Richard Morgan Loomis at the South Wilkes-Barre dike along the Susquehanna River (1997 photograph by Ed Loomis)

American neighborhood schools were everywhere when I was growing up in the Thirties and Forties.  Now they are vanishing.  We must recover them.  You walked to a neighborhood school.  You could walk home for lunch and walk back again for classes and activities that could last the rest of the afternoon.  Evening programs attracted the whole community and were generously attended by people who had no fear of violence or mayhem at a school.  Schools were safe, clean, healthy.  The order of the day was learning.  Even colleges and universities were located in the heart of communities.  Learning extended outward from the classroom to embrace all of nature and humanity.  If you paused to gaze out a window, you were not necessarily wasting time.  You were looking at the world you were studying, perhaps looking with all your heart and soul.  When you went out into the world to work and build your life, to foster the circle of family and friends who would be your life companions, to achieve what you were endowed to achieve, you would remember your schooling, remember gazing out of windows, remember your reading and listening.  Teachers and friends continue to be with you as durably as family, all of them growing closer, in fuller, franker, livelier intimacy than you ever thought possible.  Reconciliation replaces bitterness, doubt yields to truth.  History becomes real.  God is within you.  You learn where it is that you are.  Wherever you are, you continue to learn.  Your neighborhood school is the power of mind and will that keeps you paying attention and helps you learn to give yourself to your companions.