Orphanage in Michigan

Living Local Histories

This autumn, an elderly neighbor named Keith called and asked if our twelve year old son could come down to the house and help pick up sticks which had fallen in the lawn after a big storm. We live in a backward part of the country where there is no app for picking up sticks. It’s the part of the country where, when the trees fall and the power goes out, a guy with a chainsaw and some tools has to go fix it so everyone can get back to algorithming.

I hope the kids in the STEM schools are safely indoors and working on the app for picking up sticks. The ones in the classical schools are busy inside reading about the great sticks of history and then having “dialogues” about them. For the uninitiated, a dialogue is where students get to practice dominating a conversation and feeling right whether they are or not.

But while they were all busy with that, our son went down and helped Keith with the sticks.

Turns out, even in the field, definitions matter. Some of the sticks were actually tree trunks and needed the guy with the chainsaw, so I came down to buck and haul the big stuff.

Now, Keith knows I work in education and that I’ve founded a school. (trying to quit) As I fueled and oiled the saw, Keith told me how, up until high school, he had attended a one-room school just a couple miles from where he now lives—out in the Michigan countryside. By the time he reached high school, there was a big consolidated school, and all the older kids started going there.

I was curious and asked him how the one room school worked. He looked at me a little quizzically before shrugging and saying, “It was good. The teacher would tell you what you needed to know, then you’d do your work while she was telling other kids what they needed to know to do their work.”

“What if you got stuck?” I asked.

Keith, patient with an obviously stupid question: “well, there were lots of kids around. Some older, some younger. Some smarter, some dumber. Someone could always help out…or you’d just figure it out.”

Someone call the DOE. I’d like to nominate Keith as the first education laureate of the United States. Is there a presidential common sense medal?

I won’t detail the virtues of the one-room school here, and of course, it’s not the only workable model. But there is a great deal of promise in the micro-school movement. Others have written long and well about this so I’ll simply note the obvious strengths all of which derive from the principle of subsidiarity:

Subsidiarity - locally crafted solutions implemented at the lowest feasible level.

1. Increases the accountability and dignity in the relationship between teachers & parents.

2. Increases relevance and social & cultural coherence of the teaching and learning.

3. Facilitates logistical adaptation to local conditions (rather than one size fits all).

4. Reduces expenses while increasing compensation (at least potentially)

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

As I quietly wrapped my head around all the implications about student performance conveyed by Keith’s comment, he launched into a story about his father who grew up just a couple miles from where we were standing.

When Keith’s father was only eight years old or so, his father died and left his wife with six kids and a farm to figure out. Apparently when the local authorities discovered this, they sent a couple cars to the farm and told the mother to pick three kids to keep and that the others had to go into an orphanage. When the little ones heard this, they bolted.

Keith told me that his eight year old father hid in the hayloft of the barn with a little brother. Eventually one of the social workers climbed the ladder in the barn, found the two boys and stashed them in the back of the government car. Next stop: an orphanage in Coldwater, Michigan.

Because one of the boys was eight and the other was six, they were split up into age-segregated quarters. Each night, Keith’s dad would sneak out a window and across the grounds to the building where they kept the younger kids. He could always find his brother by listening outside the windows for someone crying. Apparently, the six year old just couldn’t stop crying. They would sit by the window together, the younger boy inside, his older brother outside, until Keith’s father had to sneak back to his own quarters. This continued for several months and then, one day, the crying stopped.

The older boy kept making his trip night after night, searching for his little brother, but he couldn’t find him again. Years passed, and eventually he left the orphanage as a young man not knowing what had happened to his little brother. Had he hardened his little heart and stopped the tears—and lost his brother in the process? Was he dead? Adopted? Transferred to another orphanage?

Keith told me that many years later his father was a grown man working in a machine shop. A fellow machinist noted Keith’s unusual last name and told him that his sister had married someone close to his age with the same last name. There are some big holes in my understanding of the story, but eventually the two men met, compared notes, and sure enough, half a life later, the two state-orphaned boys had found each other.

Keith’s father came to learn that his little brother had been adopted by a couple who came to the orphanage and saw the boy who could not stop crying. They didn’t know he had a brother—and anyway, they gave him a shot and tried to dry all those tears.

I don’t know what impressed me the most as I heard all this. It might have been the intense localness of it all. This whole story played out within a 30 mile piece of southern Michigan. Keith represents one generation of many… just an American family in the same place, living, suffering, dying, telling stories.

Another thing that struck me was the vexed role of the government in his story: good, bad, ugly. I couldn’t detect any resentment as he told the story. I wonder if his father could have told about hiding in the barn or losing his mother and siblings with the same even keel?

And finally, Keith is one of many older gentlemen who live on country roads in Michigan. He has stories to tell, and I bet he’s not the only one. Between the algorithms and the dialogues in school today, I’m betting the younger generation is not going to hear most of those stories. But I think, generally speaking, it would be better if they did.