This Noble Land (11 page)

A
s I prepared to write this chapter I received an unexpected letter from a former student, which provided a portrait of me as a teacher:

John Price, the writer of this letter, is remarkably accurate regarding that day in my life as an educator. I loved the profession and throughout my career taught in almost every grade level from
kindergarten through the postdoctorate level at Harvard. Always, I took my work seriously and expected my students to do the same.

Although George School, where I was teaching, was a Quaker institution preaching nonviolence, and although my unusual behavior must have embarrassed the administration, the principal and the school board supported me without even issuing a reprimand. I had behaved in an unorthodox manner, but it was clear that I was justified in doing so. Second, Walter Matthis’s parents firmly supported me by saying: ‘Walter deserved it.’ And, third, of great importance, the student body let it be known that they sided with me and not with Walter.

How different the schools are today. Note that in my contretemps with Walter Matthis I was teaching Shakespeare rather than remedial English but, more important, in 1935, when this incident took place, teachers had strong support from their students’ families—families with high moral and social values. With their shared goal—the education of children—teachers and parents could and did work together effectively. The fact that Walter might have been embarrassed by the incident—‘traumatized’ in the parlance of today—was not allowed to overshadow the importance of the lesson he learned. He even became one of my good friends and a responsible student. Today if I were to be so bold as to reprimand a student like Walter in a public school, or even in a private one, his parents would raise a storm of protest and demand I be fired for my actions. If the administration defended me, which today would rarely happen, the Matthis clan might even go to court and take legal action against me or the school.

Because of the years I have spent at the variety of institutions where I have both taught and studied, I have a keen appreciation of the educational process in America and how it has changed in
recent years. The nation has a strong tradition of education upon which to draw. As early as the 1640s the Massachusetts Bay Colony was passing laws requiring the townships to build schools and to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Of equal importance, the colony also established the tradition of taxing the public to support the schools.

Surprisingly, even though Washington and Jefferson were among many of the founding fathers who stressed the need for general education in a democratic society, our Constitution does not mention education. In 1779 Jefferson was unsuccessful in his attempt to establish public education in Virginia, but by the 1850s the principle of local schools for the education of all children at public expense was widely accepted, at least in the northern states. In the states west of the Alleghenies our nation developed the remarkable system of national land grants for public schools. In Texas, before the fall of the Alamo and the final victory at San Jacinto, the Texas Declaration of Independence declared that ‘unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.’

But the person primarily responsible for the creation of a nationwide system of free public education was Horace Mann, a remarkable lawyer from Massachusetts. He was, successively, a skilled lawyer, a member of the state legislature, secretary of the state board of education, a member of the national Congress and president of Antioch College in Ohio. In his spare time he toured the nation preaching his passionate belief in free public schools, so that by the 1850s the nation as a whole had come to share his views. He was indeed the father of the American public school, which he saw as the basis of a free democracy.

America’s free public schools provided the ladder that enabled me to climb out of my obscure village into active participation in
a great democracy. Today, in my sixty-sixth year of teaching, again in a fine university, I am increasingly mindful of H. G. Wells’s warning that ‘Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I am more involved in education than I ever was and consider myself qualified to make the following evaluations of our schools and colleges.

First, the brightest and hardest-working students, who are the ones I see today, are better than I was at their age in the 1912–1931 period. They know more, have a wider frame of reference, do better in tests and behave admirably. The top students are an impressive lot, of whom our nation can be proud. The future welfare of our nation is in safe hands insofar as having a supply of truly bright people to help run it.

Second, the many students at the bottom of the academic pile are no worse today than those I knew in school, except that they may be limiting their opportunities further by drugs. I regret to say that they seem largely incapable of absorbing any education at all. Unfortunately the types of service jobs traditionally open to them—manual labor, menial tasks—are not increasing and the wage scales in the service sector are dropping to levels inadequate for economic survival. These unfortunates are a national problem that must be dealt with.

If America consisted only of the very bright at the top and the least intelligent at the bottom, our nation could exist much as Mexico has existed, with its very rich allowing just enough of the nation’s wealth to trickle down to the least fortunate to forestall revolution. Fortunately for us, our nation has been able to create and nurture a large middle class on which our strength has depended. In my childhood days, my village of four thousand consisted of perhaps four hundred members of the elite at the top, six hundred disadvantaged at the bottom and three thousand of the finest middle-class people the nation has ever had—the storekeepers,
the secretaries, the people who worked as farmers cultivating the land, the schoolteachers, the lawyers, the salesmen and the large contingent who traveled each morning by train into Philadelphia to fill mid-level jobs there.

At the age of fourteen, primarily because of my athletic ability but augmented by my scholastic record, I leapfrogged from the bottom group right into the center of the middle group, which turned out to be decent and congenial. In those years, we students in the middle group were supposed to prepare ourselves for employment in the businesses of the community. Girls learned typing, boys were expected to master the rudiments of learning, including a proficiency in mathematics; all were expected to learn good manners. In 1925 in my high school graduation class of about seventy, only three or four went on to college; almost all the others were sufficiently well trained to find employment.

How different is the fate of the middle group of students today. Their level of education and mastery of skills are so deplorably low that they constitute a national crisis.

The nation has a vital concern in the failure of the public school system to provide a constant supply of young people adequately trained in language, mathematics, history and the social sciences. Industries large and small are experiencing an inadequately educated supply of workers. I am worried about the future of our nation. A complex democracy cannot be operated by a citizenry increasingly unable to compete in the world marketplace against the people of better-educated nations.

If our military capacities were in as much peril as are our intellectual capabilities, the nation would be taking gigantic and immediate steps to repair the deficiencies. It is scandalous that we are not taking equally huge steps to reverse the decline in our basic educational adequacy.

I am frightened by this descent toward incompetence within the middle group, a decline that stems primarily, I believe, from the many unfavorable social changes I detect in the nation. When the average child of school age is allowed to spend seven or eight hours a day watching television, there is no time left for reading. Children who do not read the important books when young fail to learn the great lessons of history, and will become illiterates wedded to television.

I should say here that I recognize the positive aspects of television and what it can contribute to an education. High school students today have a much larger base of general knowledge than I had at their age. Via the electronic marvel of television they have viewed foreign countries and traveled to deserts and ice caps; they have seen what a symphony orchestra is and heard what it sounds like; those so inclined have seen and heard grand opera; they have seen the outstanding sports figures, and they have watched more high-level entertainment of all kinds than I was able to enjoy in my pre-electronic youth. I recognize the possibility that we may be in the process of developing a new kind of person, a pragmatist who ignores books and reading but who nevertheless acquires real learning through the television screen. I think it quite possible that some of our political leaders or generals or the controllers of big businesses may arise from these television-educated youth. Television may not teach one how to think, but it surely teaches one how to manipulate.

This possibility of a new type of human being does not frighten me; I am not locked into a belief that everyone of promise should attend college. The television graduate and the college graduate can exist side by side.

But I do want to make clear the practical importance of learning that comes from books and schooling. No big city, for example, can survive unless someone there has an understanding of
the engineering required for sewage disposal. Without this expertise the city would be ravaged by one deadly plague after another. Large cities also require highly trained people such as air traffic controllers. Also essential are doctors, who know how to treat ailing human beings, and other professionals trained to deal with one important function or another. My point is obviously that no community can exist without the guidance and assistance of a cadre of bright, educated people.

I am not an elitist; I do not believe for one moment that our nation can be run only by those David Halberstam described as ‘the best and the brightest.’ I faced the problem of elitism when I taught, and although I found pleasure in goading very bright students on to higher levels of performance—better term papers, more concentration on difficult topics—I never believed that educating the brightest was the major aim of education. The real task of the teacher is to aid in the development of a well-rounded, moral society in which all levels of young people can make positive contributions.

Perhaps I should clarify one thing: where others are concerned I do not take the elitist view, but in terms of myself alone, I am an elitist of the highest order. I want to be better; I want to confront the bigger problems; I want to make a meaningful contribution. Anyone who has similar aspirations requires the very best education she or he can acquire. I feel strongly that we need people who can read and write and are not couch potatoes.

Through the years I have witnessed and experienced several trends that have made this goal more difficult to achieve. I spent many happy years as a textbook editor at one of the premier New York publishing companies, Macmillan, where I helped produce textbooks in a variety of subjects for use in schools across the nation. While I was at Macmillan a radical new discipline began to dominate the writing of schoolbooks. A highly regarded
educator and psychologist, Edward Lee Thorndike, compiled a list of words and the frequencies with which they occurred in everyday American life: newspapers, popular books, advertisements, etc. From these basic data he published a list, sharply restricted, which he said ought to determine whether a specific word should be used in writing for children. If, for example, the word
take
received his approval, use it in the schoolbooks. If
discredit
did not appear on his list, don’t use it, for to do so would make the books too difficult for children.

We editors worked under the tyranny of that list, and we even boasted in the promotional literature for our textbooks that they conformed to the Thorndike List. In my opinion, however, this was the beginning of the continuing process known as ‘dumbing down the curriculum.’ Before Thorndike, I had helped publish a series of successful textbooks in which I had used a very wide vocabulary, but when I was restricted by Thorndike, what I had once helped write as a book suitable for students in the sixth grade gradually became a book intended for grades seven through eight. Texts originally for the middle grades began to be certified as being appropriate for high school students, and what used to be a high school text appeared as a college text. The entire educational process was watered down, level by level.