Communion Of Dreams

My friend looked up from her grilled salmon, surprise on her face. “I didn’t know your father was a policeman.”

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I came across a very thought-provoking article a few days ago, about the intersection between idealism and reality when it comes to who should get a college education. It’s a longish piece, but definitely worth reading, and I have sent it to a couple of friends who teach at the college/university level. Here’s one particular passage:

There is a sense that the American workforce needs to be more professional at every level. Many jobs that never before required college now call for at least some post-secondary course work. School custodians, those who run the boilers and spread synthetic sawdust on vomit, may not need college—but the people who supervise them, who decide which brand of synthetic sawdust to procure, probably do. There is a sense that our bank tellers should be college educated, and so should our medical-billing techs, and our child-welfare officers, and our sheriffs and federal marshals. We want the police officer who stops the car with the broken taillight to have a nodding acquaintance with great literature. And when all is said and done, my personal economic interest in booming college enrollments aside, I don’t think that’s such a boneheaded idea. Reading literature at the college level is a route to spacious thinking, to an acquaintance with certain profound ideas, that is of value to anyone. Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s “Daddy”? Such one-to-one correspondences probably don’t hold. But although I may be biased, being an English instructor and all, I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you. If I should fall ill, I suppose I would rather the hospital billing staff had read The Pickwick Papers, particularly the parts set in debtors’ prison.

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Crashes and burns? Yes, because as the author discusses, not everyone has the capability to function at the college level. This is obvious to anyone who has given the matter any consideration. But it is sobering to read the accounts of Professor X about being the one who has to convey this to actual, real, students.

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Come Monday, across the street from my home there will be a big golf tournament. No, not some PGA event. It’s a benefit thing, done to help raise money and awareness for the local “Officer Down” fund. They’ve done this there each year for the last four or five. As I drive in and out of my neighborhood I’ll get to see the big signs touting the event.

It’s odd. Perhaps I should connect with the organizers. Perhaps I could be of some assistance. Because my dad was killed on the job, he was an “Officer Down“. That was almost 40 years ago, and you’d think I would be ‘over it‘ by now. You’d be wrong.

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My dad dropped out of school in the 8th grade, though I think he got a G.E.D. later. Back in the 50s you didn’t need much education to get hired as a cop.

My mom graduated from High School.

I grew up in a very blue-collar household. Comfortable enough by the standards of the time, but not what you would call an ‘intellectually rich’ environment. I distinctly remember being told that I read too much, and needed to go outside and play more. We didn’t have books or original art around the house, though my mom did draw a little.

I did well in school, though. And even with my antics and acting out, I was a straight A student through High School. Thanks to something like our local “Officer Down” fund, and insurance, and money donated for that purpose, I was able to attend one of the best undergraduate schools in the country. It is entirely possible that had my father not been killed, I would not have been able to swing attendance at such a school for financial reasons. Because of this, I’ve always had some real mixed feelings about my college education, as excellent as it was.

* * * * * * *

My friend looked up from her grilled salmon, surprise on her face. “I didn’t know your father was a policeman.”

I am used to this. Have been for a very long time. The surprise that someone who is well read, well educated, who writes, creates, and owned an art gallery, could have come from such a background. My friend’s husband, who was there with us, was one of the artists I used to represent. We’ve dined and worked together, shared many conversations and experienced both joy and sadness in the turn of our fortunes. I make no pretense of being an intellectual, no claim to a true academic knowledge of any subject. But still, she was surprised to hear that my dad was a cop.

Because, for all that we Americans assume that we exist in a classless society, we still make huge assumptions about one another on the basis of education.

So, while I do not argue with Professor X that there are, indeed, those who do not belong in college, I think that it is always important that we try and make those opportunities available. I’m smart, but I am not exceptional – it is only because of my education that I seem not to be the son of a cop. Sure, some will fail in an attempt to get a college degree, or sufficient credits to earn this or that position. But they need the chance to find this out for themselves.

I realize that this was not the argument from that article in the Atlantic. Or is it? Judge for yourself from this concluding paragraph:

One of the things I try to do on the first night of English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels that the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has so far proven impossible. My students don’t read much, as a rule, and though I think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. Oddly, there are no movies that they all have seen—well, except for one. They’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have caught it multiple times. So we work with the old warhorse of a quest narrative. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. Everybody knows that one—perhaps all too well. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her. I skip the denouement: the intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pythagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland far removed from reality. That’s art holding up a mirror all too closely to our own poignant scholarly endeavors.

Jim Downey