April 11, 2024 : Issue #65

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

The first of two parts on Kindergarten, to begin with its roots in the nineteenth century and role in the rise of the avant garde in the twentieth (next time, possible lessons for the twenty-first). And further thoughts on Gaza, six months into the disaster, as the BBC interviews the Likudist economics minister, Nir Barkat.

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Main Event

The coming 50th anniversary of my graduating class from Cowell College at the then-still-quite-experimental University of California at Santa Cruz, which alas I am not going to be able to attend but will be very much in my thoughts over the coming weekend, put me in mind of a two-part fantasy I entertained about ten years ago around the notion of how a similarly torqued utopian venture might play out nowadays, one which began, as it happened, with a return to the taproots of kindergarten. We’ll start there, and then next week follow up with the utopian fantasy itself.

From the Archive

The Kindergarten of the Avant Garde:
From Froebel to Legos and Beyond
(via Brosterman)

Glasstire, August 3, 2014

Back in 2014, the rerelease of Norman Brosterman’s marvelous 1997 volume, Inventing Kindergarten, long (and scandalously) out of print, thanks in part to a Kickstarter campaign funded by its many, many fans, afforded me the occasion for a fresh look at Brosterman’s beguiling thesis, and a bit of speculative jaunt beyond that.

Because “Inventing” is the precise word, for, as Brosterman elaborates, it’s not as though kindergarten always existed. It had to be invented and it even had an inventor. For most of European history, no one had bothered educating children before the age of seven, as it wasn’t until around that age that one might be confident they would survive into adulthood, so why bother? By the 1830s, however, it was becoming clear that if kids had made it to age four, they’d likely make it altogether; and this realization had a catalyzing effect on one German educator in particular, a charismatic crystallographer, of all things (and how often does one get to use those two words in one phrase?), named Friedrich Froebel.

Over the next several decades (through his death in 1852), Froebel elaborated an ever more specific theory and practice for the deployment of kindergartens (his term), small schools for children starting around age four, in which the kindergartners were the teachers—the gardeners of children—and the gardening took the form of guided free play: no tests, no drills, no grades, not even any reading, ‘riting, or ‘rithmetic. Just patterns and patternings (remember, Froebel started out as a crystallographer): a sequential exposition of and exposure to form and the formful.

Key to Froebel’s method was a succession of “gifts,” twenty of them in all, small boxes containing progressively more challenging materials and activities, which the kindergartner gave her charges, each in his or her own good time, as they became ready for them. The first gift, for example, consisted of colorful hand-crocheted yarn-wrapped balls from which emerged looped strings, perfect for tossing at kittens or spinning about one’s finger and in the process learning about centrifugal force.

The second gift consisted of a trio of little palm-size wooden objects—a sphere, a cylinder, and a cube—through play with which the child might gradually come to realize, for example, that the cylinder was sort of like a sphere and sort of like a cube. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth gifts consisted of different sets of wooden blocks (cubes, rectangles, triangles sliced along their vertices, and so forth).

Then it was on to colorful paper parquetry tiles, and sticks, rings, jointed and interlacing slats, and eventually drawing exercises, and pricking exercises, and sewing (threads through sheets of stiff paper with gridded pinprick holes), and cutting and weaving and folding papers, and peas work (dried peas and toothpicks), and finally modeling clay—each gift elaborating on discoveries afforded by the one before, and all pitched to a spirit of adventure and self-expression.

And the thing of it is that, though Froebel didn’t really live to see it, during the decades following his death the kindergarten movement spread, initially throughout Switzerland and Austria and the German states, then throughout Europe, and presently (initially by way of German enclaves in the Midwest: the brewery towns of St Louis and Milwaukee) throughout the United States as well, where an entrepreneur-enthusiast named Milton Bradley took to mass-producing the various boxed gifts. By the 1880s, indeed, this sort of kindergarten was the predominant form of pre-school in the Western World.

But it’s only now, in the last half of Brosterman’s book, that things really start to take off. Because that’s where he starts placing images of constructions or parquet work or sewing pages by unknown five-year-olds of the 1880s side by side with avant-garde masterpieces from the 1910s and 1920s—works by Albers and Mondrian and Kandinsky and Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright and Gropius and Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller—and you can hardly tell the difference.

Kindergarten teacher, 1900 (left), Josef Albers, 1927 (right).

Left: Unknown Kindergarten Child, U.S., c. 1890; made with 14th gift (paper weaving). Right: Piet Mondrian, 1941-2.

U.S. Kindergarten teacher Irma Crawford, 1909 (left) made with seventh gift (paper parquetry), Paul Klee, 1921 (right).

And indeed, as Brosterman mines the biographies and memoirs and late-career interviews of all of these twentieth-century masters, it turns out that, in case after case, they had a hugely influential mother or uncle or neighbor who taught kindergarten, that they’d all attended kindergarten, and each one in his own way testified that the germ of his entire vocation had been planted in those kindergarten experiences (Buckminster Fuller attributing the idea for the geodesic dome to his early games with dried peas and toothpicks; Piet Mondrian not only likely attending kindergarten—his father ran a primary school—but then training as a primary school teacher himself, during which time he’d have imbibed the sort of Froebelian rhetoric that would come to form the basis for his entire neoplasticist project; Le Corbusier, before his enrollment in art school, spending “ten years in programs based solidly on Froebel’s techniques, and during the very period when Froebelianism in his hometown” of La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, “was the purest and most rigorous it would ever be”).

More recently, the physicist and science writer Margaret Wertheim, cofounder of the LA-based Institute for Figuring and an early champion of Brosterman’s work, has taken to probing further, into the backgrounds of the physicists and other scientists who took part in the great revolutions of the early and mid-twentieth century (people like Caltech’s legendary Richard Feynman), and here too she’s been uncovering countless references to the seminal importance of kindergarten (Feynman’s mother Lucille, for example, had trained as a kindergartner), a cascade of references that Wertheim had herself been turned on to by a marvelous post on UMass Lowell professor Sarah Kuhn’s “Thinking With Things” blog.

Richard Feynman, with his seminal invention, the “Feynman diagrams.”

What we are given to understand across Brosterman’s and now Wertheim’s and Kuhn’s work is nothing less than the way many of the greatest avant-garde breakthroughs of the twentieth century were being incubated in the kindergarten classrooms of the nineteenth.

Take the case of Frank Lloyd Wright (born in 1867, fifteen years after Froebel’s death), in whose case kindergarten came by way of his mother, who’d happened to grow up a carriage ride away from the very first kindergarten in America, in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and who, early in her own married life, after the young family had moved to Boston, studied to become a kindergarten teacher herself. Frank’s 1932 autobiography is chock-full of references to the veritably life-defining lessons he derived from his own kindergarten experiences, and Brosterman’s book affords startling juxtapositions of the paper-folding and parquetry efforts of unidentified nineteenth century five-year-olds alongside early twentieth century Wright floorplans, the same with exemplary Froebel block deployments from an 1877 kindergarten manual and both the 1906 Robie House and the 1902 Larkin Company Administration building.

Indeed even the dimensions and proportions of the soaring cantilevered volumes of Wright’s iconic 1935-39 Falling Water residence can be seen to derive straight out of the wooden blocks from Gifts Three through Six that the young Wright would have handled as a boy.

One amusing aspect of all of this is the way we’ve now come full circle, thanks to the Lego company, which has issued an architectural series of its own, inviting young enthusiasts to build their own versions of the Robie House and Falling Water and such other equally Froebel-besotted masterpieces as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

Though, actually, that Lego series contains an implicit critique of the modernist project, or rather what happened to the kindergarten ideal when it morphed into modernist orthodoxy—all those stories of modernist architects, for example, who demanded that everything be just so, with not a single plane or vista altered, with every little instance of freeform decorative or ornamental play leached out; the rigid manifestos of the cubists and futurists and color theorists, with their insistence on specific methodologies, the very sorts of demands and insistences, that is, from which the next generations felt the need to wrest themselves free. To liberate themselves, that is, into all that authority-questioning free play that is the very essence of post-modernism, and as such, oddly, much more in keeping with the original spirit of Froebel’s project.

Such, curiously, was the theme of last year’s unexpectedly wonderful Lego Movie, a product-placement extravaganza if ever there was one, though one veritably pickled in the spirit of playful self-undercutting and cross-reference.

For the whole plot of Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s slyly subversive contrivance was that children, precisely, should steer clear of all the pre-programmed, rigidly model-based, instruction-enforcing prescriptions of the whole range of Lego Corporation offerings, such as those crazy Wright and Le Corbusier sets and all their formulaic brethren (represented in spirit in the film in the person of the dread corporate villain Lord Business and his legion of Master Builder drones), that instead, kids (like our hero Emmet the resolutely winsome Everyman) should instead launch themselves into a veritable Froebelian debauch.  In short, they need to learn to kick free and play.

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FURTHER THOUGHTS ON GAZA

Last week, in the wake of the systematically targeted killing of those seven aid workers from Chef Jose Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, a group which had been providing Gazans with up to 170,000 hot meals per day, and which thereupon, like several other such aid groups, felt it necessary to suspend such assistance just as the prospect of widespread famine among Gaza’s devastated civilian population was growing ever more dire, “BBC News Hour” anchor Caltriona Perry attempted to interview Israeli economics minister Nir Barkat regarding his take on the situation. I say “attempted,” as things quickly got out of hand, notwithstanding Ms. Perry’s stalwart efforts to rein in Minister Barkat’s increasingly adamant efforts at distraction and obfuscation. The entirety of the twelve-minute exchange is well worth a listen, and you can access it here (for that matter, we are providing our own transcript here). It is important to understand that Barkat is not one of the extremist settler-outliers in Netanyahu’s cabinet: the former mayor of Jerusalem, he is a mainstream member of the Likud party, and his strenuously aggrieved responses mirror much of what passes for discourse in Israel today.

With that said, a few glosses:

1. Hamas are not Nazis. Nazis are Nazis and Hamas is Hamas. Hamas obviously has much to answer for, and not just regarding the heinous events of October 7th, for which its leaders should and one hopes one day will be held to account, both by international judicial bodies and by their own population. But Hamas has its own taproots in a specific historical context, and blurring the distinctions (“We still have a fourth of Hamas—a fourth of the Nazis—in Rafah and other places”) is a rhetorical feint intended merely to upend any possible consideration of actual conditions on the ground. (Which is not to say, alas, that there is no karmic continuity between the two, with Israel sandwiched in between, across the wider arc of history: see my first observations in this ongoing series of Gazan commentaries back in Issue 53, with its citation of those endlessly pertinent lines from W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”: “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”)

2. A quick note on October 7th. A detailed accounting of exactly what took place on that godawful day—what was initially intended by Hamas commanders as opposed to what played out when Israeli defenses collapsed so unexpectedly precipitously, the actual extent of the various sorts of depredations (as terrible and inexcusable as specific instances doubtless were), and so forth, remains to be compiled.

Having said that, certain facts have become clear, though they seldom get reported. Thus the total number of deaths, for example, which was initially put at 1,400 by the Israelis and subsequently revised (by them) down to 1,200, may well have been lower than that, and certainly not all were “civilians murdered in cold blood,” as Barkat and other Israeli spokespeople repeatedly claim. As far back as December, Agence France Press, basing its tabulations on a careful study of inventories provided by the Israeli social security office, the Bituah Leumi, was able to ascertain that “The final death toll from the attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.”

Of the 36 children, 20 were under 15 years old and 10 were killed by rockets. The youngest victim was 10-month-old Mila Cohen, shot and killed at Kibbutz Beeri. An entire family, including three children aged between two and six, were killed in their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz. Elsewhere, two brothers aged five and eight were shot dead in their car with their parents. A five-year-old boy was killed in the street by a rocket. The data gives a clear picture of the scale of the atrocities at the Supernova music festival in Reim where 364 people were killed.

But it also invalidates some statements by Israeli authorities in the days following the attack. In particular, a claim made on October 10th on the government's official X (formerly Twitter) account spoke of "40 babies murdered" at Kfar Aza kibbutz, based on a report by i24NEWS channel. Questioned by AFP the following day, Israel's foreign ministry, which runs the X account, said it could not “confirm any number at this stage.” According to Bituah Leumi, 46 civilians were killed in Kfar Aza, the youngest 14 years old. Another testimony called into question was that on October 27th by Colonel Golan Vach, head of the army's search and rescue unit, who told a group of journalists, including one from AFP, that he “personally” transported “a decapitated baby” found in the arms of his mother in the Beeri kibbutz. According to Bituah Leumi, only one baby was killed in Beeri: the 10-month-old Mila Cohen, whose mother survived.”

Similar sorts of complications have emerged regarding claims of the systematically rampant (as opposed to sporadic, though no less heinous) use of sexual violence by Hamas forces, and in particular those advanced in the famous and much cited New York Times piece of last December—which faced searching subsequent coverage both in The Intercept and over NPR.

None of these sorts of careful discriminations is reflected in Minister Barkat’s blanket characterizations of the terrible events of October 7th (nor for that matter in much of what passes for informed commentary across Western media). “At least we don’t intend to kill any civilians,” Barkat insists. “We target the terrorists, the ones that committed those evil crimes. And don’t get confused: The evil in this story are Hamas.”

3A. All of which raises at least three questions. First off, the relentless use of that term “terrorist.” What does it even mean? Back in 1986, in a superb piece in Harper’s entitled “Wanton Acts of Usage,” Christopher Hitchens, following in the footsteps of his sainted hero George Orwell, undertook a meticulous deconstruction of the uses (none) and misuses (many) of the word in the Middle Eastern and Central American discourses of that time, a piece that is well worth revisiting today, which one can do here, and which concludes:

What is frightening and depressing is that a pseudoscientific propaganda word like “terrorism” has come to have such a hypnotic effect on public debate in the United States. A word which originated with the most benighted opponents of the French Revolution; a word featured constantly in the anti-partisan communiqués of the Third Reich; a word which is a commonplace in the handouts of the Red Army in Afghanistan and the South African army in Namibia; a word which was in everyday use during the decline of the British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian empires. Should we not be wary of a term with which rulers fool themselves and by which history is abolished and language debased? Don’t we fool and console ourselves enough as it is?

To the extent that the term “terrorism” has any meaning, it would need to refer to an array of tactics (acts, say, intended to sow terror in a civilian population in the hope of degrading its morale and bending its will, or some such) deployed by warring parties rather than any sort of essentialist characterization of individual members of those parties themselves. And as such, how is what Hamas fighters did on October 7th any different from what Israeli planes and tanks have been doing, to far far greater effect, to the civilian population of Gaza in the months since?

3B. If Hamas are so irredeemably evil, what were Netanyahu and his Likud confederates doing actively supporting their Gaza regime across the many years before October 7th (including as recently as September when Israel secretly urged Qatar to continue extending millions of dollars of financing to Hamas, presumably as a way of prolonging the divide between Palestinian factions and thereby allowing Israel to go on claiming they had no unified partner for peace on the other side while they went on systematically grabbing wider and wider tranches of Palestinian territory on the West Bank). Barkat himself had an especially difficult time squaring that particular circle across a long squirmy segment of an otherwise much more congenial session on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the day after the BBC interview (see, starting at 7:16, here).

3C. And thirdly, what is it exactly that the Israelis have been intending? Chef Jose Andrés, for example, is convinced (and quite convincing) that the attack on his aid convoy (three separate precision strikes on three separate well-marked cars across a kilometer and a half of a route that had been previously cleared with IDF military authorities), far from being an accident had to have been quite deliberate. Might the Israelis in fact have been intending to clear out all the outside aid operations, just as they have been intent on systematically dismantling the essential UNWRA mission, at the very moment famine was setting in? (Recall that record numbers of aid workers—over 200—and similar numbers of journalists have likewise been killed across the past half year.) And given the systematic and wholesale levelling of hospitals, schools, universities, refugee camps, apartment blocks, farming operations and the like over the past six months (regarding the last of which do watch, if you haven’t already, the essential short video put out by the good folks at Forensic Architecture), mightn’t the intent of the entire operation be precisely what so many of its architects were claiming at the outset, rendering the whole Gaza strip uninhabitable and forcing the eventual emigration of its entire population, thereby opening the terrain to “resettlement” by the Israelis themselves? (In this context, mightn’t Trump son-in-law and the Trump administration’s principal Middle Eastern peace envoy Jared Kushner have been saying the not-so-quiet part out loud a few weeks ago with his observation regarding how Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable”? For his part, he proposes bulldozing a swath of the Negev desert and moving all the Gazans there.)

5A. But returning to the appalling Barkat interview, the main thing I wanted to take note of here were two of the minister’s most egregious rhetorical feints. The first is his endlessly aggrieved what-aboutism, viz, “Did they tell the British army, going into Dresden, the same thing? This is totally double standard.” First of all, it was the British air force, not the army—and yes they did, and almost from the very day after. Notwithstanding the fact that some Israelis were already citing the Dresden template soon after the events of October 7th, the British raid that levelled Dresden, up to then one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and of no military consequence at all, has in fact been subject to wide-ranging and thorough-going condemnation across all the years since. (Likewise the American fire-bombings of Japanese cities in the months leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about which Robert McNamara himself, who in his youth had been serving as a targeting aide to General Curtis LeMay during that campaign, subsequently confessed to Errol Morris, years later, how those involved could easily have been convicted as war criminals if the Allies hadn’t won the war.) And as for Barkat’s and other Israeli apologists’ frequent recourse to the examples of Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no double standard: most of us objecting to Israeli tactics in the current war were also passionate in our objections to the manner in which those wars were carried out as well. (It is the Israelis themselves who would demand, particularly of their Jewish critics, a pretzeled double loyalty.)

5B. And the second is the repeated tautological circularity of his rhetoric: “Please show some respect. We don’t deliberately kill innocent people. That’s not Israel.” (Or, as elsewhere, the IDF go to great lengths, perhaps uniquely among the world’s militaries, to place themselves in harm’s way in avoiding the killing of civilians, etc.) Therefore, to the extent that there have been civilian deaths (as, lord, have there ever been), it was either a mistaken accident (and everybody has accidents) or a case of collateral damage caused by Hamas’s egregious tactic of hiding among civilians (though where exactly else they are expected to “hide” in such a densely populated long-besieged sliver of land is not entirely clear) or else the victims weren’t “innocent civilians” after all. In this context, the Israelis have been boasting (in tones reminiscent of Westmoreland in Vietnam) that they have managed to kill 11,000 Hamas terrorists (while only taking several hundred casualties themselves), which given the fact that over 20,000 of the 33,000 deaths so far recorded were women and children, means that virtually all the men killed are being toted up as “Hamas terrorists.” And how can that be known to be the case? Because Israel simply doesn’t deliberately kill innocent people, therefore they must be. QED. Regarding which, see David Wallace Wells’s reportage in the NY Times the other day:

The Israel Defense Forces previously bragged about its use of A.I. in targeting Hamas, and according to Haaretz, established broad “kill zones” in Gaza, with anyone crossing into them assumed to be a terrorist and shot. (The Israel Defense Forces denied that it has defined kill zones.) On CNN, the analyst Barak Ravid told Anderson Cooper of a conversation he had with an Israeli reserve officer who told him that “the orders are basically—from the commanders on the ground—shoot every man of fighting age,” a description that matches comments last week by the former C.I.A. director and secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who said, “In my experience, the Israelis usually fire and then ask questions.”

But the most pernicious turn in the Barkatian arsenal comes immediately after that initial claim: “We don’t deliberately kill innocent people. That’s not Israel. That’s not the Jewish heart. That’s not the Jewish DNA. Our DNA is to defend ourselves against terrorists that committed crimes against humanity” and so forth. Note the subtle escalation, such that any further questioning by the BBC interviewer would necessarily start to smack of anti-semitism. No one wants to be accused of anti-semitism, and indeed the interview soon after comes to a halt.

6. All of which puts me in mind of an exchange in which I myself participated several decades back. I was in the audience at a panel which included an arch Zionist firebrand whom I will call, for the purposes of this memory, Alan Dershowitz. And at one point toward the end of the evening, when they’d started taking questions from the floor, I rose up and suggested something along the lines of how Palestinians, too, might be human beings, with human longings and human grievances and the like. At which point Dershowitz, interrupting, summarily shut me down, dismissing me as “just another self-hating Jew.”

“Actually, no,” I responded, “I’m a Jew who likes himself fine. I hate you.”

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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