Back to Chapter Headings Back to home page Contact Gene Lantz
As long as you're just talking, you don't really have to quarrel with anybody. But when you set out to actually do something, you might become a problem for almost everybody!
At Lille Skole, the school I dreamed of for two or three years and finally started in August, 1970, I fanatically banged my head against the establishment wall with total abandon for 2 ½ years. Me against the world. Kamikazee living. Lille Skole was a profound learning experience for me, and some of what was beaten into me is worth remembering.
The first and most apparent lesson was a total and complete confirmation of what I had already come to believe about learning and about children. Learning is almost completely about motivation and almost completely not about anything else. People, including little people, learn when they want to. Children are also naturally helpful, kind, and studiously fair about one another.
If no one had been involved at Lille Skole except the children and me, things would have gone smoothly and just as all my “Someday School” hopes anticipated.
But Lille Skole, and all educational settings, are not just about teachers and children. From the very first day, even before the first day, my problems at Lille Skole came from elsewhere and, particularly from the parents. To be more fair, I should say that the problems came from the entire society, but those problems were transmitted to me primarily by the parents.
I won the first big fight pretty easily. It came about because of my emphasis on inclusion and my fanatic opposition to unnecessary division. To wit: the parents wanted separate rest rooms by gender.
I hadn’t even realized it when I rented the place, but the warehouse on Jackson Street in Houston had two rest rooms. They weren’t marked by gender and I absolutely refused to mark them. I told the outraged parents that children shared restrooms at home, there were locks on both rest room doors, and that there was simply no reason to artificially differentiate the girls from the boys at Lille Skole.
The students accepted the situation easily. I think they even agreed with me, because having two accessible restrooms was more convenient for them. Some of the parents had to swallow pretty hard, but I got my way on it.
The next big problem that I recall was a parents’ insistence on standardized testing. He was, like me, a graduate student in education, and he wanted to implement his ideas at the school. One of his ideas was phonetic reading lessons, which I didn’t particularly mind as long as he was willing to do the work (he wasn’t). But his really big issue was that he wanted to establish “base line” tests of the children’s academic standing and then set up regular tests going forward. I think he was hoping to get his dissertation out of it.
I was having none of it. I wasn’t afraid that our students would perform worse than other students elsewhere, but I was damned if I would allow somebody to set artificial standards before the entire school, and particularly the children, had determined what standards they wanted. I won that battle, too, because the man’s wife sided with me. They eventually divorced, and she took custody. The guy was just as much a fanatic about educational ideas as I, I suppose, but he wasn’t ready to put his entire life on the line over it, and I was!
The biggest fights with the parents, of course, were over discipline. Several of the parents regularly whipped their own children and expected me to do the same. Some were willing to let me slide on the actual whipping, but expected me to report their children to them and let them carry out the actual executions. I argued against whipping and any kind of “aversive control,” -- at home, at school, or anywhere. At regular parents meetings, night after night, we rehashed the same arguments. I generally won the ideological arguments, but never stopped the whippings at home.
The racism of the times penetrated the school. Remember that my goal was to revolutionize education through a perfect model school. I couldn’t do that with all-white middle class kids, and they were the only kind of parents willing and able to pay the $65/month tuition. So, I extended a free “scholarship” to a Mexican American family. When one of my countercultural friends begged me to accept a homeless street kid that had been sleeping under her porch, I eagerly accepted the challenge. Bennie was Black, about 9 years old, untamed, uneducated and unwashed, but my friend Pat said she’d let him stay in her house if I would accept him at Lille Skole.
Bennie quickly became famous because so many journalists kept visiting the school looking for human interest stories. Reading the articles, I found out that Bennie was also a master bicycle thief. From time to time, other people who had read the articles appeared at the school to threaten me with physical and legal action if I didn’t turn over their stolen bicycles! I had to tell them the truth, that Bennie may or may not have stolen their bikes at one time or another, but he never kept them.
My phone would ring at home. Distraught middle-class white parents would tell me that they hated racism more than anything, but that Bennie had to go. It wasn’t because he was African American, they always told me, but that he just didn’t “fit in” with the other children.
In actuality, Bennie more than “fit in.” With all his street experiences and having lived on his own, he was kind of a superstar among the children at Lille Skole. His best friend was from one of the richest and best-known white families in Texas! That same family, of course, was getting ready to sue me over Bennie, and they pulled out of the school when I wouldn’t back down.
I used the word “replicable” in every other sentence in those days. I insisted that Lille Skole wasn’t an island of independent ideology, but a model school, a replicable school with lessons for the entire American education system. Parents didn’t like that, of course. Gene was “using” their children as grist for his ideological mill, some of them said.
The constant fight with the parents wasn’t the only way that our misfit world assaulted Lille Skole. I also had to deal with the media, the education establishment, city authorities, child welfare inspectors, state licensing agencies, and, more than anything else, paying the bills. Early in the process, I realized that I was spending more and more time defending Lille Skole from the world and less and less time with the children I loved. It was worth it, but it was certainly a battle.
This may have been the biggest lesson from Lille Skole and all my years of devotion to educational reform. I began to ask myself for the first time, “If schools aren’t meant for the benefit of children, then whom do they benefit? Why do we have a school system and what’s the point?” It took a lot longer, a lot more hard knocks, and a lot more thinking to answer.