Overseeing the Alligator Benches

Written by Paul Bianchi

In early September the alligator benches outside my office were rebuilt through the generosity of a memorial gift from a good friend of the school. The new benches are true to the original design, which in an historical neighborhood is important. Seeing and hearing them be rebuilt reminded me of an essay I wrote about the benches 25 years ago. I recycle it here with only minor changes.

It’s a noisy game with all the shrieking one would expect in an alligator chase.  Sometimes one of the pursued will hang thoughtlessly on the small limb of the dogwood tree next to the west bench.  Keeping that dogwood alive and intact has long been one of the many obsessions of my job.  I rap on my office window, a window that doesn’t open without a hydraulic lift.

“Get off the tree,” I shout using hand gestures proven over the years to be an effective substitute for language.  A “what’s-he-saying?” look comes over the children until someone deciphers the pantomime.  “He wants us to leave the tree alone.”  Momentary break in the action… Shriek, shriek.

It’s been a great view from the window for all these years.  If my office were high up overlooking the campus, I would see Paideia only from a lofty perspective and succumb to those detached musings of grandeur which overcome me when I gaze out the window of an airplane.  My location is an apt metaphor: the life of a school is on the ground floor amidst the shrieking; the alligator benches were designed for one thing but adapted by children for their purposes.  As adults, we oversee them, but half the time they can’t hear what we say, so we resort to acting out our message.  Children grow up and move on, but we would like the tree to survive for the next generation.

Paideia was not born out of any lofty perspective or utopian pretense.  People love a good creation story, but ours is as ordinary as a barn building.  No, the school was not started by a few rebel teachers leaving Galloway in pursuit of Truth.  No, I did not wake up one morning in the second year of my teaching career possessed by the need to have my own school. When Elliott Galloway first suggested I talk with a group of Emory area parents interested in starting a school, I did not even know where DeKalb County was. I thought it was where they flew those mammoth C5A airplanes because with my accent, Cobb and DeKalb sounded alike.

A handful of families decided to start the school. They had been frustrated by their efforts to get DeKalb County Schools to be less standardized and more open to innovation as well as integrate.   They asked Elliot Galloway to open up a branch of Galloway in Druid Hills, but his school had just opened and was not ready for franchising. He did suggest the name Paideia and gave them my name and probably others. These original trustees contacted me, but being only 24 at the time and not knowing, among many other things, the difference between Cobb and DeKalb County, I told them I was not interested.  

The Paideia people forged ahead with their plans. The school would be an elementary school and it would open in September, 1970, in space leased from the Jackson Hill Baptist Church.  The church deacons approved the lease, but in July, six weeks before the intended opening, the congregation of the church vetoed the contract. After that rejection by the Jackson Hill congregation, the trustees folded up their plans, went on vacation, and vowed to organize anew in the fall.  In October they approached me again.  Six months had elapsed and I must have felt that it had been a summer of unusual personal growth because this time when offered the job of headmaster, I accepted. 

 It would be nice to think that my youthful intelligence and uncommon wisdom got me hired over a long list of experienced candidates, but the truth is that there were no other candidates. How could there be? These parents were trying to hire someone to head up a school with no buildings, no faculty, no students, and no money. It wasn’t a school; it was barely an idea.  Nonetheless, the job came with a great title, “headmaster”, which to my public school sensibilities conjured up images of an Irish setter sleeping in front of my office fireplace as I read history and wore tweeds. Also, some people find me ambitious.

Part of the Paideia creation story is the optimism and hopefulness of its beginning.  The school began as one of those alternative school flowers sprouting out of the reform spirit of the 1960’s. Eras of reform often bring excess, the proverbial baby thrown out with the bath water.  Paideia has experienced such excesses, and those of us who have perpetrated them have agreed among ourselves not to discuss our follies in hope that they will eventually pass from collective memory.  But reform efforts are also premised on the optimistic notion that if we work hard, the world can be improved. The original families and teachers who started Paideia believed that there were better ways to educate children and create a healthier environment for their development.  Even before we were able to reveal the location of the first building at 1509 Ponce, families of almost 100 children sent in tuition. That’s a great deal of faith to place in a school not founded on the promise of heavenly guidance or divine intervention.

The hopefulness of our beginning is a legacy which continues today.  It is also, I believe, a metaphor for so much of the optimism which pervades the school.  Paideia remains willing to try something new, to give a kid a new start, to rearrange the institution to foster teaching talent, to venture out on the sometimes thin ice of innovation.

It is tempting to try to view the past systematically or to unearth underlying principles which have guided and now explain our development.  We should be appropriately skeptical of such attempts.  All of our memories are selective and blurred by the continuous nature of the weavings in the tapestry.  There is no big bang theory which explains the school’s origin, nor are there fixed ideological principles which have governed its growth.  It took us almost ten years to get around to writing down a Framework of Values, and even then, we were quick to insist that these not be understood as the Ten Minus One Commandments of Paideia School.

Ideology and schools do not mix well.  Teaching and learning are too personal and idiosyncratic to be wedged into neat prescriptions or reduced to formulas.  Instead of ideology, Paideia has put its faith in people and the liberating effect a healthy community can have on their growth.  In order to create the best environment for children, schools need to promote an optimum environment for the adults who spend their days and lives with children: teachers.  I have many responsibilities as head of the school, but none is more important than selecting teachers and working with others to maintain a school where good teachers can do their best work.  The buildings, the brochures, the curriculum, and the administrative organization matter only to the extent to which they facilitate teaching and therefore learning.  This approach has defined Paideia.

So has the determination to enjoy our time with children, to celebrate our serious work.  The Framework of Values speaks to the importance of the present in education.  Not everything should be done or rationalized as preparation for life; as John Dewey said, education is life itself.  The best way to increase the chances of children having happy and productive adulthoods is to offer them happy and productive experiences in childhood.  If we want that environment for our children, we must also promote it for adults.  Everyone should want to come to school.

I have loved coming to Paideia each morning for all these years.  I love the variety in every day, the unpredictability, the chance to do almost sacred work with unending irreverence.  Despite our serious goals, laughter and joy fill the campus.  Paideia is a truly wondrous school that all of us have built and are still creating.  Mostly we do not to step back and take time to look at all of it.  The shrieks from the alligator benches are too alluring, and they fill our lives.

---