic.'

Clara stood and smoothed her long shirt over her thighs. Circle Time, it appeared, was over and after Circle Time it was off to ‘work'. Several projects and resources were laid out around the room, some already begun on previous days. The notes informed Frances that each child was required to work in his or her own clearly defined space and for this a small mat was used. No other child was permitted to trespass on the mat without permission from the mat's ‘worker'. A child might leave his or her mat in any state he or she wished but must, on completion of the project, tidy both project and mat away. ‘Please note that completion of the project may take weeks, and for this period the mat must be left undisturbed and in the state the child wishes it to be.'

Frances was beginning to catch on. There was an ordered classroom and within this, each child could have a space of free play, her or his own little backyard in miniature; a balance of structure and routine with impulse and spontaneity. There could be apparent chaos on the mat, but order all around. Yet despite the mat being an area of ‘free' activity, surely there must be a subtle pressure to do something ‘useful' or ‘constructive' on that mat?

She looked up. All was proceeding with uncanny decorum. She watched a small boy in a red jumpsuit who had begun to paint at an easel. He wielded his brush with unblinking concentration, painting for much longer than any other child of comparable age that she had observed in other schools. When he was satisfied, he laid down his brush, unclipped his painting and hung it on a wooden rack to dry. Then, without hesitation, he walked across the room to the sink and turned on the tap. With great ceremony he proceeded to carry a yellow bucket of water and a yellow sponge back to the paint corner, where he began to clean his easel.

‘Yellow is our cleaning colour,' said a sign on the wall above the sink.

The second teacher, Joan, a fair, freckled woman in jeans and sandals, had sat to one side of the room for the duration of Circle Time. She began now to circulate among the children, commenting, in a low-key way, on their work. One four-year-old girl was doing a giant jigsaw on her grey felt ‘territory' mat, and already she was advanced enough for it to be apparent that this was a map of the continents of the world in bright poster colours. Above her on the wall was a display of autumn leaves, pressed flat.

Another child was building a complex series of towers in blocks. ‘Some Montessori schools allow children only to use blocks and other project shapes to categorise, not for free play,' said the notes, ‘but we've modified this practice in accordance with the philosophy of the staff. We find that free play in no way hinders learning. Familiarisation with the look, and more importantly, the feel of the Montessori wooden letters is the beginning of literacy. Most of our children, with no forced effort or strain, can read by the time they begin primary school.'

So this was a local version of Montessori. A little looser, a little more laid back. But not laid back enough for some.

Tony was restless and wriggling on his child-size chair. ‘This is unreal,' he said. ‘These kids are like little lab technicians. The only things missing are the rats in mazes and the white coats.'

Frances ignored him. She was mesmerised.

At ten-thirty, the children sat at the small table in the kitchen alcove and ate their snack of raisins and carrot wedges. Then Frances and Tony rose to follow the children outside for their morning play. Out on the warm timber deck they leaned over the rail and observed that the children seemed to play like other children; careening around on tricycles, falling off onto the bitumen and scraping their knees, climbing rope ladders, swinging on the rubber tyre. No-one threw sand.

‘I'm just going inside,' said Frances to Tony, who seemed more relaxed now, leaning back against the cedar wall and closing his eyes to the sun. ‘I want to look at the learning materials.'

He opened his eyes and fixed her with a stare. ‘I don't like this place, Fran.' She ignored him.

Inside she began to wander about the perimeter of the empty room. She wanted to look at the specially designed project materials, up close. These were the famous ‘manipulatives', also known as the ‘didactic apparatus', designed to be ‘self-correcting'. They were arrayed on a wide wooden shelf at child height and all were neatly labelled. These were the Sound Boxes. This was the Pink Tower. This was the Brown Stair, a set of ten prisms. These were the Red Rods and these were the Smelling Jars. These were the Bells and the Temperature Jugs and the Baric Tablets and the Golden Bead Material. And there was even one called the Time Line. And she was thinking:
the names are wonderful
. They sounded like words from a secret code or ritual, like something belonging to the Rosicrucians, or the Masons, something that might admit you to a better world, one where there were no beggars on the streets, where no-one moaned and wailed in the toilets or stared at you with hatred in their eyes. She picked up a soft felt container labelled the Object Bag and looked it up in her notes. This, the notes explained, was for ‘exploring the art of feeling'. She opened it, peered inside and was disappointed. There was just a cup, a lid, a pin, some string, a ball. So much promise, so mundane a reality.

More satisfying was the Golden Bead Material, an exquisitely constructed cube of a thousand glittering beads. Though you would never have guessed from looking at it, the Golden Bead was a mathematical toy, designed to teach the decimal system. The beads were made of translucent gold acrylic strung on copper wire. They sat in a cedar box on top of the shelf beside the open window and when the sunlight caught them they glinted. Each bead was perfect, and each sat in perfect relation to the others: perfect proportion, perfect balance, perfect harmony. They had a mystery to them, as if each bead was a magical object and belonged in that novel by Hermann Hesse,
The Glass Bead Game
. She had read that book as a student (it had won Hesse the Nobel Prize) and had found it wholly absorbing. For several nights she had been transported to life in the twenty-fifth century, to the utopian province of Castalia where an elite priesthood studied to master an immensely complex game that sought to integrate the whole of human knowledge into a harmonious system. The Glass Bead Game was the game of life itself, and these ‘didactic' toys on the shelf beside her (they would not, it occurred to her now, be out of place in a Harry Potter novel) seemed like stray fragments from the great game; alluring and enigmatic miniatures of the whole; apparently simple tools with which you could build a series of other, and better, worlds.

Outside, as they walked back to the car, she knew that she and Tony were at odds. ‘Well, how many out of ten?' he asked.

‘Search me.'

‘The teacher in the black pants didn't smile very much.'

‘I saw her smile.'

‘It's all too organised.'

‘So you keep saying. That's better than a shambles.'

‘The kids were too subdued.'

‘We'd have to observe them over a longer period to tell if that's really the case.'

‘I take it this meets with Madame's approval, then.'

‘No, there
was
something missing there, but I can't put my finger on it.'

They left the school grounds by the same high wooden gates where, every morning, the teachers stood to welcome the pupils and, even more importantly, to farewell them in the afternoons. This way they could see who was entering, and who collected the children. Nothing was left to chance.

Out on the pavement Tony stopped and looked back at the high walls. ‘Did you check out the security devices? The alarmed walls. The cameras.'

She shrugged. ‘Well, wouldn't you want your child to be safe?'

‘Castle Keep,' he said, intent on having the last word.

Afterwards they had lunch at a café nearby. Tony ate a large, ropey pastry filled with custard and when he had finished he licked his fingers. He had icing sugar around his mouth. He looked silly. She found herself staring out into the street where a young man was begging. Though it was a warm day he wore an army greatcoat with the collar turned up and his eyes had a wild, desperate glaze. The café jukebox was playing old Rolling Stones hits and she was thinking: It wasn't that the Montessaurus was too organised, or too quiet. It was that there was too much responsibility. Yes, that was it, too much of a burden of choice, day after day, to do something constructive, something
sensible
. She saw her son in invisible fetters.

For the next few days she debated with Tony the merits of the two schools. The Montessaurus was almost unnervingly calm. Some vital spark seemed to be missing. But at The Free School some of the kids were bored, or raced around on the edge of manic distraction. Frances returned to have another look and came home in two minds.

‘It was too dirty, too disorganised,' she said over dinner. ‘The stuff they were making was junk.'

‘Yeah, but they're only three years old,' he said, ‘maybe four. Boys need their freedom.' And she felt like a prig.

Another sleepless night followed in which she lay awake and ran the arguments through her head, over and over: the Montessori method was unduly mechanical, formal and restricting; there was not enough free play of the imagination, not enough ‘creative expression'; there was too much emphasis on individual rather than group work, on the development of individual skills and disciplines rather than social adjustment to the group. In the constant struggle to balance the needs of self and other – to find meaning for the self
in
the other – it veered too far into elitist individualism. In the dark of their cramped little bedroom she saw the unnaturally quiet classroom, she saw her son in a straightjacket. On the other hand, what was the point of undisciplined, unskilled ‘creative play' that went nowhere? And there could be too much emphasis on the social, which only made children slaves to the peer group. Your best friend is away for the day and you're at a loss. Eventually she fell asleep and into a vivid dream. She was in a yard somewhere and all of the Golden Bead Material had escaped its box and was strewn about her feet so that the ground was a carpet of golden beads. ‘Look,' she said, to no-one who was present, ‘see how the beads lie freely on the ground and still they retain their beauty.'