The Last Rampart

When Novelist-Anthropologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge wrote his autobiography at 43, he had some sharp words to say. about U.S. private prep schools, and Groton in particular. Such places, said he, are "grindingly conformist." Last week, in the Atlantic Monthly, La Farge, now 52, announced a change of heart.

After more years of teaching and lecturing (mostly at the universities of Utah and New Mexico) and meeting the products of U.S. public education, he has come to the conclusion that--former President Conant of Harvard to the contrary--we need private schools . . .

"Only recently," says La Farge, "it has become apparent to me that a great many schools . . . fail to provide that most fundamental thing of all, an education." In France, during World War II, "it was startling to find that, among the thousands of American college graduates, officers, who were dumped there, the one who could speak even the most elementary French was the rare exception ... I made a point of asking as many of these men as possible how it was that they had no French, when they must have had to 'present' it to enter college. The answer was always the same, and usually in the same words: 'I took three years of French in high school . . . Then I just forgot it.' That is as pretty an example of schooling without education as one can find ..." Pure Horror. "More recently, through teaching and lecturing, I came into contact with the Western undergraduate, who typically has entered college on a high-school certificate ... In a class of 30, at least 15 will dread what they call 'essay exams' ... A quiz of ten questions requiring answers averaging 50 words apiece is feared; a major examination question, calling for several pages of answer, is a pure horror. The reason for this is clear in their contorted faces as they put pen to paper . . . They are semiliterate in a sense . . . they can read, but they cannot write. They cannot spell, punctuation is quite beyond them, the mere formation of a written word troubles them . . .

"In these classes one finds, also, a resist ance to any discussion that roams beyond the literal confines of the subject. In teaching general anthropology, the teacher can feel that he is losing some of the class if he refers to Babbitt or to Shakespeare, or speaks of the urban modernism of Rome as shown in Horace's Satires. (A good part of the class will never have heard of Horace.) . . . There is a definite resistance to erudition as such . . . [The teacher] tends to narrow his presentation . . . He cannot assume that he and the class have any common points of reference arising from voluntary reading. The result is that he is inclined to give an inferior course, lacking in depth."

Dreadful Theory. Too many people, says La Farge, insist that such evidences of non-education are the price the nation must pay for a truly democratic school system. This "is a form of insistence that all be held down to a level, rather than . . . trying to raise all to a level." Nonetheless, "parents can get a superior education for their children in private schools . . . Like owning a Cadillac or wearing tailor-made clothes, the superior education costs money . . . [But] in our democracy there is nothing against buying something better if you can afford it.

"Finally, and by no means least, today the private schools . . . are the last rampart against the dead hand of the educators of educators . . . They choose teachers on a basis of character, ability, and depth of knowledge of the subject to be taught, and are relatively uninterested in training in 'education' ... By & large, the private schools have not bought the dreadful theory that if a teacher has studied education, he does not have to have a real mastery of the subject he is teaching in school."

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