Schooling America

 

Apart from one year (1954-1955) in pubic school before I began first grade in our local parish elementary school, my entire primary and secondary education from first grade through high school graduation in 1965 was in parochial schools, which in those days were a kind of hybrid institution. It wasn't a state-funded, free public school open to all. Nor was it really an exclusive and relatively expensive private school. It was a religious institution, run by the Church, primarily for the children of the parish, charging modest tuition ($1.00 per month per family in grade 1-8, modestly more in high school) and otherwise supported by the parishioners' contributions to the parish and the labor of the religious communities (the Dominican Sisters and the Augustinian Fathers) who served the parish. 

In that "baby boom" era, elementary school was crowded. We averaged 50-55 students in a class and had to settle for half-day sessions in grades 1 through 5. We sat at desks facing the teacher, not in circles or facing each other. Nor were any other fads of progressive education indulged in. Like public schools, we were being formed for citizenship, patriotically reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the National Anthem in class. But the animating spirit was religious. We began and ended with prayers. We were taught by Sisters, then in high school by priests, their services in both institutions augmented by dedicated Catholic lay teachers. The textbooks too were Catholic. We studied both American and world history, largely through a patriotic lens, but conspicuously colored by Catholic history and Catholic priorities. Hence, we gave great weight to the early Catholic explorers of the American continent, to such historical events as the first Mass in what is now the U.S., to the impact of religious events on history and of historical events on the Church, and even occasionally to religious and moral reservations about particular policies or practices (e.g., the Puritans' religious intolerance, slavery in the American south, Theodore Roosevelt's aggressive acquisition of the Panama Canal). Where religion was not otherwise implicated, we largely followed by common secular consensus (e.g., Lincoln was a good president, but Reconstruction was ruined by carpetbaggers and scalawags and Andrew Johnson should not have been impeached!).

In today's terms, the type of schooling (religious constituency, traditional conservative pedagogy, centrist politics) we received might most resemble the "classical" schools, journalist James Traub examines (and seems disposed to like) in The Cradle of Citizenship: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy (Norton, 2026). Of course, the schools I attended (and, I suspect, many others like it) operated with minimal resources. Especially at the elementary level, teachers probably had modest preparation. It would not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that a young woman might go straight from her novitiate year to teaching fifth grade. The amazing thing about it, however, was how well it actually worked. We were not creatively taught, nor were we taught to be creative. But we learned lots of facts, knew our history, could read at grade level or better, wrote grammatically good sentences and paragraphs, and learned how to write a business letter and how a bill became a law. Children and grandchildren of immigrants, we became a somewhat successful middle class, no modest accomplishment for an educational system. 

Of course, some students did better than others. I always liked history and was well disposed by my personality and circumstances to want to learn. On the other hand, I have long since forgotten most of the facts about different places products and industries that we learned in geography. So both sides of the endless pedagogical debate about the value of facts and memorization can take some comfort from my experience. Our education was child-centered only in the sense that children's learning was its focus, not in the contemporary sense of seeking to meet children's own felt or perceived needs or wants. And, while we excelled in our secular subjects, the primary welfare of its students about which the school cared most was always primarily our spiritual welfare. For some students, this may have become burdensome in the end and may now be remembered by some of them as having been relatively repressive. The religious trajectory of my boomer generation may suggest that the schools succeeded more in their secular mission to make middle class productive citizens and maybe succeeded less in their religious mission. There may be some truth to that charge, but it is also the case that the schools' secular mission could never have been accomplished without the  spiritual motivation that animated the heroic effort involved in making the system work as well as it did.

What can most certainly be said in praise of such a system is that it was coherent with the rest of our experience at home with our families and in the neighborhood (which large;y overlapped with the parish) and that it provided us with a shared moral order that admittedly judged and punished but also comforted and rewarded.

That era is in any case now long behind us in the past, and it clearly cannot be brought back again. Yet I find these recollections remain relevant as I reflect upon James Traub's interesting and provocative book about the state of schooling in American today.

Traub's book is in part a travelogue through the many local/state variations in American schooling. He visited a number of public (or, at least, publicly funded) schools across the country to see for himself what students, teachers, and school administrators are doing. His on-site description of actual classrooms  is the animating heart of this book. In the process, however, he also addressed ideological battles about public education in states like Florida - battled largely focused on neuralgic "culture-war" issues about race and sex (and also religion, specifically Christianity). The book is not primarily about overt partisanship from classroom teachers, although such examples appear - including examples on the left in Minneapolis.  Meanwhile, many on-site teachers are somehow trying navigate the complications caused by ideologically inspired directives and the discouraging conditions they experience with the actual students in their classrooms.

Attentive as Traub is to the ideological "culture-wars" which are increasingly paralyzing American schooling, his even bigger concern is that so many students seem to be learning nothing at all. One of his harshest indictments of our American schooling is that so many public school systems prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history, which inevitably results in a greater focus on teaching methods and professional jargon than on students' acquiring actual knowledge. In this vein, Traub criticizes public school educators' widespread opposition to memorization of fcts and historical chronology, the basic source material for citizens' ability to form opinions and engage in democratic discussion and debate. and, like Traub, I am appalled to hear a teacher say that expecting students to read actual books "creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.” I simply can't imagine any teacher from my school days not expecting us to read real books - or caring about our "stress" or whether we felt bad about ourselves!

Hence his fondness for the "classical" school movement, which seems ready-made to produce a more seriously and academically rigorous and civic-minded education. Certainly, he would like to see the "classical" school model embraced more widely than it has been. And, all things considered, he is probably right.

Traub recognizes "that our wildly heterogeneous society cannot be shoehorned into a single kind of school or curriculum." But. he is "convinced that we must restore the centrality of books - of words and language, of facts and knowledge, of the depth of experience that comes only with learning from an early age to navigate challenging texts." Recognizing the corrosive effects of social media, he also insists that "phones must be banned absolutely from the classroom, if not from the school itself." He believes "that our schools must feel different from the surrounding society in some important ways - more respectful of knowledge, of reflection, of difference of opinion." Finally, contrary to our current hyper-individualistic emphases, he agrees with the nation's founders "that democracy cannot survive unless citizens are willing to look to a greater good beyond themselves," and he suspects that "more parents will seek out schools that have an overtly communitarian or ethical culture."

Let us hope so!