The Present of the Past

Oh, everything is higher, It's sure outrageous, Yes, everything is higher, Except my daddy's wages.

The kids who sang that Depression ditty 30 years ago could not be more unlike the prosperous youngsters who sing it nowadays at New York City's private Fieldston School. Yet they are linked in thought and feeling through their history teacher, John A. Scott, 46, who gives his students a passion for possessing the past as if it were the present.

Scott recently staged a smash-hit "New Deal Assembly" at Fieldston, complete with soup kitchen, union songs and F.D.R. speeches. In other years, he has done as much for the Civil and Revolutionary wars. Scott is perhaps the leading practitioner of the most exciting new art in U.S. high school history teaching--throwing away textbooks and going to original sources.

Back to Sources. A lean, lively Londoner, Scott came out of Oxford's Trinity College with a first in "PPE" (philosophy, politics, economics), married an American girl, and wound up an American citizen in the wartime U.S. Army (intelligence). He took his doctorate in European history at Columbia and taught for three years at Amherst. Sensing that secondary-school teaching might offer more challenge and satisfaction, he switched in 1951 to Fieldston (651 students), which is sponsored by New York's Ethical Culture Society.

As chairman of Fieldston's social-studies department. Scott spends only two hours a day in the classroom--allowing him to pursue his own scholarly research, which in turn he shares with students. He calls textbooks "mere dry husks of facts," insists that youngsters grapple firsthand with the issues and ideas of history. To convey "the human meaning--how people thought and suffered.'' Scott supplies documents that only scholars normally see. All it takes, he says, is a Mimeograph machine, the instrument "that gives back a student's heritage." As Scott sees it ("Historians have to take a stand"), much of the heritage revolves around colonial history, the Constitution and slavery, all of which he probes deeply. His students do not just vaguely read that Lincoln and Douglas once debated slavery, or skim snatches of rhetoric. They get mimeographed copies (30 single-spaced pages) of the complete Galesburg debate of Oct. 7, 1858, a fascinating excursion into ante-bellum schizophrenia that reads like a Broadway play. They read not only Lincoln's famed Cooper Union address, but also the rarely mentioned reply to it--a brilliant defense of Southern traditions by the Rev. James Henley Thornwell.

On to Understanding. Scott is also constantly on the hunt for "ethical images"Americans of conscience and courage who can rouse modern youngsters. While searching for "morally dedicated women" --more than half his students are girls--Scott dug up English Actress Fanny Kemble's long-out-of-print Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-39. Published last year by Alfred A. Knopf, Scott's discovery and editing won highest marks from top U.S. historians.

Scott applies the same treatment to old military documents. Zuni Indian myths,

New Deal papers. Equally impressive to colleagues is his classroom performance --"better than any professor I had in college," said a visiting headmaster. In clipped tones, Scott never stops pushing his students into the past. He even twangs the guitar and sings obscure colonial tunes. He drives himself so hard by day, says one teacher, that "at night the man is as limp as an old circus balloon." In theory, concentrating on relatively few events should force Scott to shortchange his students on others. In practice, Scott does not neglect "facts." His students do very well on College Board tests.

By deeper probing of key issues, he finds that "many more facts stick with students." His goal is student involvement: "I'm trying to find the upper limit of the adolescent mind--and I'm coming to the conclusion that there isn't any."

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