As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Charter schools don’t play by union rules. So when Harlem Success Academy, a charter group in New York, proposed to take over P.S. 194’s building after the school was shut down for poor performance, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the New York Civil Liberties Union took the obvious step: they filed a lawsuit claiming that the state pressed forward without proper consultation with local school boards.

Such resistance has dogged the school choice movement for years, producing a fog of politics cleared all too rarely by moments of forthrightness. Clearing some of the fog is The Lottery, a new documentary film by Madeleine Sackler that tracks four families hoping to enroll their kids in one of the Harlem Success charter schools. During the film’s 79 minutes, we watch UFT president Randi Weingarten on the Charlie Rose Show blurt out “No!” to Rose’s assertion that only 10 of 55,000 tenured teachers in the New York City school system were fired the previous year. (The U.S. Dept. of Education counts, precisely, 10.) We witness ACORN workers armed with megaphones fill the sidewalk outside a charter school meeting protesting the very existence of charters in the community. We hear again how the average black 12th grader performs as well as the average white 8th grader. On and on.

These familiar facts and events form a galling and sad backdrop for the real story of the film, parents desperate to find a better school. For them, it means a route away from poverty and despair, even prison. “I just want my daughter to have the best in life,” signs a deaf mother who dropped out of high school to help her grandmother. One father sits in a cell serving 25 to life. Tears in his eyes, he moans that if only someone had entered his life early on and steered him toward college, or had just given him some faith in his own intellect, he wouldn’t be there.

Harlem Success teachers do just that. That’s why so many families show up for lottery day. More than 3,000 individuals apply for admission, but the schools offer only 475 slots. Ponder those odds in light of Weingarten’s explanation to the New York Times for the P.S. 194 lawsuit blocking the expansion of Harlem Success: “Parents should have a voice when it comes to their children’s education, and by eliminating community schools without public hearings, the D.O.E. is taking away that voice.”

There you have the perverse logic of vested interests and power politics in public education. It would be laughable if it didn’t produce actual perversities such as the annual rite of charter school lotteries, which offer pathetically low chances of winning. That’s where The Lottery climaxes and where charter school advocates find their best persuasion. Observe these real people in tough circumstances attending the drawing with futures on the line. A little boy dons a shirt and tie, and his mother notes he looks like Barack Obama. “I feel a lot like him,” he replies. Another child prays to be chosen. Anxious families line up all the way down the block and file inside for the proceedings. New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein tells attendees, “Grow the options and let parents vote with their feet.”

Harlem Success administrators and teachers take the stand and the selection begins. Names roll out—and the heartbreak begins. “If they don’t call your name,” one mother mumbles to her son partway through, “it’s okay.” A father and son stare at the screen where names appear as they are called, their faces growing stony as the minutes pass and spaces run out. At the end, the father mutters, “You’re not in,” then he hesitates. He looks around as if the outcome hasn’t quite registered. “They didn’t call your name.” What else is there to say?

“Maybe my name’s gonna come next time,” the boy says.

“Yeah, next year. Not today. Next year.”

Watch and weep.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Last spring, in Fairburn, Georgia, officials in two schools piloted a startling attendance program. If struggling 8th and 11th graders showed up for study hall, they could earn $8 an hour, and if their grades and test scores rose significantly, they would receive a bonus. An Associated Press story termed the policy a “bribe,” and a Georgia State University professor on National Public Radio declared it “morally bankrupt.” But Ben Chavis, then principal of American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland, California, had started paying students for attendance years ago with steady results, doubling math scores in the school over time. “Poor people love money,” he explains, so why not let it motivate the kids? He even met with drug dealers off campus and offered them $5 for every truant they brought back. The cash came from creative budgeting, for instance, no computers for the kids. (“They can’t read,” he declares, “they don’t need a computer!”)

Chavis is one of a handful of school mavericks profiled in Flunked, a 45-minute documentary narrated by actor Joe Mantegna. The film reviews 50 years of public school investment, from Sputnik to No Child Left Behind, and derives a simple lesson: the claim “more money makes more success” is a myth, “the tallest tale of them all.” In spite of massive investment and however you measure it, one commenter says, academic achievement “looks like somebody just died—it’s just a flat line.” Success lies not in raising dollars but in changing the organization.

The “all-stars” in Flunked illustrate how it can happen. They are “entrepreneurial principals,” headstrong heroes who rescue failing schools, run charters, tighten discipline, and lower dropout rates. Steve Barr runs Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, which divides dysfunctional high schools into small charter schools. His first principle: get every dollar into classrooms. He pays teachers well and grants them wide latitude in the classroom in exchange for a “dismissal-for-cause” condition in their contracts. Howard Lappin, who took on a high school in L.A.—“1,600 kids, out-of-control school, violent, terrible test scores”—recites his message for kids: “if you’re not in class you’re in trouble—your parents are gonna be in—we’re gonna talk to you—you’re not gonna be here—you got to do what you got to do because this is a school—this is not a playground.”

The ingredients are plain and they don’t include “Give us more money.”

• Provide strict discipline, longer hours, high expectations
• Give teachers high pay and discretion in the classroom, but hold them to professional standards
• Reduce bureaucracy

A sound approach for these schools, but on the evidence of another recent school documentary, the lessons of Flunked may not apply as we move up the U.S. public school ladder. Two Million Minutes profiles two high schoolers in Bangalore, India, two in Shanghai, China, and two in Carmel High School outside Indianapolis. Ranked in the top 5 percent of U.S. public schools, Carmel has loads of money and top-notch facilities. No need to fire any teachers or collar truants. But, as the film unfolds, a striking deficiency among the American students emerges, one that no in-school policy can address—the drive to compete with their peers.

“Competitiveness,” of course, has become a touchstone of education debate. Two years ago in the Washington Post, Bill Gates warned that unless Americans hit the workplace with math and science skills, they will sink in the knowledge economy and take their nation with them. But American students appear unaffected by what one commenter after another says in Two Million Minutes: We are in a global competition, and we’re losing. From 1985 to 2004, the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded in math or science in this country fell from 21.7 to 15.8 percent. Engineering went from 9.8 to 6.2 percent, and the numbers won’t improve soon. On the 2006 American Freshman Survey, only 0.8 percent of entering college students intended to major in math, 0.5 percent in physics. These fields are a micro-niche.

For Asian students, though, math and science degrees are the way to prosperity. These students live with “economic uncertainty,” the film explains, and view math and science study as a form of “economic opportunism,” a “passport out of poverty.” The girl from India wants to be rich, and she terms engineering the “safest” field. She attends a two-hour math tutorial that starts at 7:45 each Saturday morning, and after a break, three more hours of class follow. The boy from India aims to be a physicist (as are his father and sister), and he spends 12 hours a week in evening sessions preparing for the Indian Institute of Technology entrance exam. A half million take the test and only 5,000 win admission. The Chinese boy took his first standardized test in 1st grade, and his regular school day lasts nine hours. He doesn’t claim to be number one, but he loves to win and is, in fact, the top math student in his school. It’s not all math and science. Though the Chinese girl wants a biology career, along with her full school schedule she studies ballet and violin.

And the suburban American kids? The boy is senior class president and a National Merit semifinalist, and the girl ranks in the top 3 percent of her class. He admits, though, “Occasionally, I do homework,” and for a big class project due on Monday he starts preparing a day earlier. She claims to “set high expectations,” but adds, “I’m not that 9-to-5 kind of girl.” She favors medicine because “you get an awesome feeling, it’s really a rewarding experience, I think, being able to, um, save lives.” She’s “well-rounded,” which means doing homework with friends while watching Grey’s Anatomy. He doesn’t “ever want a cubicle,” so he works 20 hours a week in a pasta joint and does graphics for the school paper.

Teachers reflect the same laxity. When handing out an exam, the Carmel teacher assures his students that on one question, “I will accept three of the four answers.” In the Indian classroom, the teacher explains the steps in a calculation and concludes, “Nobody should say ‘I don’t know how to find the tangent.’” When the students pause, she blurts out, “Why are you simply standing there?” Nobody chides the American kids like that.

The American boy wins early admission and a full ride to Purdue, while the American girl gets into Indiana University. They are accepted into top universities, so why work any harder? The policies advocated in Flunked are not the answer here. More money in the classroom and less bureaucracy in the schools will make no difference, nor will stricter discipline or higher expectations as long as the college acceptances come through.

Not one of the Asian kids gets into the first-choice college. That outcome explains the relative efforts, and it puts the American high performers in a dismaying light. Asian kids don’t talk about their “awesome” feelings of helping people. They talk about how it feels to beat the kids sitting next to them. If the American boy and girl landed in an Asian classroom, they would sink to the bottom in a week. Call it classroom Darwinism with predictable results. It’s a survival-of-the-smartest world, with few survivors.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Why, then, do measures of student knowledge and skill, and college graduation rates, show no parallel gains? SAT scores have stagnated, as has the performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And only 15 percent of those 2007 graduates had earned a passing grade of 3 or higher on any AP exam. With more challenging class time happening, and more students planning for college, more knowledge and academic success should follow, but they don’t.

One explanation appears, of all places, in a high school movie from last summer, American Teen. The documentary film follows four kids through senior year in Warsaw, Indiana, each one a recognizable type. Upper-crust blond cheerleader Megan must get into Notre Dame, working-class basketball star Colin needs to keep his rebounds up if he wants a scholarship, artsy free spirit Hannah aims to make movies in California, and pimply nerd Jake, well, he’s just gotta get a girlfriend. They’re good kids, minors hooking up and breaking up, to be sure, playing video games and texting puerile messages, but they ponder their futures with dreadful seriousness.

Yes, Colin admits, he never does homework, Megan draws an obscenity on a classmate’s window, Hannah can’t bear to return to school after a boyfriend dumps her, and Jake gets drunk in Tijuana. Social life is intense, and tribal rituals of adolescence are in play (such as the sly, sadistic circulation of a classmate’s nude photo through the web), but they don’t hate their parents or curse the Establishment.

Their striving and relative decency make a crucial aspect of their lives all the more disturbing. In 95 minutes of film, not a single book, artwork, historical figure, philosophy, scientific field, or political position comes up. And their teachers might as well be cashiers at McDonald’s serving up meals, for all the influence they wield. Seniors spend six hours a day in English, history, biology, calculus, civics, etc., and their futures depend on how well they do. Outside of class, though, the curriculum doesn’t exist. Novels, past heroes and villains, foreign affairs, metaphysical ideas, Darwin, the Constitution…they mean nothing. Students don’t even complain about them. When Hannah explains that she wants to make movies because she wants people to remember her and her work long after she’s dead, she doesn’t realize the sad irony of her statement, for she never cites a single film or filmmaker who inspired her. She remembers nobody.

History, literature, civics, and science are for coursework, that’s all. It may be that few high school students have ever been enthralled with books, ideas, and fine art, but never has the rejection been so complete, even among the ambitious ones heading to college. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the percentage of seniors who read on their own “almost every day” dropped from 31 percent in 1984 to 22 percent in 2004. Back in the 1980s, according to the American Freshmen Survey, not even 40 percent of them spent less than one hour a week talking to a teacher outside of class, but by the mid-’90s the rate surpassed 50 percent and has stayed there ever since.

How regrettable that none of them realizes that history, literature, science, and civics offer not only knowledge for school but resources to manage the vagaries of adolescence. Commiserating with a buddy after a breakup helps, but so does reading about Gatsby and his dream. Learning about how Mendeleev arranged the elements might grant a reprieve from the way sophomores take seats in the cafeteria. The heroism of George Washington sets the aura of the popular crowd in welcome perspective.

But not for these kids. Books and ideas have no deep impact. Learning signifies only homework, grades, and admissions, nothing personal, and so all they have is each other. Reality is immediate, selfhood based on peer review. No wonder knowledge and skills haven’t kept pace with coursework: once the courses end, students have no motive to retain what they have learned.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English and director of the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University.

Viewed May 2008

In the 1930s, an all-black debate team from a small East Texas college defeated the all-white debate team of the University of Southern California (USC) in front of at least a thousand people. The Wiley College team was trained by English professor Melvin Tolson and anchored by James Farmer Jr., later founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. Take a little poetic license to replace USC with Harvard, and you have a classic David-defeats-Goliath tale that is Denzel Washington’s movie The Great Debaters.

Even this wordy summary, however, fails to give you the measure of the film: James Jr. was 14 years old at the time of the great debate and something of a child prodigy; his father, a minister and son of a slave, was the first African American to earn a doctorate in the state of Texas. Tolson became an important poet (best known for his work “Harlem Gallery,” a meditation on black America and the nature of art) and a courageous organizer of farm laborers across the color line. And that’s just the start: throw in the movie’s powerful reminders of brutal racism (a showdown over a run-over hog has one riveted, a lynching becomes all the more powerful for its indirection), a love story, a meditation on the universality of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, a paean to the dreams education makes possible, a debate about Jesus as radical social reformer, and you begin to get the whole picture.

Denzel Washington as Tolson and Forest Whitaker as Dr. James Farmer Sr. give strong performances, no more so than in a brief theological fencing match on the lessons of Jesus that is the memorable debate of the movie. The shimmering fury that underpins the direction and acting of the racially charged scenes scrapes the psyche of the viewer and alone is enough to recommend the film.

Given the penumbral riches, both historical and invented, that dance around the core narrative of the film, the college debates themselves barely register: the positions are repeatedly stacked in favor of Wiley, the interactions of the team are merely sketched, and deeper pedagogical questions of lasting importance remain buried. As Wiley College’s own account made clear (it seems to have been dropped from their website), Tolson wrote out all the speeches for his students, who then memorized them, and even provided rebuttals so his team would be fully prepared. Some would call that instruction in the art of plagiarism. But the movie only touches on the ethics of professorial authorship. The debate topic is changed the night before to eliminate any advantage Wiley would otherwise have enjoyed from Tolson’s work. Then and now, there is a fine line between debate coaching and scripting. At the same time, Tolson challenged his team through his considerable erudition, buttressed by contributions from other faculty members.

California State University professor David Gold, on whose fine research I am relying here, makes it clear that Tolson’s pedagogical techniques combined extensive memorization, acute sensitivity to issues of logic, appeals to the classics, exhortation to social activism, and demands for the highest level of academic performance. Tolson, whose father was self-taught in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, combined “racial pride, radical Christianity, philological rigor, and liberatory rhetoric that changed students’ lives.” In a phrase that E. D. Hirsch might embrace, Tolson evidently remarked that “the only difference between a bank manager and a janitor is vocabulary.” James Farmer Jr. recalled being told to “finish War and Peace” and then “tackle Darwin, Freud and Marx. Don’t just taste them, chew them and digest them.”

There was, then, another movie hiding here—about a great, complex, bullying, courageous, immensely talented teacher, whose fierce discipline, acute sense of social inequalities, firsthand encounters with Jim Crow, and highly refined ear for language, literature, and culture would merit careful documentary treatment. But it is enough that his singular life and work enticed Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey (the movie’s producer) to place his story on the ever-haunting canvas of our fraught racial history, and to remind us of the constant struggle to summon education as the midwife of what we can only hope is a more equitable future.

As for debating itself, the movie highlights the skills of academic research, of memorization, of elocution, of logical thought, and of teamwork that together make a compelling case for the educational value of formal debate (for more on the value of debate for education, see “Intellectual Combat,” school life). Schooled as I was in the English form of debating—focused on persuasion, on speedy and sharp repartee, on humor and the ability to move an audience—I would add that combining American and British debating would make for an even richer educational experience.

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, CUNY, and former director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

The Fox Broadcasting game show Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? last February delivered the highest viewership for a series premiere on any network in nearly nine years, according to preliminary data released by Nielsen Media Research.

“Name the god who raised the storm that sent Odysseus over the side.” The adult contestant starts to perspire, then makes self-deprecating remarks, only to be interrupted by the game-show host: “Can’t quite remember—well cheat: ask a 5th grader.” The child’s response is…“Poseidon.” “She’s right—and you’re richer by $250,000! Now, for half a million dollars: “Do polar bears eat penguins?”

The first question is my own; the sequence and second question are taken from the Fox game show I watched at the behest of Education Next. I cannot do better than quote the admirably sober summary of the show in Wikipedia:

Content is taken from elementary school textbooks, two from each grade level between first and fifth. Each correct answer increases the amount of money the player banks; a maximum cash prize of $1,000,000 can be won. Along the way, the player can be assisted by a “classmate,” one of five cast members (who are fifth grade students), in answering the questions.

A search on Google indicates that across the country, 5th graders regard it as hilarious to watch their parents squirm: Quick—what is the most common element in the earth’s atmosphere? Oxygen? Wrong! (I leave it to any embarrassed readers to ask the nearest child for the correct answer.)

The reason adults can embarrass themselves in these quiz shows has less to do with their schooling than the fact that most have not used 5th-grade facts in many years. In response to a report from Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn that most American 17-year-olds have deep deficits in historical knowledge, Benjamin Barber sardonically proposed a multiple-choice test for 47-year-olds: his point was that both we and our teenage children would do well on items of immediate social, cultural, and economic relevance and poorly on the rest. A sample: “Book publishers are financially rewarded today for publishing (a) cookbooks (b) cat books (c) how-to books (d) popular potboilers (e) critical editions of Immanuel Kant’s early writings. For extra credit, name the ten living poets who most influenced your life, and recite a favorite stanza. Well, then, never mind the stanza, just name the poets. Okay, not ten, just five. Two? So, who’s your favorite running back?”

To be educated is not to win a contest for remembering factoids. The Fox show’s banal humor hides the sad truth that our children are too often deprived of the experience of immersing themselves, losing themselves in creations of complexity, imagination, and beauty. Knowing that Poseidon was a god in ancient Greek literature is surely useless in promoting economic well-being or the capacity to participate in civic life. The same is true of having studied this passage from Homer:

Poseidon, the earth-shaker, made to rise up a great wave, dread and grievous, arching over from above, and drove it upon him. And as when a strong wind tosses a heap of straw that is dry, and some it scatters here, some there, even so the wave scattered the long timbers of the raft.

And then recognizing in these lines from Virgil a lovely yet self-consciously derivative evocation:

Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage [summoned] a howling gust from due north [that] took the sail aback and lifted wave top from heaven, oars were snapped in two…over her flank and deck a mountain of grey sea crashed in tons.

But to have these verses as constant companions is to know something a 5th grader does not: to hold beauty in the mind, and to swirl it in the glass of delight.

-David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, CUNY. He is former director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

“whats new? glad I put u on my top and im not on urs. its cool though. whats been new? REPN TRI to the FULLEST!!!”

So goes a comment on a MySpace page I just pulled up. Enter and the cursor turns into a Cleveland Browns helmet. We have boxes with videos to play, 181 people in the “Friend Space,” photos, blog, and a personal quiz (“Shoplifted?: Tic-Tacs when I was 2. Seen Someone Shoplift?: I work in retail…come on.”). Words, images, and sounds tumble forth as the host broadcasts dreams and realities. It’s a hive of creative expression, puerile and barbarous, yes, but at least an attempt at imagination.

Download a million other personal pages of teens and the same graphics and sentiments spill out. The bustle and popularity make personal profiles the space of invention. In October 2006, Nielsen//NetRatings found that nine of the top-ten web sites for 12- to 17-year-olds provided content or tools for social networking. An April 2007 Pew/Internet study recorded 55 percent of online teens with profiles, and no doubt the number keeps rising. So does the social networking idiom, and if you can’t write it you suffer the digital equivalent of missing kickball at recess.

What a contrast to the prose they write for school. In papers for English, history, and civics, the brio disappears. Yes, they fix the spelling and drop the pesky slang, but the style flattens into monotonous blank assertions rendered in commonplace words. They lose the self-promotion—a good thing—but also the features that produce evocative descriptions and persuasive opinions. No sharp metaphors, mots justes, nifty rhythms and parallels, or punctuating sounds.

This isn’t just a verbal deficiency. It follows an assumption students make when they write about serious subjects. Lower the energy, they think; dim the rhetoric; just get the facts and ideas straight. Intellectual discourse is neutral, colorless, vapid. Verbal dash is verboten.

And why shouldn’t they think so when the primary knowledge source delivers just that kind of parlance? The source is Wikipedia, of course. Type a date, name, event, or law into the search box and it always comes up near the top (see “Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?” what next, Spring 2008). That’s one reason why, so I’ve heard, the percentage of Google searches that click past the first page is less than one! Thirty years ago, students with a paper due on a modern novel or ancient myth consulted encyclopedias, CliffsNotes, almanacs, Time-Life collections, and a dozen other reference works. Today, browsing through those heavy tomes isn’t necessary. Wikipedia has it all with a quick click, a handy trove of info students consult first and, often, last.

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:

Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.

Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly…” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him…” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Wikipedia has eclipsed them all. We may admire it as a useful repository of information, but as a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy. Students use it so much that they think Wikipedia prose is the right way to write in intellectual settings. We end up with verbal poles that preserve the worst of each. In social networking, we have inane content and energetic style. On Wikipedia, we have informative content and wooden style. It’s a new digital divide, one that separates leisure habits from coursework even further. It makes teens believe that intellectual expression is a leaden, spiritless thing, and that’s an educational outcome that can last the rest of their lives.

-Mark Bauerlein is professor of English and director of the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University.

Too often formulaic, these are not great movies. In Freedom Writers, the latest product of the genre, Hilary Swank looks continually uncomfortable in the leading role. Based on events in the 1990s at a high school in Long Beach, California, the movie tells how a teacher evokes the Holocaust to connect her students with the universality of human suffering. The result is a life-changing experience in which her Hispanic and African American students and the Jewish Holocaust survivors they encounter bear witness to a common humanity and hope. As educators in a pluralist democracy, we are tempted to forgive the film’s weaknesses and celebrate the heroic teacher as she fights for the souls of her students. Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, 187, and now Freedom Writers continually tap into our need to believe in the narrative of the “great teacher,” capable of saving students in need. (187, alone in the genre in lacking final hope, was a commercial failure.)

The exemplar of the great teacher, past and present, is a staple of Western European culture. Among the many, Socrates remains the seminal figure. In the 12th century, Abelard, known to us today through his tragic love affair with Heloise, became a legendary teacher, gathering students from throughout Europe. A century later, St. Thomas Aquinas, offering lessons at the University of Paris, became recognized as the master teacher of Catholicism. In the 16th century, the Maharal of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, founded the Talmudic Academy known as the Klausen; he defined Torah and kabbalistic studies for generations. Centuries later, as rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium, Hegel would begin his epochal rethinking of the history of philosophy, a project Heidegger would continue in Freiburg, achieving, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “the kingship among teachers.”

In the much briefer history of the United States, the teacher as a great cultural or philosophical voice is largely absent. Leo Strauss, whose influence is now hotly debated by analysts of American foreign policy, was European-born. John Dewey is a rare example of an educator whose thinking about pedagogy and engagement with broader political issues achieved national status, but he was not a great teacher. Writing about France, my father could cite the high school teacher Émile-Auguste Chartier, commonly known simply as “Alain,” as “a commanding presence in European moral and intellectual history” from 1906 to the late 1940s; there are no American equivalents.

Moreover, American literature has little place for the great teacher: in Washington Irving and J.D. Salinger, the schoolteacher is largely weak and useless. Whereas in Europe, great teaching is grounded in the power of their ideas, in America it is a matter of ideals: the lone warrior who overcomes the odds, who triumphs over the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the urban public school. The heroes depicted—Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver), LouAnne Johnson (Dangerous Minds), and Erin Gruwell (Freedom Writers)—shine against backcloths of deprivation and despair. This is an ironic form of heroism, dependent as it is on conditions for which we all bear continuing responsibility. Heroism is surely a virtue. To depend on public school teachers to display it is not.

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, CUNY. He is former director of arts education at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.