The classical, conservative approach to public school education has a lot going for it, at least when it comes to the manner in which subjects are taught. Conservatives shy away from what's known as child-centered instruction. They aren't all caught up in the wheel-spinning of teaching kids to devise "how to" strategies for reading and math.
They prefer to focus on the skills themselves, building the factual knowledge upon which those skills rest. The premise is that the more kids know, the better they read. And reading proficiency is linked to competence in math.
Well and good. It worked in the old days, right?
Not so good, however, when instead of hewing to classical rigor, conservatives allow themselves to be carried away by ideology and allow the curriculum to be warped accordingly.
That's what has been happening in Texas, where a rightward-leaning (or tumbling) state education board has pushed through dozens of changes that will make social studies classes nearly the equivalent of Republican pep rallies spiced with a strong flavor of Christian fundamentalism.
Textbook publishers, naturally, will take note. They have little choice, considering the size of the Texas market. Over time, the Texas tilt could be felt far and wide.
The national "common core" standards adopted last week by North Carolina education officials should help keep this state's public schools out of the ideological ditch, whether on the right or the left. And if they work as intended, they should boost students academically.
There's room to wonder, though, whether putting all schools and teachers on an even shorter leash doesn't sometimes become counterproductive. My best teachers weren't slaves to any curriculum handed down by the Fairfax County, Va., school board or the retrograde wizards in early-'60s Richmond.
Case in point: The high school teacher who had the biggest influence on me - Thomas Connolly in 11th-grade English - went way beyond the usual expectations with a course that amounted to an introduction to American literature.
The reading list (I dug out a memento copy awhile back) shows 11 novels. They ranged from high school standards "The Scarlet Letter" and "The Great Gatsby" to Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust." We read three of Melville's novellas, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" and the first volume of Carl Sandburg's life of Lincoln.
We wrote about each book. And there were other essays required on free-standing topics, along with regular vocabulary exercises drawn from a helpful book called "Building Word Power." It was, in sum, a terrific college-preparatory course, not least in that it honed verbal skills required to do well on the SAT.
The high point of Mr. Connolly's class was our encounter with Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men." That novel opened up the worlds of Southern politics, journalism and history as well as literature, and drew me down paths that I've been exploring ever since.
The story is commonly regarded as a fictionalized biography of Louisiana's renowned Kingfish, U.S. Sen. Huey P. Long (moviegoers recall both Broderick Crawford and Sean Penn playing the role of Warren's Willie Stark, whose rise and fall resembled Long's). Let it suffice here to say that it's more complicated than that.
Still, it was in a sense to close the circle that I finally got around to reading (and recently finishing) T. Harry Williams' definitive biography of Long, who surely would be in the running for this country's all-time "what-a-piece-of-work" award.
Long was a populist par excellence whose drives for free schoolbooks, better roads and bridges, decent health care and a strong state university were music to ordinary folks' ears. He squared off against the oil companies and other moneyed industrial interests whenever he had a chance. Today, he'd be BP's worst enemy.
But the methods Long used to seize and hold control, first as governor and then as a Democratic senator (he never relinquished power in Baton Rouge even while grabbing center stage in Washington), were stunning in their corrupt audacity. As he geared up for a presidential campaign in 1936 on a platform of "Share the Wealth" - a platform with natural appeal amid the Depression - many viewed him as a dangerous demagogue of the left.
I've visited the magnificent, high-rise Louisiana State Capitol (a Long legacy) where Long was fatally wounded by a gunman on Sept. 8, 1935. The marble corridor walls are pockmarked where assassin Carl Weiss, an idealistic young doctor whose father-in-law was on Long's enemies list, was blasted by the Kingfish's security detail.
Warren's character Willie Stark declares that "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption," but for both him and Long in real life, the issue became whether the ends justified the means. Was that also the issue for Carl Weiss? Our schools, with the right teachers and the right standards, can engage young people's intellect and imagination to frame the big questions and to help them learn what they must know to succeed in a complex world.
