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POLITICS & COMMUNITY To Sir, with Bunk by josh glenn	After college, I taught U.S. history in an inner-city public school in Boston for almost a year. Immediately before my year in the classroom, I spent a year in grad school studying the sociology of education, and was particularly intrigued by a study that had been done by sociologist James Coleman (who died recently) which seemed to demonstrate that urban Catholic schools educate their students better than do urban public schools with much bigger budgets. If correct, this controversial finding clearly has enormous implications for those education reformers who insist that urban schools need more money to be effective. What the aggressively secularized public schools may really need, according to Coleman, is something money can't buy: a community of parents and teachers who, because they are committed to the same basic beliefs and values, can create a uniquely disciplined and coherent learning environment. I should confess right away that I was sympathetic to Coleman's theory, and that much of my own teaching experience -- which was in a school so dominated by Catholic Latino kids, parents, and teachers that it was the next best thing to a Catholic school -- tended to bear him out. But of course religion is a very tricky subject in a public school, so I was interested to read In The Classroom: Dispatches from an Inner-City School That Works (The Free Press), a forthcoming memoir written by Mark Gerson -- who graduated from the same college as me (Williams) just last year. The book recounts his year teaching U.S. history in an inner-city Catholic school in Jersey City. Surely, I thought, the numerous questions and concerns about teaching disadvantaged urban youth which have remained with me since my year in the classroom will be addressed and maybe even resolved by a book whose author's experiences must have been so similar to my own. And when I learned from the book's press release that In The Classroom is "an uplifting look into how a poor urban school turns scant resources into success through discipline, faith, and the often untapped power of parents and teachers," I knew I had to read it. OK, Gerson is no James Joyce: His prose style is awkward -- unless he really speaks in such a stiff and formal manner, which seems unlikely -- and, at times, unintentionally comical, especially when he is describing his verbal repartee with his students (which is most of the time, actually). But we can certainly forgive him his clumsy style, since his story is so exciting. After all, according (again) to the book's press release, "after winning [his students'] respect in the classroom and on the basketball court, [Gerson] went on to teach them more about U.S. history than most college students will ever know." Sounds like a reverse-image "To Sir, With Love" or something, doesn't it? However, as I read through chapters dramatically titled "Race," "Religion," "Discipline," and so forth, I kept wondering, "Where's the beef?" In The Classroom is an engaging diary of day-to-day interactions between a novice teacher from the suburbs and his amusingly quick-witted, street-wise students; and that's about it. You never actually learn how -- or if, for that matter -- Gerson was so incredibly successful in teaching history. Sure, he trots out the line that "History is not the sum of dates, names, and places but, rather, a collection of fascinating stories," which he admits borrowing (along with most of his lesson plans) from his own high school history teacher, but he never demonstrates -- through improved grades, papers, or even anecdotes -- that his students have learned much of anything.
Sounds like a reverse-image "To Sir, With Love," but I kept wondering, "Where's the beef?"	Instead we witness the sorts of discussions that happen in every high school classroom: The story of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, for instance, quickly degenerates into name-calling and jokes, and the lesson ends inconclusively, leaving us to wonder why, out of any example Gerson could have included, did he choose this one? The one other example he gives, of a lesson about the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, is obviously intended to contrast a rules-oriented gun culture with the gun culture Gerson's students know all too well. Ignoring for the moment that nostalgia for any kind of gun culture seems inappropriate in a classroom, the problem here again is that Gerson gives us absolutely no indication that his students have drawn any meaningful instruction from this story, and we certainly never feel that they have learned "more about U.S. history than most college students will ever know." I could forgive the author if he was simply trying to chronicle what it's like to be a teacher in an inner-city high school and was unfairly squeezed into the mold of superteacher by unscrupulous publishers. And as far as I can tell, for a first-year, untrained teacher, the guy did just fine. But I really object to the way Gerson, who is the author of The Neoconservative Vision (1995) and the editor of The Essential Neoconservative Reader (1996), seems to be writing not for those interested in learning about educating urban youth, but solely for his neoconservative mentors and audience, who have obviously already made up their minds about the proper way to do such a thing. Without ever explaining his objections, Gerson scoffs at bilingualism, diversity training, prejudice reduction efforts, and the idea that standardized exams may be culturally biased. "I did not see myself as an ethnocentrist and considered my colleagues the least ethnocentric people I had ever known," he complains after being asked to attend a relatively harmless multicultural education training seminar, "After all, they devoted their lives to serving children from all over the globe." This sort of rhetoric is dangerously naive. It ignores the fact that a) it's impossible not to be at least somewhat ethnocentric; b) ethnocentric people never perceive themselves as being so; and c) people who devote their lives to teaching a diverse population aren't excluded from being ethnocentric! Although I myself object to some of the extremes of multiculturalism, this sort of talk is simply preaching to the converted; it does absolutely nothing to further the debate.
Gerson indulges in thoughtless P.C.-bashing at every opportunity.	Gerson indulges in this sort of thoughtless P.C.-bashing at every opportunity, including a shocking incident where he refuses to use a history textbook which describes how 19th century women were often forced to use abortion as a method of birth control: "Abortion as birth control?" he exclaims, "I surely did not look at abortion that way," suggesting that the textbook's publishers do -- which is simply preposterous. Gerson goes on to criticize the book for devoting space to illustrations of the history of working women and women's rights, but none of the 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards. To someone not intimately familiar with the (often very reasonable) criticisms which have been advanced regarding the trivialization of history education in the name of political correctness, this sort of writing comes across as more than conservative (a position, again, with which I can sympathize) -- it's downright reactionary. And it gets worse. Gerson, a summa cum laude college graduate who praises his favorite professor at least three times in this book, is shocked to discover that urban youth don't kiss up to the teacher like he and his suburban peers did. Although he admits that their honesty and self-assurance is refreshing, Gerson worries that his students will not make it in the service economy unless they change their ways. He notes with approval, however, that his students who work at fast-food restaurants in the evening and on weekends are, although usually exhausted, "trained to respect their boss and their customers, [and] this attitude figured into the way they treated their teachers and other authority figures as well." This, apparently, is what Gerson means by the virtue of "discipline," although I would argue that it looks much more like the vice of docility, which is not the same thing at all. (In an attempt to instill his brand of "discipline" into his students, Gerson invents a bizarre form of detention called a "Frank," in which unruly students are forced to listen to records of Gerson's hero Frank Sinatra singing while writing "Ol' Blue Eyes is better than Ice T" over and over on the blackboard. This is actually sort of amusing, especially since Gerson's one single moment of moral self-doubt in his entire year of teaching is, "Was I using Sinatra as punishment? Yes, I was, and I didn't like it one bit. But there was no other way to get the students to listen to Sinatra." Of course, anyone who has seen or read A Clockwork Orange knows that coercing someone into listening to certain music over and over again is hardly a good way to get them to appreciate it.)
Related Links Project Capetown: a multimedia teaching case designed to encourage multicultural practice in teachers. Teaching scenarios in newly integrated South African schools are depicted. Teach for America Official Homepage: the teacher corps of recent college graduates who commit two years to teach in under-resourced urban and rural public schools. Effective Education: a directory with links to essays, news, and research on reforming public education. James Q. Wilson: Profile and bibliography of James Q. Wilson by the "politically incorrect" Web magazine Upstream. Raising Kids: Atlantic Monthly article on raising kids by James Q. Wilson. Norman's Conquest: Article by Mark Gerson on Norman Podhoretz (the father of neoconservatism) from Policy Review, the magazine of the Heritage Foundation.	Gerson does eventually get around to making a sociological-type explication of the role that a community of shared values and beliefs plays in creating a quality learning environment, but it's a forced and overly general afterthought. In fact, it sounds suspiciously unlike Gerson and more like James Q. Wilson, a neoconservative political scientist whose writing on what he calls "the moral sense" argues that, although there may be no universal moral rules, people are born with similar fundamental moral sentiments which the education of children must concentrate on developing. I can't pretend I was too surprised, then, to learn in the closing acknowledgments that it was Wilson himself who encouraged Gerson to become a teacher, and then exchanged letters and e-mails with the young man, assuring him right from the beginning that his classroom memoirs would make a good book. Is this because Wilson needed a dramatic, flesh-and-blood example to prove his theory? If so, it makes me less inclined to believe him, which saddens me, because it was a very attractive idea. In The Classroom is, in the final analysis, neither a dramatic teaching success story nor a careful, open-minded study of the role that a community of faith can play in the education process; it is instead a piece of inflexible ideology flimsily packaged as a candid account of a year in an inner-city school. To those of us who would like to believe that a poor urban school can turn "scant resources into success through discipline, faith, and the often untapped power of parents and teachers," this book offers not succor, but the seeds of doubt. Josh Glenn is the editorial director of Tripod. © 1996 Josh Glenn, All Rights Reserved. Do you have something to say? Participate in the Politics survey about Josh's article.