Frank McCourt Is Not a Good Example
Literature does not good policy make, as some poet somewhere must have said.
Consider Frank McCourt, who has become a spokesman for the now-controversial
view that teachers should have more leeway in the classroom, not less. McCourt
is the pixie-faced, white-haired, thick-brogued raconteur who wrote Angela's
Ashes , a Bildungsroman explaining how the bitterly poor son of an
embittered drunk from Limerick, Ireland, became the kind of man who could write
a witty, heartbreaking memoir about being the bitterly poor son of an
embittered drunk, etc. He's also the author of 'Tis --the sequel, in
bookstores this month (click here to order the book). In 'Tis , the boy in
Angela's Ashes comes to America, finagles his way into college despite
his lack of a high-school education, and turns himself into a New York City
schoolteacher.
Having sold more than 4 million copies of Angela's Ashes in more than
20 languages, McCourt is not only the most beloved teacher in America and maybe
the world but also the most widely-read education expert too. Journalists call
him up for his opinions on vouchers (he's against them) and teachers unions
(he's for them, but thinks they're too bureaucratic). But his philosophy is
plainest to see in his books. For the growing numbers of experts advocating
draconian "drill and practice" routines in which a teacher's every gesture and
word is preprogrammed, Angela's Ashes offers a scene in which one of
McCourt's Irish teachers shocks him into paying attention by having an opinion
on things. ("He tells us what is important and why. No master ever told us why
before. If you asked why you'd be hit on the head.") Standardized tests are
dispatched wittily in a scene in 'Tis in which an "Academic Chairman"
reels off a list of what McCourt, as a neophyte teacher, must do with a class
full of angry, ignorant, rebellious teen-agers:
The chairman says there will be midterm exams in two weeks
and my teaching should focus on areas that will be covered in exams. Students
in English should have mastered spelling and vocabulary lists, one hundred of
each which they are supposed to have in their notebooks and if they don't
points off, and be prepared to write essays on two novels. Economic Citizenship
students should be more than halfway through Your World and
You.
Since the students have studied neither spelling nor vocabulary and never
cracked their Economic Citizenship textbook, the advice could not have been
more malapropos. Teaching eventually becomes easier but even more mindless:
I followed the teacher guides. I launched the prefabricated
questions at my classes. I hit them with surprise quizzes and tests and
destroyed them with the ponderous detailed examinations concocted by college
professors who assemble high school textbooks.
My students resisted and cheated and disliked me and I disliked them
for disliking me.
Finally, McCourt throws the whole damn curriculum in the trash:
I couldn't let days dribble by in the routine of high school
grammar, spelling, vocabulary, digging for the deeper meaning in poetry, bits
of literature doled out for the multiple choice tests that would follow so that
universities can be supplied with the best and the brightest. I had to begin to
enjoy the act of teaching and the only way I could do that was start over,
teach what I loved and to hell with the curriculum.
Now here's a truly humane theory of education: The more fully realized the
teacher is, intellectually and personally, the better able he will be to
communicate his passion for ideas and learning to the student. Conversely, the
more uniform the curriculum and teaching method, the more soul-destroying they
are for teacher and student alike.
Frank McCourt brims with intelligence and charisma (Culturebox has seen him
speak) and must have been an unforgettable teacher whatever he did. But could
other teachers follow his example? McCourt's own story indicates that they
could not. In Ireland, compassionate teachers would seem to be painfully rare.
McCourt learns to love literature more in spite of his schooling than because
of it, as a result of the ministrations of a kind librarian and a fellow
patient in a hospital to which he is briefly confined. In America, his
colleagues are mostly defeated (Miss Mudd, his predecessor on his first job,
has retired early in disgust) when they aren't sadistic. Considering how hard
it was for the extraordinary Frank McCourt to learn how to teach, one has to
wonder whether individual teachers can really measure their own progress. That
teaching, done right, requires all of a teacher's emotional and intellectual
resources; that we accord teachers neither the respect nor the pay they need to
function well in their jobs; that few public school teachers come close to the
ideal or leave the students with anything like what they need to get by--all
this seems like a good argument for better pay scales and reform in the
educational system that produces teachers. But in the absence of a nation of
McCourts, it is also a reason to insist on greater teacher oversight and
accountability and less freedom to do as they please.
