They learn, first of all, fundamental concepts that are expressed simply: “You don’t have to have a lot of fancy buildings to do a good program,” or “You know, sometimes we teach a lot of theory and we don’t really get down to—I guess you’d call it the nitty-gritty,” or even “Now don’t chicken out, the way some of you did last time, step in the water.”
They learn of “quiet hour,” when, at the beginning of the week, each child stakes out a spot for himself in the woods, beside the stream, wherever choice leads. For an hour each day, in sun or rain, everybody seeks his or her own place and is assured of peace and privacy. A girl writes a poem to her parents; a fourth-grader contemplates on a rock by the water; and almost everyone who observes the quiet hour looks forward to it eagerly each day.
Pages 142-143: Members of the Tilman Ownby family of Dudley Creek, near Gatlinburg, gather for a reunion in the early 1900s. Many of their descendants still live in the Smokies area today.
National Park Service
Children anxiously line up to go back a few years with Elsie Burrell at the one-room schoolhouse in Little Greenbrier.
Clair Burket
They learn about the highly effective lessons that are scattered throughout the week, lessons such as “man and water,” “stream ecology,” “continuity and change.” Imaginative gatherings become not the exception but the rule: “Sometimes we take a group of children, divide them into members of a make-believe pioneer family, and take them up into a wilderness area, an area which is truly pristine, almost a virgin forest. And we let the kids imagine that they are this pioneer family, and that they are going to pick out a house site.” In one game called “succession,” a boy from blacktopped, “civilized” Atlanta might search along a road for signs of life on the pavement, then in the gravel, then in the grass, then within the vast, teeming forest. And a day’s trip to the Little Greenbrier schoolhouse gives the children of today a chance to experience what it was like when the Walker sisters and their ancestors sat on the hard wooden benches and learned the three R’s and felt the bite of a hickory switch.
It may seem odd that modern children should enjoy so much a trip to school. But enjoy it they do, for as they fidget on the wooden benches or spell against each other in an old-fashioned “spelldown” or read a mid-1800s dictionary that defines a kiss as “a salute with the lips,” they enter into a past place and a past time. For a few minutes, at least, they identify with the people who used to be here in these Smokies—not “play-acting” but struggling to survive and improve their lives.