Paying Attention to the Teacher : AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN <i> by Tracy Kidder (Houghton Mifflin: $18.95; 262 pp.)</i>

The United States, where individualism is holy, has a pretty appalling record when it comes to the commonweal. No first-world country can touch us in the barbarous inequalities of our medical and legal systems. And can any other Western (or developed Asian) country hold a candle to the sheer vastness of our educational failure?

Though that failure, especially painful in a public school system that routinely graduates hoards of illiterates and innumerates, worsens yearly, it is not for want of analysis and recommendation. Rather, each year, as predictable as those graduations, commissions deliver reports and publishers bring out books. It is notable, I think, that the best-known books--Dennison’s, Illich’s, Kozol’s, Kohl’s--have been radical indictments by men of a system principally staffed (though not shaped) by women. Whether or not these gentlemen are right, they (except for Dennison) spent two years or less in public school teaching and then moved on to other pastures. The cumulative effect on American education of their analyses has been no more profound than butterflies through meadow grass.

All of which makes the publication of Tracy Kidder’s “Among Schoolchildren” a particularly happy event. This book is not an indictment. It offers no theory. It could not even be called an analysis. It has no ax to grind. It is simply a year in the life of one teacher. One very good teacher. But, in his careful observations, Kidder, using the sympathetic receiving equipment of a perceptive novelist, has given us the solution we need, if only we are willing to hear it.

One of the coldest, scariest human beings I have ever known, an education bureaucrat, is fond of dismissing evidence such as letters from citizens as “merely anecdotal information.” He would hate this book if he were able to read it, though its pure concreteness would make him too itchy to get very far. It could justly be said that Kidder writes more like a woman than a man. Now that would make the bureaucrat very itchy, but I hope it will allay the fears of many who should read the book. Here is a book that you could read on the beach, it is that pleasant and diverting; but here is a book that, if taken to heart by the right people, could change the face of America. If you think you’ve read your last book about education, try just this one more.

The main character is Chris Zajac, in her self-description “an old-lady teacher”--she’s 34--”who didn’t fall off the turnip cart yesterday.” She’s small and pretty, and she has the sort of wry boppy-pop style that fifth-graders adore. She doesn’t give up on kids: “One thing Mrs. Zajac expects from each of you is that you do your best. . . . If it isn’t your best, what’s Mrs. Zajac going to do?” They all know: “Make us do it over.”

Like most teachers, Chris Zajac is underpaid. Yet she misses her charges on weekends (much as she obviously loves her husband and their two children); she has nightmares about her classroom performance; she wakes in the night and worries about the difficult kids; out of her own pocket, she buys necessary supplies (that the school does not furnish) as well as occasional gifts for her students.

On a day trip to nearby Sturbridge Village (Mrs. Zajac’s school is in Holyoke, Mass.), she realizes that the immaculate exhibits of 19th-Century village life bespeak a better, gentler life than most of her students (more than half of whom are Latino) have ever experienced. She knows that poverty stacks the cards against the kids in ways that no teacher can redress, and she also knows that parents make a crucial difference: “Alice lived just a few minutes’ drive but a socioeconomic gulf away from Judith’s project. Chris figured that what the two girls had in common was probably more important: Each had two parents who took pains with her. . . . Alice’s parents had read to her from infancy; Judith’s father had always told her stories.”

The schoolchildren of the title are fully sculpted and alive. Pedro: “Chris saw the boy walking in his perky way, in the mornings, up Bowers Street, ambling happily along toward another day of academic failure, and she thought that the strength of some children was amazing.” Pedro, “who can hardly read or speak,” later astonishes everybody by scoring “in the near-genius range” on “a sophisticated test involving pattern recognition . . . . Told for perhaps the first time in his life that he was smart, Pedro said, ‘Sometime I know things and I can’t say them.’ ” Judith: “Judith’s eyes fascinated Chris. It was possible to imagine that they were centuries old, the eyes of an ancient soul in a girl’s body.” Toward the end, Judith prompts from Chris this remarkable response: “Judith gave her one of the best feelings she had experienced in her 14 years of teaching, the sensation that came from knowing that she had a child in the room who, with a little luck and guidance, would certainly surpass her.” Claude: “He had built his model on a metal serving platter. Little stones were piled up at one end, from which a chute of aluminum foil descended, depicting a waterfall, which led to the river itself. . . . And Claude, who for six months hadn’t managed to complete more than a few homework assignments, delivered a lucid description . . . of the birth of rivers . . . . As he expounded, talking fast, his right hand flapped, as it used to when he was concocting one of his loony homework excuses.”

But this is a book of fully realized, individual stories, and it is no more possible to deliver them to you here than if this were a work of fiction.

It is not surprising to learn, about halfway through Kidder’s narrative, that Chris is operating out of a religious motive, albeit one far too private for so private a woman to acknowledge publicly: “Chris didn’t talk about religion, except in church or among people very close to her. That God made people for a purpose seemed plausible to her, however. She thought God had intended her to teach, and if He had not given her the power to alter the lives of every troubled child who came into her room, He expected her to try.”

As the ragged, real-life stories of Chris’ students unfold, taking their unpredictable turns, as Chris hangs in there, the reader becomes convinced that the hopeless, absolutist perspective of such sometime teachers as Herbert Kohl is self-serving and ultimately useless in helping us formulate anything like a national prescription for education. Kidder quotes Kohl’s conclusion at the end of his two-year stint in the mid-’60s: “The thought of 25 more children the next year, 25 that might have a good year yet ultimately benefit little or nothing from it, depressed me. I wanted to think and to write, to discover how I could best serve the children.” He decides he can best serve the children by getting out of the classroom. Pretty depressing, all right.

For teachers like Chris Zajac to espouse such a conclusion--that, in essence, The System destroys the value of individual effort--would be to throw in the towel not only on teaching but on human life itself. Luckily for her students, she is probably not up to anything so Promethean (or macho) as systemic analysis. Rather, she takes the same approach as Mother Teresa, who, when she was once asked how she could begin to approach anything so socially overwhelming as the dispossessed of Calcutta, replied: “One by one.”

Luckily for us, Kidder has had the patience, wisdom and absorbency to present to us the wonder of an effective human being who would never have had the self-importance to draw such attention to herself. “Many people,” concludes Kidder in this fine and temperate (favorite words of his) book, “find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.” What American education needs is fewer analysts and administrators and many more Mrs. Zajacs.

Unluckily for the next generation, there are going to be far fewer Mrs. Zajacs in the future. In a country that has never given its humanity-holders anything like the honor it has accorded its rugged individualists, there has been during the last 30 years such a growth in self-absorption that it practically constitutes an evolutionary alteration in Homo americanus. There is a more and more aggressive self-seeking in politics, art, literature and education--in short, throughout the public sector. Can any of us pretend that a President today could get away with the inaugural line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”?

But even if this were not so, a positive social development has permanently altered the educational quotient. As phenomenally better-paying jobs open up to smart, accomplished women, education can hold the Mrs. Zajacs only if teachers’ salaries are doubled and their work loads halved. In the end we will have to do it, but probably not before the hidden time bomb of growing ignorance explodes into a visible, undeniable, country-wide catastrophe.