Class Dismissed
Essays from Charles Dickens, Andrea Gabor, Nicholson Baker, and Anthony Giardina
In our July issue, an essay by the writer and University of Florida alumna Ann Manov plumbs the threats to higher education posed by civic centers like UF’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, which purports to “ ‘save’ the humanities from their capture by the left, reinstate ideological diversity in higher education, and restore Great Books programming.” Before the final week of classes at New York’s public schools, we return you to the threats—and triumphs—of the academy’s little sister. With outposts from K–12 in Massachusetts, Maine, Louisiana, and Dickensian London, this week’s From the Archive Newsletter assigns a final round of homework before class can be dismissed. Read along as Andrea Gabor reports on philanthropy’s takeover of charter schools in New Orleans, Charles Dickens petitions for the merits of a “Ragged School,” Nicholson Baker tries his hand at substitute teaching, and Anthony Giardina covers high school condom policy. To read these articles and gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe to Harper’s Magazine today.
[Report]
The K–12 Takeover
Big Philanthropy’s bid to privatize education
By Andrea Gabor
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans became the first city in the nation to replace all its public schools with charters, a transition largely backed by large philanthropic organizations. After the closure of the independent and progressive charter Cypress Academy, Andrea Gabor examines the history and consequences of the dominant “no-nonsense” charter school model for the city’s unions, teachers, and students.
“The original charter-school ideal envisioned a place for community-based, teacher-driven innovation. Instead, the charter movement has come to reflect the business values of its philanthropic backers: many charter schools in New Orleans and elsewhere are more McDonald’s than artisanal eatery. Like fast-food chains...charter-management organizations often rely on cheap, transient labor, much of it supplied by Teach for America, which gives recent college graduates only five weeks of training before placing them in schools.”
[Essay]
A Sleep to Startle Us
Published in 1852, this essay sees Charles Dickens make a sociological plea on behalf of a so-called “Ragged School”—where the pupils are “young in years but youthful in nothing else”—as a solution to poverty in the changing Farringdon Street of mid-nineteenth-century London.
“They presented a very remarkable instance of the general desire there is, after all, even in the vagabond breast, to know something useful…In the other part of the school, where each class was partitioned off by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee room, was some very good writing, and some singing of the multiplication table—the latter, on a principle much too juvenile and innocent for some of the singers. There was also a ciphering class, where a young pupil-teacher out of the streets, who refreshed himself by spitting every half-minute, had written a legible sum in compound addition on a broken slate, and was walking backward and forward before it, as he worked it, for the instruction of his class.”
[Essay]
A Joyful Noise
At Hackett Elementary School, Nicholson Baker documents his day attempting to substitute-teach a rowdy—“especially,” he is told, “after St. Patrick’s Day”—fifth-grade class from the pledge of allegiance to the last school bus home.
“The sub plans said: ‘DO NOT HELP THEM! This is a test and I need to know if they know the answers.’ Well, a handful of kids knew the answers, but most were mystified. Many did not know what a compass rose was, and others had no idea how to define the word north. I didn’t know how to define north myself. Sara remembered a directional mnemonic: Never Eat Soggy Waffles. Zeke changed it to Never Eat Soggy Whales. They all passed in their quizzes and I handed out a second social-studies worksheet, in which they were supposed to draw the map of an imaginary city, with a key to symbols used, and a compass showing which way north was. Ethan began drawing a circus. Rory embarked on a map of the world he’d made in Minecraft. Troy worked on a map of a place called Skull Country. The noise level swiftly rose to unimaginable heights, with shrill charges and countercharges flying around the room: WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU? GUYS, IT’S NOT RECESS!”
[Letter from Massachusetts]
Fighting in the Schoolyard
A Massachusetts town divided by the cost and content of public education
Anthony Giardina watches from the balcony as the idyllic small town of Hatfield becomes embroiled in a civil war over condom access at a high school with only 188 students. “An ancient, long-unquestioned social contract—that a town should pay for its children’s free public education—is now, like a lot old national assumptions, up for grabs,” writes Giardina in his 1994 piece, prefiguring the familiar script of today’s culture wars over the politicization of the classroom and the purpose of public education.
“I stared down at the populace: groups of massive, block-shouldered men in suspenders, old women clutching pocketbooks, and, among them, younger parents, some of whom had grown up in this town but many of whom had come from elsewhere. Although their clothes and manner did not particularly differ from the larger group’s, the new arrivals possessed a distinguishing alertness. Clearly, these were people—social workers, lawyers, environmental scientists, teachers, and office managers—informed by sources more cosmopolitan than the pages of the local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette. The more angry among this younger group were vocal. One woman shouted at a row of gray selectmen on the stage: ‘We only want for our kids what you got for yours!’”
