How to Survive in Your Native Land

How to Survive in Your Native Land was written by James Herndon in 1971 after teaching in a public middle school for 10 years in the suburbs of San Francisco.

This is my spirit book. It’s hilarious, horrible, deeply perceptive, crude, and talks about the truths of the education system and institutions in general that just can’t be avoided. Everything about the book from the content to the style appeals to how I want to see the world.

The content is unfortunately timeless. Despite being written over the 1960s, it could have easily been written today, because the education system we have inherited still persists and presses on, something Herndon assumed would be true.

James Herndon is that teacher who wants to change the system, to not force a curriculum and system down kids throats, but give the kids something better than what they are getting. But no matter what he tries, he encounters a new, deeper challenge. As soon as you see a ray of hope and think that he’s going to have a secret to break free from the current way we educate kids, it is immediately darkened.

The book is wicked funny because it points out in a very blunt and eye-opening way the absurdity of our reality. When you take away all of our habits, procedures, and deep-rooted assumptions, the truth of what we are really up to is quite funny, and Herndon has a way of pulling that out in a witty and wry way. I love when an author can poke at the normalized absurd.

The book is roughly divided into thirds with the first and third sections containing his anecdotes from experiences in the classroom. The middle sections has five “explanatory notes”, which have changed my mind forever. I’ll deal with each of the explanatory notes later, but first give some comments on his stories in the classroom.

The Curriculum

Most of the stories he tells are experiments with trying to alter what he actually teaches in class. Herndon uses this really witty device where he summarizes all of the standard approach to what kinds need to learn in a single word: Egypt.

This is immediately funny, because Egypt is a pet topic for any curriculum-maker. Kids may not learn how to interact with each other, develop good communication skills, or know how to use a spreadsheet when they graduate from high school, but you can be damn sure they’ve had a few quality units of Egypt.

Part of his beef with ‘Egypt’ is that the teachers are always handed it and told to teach it. But beyond that, he says that, “The other teachers dragged out the teaching of Egypt or math all year because they didn’t have anything else they wanted to do or cared about, or because they were afraid of the kids once the threat of the curriculum was called off.”

He and another teacher would move through the curriculum as quickly as possible to get on with more fun stuff like inventing languages, or writing up make-believe journals of Peace Corps volunteers.

They had this idea of creating a class where they didn’t have any curriculum, but just opened up the time for students to do whatever they wanted. His assumption was that if you removed grades, if you let the kids move in and out as they please, if you didn’t yell at them and force them to do something, then they would really enjoy getting to do all the stuff that seemed more fun.

But that didn’t happen. Apart from a magazine three girls produced, and a film project that a few of the students led, most of the kids didn’t do anything. They didn’t want to do the ‘fun’ stuff Herndon thought they would. He later realized that they only wanted to do those things because they were better than the regular stuff. Once you take away the grades and the authority and the mandatory nature of the class, the kids didn’t want to do any of it. Or, as John Holt says, “Any kids truly free to run their own school exactly as they see fit, will immediately declare a permanent vacation, and that will be the end of it.”

Even more importantly, he realized that he also would not do these things if he had the freedom. English teachers don’t diagram sentences when they go home from work, nor do math teachers spend time working problems they already know.

“Why should we assume that the kids would want to do a list of stuff that we didn’t want to do, and wouldn’t ever do of our own freewill?”

In this new world where the students (seemingly) had freedom, Herndon realized that it was a new world, and one where the old rules no longer applied.

However, despite his experiences trying to discover this new world, his classes were changed or cancelled as the administration didn’t really care.

In a new effort, he and a few other teachers had a group of students called “under-achievers”–kids who tested well in early grades, but now were struggling with their grades. This was a problem for the school. Kids who start off dumb remaining dumb isn’t an issue. Kids who test well continuing to test well isn’t an issue. The very rare case of a kid going from the low group to the high group is great for the school.

But the ‘smart’ kids who don’t seem to be ‘smart’ anymore–that’s a big issue.

With the authority to solve this problem however they wanted, the teachers decided just to focus on making sure the kids could read since it seemed like something that would be foundational for the kids going forward.

Herndon notes how easy it is for a kid to learn to read. A kid wants to read something and just has to learn the basic code and build on it. He says any caring adult can show a kid how to read in a few weeks at the most.

However, trying to teach a kid how to read in a school is nearly impossible. The ‘skill’ of reading needs to be broken down in sections and words must be broken down into phonics and diphthongs. Worksheets must be made. Fake stories need to be written. Tests are created and scored and ranked. There needs to be ways of measuring and tracking the progress to make sure everyone is moving at the same pace.

[Herndon astutely points out that one thing we never track (although it is the only reason most people want to read) is if the book/material changed you.]

In short, this is an example of how a school creates a bureaucracy to solve problems that it created. They have to hire more reading teachers, bring in reading experts and consultants, and buy expensive reading curriculum–all to do something that most of the kids know how to do anyway, just not inside the school.

More on the explanatory notes later…