An educational odyssey across three generations

Striving to be a dad, I read “The Odyssey” this summer.

You probably know the story. Odysseus is trying to make his way back home from the battlefield at Troy. He’s been away at war for two decades.

But the gods punish him again and again on the sea journey home. With each new disaster that befalls him, Odysseus longs more for his wife and son. Finally he reaches the soil of his beloved Ithaca and speaks this line lamenting all he had lost by seeking glory in battle:

…I had no love for working the land, the chores of household either, the labor that raises crops of shining children.

That line caught my attention because I was reading “The Odyssey” precisely to help raise my family “crop.” My 14-year-old son enters high school in a few weeks and “The Odyssey” was his assigned summer reading.

I can’t help him with quadratic functions and the like. But literature is something I know a thing or two about. So I figured I’d read it along with him, and we’d talk about it.

To my surprise, he was assigned a rather hefty edition of Homer’s epic poem, the 1996 translation by Robert Fagles. It begins:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.

After just a few pages of Fagles’ translation, I had a bittersweet realization. It’s the sort of thing that hits you as a parent from time to time — my son is getting a better education than I ever had.

When I was about my son’s current age, I too was assigned to read “The Odyssey,” at a public school in suburban Los Angeles.

But I was given a child’s version to read. It was in prose, and it was prosaic. It was thin and tame, with drawings of the Cyclops and the Sirens.

My son is reading Homer’s complete poem — a song really — beautifully translated. When the sun rises, it’s “dawn’s rose-red finger,” and Odysseus’ ship travels on “the wine-black sea.”

The poem is violent and occasionally risqué. Odysseus is frequently bathed in oil by nymphs and maidens — I’m certain I didn’t read that when I was 14. I would have remembered that.

Back in the day, I got Homer with training wheels. My son is getting Homer at full throttle.

It wasn’t the first time I realized the shortcomings of my own education.

Last year, I joined thousands of other parents with eighth-grade kids on school tours that included visits to several top-notch high schools, some with quite pricey tuitions. To my naive eyes, these campuses resembled shiny little universities: I had no idea anything like them existed in L.A.

At one of these schools, Flintridge Prep, my wife and I entered an empty English class.

We found books to grace an excellent course in 20th century literature lying rather casually on a table. Fiction by Chekhov, Kafka and Borges, and a play by Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer.

I’d read them all — in college, or many years afterward.

At Flintridge, they read these writers in the 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

At that moment I understood concretely for the first time how wide the education gap in L.A. really is.

In our most troubled public high schools, 40% or more of students drop out before graduation, and 80% or more read below grade level. Few are expected to read anything as challenging as an unabridged edition of “The Odyssey.”

You can live in L.A. your entire life without directly experiencing this inequality, unless you’re lucky enough to be a social climber, a crosser of our city’s unseen boundaries.

That’s what I am. I write books now. I earn a living with words and metaphors. But I grew up in a place where that was an absurd dream for a young man to have.

In 1979, when I was a high school junior, The Times visited my school. Sierra High in South Whittier was about to close thanks to post-Proposition 13 budget cuts.

I played varsity soccer at Sierra and had a few excellent teachers. But when my principal talked to The Times, he complained about what a lousy student body he had. Just 20% of us went to college, he said. We needed too many remedial English and math classes.

At the high schools I visited with my son, just about everyone goes on to college.

Now, sitting in that English classroom with those great books, I could see for the first time what I’d missed. Like Odysseus, I felt certain mean-spirited gods had conspired against me. Odysseus has Poseidon rip his raft with a massive wave. My school was ravaged by a thunderbolt from the anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis.

Ah poor man, why is the god of earthquakes so dead set against you? Strewing your way with such a crop of troubles!

On my son’s first visit to his new school, I told him: “If you’re not happy here, you won’t be happy anywhere.”

Not coincidentally, my own father spoke those same words to me 30 years ago next week.

He said this to me when I was 17 and he dropped me off at UC Santa Cruz, to a dorm room with a forest view.

Poverty had kept my father from studying beyond the 6th grade in rural Guatemala, where his teachers included a sadist who grabbed him by the neck and struck his forehead against the chalkboard during a spelling lesson.

Any school in L.A. was better than that. From his perspective, I was blessed to attend Sierra High. The University of California — well that remains for my family as hallowed a destination as Ithaca was for Odysseus.

Now I can see that it’s taken my family three generations to complete our journey across the education gap.

Today, a lot of Angelenos are on the same odyssey. To get their kids a better education, they fight the Cyclops of budget reduction, and the many-headed monsters of public-school apathy. They go to battle for magnet-school points, or raid their own treasures to pay for private schools.

Odysseus had Athena, the goddess of wisdom and ingenuity, guiding him on his journey. If Athena could appear before an L.A. parent with a child about to enter our schools, she might proclaim the same prophecy she speaks to Odysseus.

And now I am here once more … to tell you all the trials you must suffer.... Endure them all. You must.

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