On a background for teachers; teachers, who exert a critical influence on all Americans, must be educated in the fullest sense venturing beyond the limits of their fields

High school teachers should certainly receive first-rate education in the field, or fields, that they will teach, and they should know the best that is known in the emerging sciences of pedagogy. This, though, is not enough. Teachers should be fully educated persons in the broadest sense; not simply because it is good to be fully educated, though indeed it is, but because teachers especially--and paradoxically--must be generally educated if they are to perform their specific professional tasks well. The reasons for this follow from the fact that the high school teacher is the first to teach all Americans as each person emerges from childhood and the last to teach all of America--those who will go to college and those who will go to work, or look for work and fail to find it, or get married straightaway and raise a family.

There is no more diverse constituency in American education, in terms of talent, motivation, and background, than the high school population, and its complexity is compounded by the anxieties and energies of adolescence. To all of this the good high school teacher brings a special kind of social sympathy, intent on giving every child a sense of purpose and personal worth. But intellectually and academically, as things now stand, high school teachers confront their classes as specialists, as English teachers or social studies teachers. Why is this regrettable? One could argue that the breadth of the high school teacher's constituency demands an equal breadth of intellectual vision and amplitude of preparation--an ability to appreciate different facets of a culture and different methodologies, so that one has the mental versatility to appreciate the different points of view that are expressed in the classroom.

This argument has some validity as it stands, but it can be made stronger. One wants to stress not so much the multiple demands upon the teacher's education--which might seem to call for a hydra-headed, hodge-podge background--as the essential need for unity to a broad background. The goal is to integrate the achievement of many disciplines into a synthesis that comes as close as possible to a whole culture--something more comprehensive, multifaceted, real. To achieve this, or even to approximate it, is a large pedagogic, as well as intellectual, gain. A discipline, treated in virtual isolation, is open to rejection by the diffident or skeptical as two-dimensional and irrelevant to other concerns. But when its contributions are seen as part of a culture, especially one that is historically continuous with one's own, rejection is harder. A culture is the sum of a people's achievements--how they lived, what they did, what sense they made of their world. Clearly, no single line of vision can do justice to such variety, but when the point of view is itself varied, the characters can be made, as it were, to step off the page, and allow themselves to be seen in the round.

There is one further substantial point to be made. A large part of education (as "progressives" in this century have often complained) is retrospective: students are forced to deal with the experience of the past, with a tradition. There is good reason for this, quite apart from the fact that there is no syllabus on the future; but resistance to the lessons of the past, and fear that they will stifle any originality that we have, run deep in all of us, nonetheless. There is a tension in all of us between the legacy of the past and the urge to escape from it into some fresher future that we define for ourselves. On the one hand, we build seasonal rituals and ceremonies and habitual values into our lives to give life dignity and the poise of continuity; on the other, we seek to refresh ourselves with new sensations, ideas, and experiences, to break out of the rut and to shatter the mold. This tension in us between the time-honored and the time-worn, between the tradition that dignifies and the habit that dulls, is a crucial factor in everyone's education; humanities teachers need to carry their students past this kind of ambivalence. To succeed, though, they must come to terms with the tradition themselves, separating out what is still vital from what is moribund, and allowing its more life-giving roots to offer enrichment and stability to their own lives. To do this well and with conviction, they must venture beyond the comfortable limits of their major and minor fields to explore the further reaches of the tradition. In short, if the teachers are to humanize their classes, they must first fully humanize themselves.

Teachers, then, must themselves have acquired an education in the fullest sense, beyond merely a major, some pedagogy, and an assortment of "distribution requirements." I propose that every teacher needs a unified "core curriculum" in his or her own preparation to teach. My task here is to assay what such a core curriculum might be.

An active care for language

Paramount over all other things that a teacher must acquire is an active care for language, especially one's own. To know what words mean and to use them exactly is fundamental to any self-knowledge, to any critical sense, and therefore to any education properly defined. Twenty-five years ago this point would have been regarded as so elementary that one would have been embarrassed to make it. But one now hears of prestigious law firms employing remedial writing instructors for their highly educated young associates--not to home existing skills in the hope that the law firm will be graced with a new Burke or Holmes, but in the hope that the young lawyer may finally and dependably be able to produce a grammatical sentence and a properly constructed paragraph, accurately conveying a sense that does not mislead the court or the client. This is a fairly low level of aspiration, but it is easy to see why it is so necessary. For the last fifteen years we have listened to arguments about "students' rights to their own language" (and we are not talking about a foreign language here) as though language were not a means of communication, but a kind of private property, or a personal right, entitling the individual, like some lonely Adam in the Garden of Eden, to give the flora his own names. It is significant that on the whole students are not encouraged to invent their own number systems. There are severe disadvantages to counting incorrectly, whether one is making money or a phone call. But what folly not to realize that language should have equal precision, and that its loss is attended with equally unfortunate consequences! The basic laws of syntax operate to render meaning clearly, no less than the simple operations of arithmetic work to make totals, and we would be correct in assuming that both can, and should, be learnt by everyone once and for all in elementary school. (Though one should keep attending to them: Carl Sandburg wrote, when he was seventy-two: "I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any time in all my born days." It is a fine, activist, American view of language, and he was, of course, right--one can go a long way with nouns and verbs, with people doing things.)