The issue of schooling is exercising my fellow baby-boomers as they settle somewhat tardily into the task of perpetuating the race — the rat race, that is. And during most discussions of the topic someone will sing out, in counterpoint to the general, tone of complaint, “The public schools were good enough for me.”
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I left 12 years in public school able to read and write and do simple calculations without embarrassment. Beyond that I learned little of what I needed to know, including some idea of how much I didn’t know. At the turn of this century it was said by advanced thinkers that what mattered about education was not that people knew things but that they could do things. This they called power. By the 1960s the world had changed, and school boards realized that the power to do things required that students know things. It was knowledge prejudiced by utility, however; always the aim was to do, not to understand.
The power we were taught was intended to be put at the service of others. We weren’t taught how to do so much as how to do as we were told. The priority was not pedagogical but explicitly political. The fact that this commonplace truth — the schools are run by the state after all — so often comes as a surprise is one proof of the schools’ success. Real power requires an independence of mind and spirit that was antithetical to the cowardly conformities of the 50s. The schools’ job was to protect us from our own possibilities; we were there to be taught, not to learn.
I was judged to be a well-adjusted boy, at least until a tardy and muddled rebellion late in high school. A teacher I liked accused me at the time of being a cynic, a word I didn’t then really understand. (A conformist could be described as one who believes, in order to belong, a cynic as a conformist who cannot believe.) I was familiar with the attitude, though. Cynicism was a vice rampant among my schoolmates. H.L. Mencken once observed that schools turned kids into actors who “know how to lie — perhaps the most valuable thing, to a citizen of Christendom, that they learn in school.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Tom Herzberg.
