Beyond a Garden in Every School

Philip Nix is the Founding Headmaster of Sonoma Country Day School in Santa Rosa, California

I first read Wendell Berry's essay, "Discipline and Hope," in the early 1970s. Nothing I have ever read has had a more profound impact on how I have lived my life. Over the years, I've returned again and again to my much marked-up text. His observations nurtured my experience until his insights flowered into convictions of my own. I now believe "Discipline and Hope" should be required reading for all educators.

Berry provokes us to review our own lives and to see what we never saw before. When we are children, we take the world as we find it, heedless of the limitations and deprivations that we can only later understand as adults. Our youth is blessed with an ability to see everything around us as wonderful and essential, and so I saw through this essay how I had come to accept an instrumental and mechanical world as the proper order of things. I woke with a shock to a new sense of possibility; and as I entered teaching, I came to wish better for the children whose care and education were entrusted to me.

Berry defined for me the two very different worlds of my early childhood. One world was Brooklyn, New York, where a journey to Prospect Park was a marginal novelty for a subway-savvy kid. The visits to my father's family in Mississippi, the delta cotton farms of his relatives, and the warm ripe figs in my grandfather's garden, and the coolness of his potato cellar in July, might well have been another planet for all their resemblance to the place I lived most of the time.

Berry made clear that cities are about control. They lack harmony, but substitute a compelling order. They are man-made and man-sustained. The poet William Blake characterized life in London as enslavement to "mind-forged manacles." After a time, one can no longer see what is missing; one consents to oppression. Until I read Wendell Berry, I thought Blake was describing some extreme blight. Afterward I came to see that much about my own urban childhood had alienated me from a critical aliveness.

The countryside calls for patience, interest, and presence. Its greatest joy is in community, not entertainment. While the city is about ideas and intention, the countryside is about experience. I came to understand the loss it manifestly is to live life as if the world, its agriculture, and the cycles of its seasons are considered mere footnotes to the comforts of suburbia and the excitements of the city lights.

Berry made it clear that without a local and disciplined regard for the natural world, our understanding, pleasure, and acceptance of life's cycles would be forever damaged and would damage the world, itself. However, such a deep sense of place is not easily found, and the mind has a way of returning, unwittingly, to what it knows or has been trained to see.

In our schools today, we need to ask what we are training our students to see. We expect them to "go to art," "go to science," "go to physical education," and "go to English." We reinforce the notion that these categories can give us a neatly divided life, definitive knowledge, and a predictable and controllable experience. We are tied to schooling methods, in other words, that actively disintegrate the vital connections between things. They become, as Berry suggests, things we consume.