When I was obliged to memorize Whittier’s “In School-days” in 1947, I was in the fourth grade. I don’t recall wondering what the speaker meant by describing the schoolhouse as a ragged beggar or by characterizing his protagonist as a failure in the poem’s final stanza, but these thoughts jump out at me now. The loss of a beloved past is a harsh lesson, for no love is lost between the poem’s ageing protagonist and those upwardly mobile others who have passed above him socially, whilst the love of his life is ensconced forever in the one-room schoolhouse of his memory.
He lives to learn, in life’s hard school,
How few who pass above him
Lament their triumph and his loss,
Like her,—-because they love him.
For readers in its time Whittier’s lines evoked a generalized nostalgia, perhaps for a simple hearted era that was waning as the nineteenth century gave itself over to the bureaucratic life of a mechanized modernity. Specific reactions to Whittier are widely noted from Longfellow and Lowell. More generalized conservative reactions to the changing world of the nineteenth century may be found all over the place. One thinks of Walden and Henry Adams’s Education. Or of Dickens’s Hard Times, a specific attack on the progressive schooling of its era and upon the utilitarianism that engendered it.
Our time knows a similar nostalgia for the putative simple heartedness of the 1950s when the shocks and social dislocations of the late twentieth century were not yet strongly felt. My generation of white Americans likes to think of the time of our growing up in such terms, generally omitting from memory the facts that our beloved schools were racially (and often ethnically) segregated and our cherished communities bastions of privilege enforced by a rigid caste system. I now live in a city whose landscape is littered with empty schoolhouses. I did most of my growing up in a small city in West Texas whose inner landscape (the old part of town) is similarly littered with abandoned school buildings, many of which sit empty, monuments to a careless upward mobility that has found no new purposes for most of them. Around the country the old caste system is resurgent, or perhaps it never disappeared; and the combination of forces that have undermined our schools and hollowed out our cities works on unabated.
The photo I have used as a headpiece for this essay depicts a frieze that adorns the facade of Cleveland High School in the Saint Louis neighborhood known as Dutchtown. The building has been empty for some years now, though Cleveland High still exists as a magnet school, one of two high schools housed in a building halfway across town at Arsenal and Kingshighway. A video produced by one of our local PBS stations sketches Cleveland’s history and includes a few interior shots of the old building that show the early stages of inevitable decay since it was shuttered. That decay is much worse now as old Cleveland succumbs to the spread of graffiti and the combined forces of disuse and lost maintenance. Once a magnificent building, erected in 1915 and designed by St. Louis’ premier school architect, William Ittner, old Cleveland schoolhouse must now be regarded as urban waste. Though the building is for sale, even the for sale sign is falling apart, a ragged beggar indeed.
Our public school system in this city is a shadow of its former self, a victim of flight to the suburbs and having been systematically defunded by a state government that favors private and charter schools and would like to put true public schools out of business. The system tends to lose good teachers to the suburbs where salary scales are higher. Both newer and older school buildings are not being adequately maintained. Our city government has collaborated in the state’s disinvestment, though there are signs that change may be possible. Our schools are again fully accredited and may be returned to local control—good things if we can change city and state government sufficiently to restore some of our lost funding. We have a handful of excellent public schools, but it will take a long time under the best of circumstances to restore the system to excellence. Aside from lost funding the chief problem our system faces is the general perception amongst the suburban populations that surround us that the city public schools are for the supposedly disadvantaged and the non-white—and the story of the city, disadvantaged and crime ridden, into whose heart suburban folk fear to travel, perpetuates itself and perpetuates the conditions it purports to describe,
I believe the undermining of public education in America (which is now affecting colleges and universities as well as schools) is part of a more generalized undermining of our public life. It is tempting to dismiss the decay of our public life as a footnote to the history of late capitalism. Such a dismissal isn’t unjust. Predatory capitalism is undermining all other systems of value in present day culture and may in the long run undermine itself. But that’s too easy. It leaves in place the symbiosis between capitalist theory and the Marxist critique and implies that nobody has to take responsibility. We’re in the grip of an impersonal and inevitable history that we neither understand nor control. That’s another message of the Harari books I discussed in my last post. But the question I want to ask is something like this: What is entailed by a large and complex society’s abandonment of its public life to the vicissitudes of commerce? I’ve been hearing that’s a good thing for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never seen the benefit of it. And there’s a corollary question as well: What is entailed by a large, rich society’s abandonment of the responsibility to educate its rising generations.
For that is what we Americans have done. As a people largely educated in public schools we no longer support the schools that educated us. The history of this deplorable situation is complex, but there’s more to be seen in the frieze at old Cleveland High than the quaint, gendered world picture it evokes. For all the parochialism of that world picture its presence on Cleveland High’s facade was meant to evoke a relationship between education and the necessary work of the world. The conception of necessary work had components both altruistic and pragmatic. It was aspirational as well as practical, and it was grounded in a shared commitment to the honor and dignity of human seriousness and of labor in the service of that seriousness. It was also creative, though its creative thrust sometimes evoked immersion in the destructive element.
The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
For we were convinced that we were special, we Americans of my generation and previous ones; and because we were special we had almost a natural right to use up the present, its resources, even its institutions. The church congregation in which I did most of my growing up decided it needed a new gothic revival home in the early 1950s and in order to build it destroyed a gorgeous period building whose value is incalculable, destroyed its gorgeous stained glass windows depicting Jesus as the good shepherd and a John Wesley whose parish was the world, broke them up into niggling little fragments of art glass and reassembled them in a fashionable rose window and a series of unremarkable lancets. Nobody objected at the time. My home town is now remarkable for its wise and humane historic preservations downtown, but the Methodist church of my childhood with its spacious half-round sanctuary and its windows that spoke of salvation history is gone forever.
Moreover, in the larger polis of my town our seriousness was at war with itself in at least two ways. Our town existed as a human community only in the myth of itself to which we were committed; it was in fact chiefly remarkable for its exclusions and divisions. And for all our present-day nostalgia for the 1950s, to have lived then is to have been part of a collective striving that valued an imagined future over any present condition. I wanted to get away from my childhood’s place—didn’t have the courage to get as far away as some of my friends did, but I got away. Then, when my life broke down in the 1980s I went back for a while, but that never works. I’m searching for a way now to think about the questions I’ve asked here in the concrete terms of my lived experience. What is entailed by the abandonments I describe: that is, what follows from them?
The high school building where I spent four years is one of the now empty school buildings in my Texas home town. There is an effort developing to save it, to turn it into a community center containing a public library branch, a theater, and other public spaces. As I’ve said, my town has had some success with this sort of thing in the past. I hope the present effort succeeds; but its success, if it does succeed, will not speak to my questions. My town still has a better than average public school system, I think, but it is not typical. St. Louis is far more nearly typical of the state of public education in urban America, and beyond that, of the state of our public life as a nation. What do we stand to lose if present trends continue? If our present love affair with privatization and the social dislocations and inequalities it has engendered continues unabated, what do we stand to lose as a people?
It seems a relatively good bet that present trends will not simply continue but will accelerate for the foreseeable future, that our social divisions will sharpen and become more intense as our public life is drained of wealth in order to support and enrich our corporate oligarchy. We have now almost entirely lost any sense of shared commitment to human seriousness and the work of the world, seriousness having fragmented into a congeries of new parochialisms whose brands are bought and sold, and the world’s work more and more being performed by robots and low wage workers. If these claims seem extreme, consider this: university faculties are now largely made up of low wage workers, and those of us who have worked to change that situation are only just discovering how much of the wealth of the social system is deployed against us. In our remaining public schools, teachers have long been programmed not to teach but rather to coach students for standardized tests. Indeed the idea of teachers as coaches is emerging as the new cool conception of good teaching.
“Where there is no vision the people perish,” reads the biblical proverb; but we need more change than a simple return to keeping the law. The fragmenting of seriousness we have experienced has turned law into politics and politics into a collection of irreconcilable disputes. One easy symptom of what I mean is that appeals to evidence are generally drowned out by ad hominem in today’s so-called public debates. By such illogic many of us are now confident that science itself is a liberal interest group bent upon making life difficult for the decent and the God fearing, and this confidence seems impervious to any need for or reliance upon the products of science. It is now possible to troll the Internet while receiving chemotherapy and still to believe that the world was created in six days about six thousand years ago and that reports of global warming are fake news. What we need is an escape from this cultural dead end, but without public education I don’t see the possibility of it. To be sure, elites continue to be educated, but the dream of a commonality of thoughtful citizens, capable of participating in their republic and making choices for the common good, indeed even that republic itself, may be buried and forgotten. If so, perhaps the frieze above the door of old Cleveland High would make a fitting grave marker.
Or perhaps not. My experience as a teacher taught me over the years that it is still possible to engage young people in conversations with and about human seriousness; though most of my students for the last fifteen years of my career were products of elite high schools. Perhaps my frame needs to be larger. In the Saint Louis Urban Debate League, in which I now participate as a judge and informal advisor, I continue to encounter middle and high school students who are not merely susceptible to but seemingly hungry for serious encounters with life and the world. The Debate League is grounded in the St. Louis public schools, but we are expanding now. We already include a couple of charters and may include others. We are successfully competing in debate tournaments with county school systems and plan to add at least one county system to the League next year. One of our alumni has recently graduated from Princeton, another from Wylie College whose debate program is underwritten by Denzel Washington. Others are at the University of Chicago and other elite colleges and universities. One of last year’s graduates, a ward of the League as he was homeless at the beginning of his junior year, got a full ride to Duke.
But the successes I most enjoy are the students with whom I become acquainted as middle schoolers. Watching them grow and seeing how this program encourages and refines their abilities to think and communicate says to me that teaching and learning are still going on in our schools. I continue to believe that the present state of public education in our country is one of our chief political failures. I also continue to think that many of us may have succumbed to the blandishments of supposed school reformers who are gaslighting us in hopes of convincing us that public education is doomed when the reality is that these reformers view public education as a potentially lucrative new market for capitalist exploitation. All that aside, cultural revision has always been a struggle for Americans, but it goes on. The myth of the good society still animates us, but the good society of tomorrow will need to affirm the polyglot, pluralist culture that is America today. The Debate League helps me again. A new frieze to replace old Cleveland’s would need to incorporate a significance (under present conditions a majority) of dark faces, but others as well: Asian faces, Latinas, Muslim girls in hijabs, as well as the inevitable contingent we call white. This is how the Debate League looks, how our public schools presently are.
The work of the world is harder, the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ harder to answer. The combination of pressures from corporate bureaucracies more intent on perpetuating and aggrandizing themselves than on mission, metastatic economic inequality, and cultural stagnation are shrinking opportunity for the young and driving a large wedge between altruism and the practical life for everybody, with fewer and fewer real careers in the traditional professions available and more and more gig work, shift work, and low wage peonage with few or no benefits. It’s still possible to achieve traditional success in a traditional career or as an entrepreneur, but the middle ground between celebrity success and low wage peonage is fast disappearing. What these things will mean in the long run is hard to predict. More and more we are educating ourselves for temporary situations, not for meaningful working lives. A new frieze for the schoolhouse door, like Cleveland’s old one but relevant to this present time, is almost impossible to imagine.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ has a number of corporate corollaries. ‘What occupations are necessary for and therefore typical of life in today’s world?’ ‘what sorts of value do we assign to these occupations, what degrees of autonomy to their practitioners?’ ‘How, and how well, do we reward today’s necessary occupations?’ These questions are problematic, the questions themselves not their potential answers. They may not be among the right questions to ask about life in todays world. On the one hand, technological development is driving social change at a pace that creates funds of obsolescence and human waste, And on the other hand the present tendency of capital to feed upon itself rather than increase real productivity is constantly widening the gap between haves and have-nots among us. As a consequence cohorts of workers for one reason or another find themselves irrelevant: middle aged workers who since the great recession cannot find jobs and have left the workforce permanently, former employees and abandoned pensioners of dying heavy industry, surplus PhD graduates who are transforming university faculties into cadres of casual employees, low wage workers who lack education and are denied advancement come to mind.
We’re all living longer too, and collectively extending childhood and adolescence at one end of the life cycle and retirement or something like it at the other. Perhaps in fifty years these trends will emerge as measurable demographics, but for now the relationship between education and the necessary work of the world remains unclear. In this circumstance, perhaps my city’s collection of private, public, and charter schools reflects that lack of clarity as much as it reflects and embodies the city’s destructive past. Still, the best high school in town is a public school, though St. Louis also supports a few excellent private high schools and at least one excellent charter, If the tensions and stresses between and among our city’s schools mean that we need a new understanding of the relationship between private and public education, perhaps that need follows from the need to reconnect education with the world’s work. But we need to support our public schools better than we do. Even given the historical trough in which we find ourselves, a system of public education that is being slowly starved to death is hardly the best we can do.