Final thoughts spurred by Frances Wright, friend of Mary Shelley, who toured America and wrote about it (1820s); among her subjects--public education.
What’s more
interesting to me, nearly two centuries later, is not the shining morning faces
of the students she saw in Connecticut but the enduring relevance of some of
her comments about public education—and its profound importance.
In her letter of
March 1820 (from New York) she writes about how communities are willingly
taxing themselves to provide free public schools, which, she says, teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to
the whole population. In larger towns these schools teach geography and the
rudiments of Latin.[1]
She goes on to talk a bit about higher education (slowly taking root in
America) before returning to more comment about the importance of all this.
The child of every citizen, she writes, male or
female, white or black, is entitled by right to a plain education, and funds
sufficient to defray the expense of his instruction are raised wither from
public lands appropriated to the purpose, or by taxes sometimes imposed by the
legislature and sometimes by the different townships.[2]
And we need to
remember here what she had said much earlier (in a letter from July 1819, from
Albany): Knowledge, which is the bugbear
of tyranny, is, to liberty, the sustaining staff of life. To enlighten the mind
of the American citizen is, therefore, a matter of national importance.[3]
Wright’s comments
strike me especially hard. As readers know, I spent my forty-five year career
in classrooms, most of them in a public middle school, where I taught seventh
and eighth graders. As that portion of my career wound down (I retired from
public education in January 1997), the passion for (or disease of?)
standardized testing was beginning to pervade the state of Ohio—and the rest of
the nation.
Now—it’s October
2016 as I write these words—it is a full-blown madness (not to mention a
ga-jillion-dollar industry). My grandsons, 7 and 11, have already taken more standardized
tests than I did, K–Ph.D. Teachers take risks if they deviate from the
test-driven curriculum, for they are
evaluated, at least in part, by the scores their youngsters receive on those
mindless measures. Education has gone with the wind, and test-preparation has
swirled in to replace it.
I’m horrified by
it—and I believe that Frances Wright would also have been. She believed in
schools that taught people fundamentals, yes, but also taught them how to think
and evaluate and debate, schools that gave youngsters worthy books to read, and
on and on.
She would be shocked
at the anti-education, anti-intellectual attitudes that are so pervasive now in
our country. We’ve reached the point at which public figures are almost ashamed to reveal the extent of their
education, as if earning advanced degrees were a mark of madness—or, at the
least, elitism.
I think of that horrible scene
in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Two,
when populist Jack Cade and his minions are trying to stir up a revolution
against those whom they consider elites (and, to be fair, those who consider themselves elite—but that’s another
story). Anyway, in 4.1—right after that famous line The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers—we get this
exchange about a man a minion has nabbed. Let’s see what his crime is—and how
he’s punished:
Enter some, bringing forward the
Clerk of Chatham
I am sorry
for't: the man is a proper man, of mine honour; unless I find him guilty, he shall
not die. Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee: what is
thy name?
Let me alone.
Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest
plain-dealing man?
Exit one with the Clerk
And as I hear some
of the bellowing this political season (Trump v. Clinton), I hear the echoes
from the distant voice of Jack Cade. So popular. So dangerous and destructive and deadly.
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