Leaving the Valley
By Stuart Grauer

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

i.

There has never been a story I’ve wanted to tell more than this one. I’ve tried a couple of times, but it never felt ready—not because I couldn’t tell it, but because the world kept shifting beneath it, leaving it suspended somewhere between the real and a tale long vanished in time. Yet one year, as Christmastime drew near, this happened.

By way of background, while starting out as a young and unsettled public high school teacher, I read Oscar Handlin’s narrative essay, “Living in the Valley,” about Handlin’s days in the Swiss Alps, which fueled my urge to live there and to develop my profession from a new perspective.

“My first encounters with the mountains were shocking and disturbing,” Handlin recalled, “for they exposed me not only to a novel set of sights, but also to modes of thinking totally different from my own.” Handlin’s valley metaphor, that living in different places means that people legitimately perceive different, even opposing, fundamental truths and that both can be “right”—the concept of multiple perspectives—would become a core theme of my teaching career for the next four decades; although at critical times, I’ve had to learn it all over again. I still have that worn, classic 1977 American Scholar issue (the paper was thick and soft back then), and it has been a companion to me through the following history.

Many years later, as a teacher adapting and being immersed in the new millennium while confronting the new generation of students it brought, I would feel similar unsettling. As you move through a teaching career, it can be exceedingly hard to accept that some of your most essential teaching stories and perspectives, however romantic your travel journals, are still in flux and searching. As such, this is not a story of how my teaching philosophies formed, or even of how meaningful or useful all these philosophies have been to a couple generations of students. Instead, it is a story about how they began to unravel, as if clearing out space for something truer to emerge. It takes place in the Alps.

I began this “career” teaching adolescents, and through the decades, I have mainly continued working with them. The dilemma of adolescence is impossibly to be drawn into the pack while simultaneously driven by nature to seek autonomy. The rush to equality slams into the eternal call to freedom. Sweet conflict! I always wanted my students to understand that, as straight and true as the view from the valley floor is, the view from the summit is completely different, although at least as clear and far. The former corresponds to the linear lines of equality, the latter to the open, non-linear heights of freedom. Neither is truth or untruth, though some people will not make the shift no matter where they are standing.

Years later, with that same question still close at hand, I would say to my students, “You may know the proverb that says, “Sacrifice a little freedom for a little equality, and you will end with neither,” not even sure it really was a proverb. But I believed that if you were a teacher and could teach this one profound value—freedom—your labors would be worthwhile.

By then, I was no longer a classroom teacher finding my way, but the head of my own school. It was three seniors standing before my desk, and we were deep into it—whatever it was. One of them responded that his cause was gender role equality, total equality, and that there was no other side to this. It was an absolute. He was sure about that, and the passionate resolution of a student is never something to squander or push aside.

The truth is, I had no real idea how I could get my students to understand the cost of freedoms they both demanded and presumed, and I had limited confidence in my own ability to create such an awakening. But I disliked the presumptive notion that they might be picking a cause that they viewed as indisputable primarily due to its political expediency and apparent righteousness—you weren’t really even “allowed” to disagree on an issue like that. Even in the name of freedom.

And so I told him and his friends this story, a story set in the Swiss Alps so improbable in today’s light that many people simply cannot receive it— a kind of inattentional blindness, where meaning disappears because it no longer fits our frame. And to you, my readers, I can hardly imagine your knowledge of the history of the Swiss, and so I will assert that this is an absolutely true story that, as such, made me, surely alone in the United States, privy to one of the timeless pivot points in human history, as though I had sat on an Alpine peak and watched the human affairs of a millennium quantum-shifting before my eyes. A tall claim, for sure, but read on. This is the story I tried to have my students know.

It was 1983, in Bern, and I was seeing a Swiss girl, Margrit. She was rightfully named after the gentlest Alpine flower, and she was patiently teaching me to speak Swiss-German. A terrific skier and teacher in the legendary Swiss Ski School, she came from the ancient hamlet of Appenzell along the Swiss-Austrian border. Steady on the mountain as a chamois, not five feet tall and sturdy as Appenzellers tend to be, she could ski the steep chutes and deep snow. I can still sing some of the yodels she taught me coming down from the mountain after beautiful days of powder and sky. I thought the world of her, even though she was of a different world than I.

The holidays were upon us and so, following a ski trip into the Bernese Oberland around Christmastime, we drove east towards her childhood home in the Alps (an hour south by autobahn from where William Tell, according to legend, freed the nation from tyranny in 1291, seven centuries earlier). We planned to visit Magrit’s mother, and I longed to ski-tour up to the fabled top of her home mountain—the dark, brooding Säntis—to peel off the climbing sealskins, and to ski back down to the valley, our own tracks alone on the mountain.

I found driving there to be transformative—not just as we purred past the shepherd huts and snowy alpine meadows, snow swirling before us on the perfect Swiss Autobahn—more because moving through the mountain passes seemed like passing through time.  We pulled into her village the evening before an Election Day. There were many such days, as Appenzell had what was called a direct democracy. Passing the graveyard, it looked like a good percentage of stones had the same last name as hers, generations of gravestones, and her father’s grave was there, and every name on every man’s stone was marked with an army rank.

We entered her Appenzellerhaus through a mudroom in the back. There was scarcely any food in the house save bread, but there were seven kinds of that. We sat around the ceramic hearth where the bread was baked, Margrit and I, while a cat lay lazily on its broad, warm crown. Her mother sat by the window, the last rays of sun flooding onto a round sampler she stitched and onto her hands, graceful and large. The local Swiss-German dialect was thick, but her mother and I were able to speak in rudimentary terms—we could talk about the bread, the barn. We did not mention the election, as that entails a more complex lexicon. Magrit’s mother showed us around, mainly the barn that seemed to be older than my home country, how clean that barn was, how Margrit’s father had always kept it so until the day he died. They had little money and got by fine on dignity. I was quartered for the night in a neighbor’s house, in the room of their son who was off in the army (as were 6 percent of all landsmen at that time).

The next afternoon, Election Day, the town bell rang, and we bid Grüss Gott to Margrit’s mother, walked down to the town square with its ancient cobblestones and water troughs.  There was some tension gathering with the people today, more than usual, auspicious, and more women in the square than usual, I learned. Everyone was preparing for the mayor to read the “Proposal to amend the cantonal constitution to grant women the right to vote and be elected in all Appenzell Innerrhoden assemblies. . .”

Margrit’s was an old family, and so, at the square, we were met by friends and relatives. Someone had a second story balcony just overlooking the square—now a page from history being written before my eyes. I wish I could find the photograph. People seemed to be whispering everywhere.

And so as we looked down at precisely the appointed moment, the Bürgermeister read: “All in favor . . .” A few stray men raised their swords in the air.  Whispers . . .

Then, “All opposed . . . Die Stimmrechte aller Bundesrätinnen,” and the sky in the town square filled with the swords of men, some of whom may have meant with that very gesture through the generations, “I am the one who will die for my family, and I am the one who will cast their vote.”

The sense that I had witnessed something historic was so strong that I could not help feeling inspired: the cobblestone square, the traditional outfits, the gleaming swords all made me feel adrift in time. The dying sense of patriarchy in the West was rationalized to me by the locals’ explanation that really the men were only voting on behalf of their households. I had no experience in evaluating 500-year-old traditions, but I understood this one to be the very source of freedom, equality, and democracy. Besides, politics aside, I loved seeing culture preserved, like fine art, and to this day I am, by nature, charmed if not blinded by folkways. 

As noted, when I recounted this story to my students years later, the story never seemed to land. The Alps? The mountains? The swords! The men! Apparently even this charming history had cast little spell over them. Were they so lacking in historical perspective that the story characters just seemed like stubborn men with swords? Did the story merely serve to make them feel even more victimized as voiceless students trapped in schooling, or trapped in a stagnant culture? Or were they just being self-possessed?

Direct democracy, which is still there in the Canton of Appenzell, is a cumbersome commitment. To reconvene in the square and raise a sword over everything that comes up is a lot of responsibility. As a matter of convenience, it made good, practical sense for the father to represent a family in the Landsgemeinde, especially if the other family members were doing other important things. In the history of the world, just imagine the right for each family to even have a vote! Who among us could sincerely call this tyranny? How amazing and rare Appenzeller democracy was compared to most places in history! And one final consideration: who would insist upon judging an entire historical development while confining themselves to today’s consciousness, as though there is no other consciousness?

My students shrugged their shoulders. I could not convey to them the human struggle or the burden of history. They cared apples of a tradition going back to William Tell—not that elementary schools even mentioned him anymore?

And had they never felt the despair of Kent State students demanding freedom, the force of Martin marching all the way to Washington? Did they even know of Alice Paul or Lucy Burns? They had probably heard little of Bobby Kennedy, much less Bobby Seale, the son of a carpenter, or Russell Means or Cesar Chavez; and probably, for all their massive music collections, never really “experienced” how Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock.

And had they never climbed mountains and looked out from the top, scanned the valley below?

I’m not sure why, but it had taken a couple generations for me to share that Appenzell election with my students. By then, my sense of personal relevance was getting a little old, and that sense is something that can make us better listeners. From them, I heard how, in this new world, the whole concept of gender was coming under scrutiny and evolving.

Some of the scrutiny was not good news for men or their historical dominance. Early in the new millennium, the wider culture was shifting, too—sometimes faster than classrooms could absorb. As teachers, we were reading, “On average, boys could achieve a high standard of self-control and discipline in an environment that allows them significant freedom to be physically active, an environment that, on average, girls do not rely upon” (Kindlon, D.). In this evolution of gender, I was concerned about the emerging uncertainty of roles for men, another almost inadmissible sentiment that seemed like a personal shadow side, an expression of my own story as anachronism:

Courageous and hyperactive sword-raisers filling the Appenzell square—make ready the beer.

Forbidden images occurred as meditations, and with no implied truth: men as hapless anachronisms, appearing heroic through the millennium primarily due to brutishness or ego. Or were those Swiss sword raisers, now already a generation ago, impassioned insurgents keeping the faith after eight centuries? I did not raise questions as conclusions, but as admissions—my own struggle to listen across a generational divide that was widening faster than I expected.

And so I tried to wonder aloud with my students: could there ever have been a legitimate cause for a paternalistic society? Were men rightfully in decline? Questions spooled out as though they masked some deeper truth, some shadowy longing. But how could I access their wisdom—enter their realm of possibility? They had no questions, only certainty.

Emerging from humankind’s harsh past, the promise of American democracy was set forth by Founding Fathers. Wasn’t this an issue that pits old versus young far more than it provokes the eternal contest of male versus female? For what does youth compel of the young if not to disturb the systems created by those before them? And what does age compel of our elders if not to protect that system from the intemperate urgencies of the young and certain?

It has always seemed unthinkable that I could let go of my beautiful Alpine folk tale. It was so real. It did matter; it had to matter. How could I bear to not tell it, much less to let it go altogether? How could I make it heard?

Margrit and her family’s sense of freedom and fearlessness was surely a world we could all stand in awe of: swords raised in courage, the enormity of the natural Alpine forces, a culture that had sustained itself with a wisdom centuries more deeply rooted than our own. And yet, in real-time and through the subsequent years it had not occurred to me that there was only one reason Magrit was able to take me to the balcony to witness the spectacle on that day:

She could not vote, either.

Nor had it ever dawned on me to ask her about this, as I think my students may have.

“The greatest tragedy that can befall a teacher,” recalled Louis Feuer, in 1977, citing Einstein, “is when he finds that his language, method, and problems have ceased to be those of the new generation of students, whose presuppositions he may find not only alien but willfully irrational.” When we find our stories are not whole. And for the first time, after decades, there in my office with a few students, I realized there was more to my story:

By then, Appenzeller women had gotten the right to vote (in 1990), but that time in the square is permanent, it still exists like a lost capsule somewhere, like a child’s carousel dream, a pure time and space to which I would never return and never could. Margrit, flower, was in true love with an Austrian fellow from across the border and I would never see her again. I was leaving the mountains for Christmas.

And there it was: Loss. Of youth. Of the old times and myth. I could not bear my own losses, much less the losses in my history lessons. I never found a way to tell my students this second part of the story. They would find it out for themselves, when they were ready.

We are not only disunited by the hills and valleys that separate the generations, we are cut off even from parts of our own lives, trapped as they are in other, distant parts of our being: distant ages, distant genders, distant ethnicities and religions, distant loves looking for connection.

ii.

Oscar Handlin, great American and teacher, whose essay had enticed me to the Alps to begin with and whose work now inspires three generations of scholars, was in his nineties when I commenced with this story, and I sent him the first draft, eventually receiving this letter in return:

My dear Dr. Grauer,

My husband's daughter forwarded to me your moving letter and article, and I hasten to thank you for both. My husband was a long standing fan of Switzerland, for its summer hiking paths - made by the clever cows who, unlike dumb human beings, don't believe in going straight up … He was almost 96 when he died and had a full life, blessed in many ways.

Oscar would have been touched by your sensitivity to his writing, and in sympathy with what you have been trying to accomplish these last twenty years. The United States has a long history in trying various educational methods, and yours is a 21st century instantiation of what this has meant - bravo and good luck to you.

I hope your article is published and receives wider circulation, and that you have attentive readers and continue ensuring the school's success.

He had given us, as teachers, plenty of warning: we cannot relive folk tales, trapped as they are in their own time and space: “In the mountains, aphorisms coined on the plains become either irrelevant or false,” he wrote …

Good luck,
Lilian Handlin (Nov 9, 2011)

But I knew the story, even if it appeared irrelevant, was also not done—and that there had to be truth to it. Long after I first read Handlin, my students have shown me why. They have gathered many times across our campus green—our own old-time town square—sorting through their generation’s inherited failures and aspirations, seeing only as far as they could in the valley, rejecting inequalities of race, economic status, age, and gender, and raising their swords for a postmodern freedom.

And I keep watching from my metaphorical balcony over the square, confronting the wild notion of a genderless generation and marveling at the vibrant students below as they raise their own swords.

I sometimes wonder if students believe their issues are the only problems that have ever existed as I might have—as if the millennium began with a clean chalkboard just for them. And maybe, for them, my epochal story was filed away next to Brothers Grimm on a quaint little shelf in their grandparents’ house.

You can always tell a generation on its way out: we imagine we’re indulging youth in their role as freedom fighters when, in truth, we may be usurping the very autonomy they need for courage. To stay in the game, you eventually have to let go—even of your heartfelt stories as your students find theirs.

Some say a real teacher is someone who makes their points persuasively, with power, imagery, and conviction. I once believed that. I don’t anymore. Real teachers are here to invite and hear the passions of their students. It’s the mysteries that are passed along to them more than the truths. The more we listen for them, the better we become—and the greater our capacity for compassionate teaching.

Maybe all our best stories are little more than interchangeable, temporal placeholders in our endless search for universal truths. Maybe we are all men in colors, wielding swords against the universe like rubbery cartoon figures—Socrates, Confucius, Rousseau, and Dewey included. Maybe what we practice as teachers is, at times, a useless thing: clinging to old, timid perspectives centered on grade books and rows of students arranged to deliver the “right” answer as we reveal the canon.

These maybes matter. But perhaps we need these practices and these histories anyway, because without them we face only loss—nothing to hold on to, and nothing that holds on to us.

And at last, I have arrived at my true, big question of the story, and I can’t ask it of my students: how much can we bear?

We are all floating. We put up a good show, keep teaching and parenting and partnering, keep listening. The generation born around the turn of this upstart millennium will never understand freedom in the way twentieth century men did—and I understand it less than I used to—but they will come to understand the freeing of human identity in ways which we still have not arrived at or even imagined, the places passion and heart take them, with us and, in good time, without us.

Students whose own appetites take them far beyond any feedback we can provide, the academic and intellectual roamers, are the ones who make teachers out of us as we cultivate those appetites with a light heart and a sense of wonder. I would love to know that my lifetime of study and travel made me a real teacher, and I do know that our generation’s stories must be passed on. This is imperative and foundational. But the real teaching is not just in the stories, it is in the faith we ultimately need to have in our students:

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.
—Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

Later that election day, Margrit pointed to the darkening sky and peaks to the east and wisely said that we were not to go up there ski touring; it could avalanche in these conditions. I had to get back to Bern, anyway, and so I packed up and drove out the steep valley that very night, alone, and the enormity of the natural forces surrounding me made the aloneness seem strange and eternal. On the way out of the village, the awesome Säntis pushed up against Enggenhüttenstrasse like a gothic cathedral, darkening the valley below, and I put behind me what is often, ironically, called the world’s only true remaining national democracy, as though it were a story from long ago. I remember this in slow time, my car headlights spotlighting the thick snowflakes, the streetlamps one after another revealing heaven while on the radio, the miraculous car radio, the glockenspiel, shimmering and spectral like a sacred, distant cowbell choir, orchestrated the whole of the ancient world in pure carols. There was only whiteness, a universe in unison, the lane of swirling snow leading me out of the mountains and into the miracle of the unknown. I was stunned at this space beyond dimension, this epiphany, and I am still stunned to this day, how the glockenspiel and the snowflakes danced together under the lamplights on that night, and equally at how those people could be a part of a timeless ecosystem such as this—why would I want to leave this world, which was both real and mythic?

Then, during that drive, I understood that time and space are not bound in a linear fashion, and that there are no absolutes—a discovery that Einstein had been circling back in Bern, where I was headed.

My story was never in the Appenzell square, nor in the courage and love of men who raised their swords once upon a time. Freedom is not in lifting the sword; it is in knowing when to let it go. My story was not in witnessing a ritual from another time, but in driving away.

 

Reference List

Feuer, L. (1977). Arthur O. Lovejoy.  The American Scholar (Summer). Washington, D.C. (358)

Handlin, O.  (1977).  Living in the Valley.  The American Scholar (Summer). Washington, D.C. (301-312).

Kindlon, D. and Thompson, M. (2000).  Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. New York. Random House.

Pinker, S.  (February 17, 2008). How attitudes to boys with ADD are changing.  London, UK.  The Sunday Times.

Robinson, J., Espelage, D. (2011). Inequities in educational and psychological outcomes between LGBTQ and straight students in middle and high school. Educational Researcher, 40(7), 315-330.

Sax, L.  (2005).  Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.  New York. Doubleday.

Whitman, W. (1855).  “I sing the body electric.” Leaves of Grass. 

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