Kansas City News Blog

Back in grade school, Mom made me sign up for the summer reading program, and I dutifully finished all the books and checked them off the list. So what if the only one that left an impression was S.E. Hinton's teen-delinquent story That Was Then, This Is Now? So what if I went on to become a delinquent myself -- I was a literate delinquent, damn it!

Because I love libraries, I'm a fan of the Big Read, which encourages everyone in a whole city to read the same book for a month. Sometimes this can have radical implications, as it did a couple of years ago, when cool librarians in KCK decided their Big Read book should be The Grapes of Wrath. With its foreclosures and job losses and socialist solutions, John Steinbeck's classic hit close to home on the eve of economic destruction.

Now the metro-wide Big Read book is Tobias Wolff's Old School. In it, a (white) kid goes to a (white) prep school and learns a hard lesson. It's a touching and humorous coming-of-age yarn, with hilarious and profound guest appearances by (white) literary icons of the 20th century. It's an OK way to blow 195 pages, but I kept wishing the whole city could be reading a different book, by a different author with the last name Wolff.

Daniel Wolff's How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations That Made Them (new from Bloomsbury USA) isn't on the National Endowment for the Arts' list of officially sanctioned Big Read books. It probably won't be for a while, either, because it might make too strong a case for the shocking idea that school -- whether it's a prep academy like the one in Old School or a provisionally accredited school like those in the KCMO School District -- is overrated.

How Lincoln Learned to Read is an amazingly entertaining hunk of U.S. history. Tracing the lives of Americans as scattered -- but ultimately as connected -- as Ben Franklin and Elvis, Wolff reveals how school is rarely the place where people learn what they need to know.

John F. Kennedy, for example, is so sheltered in his elite prep school that he has no idea the Great Depression is going on all around him. This seems impossible, Wolff notes, "but thirty years later, while running for president, he'd confirm it: 'I have no first-hand knowledge of the depression,' he told an interviewer." Ultimately, Wolff writes, it's Kennedy's rebellion against prep school traditions that makes a true leader out of the future president.

Wolff paints a devastating landscape of Andrew Jackson's brutal childhood in an uncivilized Carolina no-man's-land on the bloody edge of the Revolutionary War. Despite some occasional time in backcountry schools, Jackson gets his real education listening to the men who gather around a still by the creek each night.

It's the institution of slavery that educates the woman who becomes Sojourner Truth. Navigating between the Paiute Indian and white frontier cultures teaches Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins what she needs to know. Taking apart pocket watches is the beginning of Henry Ford's education.

Context is crucial, and Wolff sets each of these chapters in a gorgeously rendered American time and place. Just after World War I, environmental writer Rachel Carson's hometown of Springdale, in western Pennsylvania overlooking the Allegheny River valley, throbs with industry:

The West Penn Power Company "had put up rows of bunkhousers for its workers. High-voltage lines were being strung. Duquesne Light Company, which controlled the supply of electricity for the city of Pittsburgh, would soon break ground on its own power plant -- also on the Springdale shoreline, this one straight downhill from the Carsons. Known as a "mine mouth" plant, the Colfax station would have its own private railroad running back and forth ot the Harwick mine behind the Carson's cabin.

I learned more history from How Lincoln Learned to Read than I ever did in school. And I see everything differently now. Including my own city. Maybe those kids in the KCMO district have more of a chance than we think they do.