shot Oct 30, 2004, 3:40 mins
The festivities for Woodstock School’s 150th Anniversary included a recital on sitar by Sanjeeb Sircar in the school library. This is only about a quarter of the full piece.
sitar: Sanjeeb Sircar – tabla: Bharat Shinde
My classmate Chris was playing air tabla; I think he studied tabla in school (so did I, for a semester, but I was as hopeless at it as I am at other musical instruments – all I can do is sing).
shot Oct 28, 2004, 33 secs
Oct 29, 2004 – evening and well into the night
Next on the agenda was an outdoor dinner and campfire at the campground just above Hanifl Center, organized by Tenzing and Tsering, with their sons helping out. Gautam is a very talented guitarist.
I’ve been doing lots of reading for the Woodstock history project, including some books that may be interesting even to non-Woodstockers. I was excited to finally lay hands on the journal of Fanny Parkes, an Englishwoman who lived in India from the 1820s to 40s. She was the first person to write about Mussoorie and Landour (the Himalayan town which is the site of the school), so is quoted in many of my sources, but her book has been out of print since 1850. It has now finally been republished (under the title “Begums, Thugs & White Mughals”), thanks, I suspect, to William Dalrymple, author of “White Mughals” (another source I’m using). Fanny was an amazing woman who travelled extensively in India and enjoyed everything and everyone she encountered, at a time when it was becoming unfashionable among the British to like anything much about the country they were taking over. Her book is rich in detail about life in India in those times, an excellent source for all kinds of research.
For current news for Mussoorie and Uttaranchal, see The Garhwal Post.
Growing up in Bangladesh and India, I observed that every scrap of paper, or anything else potentially useful, was re-used. Peanuts bought from a roadside stand were given to me in a little bag, carefully handmade from a page of a Singapore telephone directory. At school, the kabadi-wallahs (second-hand men) would come around collecting paper, cloth, and tins, for which they would pay by the kilo. This meant that our school papers and love letters could (embarrassingly) turn up as bags in the bazaar; we took great care to burn anything that we wouldn’t want anyone to read.
Woodstock School and its environment encouraged thrifty habits. There simply wasn’t a lot of stuff to buy, let alone throw away. Sometimes even the basics, like electricity and water, went missing. In a drought year (the spring and summer after a failed monsoon), power frequently went out because there was no water in the mountain rivers to generate hydroelectricity. Studying by candlelight sounds romantic for Abraham Lincoln, isn’t so great in real life. (Woodstock now has generators, and uninterruptible power supplies for its computers.)
Then the local springs dried up, and we had no water to take showers or even flush toilets. Servants would bring up water from a rainwater tank, and we flushed using buckets. Nowadays, although I love taking hot baths, I always wince at the water left in the tub afterwards, wasted. In our previous (small) apartment, the bucket used for mopping the floors lived under the bathroom sink, so I would simply leave the water in the tub, and flush with that water until it ran out or we needed to drain the tub to take showers. I have had to explain this habit to people who couldn’t understand why I do not reflexively pull the plug after a bath. I’d like a house designed to use bath and shower water to flush toilets.
India’s recycling habits meant that there was very little trash on the Mussoorie hillsides, until recent years when plastic shopping bags and packaging became popular. Suddenly, the garbage bloomed. I suppose increasing wealth (for some) also meant that people were less careful, because plastic bags weren’t the only thing being thrown away. Dick Wechter, a Woodstock staff member keenly interested in mountain environmental issues, found a solution. He paid local sweepers (untouchables, the poorest of the poor) to collect trash from the hillsides, which they sold to the kabadi-wallahs, in the end making more than enough money to pay the collectors’ salaries. Dick has also been promoting the use of biodegradable paper bags or reusable cloth bags for shopping, and composting wet waste.
Italy was becoming recycling-conscious just about the time we got here (1991). It started with glass, which you would put into a large plastic bell, usually located on a traffic island or sidewalk within a block or two of your home. The bell had little round portholes near the top, into which you would push one bottle at a time, dropping it with a satisfying crash to the bottom. Once a month or so the glass truck would come along. It had a miniature crane on the back, with a hook which would pick up the bell by a loop of steel cable sticking out of its top. The crane would swing the bell over the open bed of the truck, and then a second hook would pull a second loop which opened the bottom of the bell – MEGA CRASH as hundreds of glass bottles fell. This was a less pleasing sound, especially at 6 am.
A little later, paper recycling bins turned up on the streets as well, though they were sometimes set on fire by vandals. Then plastic. For a while, in Milan, we had to separate out “humid” (organic, compostable) garbage into special containers and biodegradable bags, but the Comune of Milan gave that up when it was found to cost more to make it into fertilizer than farmers were willing to pay for it. A couple of years ago, Milan’s sanitation authority also moved recycling closer to home, by putting bins for paper, plastic, and glass into the courtyards of apartment buildings. This was a good idea, but the execution was confusing. Aluminum (soft drink) cans were supposed to be placed with glass; I never did figure out what to do with other kinds of cans. Some kinds of plastic could be recycled, others not. The city also tried to increase recycling rates by fining anyone who messed up. In a building complex with hundreds of people, this meant fining the entire complex, since no individual culprit could be identified. One irritated resident of a fined building noticed that sometimes the garbage men themselves weren’t fussy: he photographed a truck loading both recyclable and general garbage into the same compartment, clearly wasting the public’s efforts at recycling.
Lecco was up for an award last year as one of the most recycling cities in Italy, and I can see why. We have three bags: umido (compostable “wet” waste), sacchetto viola (violet bag, for plastic, paper, cardboard, wood), and sacchetto trasparente(transparent bag – non-recyclable). I assume that the stuff in the sacchetto viola is hand-sorted somewhere along the way, which is more sensible than trying to make confused old ladies do it at home. I recycle even more paper now that I don’t have to tear the plastic windows out of envelopes and food cartons. We have separate (small) garbage bins under the sink for umido and general garbage. Glass, unfortunately, still has to be carried to a bin down the road. We collect it into a plastic container out on the balcony, and every now and then Enrico takes a walk with a big bag of glass.
The plastic shopping bag problem is somewhat mitigated in Italy by the simple expedient that supermarkets charge 5 cents each for them. So people tend to take fewer of them (I am always left gasping at the profligacy with which American supermarkets bag groceries), and/or bring re-usable bags of their own. Also, kitchen garbage pails are small enough that these bags can be used to line them, saving the expense of buying garbage bags. You have to take the garbage out more often, but you can take it anytime, down to a trash room in your building, where the people responsible for cleaning the building will get it out to the street on the correct day for collection.
Jan 10, 2004
Mike Looijmans writes:
“In Belgium it is very common to collect rain water (usually from the roof) in an underground tank, and use this water for things like flushing toilets, washing and so. In many Belgian places, tap water is not drinking water but usually untreated ground or rain water. ‘Clean’ water for cooking and drinking is usually provided from separate taps.
In the Netherlands, all tap water is drinking water. In the east and south of the country, the water is taken from underground wells and is the same stuff which is sold in bottles at exorbitant prices in supermarkets. In fact, some types of bottled water sold internationally would not pass the Dutch criteria for tap water. Though it sounds like a terrible waste to use this water for car washing and such, the water as it is pumped up from the ground needs very little treatment, just filtering out the sand is usually enough. The water companies use trout to monitor the quality. A trout swimming in the water stream is monitored by a computer system. When the fish makes a sudden movement, alarm bells start ringing as these fish are very sensitive to pollution.”
In America, high school is hell. The movie The Breakfast Club (1985) used sharply-delineated characters to illustrate the social divisions that exist in many/most schools: the jock, the prom princess, the stoner, the brain, the geek. It’s a caste system, where positions are won by looks, money, or athletic ability, and the hierarchy is maintained by ostracism, teasing, and violence.
Columbine focused attention on the extreme results: the outcast loners who exacted bloody revenge. Steps have been taken to prevent recurrence; weapons searches have been instituted (in many schools, simply increased), conflict-resolution courses and post-trauma counseling are offered. Yet bad stuff continues to happen, some of it perpetrated by the top dogs on the underdogs, some of it by underdogs using weapons to shift the balance of power. The underlying problem has not changed: there are still top dogs and underdogs.
One solution being tried is separation: if you can’t survive in a normal high school, go somewhere else. The Harvey Milk School in New York city was created for gay students who were mercilessly bullied in other schools.
The New York Times (“School Away From School,” Dec 7, 2003) now reports on virtual high schools, where kids can do high school coursework at long distance, with testing, grading, and teacher support provided online. Some of the virtual school students interviewed had suffered in the high school social system, others feared what they themselves might become under social pressure. Some are simply too smart, and several grades ahead of their age group (a proven recipe for social disaster), others suffer various degrees of distraction/ADD, and find they can concentrate better at home.
Homeschooling (where the parents do the teaching themselves) is also common in the US. For some families, this is a religious choice; for some, it’s about quality (or special needs); for many, it’s probably both.
You have to wonder what the kids are missing in all of these non-standard school experiences. A fair amount of misery, to be sure. But what happens after high school, when they suddenly have to deal with all sorts of people? (Yes, I know that many homeschooling parents go to great effort to ensure that homeschooling does not cut their kids off from the usual kid experiences and contacts; I also know some whose main reason for homeschooling is to keep the kids away from “bad influences.”)
There’s got to be a better way for adolescents to get an education. I don’t have definitive answers, but I’ve been thinking hard about examples I’m familiar with from other parts of the world.
At Woodstock, tolerance was and is the norm, and violence is rare. In my four years of high school, I only heard about one incident in which a guy even tried to hit somebody. (He missed, and smashed his hand into the wall.) Severe bullying and teasing were fairly uncommon in my day, and as far as I know still are.
There are plenty of differences among Woodstock students – nationality, race, religion, wealth, background, you name it. But there’s no caste system. There are jocks, brains, prom queens, and stoners – and they’re often the same people. Maybe this is because the school is so small that we all had to fill multiple roles. My roommate was a basketball player and a cheerleader, played in band and orchestra, and worked on the yearbook. I was a journalist and public works artist, worked on the yearbook, wrote a student handbook (my first manual/user guide), and was president of the dorm. Another classmate was student body president, on several sports teams, and was a yearbook photographer. Of course we all had plenty of schoolwork to do as well. Maybe we just didn’t have time for the rubbish that goes on in American schools.
The rigid social divisions of American high schools don’t seem to exist in Italy, either. Ross tells me that there are some cooler kids, though in her current class she can’t tell me who they are or what makes them cool. Her middle-school class had an alpha male, so-considered partly because of his trendy clothing. Her current class has some kids who don’t interact much; she is studying the problem, trying to figure out how to involve them more in the social life of the class. In any case, they don’t seem to be particularly bullied or teased.
Maybe the American emphasis on competitive sports is part of the problem. Italian schools don’t do sports in the same way. They have physical education classes, and Ross’ current high school has after-school basketball, but it doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Lecco is an athletic town, and many kids do competitive sports, but elsewhere, either as individuals or with teams that are not related to the schools. So athletic ability is not particularly noticed in school.
Woodstock has plenty of sports, but, in my day, being an athlete didn’t carry more cachet than any other accomplishment. I don’t recall anybody swooning over a guy because he was captain of this or that team. Good sportsmanship was considered more important than winning (though winning was also fun).
Perhaps Woodstock and Italian schools have less strife for very different reasons. In Woodstock’s case, it’s partly due to the extreme variety among the students: there are so many differences that no single group can easily rule the roost.
What works in Italy may be homogeneity: everyone in a given school is very similar to everyone else in background and experience, and any differences are smoothed down, de-emphasized. There are no accelerated classes for extra-smart kids, and those with disabilities (physical or learning) are, as far as possible, mainstreamed into regular classes, with extra teaching support provided right there. This also applies to recent immigrants, who generally attend regular schools and lessons, with some extra help for Italian language.
So what goes wrong in American schools? I’m groping here, but maybe the problem is an intolerant heterogeneity. America is still a melting pot, but American culture demands that people fit in, and take on the same values as some fictive majority. Kids are especially conservative, and not inherently politically correct, so this is played out more overtly in school than later in life. Now there’s a scary thought: is American high school simply a microcosm of what’s going on, clandestinely, in American culture at large?
Note (Oct 7, 2010): Sadly, there have been cases of bullying at Woodstock in more recent years. And it’s all gotten much worse in the US.
