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FIRST PERSON

Core Curriculum on Tour

By Josh Shoemake ’96

Josh Shoemake ’96 in Marrakesh.

PHOTO: SANDRA ZWOLLO

In the spring of my senior year, I had no job prospects and somehow wasn’t much concerned about it. Perhaps Columbia and I were too perfect a fit. I’d taken the Core Curriculum literally — I could study philosophy and literature and physics, and then why not some religion and acting and Bach, and through all that somehow arrive at majors in English and architecture, neither of which I particularly intended to practice in the world. And so, when I spotted a job listing in Spectator for a high school English teacher at The American School of Tangier, I saw an opportunity to continue this scattershot course of studies I’d set for myself.

My Columbia professors were quick to point out that inclusion in the Core meant that a work had stood the test of time. To that I’d like to add the test of distance. A year out of Columbia, I was teaching The Catcher in the Rye to a class of ninth-graders in Tangier. The book had made an impact on me as a ninth-grader in Richmond, Va., at least as the expression of a style an adolescent might emulate, so I was eager to find reflections of my own young excitement in the eyes of my students. The feeling was there — the language was a kick after Dickens and Austen — but increasingly I felt the students growing impatient with Holden Caulfield. Finally, a 14-year-old Moroccan girl, in an American voice one might have called Salingeresque if it weren’t all her own, raised her hand and asked, “Why doesn’t he just go home?”

The same question could have been asked of me, although as a teacher I’m sure I had some answers. Over time, however, the question has stuck in my mind as a pretty insightful critique. Holden Caulfield has been replaced in required reading by Huckleberry Finn, who travels far and well, and who, along with Tess and Pip, My Last Duchess and sweet Romeo, only seems to benefit from the test of distance, as young Moroccan students fall in love with what we call the classics with a passion equal to mine when I first read them.

During my three years in Tangier, I spent many afternoons reading to and talking with Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky and the epitome of a literary expatriate, who told stories about Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, making legends I could hardly imagine having existed become flesh and blood in his cluttered apartment. Evenings often were spent drinking mint tea at the Café Hafa, where I gazed out over the Strait of Gibraltar and dreamed of what kind of life I might make in Spain. I later bought a little barn in Extremadura, ensuring that if all else failed, I might still imagine myself a ranchero.

I also found a wife across a crowded room, which led me to Paris and the streets of Bowles’ legends. There I stumbled into a job ghostwriting the memoirs (mostly romantic, to put it politely) for an executive in an industrial spying corporation. I liked the sound of that and thought it might someday be good material for my writing, which I had begun in earnest. Since then, I have published stories in publications such as The Threepenny Review and hope to have a first novel ready soon. Three years of being the Paris expatriate, however, were sufficient to send me back to New York, where I learned from a year in marketing that I may be constitutionally disinclined to do the jobs that earn New York salaries.

Once again, Morocco called. Actually, it took me to lunch in Grand Central’s Oyster Bar in the person of Joseph McPhillips, headmaster of Tangier for the past 30 years and founder in 1995 of The American School of Marrakesh. McPhillips and I always had seen eye-to-eye on what a school should be — a classic liberal arts education taught with rigor, discipline and, if at all possible, much joy — and so he asked me to come to Marrakesh and take over the duties he had been performing from Tangier as headmaster.

Marrakesh has given me the chance to use that useless education of mine. Not only is there the fun of implementing a high school curriculum based in spirit on the Core, but also those all-nighters in the architecture studios have enabled me to design something that the professional architects tell me will stand up, a new sports facility that began construction this summer on our campus.

This year, we will have more than 350 students through the 11th grade, 80 percent of them Moroccan. Our first class will graduate in 2008, by which time the students will have acquired a comprehensive Core of their own, including 12 Shakespeare plays, a year each of American and Islamic history, fluency in at least three languages and advanced math and science. The school is supported by modest tuitions and donations, and our teachers come from the best universities in America and elsewhere, though I’ve tended to remain faithful to alma mater. Our current high school English, history and math teachers are graduates of Columbia master’s programs. Perhaps, as I was, they’ve been spoiled by alma mater.

The Core better prepares graduates to compete in the real world, which is increasingly complex. An engineer should know how to use rhetoric, and knowledge of art history broadens his mathematical vision. An equally good argument, I think, is that Columbia prepares one not to live in the real world, but rather in a more perfect one, one in which the values and pleasures derived from a classical education might hold a more central place in our political, social and private lives.

One appeal of great schools is their attempt to create such utopias, utopias that exist beyond time and place. Columbia is still my utopia — intellectually, socially and in more ways than I can name. My goal in Marrakesh is to help create for our students a utopia of their own, one in which Huck is still floating down that river, but maybe the river is a little oued in the Atlas Mountains, and the destination, if they’re as lucky as I’ve been, is still unknown.

Josh Shoemake ’96 lives in Marrakesh with his wife, Sandra Zwollo, owner of Café du Livre, Morocco’s first English bookstore/cafe/restaurant. He can be reached via The American School of Marrakesh website.

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