[John Riley]

My favorite example of how much more legacy matters than merit in American higher education is that when George Bush was rejected by the U. of Texas Law School he sobered up long enough to talk to his dad and they decided what the hell, he might as well go to Harvard Business School. He'd have no problem being admitted there.

[Ned Balbo]

Quote:
"...overly regimented primary and secondary education system that actively discourages initiative among the students..."

-->How can that explain a decline in reading and writing skills when schools of the past were if anything more regimented?

Good question, Rose. As a stepdad who experienced the whole middle school/high school arc, I can say that Jane & I are repeatedly astonished by the over-complicated rubrics & byzantine instructions of so many assignments. That's where I see secondary education as "overly regimented." It ought to be regimented in helping students master key skills & fundamental knowledge while encouraging creativity & independent thinking beyond those skills. But that's not what I see.

Of course, nothing I've said covers the greater challenges of kids who lack a stable home life where education is valued. They need support our nation seems determined to withhold.

[Skip Dewahl]

Is it a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of composers included in The Great American Songbook were all born before 1940 when we had an educational system where one had to learn...or else. When was the last time any of you deemed an Academy Award-winning song worthy of that honor? For me it was Alan and Marilyn Bergman's 1968 The Windmills of Your Mind, and that was a translation of Frenchman Eddy Marnay's Les Moulins de Mon Cœur, which is no slight on that renowned couple, of course, especially since I consider their translation its equal.

Round,
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending on beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Was it something that I said?
Lovers walk along a shore
And leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway
Or the fragment of a song
Half-remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair?

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind



Comme une pierre que l'on jette
Dans l'eau vive d'un ruisseau
Et qui laisse derrière elle
Des milliers de ronds dans l'eau
Comme un manège de lune
Avec ses chevaux d'étoiles
Comme un anneau de Saturne
Un ballon de carnaval
Comme le chemin de ronde
Que font sans cesse les heures
Le voyage autour du monde
D'un tournesol dans sa fleur
Tu fais tourner de ton nom
Tous les moulins de mon cœur

Comme un écheveau de laine
Entre les mains d'un enfant
Ou les mots d'une rengaine
Pris dans les harpes du vent
Comme un tourbillon de neige
Comme un vol de goélands
Sur des forêts de Norvège
Sur des moutons d'océan
Comme le chemin de ronde
Que font sans cesse les heures
Le voyage autour du monde
D'un tournesol dans sa fleur
Tu fais tourner de ton nom
Tous les moulins de mon cœur

Ce jour-là près de la source
Dieu sait ce que tu m'as dit
Mais l'été finit sa course
L'oiseau tomba de son nid
Et voila que sur le sable
Nos pas s'effacent déjà
Et je suis seul à la table
Qui résonne sous mes doigts
Comme un tambourin qui pleure
Sous les gouttes de la pluie
Comme les chansons qui meurent
Aussitôt qu'on les oublie
Et les feuilles de l'automne
Rencontre des ciels moins bleus
Et ton absence leur donne
La couleur de tes cheveux

Une pierre que l'on jette
Dans l'eau vive d'un ruisseau
Et qui laisse derrière elle
Des milliers de ronds dans l'eau
Au vent des quatre saisons
Tu fais tourner de ton nom
Tous les moulins de mon cœur

[Quincy Lehr]

Originally Posted by Skip Dewahl

Dagnabbit! Durn whippersnappers. Harrump!

Yeah, I pick on Skip, but wow, Academy Award-winning songs? Really? Is that the standard? My favorite American songs by people born before 1940 tend to be by hillbillies (black and white) who were often, at best, semi-literate. A. P. Carter was many things. Especially urbane he was not. And the general dismissals of post-1954 pop music really are tedious by now. Leave that to Roger Kimball. There are some fantastic lyricists in rock music and hip-hop, and if what they do deviates from what you call poetry, that's your problem, man. Sure, my middle-school memories of a blonde English teacher robotically reciting M.C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This" in a ham-handed attempt to interest us in poetry are dear because hilarious, but hey... Hammer-time!

[Roger Slater]

Skip, Irving Berlin had only a few years of schooling as a young boy before he was forced to leave school to help support his impoverished family. Woody Guthrie had a mother with dementia, a family steeped in tragic circumstances, was begging on the streets at age 14, and didn't show up at school much at all even when he was enrolled. Aren't the two of them in the Great American Songbook a few times?

[Michael Cantor]

Umm...Skip...the term Great American Songbook loosely refers to songs written before 1970. From the Michael Feinstein Great American Somngbook Initiative program:

"The 'Great American Songbook', sometimes referred to as 'American Standards', is the uniquely American collection of popular music from Broadway and Hollywood musicals prevalent from the 1920s to 1960s. Familiar composers include George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Richard Rodgers. Singers include Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme and so many others."

The only thing surprising about most of the composers being born before 1940 is that it surprises you.

[Laura Heidy-Halberstein]

Writers without papers:

ERNEST HEMINGWAY - ambulance driver

ANNE SEXTON - advanced education consisted of attending Finishing School.

CARL SANDBURG - left school at 13, went back and re-tackled academia at a later date but left before completing a 4 year degree.

HART CRANE - dropped out of high school and took to the sea and the streets.

LANGSTON HUGHES - left college after two semesters and eventually ended up doing a myrid of things - two of which were washing dishes and writing.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY - expelled from Oxford

EMILY DICKINSON - returned home after one year at Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and seldom left home again.

DYLAN THOMAS - left school at 16 to become a reporter.

BOB DYLAN - left college after his first year.

EDGAR ALAN POE - gave up formal education in 1927 at the age of 18 after losing his tuition money due to a gambling problem.

WALT WHITMAN - His mother was barely literate and his father was a carpenter. In 1823 the family moved to Brooklyn, where for six years Whitman attended public schools. It was the only formal education he ever received.

CARL SANDBURG - joined the army during the Spanish American War, spent 2 weeks at West Point, left for another college in Galesburg and then left there without a degree.

ROBERT FROST - attended both Dartmouth and Harvard but never obtained a formal degree from either.

WILLIAM BLAKE - never attended school - was educated at home by his mother.

PABLO NERUDA - gave up his formal studies at the age of 20 to devote himself to writing.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING - self-taught

ROBERT BROWNING - In 1828, at the age of 16, Browning enrolled at the University of London, but he soon left, anxious to read and learn at his own pace.

WILLIAM BLAKE - When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. In 1782, he married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and to write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today.


LORD BYRON - once he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went to Dulwich, Harrow, where he excelled in swimming, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. It's unclear as to whether he actually got a degree in anything or not.

DANTE - studied at home, as was usual for the times.

[Max Goodman]

Reasons for home schooling are analogous in a way to those for dropping out of college. The talented often feel held back by instruction that is aimed at the group, while some others don't want to or can't deal with the challenges of traditional schooling.

That the brightest home-schooled kids sometimes outdo traditionally schooled peers (at spelling bees, for instance) is only what we should expect, and says no more about the value of home schooling than Steve Jobs's success says about the value of dropping out of college. (In both cases, success and avoidance of traditional schooling grow from the same cause; it isn't the alternative to school that causes the success.)

[E. Shaun Russell]

One of the problems is that to reform the entire American educational system so that there is a strong emphasis on learning reading, writing and arithmetic once again, you need to weed out the sense of entitlement felt by a great many people in this country -- parents and children alike. Thirty years ago, if a child came home with a report card full of C-minuses, the parents would rightfully scold the child, then endeavor to improve his/her grades by limiting the child's distractions, helping the child with his/her homework and re-emphasizing the importance of doing well in school. In THIS day and age, it's just as common for the parents of a C-minus child to scold the teacher for not making the classwork easy enough. In other words, there's been a bit of a paradigm shift in how people view education. Maybe some of it is because parents have less time than in previous generations (i.e.: it's much more common for both parents to be working nowadays).

I've witnessed a shocking amount of laziness, disinclination and malaise among college students in several basic college courses I've been taking. In basic English Composition, three weeks were given to complete an assignment worth 25% of the grade, including classes in a computer lab, classes in a library and "free" classes for students to work on it. Know how many people in a class of 20+ turned in the assignment by the due date? Three. I personally tutored two students on how to write an annotated bibliography. I went through all the steps from how to research to how to put it in MLA format, and neither of those students turned in their assignment on time -- one of them, to the best of my knowledge, never turned it in at all, even after having a copy of a perfect annotated bibliography as a reference. That tells me that it's something deeper in the psyche of many young people (and likely their parents). They don't / won't make the connection between doing the work and getting a good grade, let alone the connection between getting a good grade and having better future prospects.

All of it is depressing, but it also underscores why I'm personally progressing toward a Master's in English with the aim of teaching composition. It's the hope (naive or no) of getting through to at least one student and having that person finally make the necessary connections. Education in America is a massive system, rife with bureaucracy, but so long as there are good teachers who strive to make an impact, all hope is not lost.

[Roger Slater]

And Harold Arlen, who achieved the ultimate recognition by winning an Academy Award for "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," left home (and school) at the age of 16 to pursue a career as a musician.