Sanctuary of School by Lynda Barry the Blair Reader Fourth Edition

¶ … Sanctuary of School, by Lynda Barry [...] how school can be a sanctuary for some while it is a prison for others. Barry writes of her youth in this poignant essay, and she clearly illustrates how education affects us all in different ways. Here, education is her salvation, while for others, it is simply something they cannot wait to see end. Barry's "salvation" is another's torment, and her essay is not only a treatise on our many differences, but our reactions to everyday occurrences in our lives, and how we cope with them.

Lynda Barry looks back at her 7-year-old self in this essay, and shows just how education can be a unique experience for each of us. For some, school is something they "put up with" until they can leave the schoolyard and really "live." For Barry however, school was her salvation, and even the place she ran to when she was frightened and alone. Barry and her brother lived in an unhappy and abusive household, and so, Barry looked at school as her safety net, where she could escape the realities of her life, and enter a world where everything seemed perfect and good. She writes, "In an overcrowded and unhappy home, it's incredibly easy for any child to slip away. The high levels of frustration, depression, and anger in my house made my brother and me invisible. We were children with the sound turned off" (Barry 100). How horrible it must be to live as a child "with the sound turned off" - it is no wonder Barry retreated to the perfection of the classroom during her unhappy childhood. For many of her classmates, school was a prison to be endured until the final bell rang, but for Barry, it was the only bright spot in her life.

Each of us reacts differently to the stresses that fill our lives, and Barry reacted by running away to a perfect world - her teacher and her classroom. Education means far different things to each of us, and some of us simply endure it as something we must tolerate until it is over. For others, like Barry, the classroom is a magical and wonderful place, where discoveries come easily, and learning is a miraculous experience. Barry's essay, because it is written with feeling and emotion, conveys her early love of learning, and the great need she had to leave her unhappy home and replace it with something she could hang on to at any cost. She writes, was with my teacher, and in a while I was going to sit at my desk, with my crayons and pencils and books and classmates all around me, and for the next six hours I was going to enjoy a thoroughly secure, warm, and stable world. It was a world I absolutely relied on. Without it, I don't know where I would have gone that morning" (Barry 100).

It is easy to see just how important her teacher was to her, and why this woman, Mrs. Le Sane, was so important in her life.

In a time when many unhappy children like Barry could have chosen many other ways to "run away" from home, such as drugs, a life on the street, or alcohol, Barry chose to run away to her classroom, and create a new life for herself. She eloquently shows how different people react to situations in unique ways, that is part of what makes us all individuals. Barry clearly enjoys a lifelong love of learning, which is one reason she became a writer, and a writer with a conscience, who understands the importance of her early childhood and the classroom. She writes about the children of today, who are "asked to please stand, face the flag, place our right hand over our hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance. Children across the country do it faithfully. I wonder now when the country will face its children and say a pledge right back" (Barry 101).