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.