The Free Market Center
The sight of ignorant protesters at colleges and universities across the country has reaffirmed for me the lack of value of the schooling (indoctrination) received by schools at all grade levels. You do not need an advanced degree to make a contribution to society.
Instead of attempting to paraphrase the words of James Hillman, I have decided to publish the entirety of Chapter 4, “Back to the Invisibles” from his book The Soul’s Code.
Food for thought…
Schooldays and Nightmares1
Cradles of Eminence, a delightful (and well-documented) report on the childhoods of four hundred famous modern persons, states that three fifths of the subjects “had serious school problems”: “Rejection of the classroom is an international phenomenon and has little to do with whether the schools are public or private, secular or clerical, or with the philosophy of teaching employed in various schools.” Nor does the school difficulty of these eminent persons have anything to do with their families’ attitudes, economic circumstances, or educational level. Hating school, failing school, expulsion from school afflicts all sorts, for better or for worse.
Thomas Mann2 who was awarded Nobel recognition largely for a novel he wrote in his early twenties, described school as “stagnating and unsatisfactory”; the great Indian scholar and poet Rabindranath Tagore (who, like Mann came from an educated and well-to-do background) quit school at thirteen because he suffered so much there. “I was fortunate enough to extricate myself before insensibility set in.” “Of his schooldays Gandhi said that they were the most miserable years of his life… that he had no aptitude for lessons and rarely appreciated his teachers… and might have done better if he had never been to school.” The Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset declared: “I hated school so intensely. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.” The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman called his early school “an intellectual desert.” The actor and director Kenneth Branaugh so feared school when he was about eleven that he tried throwing himself downstairs to break a leg rather than go. Later he withdrew into his room and read and read. The German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbiner simply “could not remain in the company of normal children” and eventually was put in a Rudolf Steiner school. Jackson Pollock, “who flouted… school requirements as he ignored its dress code” was expelled from Los Angeles High School. John Lennon was expelled from kindergarten.
The saddest story I have found of the miseries of the schoolchild comes from the English poet Robert Browning. He was sent off to boarding school at the age of eight or nine. It so depressed him that “he chose a leaden cistern in the school for his ‘place of burial.’ It had on it a raised image of a face. He imagined this face as his epitaph, passing his hands over it again and again and chanting. ‘In memory of unhappy Browning.’” As for the lessons, Browning said “they taught him nothing there.”
The imaginative existentialist writer Paul Bowles “did not get along with his new teacher, Miss Crane. He resented her authoritative style and… he adamantly refused to take part in class singing and as a method of revenge devised a system to do what to him were meaningless assignments without really doing them: he simply wrote everything perfectly, but backwards.”
For Bowles the activity most detested was singing, for others it will be Latin or algebra or sports or English composition. The acorn3 draws the line, and no one can force it to cross into the territory of its incompetence. It is as if the oak cannot bend or pretend to be a lovely poplar. As the acorn brings gifts, it sets limits, and only if the school allows intuition into the tuitional methods of the teacher can a bridge be thrown across, allowing the gift to emerge from the limits.
School failures are common; is this because the child fails school or because school fails the child? Either way, the gap widens between the innate intuitive ability of the child and the formalized tuition of school. As the writer William Saroyan put it: “I resented school, but I never resented learning.” All the while he had trouble in school he was reading on his own “nearly every book in the Fresno, California, public library.”
The composer Edvard Grieg said; “School developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.” Thomas Edison said, “I was always at the foot of the class.” Stephen Crane, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all failed courses in college. For Ellen Glasgow, author of On Barren Ground and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, school was “intolerable.” Willa Cather, Pearl Buck, Isadora Duncan, and Susan B. Anthony also dislike school. Paul Cézanne was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Marcel Proust’s teacher considered his compositions disorganized, and Emile Zola got a zero in literature, also failing in German language and in rhetoric. Albert Einstein wrote of his middle school (which he attended from age nine and a half): “ preferred to endure all sorts of punishments rather than to learn gabble by rote.” Earlier, at primary school, he was not especially noticeable and was called Biedermeier, meaning a little dull, a little simple, a little “unclever.” His sister wrote that “he wasn’t even good at arithmetic in the sense of being quick and accurate, though he was reliable and persevering.” Some of these characteristics were due to his slowness of speech.
General George S. Patton was dyslexic and kept back; Winston Churchill, at Harrow, “refused to study mathematics, Greek, or Latin and was placed in the lowest form – in what today would be termed the remedial reading class, where slow boys were taught English. His English, however, was not poor; his knowledge of Shakespeare was unusual and self-motivated.”
The gap between what is seen by the school and what is felt by the child can work in two ways. Mostly, the child following his or her invisible track is perceived as “out of it,” unteachable, obstinately difficult, even stupid. But pressure can build the other way as well. Diane Arbus, the quirky and extraordinary photographer, said: “The teachers always used to think I was smart and it would torment me because I knew that I was really terribly dumb.” Whether the child is perceived as “dumb,” like Einstein, or “smart,” like Arbus, the gap in perception between child and school remains unbridged. When perception of the invisible in the child does occur, as in the case of Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, and James Baldwin, it feels like an unforgettable miracle.
Examinations especially can be a trial. The master bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich had to be excused from school compositions because of his “complete ineptness.” Giacomo Puccini consistently failed exams. Gertude Stein would not take her final in a class at Harvard. Anton Chekhov refused to study classics, and failed his school exam twice. These failures at school gave him nightmares. “All his life he was to be haunted by dreams of teachers trying to ‘catch him out.’” Pablo Picasso, “who could never remember the sequence of the alphabet,” left school at ten “because he stubbornly refused to do anything but paint”; even his private tutor gave up on him because Pablo could not learn arithmetic.
Often it was not in school, but outside of it – in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school – that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its timebound regularity. H. G. Wells was slated for the retail trade; he broke his leg when he was eight, began to read, and was “saved” from commerce for literature. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and candidate for the presidency Charles Evans Hughes wandered the streets of New York City for six months while waiting to be accepted into college. William Randolph Hearst and the artist John La Farge added to their learning by “wasting time” in Manhattan streets. Marie Curie had a whole year in the country free from school. Who can prescribe where the acorn learns best or where the soul puts you to the test?
Exams are a ritual moment, anything can happen. They mark transitions from one state of being to another, the way a wedding does, or like giving birth for the first time. Examination panics, together with the strange ceremonies of food and fetishes the night before “the final,” further show the ritual background of the test. An exam tests more than your endurance, ability, and knowledge; it tests your calling. Does your daimon4 want the path you have chosen? Is your soul really in it? If doing well on the test may be confirmation, a failed exam may be how the daimon lets us know we’ve been headed wrong.
Omar Bradley, a five-star general who held in mind vast campaigns involving millions of men and tons of supplies, was near the bottom on his test scores – in group twenty-seven of twenty-eight – when he entered West Point. Through plodding and grinding he worked his way up to graduate forty-fourth in a class of 168 (in the same class, Dwight D. Eisenhower was sixty-first and James Van Fleet was ninety-second). Tuition helped Bradley’s intuition. Intuition also helped him get into West Point when he had to sit through four days of hour-hour exams each day.
I had a terrible time with algebra. At the end of two hours I had solved no more than 20 percent of the necessary 67 percent of the problems required to pass… That was it, complete failure. There was no way I could finish or pass. Utterly discouraged… I gathered up my papers and walked up to the officer in charge… I saw he was deeply engrossed in a book. Not wishing to disturb him, I returned to my desk thinking, I might as well give it one more try. Then, almost magically, the theorems started to come to me.
Bradley made it. He “hung on through the rest of the exams” and was accepted by West Point.
Sometimes the acorn, like a good angel, “magically” enters the exam room at a fateful moment. Reading life backward we might say that Bradley had to pass that exam: His military ability was essential to victory over Germany in 1943-1945, and later to serving as Army Chief of Staff.
Rush Limbaugh failed Speech 101. When he retook the course, he held his fellow students at Southeast Missouri State spellbound; his professor, however, gave him a D, despite his inventive talent, his confidence, and “his instinct for instant analysis.” The professor said: “I felt a smugness, that he was not ready to listen to a teacher.” Limbaugh’s grasp of the audience was intuitive; for him tuition only interfered.
The conflicts between school and student show up sharply in the area that belongs most closely to the acorn’s image, as in the case of Limbaugh. Bernard Baruch, advisor to presidents in the fields of banking, finance, and international economics, did well enough at Harvard, though he finished in the bottom half of his class in political economy and number crunching (math).
Finally, Woody Allen: “I paid attention to everything but the teachers.”
He demonstrated his abhorrence of school in some predictable ways. When he first attended P.S. 99 he was placed in an accelerated class because of his high IQ, but since the strictures of the classroom did not allow him to express himself in his own way and to use his imagination in his lessons, he instead expressed himself by becoming a troublemaker…. He played hooky…. He failed to do his homework. He was sometimes disruptive in class and rude to the teacher, who in turn lowered his grades for his behavior.
The angel who reads a life as a total image hears these complaints and troubles and says: “Of course school was a horror, Woody. You were already making films and writing jokes about these situations, so why have to go through them so concretely?” Billy Graham “could see no point to going to school at all. Literature…gave him a lot of trouble.” He was “the last of every body to get” Milton’s Allegro. Of course! The world’s most renowned evangelist doesn’t need to get Milton and all that literature because he has already received the True Word. Paul Bowles had lots of imagining to do and so little time left for such extras as schoolwork. As for Rush Limbaugh, he already had a national listening audience by the throat, so of course he couldn’t take instruction from a Southwest Missouri State teacher of speech. Browning, writing his epitaph in school, was already reading his life backward. And why wouldn’t Branagh prefer a dramatic fall downstairs (such as you see on stage and in the movies) to school? Wasn’t he already a remarkable actor of heroic parts? As for Churchill, of course he had language problems. How could a person who was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature and whose eloquence in 1940 and 1941 saved Western civilization for a while take on this daimon? It was far too much for a small-sized schoolboy. Invisible fates show as visible failures.
Maybe we should read the data of learning disorders and the cases of school problems differently. Instead of “failed at school” see “saved from school” – not that this is my personal recommendation. I ask only that the sadnesses of children in school be imagined not merely as examples of failure but as exemplars of the acorn. The daimon’s intuition often cannot submit to the normalcy of schooling and becomes even more demonic. When we read life backward, when we look at the gestures of the acorn from the taller perspective of the full tree, we can gauge tuition against the importance of intuition.
But what parent and what counselor can perch so high and see so well? And what child – even gifted “genius” – can stick stubbornly enough to its intuitions, unless driven there by complete misunderstanding or by incapacitating symptoms like dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, asthma, or hyperactivity, any of which can keep a child from school. From school, yes, but not from learning; from tuition, but not from intuition, not from that certain blindness which allows seeing of other sorts. Not every child will see, not every child will profit from missing school, but for us who watch over them and supposedly guide them, this door to the invisible factors at work in their disorders must be kept open, just in case it is an angel knocking and not merely a malady.
Remember Jung’s remark: “The Gods have become diseases.” To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere. It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it5, otherwise the child is simply stupid, willful, or pathological. Even in the sciences, you only begin to see the phenomenon in the sky or under the microscope if someone first describes what you are looking for; we need instruction in the art of seeing. Then the invisible becomes suddenly visible, right in your squinting eye.
There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us. A revelation of the invisible in the intelligible form leads us to the astrologer. How can the invisible and the unbelievable planetary transits parading through your zodiacal houses make my day? Please, explain my dream; alter my state. We would see a sign. Weekend workshops invite us to open the doors of perception and invite the invisibles in. A long and serious tradition, however, warns against throwing the doors wide open, especially in a culture that cannot tell Waco from Wacko.
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