The Anything Box

"Something touched me! Gramma!" She straightened up and pressed her other hand
against the boulder. "Gramma! Somebody put something in my hand! Look,
Gramma!" And she withdrew her arm from the gray granite and held her hand out
to me.
It overflowed with a Something that Was for a split second, and then flaked
and sparked away like the brilliance of a Roman candle, showering vividly and
all around to the ground.
Liesle looked at her hand, all glittering silver, and wiped it on her
pajamas, leaving a shining smudge. "I'm tired, Gramma," she whimpered. She
looked around her, half dazed. "I had a dream!" she cried. "I had a dream!"
I carried her back to the tent. She was too exhausted to cry. She only made
a weary moaning sound that jerked into syllables with the throb of my steps.
She was asleep before I got her jacket off. I knelt beside her for a while,
looking at her—wondering. I lifted her right hand. A last few flakes of
brilliance sifted off her fingers and flickered out on the way to the floor.
Her nails glowed faintly around the edges, her palm, where it was creased,
bore an irregular M of fading silver. What had she held? What gift had been
put into her hand? I looked around, dazed. I was too tired to think. I felt an
odd throb, as though time had gone back into gear again and it was suddenly
very late. I was asleep before I finished pulling the covers up.
Well! It's episodes like that—though, thank Heaven, they're rather
scarce—that make me feel the burden of age. I'm too set in the ways of the
world to be able to accept such things as normal and casual, too sure of what
is to be seen to really see what is. But events don't have to be this bizarre
to make me realize that sometimes it's best just to take the hand of a child—a
Seeing child—and let them do the leading.
The Last Step
I don't like children.
I suppose that's a horrible confession for a teacher to make, but there's
nothing in the scheme of things that says you have to love the components of
your work to do it well. And that's all children are to me—components of my
work. My work is teaching and teaching is my life and I know, especially in a
job handling people, that they say it helps to like people, but love never
made bricks build a better wall—loving never weeded a garden and liking never
made glue stick harder. Children to me are merely items to be handled in the
course of earning my living and whether I like them or not has nothing to do
with the matter. I loathe children outside of school. I avoid them, and they
me. There's no need for school to lap over into other areas of living any more
than a carpenter's tools should claim his emotions after he leaves work.
And the pampering and soft handling the children receive—well, I suppose
those who indulge in it have their justifications or think they have, but all
it accomplishes as far as I can see is to pad their minds against what they
have to learn—a kind of bandage before the wound, because educating children
is a pushing forcibly of the raw materials of intelligence into an artificial
mold. Society itself is nothing but a vast artificiality and all a teacher is
for is to warp the child into the pattern society dictates. Left alone, he'd
be a happy savage for what few brief years he could manage to survive—and I'd
be out of a job. At any rate, I believe firmly in making sure each child I
handle gets a firm grip on the fundamental tools society demands of him. If I
do it bluntly and nakedly, that's my affair. Leave the ruffles and lace edging
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to others. When I get through with a child he knows what he should know forhis level and knows it thoroughly and no love lost on either side. And if hecries when he finds he is to be in my class, he doesn't cry long. Tears arenot permitted in my room.
I've been reading back over this. My tense is wrong. I used to teach. Iused to make sure. Because this is the fifth day.
Well, when the inescapable arrives— But how was I to know? A person is whathe is. He acts as he acts because he acts that way. There's no profit inconsidering things out of the pattern because there's no armor againstdeviation. Or has there been a flaw in my philosophy all this time? Are thereother values I should have considered?
Well, time, even to such an hour as today brings, has to be lived through,so I'm writing this down, letting the seconds be words and the minutesparagraphs. It will make a neat close-quote for the whole situation.
I was in a somewhat worse mood on Monday than I usually was because I hadjust been through another utterly useless meeting with Major Junius. You'dthink, since he is military, that he wouldn't bother himself about suchfoolishness even if parents did complain.
"Imagination," he said, tapping his fingertips together, "is an invaluableasset. It is, I might say, one of the special blessings bestowed upon mankind.Not an unmixed blessing, however, since by imagination one plagues oneselfwith baseless worries and fears, but I feel that its importance for thechildren should not be minimized."
"I don't minimize it," I snapped. "I ignore it. When you hired me to comeout here to Argave and paid my space fare to bring me here, you knew myfeeling on the matter. I am not without reputation."
"True, true." He patted his fingers together again. "But you are robbingthe children of their birthright by denying them such harmless flights offancy, their fairy tales and such imaginative literature."
"Time for such nonsense later," I said. "While I have them, they will learnto read and write and do the mathematics expected of them on this level, butby my methods and with my materials or I resign."
He puffed and blew and sputtered a little, clearly hating me and toyingwith the idea of accepting my resignation, but also visualizing the 130children with only three teachers and Earth a four-month journey away. When Isaw that, as usual, he would do nothing decisive, I got up and left.
I went out to my detested ground duty. The children were due to arrivemomentarily, dropping in giggling clusters from the helitrans that broughtthem out to Base from their housing. Their individual helidrops would landthem in the play yard, and after unstrapping themselves and stacking thehelidrops in the racks, they would swarm all over the grounds and I wassupposed to be at least a token of directed supervision, though what childneeds to be shown how to waste his time?
The children came helling down—as slang would inevitably have it—and theday began. I usually made my tour of the grounds along the fences that boxedus securely against the Argavian countryside, the sterilites along their baseseffectively preventing Argavian flora or fauna from entering. More nonsense.If we want Argave, we shouldn't try to make it a Little Earth. And those of usfool enough to people this outworld military installation should acceptwhatever Argave has to offer— the bad with the good. It's near enoughEarth-type that not many would die.
But to get back to the playground. One corner of it is a sandbox area wherethe smaller children usually played. That morning, I noticed some of the olderboys in that area and went over to see what playground rules they werebreaking. As it happened, they weren't breaking any. They were playing nearthe sandbox, but closer to the fence where Argavian rains had washed out thetopsoil and, combined with the apparent failure of one of the sterilites, haddeveloped a small rough area complete with tiny Argavian plants—a landscape in