Barry was in 5th grade when the Soviets launched Sputnik. He writes, “While Sputnik was hundreds of miles overhead, hurtling along at eighteen thousand miles an hour, broadcasting cheerful futuristic beeps as it zipped all the way around the Earth once every ninety-six minutes, our rocket soared to approximately the height of a mailbox, then blew up.” He laments that the weight of the nation’s lagging space program then fell on the nation’s students:
Never mind the fact that it wasn’t our fault the Russians were winning the Space Race. . . . Did our nation’s leaders—the people who were actually in charge when we fell behind in the Space Race—did THEY get saddled with trying to understand the ‘cosine’? They did not. They dumped that impossible task onto the fifth graders of Whippoorwill School. And as you can tell, we are still bitter.
The Sputnik response prefigured an age when schools are tasked with reacting to each new adult anxiety. Over the past decade, American elites have declared national emergencies when it comes to democracy, climate change, systemic racism, and more. Schools and students, in turn, are urgently enlisted in combating each crisis—all while knowing the next one will come around before long.
Barry is refreshingly frank. He recalls that teachers would routinely throw chalk or erasers at kids who weren’t paying attention and that it was no big deal. The kids didn’t even mention it to their parents. Why? Because, he writes, they would’ve just “asked us what we did to deserve it.” While Barry concedes that this may not be “an ideal way to discipline students,” the happy result was that “we tended to pay attention.”
The first hint of Barry’s storied career involves his high school English teacher asking him to read a funny essay he’d written to the class. Not wanting to look the teacher’s pet, Barry declined. So she read it aloud, preserving his anonymity. Sixty-plus years later, Barry recalls the class’s laughter and how “it felt good, hearing people laugh at my words.” These tiny moments can feel huge to students. That’s something we don’t talk about enough, I fear.
Barry offers an agenda-free honesty that’s all too rare. It’s a relief to read an author who isn’t climbing on a pedagogical hobbyhorse or hammering you with an ulterior motive.
It’s worth closing with Barry’s take on his junior high-era experience of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, just because it so effortlessly captures the habits and virtues that undergird healthy communities:
They had their flaws, the Armonk [New York] adults of 1960: Their drinking was excessive, their smoking was foolish, and they looked ridiculous doing the Twist. But when it came to politics, they were a lot saner than we are today. They understood that most people want basically the same things—peace, justice, a decent life for themselves and their kids—and that politics is basically an argument about how best to achieve those things. So they didn’t automatically assume that anybody who disagreed with them was vermin scum, which is pretty much how we do politics now.
That passage may not have anything to do with schooling, but it has a great deal to do with education. It’s about character. Citizenship. Perspective. Practical wisdom. These are traits that healthy communities cultivate. But they’re rarer than they should be today. Historically, the court jester was charged with helping royalty see the true state of their dominion, using humor both to illuminate truths and make them palatable. In an era when education is thick with vitriol, virtue-signaling, self-serving narratives, and endless distraction, I came away from Barry’s memoir convinced that what we might need most right now is many more class clowns.
