Thoughts About High School

At a recent birthday party for an old friend I met an obviously talented high school history teacher who teaches at a huge school—it looks to be about the size of the Pentagon—that I used occasionally to drive by in my suburban expeditions.  It is located in a rapidly developing part of Middlesex County that transitioned from potato farms to tracts of McMansions in what seemed like a trice, certainly during the active lifetime of one pickup truck.  Even the most casual observer will note, passing along its freshly landscaped borders, the evidences of a significant immigration of persons of subcontinental Asian origin—a detail not without significance to my current musings.  For as the field of competition for the Democratic presidential nomination takes shape, I have found myself particularly interested in some of the various ideas concerning education that are beginning to emerge.

As I see it, there are at least two major questions about our high schools that should greatly concern Americans.  This first is this: do our schools, in general, set a high enough standard when compared with the schools in other prosperous nations?  The answer to this is “No”—in my opinion a resounding “No”--but as the question is seldom so much as asked, I leave it aside from this essay.  The second is this: what accounts for the marked disparity in educational outcomes of our high school students along racial lines.  This question is frequently asked, and frequently answered.  But how good are the answers?

The Federal Government first became seriously involved in secondary education in 1965, the year I began teaching college. In connection with the “War on Poverty”, the Johnson administration commissioned an ambitious sociological survey of American public schools in an attempt to pinpoint as accurately as possible the facts of the racial achievement gap and its larger sources.  The so-called Coleman Report of 1966 drew attention to a dramatic chasm of about a full standard deviation separating the academic achievement of black and white students in our high schools.  Race itself was an important correlating factor in educational success, along with levels of parental education and family income.  Local budgetary factors—class size, and per-student expenditure—were relatively minor factors.

Lots of people saw the Coleman Report as a wake-up call.  Our government educational experts didn’t wake up, exactly, but they did go on a spending spree.  Over the next half century per-capita expenditure on the public schools roughly quadrupled.  Kids were given head starts.  No child was left behind.   With what concrete results?  A new major study—we’ll call it Son-of-Coleman—has just summarized the state of the achievement gap for American children born between 1954 (the year of my graduation from high school, as it happens) and 2001.  Simplifying only slightly, the needle has barely moved!  The efforts of the last fifty years, which were far from trivial, half-hearted, unimaginative or niggardly—have failed even to dent the problem of racially disparate educational outcomes in the public schools.  There is still essentially a full standard deviation separating the performance of black and white students. 

A problem so huge and so persistent is unlikely to have a single or a simple cause, but there is in my opinion one major factor that too seldom commands serious discussion because of its intractability and social sensitivity.  That is the traditional educative role of the family, as opposed to that of the school.  My two Montreal grandchildren have been with us over Easter, and yesterday my six-year-old grandson took me for a little walk.  We saw many interesting things to discuss: flowers, birds, the worms that had been driven to the surface by a heavy rain some hours earlier.  Since in his school they speak French as well as English we tried to identify objects of interest in both languages.  We stopped to admire a lush clover patch.  He knew about clover, and about the lucky four-leaf instances thereof.  But he didn’t know the French: trèfle.  He repeated the word, amending instinctively and without comment my lame pronunciation.  How could there be such different words for the same thing?  That led me to English trefoil, thence to bibliographical folios, thence to what it might mean “to turn over a new leaf”.

It is hard not to make this sound like a philological seminar rather than what it was, a perfectly natural conversation between a young boy and his old grandfather.  Yet, like dozens of other daily exchanges he has with his parents, it will certainly be a small part of the foundation upon which the boy’s formal education can be constructed.  The schools can do a great deal, but they are much better at building on a foundation than at laying one.  That has since time immemorial been the task of parents and other familiar elders.  This brings me back to the high school teacher of my first sentence.  She teaches elective Advanced Placement courses in history.   Performance in AP courses (sometimes called “college preparatory” courses) is measured by a single nationally administered test that aims to establish an objective and uniform standard.  The degree to which this goal is achievable is not beyond debate, but I know from personal experience that the College Board, which administers the program, strives mightily to achieve it.  For several years I was on the committee that makes up the AP exam for English.

Although a quarter of the students in her school are black, she has no black students in her classes this term.  She thinks most black students are “lost”—her word—to the aspirations of AP well before they get to high school.  On the other hand students of Asian background, another sizeable demographic in the student body, are significantly overrepresented.  She told me that AP is nearly the cultural norm among this broad section of the immigrant community, and one widely supported by parents “actively involved” in all aspects of their children’s school careers.  That was also her phrase.  She clearly thinks that parental involvement can be too “active” in monitoring homework and demanding high grades.  She spends a certain amount of time with pressurized teenagers.  But in terms of outcomes—such as those that are causing such anguish in the New York City system with regard to the admissions to elite high schools—the heavy hand seems to triumph over even the most benign neglect every time.

The Great Church Burns

With unaccustomed efficiency I was already well advanced with a blog essay for the week when news began to arrive about the fire at Notre Dame de Paris.  This news was coming, as it was to the whole world, though all our major journalistic organizations, and from the very start it was accompanied by shocking photographs of the spreading blaze in the timbers of the vast roof.  But we also had more in personal communications from friends at the American cathedral, of which we are members and, when lucky enough to be in residence in Paris, fairly active ones.  Personal connections, even rather casual ones, can add immediacy to generality and abstraction.

            Speaking as a medievalist, I do not regard Notre Dame de Paris as my favorite medieval French church.  I’ll be provocative and say I’m not sure it even makes my Top Ten.   You’ve got Chartres, Amiens, Mont-Saint-Michel, Sens, Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers.  That’s before you even take into consideration monastic masterpieces like Vézelay or Conques.  A short walk from Notre Dame itself you have the Sainte Chapelle, possibly the most remarkable building wrought by the Gothic hand in all of Europe.  I could plausibly go on before arriving at the crucial but.  In this instance the but is all important.  But Notre Dame has a unique significance for Parisians, for all of France, and indeed for all of us for whom France has been a teacher.

            The French ambassador, interviewed by the PBS “News Hour”, declared that the cathedral was intimately connected with “what it means to be French”.  This same phrase, or one very similar, was used by several others, including “ordinary” Parisians interviewed on the streets. I try in vain to imagine a building that many people in this country would say is integral to “what it means to be American”.  Certainly in this country—which is still in the western context a fairly religious country—it would not be a house of worship.  But in France, which underwent a sanguinary revolution directed in large measure against the Church, where militant anti-clericalism has been a more or less permanent feature of the political scene, and where the doctrine of laïcité (separation of Church and State on steroids) is as the law of the Persians and the Medes, it is there, in France, that a musty old limestone fossil is the “essence of what it means to be French.”

            The gewgaw collector in Paris can probably find a Notre Dame ashtray if he wanted to; but he would be overwhelmed with opportunities in the genre of the Eiffel Tower.  Had the Frenchman in the street told me that the Eiffel Tower was all about “what it means to be French,” I might have been scornful, but I would not have been surprised.  The Eiffel Tower is a very American kind of erection.  It’s like the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or the world’s largest polyurethane peach in Gaffney, S.C. or for that matter the imposing prestressed concrete pillars surrounding the Woodrow Wilson School on my own campus.  It does absolutely nothing beyond exulting in the audacity of its own existence.  And having no intrinsic meaning, it is available as a repository for meanings supplied by others.

Americans seem to like to define the national character by the technique of the via negativa—ruling out what it is not.  I notice that several of our current presidential candidates, when confronting some instance of quintessentially American behavior of which they disapprove, are prone to say “This is not America” or “This is not who we are.”  I actually resent being told who I am not by people I have never met, but let it pass.  The French are very much into national navel-gazing.  Mr. Macron has just completed God knows how many hours of a much-touted national conversation about the French national character; so when he associates the ancient church of Notre Dame de Paris with the essence of French identity, I take it very seriously and find it very moving.  It is striking not merely that this great sacred building has been appropriated by the civil state, but that the civil state would appear to aspire to a monopoly on it.  Among the talking heads who have been speaking with great emotion about it on American television are historians, political pundits, erudite art historians, sociologists and random tourists from many nations.  I have not heard the single opinion of one of the cathedral clergy or of frequent worshippers at its altars.  There are still a few of these, as I know from personal experience, having attended the odd service there myself over the years.

For a world in which there often seems to be a paucity of good news, the devastation of one of the great monuments of Christian civilization offers paradoxical relief.  It became clear within hours that the cathedral can be, and will be, rebuilt.  Mr. Macron promised that it would be done within five years.  I suspect it will be achieved more quickly yet.  The cathedrals of the Middle Ages—often poetically called the “Age of Faith”--took generations to build in large part because of challenges presented by capital markets that in retrospect seem primitive.  The financing of Saint Peter’s in Rome was so dodgy that it played a part in inciting the Protestant Revolt.  We live in an Age of Money.  Even as I write this, even before the embers are cool, even before we have a reliable survey of the damage, a significant portion of the funding that will be needed for the church’s restoration has been promised.  France has not forgotten where she came from, nor have the rest of us forgotten France.  It’s all rather amazing actually.  At least for a brief season we can do something more satisfying than argue about Brexit.

Peasant-Savant

Déguignet family, circa 1875

Fewer pleasures are more direct or immediate than the pleasure of good conversation.  We all know what a good book can do.  In Milton’s famous definition it “is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”  Conversation does not aspire to immortality, even the self-conscious immortality of the archive.  It has a spendthrift and wastrel nature, like a libation that leaves only its moist and rapidly drying shadow in the sand, a unique outpouring treasured up for no other time or place or company than those who are creating it in the moment.  Of course, books often lead to conversations, and, as today’s little anecdote will demonstrate, conversations may lead to books.

            Two very old and dear friends from New York recently visited us.  Jerry is an eminent historian, Jayn an eminent flautist; both are wonderful conversationalists.  We touched on various topics, domestic and foreign, drifting for a moment into the literary and artistic life of France in the middle of the nineteenth century.  It was in this context that Jayn mentioned a friend who had translated from the French a book* that had received a good deal of attention upon its publication in 1994 by a provincial editorial house, the memoir of a nineteenth-century French peasant, published from manuscripts that had somehow survived a century of oblivion, neglect, and even conscious disdain. This was all news to me, but within a week a perfect remaindered copy was in my hands at a cost of four dollars, inclusive of postage.

            Jean-Marie Déguignet was born into abject poverty in Brittany in 1834, the sickly son of landless agricultural laborers.  He died in Quimper, a few kilometers from the place of his birth, in 1905.  But quite a bit happened to him in between—in Russia, Africa, and Mexico, among other places.  In his later life Déguignet was a radical anarchist and a priest-hating anticlerical, usually penurious, oppressed on every side, walking that fine line between mumbling, street-person eccentricity and certifiable madness.  His seemingly simple but unattainable dream was to become a hermit-beekeeper. The latter part of his book will have the greatest appeal for most readers, but it was his formative boyhood that I found most arresting.

            Being “born into poverty” was no figure of speech.  There was no money, and very often no opportunity to earn any.  Distressed families lived by begging, and for years it was the children’s taxing occupation to go house by house through the sparsely settled farm country trying to scrounge a few half-rotten potatoes for his penniless family.  I find it most interesting that the embittered free-thinker, looking back on those experiences, turned to no political, let alone Marxist paradigm.  Instead he turned to the Gospels, whose official ecclesiastical interpretation he so despised—and in particular to those passages in which Jesus imposes a life of mendicancy upon his closest followers, adding with terrifying indignation that Judgment Day will be kinder to Sodom and Gomorrah than to those who denied food to his poor.  Any scholar of Franciscanism will recognize in the texts alluded to the very heart of Francis’s vision of religious life.

Jean-François Millet: Man with the Hoe

            Déguignet’s attitude toward peasant Catholicism is remarkable.  He hated it, and regarded it as the great millstone weighing down his countrymen.  One of his longest and most interesting chapters—an account of his visit to Jerusalem in the company of believing Russian peasants—is mainly a catalogue of vituperation and blasphemy.  Yet he never entirely broke free of the despised faith.  His remarkable self-education began with the priests, from whose rustic service books he first deduced written Breton and then Latin—all this before acquiring even the rudiments of standard French.   His mental acuity was of a particular kind occasionally documented in the old medical literature.  Among the early disasters of his life was a terrible skull fracture, the result of having been kicked by a horse.  He was convinced that this accident had “rearranged his brains,” leaving him with a photographic memory and intuitive powers of grammatical analysis and the power to master writing merely through imitation.  He then read widely and indiscriminately, achieving on his own many of the markers of a middle-class education.  At some point he started writing cahiers (notebooks) full of biographical reminiscences and essays on historical, scientific, and mythological topics that interested him.  His book is laced with classical allusions, Latin tags, and snippets from the poets of the Pléiade.  A surprising number of notebooks survived to be sought out and rescued by an indefatigable researcher who recognized their importance.  One of the poems I memorized in school was Edwin Markham’s “Man With the Hoe,” a socialist response to Jean-François Millet’s painting of that title.  Markham’s poem concludes thus:

  How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —
    With those who shaped him to the thing he is —
    When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.
    After the silence of the centuries?

There is a sense in which this book suggests an answer.  A few months before he died, Déguignet concluded his biography thus:  “I end by wishing mankind the power or rather the will, to become true and good human beings capable of understanding one another and getting on together in a societal life that is noble and happy.  And….Doue bardono d’an nanaon.”   According to the translator, that ritual phrase of Breton means “God forgive in the beyond.”

A good deal of the book is explicitly or implicitly about language, both as an instrument of oral communication and as the nearly magical key to the author’s autodidacticism.  The Déguignets were illiterate monoglot speakers of Breton, an ancient Celtic tongue distributed among several dialects throughout the westward-jutting bump of land between the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel, due south of English Somerset and Cornwall, with Brest at the west and Rennes at the east.  It is usually called Brittany; Chaucer calls it “little Britain”.  One Breton name for the land is Cornwall (Cornouaille)—reminding us of a vanished age in which the coastal refugees of the south of England and those of the west of France had been a conjoined linguistic community.  The last Cornish-speakers in England vanished in the eighteenth century; but in France the language was so deeply entrenched that even until today it has to some extent survived the usual attempts of nationalist idiots to improve the culture of native minorities by obliterating it.  Déguignet did not speak or read French, hardly even heard it spoken, before he entered the army at the age of twenty.  What he heard then was mainly obscenities.  If we are to believe him, his first conversation “in the language of Voltaire” was with a Russian officer after the Battle of Sevastopol in 1855.  Like most French intellectuals of his century, Déguignet had a madcap theory of the origins of human language.  It came to him while boning up on Italian in preparation for a campaign in 1859.  The distinctive beauty of Italian, he claimed, derived from the fact that all its words were “pronounced with the tip of the tongue and the lips, unlike the Anglo-Saxon languages, which are pronounced with the throat; which proved that these languages were transmitted to mankind by wild beasts, whereas the Latin ones came from birds.”

Jean-Marie Déguignet, Memoirs of a Breton Peasant, trans. by Linda Archer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004)

April Poets

We have entered April, a month of poetic significances, but also of deceptions.  “April is the cruelest month,” writes Eliot in that part of his poem called “The Burial of the Dead.”   April comes “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”   It is in the mix of memory and desire, or at any rate in the imperfect ratio between them, that the danger of deception lies.  The last two days of March here were warm and sunny.  Some of the early daffodils were already out, but now they came on in a riot.   And the forsythia, until now a mere golden-green haze, popped overnight into full gold.  “The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning has come” says the singer of the Song of Songs.   “The voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” That’s the King James Version, of course, where the “turtle” is Tudor English for the turtle dove. At the Fleming homestead, however, it was real turtles, two of them, Hector and Chloë, who were suckered into thinking that spring was really here.  They are not much for voice, actually, but they waddled out of their hibernation in our enclosed atrium to sniff the air and have a paddle in the pool.  As I have done no serious yard work for months, the atrium is a real mess; but it was still a jolly scene, turtles strutting in the sunshine.  Then, most cruelly indeed, at nightfall on Sunday, the temperature fell again to freezing; April Fool’s day broke bright but chill.  The turtles had returned to the drawing board stage of spring under their hibernatory blankets of dead leaves.

The greatest of April poems in English—to which Eliot obviously alludes--is undoubtedly the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer with its famous first sentence: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote/The droghte of March has perced to the roote…”   As I used to make my living teaching this poem, its rhetorically gaudy opening has for me a special significance.  It is the one bit of Middle English known to the general public; most educated people of sixty winters or more learned it in high school, back in the days when people used to learn things there, and many can still quote a large portion of it.  Can and do.  It’s quite an opening line: nine couplets and a hundred and twenty words long.  Despite the fact that all it “says” is that people want to go on pilgrimage in April, a surprising amount happens in it, actually, and rather quickly.  Some of my fellow Chaucerians want to deny that Chaucer is an allegorist.  I am not quite sure what they make of “the drought of March.”  Just what March drought is that? I ask.  Chaucer is either an allegorist or a really lousy meteorologist.  The latest statistics I have are from 2018.  In February of that year 64.3 millimeters of rain fell on London, in April 86.3.  In March there were 104.4 millimeters.  Just saying.

There are other poetic months, especially May and June.  The first poem I can remember being made to memorize in school was by the American poet James Russell Lowell.  I don’t think it actually has a title, but our reader called it “June Day.” Lowell is pretty obscure these days, probably better known (if at all) as an abolitionist than as a bard.  He was big in the mid-nineteenth century, but I’m not sure that even I own his works.  To get the text I sought I had to turn to the Internet, where the subject of his poem is defined as “the weather”.  Just like Chaucer, I guess.  It begins by asking the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?”  As our summer vacation began in that month, it was a question some of us could get behind.  But our teacher had very interesting things to say about it.  She told us that the words in poetry often need a little more thought than “ordinary” words may call for. For example, what about the word rare in the first line? she asked.   What rare ordinarily meant was “seldom occurring” but it must mean something else here.  Otherwise the answer to the question, “What is so rare as a day in June?” would be a day in April, September, or November—other months of thirty days.  I’m still pondering the ingenuity of that one, meaning that she had achieved the teacher’s higher goal—getting a student to think, rather than simply telling him what to think.  Then there was the cook-out at which the host asked his friend, Will Shakespeare, how he liked his steak.  O rare Ben Jonson.   I also had to think a little about the third line (Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune), since the meaning of try was not the ordinary one and there was this rather fancy if it be, a form of verbal contingency I could recognize and was happy now to be able to name as “subjunctive”.

One special function of the subjunctive becomes increasingly important with advancing age, and that is the “condition contrary to fact”.  If I were you, blah blah blah.  If all were as it should be, one swallow would a summer make.  At the very least, two turtles would make a spring.

Report on the Report of the Report

            Some years ago a convergence of curious circumstances led to me to write a book about some literary classics of the Cold War.  In order to write about four books that interested me greatly, I felt obliged to read many others that interested me less.  Among the large library I assembled was a best-seller of the year 1958—the year of my graduation from college.  Its author was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, and its title was Masters of Deceit.  The masters of deceit were the Communists, particularly American Communists—about twenty thousand of them at the time of publication—but the real source of the contagion was Russia.   Hoover himself might be described as a master of the oddly constructed sentence: “Engels was tall and thin, blue-eyed, two years younger than Marx, and a lover of horses and women.”  Horses and women?   Well there’s some masterful deceit right in plain sight.

            Hoover and other prominent anti-Communists of that time saw Russian collusion everywhere.  Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, opined that Dwight Eisenhower was possibly “a conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy”.  Even then, at the height of the Cold War, sane people judged Welch to be a kook.  And I doubt that even he could have gotten his mind around the idea that a future American President might fire a future FBI Director in order to cover up his collusion with Russian politicians and espionage agents.  But in those days the peddlers of embarrassing conspiracy theories were mainly on the right.  We owe to the best minds of our contemporary moment the development of the collusionist scenario.  

What might be called the Mueller Report report issued by Attorney General Barr excited in me two unworthy reactions: surprise, followed closely by a kind of subliminal disappointment.  The latter reveals a degree of political pathology that it is hard to fess up to.   When a patriotic American citizen of conservative temperament is disappointed to learn that his President is not actually treasonous, there is something wrong—wrong with him, of course, but also, perhaps, with something rather larger.   I blame society.  Mr. Mueller and his staff beavered away for two years while maintaining an eloquent silence that our household exegetes at the New York Times and National Public Radio daily transformed for me into the unmistakable portent of high crimes and misdemeanors. 

Is there a separate Pulitzer Prize for headlines?  If so, I want to nominate the Times’s combo of “Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy Says Barr” and “Barr Clears Trump of Obstruction After Mueller Demurs”.   Who is this man Barr with his four-page masterpiece of deceit?  He’s the Attorney General, Mr. Mueller’s boss.   A dull stickler for legal formalities (often called “the rule of law” by the Times) Mr. Mueller, as required, forwards his report to his boss.  There is reason to believe that Barr had thought a bit in advance about how he would handle Mueller’s report when finally submitted.   After all, Barr had recently gone through public confirmation hearings composed in large measure of stern demands from his Democratic inquisitors that, should he be confirmed, he honor and protect the “Mueller probe”, as the press like to call it—demands to which he solemnly submitted before a televised audience of millions.   It may have been his sensitivity to the possibility of distorting in any way Mr. Mueller’s principal finding—that he did not discover that Trump colluded with Russians—that led the Attorney General to cite Mueller’s own words verbatim and punctuate them with quotation marks: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”  To attribute this opinion to Barr may strike one as rather curious: something like attributing Hamlet’s soliloquy to Daniel Day-Lewis.  “Day-Lewis Claims ‘To Be or Not to Be?’ Is Question”. To be fair, by early morning when the print copy of the Times arrived, the absurdity had been removed.  By then, however, Progressive Twitter was in full tweet.  Note that Mueller-Barr speak only of the “Russian government”.  No mention whatsoever of possible random oligarchs, the Bolshoi Ballet or the Nizhny Novgorod United Football Club.

The grousing of sore losers, however, may be drowned out by the bellowing of the sore winner.  President Trump says (or tweets) a lot of unscripted things.  Alas, frequently these things are stupid, too often they are erroneous, and almost always they are ungrammatical.   He did not fail us on this occasion.  Barr had made only two specific citations from the report, in one of which, with regard to the possible charge of obstruction of justice, he quoted Mueller as saying “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”  So, said the President: “a complete and total exoneration”.

And so, I fear, it will go on, and that is a pity.  For it is not as though the only fish our nation has to fry are red herrings.  For example, our elected politicians might address such matters as economic stability, public education, environmental salubrity, physical infrastructure, and the reconstruction of a politics aimed at problem-solving and pursued in civility.  Oh, and then there is foreign policy.  Russian interference did not elect Donald Trump.  The desperate and probably misplaced hope of millions of forgotten Americans did.  Still, our political and journalistic elites have managed to spend the better part of two years in a strange obsession.  So the Masters of Deceit in Moscow have good reason to gloat.  They are a bit short of cash these days.  And with enemies like theirs, who needs expensive friends?  I wonder: does Trump love horses?

The College Admissions Mess

Two circumstances conspire to make this an unusually long essay.  First, it is D-Day, D being the Roman numeral for 500 and this being the five hundredth weekly essay I have published on this site since the appearance of “On Columns, Communists, and Camões” on June 13, 2009.   Even if the chiefly remarkable feature of this performance be its futility, obstinacy, or mere curiosity, racking up a total word count slightly in excess of Gone with the Wind, even if falling slightly short of War and Peace, demands a metaphorical pat on the back.  Of course patting oneself on the back even metaphorically is rather awkward, and could easily lead to a metaphorical dislocated shoulder.

            So I’ve already blown a hundred words on that, and the more important cause of dilation still lies ahead: the “college admissions” scandal that commanded so much news during the last week.  This is, in the first place, a topic of almost universal appeal, and it offered a rarely uncomplicated opportunity to exult in moral superiority and to hate on the filthy rich with impunity.  Furthermore, I know a lot about the topic and have thought about it; so it offers me the personal bonus of imagining that my ideas—some about to be shared with you—are markedly superior to those I have been reading in the press.

The college admissions crisis obviously begins long before college.  Here’s a story from yesterday’s paper.  The keen competition for entrance to the next freshman class in the designated “elite” public high schools in New York City—the Yales and MITs of the system, as it were--yielded a cohort of which only one in ten is black or Hispanic.  Stuyvesant, for example, accepted 897, of whom seven are black.  (A quarter of the more than a million students in the City’s public schools are black).  Admission to the elite schools has long been determined by a single difficult entrance exam, as nearly objective as such things can be, in two subjects: English and math.  The utility of any exam can be questioned, but this one—in addition to being administered with absolute impartiality--is impressively coherent.  English competency is fundamental to the skills of literacy (reading, writing, and effective oral communication); math teaches numeracy and is the gateway skill for the STEM fields.   You thus could say it is a basic test of capacity for high-level work in both the humanities and the sciences.  Appalled, as all of us surely should be, by the reality revealed in the yearly results, Mayor DeBlasio suggests as a remedy chucking the entrance exam in favor of some method more effective in accommodating racial preference. 

I believe the Mayor is a man of good will and sincerely egalitarian instinct; and I presume that it is pure political duress that lies behind his dreadful muddle of means and ends.  The college admissions fraud that has been in the papers is a shameful fiasco, though one made psychologically safe for most of us by the unaffordability of its turpitude.  It is a shock, a disgrace, an embarrassment.  But in terms of actual scandal or crisis it lags far behind the general crisis of American public education.  Our high schools vary enormously in quality, and people know it.  That’s why New York parents will do practically anything to get their kid into Stuyvesant.  Meanwhile throughout the country, but especially in our large cities, schools are failing to prepare young people by the thousands with the skills and discipline to do anything that our economy needs enough to pay for.  Now that is a scandal.  Mr. DeBlasio simply cannot, or dare not, recommend that we chuck out several hundred ineffective school administrators.  And, to be fair, that’s not the root of the problem either.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes (aka “equity”) are quite different things, and “fairness” will not be achieved by fudging the two.

There seems to be an implicit belief in some kind of free-floating inherent “merit,” untouched by social influences, that will manifest itself in the college admissions process.  That is nonsense.   All of us are the sum of our natural capacities and the efforts that we ourselves and others have expended in developing them.

I can tell you how to be a compelling admissions candidate, but you may not want to listen.  Start by being born intelligent, then cultivate your intelligence with wide reading and other demanding intellectual activities.  Live in a household with two loving parents, both of whom are seriously interested in your educational progress and willing to devote serious time to its pursuit.  Develop some wholesome, demanding and absorbing interests—sports, playing the oboe, bird watching, that sort of thing—and pursue them at a high level.  Eat regular family dinners at a set time, and include in your table talk some serious conversation about serious things.  Try to speak Standard English in complete sentences, and do not shy away from words of three syllables.  And, oh yeah, like, use “like” only as a preposition, conjunction, or a transitive verb.

This is not satire.  I am aware of the decline of the American family, but aware also of the dangerous popular fantasy that the public schools can or should replace its unique educational function.  I cannot go along with Bernie Sanders’s barmy idea of “free college for all,” but I am absolutely in favor of a variety of special, remedial, compensatory, and enrichment programs designed to repair some of the damage inflicted on young people by the social pathologies of those who have brought them into the world.  But, please, don’t call the absence of such pathology “unfair”.

This episode of flagrant cheating by wealthy parents suggests that many people have a very curious notion of the actual nature of institutions of higher education, and of the actual process of entry to them.  There is much indignation at the thought that an applicant admitted on the basis of a store-bought SAT score has violated some rigorously enforced protocol that would have otherwise guaranteed the success of an objectively “deserving” candidate.  In fact there are already so many blind guesses, fudges, finagles, and socially engineered adjustments involved as to knock that idea in the head.  The slightest experience in trying to rank-order a list of even ten similar candidates will cure you of spurious confidence in the objectivity of the exercise.  To call the admissions process an inexact science is to do violence both to science and the concept of exactitude.  We can wax indignant about a Yale athletic coach who feloniously got a house in Florida out of the slack in the system, but he did not create the slack.

Much scorn has been cast upon parents who hired SAT-preppers for their kids.  Really?   For what other major life trials do we consider a lack of preparation to be virtuous?  We have managed to create in the college application business an experience that is an ordeal for most applicants and an actual trauma for many of them. That is why there is a burgeoning private industry of educational consultants, advisors, and consultants.  They offer clients strategic advice, sample SAT exams, mock interviews, critiques of personal essays, and psychological hand-holding.   Only some applicants can afford to make use of these services.  Is this unfair, that is to say, an offense against justice?  You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  Yet people who undertake strenuous training before trying to climb Mount Everest or auditioning for first violin in the symphony orchestra tend to have better outcomes than those who do not.  There is a certain contradiction in the fact that everybody wants to get into an elite school while nobody wants to be elite.

It’s hard to get into Stanford, but so what?  Few people have an accurate idea of either the large number of American colleges nor of their extraordinary variety.  My dramatic education in these matters derives from nearly a decade’s service as a commissioner of the Middle States accrediting body, when I became aware of all of the colleges in several populous states.  Consciously picking a low and conservative number, I will say that there are three hundred terrific colleges in this country, most of them unknown even by name to most high school seniors.  How could anyone shed a tear at failing to gain admission to Duke?

On the one hand you have armies of parents and counselors desperately trying to get their kids into certain schools.  On the other you have each year another group of financially beleaguered institutions desperately trying to recruit enough students to keep in business.  Hampshire College, which early in my career was a trendy, pace-setting, wave-of-the-future kind of place, is in the process of going belly up.  With an endowment of roughly fifty million, Hampshire is not without resources.  But perhaps a private institution that doesn’t have a minimum of, say, a quarter of a million per undergraduate might as well close up shop.

            One emerging attitude that particularly takes me aback is that our private colleges and universities—still the envy of the world—should adopt admissions policies that take no account of their history, customs, or traditions.  But think about this for a second.  What sort of place is Harvard, founded 1636?  Is it a public amenity like any other?  Consider the toilet facilities at Interstate Highway rest stops; consider the Emergency Room at any hospital.  You want and expect such places to exist, and that they be clean, safe, and available indifferently to absolutely anybody needing to use them.  Then there’s the little restaurant where you always celebrate your anniversary.  You have been on friendly terms with the proprietors for years.  Your children and theirs were on the same high school athletic teams.  Consider the parish church, civic club, political party, or do-gooder organization to which, on account of your belief in its ethical mission, you give generously of your money, your time, your leadership talent, possibly as an elected officer, director, or trustee.  These are all public venues.  All colleges in theory share the same mission: the preservation and transmission of knowledge.  But the very essence of a college, as its published propaganda will tell you ad nauseum, is community.  Human community is based in more or less intimate personal relationships, very often extended over considerable periods of time.  In admitting a freshman class, an institution is grossly remiss if it does not give serious thought to the nature of its community.  That is far from “perpetuating the old boys’ club”—one of the more tedious canards I have heard around here for years.  On the whole the Ivy League institutions were remarkably lithe in evolving from small theological seminaries at the nation’s founding to huge charities and engines for the redistribution of their wealth in the form of social capital.  The racialized “affirmative action” of recent decades is but one aspect of the extraordinary role they have played over the generations.  Maintaining some sense of communal continuity over decades of revolutionary change requires a balancing act.  It requires, too, abandoning pseudo-scientific pretensions about a process of admission along with the odd neo-Bolshevik notion that the virtues we believe to be inherent in the education we offer our current students become despicable in our alumni.   So if old Gotrocks Schnakenfuss of the class of ’24 thought so much of his education that he gave you twenty-four million dollars for scholarship grants for penurious undergraduates, that should not be a strike against his accomplished but far from penurious great-granddaughter now a supplicant at your gates.

Troping the Light Fantastic

The Venerable Bede, bagging a trope 

American political discourse has arrived at what used to be called a pretty pass.  Though few political speakers are very good at saying things themselves, they are daily more certain about what other people are under no circumstances allowed to say.  The Hon. Ihlan Omar, temporarily incumbent in Paul Bunyan’s old Congressional district, keeps making anti-Semitic comments.  Or comments alleged to be…or perceived by some as…They are to be forgiven, according to the Speaker of the House, because she doesn’t understand the meaning of her words.  Ms. Pelosi’s intersectionalist lieutenant, Mr. Clyburn, explains it all in terms of the relative remoteness of the Holocaust as compared to the immediacy of Africa’s suffering.  Yet to anyone measuring the historical perspective of our national oratory with an instrument less fine-tuned than a micrometer, an American politician making anti-Semitic remarks perhaps attains at best the novelty of “Dog Bites Man.”   Rev that up with a little global or intersectional fine-tuning (Muslim politician makes anti-Semitic remarks) and you’re closer to the level of  “Dog Bites Alpo”.   If in doubt, read the “debates” of any meeting of the Arab League.  Since my field is philology rather than politics, I shall comment less on Representative Omar’s content than on the terminology journalists choose to characterize it.  Hers are not “controversial remarks,” accusations, insults, slurs or even mere characterizations; they are “anti-Semitic tropes”.  In fact tropes are all the rage these days.

In this linguistic turn a medievalist finds news good and bad.  The good news is that the power of the trope (even abused) may banish from polite usage the even more annoying meme, which was threatening fatally to infect the prose of the semi-literate commentariat on whom I depend to keep my blood pressure up.  The bad news of course is the debauch of the term trope.

If you want to get the real dope on the trope you have to do what few journalists have done and read a book by the Venerable Bede, published circa 710 CE, called De schematibus et tropis*.  It’s the first, and so far as I am concerned, the last word on tropes.  In it we learn that trope (tropos) is a Greek umbrella term for various figures of speech abundant in the Scriptures.  “The Greeks pride themselves on having invented these figures or tropes,” says Bede. If you want to know the Greek tropes, specifically (and, believe me, you don’t), they are prolepsis, zeugma, hypozeuxis, syllepsis, anadiplosis, anaphora, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, paranomasia, schesis onamaton, paromoeon, homoeotelon, homoeoptoton, polyptoton, hirmos, polysyndeton, and dialyton. 

 Bede continues: “A trope is a figure in which a word, either from need or for the purpose of embellishment, is shifted from its proper meaning to one similar but not proper to it.  There are thirteen tropes which Latin custom and usage recognize: Metaphor, Catachresis, Metalepsis, Metonymy, Antonomasia, Epithet, Synechdote, Onomatopoeia, Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole, Allegory, Homoeosis.”

The controversy in the halls of Congress is being prosecuted in the murky borderland between classical anti-Semitism and political criticism of the current Israeli government.  With a daring trope constructed of implied epithet and a pariphrastic onomatopoetical catachresis Representative Omar had some harsh things to say about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), formerly known to me as a hard-driving lobbying outfit but now, possibly, a semi-sacral institution of the American civil religion enjoying a protected status and exemption from criticism somewhere between that of Smile Train and the Sierra Club.  Specifically, Ms. Omar’s trope posited a possible connection between lobbying and money: “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”  Being a pensioner rather than a politician, I required a few moments to absorb the force of this particular trope.  Benjamins?  Then (thanks to T. S. Eliot) I got it! O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--My daughter! my ducats! my Benjamins!  You see, down our way, so far from the corridors of power, it tends to be mainly about the Georges, although now and again, during the week when the Social Security checks show up, it sometimes rises briefly to be about the Abrahams.

It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!  Political controversy aside, that’s a fantastic trope, and one that can illustrate the extended meaning of the term as it later developed with regard to the liturgy.  A musical trope is a kind of pleasing metrical filler—think of it, perhaps, in terms of the chorus of a folk song—that adorns and amplifies the primary text.  Here is the textbook definition: “in medieval church music, melody, explicatory text, or both added to a plainchant melody”.  The technical term for this kind of musical elaboration, incidentally, is farsing.  I don’t know how glad you are to learn this, but you do need to know.

You find tropes attached to psalms and other liturgical hymns, and there are whole books (tropers) full of them.  But what medieval chant could this farce farse—which is to say, could this trope trope?  Well, consider the well-known liturgical hymn “Sed et Omnia Vasa”.  The text for this hymn was taken from the account of the fantastic wealth of King Solomon’s (3 Kings 10:21), a man whose conspicuous consumption included the biblical equivalent of lighting his cigars with banknotes.  “Sed et omnia vasa de quibus potabat rex Salomon erant aurea…non erat argentum nec alicuius pretii putebatur in diebus Salomonis.  “Moreover all the vessels out of which king Solomon drank, were of gold:…there was no silver, nor was any account made of it in the days of Solomon.”   A suitable trope for this text could be “Et omnia erant de re aurea:—it was all about the gold, baby.  

*”Bede’s De Schematibus et Tropis—A Translations,” by Gussie Hecht Tanenhaus, in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 48 (1962): 238-253.