Dr. Grauer's Column - Living in The Village

Living in The Village

Maybe the weirdest situation I've ever been in was when, one time, walking across Washington Square, a large, young woman stuck her hand deep down my front pants pocket. I swiveled slightly, backed up against a park bench, and jackknifed into the seated position, which pulled on her arm and made her swivel down awkwardly over me; so there we were nose to nose, breath to breath. I could see tiny bumps on her moist facial skin.

The wallet wasn't in that pocket, it was in the back and I don't think she really knew what to do. She had a great hold she did not want to give up so she just said, "You give me your money," but I was pinned down and couldn't get my hand to my wallet (which barely had any money in it anyway). We were both trapped together in this liminal zone and I felt a twinge of empathy for her, like we were old shipmates but with different ranks (mine was better).

I had just moved to the Village to start my fulltime career and I think it was my first walk. It was 1975 and people were just getting over using words like "totalitarianism" and "weltanschauung." The age of nationalism was ending, Dylan was already global and not a Village phenom any more--the Café Wha was going into its second generation. The Village Voice was becoming actual, legit news; The New School was still cool but you weren't going to meet any more beat poets there. Like me there on the bench, the whole scene was sort of in limbo. It was the cusp of an age of global and cultural interaction.

Guest panelists from around the world speak about how they came to the United States during an Immigration Panel in U.S. History class - September 5, 2018

I bought in hook, line and sinker, at least in my role as a teacher. I had just taken a job in a posh, private prep school for $8000 a year and shuttled underground every day between the East Village and the Upper East Side world of the children of psychiatrists, actors who met weekly at AA to head out for nights of drinking, and advertising execs we would call "Mad Men" decades later. I didn't fit into either world well at all, and sat up in my studio long into the nights developing elaborate, resourceful global lesson plans for classes I taught in arts and humanities.

I learned to fit almost anything that inspired me into these plans. I created a student sailing club down in the South Street Seaport, and played my class a shanty. I made scavenger hunts for scurrying around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I told my students about Maslow and had them psychoanalyze Henry VIII. I had no claim to be a history teacher other than an unexplored craving for finding some kind of heritage. I was 25 and still pretty depressed and isolated.

A visionary named Andrew Smith was publishing a newsletter called "Global Perspectives in Education" then, and I could hardly wait for the new one each month because it meant so much more to me than the cardboard history in my required textbook and teachers editions where everything in the whole of creation was a footnote to the real history of civilization, which was imperialism. World history consisted primarily of the study of European cultures and everything in their scope and periphery. I thought global perspectives would take me out of there. I knew Smith would not be picked up by the major publishers and that the big shots thought the whole global perspectives movement was wishy washy. That might be what made it attractive to me and I taught my students all about how most of the people in the world ate rice most of the time, and about things which carried little weight in curricula obsessed with great men and evil dictators.

''You can read about Dick and Jane, as we did in the 50's and 60's,'' said Andrew Smith. ''Or you can read about Juan, Maria and Lee." It was all going to be a global village, as though that was something real or a place to live, realer than Greenwich Village. Did me and Smith really think it was about Dick and Jane, or that Juan and Maria could ever replace the archetypical heroes and villains human cultures and historians have always relied upon?

The Grauer School's Youth & Government Club - January 2017

That was the '70s. Around the turn of the '80s, I sent away for a new subscription of "Global Perspectives" and advertisements started appearing, and the whole thing turned into "The American Forum for Global Perspectives" as though it were drawn into an oceanic whirlpool of Americana. I thought Andrew Smith was selling out our cause, the closest thing I'd ever had to a cause. Maybe he needed the funding. Maybe he'd been plenty insulted if not threatened.

As soon as the '80s came, I moved. The Cuban Missile Crisis was long over, communism was winding down, even nationalism was suspect, but globalism was suspect, too. I moved to the center of the world, the exact opposite of a global village, Switzerland, and for the first time starting to feel at home, and to feel a sense of place. I remember dating a charismatic British girl there who claimed her father was the actual inventor of the prefabricated plastic house, how overwhelming it was for me when that relationship was happening, and how overwhelming it was when it was all splintering apart with her and Switzerland. I started missing the sea and tinkering with old boats.

My doctoral thesis, published by the University of San Diego in 1988, was named "Think Globally, Act Locally," after a phrase I still attribute to Harlan Cleveland. It traces how the most well-intentioned efforts to teach students "global perspectives in education," whatever they are, are coopted by educators promoting their own interests in national security, the politics of education, foreign language teaching, school integration, and a handful of other areas intended to advance a handful of political interests, very little of which was going to advance a global perspective, if you asked me. The rank and file world history teacher at that time still equated global perspectives in education with the eradication of the blue eyed blonde, anyway, and some still do.

In 1991, I opened up The Grauer School, which was not so much about dropping out of anything as it was trying to find something. The Soviet Union collapsed that year, and I remember making gigantic hyperboles about how the whole national U.S. education system was going to collapse like an old barn.

These days I long to be moored amidst a real movement, a canvas and wood sailing ship lure to some ideal world and an identity worth working single-mindedly for through all the flak, and for the most part I only find these moorings in books, in the long-ago world of villages, tribes, and ancient wisdom, not in the future. And I find them at The Grauer School. But I don't mean to idealize village life, either, which was hard for many.

Grauer students practicing the ancient art of Yoga for their Physical Education class - September 5, 2018

In no time, an older guy came up from behind us and gave the mean girl a stern but fatherly reprimand: "You leave him alone," he lectured. "You're going to give our people a bad name." She withdrew her face, her unreachable eyes, and slid her chubby paw from my pocket, a little bit scolded and strutted on, and I sat alone on the bench and thought it was about time to withdraw for some lesson planning up in my studio just a few paces away on Waverly Place, my topsail schooner on the eleventh floor. I worked really hard through all those years of learning to be a teacher and eventually a school founder and, after a while, I started to suspect that I was on to something larger as an educator, some vision that was developing but I didn't know what it was. Maybe vision is nothing more than the ability to look back and find a big pattern, anyway. Maybe the liminal zone is all there is. Maybe that encounter was as real a global village as I would find.