by Wes Wynne

Richard Russo's Straight Man

391 pages.

I seldom read fiction because, like many graduate students and political addicts, I feel guilty doing so -- each minute browsing a novel is a minute not spent studying history, biography, or (God forbid) dissertation references. The only times I make exceptions is when a book has some unusual relevance. Richard Russo's novel does because 1) its protagonist is an academic and 2) the action is set against the absurd backdrop of academic politics, intellectual folly and leftish nuttiness that I work around on a daily basis. Also, Richard Russo is a wise ass. That's why I like him, and why I like the protagonist, William Henry Devereaux, Jr.

You'd have to be a wise ass to come up with a character like Devereaux. Early on in a prologue scene, pre-adolescent Willie D. spends weeks engaging in a concentrated effort to wear down his parents into agreeing to get him a dog. They do, but it's a decrepit old dog adopted from the home of a decrepit old man, and within minutes of arriving at it's new home, young Willie inadvertently scares it to death by slamming a door. Then while he and father are burying the deceased, Willie looks up and pronounces, "We'll name her Red."

The grown-up William Devereaux, Jr. is the chairman of the English Department at West Central Pennsylvania State University. Undergoing a mid-life crisis while at the same time battling academic budgets and kidney stones, the poor man finds himself caught in a sudden avalanche of mayhem. As the advance material succinctly tells it, "Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a goose, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father, the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park."

It's quite a ride, and my reading of the work was punctuated by regular bursts of laughter. Russo has had some practice at this; he's the author of three other novels, including Nobody's Fool, which was made into a Paul Newman movie a couple of years ago. Russo has the gift of making the reader see through his character's eyes, understanding and appreciating the resigned acceptance and mischievousness with which Devereaux looks at life, with all it's disappointments and compromises.

Along the way, Russo has somehow familiarized himself with the academic environment amazingly well. He populates his imaginary English department with a host of absurd yet utterly believable characters, such as the untenured, pony-tailed fellow just out of Brown who, somewhat surprisingly, announced to his department he has no interest at all in literature, rather his thing is feminist theory and the role of images in American culture. (If this sounds silly, just read our cover story about UT's wackiest courses). The guy from Brown has been nick-named "Orshe" by the less with-it departmental faculty, because of an annoying habit. Every time someone uses the pronoun "he," ever-sensitive Orshe is quick to chime in with a mandatory "or she."

Russo manages to pack in a fair amount of sound social insight into this novel, as when he describes the student newspaper at his college as consisting largely of commentary on, "the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they're against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignation offsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, and style. in support of this notion there's only the entire culture."

by Jeremy Beer

Rita Kramer's Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers

First Published: 1991

I don't remember much from elementary school, but I do remember this: "Everyone's opinion counts." It was something of a mantra, chanted repeatedly in class after class, on through junior high and even into high school. Sharing one's opinion on any matter under the sun was always encouraged, sometimes even commanded. Years later, I recalled this pat phrase and was struck by its absurdity. "Everyone's opinion counts." It is hard to think of a statement that is less true. The illiterate janitor's opinion on campaign finance reform simply doesn't "count" in any meaningful sense. Surely, it ought not. And my opinion on what is wrong with my neighbor's car doesn't count because I am, as the ed school types would say, "mechanically challenged."

After reading Rita Kramer's Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, I now know the source of this fallacy. On her visits to thirteen schools of education during 1988 and 1989 Kramer found that one of the primary doctrines of education administrators and faculty is that there is no objective right and wrong, no objective truth that just might, by a long and arduous process of intellectual investigation, be revealed to us mortals. Logically, this means that "everyone's opinion counts" in the classroom. Knowledge is not the end of education because there is no knowledge, only opinions; therefore having children share their feelings and improving their self-esteem ought to be the goals of the classroom teacher.

With an engagingly simple and direct writing style, Kramer documents how this type of fuzzy-minded thinking pervades schools of education across the country. Her modus operandi is simply to give the educrats some rope; they inevitably manage to hang themselves. Take the professor at California State - Long Beach, for example, who proclaimed that "more important than content or thinking is the students' feelings." Or the leftist Eastern Michigan University professor, laboring to persuade her students of the validity of Marxism. "The ideology of 'work hard and you'll make it' covers up a whole set of social, structural issues." "Schools reproduce particular social hierarchies, the class system. Teachers make choices according to particular ideological systems." Or the students at Vanderbilt University, home of one of the more prestigious teacher-training programs in the country, struggling to give definitions of "social studies": "What you can do as a person for society." "It was just kinda the general thing we were studying - the world."

Several themes are traced throughout the book, as the same fads and foibles reappear within every institution: the conviction that the end of education is political, i.e. to bring about social change, rather than to impart knowledge; administrators preoccupied with the percentage of minorities (esp. blacks) in their programs (one wonders when black and Hispanic students will become tired of being displayed as political trophies by self-serving educationists); programs concentrating on how to teach at the expense of what to teach; an almost paranoid distrust of standardized tests as biased and useless; classes taught as rap sessions rather than lectures ("Few undergraduates, and still fewer students of education, know enough to make a worthwhile contribution to any class discussion," complains Kramer). The uniformity is extraordinary.

Kramer includes three chapters on Texas teacher-training institutions: Houston, Texas Southern, and UT. She summarizes first the uproar that erupted in 1979 after Texas Monthly published an article by Gene Lyons entitled "Why Teachers Can't Teach." That article played a large part in the passage of SB 994 in 1987, which created a limit on the amount of "methods" hours teachers-in-training could take and abolished the undergraduate education major. This latter provision has been of little value. UT simply created a major in "applied learning and development." What is "applied learning" but a euphemism for education?

At UT, Kramer sat in on a class in Reading/Language Arts in which a visiting professor informed her charges that since there is "no wrong" the students must "beware of comments that might be construed as judgmental." In that same class, "a good deal of (expensive) class time" was spent learning that "unused computer paper makes good scrap paper for drawing." In another course - this one on Social Studies - the all-female group of students "would not, to put it charitably, qualify as intellectuals." According to Kramer, these students had "trouble with the simplest directions." To cap off the UT experience, the acting dean of the College of Education told Kramer that "you can't not use the schools as the agencies of social change. It's too convenient."

Have things changed in the last ten years? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. Sources in the UT College of Education reveal an atmosphere where graduate students in education are afraid to criticize the prevailing winds of doctrine for fear of politically-inspired retribution. Undergraduate education classes are notoriously politicized. One professor reportedly instructed her class not to vote for Bob Dole. "He's not our friend," was her appraisal. If this were said from the pulpit the IRS would threaten to take away the church's tax exemption. In the College of Education it is merely part of the educational process.

Where is the outrage from "liberal" professors? How they can they sound so high-minded in abstract discussions of academic freedom but be so timid when political indoctrination is in their own backyard? Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an institution in which there is more conformity than in ed schools. Education administrators and faculty adhere to a strict and rigorous orthodoxy. The same is expected of students. Ed School Follies makes it clear that dissent from this orthodoxy is usually dismissed as either racist or reactionary or both. Kramer found only one person, a professor of health education at Eastern Michigan University, who dared to be heretical, criticizing the emphasis on methods over content, teachers unions, and student-centered teaching.

The result of this illiberal atmosphere, Kramer writes, is that "nowhere in America today is intellectual life deader than in our schools - unless it is in our schools of education." Ed school students, faculty, and administrators "are not educated. They do not love learning." Aye, "The worst of the ed schools are certification mills where the minimally qualified instruct the barely literate in a parody of learning." These are harsh words, but it is worth noting that everyone who studies ed schools that doesn't have a vested interest in the status quo seems to come to the same conclusions.

So what is to be done? The attempt of the Texas state legislature to effect change by abolishing the undergraduate education major was clearly a failure. Other states, including Texas, have provided alternative teacher certification routes, but it is unlikely that the education establishment will allow this to become too widespread. Kramer's primary suggestion is to raise standards across the board - elementary schools, high schools, colleges, etc., weeding out the most incompetent wanna-be teachers. But the experience with the national history standards suggests that any set of uniform standards that can command enough support for passage is likely to be deficient in many ways.

It seems to me that the problem is primarily structural. The public school system stifles competition between schools for good teachers, since each school will get its share of pupils in any case. A voucher system of some sort seems necessary to introduce market forces. Ideally, parents should be able to vote for the kind of education they want for their children by where they send them. At the moment, the option of sending children somewhere other than a public school is only open to a relatively small percentage of families. Whether any such system will ever be implemented on a widespread basis is debatable. In the meantime, there is only one option for the poor but conscientious parent: homeschool.