MY WILD SCHOOLDAYS AT HIPPIE HIGH
Laura Lippman was educated at an experimental high school in the US in the 1970s – an experience she looks back on with a mixture of fondness and horror…
Novelist Laura Lippman on the freedoms she enjoyed at her experimental school
August 1974. From the outside, the two-storey building in front of me looked like a space station: a squat roundish shape feeding into a slightly taller rectangle, set on an arid, largely treeless plane. Inside, the dimness reminded me of a submarine – and I have a pathological fear of submarines so pronounced that I have never watched Das Boot or The Hunt for Red October.
But I didn’t care. This was my future. I was 15 and my parents, much to my joy, had decided to remove me from a rigorously academic programme in Baltimore, the so- called A course. The all-girl programme took only the best students from throughout the city, but I wasn’t thriving at Western High School and neither was my elder sister. I had been targeted by a few tough girls on the afternoon school bus. Worse still, friends I had known most of my life, who attended birthday parties and picnics with me, ignored the abuse I was taking. On top of that betrayal, a month-long teachers’ strike had heightened my struggles in maths and science, until I was having full-blown panic attacks every Sunday night.
My parents, long fascinated by the experimental new ‘city’ known as Columbia, Maryland, decided to rent out our house in Baltimore and take an apartment on the banks of manmade Wilde Lake, within walking distance of the school by the same name. I couldn’t wait to go to a mixed school – not because I was boy- crazy, but because I was crazily competitive and wanted to prove that I could beat male students for the best grades.
I also nurtured an unspoken hope that Columbia, which embraced the power of change, would offer me a fresh start – something that teenage girls still crave, in my experience. I believed that a burgundy wool sweater and a pair of Clarks Wallabees were almost magic talismans. So why not a new school, especially one as unusual as Wilde Lake? Visionary urban planner James W Rouse had created Columbia with the idea of a place where there would be no barriers to community. In his heterogeneous new town – a system of ‘villages’ and ‘neighbourhoods’ with literary names such as Faulkner Ridge and Hobbit’s Glen – people of different races and classes would mix easily, eagerly.
Wilde Lake High School had opened in 1971, four years after ➤
➤ ground was broken for Columbia. In keeping with Columbia’s high-flown ambitions to change how people interacted, the school system had embraced so- called open-space education. Students, while compelled to meet the state’s standards for graduation, worked independently, as swiftly as they liked. The guidance counsellor who led my family around the school on that hot August day said ruefully, ‘We still say that students should learn at their own pace. But we’ve had to establish a minimum speed limit.’ Wilde Lake’s lofty principles were already beginning to fray in the face of adolescent temperaments.
The school was hushed and serene out of term time; it would be the last time I ever experienced it that way. There was a constant, low humming, sometimes shot through with a teacher’s authoritative voice.
Open-space education was literal: on the second floor, where most academic classes met, there were few walls, just utilitarian dividers carving subject areas into smaller areas. Going clockwise from the front door, there was history and social studies, literature and composition, foreign languages, maths and science. The last two were increasingly taught traditionally, unless a pupil was a certified genius. But in the other courses, most work was divided into segments, each with a ‘learning activity package’. Do 12 segments, get a credit in English.
We began the day in ‘advisory groups’, not form rooms, and although attendance was taken, we were allowed to wander much of the school day if our classes did not involve lectures. I used my freedom to read plays in the school media centre and other pupils pursued their favourite subjects. But some whiled away the days smoking, which was permitted just outside the building.
Technically, those wanderings shouldn’t have taken us off school property, but when students left – usually to buy fast food at the nearby Jack in the Box restaurant – it was rare to get into trouble. The hard cases – the students who disrupted others or started fights – were sent to RP Room, Reality Planning. There they sat until they had devised a written plan for how to leave RP Room, prompting one teacher to write a parody to the tune of ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’: Just do your work, Burke/Don’t come in late, Nate/ Make a new plan, Stan – there must be 50 ways to leave RP Room.
Alone and friendless for much of my early weeks at Wilde Lake, I completed a year’s worth of English composition in less than four months. This feat was extraordinary only because I did it in the first four months of the year. Some of the friends I eventually made – gentle drama nerds cross-pollinated with sporty types and maths geniuses (Wilde Lake was as socially fluid as the Columbia of Rouse’s dreams) – crammed their independent coursework into the last two months of the year.
You see, a central tenet of Wilde Lake was that there was no failure – no Fs at all, and I’m not even sure teachers gave out scores of lower than 70 per cent. If your grade fell short of passing or your work was not done, you were simply ‘incomplete’.
Inevitably, the national media was fascinated with Columbia, Wilde Lake and Rouse. Life magazine visited the school in the spring of 1977, photographing the first-year class because they were to be the college class of 1984. But their anonymous quotes weren’t exactly Orwellian, just rather bored and callow. Classmates who had been in Columbia schools most of their lives swore to me that they had spent entire years playing card games. Yet when they applied themselves, they did well. At graduation, seven of us had straight-A averages, and because so many people at Wilde Lake made stellar grades (and because it wasn’t generally known that a Wilde Lake A was perhaps not as significant as one from another school), we did well at getting into elite colleges: Princeton, Radcliffe, Cornell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Stanford.
It was staying that proved a bit of a problem. Few colleges tolerated the easy-going approach to studying and deadlines we had become
acclimatised to at Wilde Lake. One friend almost dropped out in his first term.
Back at Wilde Lake, the curriculum was almost a completely conventional one by the time Ronald Reagan was elected President. The school’s reputation fell on hard times, in part for things outside its control – the changing demographics of Columbia, a teacher’s fatal heart attack while trying to break up a fight.
Eventually, it was decided to blow the thing up, replacing the futuristic space station of my era with a traditional behemoth of limestone and glass. Inside, there are walls now.
For years, I mined my Wilde Lake experience primarily for comic anecdotes that also helped to explain some pretty shocking gaps in my knowledge (I’m terrible at geography and the only thing I understood in chemistry was how to memorise the elements on the periodic table). There was an earnestness to the original Columbia families, a sense of being part of something larger than themselves, and it’s easy to mock earnestness. I had a front-row seat for the last gasp of hippiedom.
But when I decided to write about my old high school in a novel, I realised there was much to admire. Yes, it was crazy to expect adolescents to make sound decisions about how to allocate their time. However, students who were motivated could soar at Wilde Lake.
It was a great place to be an outlier. There were quite a few success stories, now that I began to take notice. A practical joker I knew showed up in a national magazine; he had created a company that staged very expensive pranks. A 12-year- old allowed to study calculus at the high school went on to become one of Google’s first employees. The captain of our quiz team in 1976 (I was his successor) is working in the luxury industry in Japan, and writing novels. And the Facebook group ‘You Know You Grew Up in Columbia Md When’ has thousands of members.
It was generally a happy place (although far more homogenous than Rouse had hoped: I remember controversies over whether school dances would have a white or black band). The teachers were amazing, generous and affectionate compared with the majority of staff I had known in my city high school. My adviser allowed us to visit her home, threw parties for us and gave one talented student the chance to paint a mural on her dining-room wall. I found myself part of an incredibly accomplished dance troupe that did performances at the Baltimore city jail. And it was a great place to learn to drive – not much traffic, lots of cul de sacs.
I began to remember the stories I never told: the one about the maths teacher who indulged my desire to construct a theorem about stars drawn around the base of an equilateral pentagon. (Thanks to my bruising struggles in Baltimore, I had come into that teacher’s class believing I couldn’t do maths at all.) The choreographer who insisted on casting me in the musical despite my total lack of talent. ‘You work hard and you do what I tell you to do and you’re used to my yelling,’ she said. I earned an English credit for adapting a beloved novel into a musical, writing the script and lyrics (I can’t compose music). Today, my husband and I are tasked with trying to create the original story for a musical that will feature songs by the Pogues. Would I be a novelist with 20-plus books to my name if Wilde Lake had not been the kind of school to encourage creativity?
When my latest book, Wilde Lake – a crime novel about a family that has to confront a decades- old scandal – was published, the Columbia Facebook page weighed in with gratifying enthusiasm. Their memories are almost always positive.
My old friend in Tokyo, David Rudlin, now an executive vice president at De Beers, posted this observation: ‘When I first went to college, I had some doubts about my time at WLHS. It took me a while to adapt to working at a given pace, and there were gaps in my knowledge a more conventional education would have filled. But over time the value of self- discipline and selfmotivation came to the fore. And once I entered the working world I considered a WLHS education to be a competitive advantage.’
I do, too. And that noble experiment, while not a resounding success, can be useful to modern parents beset by anxiety over their children’s progress at school. I’m very interested in the growing nohomework movement, and I wish we could find a school that was a little looser about attendance. Last year, I took my daughter Georgia Rae to Tuscany for a week while I taught creative writing so that my urban child had the benefit of roaming a working farm, free in a way that she could never be in Baltimore.
That would have been an easy sell at Wilde Lake.
At a Baltimore school in the 21st Century? Not so much. Georgia Rae is only six and she is slow to read. Her teacher was concerned about this. I’m not. I can tell she simply doesn’t like the style of reading education used in her kindergarten class. If the problem persists, we may have to have her tested.
But, for now, it’s clear to me that she just wants to do things her way. She sits in bed at night, ‘reading’ by finding the words she knows on the page – ‘the’, ‘dog’, ‘heart’, ‘star’, ‘wars’.
My daughter would probably have thrived at the old Wilde Lake High School.
In hindsight, I realise that her mother did.
There was no failure at Wilde Lake. If your grade fell short, you were simply ‘incomplete’