Schechter book

[EClinchy@aol.com]

I have just had the  privilege of reading the manuscript of Bill Schechters 
book, Imagining History:  A High School Teachers Journey Into the Past.  It is 
difficult to put into mere words  my admiration for this book.  As a  long 
time true believer in (and follower of) the seminal works of likes of  Jonathan 
Kozol, John Holt, Herb Kohl, Jim Herndon, Jay Featherstone, Bill Hull,  David 
Hawkins, Debbie Meier, Alfie Kohn, and Ted Sizer (with all of them  supported 
by the scholarly contributions of such people as Piaget, Vygotsky,  Bruner, 
Gardner, Papert and the four authors of Womens Ways of Knowing), I think  this 
book ranks up there with the very best of them.  
First, the writing  itself: fresh, vivid, alive, enteraining (and often 
hilarious), wonderfully  self-depreca-tory without minimizing what he has 
accomplished, and breathtaking  in what he has been able to cover in a mere 200 pages. 
And then the story:  the book is a essentially a memoir telling the tale of a 
boy growing up in the  late 40s and early 50s in a tight, left wing Jewish 
community in the Bronx, how  he began to become fascinated by the history of 
that community, the miserable  educational times he had in the New York public 
schools (but including a few  inspired teachers in the all-boy 15,000 (sic) 
student DeWitt Clinton High  School), on to a four years at Cornell and then as a 
drop-out from two of  Americas finest graduate schools (Ive asked him for more 
details on this),  bouncing loosely around at odd jobs, discovering the 
Onondaga Indians in upstate  New York and fighting for them, accidentally dropping 
into teaching and  discovering he liked it, enrolling in the Goddard-Cambridge 
teacher ed program  and encountering the works of all the great ones listed  
above. 
Leading to the terrors  of student teaching at Bostons Brighton High  School  
(more disasters but no permanent teaching job in Boston),  but then!!!  He 
heard about a job  pening in the history department at a school called the       
         Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High  School  located in the wilds of 
Bostonian suburbia.  He got the job and ended up staying for  35 years. 
And what roller coaster years!  L-S (as it is known) was founded as a  small 
Public Private School and in the late 60s was opening up - no rigid  
curriculum, no bells, no dress code, open campus, electives, alternate programs,  etc. 
!! The faculty helped govern the school and had genuine academic  freedom.  It 
was a school that  boiled with debate, discord, creativity, innovation and 
energy.   
Schechter was an active  participant in the schools vibrant culture and, 
after surviving his early years  learning on the job, became a teacher.   And what 
a teacher! The bulk of  the book describes the amazing things he and his 
students did - trips to nearby  Walden Pond and building a replica of Thoreaus 
cabin inside L-S, trips to the  Deep South and a visit to James Chaneys grave, 
historical murals all along the  schools walls including one protesting the 
schools civil rights record,  discovering a monument to Shays 1787 Rebellion that 
occurred not so far away in  Westrn Massachusetts, a monument that pictured 
Shays as a disobedient miscreant  and the effort the class made to erect one 
nearby that made him a hero.                      
These fragments can  only suggest the depth of what he did and what he has to 
say about history,  about the teaching of history, about the value of every 
individual student  and how their minds can be opened up to  the wonders of the 
human historical story, and about what can be accomplished in  schools 
through the respectful activity of communal learning.   
And, mirabile dictu,  Schechter is also a wonderful poet!  Every chapter ends 
with a poem by him, and the book is sprinkled not only  with his poetry but 
with the great poets and with student poetry.  How refreshing!   
Anyone who cares about children, young  people, the public schools of this 
country and what a system of public education  might and should be needs to 
experience the joys of the first three quarters of  this book.   
Ah, but then the  inevitable final chapters.  Even a  school such as L-S, 
solidly supported by a largely well-to-do, all-white  suburban community, a 
school where almost all students ace the SATs and end up  at prestigious elite 
colleges, a school with a faculty and administration that  espouses and achieves 
the highest possible academic standards, a school where  essentially all 
students are winners, not even this school can withstand the  assault on the public 
schools that began with A Nation at Risk in 1973 and  culminates in the 
present horrors of No Child Left Behind and the Massachusetts  Comprehensive  
Assessment System  (MCAS).      
Schechter tells this  story in chilling detail - the gradual erosion of 
creative learning experiences  in classrooms and academic freedom for teachers and 
students throughout the  state, the institution of single MCAS exams in 
reading and math at several grade  levels and for high school graduation instead of 
the comprehensive system called  for in the original legislation, the 
resulting dumbing down of the endless  teaching to the test,  the extending  of tests 
to science and even to history. 
But Schechters great  concerns here are not just for the students at L-S, as 
corrosive as MCAS, other  standardized tests and the college admissions game 
has been for them.  They are well-off and privileged, and  they will somehow 
survive.  No,  Schechter is worried about the elephant in the room called class 
and the  achievement gap that is the result of an unjust social system, a 
system  that has created the truly important gap  between the suburban L-Ss and 
the relatively impoverished urban school systems  all across the country, 
systems where students dont have  trips to the Deep South or a chance to  build a 
replica of Thoreaus cabin because they are being subjected to the  endless 
torture of test preparation -- and even with all that torture they still  wont be 
acing the SATs. 
Schechter has no easy  answers for all of these problems.  He hopes for and 
sees a few signs of a backlash against the assault on  public schooling, but in 
the end he can only call for a renewed commitment to  the ideals upon which 
the public schools were founded - that all children have a  right to the full 
development of all of their innate intellectual, social and  moral capacities 
and that it is the duty of any just society to provide  equally for that full 
development.      
So -- for anyone who  cares about children, young people, the public schools 
of this country and what  a system of public education might and should be 
needs to experience not only  the joys of the first three quarters of this book  
but the sadness and bravery of its final  chapters.  And what an experience  
that is! 



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