Ignorant Armies

Dear Mrs. Steveson
I know I have fail the novel test, but that just one thing I want to know and this is If I still have a chance to pass this course. I need this course very bad because if I fail this course I will be put out of college for the second time and I can’t effort that now, because of my mother and father I know I got off to a bad start but if I do god on the final exam, will it be possible for me to get out? I am asking a big favor and this is the first time I am asking anybody for something. Well, If it not possible, I will have to face the result of not comeing back next semester or at anytime because I won’t be able to go to any college.
If it is possible I would like to talk to you before the final examination because I know it to late for help now, and I need it very bad.
Your truly
Bill Bostwork
PLEASE HELP ME

The above, written in a just barely legible hand, was handed in to me in lieu of a test paper toward the end of the first semester of my short career as a teacher of English composition in a “predominantly (that is, all but completely) Negro” college behind the Cotton Curtain of the Deep South. Bill Bostwork’s letter contains a blunt and moving statement of the dilemma of the “disadvantaged” student of the South—a desperate cry for help, coupled with an acknowledgment that it is already too late.

Bill never came around for the talk he asked me for in his letter. I was grateful that he didn’t. I could have offered him no hope of the C which was the grade he needed to stay in school. Nothing else—not sympathy, or pious preaching, or even vocational counseling—would have done him any good. I would have had to watch his face while I pronounced the words that pushed his head under, and he would have had to watch mine while he tried to lie his way out of the cheating he had done to get as far as a third doomed try at English Phase II.

Bill was not the worst student I had, nor the most undeserving. In fact, he was fairly typical of the 40 percent of every entering class which is destined (statistically) to flunk out of Broadleaf (as I shall call the college) at the end of the first year. He came to very few classes, though he told me that English was his favorite subject. He had a slight talent for rhyming and was trying to write lyrics for Country and Western songs. He slept through the classes he did attend because we were not dealing with the one area of English that interested him, and he didn’t understand whatever it was that we were dealing with instead. He turned in written work done by some party unknown and not even recopied in his own hand (except on those occasions when he submitted one of his “original ballads”). He had cheated on all the tests he took before this one. Cheated in a lackadaisical, feckless fashion which said, in effect, that he knew I knew, but what the hell, I was going to flunk him anyway! If I had held out any hope that a good grade on the final would “get him out,” he would have been put to the trouble and expense of cheating on that too.

What else could he do?

His “scholastic aptitude” was too low to measure. He did not read well enough to handle eighthgrade work with any ease. His vocabulary was so limited that even the college newspaper strained it. He was twenty-three years old. About thirteen of those years had been “spent" in the substandard, segregated schools of his home hamlet and had rendered him ineducable; at least, under the conditions that prevailed in Broadleaf, which was the only college that he could get into.

A fraud was perpetrated upon Bill when he was admitted. Keeping him on through a second and then a third semester of probation not only prolonged his agony, it took his money under false pretenses, for there was never any hope that he could make the grade. And keeping a quota of 40 percent of Bill Bostworks, year in, year out, clogs the pores of the body academic so that it can hardly fulfill its obligation to the other 60 percent.

That is what matters in the long run—what kind of education is offered to the survivors of the first year, of whom less than half will survive another three years and eventually emerge with a B.A. degree. For the overwhelming majority of these young men and women will go back and teach in the segregated schools that hobbled the minds of the Bill Bostworks in the first place. Unless spending four years at Broadleaf lifts its graduates to a level of competency well above that of the previous generation of teachers, the vicious circle will continue to produce a class of disadvantaged black citizens, hopelessly handicapped in competition for any but the most menial jobs, no matter what laws are passed (or enforced) about fair employment practices.

The circle has been operating for a long time, ever since free public education for Negroes— “separate but equal"—came into existence. It begins with children born into families living below subsistence level in everything from diet to literacy. These children come to school already so far behind that some educators doubt that they can ever be helped to catch up. They are “taught” by graduates of colleges like Broadleaf, who work for wages no white teacher would accept. Low as these wages are, however, they look princely to the parents of the children and probably to the parents of the teachers as well. Teaching is almost the only profession open to the poor black child of the South, and college is the trial by fire he must endure to enter it.

So thousands of boys and girls submit to twelve (or more) years of grammar and high school, and graduate—in the sense that they are handed a diploma. With this, they can qualify for admission to Broadleaf or one of the other state-supported “predominantly” colleges. As long as they pay the low tuition and living costs, they can stay on by maintaining a C average (and for two semesters after failing to do so). If they last the required four years and pass their final exams, by fair means or foul, they can “get out,” get jobs as teachers, and start the cycle all over again.

Concentrated injections of “enrichment” like Head Start and Upward Bound programs help a few lucky youngsters to break out of the hobbles. But to break the circle itself, it will be necessary to upgrade the education of the teachers of black children over the whole South. This is what makes places like Broadleaf of concern to citizens of our troubled democracy who will never hear its real name.

The observation post from which this report is written was located on that sector of the battlefront where the casualty rate was highest, the English department. Most Broadleaf students who flunk out do so because they can’t meet the English requirement. (Math is the runner-up.)

This is not because the requirements are very challenging. “Proficiency in speaking and writing standard English” is all the catalogue claims. “Standard” is not defined, but it can be assumed from what one hears at faculty meetings and chapel addresses that Broadleaf’s standard is less exacting than Professor Higgins’.

The trouble is that English, like all language, is learned when one is very young, learned lay listening and imitating. If one has never heard it spoken clearly and fluently in all the years of one’s growing up, it is almost impossible to start learning it at seventeen or eighteen. I am trying to avoid using words like “good” or “correct” or “acceptable,” which are usually masks for some class or regional chauvinism. To speak “well” does not mean to speak like a white, urban, middle-class Easterner. But it ought to mean “clearly enough” so that one is understood by those to whom one speaks, and “fluently enough” so that one can express not only physical needs and emotions but ideas, concepts, generalizations from the particular.

I had dozens of students at Broadleaf, some of them of superior ability, who could not make themselves understood to any but their “home boys and girls” who spoke the same local dialect. And I had dozens who could not find the words with which to formulate, discuss, defend, or refute an abstract idea. (There is some basis for believing that the ability to put an idea into words is a prerequisite for the process we call “critical thinking” or reasoning.)

Further, despite the militant defense of “black language” (usually meaning whatever class and regional variant the defender happens to use), the fact is that a young man or woman who wants a white-collar job—North or South—has to speak like the public in which he will function. Broadleaf students come to college to prepare themselves to get that sort of job (or to teach children who will one day want that sort of job), and most of them face an ordeal no less severe than Eliza Doolittle’s, without the help of a Higgins. Writing is perhaps less important, but even to apply for a job one must be able to write a passable letter (unless one can hire a ghost-writer), and few Broadleaf seniors can do that.

The underlying problem, however, is not speaking or writing but reading English. Every set of statistics on the freshman class of 1966-1967 showed that less than half could read well enough to do college work.

The nationally accepted minimum for “successful work in the first college year” is a tenth-grade reading skill. My body count showed that of 183 students, I had 136 who tested below tenth grade. In my three levels (Phase I, II, and Advanced) I had only 30 students who read at tenth grade, 15 who read between that and twelfth, and 2 of superior ability. It is interesting that of the whole 183, only 3 spoke acceptable English (acceptable to the middle class of both races in this region), and only one of the 4 was in the top reading group. The other 3 were students of average ability who happened to have spent their youth in places where English was spoken better than in the poverty pockets of the South.

Incidentally, this problem is not exclusively a Southern one. It is so acute among disadvantaged young people in the North and East that educators have been working for several years on crash programs for upgrading language skills, one of which (originating in Detroit) goes by the dismaying title of “teaching English as a second language.”

What appalled me about Broadleaf—one reason the word “fraud” crops up whenever I try to describe the educational effort there—is that none of the results of all this work on remediation were available to us, despite the universal admission of our students’ desperate need for it.

We did offer a section called Remedial English to students who read below the eighth-grade level, but there was absolutely no remedial work done in it. On the contrary, it differed from the regular English Phase I classes only in that its victims met five times a week instead of three times, and covered the required material in an even more boring fashion. The teachers assigned to these classes were not trained in any of the several approaches to the problem which are recognized as effective. They were the least-qualified (because the least-prepared) members of the department, and they quite naturally regarded the work as punishing and degrading.

Remediation was not the only teaching skill in which the Broadleaf faculty was underprepared. Things were not much different in social studies, math, or education, the departments which share with English the major responsibility for the final product: the Broadleaf Bachelor of Arts.

Because I came to love and respect some of my colleagues, to sympathize deeply with most of them, and to loathe a few, I shall try to keep myself to statistical estimates of our collective ability to achieve the collective goal.

First: there simply weren’t enough of us to carry the load. Most authorities in the field of teaching English composition recommend a maximum of twenty students per class, and an instructor load of twelve class hours per week. Where students need more than the average amount of help, the recommendation is fifteen students per class and nine hours per week.

Broadleaf English teachers had an average of thirty-five students per class and fifteen class hours a week. Some Phase I classes in my year ran as high as forty-two students, assembled in a room designed to seat no more than thirty-five.

The state guidelines under which Broadleaf was supposed to operate set a maximum of twenty-five students per class. I asked once why we didn’t conform and was told that the guidelines applied to the “all-college average.” English teachers (who must read, correct, and/or discuss all that their students write) are expected to take up the slack for departments with low enrollments. Courses in floriculture, swine breeding, bowling, first aid, and advanced trumpet were permitted to continue year after year with enrollments of three, two, eight, six, and one student, at the expense of basic communication skills.

The corps of teachers that was expected to do the impossible under these conditions consisted of nineteen and one half people (the other half being dedicated to foreign languages). Two had what was referred to as “the terminal degree.” Although the catalogue states that no one can receive an appointment at Broadleaf without at least a master’s degree, only seven had M.A.’s. The other ten were “temporary appointments”—wives of local ministers, professors, or coaches, teaching because they needed the extra money. Some had been “temporaries” for ten years, but they had no tenure. (Not that tenure was much protection when a storm blew from the president’s office or beyond.)

Some of these relatively untrained teachers were “naturals” who got better results than the Ph.D.’s —real educational miracles which could only be ascribed to total commitment on both sides! Some, including some of the M.A.’s, were harmless anachronisms left over from the days when Broadleaf was a two-year normal school for rural elementary teachers. A few were real pedagogical monstrosities: people who had come into teaching for the wrong reasons (usually financial). They spoke and wrote English so badly that they made problems for colleagues who knew and did better, and they were so insecure that they resorted to classroom behavior reminiscent of overseers in slavery days.

(“Just don’t never ask Mr. A. a question,” I heard a sophomore counsel a freshman one day. “He most likely don’t know the answer, and all he’s going to do is cheap you up for asking.”)

Even more startling than the caliber of the faculty and the load it was expected to carry was the Broadleaf salary scale. It was mysteriously high, not only in English, but in all departments, including administration. We were better paid than our counterparts in the best private white colleges in the region. We were better paid than our peers at other statesupported black schools, although Broadleaf’s scholastic standing was the lowest in its category.

The official explanation for this curious state of affairs was that the State Board of Education felt that “only premium salaries would attract teachers of real stature” into what amounted to a black reservation in Klan country. But it was obvious that the bribe had not worked, unless stature was being measured by some yardstick other than competence. Was the state board aware that they were not getting what they paid for?

While I puzzled over this question, I became aware of a matching mystery: the equipment budget. It was staggeringly generous, also clearly a waste. Opening any storage closet in one of Broadleaf’s newer buildings was like peeking into a Bluebeard’s chamber of audio-visual aids. Expensive machines of all kinds were gathering dust, some of them in need of minor repairs or routine maintenance, some never uncrated or assembled. One specific example in my own area: a year before I came to Broadleaf, the college received a sizable grant to set up a reading laboratory, something we certainly could have used. Halfway through my teaching year, space was cleared in the library, and a dozen very expensive reading machines were installed. When I left in June, there was not a single staff member trained in the use of the machines (or their maintenance), and they were already beginning to show the effects of casual or deliberate misuse.

The answer to the questions that puzzled me I “discovered” so gradually that it was not until I was ready to leave that I was willing to accept it. I came to believe (on the above and other evidence which follows) that the State Board of Education was not being conned into wasting taxpayers’ dollars. Those gentlemen knew exactly what they were buying. They were paying premium prices for a precious and increasingly rare commodity, the type of education which looks “separate but equal” to the casual observer, but does as little as possible to raise the black student to a level that might pose a competitive threat to whites.

Before 1954, Broadleaf and places like it didn’t look equal. They were as poor as the segment of society they “served.” Now they look affluent, alluring to the students they are meant to attract. But they are not meant to educate them. They are meant to keep them out of the hands of Stokely Carmichael (in my day), off the street corners until time for the “boys” to be drafted and sent overseas.

If the foregoing observations are not persuasive enough, let me add this much further proof in the area of curriculum, teaching methods, and required texts. I still remember my dismaying search through the English Phase I and II text for an assignment on which to start my 100 or more entering freshmen. The volume was too heavy to hold, too expensive for their budgets, and divided, like Gaul, into three parts. There was a rhetoric (totally unsuitable to my students’ reading level); a handbook on rules of grammar, usage, punctuation, and spelling; and a section of Selected Readings.

The authors represented included Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Jacob Bronowski, John Henry Newman, Edward Sapir, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, C. P. Snow, and Lillian Smith. Mrs. Smith’s “Memory of a Large Christmas” was the only selection that touched in any degree at all upon experience shared by my freshmen. And Mrs. Smith’s vocabulary was so far beyond my students’ that most of them were going to be forced to read her at the “frustration level"— that is, encountering 10 unfamiliar words out of every 100.

To convey to the reader some sense of the discrepancy between the content and style of the text and the experience of the students who were forced to buy it, I offer a sample theme, written by one of my Phase I students:

THE HUSH HUSH BEATEN

There was this colored woman in Texas who went to Newelton one Saturday nite. When she made it there, she stop to talk to some friends. While standing there talking, a white man drove up in his truck and got out. When he got out, he went around to the back of the truck and got an iron rod out. Then he came over and started to beat the lady while some sorry colored men watch and didn’t do a thing. He beat the poor lady real bad.

Then Newelton sorry old deputy came. The deputy and this old man pick her up and threw her in the deputy’s car like an old hog or something. They carry her to the hospital where she stayed for three days. After she was released, the deputy carried her to jail and charge her with disturbing the peace. But the white man wasn’t charge with anythings.

When time came for court, all of the colored people were afraid to appear in court and be witness. They claimed it was none of their business.

After the trial was over, she was released and she had to pay a hundred and seventy-five dollars for nothing. The white man didn’t have to pay anything.

I brought up in the next departmental meeting the question of whether there was not something wrong with the choice of this text for this Phase. Most of my colleagues’ faces wore bitter smiles through my question and the answer which followed: that disadvantaged students needed “exposure” to as wide a variety of “cultural richness” as possible because only so could their constricted horizons be widened. I am not a true pedagogue, but even I know that the word “educate” is derived from the Latin verb ducere, which means “to lead.” One can lead someone else only by starting where he is. Or, as the educational psychologists put it, learning takes place only when the student interacts with the new experience, an activity that the word “exposure” does not describe.

The freshman English text teas not the only inappropriate choice of this kind. There was another required for Advanced English, just as heavy, just as expensive, and just as unsuitable. In fact, there was so little difference between the two books that I couldn’t see why impoverished students should be asked to lay out the price of both.

“The rhetoric section and the handbook are almost identical,” I argued in staff meeting. “We could use one of them for both courses, and buy another Selected Reading for the Advanced classes. There are fine anthologies, in paperback, at a fifth the price, which also include some work by black writers.”

(The final outrage about the required texts, it seemed to me, was that neither had a single prose selection by a Negro. One of them had a dialect poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and a sermon in verse by James Weldon Johnson. It might have been less insulting to make the exclusion of nonCaucasians complete.)

With support from some sympathetic colleagues, I carried the day. A committee was formed to read and evaluate a new Advanced English “reader.” The one finally chosen was a remarkable sampler of selections of different length, difficulty, subject matter, and style, a number of them by Negro writers, poets, and political leaders. Before I left Broadleaf, I saw the order placed for the following fall. But a colleague who taught in summer school informed me that the order was countermanded. The reason given was that Broadleaf had to consider its image in the eyes of the accreditation committee that would soon be reviewing its status. Presumably the size, price, and specific gravity of the texts used in basic courses would be weighed in the scale.

My deepening conviction that all this ineptitude was not accidental was confirmed by scouting trips I took to other black colleges, private and statesupported. At all of those which were controlled by some arm of the regional white Establishment, the English department seemed to be the stepchild of the institution.

But there was one startling exception: a small, private, and therefore poorly endowed college which has been adopted by a Northern university’s English department for use as a proving ground in an experimental program for upgrading language skills. The equipment at this school was excellent, but no more expensive than what was gathering dust at Broadleaf. The English faculty had no more impressive array of advanced degrees, although they were on the whole younger and had given fewer hostages to fortune.

The most striking difference was in thrust. Here all available energy, equipment, and organization skill was directed toward a single goal. The curriculum in English was coordinated with the curriculum in history, education, science, and so on. Entertainment brought to the campus, guest lecturers, extra reading assignments, even the background sound piped into dormitories and dining halls— all were part of the master plan. And the students cooperated. They felt that they were achieving something they wanted to achieve, and they needed neither carrot nor club to keep them working.

I came back to Broadleaf after this excursion too high to be tactful. I bored everyone within earshot by telling and retelling every interesting detail. Finally, another English teacher brought me down. “Look,” said Miss Jones, “we know all about that. We could do the same thing, if they’d let us. As a matter of fact, I do it anyway.”

I learned for the first time that Miss Jones had been sent North, at department expense, two or three summers before to attend an institute for “teachers of English in Negro colleges.” She came back to Broadleaf with a notebook full of procedures for what she called “the experiential method” of teaching basic communication skills. She was asked to give a forty-five-minute presentation of the method to a departmental meeting. When she was done, everyone was told that it was up to the individual teacher to choose between the new approach and the traditional one.

“And what happened?” I asked.

“Nothing. Except with me. I use the new way.”

“Not a single teacher wanted to change?” I found it hard to believe.

“Some tried for a while, but it’s really an awful lot of work. You have to keep the kids writing all the time, and you have to read everything they write. I have one hundred and seventy students. If they write three times a week, that’s more than five hundred papers. I couldn’t do it if I paid any attention to the course outlines we’re supposed to follow.”

I was converted to her “experiential method” within minutes of my first scanning of her notes. But I still found it hard to understand why I was the first true believer she had found.

“Maybe that’s why I get away with it,” she said. “They let me ignore all the red tape and requirements because I’m not making any changes. If I were, they might come down on me and anyone else who was rocking the boat. Or maybe it’s because I don’t really care whether I get fired, and the others do. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you when I got to know you better. You’ve been around. Where would you suggest I start looking for another job?—a real one!”

The answer—and it is cruelly important—is that there is no answer for the Miss Joneses who make up the majority of the faculties of the black institutions of higher learning of the South today.

There are only a few exceptional institutions like the one I had visited, and the salaries they pay are scandalously low. Also, the number of positions they offer is negligible. There are almost as many, or as few, openings in the North, in large, predominantly white institutions that want to “look good on integration.” These “instant Negro” jobs are normally awarded to scholars who have escaped the vicious circle of segregated education and are able to compete on a par with whites— men like John Hope Franklin of the University of Chicago, Frank Snowden of Howard University, Mozell Hill of Teachers College, Columbia, Ira Reid of Haverford College, and Rufus Clement of Atlanta University.

The vista of employment opportunity for the black educator is so narrow that there is really no need for a blacklist of “troublemakers,” although there is some reason to believe that one exists. That is the club. The carrot is the high salary level and the mortgaged middle-class standard of living it establishes. A good deal more could be said of the dilemma of the black teacher (especially in the colleges) of the segregated South, but this much, I hope, will make clear why black students look in vain for solid support in any movement they initiate for radical change.

And it should also make it clear why I am convinced that the whole structure of “separate but equal” education is a plot not only against young black people of the South but against all of us.

Since the Supreme Court decision of 1954, millions of tax dollars have been poured into the effort to make the fraud look like the free choice of its victims. Showplaces like Broadleaf get new dormitories with individual air-conditioning in every room, “better than what we’ve got for our own kids” at the white college down the road. There are beautiful new libraries with no books on the shelves, marvelous machines that no one knows how to use or repair. There are big salaries for conforming nonachievers, and real opportunities for advancement for young male graduates who do well in sports.

It is all as phony as the villages Potemkin built to deceive the Empress Catherine. Visitors from the North, or from Washington, D.C., come down, are shown around the spread, fed some fried chicken, and sent back to report that things are progressing “with all deliberate speed.” Everything rocks along in a minstrel show parody of white higher education, including fraternities and honor societies (segregated), and gorgeously costumed academic processions every hot, humid June.

Now and then, more and more often, the students stand up and denounce the fraud. They often pay a grim price for comparatively little gain. The fall after I left Broadleaf, for instance, there was a comparatively successful student strike. Under the leadership of a small elite, who consulted with all levels of the student body and even sub rosa with some faculty members, the overwhelming majority of the 3000 students closed down the administration and main classroom building on the eve of the fall homecoming game. The demands they presented were concerned almost entirely with “academic excellence.”

The preamble to the list read in part,

Academic institutions exist for the transmission of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, the development of students, and the well-being of society. . . . For the future of . . . [Broadleaf] College, it is necessary that steps be taken to remove those administrators and faculty members who impede the implementation of these desired objectives, and to replace them with more qualified ones.

The students also asked the “subordination of athletics to academics,” longer hours in the library, more books, and a revision of curriculum and examination procedures with the avowed goal of winning back Broadleaf s lost accreditation.

For a while it looked as if victory were possible. But the administration held trump cards which it was willing to play, when forced. The State Guard was called in to “protect visitors to the big game.” They occupied the campus while the leaders of the strike were being forcibly removed from it. At that point more than 50 percent of the student body withdrew from college and went home. The administration put on a saturation campaign of phone calls and personal letters to parents, who were urged to save their children from the consequences of “manipulation by a minority of outside agitators.”Most of the parents succumbed to this pressure, and such is their influence over their sons and daughters that they were able to persuade even the most militant to “go back and finish out the year.”

Meanwhile, the expelled leaders were appealing their case, all the way tip to the State Board of Education, which heard their attorneys and then solemnly rubber-stamped the action that they had probably recommended to the president in the beginning. Most of the expellees were men and on college deferments. Their draft boards lost no time reclassifying them, and before the academic year was over, at least one of them was reported missing in Vietnam.

Nothing, so far as I can discover, was changed for the better at Broadleaf as a result of this sacrifice. Progress, at a similar price, is reported at some other schools where similar strikes took place last year, but no one with firsthand knowledge of the Negro college scene is sanguine about its future.

There are many honest and informed observers who believe that the institution of the predominantly black college will, and ought to, go out like a candle as the light of real integration dawns. Most black educators disagree.

Some may do so because their own futures are tied to substandard institutions. Others give reasons which are impressive. One of the clearest statements of this position comes from Alphonse Jackson, who wrote in 1967 as president of the Louisiana Education Association (Negro):

We must stop destroying the Negro institutions [because] if freedom is to come to the 20 million blacks of America, it will come from leadership discovered, developed, and used largely within the black ghettos of this land. ... If Negro leaders are to obtain the needed skills and sophistication, many of the functional experiences needed must be learned in Negrooriented institutions [where there are] unlimited opportunities to develop and practice, opportunities that are not afforded Negroes in institutions controlled by the white leadership establishment. . . .

Without a sufficient leadership base, black America will not be represented at the conference table, will not be part of the decision-making process, and the cause of freedom will not he advanced.

The cause of freedom to which Jackson refers is not the cause of any particular racial grouping in America, not even the majority one. It will be the worse for all of us if the battle lines are drawn so that those who should be allies face each other