Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 96

“A child, any child, is a garden, and a garden without a wall.” So wrote novelist and Presbyterian clergyman Frederick Buechner. Staying with the garden metaphor, Buechner wrote:

Anything can enter there . . . and anything can depart, quite at will, as long as the wall-lessness lasts: birds and friends, secrets, hates, games, fear, and magic of all sorts. But then . . . a wall appears, and then . . . the garden is enclosed. Whatever is there is there to stay.78

Buechner’s metaphor helped me connect with an event in the life of Jesse Stuart. In 1954, Kentucky named him poet laureate. He wrote thirty-two books, four hundred short stories, and gave five thousand lectures all around the world.

As a schoolboy, Stuart had a remarkably undistinguished career. However, in Mrs. Hamilton’s history class, one day he spoke a few words that moved Mrs. Hamilton to tell the class that “Jesse sounded just like a future Patrick Henry in this room.” Mrs. Hamilton may not have remembered a week later even speaking those words. She surely never imagined how formative that one sentence would become in Jesse’s life. But Jesse never forgot, and decades later he singled out that moment in Mrs. Hamilton’s history class as a moment of recognition he sorely needed at that point in his life.79

I hope people who go into teaching these days aspire to become a Mrs. Hamilton. I hope their greater aim as they instruct is to inspire children to believe in themselves, to put an “I am able” thought in their minds before those walls start going up and the garden becomes enclosed.

Lee Iacocca, I believe, tells it right: “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.”