Like most five-year-olds, my youngest granddaughter, Melanie Eisenhower, sometimes likes to stay home rather than go to nursery school. Once, when I asked her why, she said, “I hate school.” I told her that I thought she liked her teacher, whom I had met recently on a visit to her school. She thought a moment and said, “I hate school, but I love my teacher.”
She comes by her affection for teachers quite naturally. Her grandmother, Pat, was one of Whittier High School’s most popular teachers when we first met in 1938. During the eighteen years I attended public grade and high schools, Whittier College, and Duke University Law School, I can recall no poor teachers. I can remember a number of very good ones. I was fortunate to have attended school before the wave of “progressive” reforms in the 1960s radically changed the curriculum and seriously weakened the quality of teaching.
My mother was my first teacher. She spent countless hours encouraging me, helping me with homework, and challenging me to learn. My first-grade teacher was outstanding. My first report card had all E’s on it except for writing, in which I got a U, the only time I ever failed a course. Handwriting and drawing never appealed to me. I often wonder if some of the good grades I got in later years were due to the fact that my teachers couldn’t read my writing. My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Burum, launched me on a life-long love affair with geography; National Geographic became my favorite magazine. My seventh-grade teacher, Lewis Cox, who was also our part-time coach, sparked the interest that led me to become a history major in college.
I found math difficult. But Mr. Miano in algebra and Miss Ernsberger in geometry challenged me to make math one of my best subjects. I vividly recall the time in my sophomore year at Fullerton High School when Miss Ernsberger gave our geometry class a difficult problem and told us that anyone who solved it would get an A in the course. I started to work on it at nine o’clock at night at the table in the kitchen. It was a bitterly cold night, and I kept warm by lighting the fire in the gas oven and leaving the door open. Right after my mother came down to bake pies for the store at four in the morning, I got the answer. After that I never thought there was a problem I couldn’t solve if I worked hard and long enough.
Mr. Swartling made chemistry and physics fascinating even for those of us who were more interested in what are now called the “language arts” and “social studies.” In his course in oral English, H. Lyn Sheller taught us that a speaker will be more effective when he uses a conversational style rather than flamboyant oratory. Long before television made that approach mandatory, he drilled it into me, and I have followed it throughout my career. Miss Fink loved the English language, and her insistence on strict compliance with the rules of grammar made an indelible impression on me.
Jenny Levin, my American history teacher at Whittier High School, was the toughest grader I ever had. I was not alone in the assessment. Several years later I learned that so many parents complained about the low grades she gave their children that she was relieved of her teaching duties and assigned to be a study hall supervisor. What a loss to her profession that was. In teaching a subject that was easy for me, she was pushing me to reach the level of excellence of which I was capable rather than just being satisfied with being better than average. I have always found that the best teachers were those who graded the hardest, just as the best dentists are those who aren’t afraid to hurt you in order to clean out the cavities.
At Whittier College, my first-year French teacher had just completed two years of graduate work in Paris. Long before Professor Higgins made the point in My Fair Lady, she insisted that we not only learn how to write the language well but also to pronounce it correctly. Dr. Paul Smith was an inspirational lecturer on American history and the Constitution. I remember him most for his love of books. His mouth would literally water as he read aloud from some newly published book to our class. It was a standing joke among his students that as great as our affection for him was, we avoided sitting in the front seat for fear that some of his moist enthusiasm would reach our desks.
Dr. Albert Upton taught a revolutionary new course called Basic English. I learned from him that the most effective way to write and speak was not with big words but with sparse, lean prose. It was at his suggestion—in fact, insistence—that I read everything that Tolstoy had written in the summer before my senior year.
In his course on the Philosophy of Christian Reconstruction, Dr. Herschel Coffin taught us not just to read the Bible but to understand its profound lessons for our daily lives.
Something else about my teachers at Whittier College continues to amaze me. During the Depression years from 1930 to 1934, the four people I have mentioned, all of whom were full professors with PhDs, took voluntary 25 percent cuts in their $2,500 annual salaries to keep the college from going under. The fact that it did survive and today is rated as one of the better small colleges in the nation is a tribute to their sacrifice and dedication to education.
The Duke Law School did not have such financial problems. Dean Justin Miller was able to recruit a teaching staff of brilliant young professors from throughout the country. Douglas Maggs in Constitutional Law, Charles Lowndes in Taxation, Malcolm McDermott in Criminal Law, Bryan Bolich in Property, and Claude Horack in Equity, were all outstanding scholars in their fields.
David Cavers, who had been first in his class at Harvard Law School, taught Conflict of Laws and was the faculty adviser for our law review, which was then called Law and Contemporary Problems. Some people can do two things at the same time. He is the only man I know who could do three. He could grade papers, help me edit a law review article I was writing, and blow absolutely perfect smoke rings. Since smoking anywhere on campus was prohibited at Whittier, I was surprised when professors and students even smoked in the classrooms at Duke. Cavers once told me that Duke also had a no-smoking rule—except when products were made by the American Tobacco Company, which was then the major source of Duke’s huge endowment.
Cavers gave me some excellent advice about writing. When I told him how hard it was for me to find exactly the right words to express my thoughts, he said, “You have an affliction common to most writers—intellectual constipation.” He said it was sometimes better to write more freely in the first instance rather than trying to write a first draft that would measure up to the standards of an article for a law review. He must have taught me well, because he sent the article to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who thought well enough of it to write back a letter of commendation. I was also indebted to Cavers for recommending me for a position on the legal staff of the Office of Price Administration, my first Washington experience. Nothing gave me greater pleasure as Vice President than when I was able to debunk some ludicrous charges that were made against Cavers of pro-Communist sympathies.
I learned one unforgettable lesson in law school from a student rather than a teacher. Over half of the members of my first-year class were Phi Beta Kappas, and I worried whether I could keep my scholarship against such formidable competition. When I confided in Bill Adelson, a third-year student with a brilliant record, he reassured me. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’ve noticed how long you study in the law library. You have all that it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.” I also learned a lot from working my way through school. I was an assistant to the librarian, Miss Covington; did research for the dean, Claude Horack; and spent a summer mimeographing a new case book on constitutional law for Douglas Maggs. Sometimes the work was boring, but I never resented having to do it.
The professor who influenced me the most at Duke was Dr. Lon L. Fuller, who finished his teaching career at Harvard. He taught the basic course in Contracts as well as it could possibly be taught. But I was particularly fortunate to be one of three third-year students selected to take his course Readings in Jurisprudence. It was a mountaintop experience to have one of the top legal philosophers in the nation share his wisdom with us on our legal heritage from the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the French, and the British. His book The Morality of Law, based on the Storrs Lectures he delivered at Yale in 1965, should be required reading for anyone interested in law or philosophy. He was also a man of great courage. For a Harvard Law School professor to head the national Scholars for Nixon Committee in 1960 took guts.
Some may be surprised that I have not mentioned a political science professor. The reason is that I never had a course in political science and in fact would not advise anyone who plans a political career to take one. Why? Because politics is an art, not a science. It is the art of getting along with people, and you can learn more about people clerking in a store than sitting in a political science course.
Others might contend that four years of Latin in high school was a waste of time, and that four years of French in college could have been compressed to a six-week Berlitz course. I would agree that studying Latin, though useful, is not necessary as a preparation for courses in the modern Romance languages. But I would still recommend Latin for two reasons. First, it is the most disciplined and orderly of all languages. The hours I spent studying Latin taught me to think in a more logical, disciplined way. A second advantage is that English translations do not adequately capture classics of our Roman heritage such as Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil. This is even more true of French. French is a very subtle language. Literal translations sometimes can’t convey the real meaning of a French text. Only by reading Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other classics in French can you get their true flavor.
Critics of the kind of education I received might point out that, except for the law, it did not provide useful information about the practical problems a person faces in life. But that is not the point of education. School should discipline and strengthen the mind, teach young people how to think about and solve problems, and make them realize that the world did not begin the moment they were born.
In the sixties, schools became a social and cultural wasteland. In college, curricular decisions were held hostage to student demonstrators who thought they knew better than teachers and administrators what and how young people should learn. In high school, educators and students seemed to spend more time arguing about smoking areas, hair length, and hemlines than they did teaching and learning. In elementary school, students became guinea pigs for the latest theoretical crazes imported from Washington.
In the confusion, the fundamental mission of education was lost. Before the sixties, the job of education was to help students become productive members of society. Good schooling prepared them for the responsibilities of having jobs and families. But during the sixties, the very idea of “having jobs and families” was judged to be hopelessly banal, even corrupt. It became the job of education to mold students into culturally and politically correct citizens of some ideal world that existed only in the brain of the ideologue or theoretician.
It became “racist” to teach Shakespeare to Hispanic children, “racist” to teach traditional English to inner-city black children, “racist” not to teach white children Latin American literature or not to teach non-English-speaking children in their own language. Competition was ruled to be dangerous, so grades were tossed out at many colleges—to be replaced by “Pass” or “Fail”—and competitive sports were frowned upon. Standard tests were judged to be racist, sexist, or both. Only last year a women’s group complained that a test that asked women about stock dividends was inherently anti-women. In fact, what was anti-women was the group’s implicit, condescending suggestion that women couldn’t understand dividends as well as men.
Some of the education reforms were probably well meaning. Many, thankfully, have been modified or eliminated completely. But while many of their authors were either naive or ignorant, they were so powerful in the way they controlled the educational system that they risked crippling an entire generation of young people.
When they ruled traditional English “racist,” they forgot to tell employers to stop hiring people on the basis of how well they could speak or write.
When they pampered students with non-competitive sports and classes, they left them ill-prepared to deal with law school, medical school, job hunting, and life itself—all of which are ruthlessly competitive.
When they provided places on campus for children to smoke cigarettes, they lost the moral standing to tell them that it is deadly and also wrong to become addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs.
When schools and colleges were transformed from molders of youth to temples of youth, educators abrogated the responsibility to share the wisdom that can only come from having read more, studied more, suffered more, and triumphed more than young people. In the sixties and seventies teachers did not want to hurt young people by lecturing them, or making them pray, or punishing them, or being too authoritarian. Instead, they struggled to understand their students, to be their friends. But the students did not need friends. They needed teachers. By becoming ashamed of American society and uncertain about whether it really had anything of value to offer young people, many educators betrayed the youth of America. They left them alone, bereft, to learn about the world from heavy-metal rock records and slasher movies.
What should they learn instead? My views may not be the conventional wisdom, but because I feel so fortunate to have had a good education, I want to share them with others.
Each student should leave twelfth grade reading English at a twelfth-grade level or better. He should have read great English writers such as Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, and, in translation, great Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Spanish writers such as Cervantes, Latin American writers such as Borges. Black students should know something about Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and white students should know about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In short, every student should know a little bit about everything, so he can make an intelligent decision about what he wants to study in greater depth in college.
He should know algebra, geometry, and pre-calculus and the fundamentals of biology, chemistry, and physics. Our students’ persistent weakness in these subjects is our educational system’s greatest failure. Ever since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, educators have been pushed to emphasize science and math. Today the United States spends more per student on education than Japan, France, Britain, Italy, or Canada. And yet students in all these countries test higher in either science or math than students in the United States. Special interest groups that insist calls for better education should be matched with more government spending on education miss the point. Renewed educational excellence will be found not in dollars alone but also in the deportment of educators rededicated to the traditional methods and values of teaching that helped push the United States to the forefront of the industrialized world.
A student should know the rudiments of a foreign language, be able to recognize at least a few of the great works of Western music, and understand the tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the world’s other great religion, Marxism-Leninism.
He should have spent some time playing a competitive sport.
He should know the history of his country, and something about the history of the world. This should include contributions of women and minorities that were left out of the curriculum in earlier eras. But these new elements can be added without ejecting the classics of the past. He should know that black soldiers volunteered and fought as free men in the Civil War, and that women have made great scientific discoveries and have composed symphonies, painted masterpieces, and written some of the greatest works of literature.
When he is finished, and he is standing on the stage receiving his diploma from his principal, he should look out over the audience, and his mind and heart should fill to overflowing, not with uncertainty or guilt or confusion, but with pride in what he has accomplished and anticipation about what is to come. He should feel that there is nowhere he cannot go, nothing he cannot accomplish. Making every high school graduate feel these things should be the goal of every elementary and high school teacher.
To keep things in perspective, let me emphasize that when my other grandchildren, Jennie, Alex, and Christopher, bring their friends to visit us in Saddle River, I am amazed by their knowledge of the world and by how bright they are in fields we were not even aware of in our time. They know all about pulsars, black holes, and computers. Young college graduates I meet invariably impress me with how much they know. What concerns me is not the breadth of their education, but the depth. What they must guard against is becoming what Chambers described in Cold Friday: “The educated man who knew all about the time-space concept but did not know how to tell what time it was.”
We have a magnificent heritage and can never learn too much about it if we are to be able to defend it and to pass it on to our children. It is not fashionable to teach values these days. It is said that we must be flexible enough to meet the challenges of a changing world. But it is even more important that in a changing world we always hold firmly to certain unchangeable values.
In the final analysis, it always comes back to teachers.
In too many communities today, teaching is the most underpaid, unappreciated profession. The physical facilities of the schools I attended would be considered hopelessly inadequate today. But sixty years ago no profession had a higher standard or was more respected than teaching. When we were living in Yorba Linda, our teachers used to come to our home for a family dinner at the end of the school year. It must have been a chore for them, but for my brothers and me these were very special occasions. I particularly remember the time my mother served homemade ice cream topped with maraschino cherries for dessert. I had never had them before. My third-grade teacher ate the ice cream but left the cherries on her plate. People did not count calories in those days, and I always assumed that she left the cherries for me since she could not have helped but notice how much I had enjoyed my first exposure to that delicacy.
Any program of educational reform should put the primary emphasis on the quality of teaching. While we cannot expect our children to love all of their teachers, it is vital that they respect them, and that their teachers be worthy of that respect.
Teachers will earn more respect if they begin to focus more on teaching and less on theory and politics. Teacher unions pass resolutions against funding for the contras, investigate the political and cultural content of books and television programming, and lobby tirelessly for higher salaries and benefits. The National Education Association recently wasted union money by distributing illustrated “congressional trading cards” with pictures of each member of Congress, prompting congressmen to waste taxpayers’ money by writing one another to request autographed copies of their colleagues’ cards so they could complete their sets. As was the case even back when I attended Whittier College fifty-five years ago, the excruciatingly boring courses offered to education majors still emphasize how to teach rather than what to teach. Many teachers still worry more about their students’ feelings and cultural awareness than whether they can read, write, add, or think.
Someday there may be time for all of these elective subjects, but for now teachers have to get back to the basics—a tougher curriculum, more time in the classroom for each student, and raises for teachers based on performance as well as seniority. Without these and other measures, such as parental choice, our young people will fall so far behind that we will run the risk of entering the next century as a nation of semi-literates in a world of PhDs.