Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 13, 1993 TAG: 9309300288
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I remember being spanked in kindergarten for trying a backwards somersault during Circle Time. I remember being hit on the hand with a ruler in the third grade for some offense I do not recall.
As for high school: I remember that a guidance counselor pulled me aside one day to inform me that I could not wear any item of clothing in any manner other than the one for which it was designed. She was referring to the vest I was wearing as a shirt.
I also remember being sent to the assistant principal for arguing with the biology teacher. I thought it unfair that he - a self-described drug addict turned born-again Christian - was skipping the chapters on the theory of Evolution. Why could he choose for us what he had been allowed to choose for himself?
Besides, my father had just recently given me a copy of Darwin's The Origin of the Species and I had questions about it I hoped my teacher could answer. When the assistant principal asked me what my problem was, I remember saying I had spring fever. I didn't, you know. I had some other, far more dangerous affliction.
I was curious. But trying to learn something about the world and about myself in it within an environment that aggressively fought any question that might cause a controversy (though such dispute is often the basis for real discovery) was like trying to fry bacon at the bottom of a swimming pool.
Although an admittedly absurd evaluation process I went through in kindergarten established me as a "gifted" student, no teacher save one ever encouraged me to develop whatever gift I might have had. (That one was a math teacher I had in the eighth grade. I'll never forget how excited I was to read that she had written "be true to your dreams" in my annual.)
No teacher I met before I went away to college ever pulled me aside and offered me a book to read. Not one. Not ever.
Or let me put this another way. Several summers ago I taught a group of students 10th-grade English. Most had failed English the previous year, and some had failed more than once. Though I had to deal with behavior problems I would never imagine having to confront in my college classes, the difficulty of that summer had little to do with my students.
Once I asked the principal if there were any funds available with which we might pay a poet I knew to visit my class. Because of the thematic nature of his poetry and even his physical demeanor and stature, I believed this poet and professor could reveal poetry to be something beyond what I knew my students thought it was.
The principal said unequivocally that he had no money for poets. I asked him then if we could have my friend visit for free (if he were willing) and invite all the English classes to the reading. He said blankly that there was no air-conditioning in the auditorium.
Because so many of them worked after school to pay for their cars and/or (in once case) to help support their families, I discovered early on that my students that summer could not easily complete the homework I assigned. But I felt it essential that I spend that summer giving them one last chance to learn how rewarding reading could be. So I decided to read several stories to my students one day.
I took them outside and had them sit in the grass under vibrantly pink blooming something or another. Then I opened my book.
I read for two hours and not one of my students fell asleep. On their faces all that afternoon were the interest and the excitement I had desperately hoped those students - "failures," supposedly - had in them.
On my way back to the classroom, another teacher confronted me in the hallway and said that he saw me reading to my students. It was, I heard, an accusation. I felt as if I'd been teaching my students how to curse or draw pictures of nude men. Nonetheless, I admitted it.
Reading - they hate that, he said. But I'm working on it, I said. The man got a smug look on his face and said: In five years you'll give that up.
As many teachers will tell you, this attitude, along with the others I have described, is prevalent in the public school system.
It's maddeningly unattractive to think that we could so carelessly send our children into a place where they will be shunned and shouted at, where they will be encouraged to memorize and spit out bits of information they are not often taught to use for the purpose of living more kindly and more peacefully and more knowingly, and where they will be judged by their willingness to keep quiet and not make a fuss.
But if we choose instead to send them into private schools whose philosophies are already more akin to our own, we will do nothing but aggravate the problem.
One of my two sons is school-age. He is a second grader in the local elementary school his father and I had no choice but to enroll him in because we simply did not have the tuition money a private education requires.
So far, we do not have any major problems with our son's school, but the little things - the fact that the children are appraised by the limited and often perilous A-B-C-D method in the first grade, the fact that the children are not often allowed to talk in the classroom and must interact, instead, with mounds of pre-processed exercise sheets, and the little problem of the tyranny of the cafeteria workers - are difficulties we will either have to swallow or - and here's the point - through active participation, parent/teacher conferences, letters to the school board, and, if need be, all-out protests, correct.
I am in favor of the individual's right to make her own choices about her own life and, while necessary, her child's life. But as more and more of the parents who have the time and the energy and the knowledge and the power to improve the quality of our public school system move their children into private schools, more and more problems will surface because of the decrease in people willing and able to stand up ready to exchange ideas and provide labor in search of solutions that could help all children.
Then the division that already exists between the children whose parents have money and those whose do not, between those whose parents have the time to work on the system and those whose do not, between those whose parents have health insurance and those whose do not, and between those who will be able to go to college out-of-state (if they choose) and those who must go in-state or not at all, will widen.
Our public schools will then become the absolute slums at the absolute bottom of the democratic idea of an education for all, and the advantaged and privileged will just grow more and more advantaged and privileged while the poor and ignorant will have to, through no real fault of their own, just stay that way.
\ Adrian Blevins-Church of Fincastle teaches writing at Hollins College and Virginia Western Community College.
by CNB