In Yeats’ “Among School Children” he begins the poem with the line “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.” It is a great opening line, and while this poem isn’t one that we are reading this term in Ireland, it is certainly one of the many Yeats poems that I wish we had time to read. It is interesting on a number of levels. Yeats wrote it about a visit that he made to a school that was run by the Sisters of Mercy, an order that after our trip to Dublin, our students are even more familiar with. Yeats, I imagine, feels that his life project is like walking through a long educational corridor where he, as a wise and inquisitive man, questions what he encounters. Certainly it seems that all young children, school children, come to school with questions aplenty, as well as the desire to ask questions. My hope is that the educational system doesn’t take that questioning out of us. Students should challenge their teachers just as teachers should challenge their students. Nothing would be a greater tragedy than to have the end product of education be passive students who fit easily into the grid, like cogs in a wheel. In the poem, I think Yeats has concerns about the school children he is observing. He is an old man at the time he writes the poem, but he is not satisfied. And thankfully, the children seem to at least “wonder” about him. All of this takes place in just the first stanza. Yet as this is one of Yeats’ longer poems, it takes on many topics as it moves forward including the meaning of life, morality, beauty, death, and coming to terms with things. I think it is a very personal and reflective poem for Yeats, where he is taking stock of his life. The poem moves well past the image of the children in school, and yet, that is the image I’m left with when I read it.
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