Books Worth Remembering
For most of us, teaching is a craft without memory, and so we end up repeating ourselves. Recently, I reread some "teacher books" that have touched my life. This is not the first rereading. Since any book that matters will last a lifetime, with different sentences resonating at different times in our careers, each of these books contains underlinings, exclamations, quarrels, and commentaries from at least three previous readings. Significantly, none of these books was recommended to me by a professor of education I encountered during the 60-plus education units I've picked up over the past 20 years.
People who think that, say, William J. Bennett, Chester E. Finn Jr., Albert Shanker, the standardists, the collaborationists, or even the whole-language evangelists have given us startling new insights would do well to read Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (Vintage, 1960). Utopians such as Mr. Goodman are out of fashion these days, but his decades-old examination of how the spiritual emptiness of our technological society wastes human resources, particularly the young, remains a milestone. Mr. Goodman points out, for example, that people objected to progressive education on the grounds that it "flouted the Western traditions, the three R's, Moral Decency, Patriotism, and the Respect for Authority." His letter to the New York commissioner of education, included in the book, nails the absurdity of lesson plans on the nose.
Today's teachers would do well to search in libraries for copies of Josephck Featherstone's Schools Where Children Learn (Liveright, 1971) and What Schools Can Do (Liveright, 1976). As well as offering a fine analysis of what schools can do, these books remind us that the big issues in education don't change much from one decade to the next. For starters, Mr. Featherstone predicted both the coming of the teacher-effectiveness mania and its shoddy content. "Teaching practice is so complex, and our modes of knowing about it so limited," he writes, "that it is difficult to believe that any emerging paradigms of technical knowledge will be anything but scientific mumbo jumbo, concealing their essential inadequacy under a veneer of statistical precision." Reading Jay Featherstone is a poignant reminder that today we teachers talk only to each other. Nobody else is listening. The fact that Mr. Featherstone, an education professor, was once a regular contributor to The New Republic reminds us that today there is no general-interest publication in America...
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