My most memorable high school teacher, Mr. Siringer, taught English wearing sunglasses to conceal an eye twitch. He brought a phonograph into the classroom to play Wagner while we took our exams. He read aloud to the class all of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, and he did it every year. My brother used to quote it to exasperating effect.
He told us that Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past was the greatest novel, but that we shouldn’t try to read it until we were in our 20s. He gave us a list of interesting vocabulary words — ignominious and idiosyncrasy are two that I remember. He was not a good teacher in the conventional sense. A lot of the time he was boring and vaguely insulting. He had a bias against football players, or so I thought, and I nursed a mild resentment. But what made him memorable made him good in an unconventional sense.
Author and scholar Helen Vendler wrote an article recently bemoaning the way high schools and colleges today ignore or water down the humanities because, it is thought, they have no practical, testable use. Literature is taught to illustrate a point, not because it’s a wondrous part of our nation’s cultural heritage. How do you test for wonder?
Vendler advocates using our schools as hotbeds of culture ; piping Aaron Copland over the sound system in the hallways, or Ellington or Armstrong; lining the hallways with examples of great American art; stop trying to make a point, except the point of the greatness of great novels, movies, and plays such as The Glass Menagerie.
Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, wrote about his “accidental education.” He had detested school, which was given over to rote memorization, but he described the moment in Germany when he heard Beethoven, whose music he thought he hated, and he suddenly got it. He had an “accidental education” when he went to Italy and was confronted by the grand mysteries of the past, its glories and ruination. We can’t all travel to Germany or Italy for our education, but when our schools open themselves to surprise and idiosyncrasy, memorable things happen.
People my age often moan that things aren’t the way they used to be, but they never were. I never did finish Moby Dick when I was in high school, but I learned it was a great book, and I read it later and loved it.
Everybody wants to put a dollar amount on education, which is fine, but we need to remember something else that Henry Adams wrote. His accidental education, he said, “differed from other education in being not a means of pursuing life, but one of the ends attained.”
