The Problem of Public Schools

Reading. Writing. 'Rithmetic. Those are the things most people agree should be taught in public schools. 

But now we have public schools as a battleground, where "parents rights" to keep their kids from learning things are turning elections, and the Republican elected officials from Marjorie Taylor Green to Matt Goetz to Tom Cotton to Josh Hawley to Ted Cruz have seen public education as an opportunity to establish themselves as the new high priests of The Truth.

Schools, as Jill Lepore notes in a recent New Yorker article, have been battlegrounds before in America. Surely, in autocracies, schools were seen as the instrument for inculcating belief in the next generation during the Third Reich, which sought not simply to indoctrinate those already born in Hitler Youth groups, but to form the not yet conceived, in Lebensborn.  During 75 year Communist regime history was taught as an instrument of right thinking, much as Orwell described. New Think.

Walking home one day with Sue, from my "advanced placement" high school English class, I was astonished to hear her say, "I think English should not be taught in school." "You can't be serious," I said.

"I'm completely serious, " she said.

"She might be right," said Terry Rodgers, who was walking with us. 

Sue wound up going to Berkeley, the place for people who thought radical thoughts in those days.

Terry wound up becoming an artist, something nobody from Bethesda, Maryland aspired to be, at least nobody I knew.  He went to Amherst.  Did he need to go to Amherst to become a painter? He likely would have said, of course not, but he benefited from the education, even if it made no difference to preparing him for what he ultimately made his living doing. He would ask, "How many people really needed college for what they ultimately wound up doing?"

So many of us found jobs in computers which nobody had imagined, let alone prepared for in the schools of the 1960's and 1970's.

I alone among the three of us used public schools to launch myself beyond what my first generation parents had done--they went to public schools and college; I went to private college and professional school.

The thing about the particular public schools we attended in the striving, post War suburbs of Washington, DC was they were not places where education really mattered so much as places designed to select the winners and losers for the glittering prizes ahead.

Had classrooms simply been places where we learned whatever the teachers might be able to impart, take it or leave it, then public education might not have seemed so important or fraught.

Until that advance placement English course, English had been my favorite subject, but in that AP class we were somehow aware something beyond the discussion of the Scarlet Letter or Billy Budd was afoot.  In 11th grade, we read Thoreau, which I loved and which seemed more and more relevant a few years later during the Vietnam war era when Civil Disobedience was all the rage. But in AP English, we were being judged, selected or being selected against.

During those adolescent years, we had enough popular history books around the house, I knew enough to know how inept my high school history teachers were.  I knew the scrubbed anodyne versions of history they taught were simply castrated versions of history the Montgomery County government would allow, which is to say, I didn't take it seriously.  It was just so much blather. I felt the same way about history Sue felt about English. If you can't teach the real thing, don't teach it at all. Don't call it something it isn't. 

Now the governor of Florida accuses public schools as being in the business of "grooming" children, as if public schools have not ever been in that business.

When I got to college, my roomate, from Long Island, was astonished I had not read The Sun Also Rises or Farewell to Arms as he had in his public school. We had read The Old Man and the Sea. I thought Hemingway was an outdoorsman writer. He knew Hemingway wrote about sex, men and women. Sex was not a subject mentioned, except obliquely, in our high school below the Mason Dixon line.

In college, I took a radical turn away from my public school education, and went into the sciences. Never got to return to my favorite subject, history, about which I was well versed and self taught.  I've continued to read history ever since. And I love it still.

One of my sons attended the same public  high school I did, and 30 years later it was essentially the same hypercompetitive place, claiming an academic excellence which existed only in its own marketing, a wasteland of squandered talent. It still attracted the occasional exceptional teacher--a refugee from the Bronx High School of science who taught a dazzling physics course and a department of music which taught an intimidating music theory course, but mostly it was just busy work and who is willing to memorize the following nonsense to get the "A."

We sent the other son to a private high school, which was blessed with a high percentage of excellent teachers, but also carried a dismal lode of clunkers who had no idea what good is. 

That son, assigned to write a two page biography of some important American, stumbled upon a biography of Ben Franklin written by non other than DH Lawrence, who, as he eventually admitted, "I loathe the man," writing about Franklin. My son was captivated by the insouciance, the critical courage, the daring of the book and he wrote his essay reflecting that breezy British style only to be given a "C" and a severe scolding saying the paper hardly even deserved that high a mark, disrespectful as it was, not just of the great American which was its subject but of the teacher and the school.

Picking him up after school, I thought he must have lost his wrestling match that afternoon, but no, he had pinned his opponent, but he was crushed by the results of the paper, of which he was very proud. Critical analysis of our great American past evoked the ire of the establishment as far back as the 1990's in America.

Quality Control

Having read a review of "A Molecule Away from Madness" in the New York Times Book Review, I quickly downloaded it to Kindle.  

The only reservation the reviewer, Annie Murphy Paul, voiced was the author had not revealed much about herself in the course of her narrative about the fascinating neurological diseases she describes.  Well, I thought, that's a virtue in many cases. Of course, the reviewer compared this new author to Oliver Sacks, the grace and clarity of prose. 

Expecting a journey through both familiar and new territory, led by an author in the footsteps of  Sacks, Berton Rouche, Natalie Angier, Gina Kolata, Lawrence Altman, I flipped open my paper white and flew off a cliff, like some misguided lemming. 

The writing would have not made it past my high school English teachers. And it was not just the occasional malapropism, but the indiscipline suffused every sentence, the rank amateurism simply destroyed the stories.  

You have to fight your way past the writing to the story.

"He used chemicals to turn the samples into liquid. Finally, he injected the material into several chimpanzees that lived in his laboratory."

My God! Where to begin?

These chimpanzees, living in this scientist's laboratory, as opposed to living in the jungle, were the subjects of this experiment? Why do we need to be told the chimps were residents of the lab? If the scientist was using them for the experiment do we not already know the chimps' domicile? Or, perhaps, these resident chimps were there, as opposed to chimps who just happened to wander through the lab and were trapped into being subjects? 

And the chemicals in which the brain samples were liquified--do we need to know that the tissue had to be dissolved into a liquid to be injected?

My high school teacher's blue pencil would have slashed through all this and what would be left would be, "Chimps, injected with brain material from diseased brains, exhibited the same syndromes seen in human subjects."

Even the "Months later, the animals developed the same symptoms akin to the clinical syndromes in humans," which followed, is jarring to any medically trained human. 

Symptoms are what a patient reports to the doctor which the doctor cannot see for himself--nausea, lightheadedness, pain. Signs are what the doctor can observe in the patient: vomiting, unsteadiness of gait, grimacing. The chimps showed signs of the syndromes; they did not complain of symptoms. (Unless these brain injections really did do something remarkable to those chimps, which would be another and more exciting story altogether.)

"Using a foul-smelling adhesive, she attached two dozen electrodes to Joe's scalp. His hair stood in all directions, as if in fright, to make room for the small pieces."

Which is to say, the patient had an electroencephalogram. 

I suppose this description is supposed to place you in the viewpoint of the patient's wife or the patient himself, but it is entirely irrelevant and adds nothing to the pathos and horror of the story told. In fact, it reads like a snippet from Daniel Tiger, that nauseating profoundly insipid children's cartoon show, where every moment is filled with empathy, fear, compassion and the mother's milk of reassuring drivel.

Enough said

But I'm not writing this to complain about my misspent $9 for the Kindle edition. In fact, I keep reading because the author does assemble and connect a series of fascinating diseases and patient cases, which need no emotional embellishment, because the stark facts of suffering are so evident, but I'm writing because I was moved to look up the author, to see what sort of academic training, if any, she had suffered through, to arrive on the other side so wholly incapable of constructing a single well wrought sentence.

She is, it turns out, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, which claims to be one of the most elite medical schools in the country--although some have doubted this, dubbing Penn Med as "Penn Pretender" with insistent claims to a glory not actually demonstrated by achievement.  

Penn medical school has, for years, tried to compensate for a dearth of actual faculty talent by claiming to accept only the most illustrious undergraduates and it will not even consider a medical student applying to its post graduate training if that student is not AOA, which is the Phi Beta Kappa of the medical school world. Make it exclusive and you make it superior, seems to be the strategy.

In recent years, Penn has been more famous for eating its young, as it cashiered the lady who pioneered mRNA science which formed the basis for the mRNA vaccines almost into oblivion.  Only when talk welled up about a possible Nobel prize for this lady, whose work likely saved more lives than any other technology since the discovery of insulin 100 years ago, has a technology and investigative breakthrough had as much impact. Now Penn is running advertisements in the New Yorker claiming that such investigators are nurtured at Penn and it's no surprise the work was done there.

Such a story really illustrates Christopher Hitchens' remark that hypocrisy is the compliment canard pays to truth. 

Penn, at least has the excuse it is a medical school, and if medical students cannot write, that is the fault of the undergraduate colleges where they are supposed to teach that sort of thing. In fact, the famous explanation by the Dean of Harvard Medical School about why there were no written exams at the medical school in the early 20th century: "Very few of the students would be capable of writing competently enough to write an exam."

But getting back to the author of A Molecule Away, here is a young woman who doesn't even know how bad she is. (At least as a writer; she may be a stellar neurologist.) No editor has explained it to her. No book reviewer--and this review appeared in the hallowed pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES--has let her know. 

So there we have it. The center will not hold. Bad is good. Every author needs a safe space. Criticism and correction and basic skills are just so 20th century, at least among the elite. The effete elite.

Somewhere out there among the unwashed, dismissed, disrespected state colleges and universities, and community colleges, there may be some folks who will replace H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Sacks, but as of this current report, none have been detected on the bleak horizon of Kindle or The New York Times.