The
trouble with advertising “whatever comes into my mind” as the subject matter of
my blog is that episodes of writer’s block demonstrate to the world that there
is nothing there—in my mind, I
mean. Actually, two events of the
past week—the reunions that immediately precede the Princeton graduation
ceremonies and the observance of our wedding anniversary—have come together
there to give birth to an heretical opinion on the subject much in the
educational news of late: school tests.
I
do have an axe to grind. For
several years I was a member of the committee charged with constructing the
Advanced Placement test in the subject of English Language and Literature. There were, as I recall, about ten
people on the committee, carefully chosen to cover the usual categories of
“diversity” and to represent a wide variety of secondary schools and
colleges. The membership was
organized into “classes” on fixed terms to guarantee both the benefits of
experience and the vigor of “new blood”.
The great disparagement of “standardized tests” that is now common was
less so then, but we spent a good deal of thought and time in trying to
anticipate criticisms. I thought
the tests we came up with, though obviously the product of compromises and
tradeoffs, were pretty good.
For
as you know, since you are probably a right-thinking person, the use of
standardized tests in our schools to assess students’ progress is at best a
dubious practice and probably a Bad Thing pure and simple. I’m sure you know the arguments. The “test culture”—nearly everything
now being a culture--stifles “creativity” on the part of teachers and fosters
“rote learning” instead of “critical thinking” on the part of the students. Testing deforms the curriculum,
terrorizes students, and can even transform teachers, whose actual salaries
made be indexed to test results, into white collar criminals. A bunch of them in Atlanta have just
been given significant prison sentences for racketeering. They were cooking their grade books.
Well,
this past weekend I spent a couple of days at the reunion of the APGA
(Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni), and my thoughts not unnaturally
turned to my own years as a graduate student—both of them. My graduate education, being
particularly brief, was particularly intense. I completed the work for my Ph. D. in two years. During the first, my only year in
residence in Princeton, I was taking seminars and preparing for a big test
(known as the “General Examination”, or simply “Generals” as it had many parts)
administered in May. The second year
was spent delightfully in Europe, first looking at manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose in libraries from the
Hague to Valencia, and then writing a dissertation about them while ensconced
in a delightful Provençal village.
Lest
the situation of my residential year should lack a sufficient degree of psychological pressure, Joan
and I added a supplementary personal dimension. While we were still at Oxford we had decided that we wanted
to get married, but agreed that I would pass the General Examination before we
did so. Thus it happens that the
date of our wedding anniversary is always quite close to the Princeton Commencement
day. Every now and again, as in
this year for instance, they coincide.
Well,
I did pass the General Examination fifty-three years ago, and the rest is
either history or silence, depending upon your perspective. And passing that exam was probably the
most “creative” moment in a long scholarly career. (A close second was preparing for the similar “Final
Schools” at Oxford). The Princeton
graduate students in English in my day were a collection of brilliant odd-balls. Though varied in their tastes,
opinions, and intellectual enthusiasms, and though capable of gestures of
ferocious competitiveness, their attitude in face of the General Examination
was one of communal cooperation.
Everyone
was required to prepare in some depth four “minor” fields in addition to their
declared specializations. All the
students worked together in preparing study guides—somewhat inelegantly known
as “poop sheets”—covering the various historical fields and special
topics. The departmental
secretaries colluded with us by giving us mimeograph stencils and allowing us
to use their funny old rotary machine after hours. The results, for some reason invariably printed in purple,
were little masterpieces of intellectual force-feeding or “teaching to the
test”. The poop sheets paid
especial attention to the particular interests and eccentricities of the
graduate faculty and reviewed the content of every graduate seminar taught
within the previous five years.
There
were giants in the earth in those days.
One of the dozen or more great men of the English faculty at that time
was Louis Landa, the scholar of eighteenth-century literature. Like most of my professors he was
awesomely erudite, but also gentle, kindly and slightly exotic. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds
of Texas accent, which I distinguish in my mind as the “southern” and the
“western”. He had the former, and
it was delightful. What a Jewish
family was doing in Hallettsville, Texas, around the year 1900 is one of those
little mysteries of American sociology that makes our nation so interesting. (Many years later I would encounter the
figure of Diego de Landa, the sixteenth-century Franciscan historian of the
Mayans, probably from a converso Sephardic
family.)
Louis
(always pronounced in the French manner, Loo-ee)
Landa was a great expert on Swift, and extremely knowledgeable about the Church
of Ireland in the eighteenth century generally. But as I later deduced from the oral part of my examination,
I probably owed the high score I achieved on the eighteenth-century section to
my learned citation of one of his favorite books, a history of the potato.
Needless to say I had not actually read this book; I was leaning on the
account of it by one of my classmates in the poop sheets. I probably never knew more in my life
than on the day I finished my generals.
