EDUCATION BEYOND POLITICS
417
Digby Baltzell:
All of my students want careers. But none of them
want to be teachers anymore. In the past, women were precluded from
being anything else. My best teachers, as I look back on my early days in
school, were women. I think consumerism may go down, and we may
get better people going into teaching.
AI Shanker:
Two things. One is that most of the elementary school
teachers even through the thirties were high school graduates who went
to one- or two-year training schools, normal schools. By the thirties,
high school teachers were the only ones who had a college degree. At
that time, they were part of a very elite group. Five percent of the
American public graduated from college in the 1930s, so they were part
of the top five percent in the country. And because only twenty percent
graduated from high school in the 1940s, elementary school teachers
who had two years more than that were also part of the top six or seven
percent. Now, teachers are among those coming from the top fifty per–
cent. So you're dealing with different layers.
The second thing has to do with issues of curriculum. Then, people
essentially went to training schoo!. They knew that, in the fifth grade,
for instance, they get these words, these stories, this part of American
history, this part of geography. They knew they would be tested at the
end of the year. And it was very much like learning to play the piano.
You may playa little better or a little worse or with a little more feeling
or a little less. But you're learning to play that piece. Today there is no
piece to play. Today you have a blank canvas, and you're given the
paints. You get a much different system of education when you're told
that you have a piece to play, which you're specifically trained to do,
and which you do over and over again. I'm not saying that's the great–
est. But if that's too narrow and restrictive, then to have 2.7 million
people individually figure out what shou ld be taught and what way to
do it is too open. The issue of quality isn't in and of itself the central
one. These other issues have to be tackled.
William Phillips:
Before we break up, could we return to what was
the ostensible purpose of this meeting? Is there anything that we haven't
discussed that we could do - we as more enlightened individuals than the
norm in the universities?
Irving Louis Horowitz:
William, one thing we ought to do is, instead
of returning to the
ought,
to return to the
is.
If we are referring to ed–
ucation, it is not only public and private; it is also parochial and secular.
There are different elements involved now, more profound, than simply
public and private. Maybe parochial education did not dissolve. There
