IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
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Igor Webb :
You also have to remember that college professors never were
exposed to thinking about education itself.
In
my Ph.D. training, in English
at Stanford, a little time was spent on it. But for the most part there's no
conversation in graduate school, for example, about how to construct a
meaningful curriculum. And yet the beginning professor is assumed to be
an expert on education and on the curriculum.
It
is expected that this per–
son automatically will be helpful. The people who can actually be helpful
need to have a sense of the institutional role they're serving, to be helpful
in the high school classroom in the way that you're talking about it.
Rita Kramer:
I'm talking from fantasy, and you're talking from experi–
ence, so I defer to you.
Igor Webb:
Don't do it that quickly.
Chester Finn: I
share some of Igor's ambivalence. When well done, this
can be a wonderful experience. Arguably the most stimulating teaching
experience that I ever took part in was a three-week sununer institute on
the university campus designed for high school principals to learn about
leadership via the humanities. They came from four different disciplines.
We selected half a dozen works of the humanities that evoked leadership in
various ways, and this produced an unbelievably exciting intellectual reju–
venation for thirty or so high school principals from around the country.
Everybody benefitted. But does exposing the average teacher to the author
of the typical paper delivered at the Modern Language Association meet–
ing, or an historical association conference? What are the odds that this will
lead to a better rather than possibly worse elementary school system?
Linda Wells:
Well, then that's the level of teaching that goes on in uni–
versities as well. I think that people in higher education can be catalysts for
scholarly development in teachers. I have seen public school teachers who
are arid, not because they don't have the intellectual capabilities but
because they don't have the space and the opportunity. I've seen individu–
als take a seminar in the humanities and then go on to develop their own
scholarship. So my concern is that we don't just reduce it to: "Higher edu–
cation has no knowledge of what goes on in the public schools."
Peter
Wood:
I'm an acimjnistrator at Boston University, and as Chester
mentioned
I'll
be speaking on pretty much the same issue that Rita,
Chester, and Igor were talking about, that is if I can figure out something
different to say, now that they've stolen all my best lines. But I would like
to take advantage of a pretty rare opportunity to ask some questions that
