Tony Wagner - Learning by Heart: An Unconventional Education

When I talk to people who have pleasant memories of their school years, they rarely mention the classes they took. Those who remember school fondly are far more likely to recall it as a time in their life when they had fun with friends. Or they excelled at a sport or joined in an extracurricular activity that excited them. Almost invariably, they say classes were easy for them, and so they got along with their teachers and brought home good grades that pleased their parents.

For many studentsthose for whom school is hard for whatever reason, or who are not popular or good athletesschool is tedious at best, torturous at worst. I was such a student. School for me was a giant jigsaw puzzle with many hundreds of tiny piecesa puzzle that came with no picture to guide me or tell me how it was all supposed to turn out. I was lost.

From first through sixth grade, I went to a small, coeducational private day school half an hours drive from where my family lived. I have only hazy memories of my classes and teachers therethings scrawled on the blackboard that we were told were important for us to know; heavy, dull textbooks that had to be lugged to and from school every day. What I remember most vividly was being an outlier. Most of the other kids were from the suburbs, and they saw each other frequently, after school and on weekends. But not me. We lived too far away. And so during recess, I wasnt invited to join in their play. I mostly just watched from the sidelines.

I was also slow to learn to read. Some kids naturally learn much later than others, and then, all too often, parent anxiety and teacher pressure fester and turn a late reader into an insecure learner. For several years, my mother dragged me to a tutor once a week. Mrs. Gray was patient and warm, unlike my teachers at school, and by fourth grade I was proficient. But the beginner reading books, organized by level of difficulty, and the assigned textbooks bored me, and I took no pleasure in reading them. I liked the smell of the blue ditto sheets, fresh off the mimeograph machine, that were sent home with us every night, but I hated doing the same math problems over and over. They were even worse than the reading assignments. I didnt do the homework most of the time.

About a year or so after Id really gotten the knack of reading, I fell in love with it just for pleasure. At first it was a series of books called We Were There. Each book was a fictional retelling of a real historical event featuring one or more kids as the main characters. I dont remember where I got the first one, but it took me awhile to get into it. By the age of eleven or so, I was reading most every nightfor myself, not for school.

I trekked the Oregon Trail, fought at the Battle of Gettysburg, dumped tea at the Boston Tea Party, nearly froze to death with Admiral Byrd at the South Pole. But it was the books about World War II that most captivated me: Id watched, horrified and helpless, as the Japanese Zeros screamed out of the sky and bombed our fleet at Pearl Harbor; I ate bugs to survive in the jungle during the Battle of Bataan; I charged ferociously at the German pillboxes above the beaches of Normandy.

I went on to read about the different ground campaigns of the war. The German general Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, fascinated me by the way he kept sneaking around the desert, attacking the British, then slipping away. Then I got interested in battles between big ships. I begged my parents to let me watch Victory at Sea, a TV documentary that each week depicted a different naval engagement of the war, using original film footage. The program always closed with the first verse of The Navy Hymn:

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who biddst the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

The music gave me shivers and made me feel sad. All I felt when they sang the hymns at our little Episcopal church each Sunday was impatience for the service to be over. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be on a destroyer, manning a gun under fire from a Japanese battleship, terrified that a kamikaze would fly into us.