Dave Barry’s book Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass is a rollicking, sometimes meditative, and genuinely funny look at the life of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Does he have much to say about education, though? You might be surprised.

Early on, Barry recalls that he and his friends spent their childhood throwing rocks, shooting at one another with BB guns, climbing trees, swimming in lakes, and hitchhiking around upstate New York, all of it far from adult eyes. “It wasn’t that our parents didn’t care about us,” he explains. “I think it was mainly that they didn’t view the world as a fundamentally dangerous place. They grew up in the Depression and had recently been through a world war. To them, the 1950s weren’t so scary.”

There’s an implicit critique of what we’ve lost by moving childhood indoors and online, as well as today’s fashionable certainty that the 2020s are scary, even if our era is safer in any number of ways than were the 1950s. I mean, it felt really transgressive to cheer Barry’s presumption that rock-throwing and risk-taking are part of a happy childhood, and overwrought safetyism is not.

Indeed, Barry’s wry asides and absurdist storytelling feel like they’re from another age amidst today’s always-online culture of hot takes, meme-driven gags, viral videos, and 24/7 news. An afternoon with Barry’s droll prose makes clear the cost of that shift.

Of his parents, Barry writes, “They taught us, by the way they treated others, how they believed a person should act.” For instance? “Don’t act like you’re better than other people. Be polite to everybody, not just people you want to impress. . . . Above all, never take anything too seriously. Especially not yourself. . . . These are good values,” he concludes, adding, “I’ve tried, in my half-assed way, to pass them along to my own kids. The older I get, the more I understand that this is the most valuable thing I have, the wisdom I got from my parents.”

When it comes to schooling, Barry tackles even mordant subjects with a light touch:

Atomic war was part of the school curriculum in the fifties, most notably in the form of the famous “duck and cover” drills, in which we students would practice crawling under our desks to protect ourselves in the event of a nuclear blast. We really did that. It seems pretty stupid now, but back then—when the threat of nuclear attack felt very real—it also seemed pretty stupid. I think we all knew, deep in our hearts, that school desks did not provide meaningful protection against atomic bombs; if they did, why not erect giant school desks over major cities? But we didn’t really mind the duck-and-cover drills. They were more entertaining than, for example, school.

What from elementary school stuck with Barry into adulthood? “Aside from polio and nuclear war,” he allows that “elementary school was a pretty good experience. I learned to read and write, useful skills that I still sometimes employ.” As for math? “I also learned to add and subtract, which turned out to be the only math skills I have ever really needed in adult life (and to be honest I have done very little subtracting).” He adds, “I made art projects out of construction paper and this white paste—you Boomers remember this paste—that turned out to be delicious.” But, he reminisces, “The best part of elementary school was recess, which is when we students were released on the playground to swing on the swings, slide on the slides, chase each other around, throw things, and pretend to be Davy Crockett.”

Barry has a low-key way of surfacing simple truths. While the “pedagogy of the depressed” is modish today, it’s unclear to me why climate change justifies the catastrophism that schools once avoided even when prepping for a Soviet first strike. Playground time is a vital part of a healthy school day and shouldn’t be lost to test prep or rendered tedious by adult litigiousness. Schools are charged with all manner of things, but job one is ensuring that students master reading, writing, and math.

Barry was in 5th grade when the Soviets launched Sputnik. He writes, “While Sputnik was hundreds of miles overhead, hurtling along at eighteen thousand miles an hour, broadcasting cheerful futuristic beeps as it zipped all the way around the Earth once every ninety-six minutes, our rocket soared to approximately the height of a mailbox, then blew up.” He laments that the weight of the nation’s lagging space program then fell on the nation’s students:

Never mind the fact that it wasn’t our fault the Russians were winning the Space Race. . . . Did our nation’s leaders—the people who were actually in charge when we fell behind in the Space Race—did THEY get saddled with trying to understand the ‘cosine’? They did not. They dumped that impossible task onto the fifth graders of Whippoorwill School. And as you can tell, we are still bitter.

The Sputnik response prefigured an age when schools are tasked with reacting to each new adult anxiety. Over the past decade, American elites have declared national emergencies when it comes to democracy, climate change, systemic racism, and more. Schools and students, in turn, are urgently enlisted in combating each crisis—all while knowing the next one will come around before long.

Barry is refreshingly frank. He recalls that teachers would routinely throw chalk or erasers at kids who weren’t paying attention and that it was no big deal. The kids didn’t even mention it to their parents. Why? Because, he writes, they would’ve just “asked us what we did to deserve it.” While Barry concedes that this may not be “an ideal way to discipline students,” the happy result was that “we tended to pay attention.”

The first hint of Barry’s storied career involves his high school English teacher asking him to read a funny essay he’d written to the class. Not wanting to look the teacher’s pet, Barry declined. So she read it aloud, preserving his anonymity. Sixty-plus years later, Barry recalls the class’s laughter and how “it felt good, hearing people laugh at my words.” These tiny moments can feel huge to students. That’s something we don’t talk about enough, I fear.

Barry offers an agenda-free honesty that’s all too rare. It’s a relief to read an author who isn’t climbing on a pedagogical hobbyhorse or hammering you with an ulterior motive.

It’s worth closing with Barry’s take on his junior high-era experience of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, just because it so effortlessly captures the habits and virtues that undergird healthy communities:

They had their flaws, the Armonk [New York] adults of 1960: Their drinking was excessive, their smoking was foolish, and they looked ridiculous doing the Twist. But when it came to politics, they were a lot saner than we are today. They understood that most people want basically the same things—peace, justice, a decent life for themselves and their kids—and that politics is basically an argument about how best to achieve those things. So they didn’t automatically assume that anybody who disagreed with them was vermin scum, which is pretty much how we do politics now.

That passage may not have anything to do with schooling, but it has a great deal to do with education. It’s about character. Citizenship. Perspective. Practical wisdom. These are traits that healthy communities cultivate. But they’re rarer than they should be today. Historically, the court jester was charged with helping royalty see the true state of their dominion, using humor both to illuminate truths and make them palatable. In an era when education is thick with vitriol, virtue-signaling, self-serving narratives, and endless distraction, I came away from Barry’s memoir convinced that what we might need most right now is many more class clowns.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”