Just Say No to College

...While my own curiosity friends...

...Nicely bound broken sets of the Reading, writing, and intelligent dis- still included Latin meant an early tory, politics, and the arts...

...The very communications and law enforcement that most mind-bending of hallucino- aggravation of innumerable family act of working to pay for each volume and it doesn't matter who is president...

...had written a book entitled Wines of ographer Peter Quennell and the late guishes the natural candle, which is the the World, painstakingly analyzing their Alan Hodge who, among other things, reason of so many useless scholars in chemical compositions without tasting was one of the two ghostwriters for the world...

...Given a gebra and geometry with the logic and founding until his death in the early hann and Richard Strauss, Lehar, and little Latin, years later you will be able to precision they deserved...

...At the same time, a curriculum that writes and broadcasts frequently on his- shops...

...We didn't need classrooms...

...tophanes, Chaucer, Emerson, Parkman, they were worthless...

...tering summer day in Washington, D.C...

...tine Birrell, and at that time, even a learned the elements of real, as opposed ticipating Nancy Reagan by twenty newspaper carrier turned copyboy like to apparent, political power: control years, I "just said no"--in my case, to and agreeing with Sydney Smith (to the myself could afford to start...

...it is the They included a deaf, dentured retired who edited the arts and manners section met everyone from the last two Hapsmost practical subject many secondary colonel, Merritt Booth, who taught al- of National Review from the magazine's burg emperors to Brahms, Bruckner, Jo-school students will ever study...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991...

...He's from Barcelona...

...Although we struck up a strong Puccini to Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einget the gist of street signs, simple news young English teacher named Bill Gaull intellectual friendship during hundreds stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marshal Tito, clips, and broadcasts in Spanish, Italian, who, while working his way through law of hours of phone conversations, we Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe, Portuguese, and, in a pinch, even Ro- school, took the trouble to encourage never met...

...National Council for the Humanities, could go in those literary old curiosity more equal footing...

...tioning system was working that after- bought for all of seventy-five cents a vol- arts education in academia...

...How Latin came to be motley but worthy crew of teachers, not face meetings...

...One of the rewards: extensive writing on the topics conti's exquisite film adaptation of Today's book fanciers, usually forced earliest pleasures of my own writing ca- of one's choosing, more free time and Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard to choose between overpriced antiquar- reer came when, a few years after I had fewer scheduled classes, and the ability was playing and the erratic air condi- ian dealers and chain retailers limited to left the National Observer, I appeared to slip out for an illicit beer (I was tall standard current titles, would be amazed in its pages as a book critic and was able for my age) with the connivance of one's Aram Bakshian, Jr., a member of the at how far—and wide—a few dollars to renew earlier acquaintances on a subordinate hall monitors...

...As I watched the world-weary vantes, Marcus Aurelius, Gibbon, Ma- without being subjected to the nuisance Well, it's better than going to school .. . —from the film Just You and Me Kid patrician hero turning his back on the caulay, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, of gym, the irrelevance of Geology I, gilded sham of risorgimento Italy, I felt Sterne, Smollett, Daudet, de Maupas- and the forced purchase of dozens of a smug kinship, excusable, perhaps, in sant, Surtees, Suetonius, Sheridan, Aris- badly written textbooks, as expensive as F ew things in life are worth stand- one still in his teens...

...reading it, a principle that probably ap- councils, as I would later observe in the tioned yet unappetizing academic schol- So much so that, from junior high plies to students who have to work for Nixon and Ford White Houses before arship, but my mind was made up: rath- school onward, I regularly played hooky their tuition...

...bookstores that still dotted the Washing- and then at the (now-unrecognizable) a thing or two about communicating...

...is better to collect one," wrote Augus- academy called Woodward Prep, I even been the defining choice of my life...

...Similarly, collaborating with Just thinking about that makes me estly say that everything I needed to authors, politicians, journalists, artists, Viennese composer Robert Stolz (1880- shudder...

...and literature...

...ary mentors was the late Frank Meyer, europa under a man who had known or vant" baffles me to this day...

...Several inspirwhen, overcome by the dinginess of dependent reading and conversation Ligne, Luther, and Dante, not to men- ing elementary and secondary school George Washington University's down- than from the standard gruel dispensed tion more recent and routine titles, could teachers tolerated my maverick streak town campus, and the industrial- in class, taking to heart the Shakespeare- be had for a song, sometimes in moroc- and encouraged my interests in history strength effluvium issuing from long an admonition that co or calf...

...The only time we were in the a rather fascinating mixed bag...

...An- In brief, sir, study what you most affect...

...But I can hon- been untenured and unofficial: editors, interests...

...decision...

...a dedicated 1970s...

...When asked about this, the head- John Birch Society, graded fairly and bles of King Farouk was an important at George Washington University and master's wife dismissed the matter with taught passionately...

...News & World Report, also meant Editing the school newspaper and lit-don campus and walk a few blocks to Nearly all of them, Lowdermilk's, Pearl- access to good reference libraries and erary supplement and commanding the the old Circle Theatre on Pennsylvania man's, Estate, Savile, and Park Books, interesting conversation with the less hall monitors meant real power and real Avenue...

...manian...

...stuffy writers and editors...

...Winston Churchill I've been lucky have ended up as a tenured, politically seller, I do not claim that every- My graduate and post-graduate enough to know, has been an unending correct hack . . . perhaps even a registhing I needed to know I had already teachers, while more famous, have all source of new ideas, friendships, and tered Democrat...

...At the very worst, I might U nlike the author of a recent best- any of them...

...of several years of post-graduate study quisition of rudimentary French and deserves some of the credit, so does a sometimes we didn't even need face-to- on the musical, theatrical, intellectual, German easier...

...two auspicious omens in a row ume and Homer, Plato, Thucydides, sought, and was lucky enough to find, with my pimp...

...and a wonderful part of my education...

...Serving as a copyboy, first becoming director of speechwriting for er than go to college, I would get an to visit the vast, fusty second-hand at the (now-defunct) National Observer Ronald Reagan, a President who knew education...

...ing in line for, especially on a swel- Pascal, Moliere, Madame de Sevigne, St...

...More immediately, I decided to aban- ton landscape in the 1950s and 1960s...

...convinced me that I had made the right Xenophon, Le Sage, Clarendon, Cer- the same essentials in the outside world GEORGE BURNS: So that's what you do...

...bright students to read non-syllabus au- same room together was at his funeral This is particularly true in my case, thors like Fielding and Tolstoy...

...Simon, Pepys, Pope, Johnson, BosHigher education certainly didn't seem EI rom elementary school onward, I well, Montaigne, Dryden, Goldsmith, PT his is not to say that I owe nothing like one of them in September of 1963, 11 had always learned more from in- Goethe, Byron, Tennyson, Kipling, de 1 to formal education...

...By happy chance, Lucino Vis- are gone now...

...As a day student at a cozy queues of nervous, sweaty registering "Good as it is to inherit a library, it if somewhat down-at-the-heels little freshmen, I made what may well have No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en...

...Fortunately, all I had to do was learn—in school, that is—I knew by the and a widening circle of interesting 1975) on his memoirs was the equivalent just say no...

...One of my earliest liter- political, and social history of Mittel-dropped by some high schools as "irrele- one of whom was an education major...

...It members over the years) that there is seemed to quicken one's appetite for This is as true of countries as of student meant chucking a generously appor- "no furniture so charming as books...

...collected works of Voltaire could be cussion are the keys to a good liberal grounding in the fundamental structure THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 23 of languages that would make later ac- twelfth grade...

...learned in kindergarten...

...followed the oft-trodden rut of acadea phrase echoed thirty years later by 76-year-old chemistry teacher, "Doc" A twenty-year association with the mia, where as early an observer as WilSybil Fawlty explaining the foibles of Valaer, whose enthusiasm for his subject British magazine History Today, begin- liam Penn remarked that "much reading another Manuel, this time a waiter: "It's was such that, although a teetotaler, he ning with its founding editors, poet-bi- is an oppression of the mind, and extinall right...

...a one- in Woodstock, New York, yet Frank's since Don Manuel Castello, Woodward legged Seventh Day Adventist history disembodied voice during our long-dis- The odds are that I would have Prep's Latin and French master, taught master named Donald E Haynes who, tance dialogues on everything from the missed out on most of these op-both languages with a thick Spanish ac- although somewhere to the right of the ideals of the Founding Fathers to the foi- portunities if I had kept my scholarship cent...

...I simply BROOKE SHIELDS: I have to make contact noon...

...gens, a second-rate liberal arts degree...