PROVIDENCE – At a time when public education is under siege from the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic – and from corporate desires to turn public education into a commodity, much like what health care has become today, I wish I could have one more conversation with Norton Juster, who passed away this week at the age of 91.

Juster is perhaps best known as the author of The Phantom Tollbooth, a children’s book that engages in wordplay and puns, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. It follows the adventures of Milo, “a boy who didn’t known what to do with himself – and not just sometimes, but always,” on a journey through which Milo meets many perplexing characters in an attempt to find a place where he belongs.

Juster’s opening description of Milo captured the yearning of a young person – and perhaps most adults – in search of a place where he or she can to belong:

“When he was in school he longer to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were someone else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered. Nothing really interested him – least of all the things that should have.”

Soon Milo finds himself on an adventure, passing through a tollbooth, following a map, where he keeps encountering bewildering characters, such as the “Whether Man” when he enters the land of expectations. “Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you are going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them, whether they like it or not.” [The illustration by Feiffer of the Whether Man is actually a portrait of Juster.]

A mentor in unexpected ways
I never read The Phantom Tollbooth before I had arrived at Hampshire College in 1970, when I had the privilege of taking classes with Juster. He taught architecture, with an emphasis on place-based design. And, if I am brutally honest, I was never a favorite student of his, often completing assignments that I admit were mediocre at best, when I took successive years of his class: “The man-made environment.” Architecture was not to be my calling.

It was during one of his classes in early November in 1970 where my desire to become a writer emerged, full-blown, during an exercise when the students were asked to interact with the brick-and-concrete fortress known as the Main Lecture Hall, a building that had been erected on the site of a former frog pound, a building resolute and oblivious to its surroundings, its brick walls with tiny windows serving as a proverbial stone wall that would always be in need of mending, even though its nearest neighbors were the remnants of a sprawling apple orchard, teeming with a late-season crop of red delicious and golden delicious apples.

While Juster and a colleague from New York City observed us, the 20 or so students in his class attempted to engage with the foyer and surrounding concrete staircases.

My choice was to grab a chair, sit down, and begin a monologue, talking about our lack of connection to the world around us, in the way that we ignored the sound of the B-52 bombers roaring above us, taking off on training missions from the nearby Westover Air Force Base, which would suddenly cast the entire building into shadow before we heard the roar of the jet engines, what our eyes refused to see and our ears refused to hear: we were in the midst of a war in Vietnam, and no one seemed to be paying attention, certainly not within the sterile walls of the lecture hall.

In search of a sense of belonging
Despite my best efforts, I could never seem to find a safe place to belong within Juster’s classroom sphere.

• He lent me a host of papers to read from his personal files but a jug of cider exploded in the trunk of my car, staining many of the pages with a deep aromatic stain.

• I led a contingent of classmates up to his home in rural Buckland, on a small farm on a ridge above the Deerfield River, but I hadn’t listened carefully enough to his instructions, so we arrived empty handed, instead of with the necessary provisions for a meal.

A few years later, I would find myself living in Buckland, renting a room in a tiny Cape on a steep hill above the two retail town centers of Buckland and Shelburne Falls, on an area the topological map described as Hog Hollow, just down from Moonshine Ridge, a small portion of the northern branch of Appalachia. At the time, it was an impoverished, run-down rural community, but that would soon change, in large part thanks to Juster.

Juster, working with his architecture firm partner, Earl Pope, who also co-taught his classes, had led a student project called “Shelburne Falls Observed,” interviewing residents about what they saw in their town, and then held gatherings to show the residents what they themselves had said – and what was valued by them about the town.

The process led to a local resident-led revival of Shelburne Falls, and the repair of its prominent tourist attraction, the Bridge of Flowers. It was an example of what happens when a community is able to see itself as part of a neighborhood, something to take price in, what could be described as bottom-up innovation.

For sure, the roots of the project had its origins in some of the original class work of “The Man-Made Environment.”

• On an assignment to observe and then document the town of Amherst, looking for nodal points, I got lost on a tangent that I couldn’t express very well: how all the roadways leading into the center of town, located atop the plateau of the highest ground, altered one’s perceptions of the boundaries of what you observed. It was a problem that I often encountered as a young writer, confused about whether I was a first-person participant or a third-party observer.

I got stuck on the oddity that there were two restaurants of the very same name, the “Gaslight Cafe,” within 200 yards of each other. One catered to those travelers moving south but up the hill towards the town center, from the massive University of Massachusetts campus, the home to some 15,000 students at the time. The second was encountered by those traveling west, up the hill from South Amherst, in a row of shops bordering on the Amherst Town Common, next door to a venerable clothing store, the House of Walsh, which catered to the needs of Amherst College students. What separated the two cafes with the same name was the inability to see beyond the highest point, I argued.

As I recall, Juster strongly dismissed the presentation as widely missing the mark. Ouch.

• At my urging, later in the semester, the class took a trip to Springfield, located some two-dozen miles south of the campus, alongside the Connecticut River, on a walking tour of the city’s downtown. The purpose was to observe how modern urban renewal with a new vertical office building, known as Bay State, seemed to be hastening the destruction of the downtown commercial district, which had once been built on a very walk-able scale.

To open the tour, I had taken the class and our caravan of cars on a different perspective, entering the city from the vantage point of Forest Park, through the park’s rose gardens and duck ponds, then through residential Forest Park section, finally down through Little Italy, before arriving at downtown.

Juster was angry with the class for not bringing notebooks, for not bringing cameras, in order to document what we had observed. Double ouch!

Learning how to see
Despite my mediocre class work, Juster’s classes opened doors to me, learning how to listen and to observe, critical skills for a reporter. Anyone who has every visited Shelburne Falls, anyone who has ever visited the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, adjacent to the Hampshire College campus [which his architectural firm designed], has been taken on a journey, much like Milo, into a land of expectations.

I had one last significant encounter with Juster, when my son was a fourth-grade student and the class was reading The Phantom Tollbooth. I made the mistake of volunteering the information during a parent-teacher conference that I had been a student of Juster’s in college.

That led to my contacting Juster and asking if he would be willing to answer a question or two about the book from the students. He agreed, asking to limit the questions to two or three. Instead, the teachers sent a deluge of more than 20 questions, not following the careful instructions I had given them.

Juster answered the questions dutifully, the kids and teachers were thrilled, but Juster let me know how disappointed he was that his instructions were not followed. I apologized then, and I apologize again now. My bad, Norton.

Lessons learned
No one I interviewed this week for ConvergenceRI – including Neil Steinberg, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foumdation – was familiar with Norton Juster, the author or the architect.

In interviewing Linda Perri, one of the community activists fighting against the tide of toxic pollution along Allens Avenue, which was made “visible” last week by the dark billowing clouds from a fire when a submarine was being cut up, after years of legal intervention, Norton Juster was clearly on my mind.

I suggested that she and other community residents might consider taking Gov. Dan McKee on a “a toxic avenue” bus tour, so that he could observe, first-hand, what residents have had to endure for years on daily basis – and to share with him their vision of a future tree-planting project for the neighborhood to repair and to mitigate the damage. Allens Avenue observed?

We are all still searching, I believe, for a place where we belong, which might be the best definition of neighborhood in a place-based community. When it comes to public education and addressing racial equity and social disparities of health, it needs to be an inclusive conversation. The brighter side of the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps, is the realization of how much we need to depend on the kindness of each other, in that larger neighborhood where we all live and empathy is valued trait.

In the next few months, I predict we are going to be assaulted by a corporate messaging campaign, led by private equity champions of education reform, about how to solve the predicament of what will come to be known as “learning loss,” tied to the coronavirus.

No doubt “learning loss” will be blamed on the “lack” of in-school learning caused by the coronavirus [and, inevitably, somehow, on teachers’ unions]. The solution, I predict, will come right out of the “Chiefs for Change” playbook – new investments in charter schools, followed by new investments in “personal learning” initiatives, financed by technology giants.

Before we respond to the alleged threat of the damage caused by “learning loss,” a simpler solution might be to invest in re-reading The Phantom Tollbooth, which ends with Milo having a new appreciation of the world around him: “He noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep green. Outside the window, there was much to see, and hear, and touch – walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day.

“And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know – music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real.”