Green thoughts

One of my kids was really embarrassed by the fact that I never finished high school. It was only I who suffered embarrassment from the fact that I did have a high school equivalency certificate. My mother had insisted that I pick it up. I had enjoyed finding a way in which I could complete a graduate education and emerge with nothing but a grade school diploma and a Ph D. Mom wasn't charmed by the notion.

In the 50's, the Ford Foundation pour a sizeable chunk of money into an experiment to see what would happen if some smart high school kids started college a year or two earlier. There were about a dozen colleges and universities which participated in the experiment, some of them fairly substantial places. Ford provided lots of scholarship money to lure the tots.

I was one of the experimentees. I left high school and home when I was 16. Perhaps half of the class which entered with me were part of the same program, some as young as 14. We were called early entrants. We weren't segregated or coddled, but treated just as ordinary undergrads.

The experiment worked. Except for the handful of kids who arrived on campus before puberty hit their corpus, we did better as a group in terms of adjustment than the fully aged and flavored ones. It worked so successfully, in fact, that essentially it doesn't exist any more. High school guidance counselors were not charmed by having their best upperclassmen creamed off as early entrants and stopped pushing their graduating seniors toward the participating schools, unless, perhaps, they were also looking for full scholarships.

A few dozen schools now have special collegiate academies for kids willing to skip the senior prom, but many of these are not residential or are separate institutions within the larger institution. Simon's Rock of Bard College admits only early entrants. The only colleges I know of which today admit early entrants at ordinary freshmen are Shimer (which is tiny and something you've never heard of) and Wellesley (which is no help for smart guys).

Anyway, I became a college student at 16 at a college which subjected all new students at the very start to a battery of placement exams which would excuse the proficient from otherwise mandatory classes. So, I was not only 16 but more or less a sophomore to boot. A heady experience reading Marx and Milton and Mill and Marlow and Mendel and the like long before needing to shave every day, and doing so with the burning conviction that what one thought about such things really mattered.

I have never forgotten my first night standing with a cluster of strangers outside a dormitory door, all freshly abandoned by our parents and all smoking because that was what people who wanted to be intellectuals then did. (Cigarettes of course; weed didn't appear for nearly another decade.) We were all desperate to have a serious, meaningful, probing dialectic about something that mattered, and some how we wound up debating the meaning of 'green'. I have no recollection of what the arguments were, but they were passionate. The core of the passion, I think, was to find an idea and explore it all the way, to do something none of the friends we had left behind would be doing for another year or two to come, -- if ever. And this was the only passion that seemed to matter. I suspect "green" may even, at a deep level, have had something to do with the virginity I suspect that every one of us was still weighted by.

And I'm still pissed my mother made me pick up the high school equivalency certificate. It was a fraud. That launching year wasn't the least bit equivalent to high school.