Fast Track

Mine is a neighborhood of double-wide strollers outfitted for speed and oversize cargos and speakerphones, the better to respond to some thousand emergencies I am apparently too dim to imagine. Alas, it was not always so, but if there is any comfort to be derived from the current economic hangover, perhaps it’s a future where the sons and daughters of moguls and otherwise trailblazers will actually walk to after-school programs like FasTracKids! Or maybe they’ll just stay at home and read a book.

“Learning Cleverly Disguised as Fun!” is how that particular program advertises its revolutionary technique. You can’t make this stuff up. Actually you can (abundantly; I’ve tried), but nothing that rises to the funny-tragic level of this reality.

The banner I saw is only a couple of blocks from my house. Maybe it’s new. I don’t usually walk on that side of the street, and am generally too preoccupied trying to avoid getting kneecapped by double-wide strollers to peer into those second floor windows where somebody’s brain development is allegedly getting accelerated.

My thoughts go out to that six-year-old, passing, glancing, mouthing the words, and experiencing hellish Manchurian flashbacks about all of the stuff – role-playing games? ocular probes? Space Chimps? - somebody once told them was fun. The notion that there is some less intuitive route to enlightenment than we are able to carve in the ordinary forms of our days, our stories, our fun, is a sorry sort of surrender, I think. And the fact of anyone describing themselves, even adverbially, as clever, is either a winking acknowledgement of our mutual wisdom as grown-ups, or an admonishment that we, as parents, are too stupid and distracted to hoodwink our own children.

Intentionally or not, the brains behind FasTracKids! have managed to drag this conversation out into the open – and we should thank them for their clunky candor. Maybe - let’s hope - this is the last desperate symptom of an industry reaching critical mass, but it never hurts calling something what it is, so parents – if not children – can at least figure out if they want it. We’ll see. That banner will either still be there in a year, or it won’t.

Still I worry about our abilities to rationalize – as parents and educators – when the stakes are not so explicit. The world is full of newborns listening to Mozart, and preborns listening to Bach, and kindergarteners practicing Pilates and breaking boards with their bare hands; my sense is we take what we want from the pile, and call it wisdom. Sometimes I hear myself prattling – about music and math, about movies and manners and whatever else just happens to occur to me - and I think, really. Shut up. It’s a mysterious business, all the stuff we put into our kids, all they take out, and all of our cleverness at discerning between the two.

I thought about all of this – the fussing, constructing and instructing - a couple of months ago when I brought a book home called The Room of Wonders. It’s got that two-dimensional, deadpan look about the cover, like it’s by a Norwegian or something, but the artwork inside is more detailed and extravagant, especially where it depicts all of the junk that fills up the walls of that eponymous room - and the book is by an Italian. Pius Pelosi is a pack rat (and also literally a rat) who collects keys, driftwood, undelivered letters, shiny bits of glass and anything else he finds on his wanderings around town.

This approximates the magpie spirit of my son for whom even a crumpled bit of newspaper radiates the possibility of half-completed origami. His optimism is unfortunately at odds with the limitations of a one-bedroom apartment, so most of the stuff gets piled around the perimeters like someplace floodwaters have receded from, whereas Pius is able to display his treasures in neat little cubbies for crowds of admiring visitors. As a centerpiece, under glass, he keeps an unassuming and unexplained pebble of no apparent splendor, and when visitors begin remarking on its relative plainness – “an eyesore,” says one - well, I’m not going to tell you what happens. I might have bought it anyway, for the art, for the hobby, but the books that we like to read more than once in my house (and for seventeen dollars, we better) are necessarily a little surprising – by hooks and by turns - even when you’ve already visited their ends.

In my son’s first grade class they had something called bumper stickers which they attached - I think figuratively – to books that they read as a group. So morals? I asked. Not exactly. There is, to hear him tell it, some flexibility on what rates mentioning, and that is as it should be of course; I hope there’s no consensus. And I trust they were reading the kind of stories where the bumper sticker was not already affixed to every single page, though of course I still have my concerns.

There is surely some peril to children getting FasTracked through too many lessons masquerading as a great good time, but part of the risk is plain boredom, and much of that risk we bear too. Books like fun are popular and they are everywhere, but they don’t necessarily come with an advisory – Fables say, or Parables, or Cleverly Disguised! - and I wonder if the nobility implied by their clarion wholesomeness isn’t finally outweighed by some cynicism relating to all of the guidance we think our children aren’t getting, but possibly, desperately need. Maybe I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it be fun (and more than a little instructive as well!) to try an alternative sales model in some hermetic little backwater like Norway for example, or Italy, or Rhode Island? Like let’s just see what would happen if everyone - the people who make children’s literature and the people who consume it – concerned themselves with the beginnings, the middles and the ends of complicated stories, and let their children write the banners for themselves.