"To Fix Education Look to the Past."

That's the headline at #1 on the Wall Street Journal's "Popular Now" list, and I guess those words are working better to win clicks than the actual title on the essay from last Saturday "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," which is framed around the story of a hardcore teacher from the 1960s, "a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky."

Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated...

The teaser on the sidebar "Popular" list got me to click, but my hopes are dashed. It's nice to look at the past for sighs and nostalgia and exclamations of "You can't do that today," but you can't look to this past and see how to fix education.

The essay writer, Joanne Lipman, does try to extract some lessons — "A little pain is good for you," rote learning works, etc., — but she begins with predictable disclaimers:

Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. 

(We're using "modest proposal" unsarcastically now?)

Lipman assures us that "Studies have now shown" that something she calls "conventional wisdom" — nurturing self-esteem and a joy in discovery of knowledge — is wrong.

Kupchynsky was a music teacher, and I don't know what went on in Ukraine that led to his ferocity and his relocation to a northern New Jersey high school, but he was off the norm even then. (I happen to be an authority on high school in northern New Jersey in the 1960s. I had 4 years of direct personal experience.)

Anyway, Lipman has a book to sell, about Kupchynsky, and maybe it will fire up the same crowd that got excited about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" a couple years ago. Remember that? It was also about drilling youngsters into proficiency playing classical music.

But most of what kids need to learn isn't music performance, and those who get carried away thinking about strict music education ought to demonstrate their love of strictness by being stricter with themselves as they contemplate the effectiveness of different approaches to educating children. Consider whether there's something self-indulgent, sentimental, and even perverse in your dreams of fixing education by getting tough with children.

Did you instinctively resist my suggestion? Ah, you just took my tough test of whether you are serious about toughness.

And you failed!

"Mother — crazy as she was — had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop."

"Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town."

You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

That's a random excerpt from an interview with Mary Karr in The Paris Review, which I found via Andrew Sullivan who excerpts a completely different section about why and how Karr prays.

Is that SAT story true? I don't know. What a vivid detail! Today, you'd only have to remember a couple key words, and you'd be able to find the poem later by Googling. And it's interesting to think about the psychology of reading. You may think it's a shame that people — including you yourself — don't read whole books the way we used to. But many people were meeting psychological needs through book reading because there was no other option, and the internet works better for the purposes people really have.

And yet, we worry that the internet is degrading us. We don't read books. We don't memorize poems. But stop and think: Why were we doing those things in the past? Why, other than: there were no alternatives? If we've chosen this internet alternative, it could be that it's better — better for our true purposes.

It's not a better way to learn, say, Russian and Chinese history, but Mary Karr's mother's true purpose was not to learn Russian and Chinese history.

Do you wonder why you spend so many hours reading on the internet, when there are so many worthy books you could be reading? Do you tell yourself you should be reading books? Consider the likelihood that what you are doing is what you should be doing. Assume it is, and put into words why it is.

As for memorizing things that, these days, can be looked up: Is there ever good reason? I say yes. It's no longer out of fear of losing something forever, but there are other reasons. What is the last poem you memorized? (Don't tell me about song lyrics. You don't have to memorize them. They just get imprinted by some magical musical process.)

ADDED: I loved Mary Karr's memoir "Liars' Club." It transformed my thinking about what a memoir could be, and I toyed with the idea of writing a memoir for many years, mostly before starting this blog. There's some line between truth and fiction in these things. No one remembers all those quotes and details. How do you get into the imaginative zone to do this well and not get dragged down by the ethics of what you are saying about real people? I thought Karr's answer was: Don't flatter yourself. Be even harder on yourself than everyone else.

Joseph Brodsky "used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester."

"He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972."

From "Why We Should Memorize," by Brad Leithauser.

(In 1972, Brodsky became the poet in residence at the University of Michigan. I was a student there at the time and remember a grand assembly with Brodsky received as a great hero.)