Lessons of a Lost Education

I felt myself blushing as I proposed this story to an editor.

She was very nice about it. “I’m sure you know more than you think,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Really, I don’t know anything. Go ahead, ask me a question.”

We launched onto a different subject, so she never did test my knowledge of history, geography or math. But if she had given me an impromptu quiz, there’s a good chance I would have failed. I know, because I tried it when I called my mom the other day.

“Ask me something you think I ought to have learned in high school,” I instructed her.

“OK,” she said. “Who was Hitler’s right-hand man? Who was Sirhan Sirhan? Who were Sacco and Vanzetti?”

Whew, at least I was sure of one: “They were those guys who got the death penalty and shouldn’t have, or something?”

“Something like that,” said my mom.

I truly feared writing this because I thought--still think--that confessing my educational deficiencies could have a negative impact on my life. It’s not a brilliant career move to admit that despite being a professional writer, I still can’t name all 40--it is 40, right?--U. S. Presidents.

But I also think it’s better to ask a question and be thought a fool than to keep your mouth shut and really be a fool.

So I’m asking. How is it that someone can breeze through grade school, junior high and high school with A’s and B’s and emerge at the end never having learned about Stalin or Lenin or Castro, what Watergate was all about or where Madagascar is? Without ever having dissected anything?

Since realizing the scope of my ignorance, I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong with my education. By current standards, I seem to have had the optimum California public school experience. I went to grade school in San Diego County and most of high school in the San Francisco Bay area, at what seemed like well-equipped institutions. My parents gave me lots of mental stimulation.

But I was also a student during the 1970s and 1980s, when experimental education programs started in full force. And I was in junior high during the Jarvis-Gann tax reforms of 1978, which resulted in massive budget cuts to schools. I can’t help but think that these upheavals shortchanged the students in some way.

One experiment that probably sounded good on paper was to pair up a class of “faster” third-graders with a class of “slower” fourth-graders and have the two teachers teach both classes. Each child could then learn at his or her own pace. But all I can recall of my third-fourth combination was a huge, noisy roomful of 40 or 50 kids. Instead of getting the attention of both teachers, the class was so vast that it seemed nobody got any help.

My fifth-grade teacher abolished all the desks in the room and let us build our own curtained huts. He also tried to teach us about a market economy by issuing play money and letting us “sell” handmade wares to each other every Friday.

I spent the entire year hiding out in my hut, making beads with my girlfriends. I learned a lot about bead making but not a lot of whatever it is fifth-graders are supposed to know.

I’m not trying to paint my teachers as bad or uncaring because they weren’t. Certainly, I agree in principle with the philosophy of developing students’ creativity in a non-rigid format. (My Southern California teachers showed a degree of imagination lacking in their Northern California counterparts.) But if certain fundamentals are lost, education becomes all flash and no substance, and ultimately no better than the old style of relentlessly drilling the “three R’s” into students’ heads.

My lack of knowledge in the basics became clear when my family moved to the Bay Area. I was in the second half of ninth grade and had been in an advanced English class in Southern California, where I’d excelled in creative writing. I found myself in a class at the same level where I began getting C’s and D’s. My new class was in the middle of a lesson on diagramming sentences, and I had almost no concept of formal sentence structure. The lessons were tedious and difficult, but by summer I could keep up with my peers. My writing had improved, too.

But moving to a more traditional school didn’t solve my education problems. Back-to-basics schools seem to rely on archaic evaluation methods that better test how well you can memorize than whether you’ve absorbed what you’ve learned. My short-term memory is apparently good, which is why I managed to pass American history at the top of my class without retaining more than a few general facts.

Then there were the subjects that were never even taught--at least not in my classes: world literature; any important events after World War II; any connection between subjects that would have made them more significant to a 16-year-old, such as how science affects religion or geography affects history. I wonder if Jarvis-Gann did away with them, along with the bus drivers, career advisers and school psychologists.

I realize I’m asking a lot of an overburdened, underbudgeted system. I know teachers have to simultaneously baby-sit, discipline and get some lesson plan accomplished. There probably isn’t a lot of time to infuse a bunch of apathetic, media-saturated teen-agers with a thirst for knowledge.

And I knew during my school years that I was at fault, too. As I coasted my way through typing class--never bothering to learn the keyboard, hunting-and-pecking my way to a B minus--I knew that I should be going in for extra practice. But since I could get away with it, it was hard to care.

The catch is, now I do care. I also worry that with more budget cuts apparently on the way, more distractions and fewer teachers, it’s going to get even easier for students to get by without being educated. I’m a perfect example of how far you can go in a system that doesn’t have time to deal with students who seem to do OK.

I am thinking of taking some extension classes.

Lauren Lipton is a Times staff writer.