The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (58 page)

Years later, I did the same thing with my children, but I never explained the secret 'I love you' message to them... until now, in this footnote.

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5. '...educational system work' (p. 55)

This chapter serves as a testimonial from one of Miss Cox's last students. Her devotion, zest and commitment was typical of those under-paid, self-sacrificing women... those lay saints who, for sixty years, made American elementary public education a notable success, even in the absence of national standards to mitigate the damage inflicted by narrow-minded proscriptive local boards of education.

During the golden age of American elementary education (1890s-1950) most of these women were trained, not in colleges or universities, but at normal schools where they learned to be effective teachers... not social workers, nor amateur psychologists, nor clever 'edu-biz' managers of personnel and budgets, nor inculcators of fashionable doctrines, nor promoters of religious dogma, but teachers whose students ended up with a store of those facts and methods that give them entry to our cultural inheritance: how to parse a sentence, the history of Europe, the principal agricultural products of the nations of the world, how to use a library, the ideals that guided and shaped America's development (and the errors and blind spots that sometimes perverted its course), how to do long division, how to conceive and construct an essay, who wrote The House of Seven Gables, who painted the Mona Lisa, who discovered the source of yellow fever... facts and methods, facts and methods, the rocks upon which an education is founded. They did this, rather than ask twelve-year-olds to express their personal interpretations of the profundities hidden within the 'deceptively simple' lyrics of John Lennon. (Whose lyrics, by the way are not deceptively simple; they're just simple.)

It would be unjust not to praise the handful of gifted, self-sacrificing educational saints who continue to work within the public education systems of America, despite the collapse of general standards, the lack of peer stimulation, the absence of appreciation and financial incentive, the conversion of most inner city schools into temporary holding tanks for the sullen illiterate, and the widespread practice of hiring cultural role models with sub-standard qualifications and advancing them as quickly as possible into administration.*

The quality of American mass education is unlikely to improve now that all the old normal schools, with their tight focus on teaching methods that help the child acquire basic facts and models, are gone, having been converted from first rate teacher colleges into third rate state universities. Worse yet, with a few glittering exceptions, the best and brightest of our young people are no longer attracted to the hard work, low pay, and modest social prestige associated with teaching.

I worked for some years at the richest of America's state universities where admission standards were significantly higher than the national average, but even there a little over eighty percent of the students enrolled in the School of Education came from the bottom twenty percent of accepted students. This did not mean that there weren't a few bright potential teachers, but it certainly indicated that the teaching profession was no longer receiving the best and the brightest. Instead teaching had become a last-ditch back-up profession for the least imaginative, least confident, least ambitious. This unpromising material was pressed into a teacher-like shape by batteries of jargon-riddled education courses then sent out to instruct the next generation of youngsters, the least imaginative and the dimmest of whom, in their turn, became teachers of the following generation... and thus we arrived at the current state of public education in America, where most students entering university often have only a vague idea of the grammar and syntax of the language they speak (and in which they think), and no idea at all of how to plan, research and write a paper, or defend a premise, or prove a logical assertion, or write a cogent sentence, to say nothing of their almost total ignorance of geography, foreign languages, art, history... indeed of any culture beyond the pre-chewed MacKulture they derive from narcotizing mass media designed to by-pass the brain and impact directly on the central nervous system. This step-by-step lowering of the average quality of those who enter teaching has brought us to a dilemma. To attract the kinds of people who might be able to bring elementary and secondary education in America back to the level that had been achieved by 1940 by the legions of high-minded, devoted, competent (and ruthlessly exploited) women who entered teaching because few other professional opportunities were open to them, we would have to entice a better level of university students with palpably higher wages and better working conditions than are on offer today, and this would mean vastly overpaying, for a time at least, the lees, culls and time-servers that currently constitute the majority of the teaching profession.

But one of our current social problems might help us solve another. It is difficult to find dignified work with job-security and decent health insurance and retirement benefits in an era when corporate greed inflicts downsizing, piecework, and out-sourcing structures on its employees as a way of wringing the last drop of energy and talent out of them. Offering such enticements as job-security and decent health and retirement benefits might attract better graduates into teaching with only a modest increase in the current wages, if—admittedly a vast 'if'—a new crop of strong, forward-looking educational administrators could return our schools to their educational function, rather than serving, as they now do, as baby-sitters cum policemen cum social workers cum ideological inculcators.

It is a constant embarrassment to Americans living abroad that, when it comes to cultural awareness, general knowledge, and the ability to express oneself cogently, American students, even intelligent ones and those from the 'better' colleges and universities (not always exclusive categories), are about two years behind their counterparts in England and France. And even the brightest of our graduates are shameless in their sloppy use of language, which they fill with clichés, jargon, pleonasms, inarticulate grunts, mispronunciations and that annoying mélange of vacant buzz terms and longer-than-necessary words used just that painful little bit wrongly that has come to be called NewConese: the language of the current Whitehouse front liners, save for the Secretary of State.

But the embarrassment caused by our visiting students is nothing compared to the humiliation of sitting with an educated English-speaking Frenchman listening to a speech being delivered by an American president, military leader, or head of a major corporation, and knowing that the fate of the world is in the hands of these blithely self-confident cultural illiterates.

Fortunately, a bright kid can be saved by meeting just one really good teacher. I don't know how to save our bright teachers.

* Who can, do; who can't do, teach; who can't teach, administer; who can't administer, consult; who can't even consult, appear on television as 'experts' and 'life-style gurus'.

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6. '...ever taken an IQ test' (p. 55)

In the '30s the dominant pedagogical craze was the use of IQ tests to discover students of high 'intelligence' in slums and impoverished rural areas, where they were not expected. The kinds of 'intelligence' that were sought were the mechanical and nomenclatural facilities that were measured by Stanford-Binet-Terman IQ tests, which were developed from prototypes used by the French army during the First World War to separate recruits who might be capable of mastering the technological intricacies of modern warfare from those whose primary military value was the ability of their flesh to absorb bullets that might otherwise have hit more useful men. From the late '20s and throughout the '30s, locating and burnishing 'intelligence' among the poor was liberal middle-class America's favorite gesture towards equal opportunity. It was something the do-gooder could accomplish without excessive effort and without actually coming into physical contact with nastiness, as it involved dealing only with the presentable few of the disadvantaged who were lucky enough to have IQs that equipped them to make their way upstream against the current of capitalist privilege.

This missionary quest for poor kids with high IQs was even the theme of several popular tough-kids-in-the-city films of the era. Like today's besetting educational zealotry for exposing students to cultures outside the Greco-European canons of literature, art, philosophy, science, and technology; the 'Test and Measure' movement of the '30's was focused on 'disadvantaged' children. But unlike modern 'multi-cultural exposure', the IQ fad was essentially elitist in its focus. Multi-cultural education, on the more democratic hand, is not only non-elitist, it is anti-elitist, providing, as it does, culturally disadvantaged students with attractive role models by pointing out and honoring contributions (often, because of a long history of social and cultural injustice, relatively minor ones) made by non-European, non-male constituents of America's colorful and healthful ethno/cultural salad.*

It is assumed that the benefits and comforts derived by children of minority cultures being exposed to the relatively minor contributions of non-European/non-male figures in art, literature, science, politics, etc. over the past two centuries will compensate for the loss of concentration on those cultural figures and events that constitute the rich inheritance of all young people in the English-speaking stream of Western Culture, including most particularly African-Americans and Indians, who need access to classic models of thought and expression even more than do their European-American classmates.

For those condemned to becoming more familiar with Toni Morrison than with William Shakespeare, we must hope the social benefits derived from preferring the 'role model' to the 'Heroic Creator' will be as great as the cultural losses have already been. Surely a wiser approach would be to offer the highest models of achievement, method, style, and character, while explaining the historical injustices and cultural distortions that biased opportunity towards males of European descent.

* It has often been pointed out that 'salad', with its separate and discrete bits differing in color, texture, and taste, is a better metaphor for the American cultural mix than the monotonic soup of the 'melting pot'.

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7. '...IQ would be 50' (p. 58)

You might well quip that an IQ of 50 would have qualified me to teach creationist science at a fundamentalist college. But people didn't think about fundamentalist colleges in 1937, twelve years after the Scopes trial in which Clarence Darrow defended a high school science teacher who had broken Tennessee law by exposing his students to a Darwinian view of creation that differed from the six-day sleight of hand version in Genesis.

The 'Thirties brought a fresh, mind-clearing wind of reason that began to ventilate American thinking, while blasts of ridicule from such men as H. L. Menkin drove the Snake-Handlers, the Creationists, the Flat-earthers, the glossolalists, the Doomsday Cultists and the Literalists back into their caves. No one living in the new dawn of social realism of the 'Thirties could have imagined that these follies would re-surface in the 1970's to infiltrate the American cultural and political scene. Once again, the Shamans of Balderdash have risen from the slime of superstition to hiss their electoral threats into the ears of spineless legislators, and once again American children who have the misfortune to live in such states as Kansas (if reports in French newspapers of recent pro-creationist legislation are true) are having their minds befogged with creationist nonsense.*

I assume that the entire faculty of the University of Kansas turned in their resignations en masse. If they didn't, I am ashamed on their behalf.

* Intelligent Christians manage to deal with Genesis on the poetic, metaphoric level... rather than as low-grade journalism.

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8. '...with a dose of salts.' (p. 68)

It was some years before I learned that the figure of speech involved taking things that certain unreliable people said with 'a pinch of salt' not a 'dose of salts'. But one has to admit that there was a certain earthy aptness to my mother's muddled simile.

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9. '...into the shadows of history' (p. 72)

Long before NBC established the first coast-to-coast radio network in 1926, popular music had become an important cultural element—some have claimed the most important element—coming as we did from such diverse cultural backgrounds, and scattered as we were across a vast continent. Even before the invention of the phonograph, Tin Pan Alley tunes spread through those ubiquitous music stores found in every town, selling not only instruments, but also sheet music from which families sang the newest hits together, grandfather and granddaughter enjoying the same songs. This began to change with the advent of ragtime and, later, swing, which established boundaries of music-vs.-noise that separated the generations, a chasm that the arrival of rock-'n'-roll transformed into 'a great gulf fix'd' between the generations, which is only now beginning to heal over, as the rock-'n'-roll generation approaches its sixties.

In the early years of the popular 'hit', an individual song enjoyed a longer shelf life and broader catchments than they have today. Many of the tunes that we sang in our kitchen while Anne-Marie and I did the supper dishes had, in fact, been written before the First World War: such universal favorites as: 'My Gal Sal', 1905; 'Some of These Days', 1909, 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' and 'My Melancholy Baby', 1911, all of which were widely sung, whistled and hummed throughout the '30's, comfortably holding their own with the transitory top ten 'hits' played by Big Bands.