Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 20, 1993 TAG: 9312150005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN D. HOPKINS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Though she was trying to be polite and not say all that was on her mind, she seemed to feel that some officially bilingual teachers, while able to converse in Spanish, lacked the full command of that grammar to be proficient writers or to correct what their students might write in the language of their Latin-born parents.
Presently there emerged a genteel verbal fencing match between this Hispanic board member and a fellow member who is a stalwart of Miami's older, dwindling community of native speakers of English. This woman had a parallel concern: that all who teach be fully literate in English, and speak it clearly enough that their pupils would go into the world with language skills that would serve them well wherever in America they might live or visit.
I don't know if the two board members ever quite worked out whether they were on the same side or not. But their exchange has been ringing in my mind because it seemed so much like the kind of thing that could have happened back home in Virginia in my own school days.
Just as in today's Miami, the Virginia school boards of the 1950s had to work in the light of their aspirations for the children whose futures were entrusted to them. And just as a Miami parent might assume this will always be a Spanish-speaking city, now that that tongue has become so prevalent here, some of the Virginia school trustees seem to have felt that the life they knew best would also be the life their children's generation would lead.
Because of such assumptions, a Virginia lad in a rural county was likely to be offered vocational agriculture in high school, even as family farms were disappearing and more and more Virginians won their bread in an office or a factory miles from the farmhouse they called home. Their blue corduroy jackets marked the Future Farmers of America as dinosaurs of the '50s - noble in the ideal but fundamentally unprepared for the change of economic climate already embracing the land.
In my own case, parents in one Piedmont county seat had to hire their own foreign-language teacher because the School Board had dropped the second-year language from the high-school curriculum, even though the second year was a common college-entrance requirement. And it was not unusual for people of my age and background to find themselves as college freshmen in a class where they were expected to know calculus and differential math they'd never seen in their hometown schools. Persisting in the old ways, unprepared for the new, such schools had a vision that extended no farther than the boundaries of the county magisterial districts.
Well, most of us did all right anyway. Between family and school, we did learn enough about working hard, and most of us cared enough, to give what it took to catch up. So if we're not rocket scientists, nevertheless we're productive citizens by and large, and quite a few have excelled and become sources of civic pride in their home communities.
But on a lazy Sunday afternoon, it brings this child of Virginia up short to read that a new Virginian named Mike Farris had said that Virginia school boards of the '50s and '60s didn't omit "to teach foreign languages, or physics, or other subjects that students might need to enter college". As I've said, some did neglect exactly that.
Whether they did so because the boards had the greater freedom Farris speaks of, or because they never managed to look beyond their own decade, is not my purpose to discover. It is sufficient to wonder what might have happened to my generation had the state nurtured a broader vision of education than it did.
Had there been more math and physics taught, for instance, or economics and modern languages, would Virginia workers and employers be better prepared today for the competition emerging all over the world in lands we once ignored? Isn't it likely there would be better prospects for conversion to civilian economies in Virginia's defense-centered cities, and fewer empty factories in the mill towns?
Someone may ask, dare I suggest that vision was lacking if a county didn't prepare its children to move away and do work that would never bring them home? Do we expect a rural community to tax itself to send its youth off to a distant city? Is that the small town's homage to the metropolis?
Perhaps the best I can answer is that it's too much to ask a little place to see the future alone. Maybe the county, or even a city of a certain size, views the landscape from too far down the mountain to see what lies in the next valley over. I think that's one reason states have curriculum standards and why it's a good idea that a single school board, or pair of parents, not be able to decide entirely on its own what to teach - or what to leave untaught.
\ John D. Hopkins, a newspaper copy editor in Florida, grew up in Patrick County.
by CNB