Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Call it sleep


By JOHN REMBER

In the summer of 1967, I was one of 20 high-school juniors attending Idaho State University's summer honors program. We had been the top scorers on a standardized test given in all Idaho high schools the previous October. The program had been designed to attract high-achieving students to ISU.

I was Wood River High School's representative, which surprised me as much as it surprised my teachers. I wasn't the highest-achieving person in the class. I was just the best at taking standardized tests. If I ever have a tombstone, it will read "Good At Multiple Choice" below my name.

The honors program didn't accomplish its purpose. After taking college-level English and psychology classes and a seminar on the Vietnam War, and after experiencing the suburban sophistication of Pocatello, all 20 of us went to college somewhere else. It wasn't Pocatello, which was and is a nicer town than it gets credit for. It wasn't the professors, whom I remember as some of the best teachers I had at the university level. It wasn't the dorms or the food, which were, by my standards at least, luxurious.

It was that we had been awakened to a wider world. There were more choices than we had dreamed of. There were other colleges in other states. There were professions other than those of our parents. There were ways of avoiding Vietnam, which even by 1967 had shown itself to be a bad idea, and there were whole undiscovered depths of knowing that were accessible for the price of opening a book.

That fall, as a Wood River High senior, I felt like the entire universe was open to me if I could read enough. I started paying attention in my classes. The more I read, the more I realized that learning was a life-and-death proposition. I memorized whole chapters of my grammar book. I stopped being a C student with a habit of getting kicked out of class.

I learned how a little research can result in a lot of authority in speaking and writing, and I learned that the most important thing to know is what you don't know so you can start figuring out how to know it. I learned that while the truth is difficult to get close to, it exists, and with humility and effort you can turn your face toward it.

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This was the awareness that I took to college. It gave me much more value for my tuition money than if I'd stayed home during the summer of 1967, and I thank ISU for it.

This long-ago experience comes to mind because of the slow starvation diet that Idaho education has been on for a couple of decades. Idaho taxpayers haven't been willing to fund honors programs or teachers' salaries nearly as generously as they've been willing to pay for athletic programs, and the logical conclusion is that we produce better athletes than scholars. Intellect is something that needs to be awakened, but we're letting people sleep, even the ones who score well on standardized tests.

Not all educational problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Expensive facilities and phalanxes of highly-paid administrators don't help anyone to become more conscious in high school.

But you do need to pay for classes of no more than 20, pay smart teachers well enough to be proud of their profession, and fund university programs for high-scoring social misfits. These will produce people able to use their brains for something other than shock absorbers.

My own experience as a teacher over the last 35 years tells me that the complicated awareness that allows humans to discern truth from lies has gone haywire. Our educational system lacks the time to give students any idea of what they don't know, and so they think that what they do know is the truth and that there's no need to know anything more.

It's a process that produces, for want of a better phrase, lying self-righteous mouthbreathers. There but for the grace of God go I, but a few years ago my wife and I, both teachers, saw a tsunami of these people heading at us from Idaho educational institutions. We decided that discretion was the better part of valor and got out of the profession.




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