One of my favorite novels is The Cannibal Galaxy, by Cynthia Ozick. I thoroughly enjoy everything Ozick writes. I usually expand my vocabulary reading her, as “narthex,” “diremption,” “crenellation,” and other words pop up in her narratives.
But I usually don’t “understand” what her fictions are “about.” Novelist Edmund White likens her to Flannery O’Connor, which makes it a little clearer why I can’t come up with easy overall interpretations (though I can with O’Connor). O’Connor famously told off her publisher, who was demanding advanced outlines, by telling him she didn’t know what her story was going to be until she finished writing it.
The plot of The Cannibal Galaxy involves a Hannah Arendt like figure, Hester Lilt, who takes an appointment in the Midwest, and enrolls her daughter Beulah in a local Jewish school, whose headmaster and founder, Joseph Brill, has begun to despair of the mediocrity of his students and their parents. Brill was orphaned by the Nazi occupation of France, where he alone of his family was rescued and hidden by Catholics in an eccentric but intellectual priest’s basement, where he had nothing to do but read the priest’s stored library. Emerging from this cocoon of European literature, philosophy and theology, Brill founds a K-12 school in America devoted to marrying French and Hebrew literature and culture. (Whether this is Ozick’s commentary on schools like St. John’s College of Annapolis and Santa Fe, or of the undergraduate common core programs like Human Being and Citizen at the University of Chicago was something I wasn’t able to decide.)
Brill idolizes Lilt and plans to propose to her. (Beulah’s father is unknown and absent.) But he also despairs that Beulah is ordinary, like his other students, and shares this opinion with her mother.
Skipping years later Beulah, and Brill’s son—fathered in a late-marriage to one of the school’s secretaries—are adults. His son, a rule-following A student, doesn’t make much of himself. Beulah becomes a world-renowned visual artist, using a kind of intelligence and imagination that wasn’t a big part of the curriculum. Exactly who is a “cannibal galaxy,” a larger galaxy that “collides” with and submerges a smaller galaxy, so that the result has a new shape and direction, I’m not sure.
But I’ve been teaching for the past three months where I work with kindergarten through second grade, mainly bright children who have some “special” need: autism, lack of self-control, inability to focus, etc. I “push into” rooms for my charges or pull them out to another room to give them “small group” instruction. Some of the instruction is blowing your nose, or not talking while someone else is, or not walking down stairs while your face is glued to an iPad, talking at a reasonable volume, or sitting in a chair normally. More of it’s on trying to finish the same piece of work everyone else just did, or covering the same topics (planets and orbits, Greek mythology, life cycles of plants and animals) that their general ed classmates are receiving, but in a separate room where the “special” kids’ disruptive behavior will only annoy each other, not the general population.
I have this one kid, “Burt.” I thought English wasn’t his first language; he has an eastern European last name. Burt’s intelligent (after teaching him for three months and even meeting his dad I googled his parents—Ivy PhD dad, Ivy PhD and JD mom), but he can’t finish his kindergarten work, which often consists of activities like coloring areas in a “paint by number” type page according not to with which numeral but instead which “sight word” they are labelled. Burt stares off into space, occasionally twists his arms or body as if he’s having a seizure, gets up and paces and skips about. And doesn’t finish the work, which seemingly less intelligent kids finish.
Recently Burt asked the main teacher in this class if Mr. Majors could take him outside so he could finish his work at a desk in the hallway, which has less noise. He then finished faster, and even finished some projects faster after returning to the class. (Noise-cancelling headphones are ubiquitous in a modern public school in a wealthy county. They may not have the same effect as just exiting the whole sight and sound cacophony of the classroom.)
I think like Ozick’s Beulah, Burt may turn out to have hidden talents that aren’t addressed by the school and the curriculum. He likes math, patterns, sequences. I don’t think he enjoys coloring and cutting and pasting every day, even if “sight words” or other content are involved. My reaction to these situations makes me recall the argument of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.
In the case of some of these students being “forced” into very structured classes and schools where almost everyone does the exact same thing the exact same way, I can say which galaxy is attempting to cannibalize which, submerging it and changing its direction, perhaps forever.