Among School Children (35 page)

"That was so great!" said Claude when Judith finished reading. "She didn't get nothin' wrong! Hey, Judith, if you ever become a businesswoman, you could use that in your speech. You could run for President with that thing."

"Claude!" Judith said. She smiled, the sick-looking smile that Claude himself wore when classmates teased him.

Claude didn't seem to know that he was mocking his best friend and protector for being smart. He just thought he was having fun. The idea of Judith's being President pleased him. The hyperbole must have diminished for him the distance that he felt between him and Judith. Claude couldn't stop. He turned to a classmate. "She could run for President." Robert walked by. Claude said to him, "Oh, man, you shoulda been here when Judy read hers. It was awesome! She could run for friggin' President!"

It is dangerous to be smart. Still wearing that sickly smile, Judith reached out with both arms toward Claude, hands opened as if to shove him away, and Claude desisted.

A few days earlier, Chris had read the rough draft of Judith's essay, and had chuckled over it.

Judith had lowered her eyebrows. "What's funny?" she had asked Mrs. Zajac.

"Oh," Chris had answered. "It's wonderful, Judith. It's just that I don't think I could have written anything like this at your age."

Perched against her front table now, springtime at the window of her classroom, Chris read aloud a passage about slave traders wrenching children from their parents. It was exciting to feel Judith's eyes on her. Chris had a recurrent fantasy about waking up one day to find that a former student had become an admirable and famous personage. She felt ready to settle for something less grandiose. She hoped for confident, "well-adjusted" children. But Judith gave her one of the best feelings she had experienced in her fourteen years of teaching, the sensation that came from knowing that she had a child in the room who, with a little luck and guidance, would certainly surpass her.

Thomas Jefferson imagined an aristocracy of intellect, made up in part of "youths of genius" who would be raised by public education "from among the classes of the poor."

Horace Mann, the great spokesman of the Common School Movement, imagined in the mid-nineteenth century a system of universal education for America, which would make "the wheel of Progress" roll "harmoniously and resistlessly onward."

John Dewey imagined schools that would provide for every child "an embryonic community life" and, for the nation, "the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious."

W. E. B. Du Bois imagined that education would someday help to bring about "the treatment of all men according to their individual desert and not according to their race."

James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard and a leading voice for educational reform from around the end of World War II until the mid-1960s, imagined that public schools would answer the threat of Soviet Russian competition and "secure the foundations of our free society."

What great hopes Americans have placed in formal education. What a stirring faith in children and in the possibility and power of universal intellectual improvement. And what a burden of idealism for the little places where education is actually attempted.

The history of education in the twentieth century presents a picture of a nation perennially dissatisfied, for one reason or another, with its public schools. But maybe if less had been asked, less would have been done. America has greatly increased the quantity of education. When Horace Mann got started, only a small percentage of American children finished grade school. Now virtually every child
has
to go to school until the age of sixteen. In the 1980s, about a quarter of all Americans, adults and children, are actively engaged in education in one way or another. The nation spends about $150 billion a year on public elementary and high schools. America spends a larger percentage of its gross national product on education than Japan, Germany, France, and England, and a slightly smaller percentage than Canada. Many state governments have at least begun to try for a rough equality in financing between poor and wealthy districts. (For the first half of the 1980s, Holyoke ran its schools entirely on state money; on occasion, a former mayor used some of the funds for fixing potholes, too.) Against long odds, school districts all over the country have been desegregated.

And yet while public schools have always helped a relative few rise out of poverty, they have not proven to be the "great equalizers" that Horace Mann dreamed of. Many schools, of course, remain desegregated only in theory. Many high schools are segregated internally, thanks to "tracking," a system Conant helped promote, which in theory sorts students according to natural ability, and in practice most often sorts them along lines of race and economic class. John Dewey did more than any other individual before or since to bring new air and light into classrooms, but the deep changes he dreamed of never came to pass, and he lived to criticize pedagogical practices carried out in his name. Some commentaries from the left doubt that idealism has ever been much more than a cloak for darker purposes in educational reform, such as the production of a tranquilized workforce that would learn enough but not too much in school.

The history of education in America is the history of attempts to reform it. The latest movement deplores high dropout rates and declines in the College Board scores of new teachers. Many tests and surveys show that large percentages of American youth come out of high school and even college incompetent in the three R's and ignorant of basic facts about history, geography, science, and literature. The bad news has inspired many commissions and from them many reports that make use of the word "crisis." As in the late 1950s, these reports often invoke an external threat—not Soviet competition now, but Japanese economic power. "Public education has put this country at a terrible competitive disadvantage," a corporate leader was quoted as saying in 1987. "They're the suppliers of our workforce, but they're suppliers with a fifty percent defect rate."

On the whole, the reform movement of the 1980s lacked the moral and emotional force of the movement of the late 1960s. The cries of alarm from that earlier campaign still echo, particularly from one group of books that comprise, collectively, a literature of rage.

In an often used metaphor of the 1960s, children were dying in their schools. Changes weren't just desirable; they had to happen right away. Yet to the critics, change seemed impossible within the walls of urban public schools. Ivan Illich's
Deschooling Society,
the manifesto of the movement that called for the dissolution of all institutions of formal education, was published in the early 1970s. It nicely caps the literature of rage. A number of books in this genre were firsthand accounts by reform-minded teachers. Most could have been written in the late 1970s or the 1980s—conditions in many urban school systems have not improved, and in some have gotten worse. A surprising number of the writers were men. According to one view, they'd never have written their books if there hadn't been a war on with draft deferments for teachers, but that overlooks the genuine strength of feeling in many of the books.

In
Death at an Early Age,
published in 1967, Jonathan Kozol describes a year of teaching in Boston, in a school where children were beaten in the basement, and the students were black and the teachers white and, by Kozol's account, deeply racist. Kozol got fired for having his class read a poem by Langston Hughes.

According to the era's "free school movement," public schools were prisons; no change was possible within them; a different sort of school was needed. In
The Lives of Children,
George Dennison describes a "free" school that he helped to create in New York City. Dennison writes with an enormous certainty, and, in keeping with the temper of the times, he gets carried away when describing the enemy. Dennison holds that public school teachers, even ones he's willing to assume are "fine," can't possibly avoid hypocrisy in imposing discipline on their students. "On the contrary," he writes, "it was only too evident that in accepting their jobs they had given away their integrity, for the truth was that they could not make moral judgments and implement them."

Herbert Kohl (36
Children,
also published in 1967) makes it plain that he at least did not give up his integrity during the two years he spent teaching in a public school in Harlem. But during his second year, Kohl received discouraging news about students from his first class. He began to feel that other teachers and omnipresent racism had started to undo whatever good he'd done. He writes, "I was no longer sure of the value of my work to the children. That it helped me was undeniable." He felt that teaching had forced him to confront the worst parts of himself, and had helped him to improve: "I fought to be more human and feel I succeeded."

By the end of his second year, Kohl writes, he lacked "perspective": "The thought of twenty-five more children the next year, twenty-five that might have a good year yet ultimately benefit little or nothing from it, depressed me. I wanted to think and to write, to discover how I could best serve the children." More than poor pay and lack of status make teaching hard. Kohl did what many teachers would always like to do:

I decided to take a year's leave and go to Europe. As hard as it was to part from the children, it was necessary, and so I spent a year in Spain, thinking, mostly, and writing, avoiding until the last moments the decision to return to work with the children and still remain outside of the system. I have never stopped teaching, but I no longer have a classroom.

Chris made up delinquency lists over Memorial Day weekend, which followed the Science Fair, and on Tuesday she got right back to work. "Ashley, you owe me a story. Kimberly, you owe me social studies. Claude, come here, please. Claude, you got a twenty-five on the last spelling test. Claude, I thought you were on a roll. I don't think it's too much to ask that you study your spelling every night." She interrupted the Civil War when half the class could not explain what she had just taught, that the Emancipation Proclamation was partly a political act and not something humble Abe Lincoln did just because it was right. Chris said cheerfully, "In case you people haven't noticed, I'm not letting you sit here for the next four weeks. I'm not letting you come with your bodies and leave your brains behind. So remember to pack your brains when you come to school."

The North, they figured out, had strategic advantages. And it was on to Bull Run. "People with picnic baskets! To watch people going to war! They were going to have a picnic and watch people get killed!"

"People got killed?" asked Robert.

"Robert, in a war, people get killed," said Chris.

"My grandfather was in a war, and
he
didn't get killed," said Robert.

"Did I say that everybody in a war got killed?" asked Chris. Afterward, she resolved, "I'm not going to let my little fifth graders leave me thinking war is fun, like on TV."

She didn't want them to leave ignorant about the future either. She wanted to tell them that their lives did not have to include welfare. These lessons sprang from local reality; they would never have occurred to her if half of her class hadn't come from families on some form of public assistance.

She started the story of Reconstruction, and then for several days in a row she got waylaid by the subject of school segregation, which led her and the class to muse on why, in a segregated system, most of the money for education would go to all-white schools. "What was wrong with that?" she asked. "Why is it important that everyone get a good education?" They talked for a long time on that subject.

Irene said, "My father quit high school and now he's going back to college."

"My mother, too," said Claude.

"My father dropped out in tenth grade," said Arabella.

"I bet, Arabella, if you asked him, he would say he regretted it," said Chris. "If Jimmy goes for a job, and Jimmy has a high school diploma and Claude doesn't, the person with the diploma almost always gets the job."

"That's not fair!" said Claude.

"It's very fair," said Chris.

During the ensuing argument, Alice leaned toward Margaret and said, "I want to go to Smith or Mount Holyoke."

The next day, digressing again from Reconstruction, Chris asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. She would ask them that question many times, in the midst of other lessons and in between lessons, throughout the last weeks of the year. "You should never sit there and have no idea what you want to do in life," she said. "It might be one week you want to be an astronaut and the next week a paleontologist, but you should have
some
idea. I think you should start to think about that. Arnie, what do you want to be?"

"A policeman."

"A hairdresser," said Arabella.

Lots of chatter followed about who was going to become what, while Claude advised Arnie on the sort of handgun he should carry as a cop—a .357 Magnum would be best, Claude thought.

Claude said he wanted to be a professional fisherman.

Chris smiled. "Oh, Claude, you'd be a
very
good one."

She turned to Jimmy. "Jimmy, what do you want to be?"

"I dunno," said Jimmy.

"Jimmy, you know, you should want to be something."

"I do," he said.

"What?" said Chris.

"I dunno," said Jimmy.

She carried on with Jimmy. Getting him to write his last story of the year became the battle now. She didn't really win. She brought Jimmy up to her front table. She tried to coax ideas from him. She teased him, saying that she hoped she had him in her class next year, because now she knew how smart he was. Jimmy sat with his head on his arms and gazed toward the windows, his flourishing, healthy-looking curly hair surrounding his delicate but ashen face. She lifted him by a skinny arm and said, "Think, Jimmy, think." When she let him go, he collapsed again. She lifted him and said, "I'm going to ask for you next year, Jimmy, and boy, are you and I going to go places!" "He's such a sad case," she thought. "It's like I'm sticking a needle in him when I ask him to think." She did get him to finish the story finally. Jimmy sat right up then, all by himself, to copy it over. Then he looked alert. He looked undistractable, aiding his pen with many twistings of his mouth.