A Resurgence of Mischief

the first green shoots

---

The high school’s water fountain is very inconveniently placed. Or perhaps some sort of antagonistic architectural design is at work, a design that wants teachers in our Rhetoric School to be forced to wander through several student-swarmed hallways before we can get a drink. It’s certainly true that those impromptu journeys, empty water bottle in hand, often result in chance encounters that do both me and my students good. A greeting. A chat about what was missed during a sick day or family vacation. A moment of informal, unplanned exchange that, in its casual way, reinforces our mutual humanity.

I was on one such trip the other day when I ran into an unmoveable clot of ninth graders along my usual path and had to work around them by an alternate route. As I passed through the requisite hallway, I was deep in thought about whatever stack of essays I happened to be grading and only partly registered something strange going on. Then the old teacher’s instincts kicked in and I turned around to investigate. What were those tenth graders up to?

I craned my neck around a doorframe and saw two of them touching the near wall of the long hallways with their noses, while a gaggle of four or five more crept slowly toward their exposed backs, grinning. “What in the world are you all doing?” I asked, vaguely alarmed. They all turned to me with a shock. No answer. “Well?” I demanded a second time and finally, one of them said, with a look halfway between embarrassment and laughter, “We’re playing red light green light!” It was a game I’d played a thousand times as a kid. My deep memory had known it for what it was but, in this world of TikTok and Instagram, my conscious brain had refused to recognize it. The fact was, in the whole of my fourteen years on the faculty here, I’d never seen a high school student playing one of those classic children’s games. It hit me like a blow: the world has grown so strange that what should be normal—kids at play—now feels alien to my jaded brain.

But after that shock came a flood of delight. Like a dandelion clipped by a mower, that sense of play latent in everyone under the age of twenty will surge up with fresh strong growth if it’s given the time and sun. Over the next week, I kept my eye open and saw all sorts of capers in the halls: rock, paper, scissors, games of cards, tag, red rover. Somehow, while my back was turned, play had returned to the school’s halls.

What caused this change? Simple: we took away the phones.

As of this year, every Middle and Upper School student entering the school must slot their phone into one of a row of handsome little wooden boxes that look something like a cross between a carrying case and a birdhouse. Each student has their own slot. The boxes don’t lock, but students have to ask permission to remove the phones from them; permission which will more or less always be denied during normal school hours. It took a lot of planning, plotting, and convincing for our administrators to get this policy in place, and it met with predictable resistance, especially from a small but vocal group of parents who had gotten used to the digital tether.

But, after a week, everyone had settled into the routine. After a month, there was a palpable change in atmosphere. And now, five months in or so, the students’ old atrophied muscles of play are gaining strength again. The return of mischief to the Upper School halls has been so gradual as to be unnoticeable, but it’s a symptom of profound healing and a sign that, despite the odds being so dramatically stacked against us, our school is doing something right. It’s painful to cut off the digital head of the dandelion, but it sure does strengthen the roots.

What has any of this to do with a gardening program? Well, as I’ve written before (in several places), and also spoken about at some length, it’s my belief that, in the modern age, schools need to stick to the heritage of great books and classical methodology while also undertaking a ground-level reconsideration of their role in a young person’s life.

To put it simply, schools used to be the place, in a hemmed-in agrarian society, where young people came to get in touch with the outside world. It was in the schoolhouse that young men and women learned that, in the words of Coriolanus, “there is a world elsewhere.” But now, elsewhere is invading a young person’s life at every conceivable moment of the day, and by every conceivable means. They are constantly, floodedly, destructively in touch with the rest of the world all the time, the upshot of which has been an epidemic of depression, suicide, and social isolation. What should be a school’s role in such a world? I believe it should be to provide what agrarian life used to provide by accident: hours of quiet, intimacy, and connection with the natural world. The students are hungry for those things, even though they don’t know it, which is why, year after year, the Classical Roots Program is mentioned pointedly in graduation speeches, student surveys, and parent testimonials. School must now become the place of locatedness, of in-place-ness, of presence.

The cycle of planting, feasting, and rest that gardening enforces on us is one way of getting students so grounded. Getting rid of the phones is another vital element, like a catalyst that accelerates the reaction of quietude. Paradoxically, it turns out that this extracurricular-feeling program is a highly efficient and efficacious way of doing a school’s main business in the modern world. It’s not about teaching practical skills per se, as if all schools should become agricultural or trade schools. Instead, it’s about getting back to what the monastics, who helped shape modern education during the darkest centuries of European history, understood so intrinsically that they seldom bothered to codify it in their educational plans: that schools should enforce quiet, and that they should contain gardens. Not merely decorative gardens that delight the eye, but working gardens that train the students’ hands and nourish their bodies. The body and the soul are connected. And when we give the one wholesome work, hours of rest, and real food, the other will also be nourished. The silliness I’ve noticed in the hallways isn’t just a thing to gratify the nostalgia of someone raised in the twentieth century, it’s a little sign, a foretaste, the first green shoots of healing breaking through hard soil.

---