Boy's Dream

"He who cannot learn from defeat cannot profit from victory."

--The Phantom, 2011









I don't watch baseball, or any sport much, unless I'm on the treadmill in my basement and need something, anything, to divert me. Usually, It's The Wire, which can make an hour on the treadmill simply evaporate.

But October 27, 2011, I thought, well, I'll just watch the World Series until it gets really boring. Never did. Cannot recall a game I've watched which was as wonderful, ever. I've played in two games which were just as crazy and unlikely and fantasy like as this one, but never seen a major league game like this one.

Usually, baseball is a game of anticlimaxes, but this time it was a game of one climax after another. The St. Louis third baseman, David Freese, who I had watched drop a routine pop up, allowing Texas to score and take the lead, comes to bat in the last of the ninth, gets two strikes on him. St. Louis is down to its last strike, understand, and Freese hits a shot to right field and Nelson Cruz, who had homered just an inning before, races back to make the Series winning catch and can't quite get his glove on it. The ball sails just a bit to his left and below his glove and Freese, who hit the ball, the guy who dropped that easy pop up just innings earlier, winds up on third, having driven home two runs to tie the game. And that does not even begin to explain how much more went into setting up that moment.

Every boy who has played backyard ball has dreamed up something like this, but I doubt any boy ever dreamed up the build up to that moment, which involved two Texas home runs which seemed to come out of nowhere, as if God were speaking and saying, "Okay, let's just get this over with."

As they say, you could not make this stuff up.

Then, the same player comes up in the bottom of the eleventh, with the score tied. Freese gets down to his last strike, two strikes on him, and hits one out to the deepest part of center field and wins the sixth game, sending the Series into the seventh game.

No way.

So that's what childhood and life are made of.

This is what dreams show us. Dreams show us you can dream big, but life can dream even bigger.

And then there is the reality of school. And there is the subject of how school can crush dreams and childhood and imagination and make minds constrict, if we are not very careful.

If we allow burnt out adults to burn out our children, we get...What? A burnt out aristocracy maybe.

The New York Times ran a story about Dalton School, an exclusive private New York City school, which is considering lightening the homework load and all the agonizing about this. One parent says he doubts Chinese or Indian parents are worrying much about over working their children: The message being, don't be wimps; we've got to not spare the whip, if our children are to compete in a global market place.

But does that line of Dalton School to Princeton to Harvard Business School to Goldman Sachs really constitute the playing fields of Eton (as in, the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton)?

I cannot know, but I doubt that parent knows what parents of children at competitive schools in India or China think, and I doubt he has much of a clue about the homework successful Indian or Chinese children are doing.

I wonder whether the Dalton School or the Horace Mann School homework assignments have much to recommend them beyond the length and ponderous heft of the reading and workbooks.
James Atlas's recent article about "Super People" in the Sunday Times, described people who seemed to be buffing their own personal stories for publication in the Style section wedding announcements, with prestigious fellowships, mastery of classical piano and brand name schools.
Could these parents be grooming their trophy kids for this ultimate accolade?
Are these parents really worried about stoking their kids' competitive spirit or are they simply creating trophy kids for their own ego gratification, so they can brag on their kids and feel superior and strut?

It's a given none of the parents mentioned, save Adam Gopnik, will read Andrew Hacker's fine examination of the outcomes of all this effort at resume building, Higher Education?: When Dr. Hacker examined what happened to the members of the Princeton class of 1973, the results were eye opening, dismal and predictable.

These were not kids with something to prove. They had already proven themselves just getting past Dalton or wherever, and getting into Princeton, or Harvard. Some of them probably stopped working--and Hacker tells stories of Harvard students telling their parents their classes weren't important, it was being at Harvard which was important. Can you blame these kids for resting on their laurels? Maybe they are not so much burnt out as simply recovering. But they are not kids with something to prove. Been there, done that.

The outcomes in terms of performance of this highly select class was one of, overall, moderate success, yes men and yes women who fit in as organization people, who made their low six figure salaries but were in no way really remarkable, and in no way changed the world; they sustained the world as it was given to them. They earned money for their law firms or financial firms, but they squandered their brainpower and lived lives with bound feet, in straight jackets.

People whose highest ambition had been self promotion and striving for effect, had gone on, for the most part, to undistinguished careers and, one imagines, lives of much disillusionment.
Is this the glittering prize these parents covet? Admission to one of the big three? And if the ultimate outcome beyond those campuses is uninspiring, then why?

At this point, you may be wondering what the epigram at the top of this posting has to do with any of this? It's about kids who have had too much success, who have had too little failure and feared failure too much and who play not to win but not to loose. It's about being able to shake off a defeat and move on. This is the root of persistence. It's what made U.S. Grant the essential general. He could absorb defeat, mistakes, and press on. Steve Jobs, same thing. It's what the chief of Radiology at Duke meant when he said he preferred jocks to the medical students who had never had anything but A's when he selected his residents. The jocks were accustomed to getting things wrong, correcting and getting better the next time. The never less than an A kid got corrected and fell to pieces.

Adam Gopnik is likely on to something, when he asks if the parents at Dalton are robbing their kids of their childhood.

The best thing he might do for his kids is to remove them from the pressure cooker and place them in a greenhouse, and allow them to grow.

What a curse, if the best thing you can say about your life is you went to Dalton School, and then Princeton, or Harvard, or Yale, or you name it. You have measured out your life in teaspoons, and with Eliot, found a wasteland.