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Shooting the Rapids
Anthony Esolen on Manhood in the Making
The summer before my eighth grade, a couple of young men from town showed up at our door, asking my parents if they could talk to us about my enrolling in something they called the “Higher Achievement Program” at the local Jesuit high school. They had heard, they said, that I was very bright, and they thought I’d be a great addition to the program. I actually thought that somehow they were recruiting my assistance, so for this once in my boyhood vanity overcame shyness and I agreed.
Day Camp
I now see it was a “day camp,” for six weeks, for about fifty or sixty kids, all of them boys. The program was the invention of a youngish Jesuit priest who had gotten into a lot of trouble when he was a kid in the city until somebody offered him a chance to use his brains a little one summer; and now he wanted to return the favor by giving other boys the same chance. The whole thing was simple enough. He had picked up four or five instructors (including the two who had called at our house, brothers who worked as a team) to teach reading comprehension, literature, writing, and art.
They divided the boys into five groups, each named after an Indian tribe (we were the Algonquins) and placed in the charge of one of the teachers. Your group would have its own “homeroom” where you could leave your jacket or your lunch, and you’d rotate round the rooms through the course of the week. Mornings were devoted mainly to the schoolish stuff, only it wasn’t like school, either; it was, on the whole, interesting. The art room was filled with large and small pieces of wood of all shapes, hammers, nails, saws, and so forth—an art room with boys in mind.
The literature teacher was, I now suppose, a graduate student from the nearby Jesuit university, a pleasant burly young fellow with long hair and sandals, whose Polish name was too complicated to pronounce. “Just call me Mr. W,” he said. Mr. W had us read and talk about—what else?—The Lord of the Flies. He was great. After lunch and recess on the basketball court outside, they’d usually troop us into cars and take us on a field trip: An infernally hot doughnut factory and a bookbindery are the two I remember. Those, and the local public swimming pool.
From these morning classes I soon began to see that my vanity was not wholly mistaken. The boys came from all over the place. Some were very high achievers, sons of lawyers and doctors, and seemed to have been chosen on account of it. Many, however, were troubled kids from the city, kids whose parents (in those days, even of troubled kids you still spoke of their parents in the plural) wanted to get them off the streets for part of the day at least, for part of the summer. A few of the boys had obviously been failing in school.
The Higher Achievement part of the program, then, had two angles to it: The priest was hoping that one kind of boy might inspire higher achievement in another kind of boy, while having some fun and learning some things himself.
Whether it happened that way or not, I’m in no position to tell. Besides the couple of others from my hometown, I met only a few of those boys again. Two of them enrolled along with me a year later at one of the diocesan high schools. They were at best marginal students; one of them, a good kid from a terrible home, ended up doing a lot of drugs, fell afoul of the law, and has spent much of his adult life in the clink or on probation.
What it did for me, though, is another matter; and since the very idea of a Higher Achievement Program set aside for boys is almost unthinkable nowadays, I thought I’d describe what it did, lest such truths be backhoed over while we put up the next asexual subdivision.
Clumsy Lefthander
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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