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CHAPTER 1
The American Revolution in Education
Mr. Ramirez Comes to America
On a recent visit to a Midwestern university, I was approached by an elderly man who announced that he wanted to tell me his story. A half century before, he said, he was a teenaged refugee from Cuba, washed up on a Florida shore — an exemplary instance, as he put it, of "tired, poor, wretched refuse" come to this country in search of a better life. He had no money, no English, no American relatives, no friends, no papers. After a couple of years of rough living, picking up odd jobs and some English, he sought to better himself. He got a GED and enrolled in a community college where, in order to meet a requirement, he took a literature class and found himself reading, or rather staring helplessly at, the words of a Shakespeare sonnet. What did they mean? What was Shakespeare trying to say? "I always sat at the back and kept my head down," the man said. But one day, he said, the instructor came over, stood beside him, and asked, "Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?"
As the man I am calling Mr. Ramirez told me, "I had no thoughts at all, and nothing to say." But he made brief eye contact with his tormentor; and while the teacher's probing attention eventually found another target, the event stuck in Mr. Ramirez's mind because, as he told me, "it was the first time anybody had asked me that question. And that," he said, beaming, "is my story." He shook my hand, gave me his card, and departed. Back in the hotel, I read his card. Mr. Ramirez had apparently recovered from his embarrassment at some point, because he was now an emeritus professor of comparative literature.
Humankind hungers for learning — we are, as observers of the human condition since Aristotle have said, curious creatures in every sense — and countless people all over the world living in restricted or impoverished circumstances have discovered through some chance occurrence a powerful intellectual or imaginative drive within themselves that had lain dormant and undiscovered, but which, once awakened, could not be denied. But Mr. Ramirez's is an American story. A similar tale told by a person who had arrived by desperate chance in England, France, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Chile, Thailand, China — or Cuba — might be considered remarkable and moving, but it would hardly inspire the blend of empathy and national pride that Professor Ramirez could count on inspiring in me. Indeed, the same story set in any other country might seem more an improbable fluke, even a kind of mistake. In America, it was the result of a deliberate policy. The presumption built into the American system that Mr. Ramirez was worth educating, an entailment of a larger hospitality to orphans of the world's storms, gives his story its peculiar force as an astonishing conjunction of individual need and national principles. The system works! A nobody, a mere atom in the human mass, comes to this country, is treated with respect in the form of an invitation wrapped in a challenge, and becomes not only a grateful and productive citizen but a man of learning.
How did this excellent result come about? What assumptions about the goals of education, the ends of human existence, and the character of American society had to be in place in order for that teacher in that classroom in that institution to point that finger at that individual and ask that fateful question? What were we thinking when we created the system that could work such wonders?
Mr. Ramirez plainly regarded his story as nothing short of miraculous, which it was, both for reasons he well understood and for many that neither he nor any other individual could have grasped. What follows is an attempt to think backward from that singular moment to the conditions that made it possible. I will not attempt a history of American educational thinking or practices, which would quickly become a chronicle of overlapping and mutating movements and countermovements, a swirling tangle of earnest experiments, utopian reforms, revanchist reactions, pragmatic concessions to the reality of scarce resources, and terminological disputes. I want rather identify the deep currents of commitment and aspiration that informed an American system of education, a system that was at one time able to produce countless versions and variants of Mr. Ramirez's story, many in the mainstream culture. (I count myself, a product of midwestern suburbia, as one of the beneficiaries of the midcentury American educational covenant.) The subject, in other words, is not how a solitary community college teacher managed to bring out the best in this one unpromising student, but rather how an American educational system was constructed, partly by intent and partly by chance, to maximize the possibility that such miracles might occur. And then, within that question, how the miracle-making role was allocated to the humanities. And finally, how the study of literature emerged as the focus of democratic aspirations.
The young Mr. Ramirez washed up on the right shore at the right moment, for at that time — the twenty-five or thirty years following WWII, a time now commonly considered the golden age in American higher education, when the system enjoyed unprecedented self-confidence, success, and public support — everything was in his favor, including the fact that refugees from Cuba were far more likely to be welcomed than undocumented immigrants from other countries. And his story bears brilliantly efficient witness to many golden age premises concerning American values and aspirations. Think about it: in his account, a beneficent and bounteous America welcomes the impoverished and outcast of the world, who come to this country to repair their damaged fortunes and begin life anew. The instrument of that hospitality and the guarantor of opportunity is education. The humanities are a crucial part of the system, giving even those clinging to the lowest rung of the ladder, those whose imaginative horizons are likely to be the most restricted, an opportunity to think of themselves as the inheritors of a tradition, to acquire some sense of cultural knowledge and cultural differences, and to deploy that knowledge in forming an expanded and enriched sense of themselves and their possibilities. An abundantly gifted person, Mr. Ramirez might have made a successful life anywhere in the world, but he would not have found such premises so purposefully embraced in any other country.
To be sure, it may be an overstatement to describe as a "system" a set of practices so responsive to local initiatives, so dependent on local resources, and so vulnerable to gusts of reformist energy, lassitude, inertia, and political fashions. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in 1958, it is only in America that education is a political issue. But in a sense, the disorderly interplay of all these factors actually constitutes the American system of education. From the beginning that system has charted a path very different from its European antecedents, first because of the needs of the Puritan settlements for learned clergy and for congregations that could read the Bible, and then, after the Revolution, because representative democracy forced people to govern themselves, as they would not have had to do in a country with a hereditary peerage, an established church, or an unchallenged ruling class. Even without a stable consensus about what people must know in order to govern themselves, much less how to teach it to them, the American system had, by the time Mr. Ramirez struggled ashore, come to exemplify a few distinctive propositions in that it was, throughout the land, universal, general, and liberal.
The system was universal in the sense that, by design, the overwhelming majority of students had access to publicly funded secondary and postsecondary schools whose curricula included an academic component. It was general in the sense that certain kinds of courses were to be required of all students on the premise that education should be organized around the purpose of creating responsible, accountable, and self-sufficient human beings. And it was liberal in the sense that students were exposed to different kinds of knowledge, which were studied for their own sake, without any immediate purpose or goal in mind. Further, the fact that Mr. Ramirez was brought face to uncomprehending face with Shakespeare also testifies to an assumption that some kinds of cultural knowledge carry special value and content that cannot be reduced to information — indeed, that they possess this value and this content even in the absence of full or definite understanding — and that the educational system should expose students to this kind of knowledge no matter how strange, unnecessary, or unproductive many might find the exercise to be. And finally, the fact that his teacher solicited Mr. Ramirez's opinion of Shakespeare testifies to a conviction that literary study, especially at the undergraduate level, centrally involves acts of judgment and interpretation arising from an individual's reading of a text. This was important, because, as I contend in the second section of this book, opinion has a foundational status in both literary interpretation and in American civil discourse, and beyond that, in American self-understanding.
All these premises have been contested and in some cases rejected outright since Mr. Ramirez arrived in the early 1960s. We are no longer in the golden age. And so, in explaining the remarkable success of the American educational system in this case, or class of cases, we must recall a whole series of assumptions and practices that have, over the years, been weakened, compromised, or abandoned.
Mr. Ramirez would not have had his humiliating but transformative moment if the federal government and the local community had not made a series of commitments, beginning with the promise of universal access to higher education, which entailed a system of community colleges with an academic program that included the humanities. That program itself reflected a local embrace of liberal education, and a commitment to two foundational principles, the first to individual freedom and enrichment and the second to social cohesion and civic responsibility.
Each of these principles was given a memorable formulation by one of the nation's founders. In a letter well known to humanists, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in 1780, "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine." In the dreamy vision evoked by this passage, people once freed from the burdens of want and oppression will become increasingly refined and subtilized, eventually settling into a state of aesthetic bliss. More pragmatic, Thomas Jefferson saw the diffusion of knowledge as a necessary condition of democracy. If knowledge were concentrated in a single class, he thought, the result would be a reconstituted and potentially despotic aristocracy — the progeny of people like Adams and himself perpetuating their privilege forever by obtaining a monopoly on knowledge. "Every government," Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1781–83), "degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone." Governments and the people they govern would, Jefferson thought, flourish only if significant numbers of people were proficient in such subjects as mathematics, the sciences, languages, anatomy, medicine, moral philosophy, and law, thus qualifying themselves for leadership in society. Democracy's viability, he concluded, hangs on the success of a "crusade against ignorance."
Both Adams and Jefferson saw education as the solution to a problem specific to democracy, and even as the very core of democracy itself, the essence of the American experiment. For Adams, the problem was how the nation's most privileged citizens could occupy the unused time and energy created by the elimination of external threats and immediate needs. For Jefferson, the issue was how to improve the moral and intellectual character of the population so they could govern themselves. Neither man could be called a populist, or even a supporter of direct democracy. Adams's vision of successive generations evolving (or devolving) from warriors into dilettantes was, at least in this passage, specifically restricted to his distinguished lineage and their peers; he did not contemplate an entire population of farmers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and peasants spending their days admiring tapestry and porcelain. For Jefferson, the educational system would have a sifting function, identifying the most talented and ambitious students, who would be recruited into leadership positions — a process, as he told Adams in a phrase that has become famous, of "pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government."
The Founding Father rhetoric with which Jefferson articulated his vision for education has been much admired. Among other worthy goals, Jefferson wished "to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; to enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences, which advance the arts and administer to the health, the subsistence and comforts of human life; and, generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others and of happiness within themselves." Jefferson's understanding of both human nature and the needs of a civil society led him to argue that what we would today call a liberal education was a public good, as much a necessity as a virtue in a democratic society in which people were expected to work to improve their conditions and manage their own affairs. His convictions about the intimate connection between a democratic polis and a multidimensional education embracing languages, mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, "fluxions," pneumatics, law, grammar, ethics, and belles lettres have been cited countless times in efforts to promote the liberal arts. Less often noted, and then rarely with approval, is his equally heartfelt belief that humankind was in effect self-sorted through "natural" inequalities that would be exposed and then aggravated by the educational system.
Some of the opinions of the omnidirectional genius of Monticello would place him on the right edge of today's political spectrum. The passage quoted above on the role of education in preventing the rise of a permanent ruling class occurs in the section of Notes on the State of Virginia devoted to laws and the administration of justice, a section that includes lists of crimes punishable by death and dismemberment and prescribes gibbeting for initiators of duels. The same section contains Jefferson's most pungent deliverances on "the real distinctions which nature has made" between the races, which are said to include, in addition to profound differences in powers of reasoning and imagination, other differences pertaining to beauty and general physiognomic suitability. The ability of whites to blush, for example, compares favorably to "that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of that other race" (264–65). Jefferson brought his formidable knowledge of biology to bear on the issue of racial difference. "They secrete less by the kidneys," he noted; they have a "greater degree of transpiration" perhaps owing to "a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus," "they seem to require less sleep," "they are more ardent after their female" but appear to be incapable of the "delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation" characteristic of love. And, their lesser need of sleep notwithstanding, they demonstrate when not working a puzzling "disposition to sleep" (265). For Jefferson, "that other race" is strange, tragic, and uneducable, almost a distinct species.
"Natural" differences also play a decisive role among whites. Under Jefferson's plan, many children might receive basic schooling ("reading, writing, and arithmetic"), but only one in each school would be chosen to attend one of the twenty grammar schools in the country, where he would be taught Greek, Latin, geography, and mathematics. Once in grammar school, a high-stakes test would produce a winner, "the best genius of the whole." "By this means," Jefferson wrote, "twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually," and "the residue dismissed" (Notes on the State of Virginia, 272). Of these twenty, half would become grammar school teachers and the triumphant ten remaining would go to college. A meritocracy, in short, but not a democracy of opportunity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez?"
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