Juilliard, Jazz and the Golden Gate Bridge

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Sept., 1959), pp. 347-349

The teaching of eleventh grade English has come a long way when you can include, without awkwardness, film sequences of the Juilliard String Quartet, the Wilbur de Paris combo, and the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the same half-hour lesson. Yet Clifton Fadiman did this and more in the introductory program of a twelve-part pilot series on the humanities recently screened for specialists brought together by the television section of the U. S. Office of Education in Washington.

Supported by grants from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, the series has been developed by the Council for a Television Course in the Humanities for Secondary Schools, Inc. (mercifully abbreviated to CTCH to get it on the crawl of a less than twenty one-foot TV screen!) The first twelve half-hour films-four each on Thornton Wilder's Own Town (Fadiman), Hamlet with (Maynard Mack of the Yale English Department), and Oedipus Rex (with Bernard M. W. Knox, a Classics professor from Yale)-were two years in the making. They were recently telecast over Boston's ETV channel, WGBH-TV, four times a day (8:30 a.m., 10:15 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 7:15 p.m.) the first four days of the week, leaving Fridays for classroom testing. Over 8500 Beantown scholars in 137 public, private, and Catholic schools participated in the sessions. The course has also been tried out in St. Louis where the Fund has invested a great deal in experimental tele-teaching.

Fadiman's first session defined the humanities as the record of man's ideas and feelings about life down the centuries of recorded time. He wisely juxtaposed the Juilliard performance of Brahms' "Clarinet Quintet, Third Movement" with a swinging performance of the Wilbur de Paris jazz group, for the series is aimed primarily at the high school student who won't go on to college.

It was also smart to approach these reluctant aesthetes through a series of stills from Edward Steichen's photo-exhibition, "The Family of Man," and to close the color film with a pitch about the compatibility of science and the humanities by illustrating the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. The lively arts of jazz, photography, and technology are closest to the average high school student, and traipsing him through a Cook's tour of culture from the Greeks to the day-before-yesterday is a pretty inefficient way of developing alert patrons for contemporary art. It's like looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

That's the main trouble with the Shakespeare and Sophocles films. Both Mack and Knox are enormously articulate lecturers, and the dramatic sequences done by the Stratford (Ont.) Shakespeare troupe are first rate (Our Tomn rights were tied up for a TV spectacular and couldn't be dramatized). But the content and level of instruction are really sensible only for college-bound students who will get it anyway although rarely as expertly contrived as it is here. In fact, the real audience for the films should be future English teachers and the faculties of teachers colleges, not to mention the university pedants who somehow manage to squelch interest in a great popular playright by their sloppy preparation and audience ignoring remarks.

Another quibble about this series is that a great deal of time and money have gone into making brilliant color which then washes out on the classroom TV sets. True, Encylopedia Britannica sells the twelve polychrome films for $3000. But it would make more sense to invest that amount of money in color TV sets so that students could see and criticize as part of their classroom work the many specials broadcast by the commercial networks. Instead of trying to make grandiose and expensive gestures, it would be more prudent for schools to piggyback on the investments and interests generated by the best in commercial TV.

As it is what was originally planned as a 128-part series (with sequences on painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, and music as well as drama) has already been cut back to a projected ninety-six, done three times a week. It would make equal sense to cut down the ambitiousness of the producers to the black-and-white, nuts-and-bolts effectiveness of "Continental Classroom." The Boston series, on the other hand, is on the right track in the imaginative way it distributed free paperbacks with the texts of the plays discussed to all students participating in the experiment.

The real stumbling block, however, lies in the implicit assumption behind the choice of college-level plays: if you can bring university lecturers into the high school classroom, you can turn a public school into a private academy. The Ivy mentality is rarely to let different kinds of people develop standards for their own kinds of art but usually to assume that Ivy art and Ivy standards will civilize everybody if you push them hard enough down enough unwilling throats. "What's good for Yale is good enough for the rest of the country."

In this respect, it is interesting to note what one teacher in a Boston area prep school had to say about bringing private school caviar to the general student: "... every registered pupil received free copies of the plays to be studied . . . Even to Nobles boys who are used to owning their own texts, this free gift was exciting. We may infer from this the thrill to hundreds of public school youngsters who have never before owned a school book." Many of the Nobles students felt that "the course might fill great need in areas where English teachers are not specialists, and where the community has less access than we have to theaters, museums, symphony halls. This response may sound snobbish (and in a few cases felt so), but it seemed to represent a considered view."

It should be noted too how the presumed elite schools in America seem to feel no obligation to provide leadership in the criticism of the popular arts. What terminal high school students in the public schools really need is not genteel samples of what they won't get because they aren't going to college, but imaginative analyses of Paddy Chayefsky, Stanley Kramer, Mort Sahl, and Steve Allen. This series, in spite of the tentative right first step by Fadiman, reveals precisely why the humanities are so irrelevant to so many people in America today. Professors despise popular culture very often and make the humanities a way of escaping nostalgically out of the exciting confusions of the present. It's a tribute to the fundamental good sense of most Americans that they don't accept this genteel evasion.

Another real weakness is the humanist's sensitivity to criticism. The Humanities after all are A Good Thing, and therefore even to criticize constructively ill-conceived and grandiose plans is to accuse one's self of philistinism. Yet as more and more money is invested in television teaching, there is an even greater need for savage candor. (It might be instructive if commercial broadcasters parried the unenlightened criticism of broadcasting with trenchant critiques of poorly conceived educational broadcasting.) And a recent report from the Ford Foundation and the Fund for the Advancement of Education, "Teaching by Television," suggests that we are going to have more and more TV experimentation in the schools.

The experiments of over twenty-five colleges and universities, 100 school systems, and this academic year, more than 100,000 students and their teachers are discussed. As the birth rate zooms and teacher recruitment dawdles along, it's really no longer a question of TV or not TV teaching, but rather how good or bad. Given this squeeze in quantity of students and quality in teachers, the present situation in television teaching is important to consider.

As of February 1959, 117 colleges and universities were offering TV courses for credit, 241 are granting credit for "Continental Classroom," 569 school districts are making regular use of televised instruction. The Joint Council on Educational Television and the American Council on Education report that there are more than 150 closed-circuit installations in schools and colleges throughout the country and twenty-one military installations. The Ford Foundation and the Fund for the Advancement of Education have plunked more than $10,000,000 into more than fifty different experiments at the school and college level in the last five years. If the commercial broadcasters need sympathetic critics to mature, so now do the educators need critics to prevent the absurdity of using twentieth century machines to multiply the inadequacies of a nineteenth century concept of the humanities and of education in general.