My favorite Tony Kallet article ...

Tony was born on May 27, 1933, and died on April 16, 1989. Only 55 years old.

 Tony, a New Yorker, was a colleague and dear friend of mine. We worked with Bill Browse in The Advisory Center in Leicestershire, England. Tony returned to the US when we joined David Hawkins at The Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, CU Boulder, 1970. 

Tony was a wonderful writer........his ability to observe classrooms at work, and note the detail, then document with the most appropriate choice of words, was extraordinary. 

Tony always, always hid his Ph. D in his back pocket!! :)

Tony died in his early 50s.

Bill Browse and Mary Brown gathered a collection of Tony's writing and published them. 

Few Adults Crawl is available, on loan, from me.

This is one of my favorite Tony Kallet articles:

One Blue Jay……………………..1969

On a cold January morning Sabra and I hurry down the street towards the bus stop. I’m an experienced hurrier but Sabra isn’t. Like many children she is not convinced than another time and place can surpass the present moment. Just as I hear the bus coming and start to run, Sabra stops, having noticed in a puddle a feathery ice crystal. As often happens, my adult point of view prevails, we catch the bus and leave the crystal to the sun.

After a busy day for both of us I have dinner with Sabra and her family. In no context except her own Sabra suddenly says ”If you’re walking along and you see some blue jays, you say…..” Her voice trails off. Then: “It’s the same with anything. Like floorboards, even. You walk across them and they’re just floorboards, but when you stop to look at one floorboard….” Again the idea is bigger than words. On a hunch I say, “And the same with ice crystals?” Sabra smiles. ”Yes.”

We seldom seem to encourage children to take the time to become involved with one particular anything. We accept that young children deal with specifics much of the time but because we put such a premium on classifying we may make it hard for them to retain their acute sense of the individual items which form classes. Adults live in a highly symbol-dominated world.

Most of us approach reality only gingerly, as if afraid of being overwhelmed by detail. Children, however, revel in detail. As a result they often become amazingly perceptive. I recall a ten-year-old who could identify each one of a dozen chicks within a day or two of hatching. Not for her, “Oh, baby chicks” but rather, “This chick, that one.”

Concepts are formed by focusing on likenesses. Most of us are lazy and in time may think only of likenesses, forgetting differences, irregularities. Perhaps only poets retain a vivid sense of differences, an awareness that nothing is quite like anything else, no two birds, no two ice crystals, no two people. The laziness is worth fighting, the poetry worth cultivating. If children are fortunate as they learn to classify they may come to see that categories are more than simply handy devices to sort out complexity. They may see that well-formed concepts enable them to return to each unique member with a sense of its relation to other members and with more insight into its individuality.

R.D. Laing, the psychiatrist, speaks of the “invalidation of experience.” The self-defined sane person defines another as insane by saying in effect, “My experience is right, yours is wrong.” John Holt has pointed out that much of what happens to children in schools involves adults trying to invalidate children’s experience by means of correcting, belittling, hectoring.

A major kind of invalidation is the insistence on the adult sense that “the unclassified life is not worth living” and that in the romance between a child and the unique present instant and its contents lies danger, if not positive sin.

Walking on a beach in Maine in August, Sabra stops to look at a sand dollar.

She stoops to pick it up and………………..

Tony Kallet.

February 28th.

And two others.......Science and other ways of seeing things, and, Homo Cartographicus, the printed version of Tony's talk at Loughborough Residential Course, Easter, 1970.

 I'll get these copied and add it to this blog over the weekend.

These articles came to my mind last evening when I was watching and listening to Jeannine's Poetry Club read their poems to a crowd of enthralled parents.Tony would have loved it.