education | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

November 3, 2016

Class Conflict

Here in Massachusetts, in the birthplace of Horace Mann’s free American ‘common school’, an intense battle over charter schools — one with outsized national stakes — will be decided at the ballot box next week. The fight, at least on the surface, concerns a question of expansion: Do we need more charter schools to meet the demands of over 32,000 students currently on the waitlist for charter enrollment, or do we need to limit the growth of new charter schools, whose growth may spell a decline in the public system?

Zoomed out, however, the question of expansion morphs into several different debates: market driven forces versus publicly funded services, stricter discipline versus free expression, longer school days and greater teacher demands versus union standards and protections.

But what if ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on charter schools misses a bigger point? Amid all the divisiveness, all the rancorous disputes, a near-consensus still abounds: Reforms are needed to drastically improve the quality of education across the board. The real question may be: If the reachable goals are a full day’s learning, a path to work, higher education, and self-reliance, a bond with families and the real world, why shouldn’t kids find those essentials in shaped-up modern versions of community public schools?

This week we enlist the help of pioneer education reformers Linda Nathan and Paula Evans.

Both Nathan and Evans have had long careers in education reform. Both are disciples of the great reformer Ted Sizer, author of Horace’s Choice and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and both have served in positions in the public and charter system. Yet they have also been at odds with each other over specific reform tactics over the years. We brought them in to talk about the real issues overshadowed by the ballot debate.

Bringing the debate outside the commonwealth borders, we’ve also recorded a segment with Dale Russakoff, author of The Prize, which tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s 100 million dollar pledge to transform Newark schools, with a little help from Corey Booker and Chris Christie. The fiery and very funny education blogger Jennifer Berkshire joins us, too. She runs the Edushyster blog, which has been skewering various aspects of “market-based education,” from joy and achievement culture to the basic problem of teaching obedience. She serves as moderator and provocateur for this debate over the charter choice.

This Week's Show •

Black Mountain College: “The Grass-Roots of Democracy”

In 1933, a group of freethinking American educators and academics took a look at their fresh, interwar world — and set about trying to remake it. They set up a campus in idyllic countryside outside Asheville, North Carolina, and Black Mountain ...

In 1933, a group of freethinking American educators and academics took a look at their fresh, interwar world — and set about trying to remake it.

They set up a campus in idyllic countryside outside Asheville, North Carolina, and Black Mountain College was born.

Our guest, the literary historian Louis Menand, explains that B.M.C. was a philosophical experiment intent on putting the progressive philosopher John Dewey‘s ideas to work in higher education. The college curriculum was unbelievably permissive — but it did ask that students undertake their own formation as citizens of the world by means of creative expression, and hard work, in a community of likeminded people.

The college may not have lived up to its utopian self-image — the scene was frequently riven by interpersonal conflict — but it did serve as a stage-set to some of modern culture’s most interesting personalities and partnerships.

Josef Albers — he of “Homage to the Square” — served as the head of the painting department and the school’s nerve center from 1933 to 1949. He and his wife Anni — whose beautiful weaving stands out at the ICA/Boston’s B.M.C. exhibition — fled Hitler’s rise and brought the Bauhaus School with them to America. Albers would go on to influence the great names of modern American art in his role at B.M.C., including Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jacob Lawrence, whose 1946 painting, “The Watchmaker” leaps off the wall.

Meanwhile, the summers saw visitors like architect Buckminster Fuller — who threw together his first, flimsy geodesic dome at B.M.C. — and the dance-and-music pairing of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. All that talent could sometimes converge, as in “Theatre Piece No. 1,” an fabled, but undocumented, mixed-media happening starring Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Franz Kline.

Or, again, during the college’s cash-strapped final six years, while the voluble poet Charles Olson served as rector — and built a trailblazing poetic scene feeding into and drawing on the burgeoning Beat generation. Our guest, Globe art critic, Sebastian Smee, told the story of Olson grumpily fishing a delirious Rauschenberg out of icy Lake Eden.

So we’re looking behind B.M.C.’s famous products — the all-white canvases, the silent 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the domes and the poems — to the effervescent human world beneath it, and for the much it tells us about vision, education, and human growth.

Podcast • May 15, 2014

Chris Cooper & Marianne Leone: Becoming Actors

For the perspective of experience and solid accomplishment, we're asking two pro’s in the middle of enviable careers what they learned in and out of school, where they’d be looking for training, how much they’d pay, if they were starting out again. Chris Cooper is a Hollywood hero in supporting roles. He won an Academy Award for one of them, in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. His wife Marianne Leone played the gangster mama Joanne Moltisanti in The Sopranos on HBO.

We’re digressing here from our ongoing conversations about higher education in general, and arts education in particular. For the perspective of experience and solid accomplishment, we’re asking two acting professionals in the middle of enviable careers what they learned in and out of school, where they’d be looking for training, how much they’d pay, if they were starting out again. Chris Cooper is a Hollywood hero, often in deep supporting roles. He won an Academy Award for one of them, in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. His wife Marianne Leone played the gangster mama Joanne Moltisanti in The Sopranos on HBO.

May 8, 2014

Who Needs College Anyway?

On the way to commencement season, what’s college really good for, if the cost is out of sight, and your degree doesn’t point you to a job; if there’s too much drinking, cheating and grade inflation; if it’s not safe enough for women; what if the whole bloated model is outdated in a digital age? Who’s got a better idea? Schools are almost out, but will they still be there in September?

Higher Ed By The Numbers

Thomas Frank: The Higher-Ed. Dream Factory

Guest List

• Liz McMillen, editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education

• Joseph Moore, president of Lesley University

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor at the University of Virginia and cultural historian

• Thomas Frank, founding editor of The Baffler.

On the way to commencement season, what’s college really good for, if the cost is out of sight, and your degree doesn’t point you to a job; if there’s too much drinking, cheating and grade inflation; if it’s not safe enough for women. What if the whole bloated model is outdated in a digital age? Who’s got a better idea? Schools are almost out; will they still be there in September?

Reading List

• In a New York Times blog, Suzanne Mettler argues that college is not leveling the playing field, it’s doing the opposite;

• Thomas Frank’s essay from The Baffler, “Academy Fight Song;”

• Siva’s blog post, “Going Public the UVa Way;”

…We must stop using business language to describe universities. It’s not only misguided and inaccurate, but it also sets up bad incentives and standards. The University of Virginia is a wealthy and stable institution, a collection of public services, a space for thought and research, a living museum, a public forum, a stage for athletics competition, and an incubator of dreams and careers. But it’s not a firm, so it’s certainly not a “brand.”

…and the case he makes in Bookforum for “academic calling in a neoliberal age”;

• Clay Shirky on the coming money crunch in higher ed;

The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.

• We’re also reading two public worries about the university from two different sides of the conversation. The first is Noam Chomsky’s recent talk, “The Death of American Universities,” published at Jacobin. Chomsky sees universities caught in a corporate drift; he wants us to double back in search of the old Enlightenment idea of learning. Education’s not filling a vessel, but

…laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string, maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the string means imposing some degree of structure… But the goal of it is for the student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge—that’s education.

• David Brooks wrote about Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova meeting in Berlin in his column “Love Story.” Two thinkers meet, turn over the canons in their heads and recognize each other. The story ends with Berlin collapsing, lovestruck, on his bed back at home.

I’m old enough to remember when many people committed themselves to this sort of life and dreamed of this sort of communion — the whole Great Books/Big Ideas thing. I am not sure how many people believe in or aspire to this sort of a life today. I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.

Does this sound nostalgic, or are minds meeting in this way on American campuses? What do you think? Leave a comment or send us a message.

By the Way • March 24, 2014

Gustavo Dudamel: Stardust from El Sistema Heaven

“I’m not a great singer,” Gustavo Dudamel told the kids in a teaching aside on Saturday in an El Sistema rehearsal with the Longy School at MIT on Saturday. “But of course I sing in the shower,” he said, working up a conversational lather. Here was the point, in spirit and in so many words: “We sing in the orchestra, same way we sing in the shower. You know how you get to love that big, long line you’re singing — clearer and stronger when you’re into it. We want to take it right to the point where the people in the next apartment start banging on the wall and shout: ‘We get it! Now shut up.’”

This is how we make music in Gustavo Dudamel’s world: intense focus, intense fun together. For 60 minutes or so, El Sistema-trained teenagers from public schools in Boston, Somerville and nearby worked several times through Bizet’s “Farandole” and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with the mesmerizing maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Not once did the conductor speak of tempo, articulation, or even being in tune. But he kept offering the kids images: the difference between a dancer with long legs and someone marching on short legs, for example. Every coaching point was about adding colors for the listeners, making the musical experience more dynamic in the ensemble, a life lesson closer to home for the young players.

The life lesson was humility in triumph for the surprise star of the rehearsal show, the 9-year-old timpanist Francis Puente from the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton. With his broken left wrist in a cast, Francis was working his kettle drums with just his right hand, ever with style and effect. Maestro Dudamel singled him out for recognition, and Francis smiled his thanks. His mother Maria Puente emailed the next morning: “But you know what was even more admirable with our son? While we were in the car, I asked him how he wanted to celebrate his wonderful achievement — maybe eat out in some nice restaurant, I suggested. He said he wanted to celebrate by just going home and having a quiet evening with us. He said, ‘I like being acknowledged and then being able to go back to the ordinary pace of life, like going into oblivion.’ What a blessing, too, for him to remain unaffected by all the attention he gets.”

Next day at Symphony Hall, under a thundering, tearful standing ovation, Maestro Dudamel took credit with Francis Puente’s taste for oblivion. Dudamel saluted his Los Angeles Philharmonic stars, embracing his horn soloist, his woodwind section, his brilliant cello duo who’d outdone themselves in the full Tchaikovsky 5. But to the end he stood hand in hand with the ranks of his first violins and violas. The most celebrated young conductor in the world today, the man we came to hear, never mounted the podium again after the music stopped. He declined to take a solo bow.

Podcast • April 12, 2011

Thomas Balmès: An Education in Images

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Thomas Balmès (12 minutes, 6 mb mp3) Director Thomas Balmès on location in Mongolia filming “Babies” [Focus Features photo] Thomas Balmès, the French film documentarian, had a worldwide ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Thomas Balmès (12 minutes, 6 mb mp3)

Director Thomas Balmès on location in Mongolia filming “Babies” [Focus Features photo]

Thomas Balmès, the French film documentarian, had a worldwide hit last year with Babies. The movie was all pictures, no dialog. No text, no voice-over. No argument, no “cause.” Just irresistibly patient long shots of newborns and their parents in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan and San Francisco, provoking wry comparisons and conversations (speak for yourselves) but mostly questions.

Is this the man to tune up — maybe redesign — the education of kids, and college kids, who already learn more from images and screens than they do from sentences and books? Thomas Balmès is saying that an education system that neglects to teach its students to participate in making the images they so readily consume is collapsing all around us, not least at Brown, where he was Artist-in-Residence last week. Academics (like his father, a Lacan scholar) write impenetrable texts for a closed circle of friends and rivals; students lean on screens, even in class, and learn by images without acknowledging their adopted language. The students who hovered with him all week arrive typically with ambitious and original film projects to save the world but very little idea, he said, of the how — or of craft, form and story-telling. Among the 10 “rules” that Thomas Balmes has adapted from the great Victor Kossakovsky, one suggests that while it would be nice to save the world, better perhaps for a filmmaker on a project to think of saving herself. It is part of academia’s duty, in Balmes’ view, to create at least a part of its product in today’s vernacular, a language defined overwhelmingly by images.

Today there was a survey published saying an average American child watches on average 7.5 hours of images per day — on phones, iPads, computers, TV. This is insane: to have so little concern about images in places like this to me is criminal. You need to participate in the making of these images, to be thinking about images and not learning how to communicate only through writing. It’s time that academics really taking this seriously. This is crucial. …

Students should participate in the creation of images, and not give it up to Murdoch, and others. You have people here in academia who are working in a kind of closed circle and not caring about what is going on outside. People do read, but writing cannot be the only mode of creation in the academic world. Academics must take and grasp, very rapidly, moving images, and participate in the production of these images… In France every child before 18 spends one year studying philosophy. You don’t become a philosopher, but you study. This is crucial. Reading images, understanding images, semantics, semiotics, whatever, is absolutely crucial and must be implemented at every age in the school system…

Thomas Balmès with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, April 8, 2011.

Podcast • January 11, 2011

Knowing Jesse: Among the Books of 2010, a Life Lesson

I am always, I am sometimes tough I am sometimes heroic I am sometimes tough I am always, I am always brave I am always tough I am sometimes invisible I am always brave, heroic ...

I am always, I am sometimes tough
I am sometimes heroic
I am sometimes tough
I am always, I am always brave
I am always tough
I am sometimes invisible
I am always brave, heroic
I am always, I am sometimes brave
I am sometimes, I am always tough.

Jesse Cooper

Marianne Leone Cooper wrote the book that stuck to my ribs at the end of 2010: Knowing Jesse.

Way off our usual path of wonkery and literary modernism, this is a book (and a writer) that ambush the heart, that confront our numbness with numbers and the new. It’s a book that feeds our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, for a transformation of consciousness. It is Marianne Leone Cooper’s fiery, often very funny account of her son’s brief, brilliant life. Jesse Cooper, as she writes, was “an honor-roll student who loved to windsurf and write poetry. He also had severe cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic, unable to speak, and wracked by seizures. He died suddenly at age seventeen.”

Marianne Leone played Joanne Moltisanti on The Sopranos for four seasons on HBO. Chris Cooper, her husband, is a supporting-part superstar in Hollywood. Knowing Jesse is a celebrity-proof story of love-struck strivers from acting school bringing up their baby in Hoboken in the 80s, about their readiness, as it turned out, to be led by their hearty, heroic, sometimes brave, sometimes invisible boy Jesse. By the 6th grade, after storming their way into mainstream public-school classes in Kingston, Massachusetts, Jesse was writing compelling poems, as above — each with its own rhythm, design and heart:

I love that poem. What I remember when Jesse was writing that poem is how insistent he was on the way it looked on the page, which I thought was really interesting. “I am sometimes invisible” grabs you by the throat in that poem. I actually thought of calling this book “sometimes invisible,” because people with disabilities are sometimes invisible in our society… When you’re in middle school you have these heroic self-images, but he also knew that he was sometimes invisible.

We never downplayed the disability. I used to talk to Jesse and say you know, Jesse, you’d be a master of the universe if it weren’t for this disability. You would be a little white boy with a movie-star daddy, and more money than 99 percent of the world deals with every single day. But we are a minority. And because of that he was well schooled in Martin Luther King and Ghandi and all of those movements. I wanted him to be politically aware of what it meant to be a minority… In sixth grade, when it was black history month, the teacher says: I want each of you to pick a black personage to be. Everyone in the class picks a sports figure, except for Jesse who picks one of the kids who integrated Little Rock High School. And why is that? Because we read a book about it, together. About what that meant…

I did worry that I was grooming him to be more of an insurrectionist than maybe his own temperment would have made him. But I think he agreed. “I’m sometimes invisible” tells me that he got it. And his picking not a sports figure, but the kid who integrated Little Rock High School, told me that too. I wanted to give him a vision. He could take his intellect, have a life of the mind, and thrive with that.

Marianne Leone Cooper in conversation with Chris Lydon in Kingston, MA, January 6, 2011

Podcast • March 22, 2010

Linda Nathan’s Public HS for Artists, Scholars and Citizens

Click to listen to Chris’s field trip to Boston Arts Academy. (55 minutes, 33 mb mp3) For 20-plus years Linda Nathan has been showing me the peaks of effort, originality, achievement and humanity! that are ...

Click to listen to Chris’s field trip to Boston Arts Academy. (55 minutes, 33 mb mp3)

For 20-plus years Linda Nathan has been showing me the peaks of effort, originality, achievement and humanity! that are possible in big-city public schools. And now she is sharing her hard-won mountain-top lessons in a manual for anybody who cares about real education today: The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School.

Linda’s led me to some peaks that seemed impossible, too. She asked me in the early Nineties to teach a course at her high school in Boston. I said: “See if there’s a handful of kids who’ll read The Brothers Karamazov with me over a semester. It’s not P.C. It’s not ‘relevant.’ It’s just great. As long as the kids live they’ll never have to ask what makes a work of art.” Linda quickly found about 15 volunteers — boys and girls, seniors and juniors, of all sizes and stripes — for 750 pages of dense Dostoevsky. Twelve kids read and talked their way through to the end of a masterpiece. Most wrote very strong papers about it. Twenty years later, some of those kids still stay in touch with me. All of them stay in touch with her.

Linda Nathan’s kids call her “Mom” in the corridors of the Boston Arts Academy — on three floors of a converted warehouse behind the right-field bleachers of the Red Sox’ Fenway Park. On the occasion of Linda’s book, we’re hanging out with her teenaged painters, poets, horn players, dancers and stage designers, and with the teachers who’ve chosen with the kids to find their own path to art, learning and citizenship.

Thinking-wise, it opens your mind, being around the arts all the time. If someone is struggling in middle school you would look and giggle; in regular high school you would look and giggle. “Look, oh, they are having a hard time.” Here you know what that struggle feels like because you struggled to get that note, you struggled to stay on the right key, you struggled to get that dance move down. It opens your mind. When you look at the world you look at it artistically, and with your normal mind. I don’t want to say normal mind because art is part of my normal mind. But you see the world differently from the way people at a regular Boston public school would.

“India,” a student in Mr. Ali’s Humanities class, with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy.

I was a physics major before I became a dancer, and I truly believe in my personal journey that I wouldn’t be the artist I have become had I not had a very strong academic background. It actually gave me a lot of skills, a lot of tools to go back on, even math. It taught me a different way of thinking. I also feel if you are a true artist you have to develop your own voice. What is your voice? And what are you trying to say? That is why we aim for wholistic training, because I don’t think you should spend all your time in the studio. And, yes, you can become a fabulous technician, but that is not the true sense of an artist. I think you also have to have something that comes from inside you. So you have to enrich every aspect of your brain, your soul, all of that. And that’s why in this school we don’t say: we’re training you just to become an artist. We say: … an artist, a scholar, a citizen.

Dance teacher Fern Chan with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy, Friday, March 5, 2010.

What we know from the arts is there is a whole range of experiences that fall outside of the mind. What our students get is a sense of the things that cannot be expressed in words or mathematical symbols, but deserve expression. That is where the arts live. I can’t tell you how often students tell me, ‘I’ve had experiences but I can’t put them in words.’ The arts provide sound and kinesthesia that help us explain these other things that we express and experience. Adolescence is this open field of complications and contradictions. How do you get through that unless you have a way of embracing it and in some way integrating it into your lives.

The other side is this: just because you’re giving me the arts, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden my world becomes OK. When you give me the arts you’re actually creating new anxieties for me, or you’re agitating anxieties that I carry. Our model of teaching is one that involves mentorship. It’s important that older artists be a part of their educational experiences. We need you to tell us your story about how you crossed this creative bridge. The world of art-making is hugely anxiety-ridden. People are constantly worrying about reputation, they’re doubting themselves, they’re questioning themselves. How do we help students in that space to continue on, to feel like they have enough muscle in them to really feel like they can face some of those monsters? Because there are monsters that come up with art-making.

Humanities teacher Abdi Ali with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy, Friday, March 5, 2010.

The question in my head going in was: how’s to evaluate a public high school that doesn’t take tests as the true measure of anything? My question on the way out was: if I had to do high school all over again, wouldn’t I rather go to a place like Linda Nathan’s Arts Academy than to the sort of “Marine Corps of the Mind” exam-school where I did go — and where we sent our own three kids? Who else out there is puzzling through that sort of choice?

Podcast • February 10, 2010

Ghana Speaking (III): Kofi Sam’s Model of African Self-Sufficiency

We are making the full village rounds here in Aburanza, near Cape Coast, with a strong-minded, strong-willed modern chief. From furniture works to dress-making class to palm-nut oil pots, Dr. Kofi Sam is barking out variations on his evangelical theme: West Africa can provide the essentials for itself (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) if only it first licks a second AIDS crisis — the Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome.

Kofi Sam, who graduated from high school in the 1950s with Kofi Annan of the UN, is a cheerful misfit in the Ghanaian elite. He is an engineer with English training and now a compelling Ghanaian vision, however eccentric. He ran steel works in Ghana back in the day, and held the Housing ministry in Jerry Rawlings’ military government in the 1980s. But he was all the while getting more focused on “appropriate technology” for tropical Africa — on finding modern designs and materials, that is, for the climate and culture of a hot, poor place. Tight denim blue jeans make an interesting Western fashion statement, as he might say, but what is their place in Africa? And what is all that Scandinavian concrete doing in new Ghanaian housing?

How is it, Kofi Sam asks, that “for 50 years we haven’t been able to design a building that doesn’t use air conditioners?” Kofi Sam laughs a lot through what can sound like a stand-up routine getting heavy and deep:

Why is Africa waiting for Germany and Japan to go solar? Because we are copy cats.

Whatever the master in England does, we copy it. Our buildings should have big open windows. That’s how the imperialists, the white men, built their bungalows. We knocked them down and replaced them with glass houses, sealed glass.

Africans wear suits with neckties! With socks! With underwear! We cover ourselves so we feel the heat, then we go to the office and call our secretaries to bring us hot coffee, not cool cocoa, using an air conditioner that could light forty homes…

We only wear what we make on Fridays — Friday wear! That’s the problem…

There is a tunnel called ‘Western education.’ We enter it and learn how to forget. We go to Accra and forget about the village…

The African intellectual is like a bee who has forgotten how to make honey.

The governmental system in Africa only caters to Western-educated people, even though they’re less than 15 percent of the population. From the president right down to the teacher, they get paid at the end of every month.

No villager gets paid for anything. They get up in the morning, they go to their farms, they produce their cassava or yam or plaintain. Nobody guarantees them a market. Nobody gives them loans. All the taxes raised in the country are for Western-educated people, like Kofi Sam.

The villagers don’t get anything.

Dr. Kofi Sam with Chris Lydon, in Aburanza on the Atlantic coast of Ghana, January 28, 2010.

We spend the day surveying some good old alternatives. At one smoky, blistering-hot open-air work site, a dozen women are time-sharing a machine that cracks palm nuts, and in their individual vats they’re slowly cooking the cherished red oil that Africa uses for soap and cooking. No corn oil here, thank you. In his home village of Aburanza, Kofi Sam has sponsored a cane furniture works, hand-weaving of kente cloth, and machine-assisted grinding of cassava flour. His sister’s henhouse looks spotless and contented. “You asked what should aid agencies do,” Kofi Sam remarks. “How about a little capital so that my sister and her kind can each construct 100 henhouses and start with ten layers apiece. Whole villages improve that way.”

At a hilltop prayer meeting at mid-day in Aburanza, families answer my greeting (“He’s real! He’s alive! He’s on time!”) with “Hallelujah!” A pastor is offering pint-sized bottles of an herbal remedy. As for those basic necessities that Africa can provide itself, I challenge my host on one big point: “Native medicine isn’t going to cure malaria, Dr. Sam,” I say. “You’re wrong,” he fires back. “I made the same mistake you’re making.” What he learned eventually is that malaria wiped out mainly white newcomers; West Africans had developed an immunity and boosted it with natural medicines. Malaria was a weapon, he said, that forced the British to adopt “indirect rule” in West Africa, rather than settle as they did in Kenya and Southern Africa.

You’ll hear Kofi Sam inviting me back to Aburanza — and me promising to return before Christmas. “I want people like you here,” he says, “to let the world know that the aid they give doesn’t get to us. It’s in Accra — in the swimming pools of Accra, in the golf courses of Accra, in the lawn tennis courts of Accra, in the restaurants of Accra…”

And then, for $20, he sells me that striking handmade blue shirt off his beautiful brown back. Thank you, Kofi Sam. We will meet again.

Podcast • February 9, 2010

Ghana Speaking (II): Village Living in Kwabeng

I’m going “home” here with my friend Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang to “where my belly button is buried,” to the seat of his fondest memories and his first great love, his grandmother. And I’m concluding presumptuously, on ...

The burdens on ten-thousand villagers in Kwabeng, in Ghana’s Eastern Region, begin with infectious diseases: malaria, typhus, HIV. They have no hospital, no resident doctor. Listen and you will hear a village leader tell me: “people over here are not feeling fine at all.” Another: “when someone falls ill, sometimes you lose the person on the way to finding help.” The gold digging company that skipped town two years ago left a contaminated water supply and no benefits. The leading farmers in Kwabeng fret openly about backward methods and bad markets. They should be planting more trees. They are not sustaining their own environment.

But it’s the robust strengths of the village that astonish and stick. Handsome men gather and gab in the breezy open air at their own self-started NGO, the Kwabeng Development Foundation. Some in work clothes, some in traditional robes, they all glow with calmly Emersonian self-reliance. “It is now generally understood,” one farmer explains, “that government by itself cannot solve the problems of life. We need to depend on ourselves.” Projects like the village hospital “have to start with us.”

“Our life is good,” says a man in the chief’s council of elders, and the supporting evidence is all around us in Kwabeng, whose name means literally “the forest that was cooked red.” A host of little children and teenagers play noisy games at the heart of town. The air is familiar, confident, safe without a second thought. Kwabeng seems delighted to meet a stray American. “It’s as if the government of America is here,” a woman marvels. She has heard I do radio, and when I ask “if we had our own radio station in Kwabeng, what would we talk about?” she says: “farming, and education!”

These are people of breathtaking physical beauty, and twinkling humor, too. The name Barack Obama brings out affection and a touch of mischef. “He is our brother,” says an elder. “He’s our friend. He’s our son. He’s everything to Ghanaians.” So why did they all laugh when I first mentioned our president? Because, they explain, Obama had handed Ghana a sweet victory with his first sub-Saharan visit, a score as delicious as Ghana’s futbol win against Nigeria just before I arrived. “If Obama can send some American doctors to this district, and help us build a hospital, we will be pleased.”

We’re all in on the irony that Ghana, in fact, exports medical doctors to England and the US. I was shocked to hear reliably that there are more Ghana-trained doctors working in London and New York than in Ghana. Can it be? Ghana’s home network of healthcare is held together, just barely, by a couple of hundred Cuban doctors. It is one of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s assignments, as a local boy made good at the University of Cape Coast, to get a Cuban doctor assigned to Kwabeng for one day every weekend.

It comes clear, as teenagers drift up to Professor Opoku-Agyemang with their college applications and their test scores, that he is also the village’s higher education chief. All afternoon he is giving students discreet advice and encouragement, showing me how the village works, and aspires. Kwabeng, with an immemorial past, looks to the future, too. Of course, the fantasist in me is scheming: how do I get back here — to live?