This Noble Land (12 page)

Coincident with the dumbing down of the classroom materials came a wild inflation of grades. What in my early days as a professor was judged to be a C paper was elevated to a B, and students’ estimation of their own merit became so inflated that professors were berated if they did not give even the most casual student at least a B. Former B students, as judged on a realistic scale, now demanded A’s. The softening of American education was under way with pernicious results.

It is well documented that discipline in today’s public schools has fallen to lows that are not only regrettable but even preposterous;
the average big city is unable to keep intruders with guns out of its schools. In one year at an average-sized Florida county school, more children aged fourteen to nineteen were murdered by handguns brought into their schools than adults were killed in the entire nation of Denmark. One beginning teacher told me she was warned during her training class: ‘You must always make sure you have direct access to the classroom door, so you can escape if they start to come after you.’ I cannot conceive how meaningful education can take place if teachers and students have to worry about protecting themselves from gunfire.

I have begun to appreciate the determination of parents so concerned about their children’s education that they move them out of the poorly controlled public schools and place them, at considerable cost to themselves, in private or parochial schools. I regret this weakening of the public school, especially if decreased enrollment erodes support for the taxes that go to schools, but until the public schools are improved it is understandable that parents will make the alternate choice.

Strange as it may seem, coming from a fanatical defender of public school education like myself, I am beginning to believe that refractory students who refuse to accept classroom discipline should be allowed or even encouraged to drop out of school, perhaps as early as age fourteen and certainly at sixteen. Successful education for the majority of students can proceed if boys and girls determined to disrupt orderly procedures are kept out of class. Such committed troublemakers would not be allowed in a workplace or in any military unit; why allow them to disrupt the schoolroom? Especially when our law courts have succeeded in eroding the right of schools to discipline even the most egregious offenders.

I am aware that private schools are able to achieve favorable results partly because they are permitted to reject or expel students
who pose disciplinary problems; the rejected student then goes back to the public school, which by law must accept him. I also understand why parents would pressure the government to help them pay the tuition charged by private and parochial schools, which provide much better education than the public schools. As a teacher in both private and public schools I cannot blind myself to the fact that any public school that has allowed itself to become a wasteland cannot provide the education our nation requires of its young people if we are to survive in world competition.

Allowing incorrigibles who are sixteen or even fourteen years old to drop out of school should be counterbalanced by instituting special schools organized to handle such young people. A feature of these schools would be practical training in the industrial arts. No attempt would be made to teach literature or philosophy. In addition to vocational training, simplified courses in the basic moral structure of society would be stressed: the sanctity of an agreed-upon obligation; care for the poor; the healthy rearing of children; avoidance of misbehaviors that might result in jail sentences; and the foundations of patriotism. The students must also be told that the years following graduation from high school are much tougher today than in the past. When I graduated in the 1920s, almost any boy with a sound body could find refuge by enlisting in the army, but that is no longer the case. The difference is that the computer has radically altered the army and the other services. The new technology is so prevalent and so demanding that dullards are not welcomed by the services. It is more important than ever that boys and girls learn some skills that will assist them in finding work.

I would expect that there would be a residue of incorrigibles for whom even such carefully structured schools would be incapable of accomplishing much, and we would simply have to
watch with aching sadness as these students sink lower and lower. But this has happened in all societies in all times, and there seems to be little we can do for such hopeless cases. A tremendous amount of constructive results can be achieved however, with the upper echelon of difficult young people
if
their schools train them not for college but for taking their place in the national workforce.

Another important factor in the decline of our schools is the breakdown of so many American families. It has meant that the schools can no longer rely upon parental assistance, either scholarly or disciplinary. When I was a young instructor during the Depression and working with a sterling group of teachers, we conducted a running seminar on the question ‘What are the essential components in the education of a child?’ We spent long hours discussing our experiences with growing children and analyzed a score of factors. In the end we arrived at a list something like this:

1. Living in a family that has an orderly dinner every night at which there is lively discussion of important subjects.

It helps if there is a dictionary and an atlas available so that the parents can frequently say: ‘Let’s look that up in the dictionary,’ or ‘Let’s see exactly where Morocco is.’

2. Instruction in fundamental moral values.

This can come from discussion in the home or in attendance at Sunday school or church, or—perhaps most important—by parents’ setting an example by their own moral behavior. But it had better come from somewhere, and forcefully, or the child and, later, the adult, may find himself or herself adrift. These values should also be reinforced in the school.

3. It helps if the growing child has other children to play with, and if there are no siblings, preschool is a strong substitute.

But since this is an expensive luxury for most families, it introduces an early wedge between the affluent and the impoverished that our Head Start programs have only partially removed. Preschool is a splendid experience for children, and the Head Start programs should be expanded and improved rather than cut back as was being contemplated by the U.S. Congress in 1996.

4. Although the first six years of schooling are very important, they do not carry the intellectual weight or significance that the later years do.

By the seventh grade, however, rigorous intellectual instruction should take place to include basic mathematics and the ability to write in thoughtful sentences.

5. When young students enter high school it becomes essential that they really get down to work: research in the library, mastery of plane geometry and trigonometry, familiarity with some of the great books of the world, a solid sense of world geography and, of great importance, a study of the traditions and documents of American history.

In our little school in 1934–37 we idealists were providing our high school students with the equivalent of what colleges and even universities would be offering twenty years later. Our students responded to our sometimes harsh demands; they received an education, and most of them became first-class citizens. Those who went on to college—a majority—tended to do superior work.

Reviewing these notes sixty years later, I would not revise the scale of values. Education at the family dinner table remains in first place for me, and the seventh grade is still a great dividing line between easy educational tasks and real intellectual work.

I can imagine how frustrated I would feel in a public school today in which homework is not required and in which a shocking number of my students come from homes in which family discussions do not take place or cannot take place because there
is
no family. A great sadness overtakes me when I think of the young people who start life in such deprivation and I wonder if they can ever recover from this first crucial void.

I can speak of these matters with some authority because I grew up in an untraditional family with no man in the home. We certainly could not afford a preschool program, but we did have a free public library at our disposal and learned from the readings our mother shared with us each evening. We took advantage of every free opportunity provided by our society: picnics in a parkland, church festivals, games on the athletic field, music played on the bandstand and, above all, that constant flow of library books into the home. Reflecting on those difficult days, I can see that we had a wealth of educational opportunities, as proved by several of my fellow orphans who went on to earn high marks in college.

A final important factor in reversing the decline in the education of America’s middle students is perhaps the most powerful of all—the computer. It has burst upon our society with consequences so explosive that we do not yet appreciate how much this new technology changes everything.

One expert I spoke to said he believed that in history ordinary citizens had faced two crucial moments in their painful struggle to achieve meaningful lives: ‘The first came with Gutenberg’s invention of a process whereby movable hand-carved type could be used to publish books. The ability to mass-produce books set men’s minds free to explore all branches of knowledge. Imagine the plight of the village boy half a century earlier who might have aspired to learning. Impossible, unless he joined a monastery and became a scribe. After Gutenberg the village boy, even though he could not afford to own a book of his own, for prices were prohibitive, could with persistence and a touch of guile gain access to the five or six books in the local church or in the
squire’s library. The period from 1440 to 1500 must have seen bright young men proliferating across Europe, bursting with newfound energy and aspiring to new forms of employment.

‘Believe me,’ the expert said forcefully, ‘the arrival of the computer in the past thirty to forty years is an accomplishment even
more
crucial than Gutenberg’s book. In externals the two might seem basically the same—technological advances that had revolutionary consequences. But the computer carries an added dimension that makes it much more powerful and dangerous than the printed book.’

I interrupted: ‘I think you’re downgrading the book. Its consequences were world-shattering; because of it anyone could be a scholar. What had been arcane now became available. I doubt that from our vantage point we can appreciate the intellectual revolution produced by the availability of the book.’

He replied: ‘I revere the book, but the computer is greater by several magnitudes because it deals not only with words but with all the symbols of human life: mathematics, the equations of chemistry, the catalog of genes, economic patterns, mechanical intelligence, business predictions, speculations about the beginning of the universe and the age of our world, predictions as to how much longer our world can exist before our sun explodes and engulfs us in a fiery ball of exploding hydrogen. The computer is infinite and it invites us and enables us to think in infinite patterns.

‘Believe me, the chasm that already exists separating those people with computer competence from those without will widen until it becomes unbridgeable. I see no hope for the computer illiterates to acquire meaningful jobs or to secure places on the economic ladder. The computer alters everything.’

Other experts agreed with his Gutenberg/computer analogy. One said: ‘Granted that when Gutenberg offered his movable
type around 1455, the resulting book changed perhaps one hundred of the then most important intellectual fields, an amazing contribution. But today the computer will modify, for the better, five thousand of our pressing problems. You’ve got to think of the computer as an agent magnitudes more powerful than the book.’

A woman computer professor pointed out another problem that I had not identified. ‘Since in the ownership of advanced computers men account for eighty percent and women twenty percent—or maybe the imbalance is as wide as ninety percent to ten percent—we women will be at a severe disadvantage in the competition for jobs in which computer competence is required. The glass ceiling is bound to be lowered every year.’

I became aware of how all-embracing the computer problem is the other day when I received a bulletin from Harvard University that listed some hundred jobs that were open at Harvard. Among a wide variety of specialties, they ranged from a position as head of a department to beginning instructors in small classes to students who reshelve books in the library. And every announcement carried the proviso: ‘Must be computer-literate.’

I asked a Harvard faculty member why a young man assigned to reshelving books in the library stacks required this literacy and the professor replied: ‘We work on Napoleon’s principle: “Every one of my soldiers carries a marshal’s baton in his knap—sack.” We expect the boy shelving books today to be in charge of our Greek bibliographies six years down the line.’

The gap between the young person who is able to handle computers and the unfortunate who cannot will grow ever wider, and always to the terrible detriment of the latter. Therefore, it is imperative that all schoolchildren be taught how to use the computer and word processor, for to fail to learn this technology is to condemn oneself to life as a secondary wage earner.

I must confess, however, that since I never learned the touch system of typing QWERTY—the name for touch-typing that comes from the first six keys on the standard typewriter—I myself cannot use even the word processing programs of my computer. I’ve slowly and laboriously typed my millions of words with two fingers on manual typewriters, but I am not completely stupid. As soon as I finish with my inept typing I turn the pages over to my gifted secretary, who puts them on her word processor, on which we do our editing. Without her help I could not function.