(1)-To suggest that my comments about "the infinitely destructive genius of American public education" is material that presumably should be suppressed merely because it "could be construed as a personal attack" is a another (perfect) example of the dismaying phenomenon I was describing in 72/(1): the methodical efforts to silence education critics, whether originating from left or right.
Surely you, as a teacher of 23 years experience, must recognize (A), the historical truth of what I am saying and (B), the textual truth that reporting negative facts (e.g., Americans are demonstrably the most ignorant people on the planet" or "the SUV is the personification of the environment-destroying greed of the white American bourgeoisie") is not even remotely the same thing as a “personal attack”: though to claim “personal attack” is unquestionably one of the tactics of censorship to which I referred in 72 /(1). More to the point, the implicit threat of denunciation to the moderators is seen and noted. I have been battling censorship -- including censorship in its more devious and subtle forms -- all my life, and I have no intention of being intimidated to silence now: particularly when my defense is that what I say is demonstrably true.
Which brings me to that very point: the historical truth of my "infinitely destructive genius" statement (which by the way I think is a fine descriptive turn of phrase) -- the practice of appointing coaches to teach civics, history, sociology, American government and other such social studies courses. It was standard in most of the dozen or so U.S. public school systems I wrote about in depth (in Michigan, Tennessee, New Jersey, Washington state and New York City); it was standard in all but one of the states where I attended public school (Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Tennessee); and -- most significantly -- it was defended by school officials in most of these jurisdictions as standard practice nationally. It was also universally despised by all of the brighter students in all of the school systems that employed it -- a point on which I will elaborate as appropriate.
As college graduates we both know a physical-education major typically devotes most of his/her college career to competitive sports -- a curriculum of body-building rather than mind-building -- and almost invariably, as an expression of the "jock" ethos, has a hearty contempt for anyone who would commit to the latter. To assume that a self-defined "jock" would possess the knowledge (or even the intellectual instincts) essential to teaching the cause-and-effect relationships that animate history is like supposing Karl Rove could be transformed into a convincing teacher of humanitarian ethics. Such multipurpose job descriptions do both coach and students a profound disservice: they force the coach into a role likely to be uncomfortable at best, and they force the brighter students to endure -- in academic classrooms where they would otherwise be safe from it -- precisely the same muscle-bound anti-intellectual savagery and locker-room contempt they already endure in gym and on the school grounds in general.
Every school administrator worthy of the name knew this in 1957, just as every administrator knows it today: all the more so, given the burgeoning studies on the dire effects of bullying. Yet -- save only for New York City and two of the best school districts in Michigan -- coaches served as social-studies teachers in every school system I ever encountered. Significantly, the exceptions were systems that, for much of the time spanned by my newspaper and trade-magazine career (late '50s through late'80s), were considered to include schools that were among the very finest public schools in the United States. In these locales, school administrations (probably because of pressure applied by organized labor and left-leaning constituencies in general) adopted policies of hiring history majors to teach civics and history, sociology majors to teach sociology, physics majors to teach science, etc., with the result that the specialist-taught classes contrasted vividly with the coach-taught classes elsewhere: in the latter, you had rote recitation of names, dates and places occasionally "lightened up" by little tastes of locker-room humor -- humor that mercilessly victimized the exceptionally bright, the physically inept and the chronically unattractive; in the former, you had intense, passionate (and often eye-opening) dialogue and discussion.
Nor is this an obsolete issue. National media controversy -- controversy substantial enough to make it into the national media I read daily (i.e.,
The Washington Post and
The New York Times) -- erupted again a couple of years ago over the fact something like half the nation's public school teachers are required to teach subjects in which they have no qualifications whatsoever. Thus the problem has metastasized far beyond the absurdity of coaches teaching history as if it were the statistical summary of some 2000-year-long football game ("Hitler's attack through the Ardennes Forest was like a well-executed wingback reverse") and has grown into one of the great malignant sub-crises of U.S. public education --
reductio ad absurdum, a modern-day behavioral therapist substitute-teaching in both English and construction-trades classes: "it's all in your attitude; we don't need to diagram sentences to understand grammar any more than we need to look at blueprints to understand the construction of a house."
Searching the Internet to find relevant links (many of which I had on my old and now dead computer), I was deeply troubled (though not very surprised) to discover that most of these resources -- including the full text of the bipartisan Congressional study that triggered the controversy -- have vanished, apparently down the Orwellian memory hole. Indeed in nearly an hour of Googling, I could find only this news link:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/1996227.htmlAnother example of something I noted before: the curious (and clearly ongoing) tendency for this sort of material to disappear from easy public access -- a trend that was a lot less evident in the hard-copy library era than it is today.
Based on the various school-funding fights I have written about, the coach-as-historian, typing-teacher-as-literature-instructor mode of staffing is mandated by budget constraints -- or at least this is what the administrators and the school-board members want us to believe. But the fact the practice has been so long decried, and the fact it is yet so persistent, proves that in truth it is an expression of legislative and executive preference -- and therefore the preference of the corporate interests that, in absolutely every school board in the United States, pull the strings from behind the scenes: just as these same interests pull the strings at all other levels of U.S. society. Thus -- particularly since all the dire consequences of this policy are well known (and have been topics of complaint for decades) -- it is eventually impossible to avoid concluding that the coach-as-teacher module is not only deliberate, but is specifically chosen for the intellectual outcome I described in my passage about "the infinitely destructive genius of American public education."
(2)-Though I do not typically use my own experience as a source of illustrative examples to support my conclusions on any topic, the fact remains that sometimes these experiences have been very eye-opening -- and thus lead me to explore a subject in much greater depth: an exploration in which one of my (often unspoken) questions is whether my experiences are typical. This was -- and is -- never more true than in my reporting and writing about education: during my public school days I suffered deep and still hurtful wounds under the enforced conformity of a Virginia kindergarten, the mind-numbing rote learning of a Florida elementary school, and the truly vicious bare-knuckle, jocks-
über-alles Ku-Klux fascism of two Tennessee high schools. The above description of “little tastes of locker-room humor” is personal experience: skinny, clumsy, bespectacled and physically ugly, I was often the locker-room humorists’ favorite target. But I also flourished -- relatively speaking -- in the intellectual encouragement provided by a nationally renown urban Michigan elementary school and, years later, did likewise in a high school in another nearly as-excellent urban Michigan system.
I say "relatively" because, typical of the child who is despised by both of his divorced parents and most of their extended families, my grades hovered erratically around the mediocre even in the best of environments; my redemption (a kind of redemption ironically impossible today despite all the alleged emphasis on test scores) was my dependably excellent performance on I.Q., aptitude and competence examinations. Among other things, my scores were sufficient to overcome my lusterless grades and ensure me admission to the University of Michigan, a longtime dream fulfilled. Or so I foolishly thought; in an early, profoundly heartbreaking and even-now-bitter lesson about the absolute futility of dreams and long-range plans, I was soon permanently ousted from Michigan by still more family dysfunction: banishment back to Tennessee, which abolished my Michigan residency, required me to pay non-resident tuition if ever I managed to return to Michigan, and thus put the U of M beyond consideration forever. But at least in Tennessee, in the midst of a senior year that was otherwise utterly wretched -- the Ku-Klux fascists again -- random chance assigned me the English teacher I mentioned in 72/(3), with the positive lifelong consequences so described. There is much more to this; indeed I could write whole chapters on the influence of this teacher on my life. But to do so would violate my anonymity. Thus -- at least for here and now -- my generalized homage to her will have to suffice.
Point being, I have personally experienced both the bad and the good of U.S. public education, and while (at least in my life) the good clearly won -- and I have seen it briefly prevail elsewhere too -- the bad is not only as Shakespeare says ("the evil that men do lives after them") but is also far too often -- whether by inertia or intent -- the bureaucratic default condition.
The parents I have interviewed or known as friends tell similar stories.
One is sufficiently typical to retell on behalf of all: A mother and her two children were moved to Seattle, the victims of the father's corporate transfer from an urban state that ranked among the nation's most enlightened in public education. The daughter, an exceptionally bright high school student with substantial talent expressed in what was potentially a world-class photographic vision, had been performing at the upper level of an academic program that utilized visual art as a portal to the humanities and a close approximation of a classical education; the son, an exceptionally bright junior-high-school student, was inclined toward the sciences and was in an accelerated program that used mathematics, rocket-physics and the history of science as a portal in the same way his older sister's art program did. But the Seattle school system had no such programs; when the mother inquired, she was told it was official Seattle School District policy "to discourage intellectual elitism," and that if she had allowed her children to imagine they were intellectuals, she had best discipline them out of their "potentially disruptive arrogance" lest the children soon find themselves in trouble with their teachers and the school authorities in general. "Your children will thank you for it later, when they get out into the world," a principal told the mother: "Intellectuals aren't welcome in the workplace." Such was Seattle in the late 1970s, its McCarthyite hatreds lingering long after the fact.
Predictably -- bored to vexation by the oppressively zomboid atmosphere of Seattle's public school classrooms and constantly goaded by the rigorously enforced conformity -- the two kids got into ever worsening trouble. Desperate to escape school, the daughter got herself pregnant at age 16, kept the child, sunk ever more hopelessly into the impoverished underclass, and as far as I know thoroughly destroyed her own life. The son did only a little better: constantly flirting with petty crime, he nevertheless managed to stay out of jail until he turned 18, after which he joined the U.S. Air Force as a career enlisted man. Two fine exceptionally bright young people -- one a would-be artist, the other a would-be scientist -- their methodical degradation not only a perfect example of "the infinitely destructive genius of American public education" but unusually vivid proof of just how that degradation specifically serves corporate purpose.
There are nevertheless some exceptions. By contrast and during the same years, and entirely because of fiercely protective parents and unflinchingly dedicated teachers, a school system only about 15 miles away from Seattle braved repeated attacks by avowed John Birchers (and repeated school-levy failures spawned by the attacks) and nevertheless managed to pioneer and maintain one of the most controversial -- and best -- high school programs in the state: by at least one standard, also among the best in the entire nation. Called "individualized instruction," its core educational principle was borrowed directly from the interdisciplinary major/independent study concept developed by two of the state's leading colleges: individual selection of courses within a structure of demanding requirements; intense research culminating in reasoned hypotheses expressed in carefully written, copiously footnoted reports; not only "basic education" but opportunities to pursue certain subjects -- especially in the arts, humanities and sciences -- far beyond the limitations typically imposed by the normal one-size-fits-all high school program. This was a school I wrote about extensively and enthusiastically -- a place I spent several days monitoring its advanced classes, which were, just as its teachers maintained, like their college counterparts: both in the obvious knowledge displayed by the instructors and the intellectual quality of the in-class discussions. No coaches uncomfortably doubling as history teachers here: indeed this school was the west-of-the-Mississippi national leader in the percentage of certain kinds of academic scholarships granted its graduates. Again I would say more -- all of it laudatory -- save my concern it would violate my anonymity.
Alas, I am told the entire individualized instruction program has since been purged, its destruction -- bitterly opposed by students, parents and teachers alike -- a product of three factors: a conservative shift in district demographics (with the predictable increase in anti-intellectual malice); opposition from a tiny but very determined hard-core minority of teachers (motivated by their own anti-intellectuality plus a long-simmering and vindictive jealousy of the higher pay and greater freedom given the individualized instruction teachers); administrators' paranoid fears they were losing control of class content (once again and as always the anti-Dostoyevsky/anti-Camus factor that was my own favorite high school teacher's undoing); and finally the fact that of all the 50 states, none is more hostile to exceptionally bright children than Washington: in the most recent such figures I saw, probably five years ago, Washington was dead last in its educational expenditures for such students -- exactly the same place it had been 15 years before that. As Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray once assured complaining parents, there was absolutely no need to change anything: "the bright kids can always use the libraries." Right: just as
les miserables could always eat cake.
(3)- If it was not already obvious, it should be apparent from the foregoing that I do not for a moment doubt there are -- precisely as you said -- “still many (teachers) working hard to serve students in spite of all the problems (teachers) deal with on a daily basis.” As I noted above, just such teachers were my inside-the-school-district sources many times over the years. But the sense of common goals that formerly so often united teachers and journalists has somehow been eroded to near nothingness -- an erosion in which (and it would be derelict of me to deny this) -- the treacheries of the amoral careerists ever more commonly hired by corporate mass media have sometimes played a pivotal role: another tactic by which we the workers are kept divided. Even so, teachers who are committed to excellence -- excellence that is typically achieved in spite of the system rather than because of it -- would advance their cause a lot further and faster if they recognize again (as the teacher who so influenced my life surely recognized during the post-Sputnik debates) that American public education's harshest critics may in fact also be the public schools' most faithful defenders -- and the public-school teachers' most dependable allies. That is, if those teachers' intentions are indeed as claimed.
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