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Thinking about Wendell Berry’s Lessons for Schools
When Andy Catlett, Wendell Berry’s character, a nine-year-old boy, visits his grandparents in 1943 over a Christmas vacation, he narrates the everyday happenings of a three-day journey. In one scene, he describes his Grandma’s button box. According to Andy, everyone had button boxes in every home he visited in those days — an assortment of plastic, brass, or pearl buttons in different shapes and colors collected over the years from worn or discarded garments. These could be used to adorn new handmade clothes or to replace the lost buttons on other shirts or dresses. For Andy Catlett, playing in these boxes was like searching for hidden treasure.
On this particular visit, however, Andy realized he no longer liked playing with buttons. In one sense, he was surprised at the realization. On the other hand, it was an acknowledgment that growing up means losing interest in some things and finding it in others.
At the same time, Andy was realizing his interests were shifting to more adventuresome objects like rifles or mule teams. Even as he thought of this moment from childhood, the grief in his voice is evident as he says, “Maybe it was because I was now traveling away from home…by myself, but I knew suddenly and finally that my time of playing with buttons was past, just as one summer evening a year or two later, when I had found a perfect slingshot fork in the top of a tree, it came to me that I was no longer interested in slingshots, and I climbed down and left the perfect fork uncut” (Berry 457).
In addition to Andy’s realization that button boxes and slingshots had lost their interest for him, he also realizes that small farming practices are going out of style as well, and this sad reality brings more serious consequences for entire communities. In fact, it is this loss that shows up most as one of the major themes for most of Wendell Berry’s characters.
Almost all of Berry’s books contain themes that run up against the losses of treasures we so easily discard in the name of progress or modernization. From his nonfiction work, The Unsettling of America, to his poems of protest against practices like strip-mining, Berry’s works create a masterpiece of classics that help us relate to the everyday lives of his characters while yearning to redeem or repair the damage being done to their places and lives.
Some of these losses, Berry acknowledges, are a natural part of living. Others, however, he shows, have been thrust upon us by outside forces bent on taking rather than giving.
In his novel about Hannah Coulter, the grandmotherly narrator is able to show her patriotism while also pointedly convincing you of her hatred of war and violence.
Jayber Crow, the town barber, in the book he narrates, helps readers grieve the loss of forests and natural field boundaries that protect farms from erosion and land devastation.
As a Kentucky farmer, Berry lived near the very Kentucky River he describes in his fictional town of Port William. He also practiced what he preached. The Berry Foundation, established by his family, has helped small farmers reclaim more than 2,000 acres of Kentucky farmland to reestablish regenerative farming practices that are not dependent on industrialized farming methods.
What do Wendell Berry’s stories have to do with school leadership?
Growing a community of learners can very easily be compared to the growth of a healthy garden or farm.
- Both require healthy soil as the culture for healthy growth.
- Both require a commitment to long-term investment of careful husbandry versus quick fixes or trendy applications.
- Both require an investment in the people involved in the work as much as the work itself.
As I’ve said in other posts, strong schools (or any community, for that matter) require commitments to three areas:
- strong shared beliefs,
- committed people of strong character, and
- sustainable, effective systems.
Strong beliefs include the shared values that every child can learn and include an unbending commitment to doing whatever it takes to hold them to high expectations while providing high supports.
Committed people have the hearts, not just the heads, for good teaching and learning. Character is more important than competency, and competency goes much further when carried by people with character.
And without strong, sustainable systems or structures in place, you cannot achieve outcomes. You can attract good people with the right beliefs, and you can have the right collective outcomes in mind, but if the structures are weak, many of those same people will grow frustrated in the work and likely go somewhere else.
It is the responsibility of leaders to set the tone for beliefs, to invest in supporting people, and to create the structures for sustainable outcomes.
This school year, you will be venturing into the hard work of growing a healthy learning environment. Wendell Berry’s books remind me of the wonders and joys of being a child. They also remind me to honor the legacies of brave everyday men and women who are often our best examples of human flourishing.
He calls his readers to think deeply about our relationships not just to people but also to places. He inspires us to improve or redeem the places and times we live in now, not just yearn for the past or look to the future.
Wendell Berry’s ability to take simple, everyday occurrences and turn them into moments of reflection is a gift that keeps giving over and over again in his books and poems.
These sentiments may be best captured in one of his most famous poems, “The Peace of Wild Things,” where he says:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1999)
Now It’s Your Turn
This school year, what commitments can you make to the beliefs, people, and systems that produce healthy learning outcomes?
How can you stay timely in your understanding of your students and your practices while also holding to the timeless principles that have always made learning possible and will keep on working long after we’re gone?
Other Source Cited:
Berry, Wendell. Port William Novels & Stories: The Civil War to World War II. Edited by Jack Shoemaker, Library of America, 2018.
