Given the recent hubbub and huzzah surrounding the many and alleged splendors of blended and distance learning, it’s fair to say that the traditional “night class” might soon go the way of the dinosaur, the dodo, and the interoffice memo. And what a shame.
As an undergraduate I felt the term “night school” sounded vaguely forbidden—something only adults should have access to. Combine any otherwise innocuous word with night, after all, and it immediately bespeaks mystery and temptation—compare swim and night-swim, for instance, or shade with (deadly) nightshade. These days, as a long-established (as in one foot in the grave) professor in a graduate liberal studies program, I find “night classes” no less alluring than I did back then. The fear I feel these days is a fear for their survival.
In the Seventies and early Eighties, “night school” became synonymous with the Feminist revolution; it was widely lampooned in the macho male media as “college for divorcees” and other such mean-spirited and reductive epitaphs for women who had found solace and companionability in learning. To a degree the dig was true—the night class attracted legions of women (and men) for whom conventional, 9 to 5 undergraduate education had not served. The hours that women once spent caregiving and homemaking could now be spent improving their minds, a meme and motif picked up most recently in the runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, wherein divorcee-protagonist Elizabeth Gilbert is propelled on a journey of emotional self-discovery via a course in Italian.
Among educational elites, night school has long conjured images of the remedial, or (gasp) the “trades,” a place where working men and women could get on with the inglorious business of getting a G.E.D. or learning to rebuild an engine but would certainly not be deconstructing Nietzche or grappling with Chaos Theory. So thorough has been elite education’s aversion to this practical brand of “night-learning” that wholly separate divisions have been created in otherwise august institutions of learning under quaintly euphemistic sobriquets like “College for Working Adults” or “Continuing Education.” Such terms still have a certain déclassé ring to them among elite education snobs, though less so now that so many such programs have become cash cows.
For decades now night classes have been conflated with the remedial or the “special”—a shadow curricula devised for a shadowy population, a parallel track for extra-traditional (think extra-terrestrial) students living in a parallel universe. The Nineties beget the passing pipedream that somehow traditional residential undergraduates and nontraditional commuters might be blissfully wed in pedagogical matrimony, in equity and parity forever amen, if only they could be enrolled in night classes together. That dream never quite came to fruition, however, and even where the graft took temporarily it fairly quickly disintegrated into the usual ghettoization and bifurcation of “day” and “nighttime” students—the latter appellation apparently reserved for overworked, hollow-eyed, over-the-hill adults; the former the province of bright-eyed undergraduates who were, as the saying goes, “going places.” Little wonder that blended and distance learning insinuated themselves in the spaces betwixt and between these divergent populations, widening and at the same time promising to close the gap between them.
By the early 2000s, digital learning was cool—something the undergraduate “kids” were already doing, and which had come to define them as a generational cohort of unusual promise. Adult students could be cool, too, the reasoning went, and if being cool entailed being able to stay home in one’s robe and learn on the computer, then adult students could learn to play that game, too.
Distance learning seemed to absolve everyone—professors, teachers, students, and administrators—from the problem posed by “night school.” It promised to change the stigma by renaming it and giving it a cool techno-spin. Non-trads could now be considered “too cool for school.” They had better things to do, the admissions counselors who hawked the new-fangled programs told them, then schlep themselves to some nondescript classroom to try to learn from some wunderkind professor who was in many cases two decades younger than they were and half again as experienced. “Stay at home, kick up your feet…you deserve it,” the distance learning propagandists seemed to say, while at the same time, and under their breath adding, “and for heaven’s sake save us the classroom space, utilities, and stigma of the night class.” For busy working adults class-time could now be any ol’ time. Education, once relegated to that second-class station called Nighttime, could now be purchased like any other digital-age commodity—around-the-clock.
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This, though, is an essay in praise of that endangered species, the night class populated in person by seasoned, experienced, mature adults who have spent a decade or two learning from the School of Hard Knocks. We, the teachers and students of liberal, graduate, or continuing studies programs that still somehow insist on convening, at night, in the flesh, are often dismissed as refugees from the supposed greater enlightenments of the day shift. Granted, I confess there’s often something a bit “touched” about the students and faculty who gravitate toward the night classes offered by many graduate and continuing education divisions; the system as it is has somehow failed many of these students and faculty; life has been hard or at least unconventional; they have been hurt, wounded, or dismissed, and sometimes all of the above. Looking out across the evening classroom, the evidence of wounds is still fresh.
Viewed through another lens, however, the communion of the wounded and their genuine desire to improve and to transcend represents education at its best and most honest. We, the givers and takers of “adult” night classes, have learned better than our daytime colleagues that learning is collaborative, interpersonal, experiential, and sometimes messy. In the real world, solving problems collaboratively often means coming together in a nondescript, uninspiring rooms at odd hours to find breakthroughs among warring parties and lonely hearts. Night classes remind us that real problems are not virtual or hermetical or hypothetical but kinesthetic and physiological—in other words, abundantly interpersonal. The weighty issues of the day (and night) cannot be lone-wolfed at a distance, but must be addressed by those willing to come to committee or seminar rooms to listen to, and learn from, each another until a solution presents itself by agreement if not by attrition.
In my lifetime the night class has become as unsexy for some as participation in local government. Indeed, in many Middle American towns like the one where I hang my hat, candidates for mayor and council are hard to find. The middle-aged stalwarts who once joyfully staffed such thankless posts have either left for their retirement condos in Florida or gratefully moved to the suburbs and joined a gym where they spend their evening hours in self-regarding isolation, working levers and pulleys in an attempt to be beautiful again. Braving winter roads to sit in an incandescent-lit, beige-walled, cinder block council chambers or classroom is, in their view, kinda-sorta-seriously pathetic by comparison, carrying with it a whiff of their grandfather’s Oldsmobile and a glimpse of their own grave.
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For those of a poetic disposition, however, the fascinations of night school are abundant—by analogy it’s a pungent cheese, perhaps, that’s ardently defended by some and yet clearly “not for everybody.” At night we are looser somehow, less secure in our daytime go-it-alone cocksuredness. At night our fears and dreams and losses come tumbling out in spite of our attempts to staunch them. Subliminally, we link the hours après-dinner with comfort-seeking and the shedding of the pinching and often painful professional masks we don during the day. In the evening we become ourselves again, unguarded and uninhibited. Nighttime, too, we associate with greater vulnerability and need—the need for companionship, contemplation, for something or someone with whom to pass the time, for whistling through the graveyard of the dark things we otherwise shoo away during the day only to have them return for nocturnal roost.
Only at night do students emerge in their complex and irreducible roundedness. The graduate student who excuses herself politely to go to the bathroom is, during the other 21 hours of the day, a nursing mother. The same five-month-old baby girl who waits for his mother to return from her night class at 11:00 p.m. listened to the professor the semester prior whilst in utero, learning amniotically not only his mother’s world but also the byzantine complexities of a graduate education by placental osmosis. One imagines the girl-child might become a genius for having swum nocturnally through so many night classes in her mother’s womb, not unlike, I suppose, the child who is introduced to Mozart in utero is hoped to be the next great maestro.
At night students are not so easily divorced from their many and complex identities as during the day, and this is a good thing. Even the presence of food—some recently “nuked,” some consumed raw, some assembled right before your eyes in assembly line fashion—is an undeniable reminder that education is embodied rather than disembodied. The food so often present in night classes reminds that we are far from sexless, genderless, bodyless creatures able to sustain ourselves on thought alone.
In night classes we truly “come as we are.” Night school means we show up wearing the same dress / disguise worn during the day—the necktie slightly more askew, perhaps, the blouse now more or less ruffled and unkempt. While we discourse intelligently on everything from the fungibility of memory to marketing’s little white lies, we tug unhappily at the clothes that have in their prior twelve hours of wear grown into straightjackets. Our 12-hour deodorant has expired, and the 24-hour-hold our gels and hairsprays promised on the shelf has clocked-out. We dream of the hour not so long from now when we will be safely returned home, showered and in our sweats, eating far more ice cream than is good for us as a binge-reward for three hours-plus of intensely ruminative learning.
The conclusion of a night class is both climax and anticlimax, but not less sweet. Predictably, the class ends with a whimper at 10:30 p.m. with heartfelt well wishings for the coming week, with be-safes-out there, with don’t-do-anything-I-wouldn’t-dos. Officially adjourned, students often line up with their individual questions and concerns and extra-curricular anxieties. This additional stanza—the late, late show, as it were—inevitably brings both tears and laughter. The conversations engendered in this extra frame sometimes spill into the 11 o’clock hour in spite of our shared, omnipresent desire to get the hell out of this place and leave the night janitor to finish his work uninterrupted.
Still, we stay until the last of us has said their peace. We stay because we sense that one of us, or all of us, is wary of returning to the relative loneliness of home or apartment, where there are almost certainly not twelve or fifteen or twenty caring, world-wise, sometimes annoying professionals passionately debating lofty ideas late into the evening. Instead, for many, a child or spouse waits with their far less abstract, more organic needs. Last call in the night class’s marketplace of ideas can be harsh indeed.
The ride home after night school is not unlike the ride home after a movie, though, barring the exceptional instance of ride-sharing or carpooling, this is a ride one takes alone, mulling over things said, unsaid, and should-never-have-been-said in the three- or four-hour long marathon recently wrapped. You turn the radio on as a proxy for the intelligent talk you already miss, and pilot your car down deserted streets past homes where the lights have long since gone off, and normal, respectable families have gone to bed while you and the night crew wiled away the hours hotly debating semi-colons or Cornish game hens and otherwise trying to render into art that person or thing in our life who almost but not quite succeeded at wounding us beyond recognition.
We sleep soundly, do we denizens of the night, telling time by our weekly confabulation on Monday or Tuesday evening, or perhaps it is Wednesday or Thursday night—in any case, of course, the rest of the week is downhill after the class meets until Monday arrives again and the anticipation builds anew for that awkward, infuriating, necessary, beautiful thing we do when we sit down with one another around a table at night, and dream, and talk, and listen, and most of all, learn.
AGLSP Confluence
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