The World Turned Inside Out

It has long been striking to me that people who write about place, even from the most scholarly or technical perspective, often find a way to introduce their own childhood experiences into otherwise impersonal texts. These references, inevitably, have an emotional timbre that is in startling contrast to otherwise rigorously cerebral approaches. And yet, the reminiscent passages seem to thrust their way to the surface as irrepressible touchstones of truth--messengers from what playwrights call the backstory, the unspoken experience out of which the spoken arises.

But the actual evolution of thought from backstory to professional perspective is rarely unfolded. In particular, that intermediate zone where personal experience meets political reality, the truly formative stage of education by place, tends to remain mysterious. As I lay out here my own experience of that zone, I mean to suggest nothing absolute. I know that even minute gradations in period, location, family background, and personal proclivities could change everything. Indeed, the very point of recounting the experience is to acknowledge the relativity that governs our deepest ideas about places. The great paradox of place is that it s the most personal, and also the most common, thing. Therefore, no place education is purely relative. It s a connection to a history that we share.

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