Jack Pidgeon gets out of school today. He's been in class since 1957. He's gone to morning swim practice at 5 a.m., five days a week. He's never willingly left the campus for more than three days since the Eisenhower administration. Since then, he's graduated, graded, cajoled, loved and terrified over 3,400 boys at The Kiski School in Saltsburg, one by one. But today, when the class of 2002 leaves the stage, they'll be taking their headmaster with them. John A. Pidgeon is retiring.
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| | | David Conrad, a Pittsburgh native, is an actor living in New York. | |
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It seems like a small matter, a Western Pennsylvania footnote. Why should we worry? Single-sex, boarding, coats and ties, school mottos -- they all add up to an anachronism at worst, a sidelight at best. What about the majority of people? Parents grinding up against the educational system in this city, fighting for and praying their kids will get a toehold into a better future, unable to buy the leg up a private school can give you -- where's Kiski in all that?
The truth is that, however marginal Kiski's existence in the grand scheme of American schooling, there are lessons taught there, ingrained there, that should be pumped into the oxygen of every American classroom.
Pidgeon ran a private boys' school, but his fundamental approach to teaching and his devotion to his students could serve as a model for any form of education. Jack Pidgeon's example -- the life he gave to a half-century's worth of American children -- is a matter of national honor.
Jack Pidgeon went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., one of the best prep schools in the country. He was a scholarship kid. The school fathers plucked him up as charity case; Lawrence, his home town, was the working-class neighbor. Pidgeon's mother was a domestic, which means she scrubbed floors. His father was not, as they say now, a factor. Pidgeon himself was what you could nicely term a difficult boy of Celtic extraction. In his own words, a mean Irish.
He went to Andover, excelled, played baseball with George Bush, went to a good college, nearly became an Olympic swimmer and landed a decent job. So we can say Jack Pidgeon was lucky. His schooling made that crucial difference. But, maybe, sometimes, it takes more than luck.
Kiski has a grading session every month. After dinner, the entire student body lines up dorm by dorm, usually packing the stairwells, and waits for Pidgeon to come. He speaks to every single boy, but reads them their grades only at the very end. It's a question-and-answer session, not always pleasant for the kid but inescapably personal. Two grades are actually given for every subject, a score and an effort grade. It's always the second of the two that Pidgeon reserves some passion for. In his world, indifference was an absolute enemy. He despises the word "cool." Any evidence that someone wasn't straining at his limits brought the headmaster directly into his path. You could be an A student and starting on whatever team, but if you laid back on your teen-age laurels, Pidgeon would be in your face.
Maybe it's because he grew up poor, maybe it's what he saw in the war era, but he can't abide fear. Not the feeling of it, no, but the choice to turn away and huddle in it rather than to let fear pass through you. His basic teaching tool, rule No. 1 at Kiski, was that no one quits. Not "no one fails" or "no one loses" but no one gets down off the block before he tries. His core message is, as I heard it: "Confront your fears, reveal your self, I'll embrace that, however flawed." It's the fundamental balance point from which anyone learns.
It also seems to be the elephant in the conference room on education that nobody talks about. Higher scores, more science, more computers, more rooms, more numbers, data, supplies -- these are end, not means. Education boils down to one question: How do you keep a mind receptive? You build a relationship that allows teachers to hold students over the fires of their insecurities, to demand, to push. A scary image, but it's one of a tough love -- not of insensitive discipline.
We've lost the ability or the guts to distinguish between the two. Pidgeon never did. You can interview hundreds of men who will describe his demands on them as the deepest concern they ever knew.
The door to his office was never closed. No student ever needed an appointment to see Pidgeon or any teacher at Kiski, seven days a week, all year. This level of attention often is the privilege of the lucky or the wealthy. Until we fundamentally change the way in which we value our educational system, rank it as a national priority, then that will probably continue to be true. We'll look at people like Jack Pidgeon or the public school teacher who stretched the envelope for 30 years as exceptions, as anachronisms, because only the toughest can make a life of it. And that's the key. Teaching's not a job, it's a life. It's a commitment of life to nurture life. It should not be so much "funded" as held sacred. The fact that we count it as an expense or that we have to run it like a business is a disgrace.
At Kiski's graduation today, Jack Pidgeon will do a strange thing. He won't talk. He'll sit and watch.
Someone else will start the ceremony, someone else will give the address, two class leaders will speak to their classmates and their parents, and finally someone else will read the names of departing seniors. Pidgeon doesn't even hand out the diplomas. It's odd to see the man who infiltrated every aspect of your life for four years go quiet, step back, demand nothing. The gesture is almost frightening until you realize it's not one of sadness but humility. When the seniors cross the stage, he'll stand finally, at the far end, away from them. You have your moment in the sun -- some smile uncontrollably, some gesture to the crowd. The last thing you do is shake his hand. He says something, not everybody catches it, and then he sort of pulls you past him. Just when you think, "Yes, we're gonna have that moment. I'm gonna stop and tell him" -- you're gone, tugged lightly through, and the next boy's up on the stage.
Imagine: Pidgeon's pulled through nearly 3,400 of them, one at a time. That's a small town. Now give them families, friends, jobs, children. The ripples of influence, of compassion, stretch out over what could be a city.
About one-third of those kids could never have gone to any other private school. They didn't have the numbers: the scores, the income, the glowing reports; they didn't make the quota charity set that year. They went to Kiski because John Pidgeon met them and decided they were worth the risk. Some didn't cut it, but most did. Some prospered, some didn't. But all of them got a chance at the crucial difference. You can call it an education, you could call it a kind of love. Pidgeon's offered it every year for nearly half a century.
If you ask Pidgeon why he became a teacher, why he stayed at Kiski all this time, he'll start a speech and then he'll stop mid-sentence and say, "You know I could give you a speech, but I'm a teacher because I just wanted to make a difference in a boy's life."
The choice of words I think is no accident. He gave what he got. I know. I was one of those boys in the one-third -- recipients of something maybe a little more than luck.
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