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THE POLISH BOY
John Paul hated school. His Mother did her best, but how could she possibly teach anything to him when she had eight other children--six of them to teach, two of them to tend because they were mere babies?
What John Paul hated most was the way she kept teaching him things he already knew. She would assign him to make his letters, practicing them over and over while she taught interesting things to the older kids. So John Paul did his best to make sense of the jumble of information he caught from her conversations with them. Smatterings of geography--he learned the names of dozens of nations and their capitals but wasn't quite sure what a nation was. Bits of mathematics--she taught polynomials over and over to Anna because she didn't even seem to try to understand, but it enabled John Paul to learn the operation. But he learned it like a machine, having no notion what it actually meant.
Nor could he ask. When he tried, Mother would get impatient and tell him that he would learn these things in due time, but he should concentrate on his own lessons now.
His own lessons? He wasn't getting any lessons, just boring tasks that almost made him crazy with impatience. Didn't she realize that he could already read and write as well as any of his older siblings? She made him recite from a primer, when he was perfectly capable of reading any book in the house. He tried to tell her, "I can read that one, Mother." But she only answered, "John Paul, that's playing. I want you to learn real reading."
Maybe if he didn't turn the pages of the grown-up books so quickly, she would realize that he was actually reading. But when he was interested in a book, he couldn't bear to slow down just to impress Mother. What did his reading have to do with her? It was his own. The only part of school that he enjoyed.
"You're never going to stay up with your lessons," she said more than once, "if you keep spending your reading time with these big books. Look, they don't even have pictures, why do you insist on playing with them?"
"He's not playing," said Andrew, who was twelve. "He's reading."
"Yes, yes, I should be more patient and play along," said Mother, "but I don't have time to..." And then one of the babies cried and the conversation was over.
Outside on the street, other children walked to school wearing school uniforms, laughing and jostling each other. Andrew explained it to him. "They go to school in a big building. Hundreds of them in the same school."
John Paul was aghast. "Why don't their own mothers teach them? How can they learn anything with hundreds?"
"There's more than one teacher, silly. A teacher for every ten or fifteen of them. But they're all the same age, all learning the same thing in each class. So the teacher spends the whole day on their lessons instead of having to go from age to age."
John Paul thought a moment. "And every age has its own teacher?"
"And the teachers don't have to feed babies and change their diapers. They have time to really teach."
But what good would that have done for John Paul? They would have put him in a class with other five-year-olds and made him read stupid primers all day--and he wouldn't be able to listen to the teacher giving lessons to the ten-and twelve-and fourteen-year-olds, so he really would lose his mind.
"It's like heaven," said Andrew bitterly. "And if Father and Mother had had only two children, they could have gone there. But the minute Anna was born, we were cited for noncompliance."
John Paul was tired of hearing that word without understanding it. "What is noncompliance?"
"There's this great big war out in space," said Andrew. "Way above the sky."
"I know what space is," said John Paul impatiently.
"OK, well, big war and all, so all the countries of the world have to work together and pay to build hundreds and hundreds of starships, so they put somebody called the Hegemon in charge of the whole world. And the Hegemon says we can't afford the problems caused by overpopulation, so any marriage that has more than two children is noncompliant."
Andrew stopped as if he thought that made everything clear.
"But lots of families have more than two kids," said John Paul. Half their neighbors did.
"Because this is Poland," said Andrew, "and we're Catholic."
"What, does the priest give people extra babies?" John Paul couldn't see the connection.
"Catholics believe you should have as many children as God sends you. And no government has the right to tell you to reject God's gifts."
"What gifts?" said John Paul.
"You, dummy," said Andrew. "You're God's gift number seven in this house. And the babies are gift eight and gift nine."
"But what does it have to do with going to school?"
Andrew rolled his eyes. "You really are dumb," he said. "Schools are run by the government. The government has to enforce sanctions against noncompliance. And one of the sanctions is, only the first two children in a family have a right to go to school."
"But Peter and Catherine don't go to school," said John Paul.
"Because Father and Mother don't want them to learn all the anti-Catholic things the schools teach."
John Paul wanted to ask what "anti-Catholic" meant, but then he realized it must mean something like against-the-Catholics so it wasn't worth asking and having Andrew call him a dummy again.
Instead he thought and thought about it. How a war made it so all the nations gave power to one man, and that one man then told everybody how many children they could have, and all the extra children were kept out of school. That was actually a benefit, wasn't it? Not to go to school? How would John Paul have learned anything, if he hadn't been in the same room with Anna and Andrew and Peter and Catherine and Nicholas and Thomas, overhearing their lessons?
The most puzzling thing was the idea that the schools could teach anti-Catholic stuff. "Everybody's Catholic, aren't they?" he asked Father once.
"In Poland, yes. Or they say they are. And it used to be true." Father's eyes were closed. His eyes were almost always closed, whenever he sat down. Even when he was eating, he always looked as though he were about to fall over and sleep. That was because he worked two jobs, the legal one during the day and the illegal one at night. John Paul almost never saw him except in the morning, and then Father was too tired to talk and Mother would shush him.
She shushed him now, even though Father had already answered him. "Don't pester your father with questions, he has important things on his mind."
"I have nothing on my mind," said Father wearily. "I have no mind."
