AC_1965_Web

171 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R chestrated by Bill Hooper: a formal dinner in the cafe with tributes was followed the next day with an ox roast on the golf course (where the solar panels are today), perfor- mances and reminiscences in the amphitheatre, and non-stop conver- sations among hundreds of friends, family, alumni and colleagues. Many of us kids from Yellow Springs went to Antioch, but long before that we went to the Antioch nursery school and the Antioch School. Now the longest running progressive democratic elemen- tary school in the U.S., the Antioch School remains for me the high point of my many long years in American education and the gold standard for what teaching and learning should be: serious, creative, democratic.“Democracy”was an im- portant element in the school’s doc- trine of child-centered learning; in practice it was rarely fun. Kids or- ganized much of the day (archived records tell me I was once “Sports Manager”), and voted on everything: choice of recess activities, selection of the annual school play, and debate over the lunch policy (we each had to clear all trash and crumbs from our lunch space or incur the wrath of the “Lunch Manager”). A trans- gression (crumbs!) might land you on the agenda for the weekly class meeting; or in our parlance, you would be “brought up.” Innocent or guilty, you trembled when someone shouted across the playground “I’m gonna bring you up!”Typical trans- gressions besides crumbs: bullying, cheating, picking on others, packing rocks inside snowballs, being a bad sport, and shunting your crumbs into your neighbor’s space. One leg- endary incident: a precocious third- grader cut and glued small strips of yellow paper to his penis for “hair” for all to see. Discussion and adjudication were in our youthful hands, though adult oversight ensured that no Lord of the Flies scenario would develop. The teachers were amazing: instead of grades, they prepared detailed progress reports for our parents, as- tonishing in their quality of obser- vation and narrative.The school still gives no grades. In 1952,Arthur Lithgow founded theAntioch Shakespeare Festival and audiences came from all over the U.S. and abroad and included Brooks Atkinson, the theater critic of The New York Times . Professional NewYork ac- tors joined the repertory company each year withAntioch students and Yellow Springs community mem- bers, for the first ever staging of all 37 Shakespeare plays over a period of five years, one each week and a different play every night for the last two weeks of the summer.Again, we children played many parts; we also ushered, went to cast parties and hung around. I fell deeply in love with a New York actor named David Hooks; I asked him to be my godfather (stunned, he said yes) and told my mother I wanted to marry him when I grew up.“You can’t,”she said, “he’s homosexual.”What? “He loves men.”Life, it seemed,was to be full of perplexities. As a faculty child and townie, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Antioch College. But I hated the Seven Sisters schools I sampled and in the end nothing could com- pete with the co-op plan. I wasn’t alone: ten students out of 55 in our Bryan High School graduating class of 1960 went to Antioch (while oth- ers including Sheri Scott and David Landes joined us after the first year elsewhere). Barrie Dallas (Grenell), Jemi Faust, and I—friends since age two—made a pact that at Antioch we would lead separate lives, as though we were new freshmen at a strange college. How futile: first all three of us were assigned to the same div, then to the same floor of Birch, and then when my parents and I pulled into the driveway be- hind the dorm with my stuff, who should be unloading in front of us but the Dallases and the Fausts. Though many Antioch faculty were old family friends, the class- A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 1947 and 1948: Butler’s pantry, Mr. Birch’s birdfeeder, Antioch nursery school with Jemi Faust.