394
PARTISAN REVIEW
Rita Kramer: Yes. At the time I wrote the ed school book, and spent so
much time in classrooms, it occurred to me that the natural solution was
to put college and university faculty with teachers in the grassroots com–
munities. This would be very acceptable to local schools. Unfortunately,
you are an exception. Most college and university members aren't inter–
ested in spending any of their precious time doing that sort of thing. They
have pressures on them, to publish, to do all the things you have to do to
get tenure. There is no money, no prestige, in this for them. This idea is
like other wonderful ideas, but would be very hard to get off the ground.
Linda Wells: Initially the American Council of Learned Societies invest–
ed a lot of money in this effort. It has been picked up in about fifteen
districts in the Boston area that will give their teachers release time.
College faculty might not spend a full semester at it. Most teachers have
been amazingly receptive, and this is a way to get them back to the life of
the mind and the life of scholarship. It's just going to take some creative
thinking about how to finance it.
Rita Kramer: Exactly. I think it's a wonderful idea.
Igor Webb: Well, it's not altogether a wonderful idea, if you think about
what things are happening in the universities. It's not a simple matter of
connection. Yes, colleges should work with a consortia of schools, but it is
only really fruitful
if
a university professor has some useful thoughts about
education and understands his role in something larger than his discipline
or sub-discipline. Otherwise what you get is not only incoherence, but
condescension on the part of the university professor to the high school
teacher and to that task. There is nothing to suggest, in my experience, that
the university professor, as a generic quantity, is fit to be helpful, indis–
criminately, in the high school classroom, to the high school teacher.
Linda Wells: I'd like to take issue with you, and to say that I'd be satisfied
with crumbs! If, for instance, a high school teacher in the average subur–
ban or inner-city high school of what is now called "Language Arts"–
and has nothing to do with language and nothing to do with art-could
spend a few hours being introduced to the nineteenth-century novel, for
example, or to the ideas about the relationship between domestic arrange–
ments and the social and political constructs of the period, it would help.
Chester Finn: But why do you think that's what's going to happen when
the English professor meets with the high school teacher? It's just as like–
ly not to happen. That's the rub.
