Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School / Against Mediocrity: The Humanities in America's High Schools
Turner, John R.
constructing excuses for those countries that are dominated by it abroad--that is, countries controlled by the Soviet Union. My impression, for what it is worth, is that things have been...
...His entire existence is chopped into units so restrictive that the idea of genuine reflection becomes ridiculous...
...This is a collection of sixteen essays treating the teaching of the humanities in high school...
...Once a student has shown that he has satisfied these claims, or, I suppose, that he is incapable of satisfying them, no further schooling should be required...
...The worm at the core of discursive fruits such as these--and it has eaten away at the eleven I didn't discuss more destructively than at the five sketched here--is that they tend to be offered as solutions to a problem that doesn't exist...
...now telling us what he found...
...Delattre gets to the heart of the teacher problem with a succinct statement of his theme: "It is the fate of narrow minds to be the victims of fashion-or worse, the perpetrators of it...
...Central America correspondents Alan Riding and Raymond Bonner have continued in the apologist tradition established by the Times's prewar Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, but even they pale by comparison with Matthews...
...The Horace of Sizer's title is not the Latin poet, nor the eccentric proprietor of Strawberry Hill, nor even the nineteenth-century educational reformer...
...The Washington Post is frequently this way...
...The students are usually "docile, compliant, and without initiative...
...And, in Mr...
...A while back this network was given a stack of the taxpayers' dollars by the National Endowment for the Humanities (that's how NEH Chairman William Bennett came to write the introduction) and spent it on conferences held in Atlanta and Denver in the spring of 1983 and, attended by assorted teachers, professors, and school officials...
...The intellectual lassitude of the majority of people is not a puzzle to be worked out, it's just a fact...
...There is money in the hierarchy...
...And these discourses, duly revised in the light of editorial advice and commentary at the conferences, have now been made into a book...
...He calls for heroic action by individual schools and teachers, not a very hopeful formula for widespread change but perhaps the only practical option we have...
...One might expect something of a different character when he learns that Horace's Compromise is--forgive me but I must quote--"the first report from a study of high schools, cosponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Commission on Educational Issues of the National Association of Independent Schools...
...Five out of sixteen is pretty good when one considers how this book came into being...
...but the country remained relatively prosperous and citizens were free to go about their business so long as they did not criticize the Big Chief...
...As Sizer says: "Without good teachers, sensibly deployed, schooling is barely worth the effort...
...This deplorable situation is unlikely to change soon, but Sykes thinks there are opportunities for single institutions to make headway against the stultifying crowd...
...Young people who want to learn have plenty of opportunities outside of schools, and obviously, many take advantage of them...
...Mary's College of Maryland and author o f the column "'An Idea o f Freedom...
...by then, of course, the country had been debauched by various colonial powers...
...Businesses were nationalized and pillaged...
...The first requirement of school reform must be teachers and principals who love learning so much they are driven to have it for themselves...
...John's College in Annapolis...
...In "Teacher Education and the Predicaments of Reform," Gary Sykes, a former official of the National Institute for Education, gives a convincing review of recent attempts to revamp the education of teachers...
...In 1970, however, Burnham, who until then had been an oddly regressive neocolonial, gave in to intellectual fashion and became a born-again Marxist along the lines of Dr...
...In fact, he goes so far as to say that the single variable which makes a genuine difference in the schools is the social class from which students come...
...adults cannot 'give them an education.' " Furthermore, with an engaged student body, the schools could finally face the truth that an education which does not include "education in character" is scarcely worth the name...
...he spent a few harrowing months in the bush and returned with the inspiration for his best novel, A Handful of Dust...
...Burnham's private goon squad...
...If the upper grades of the public schools were thereby freed from their baby-sitting function, they could then turn their attention to the intellectual development of the students who remained...
...Now there's an incantation to conjure up visions of grave-faced committees harrumphing their way to statistical inanity...
...What we are justified in expecting are literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding, simple standards which can be met by fewer than twelve years of school attendance...
...Observers of the public schools can be both grateful and relieved that Theodore Sizer has produced a readable and sensible book on education...
...Conferences, of course, have to be addressed...
...But, Io and behold, Horace's Compromise is not a work of quantitative scientism but rather the straightforward report of the former headmaster of Phillips Academy who visited dozens of schools over a two-year period and is John R. Turner is Director o f Continuing Education at St...
...Julius Nyerere of Tanzania...
...His commitment to language is undeterred by erosive developments in contemporary culture...
...The fundamental weakness of our educational system is that it does not attract well-read, imaginative persons into its ranks...
...Some of its foreign reporters are now plainly anti-Communist (Alexander Cockburn unfailingly identifies them for us in his press column), as is the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal...
...Evelyn Waugh passed through in the early thirties...
...They would have to learn more while being taught less...
...Horace, in fact, isn't even a real person...
...Ever since Sir Walter Raleigh drifted three hundred miles up the Orinoco River and came back to write of "a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought," British Guyana has been a favorite of touring literary mandarins...
...His discoveries were not encouraging, at least not if one thinks that high school ought to foster intellectual development...
...It may be that the high school is becoming, like numerous other elements of government, an additional component of the social detritus, maintained because people can't think how to get rid of it...
...man on the front page of the New York Times, to be of exceptional interest...
...This is not an elitist argument to abandon the children of the poor...
...Five of them are worth reading whereas the others exemplify, in varying degree, the quality they claim to be against...
...Horace meets 120 students a day...
...Alas, when Sizer raised the possibilities of these reforms with Horace, he did not get an enthusiastic response...
...Naipaul reports in his brilliant book, Journey to Nowhere (1981), the only concrete result was that ministers and civil servants began to sign their correspondence "Yours cooperatively...
...His ineffectiveness derives from a schedule that has him rushing all week long from one task to another...
...This, announces Sizer, is simply "whistling in the dark...
...But it makes no sense to exact this duty by prescribing the same stint of schooling for everyone...
...Sizer's considerably so...
...One is considerably better than the other, but both address the same conditions and both are in general agreement about what ought to be done...
...Society, he says, has a right to demand a certain level of education in each of its citizens...
...political strongman suddenly gets his head turned by Marxism and Third World liberationist rhetoric...
...boy, took over as Prime Minister and settled in for what seemed the usual run of equatorial corruption...
...It's true that determined public action might raise test scores a few points, and that would be fine...
...So long as "in-service" training concentrates on "how-to" issues and neglects the material to be taught, teachers will recognize that humanistic learning is to be supported only by lip service...
...So the conference organizers selected a number of educational thinkers to deliver papers on the teaching of the humanities in the high schools...
...All one need do is follow Horace around for a couple of days to see why the schools are intellectually enervating...
...Nobody wants to write truthfully about what's possible in education because there wouldn't be much drama in it...
...And he is content, after a fashion...
...He assigns them one theme a week, and figures he can spend an average of five minutes reading, correcting, and commenting on each paper...
...The constitution was gutted so that even rigged elections were no longer a necessity...
...Implicit in his reservations about compulsory schooling is the expectation that once liberated from onerous bureaucratic requirements the schools would become inviting enough to attract most of the students who now attend unwillingly...
...My impression, for what it is worth, is that things have been slowly changing at the Times in the last few years, especially in its news division...
...At one point Sizer asks, "Can an ungenerous and irresponsible adult culture long get away with preaching virtue to its young...
...The American high school of today--and this is true throughout the nation--is a youthtending institution devoted to preserving "mediocre harmonies...
...Horace knows he is a lot better off than his counterparts who labor in the inner cities...
...He is the embodiment of busy-work...
...Naipaul was quick to see that Jonestown was not the only story down there...
...The two volumes outlined here are better than average, and Mr...
...Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, contributes an explanation of why, and how, Bard has made writing the foundation of its core curriculum...
...The most sprightly of the five essays I can recommend to general readers is "The Intellectual Lives of Teachers" by Edwin J. Delattre, the president of St...
...Guyana itself was a bizarre place...
...Greer echoes Edwin Delattre in arguing that teachers will not improve instruction in the humanities until they are led by administrators who themselves know what the humanities are...
...He's a composite figure, a 53-year-old English teacher in a pretty good suburban school whose working conditions are more pleasant than average...
...The causes of Horace's predicament are evident to Sizer: parental indifference and the vested interests of a voracious educational bureaucracy...
...The Times's editorial pages remain left-wing, however, and in this the paper seems to be running counter to a media trend, if that is what it is, of "news" based on essentially leftist premises, combined with editorials tinged with a mild conservatism...
...Horace may or may not have the potential to be a good teacher, but he is clearly not sensibly deployed...
...The whole of Horace's Compromise can be read as an answer to the question...
...But society is generally satisfied because "the adolescents are supervised, safely and constructively most of the time during the morning and the afternoon hours, and they are off the labor market...
...Jon Moline, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, offers an enlightening discussion of the difficulties teachers face in becoming genuine professionals...
...If, however, it is to be reformed, and again perform functions vital to the life of the mind, Sizer's prescriptions will be a good place to start, l recommend Horace's Compromise to anyone still believing there is hope for the schools...
...But there was also Guyana's political life, a potent brew of farce and tragedy even by the standards of the region...
...On the evils of the latter Sizer could not be more explicit: "The existing hierarchies are comfortable for the people at the top of school bureaucracy and for their influential colleagues in the university with whom they are interlocked in a variety of training-to-license programs...
...Guyana was granted independence in the mid-sixties, and, with the help of the CIA :~nd the British Colonial Office, Forbes Burnham, a black racialist bull3...
...Equally manifest to Sizer are the corrective measures that ought to be taken...
...Elections were rigged, political opposition was snuffed, and the army was turned into Mr...
...Yet he also knows he is teaching his students almost nothing...
...Sizer's analysis, however, is probably too gloomy, because it overestimates the importance of formal schooling in adolescent development...
...In what he calls the three pedagogical approaches to language--the philosophical, the etymological, and the aesthetic--Botstein finds the underpinning for all humanistic study...
...He converted Guyana into something called a Cooperative Socialist Republic...
...And from these youngsters much more could be expected than is now the case...
...Freedom of the press" was redefined, Cuban-style, as the right to publish only news which helped the "class struggle," i.e., which buttressed the regime...
...There was, of course, the usual blend of corruption and social comedy which makes post-colonial societies such a lark for journalists and novelists: the semiliterate ministers racing around in limousines, the curfews and black markets and waterless toilets, the handful of Europeans left drinking in the shadows...
...Sizer believes in the dictum coined by Robert Hutchins, that the best education for the best is the best education for all...
...The students are the chief victims because they miss an opportunity to have their minds activated...
...Presumably, if the schoois were capable of dealing with subtleties, basic moral questions could be discussed without the frothing at the mouth which now accompanies any hint of a religious issue...
...But their teachers also are mistreated and forced to live with the knowledge that they cannot do good work because the conditions of their employment won't permit it...
...The two books discussed here are units in the remarkable parade set off by the nation's belated discovery that American high schools are not exactly palaces of intellectual scintillation...
...The latter gains it.s quality by containing an unusual number of stories about what actually happened in schools...
...In the absence of that basic change, says Delattre, other measures will be futile...
...Sizer's judgment, "that is what high school is all about...
...These efforts were crippled by the inability of the various organizations responsible for teacher training to forgo games of one-upmanship...
...Almost 50 years later, after Jim Jones and his followers had passed around the Fla-Vor-Aid (a holocaust which at least corrected the impression abroad that the country was located in Africa), Shiva Naipaul was among the mob of journalists and Third World aficionados who flew in for the media wrap-up...
...That is also why treatises on education are usually dull...
...But it wouldn't turn the world around...
...And with a final chapter entitled "A Paralysis of Imagination," the answer is clear...
...If that's the case, the high school will gradually come to be of major interest only to governmental economists and the bureaucrats who draw their salaries from it...
...The final entry on my list of the worthy five is by Peter Greer, superintendent of schools in Portland, Maine...
...Horace knows that the schools are paralyzed, but he has little faith they can be enlivened, and he is intensely fearful that any change will work against him...
...It's a page-turner, quite apart from anything else, and I found the section on the Cuban revolution, with Herbert Matthews acting as Castro's P.R...
...Vanderbilt University has an Institute for Public Policy Studies which sponsors an Educational Excellence Network...
...Greer's solution is for community leaders to insist on substance from school officials, and if that's similar to a directive to pull up your socks and sit up straight, it's still probably useful...
...Professional" as it is generally used is one of the biggest cant words now going, but Professor Moline manages, through careful definition, to restore some integrity to it, and to convince one that it would be a good thing for teachers to become more professional than they are...
...As Sizer rightly proclaims, "their personal engagement with their own learning is crucial...
...No level of pedagogical skill or administrative acumen can make up for empty, conventional thought about history, literature, philosophy, and modern world culture...
...The country, in fact, provided an object lesson of what happens when a run-of-the-mill George Sire Johnston is a writer living in New York City...
...But what the Big Chief had in mind was soon made clear...
...I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Against Mediocrity...
...His harried, droopy life is the focus of the problem...
...A consistent motif throughout Horace's Compromise is the author's disgust with the way less privileged children are now treated by the schools...
...Since American society has not taken the trouble to ask itself what teachers should know or how they should learn it, it is not surprising that our schools are staffed mostly by intellectual plodders...
...At first, as Mr...
...Actually, he feels fairly lucky...
...Paramilitary organizations (never referred to in the American press as "death squads...
...Americans have, traditionally expected schools to stand for certain values, but the takeover of the educational establishment by social-scientific hierarchies has fostered the shallow belief that values can be completely separated from their religious roots...
...Sizer doesn't come right out and say so, but the implication is fairly clear that lurking within Horace's privy soul is something close to love for Big Brother...
...That, in itself, should be a good lesson for educators...
...Sizer's thesis is that the average citizen is an unwitting participant in a conspiracy to keep the schools dull, flat, dreary, insipid, trivial, and monotonous...
...As he says: " I f the roots of the decline in literary interest and clear and powerful thinking among students are beyond the school, then the school must confront those deeper roots by addressing the challenge of motivating the student to employ the language in the first place...
...Anyway, do get Braley's book...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
