Oh? Really?

by David Benjamin

“Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly.” 

― Pat Conroy

“You talking to me, teach?”

— Vic Morrow, as Artie West, The Blackboard Jungle

MADISON, Wis. — Conservatives in America have never been entirely comfortable with the experiment of sending every last kid, willy-nilly, to school. All the way back to Horace Mann’s conception of the American “common school,” the right wing has peered suspiciously at universal education as some sort of Marxist plot. The antebellum ruling class in Mann’s times didn’t mind bestowing upon the masses a few rudiments of reading, writing and mercantile math. But the idea of general “public” instruction gave them the heebie-jeebies.

They feared that affording the future sandhogs, hod-carriers and scrubwomen of America an excess of book-learning would “give them ideas” and upset the social order. 

And indeed, from its very beginnings, public school has been a little bit subversively leftist. The National Teachers Association (now the National Education Ass’n) goes back to 1857, and teachers have been unionized since 1906, which was three years after the Teamsters and three decades before the United Steelworkers and UAW. The public education movement grew even more sinister to the right wing when the Progressive Party took it up. Around the same time, John Dewey’s extensive writings about the virtues of the American “common school” made Mayberry Junior High seem like a nest of baby Bolsheviks.

By the time I started matriculating in the ’50s, the right wing’s worst schoolhouse nightmare had come to pass. Voters had sent two straight public-school graduates to the Oval Office (Harry Truman, Independence High, ’01, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Abilene High, ’09) and conservative senators were fulminating about pinko teachers prowling America’s kindergartens polluting the minds of defenseless tots with quotations from Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao. 

The Shakespearean solution to this unionized scourge — “First thing we do, we kill all the teachers.” — is largely impractical and not very humane. Instead, reactionaries and religionists have pecked away peripherally at secular public education, partly by nurturing a shadow system of private and parochial schools, “Christian academies,” prep schools and home-learning, and partly by promoting “school choice” scams that efficiently sort children and stratify educational opportunity according to race, faith, wealth, snobbery and red lines on maps. 

One of conservatism’s great white hopes, emerging out of Silicon Valley when it still had fruit trees, was the imminent replacement of teachers with computers. One little Univac, we were told, could be programmed with more information than you could squeeze out of 10,000 Mr. Chipses. In short order, the vast majority of teachers could be flushed from the schools. The few survivors would be reduced to (non-union) proctor status and IT support. The NEA and AFT would be extinct. Kids would get all their lessons onscreen either in teacher-free school buildings or back home in their rooms, safe from Socialism (but not porn). 

Trouble is, this promise has gone long unfulfilled. Although kids are bringing laptops to school by the millions, I can’t cite one instance of a live teacher supplanted by a Commodore 64, an HP Spectre or even an iMac Mojave. Meanwhile, most high schools have tuned to high-tech and replaced typing class with computer courses.

A possible lesson: Technology can’t teach but but a teacher can teach technology.

But let me pose another answer — that education is fiercely personal. For example, since it opened in 1963, my alma mater, Fighting Bob High, has graduated about 17,000 kids. But not one of these kids had the same high-school experience as any other. None remember the exact same teacher or teachers as either their favorite or their most hated. And none of those emotional impressions could have been formed by intimate contact with a software algorithm.

Consider, for instance, my homeroom teacher, Carol Arnold, who also was my junior-year English teacher. One day, the onerous duty fell upon her to help me and my so-called “honors” classmates plumb the hidden meaning in T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men (the one that starts “We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw…”).

As you might recall, if you ever went to high school, a teacher could ask a richly provocative question to a group of thirty kids and then stand there, for 45 minutes, without eliciting even a syllable from any of them. This freeze-frame did not denote malice or ignorance on the students’ part. It simply illustrated that it’s not the nature of a teenager to volunteer any sort of information to a grownup. For the teacher, one of her greatest fears is to behold that scrim of almost preternaturally blank faces and see no spark of interest, no flicker of curiosity, no sign of life. Just dead silence, stretching forward into a bleak Yeatsian infinity. 

(I’ve been there. I know.)

Mrs. Arnold, typically, would forestall this crisis of adolescent apathy by posing a terse but tempting riddle. “How could they,” she might ask, “be hollow, if they’re stuffed?”

Just that. She needed no more. This class was larded with know-it-alls and smartasses (I, of course, being an exception to that rule). So, a clever riposte from Keener, or Scott, Dick or Barry Chase, was certain to erupt, followed by a flurry of hypotheses, to which Mrs. Arnold would respond with, at most, a lifted eyebrow. 

Her style is usually defined, in the ed biz, as “the Socratic Method.” However, as I recall, it would have been more accurately characterized as the “Oh Really Method.” Mrs. Arnold, as we fired ours darts around the classroom, would glide a few feet and lean against the edge of her desk. She would slowly cross her perfect legs (this was an era of young teachers in short skirts), turn toward the last speaker and cock her head, as if to say — but not saying — “Oh? Really?”

And there you were, the last speaker, advancing a dubious, if not preposterous, interpretation under the scrutiny of this tall, brilliant, knowing woman while every other eye in the room joined in bearing down on you. 

You had to say something, so you did, after which Keener, unable to curb his sarcasm, would assert that “You’re wrong, Rat’s Feet-Breath!” After a moment of general snickering, Keener would look up and notice Mrs. Arnold’s dark and smoldering gaze as it said, soundlessly, “Oh? Really?” 

Thus engaged Socratically, step by step, we proceeded to cobble an exegesis of The Hollow Men that was unique to our class on that day, but faithful to T.S. Eliot in our own fashion. Subtly, Mrs. Arnold teased observations from even the shyest girls among us. I remember, the comment that best illuminated Old Possum for me that day came from Patricia Williams, who was known better for her brilliance as an artist than for her ability to dissect self-referential modernist poets.

I’ve forgotten what Patt said that day, but I knew she’d nailed it. For that epiphany, I admired her all day and gave no credit whatsoever to Mrs. Arnold — who had set us all loose by crossing her legs and turning her head, just-so.

Which, on Zoom, would not compute.