American school
Every country in the world, I think, has at least one school for the children of foreign diplomats, missionaries and business people. There are three kinds: there are schools run by and for missionaries, usually named something like Central American Christian Academy and characterized by a high degree of religious fervor. There are independent secular private schools, usually smaller and idiosyncratic, catering to the more demanding expatriates, including some missionaries. For most families from the US, there is a school run by the Defense Department that tries to offer something close to the standard mainstream schooling experience in the US.
We went to all three of these kinds of schools at different times. The only experiment with local schools was carried out by Johanna, my oldest sister, who did one of her junior high school years in a public school in Costa Rica that was known for the quality of its music instruction. She had a knack for the flute, and my mother, also a flute player, encouraged her to take a chance on it.
Public education in Latin America was done in those days on what I think is a European model, with uniforms, early tracking, and lots of sir-and-ma’am and lining up. Dewey and Summerhill and all the rest of the things that changed public schools so radically in the US did not have much impact on the schools we saw. Jo chafed at the regimentation and didn’t go back after that year.
When possible, my parents put us in the smaller, independent schools. They liked the cultural diversity, I think – you were likely to be sitting next to the Dutch ambassador’s daughter and across from the son of a Taiwanese export magnate, both of whom spoke English as a matter of course, so all the better. And the teachers seemed often to be whatever expatriate oddballs were bumbling around the country at the moment. The first one I remember was Miss Thomas, a middle-aged English woman who loved C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories and Bedknobs and Broomsticks and the rest of the British children’s canon. She would gather the whole school – there were only about 50 kids – for a morning assembly, call the roll and then read to us with great drama. I don’t know when I figured out that Narnia was fictional. Or that there was R in it.
Miss Thomas had an elderly dog named Mary Plain (after a character in another British children’s book) who had been in a car accident and had a bad back. When it came time for Miss Thomas to go back to England, my parents volunteered to adopt the dog. It was clear that this was a great honor, as Miss Thomas had said Mary Plain couldn’t just live with anybody. You had to be very careful and respectful of her aches and pains. I was the main dog walker and feeder. We were living in a shabby middle-class neighborhood near downtown Lima, and I remember walking Mary Plain around the streets, past the old men in thin ties standing idly around the corner stores.
Categorised as: Memory, Uncategorized