Viewpoint Celebrity profs dabble while the ill-educated starve
By COLMAN McCARTHY
Al Gore teaching at Columbia
Universitys Graduate School of Journalism, along with Fisk and Middle
Tennessee State Universities, means that American education has one more
celebrity professor.
Two years ago, Oprah Winfrey took to the classrooms of
Northwestern University to teach business and marketing to students hankering
for careers in moneymaking. Bill Bradley decompressed from the Senate by
spending a few semesters at Notre Dame and Stanford. After leaving Washington
and the ways of Eastern elites that he delighted in scorning, Alan Simpson of
Wyoming didnt go home to swap yarns with cowpokes at the Cody general
store. He became a Harvard professor. George Stephanopoulos took his show to
Columbia. Last week, David Broder of The Washington Post announced he would
teach at the University of Maryland. Ben Bradlee retired from The Post to hold
forth for a semester at Georgetown University.
Celebrity professors are little more than academic dabblers,
providing star quality entertainment for privileged students glad to have one
more privilege. A publicity-minded university welcomes the celebrities for the
sheen.
But after that, what does it amount to?
If a Professor Famous feels called to teach, why not go where the
need is great -- a low-income public high school or prison? Inner-city high
schools are crammed with students hungry for caring and world-savvy teachers.
They have gifts waiting to be discovered and nurtured.
Prisons, or at least the occasional ones in which politicians
still allow money for academic programs, overflow with the ill-educated who
never lucked out by having a kind teacher who might have intervened early
enough. For these its not too late.
Public high school or prison teaching is the heavy lifting of
American education. But how inspiring it would be for an Al Gore or Oprah
Winfrey to give their time to students in those settings. Imagine the
affirmation that teachers already there would receive. Think of the example
given to high school and college students considering teaching careers.
The District of Columbia public high school where I began
volunteering since the early 1980s is the closest school to the White House --
five blocks directly west on G Street -- and one of the poorest in America. Why
doesnt the new education president stroll over to teach a weekly seminar
and gain experiential knowledge on ways to improve schools?
In the Maryland prison -- Oak Hill -- where I have been teaching
juvenile offenders for the past three years, my students have been a mix of
felons, dropouts, the abandoned and the still-hopeful. If former members of
Congress, or presidents or vice-presidents, have time on their hands and need
to fill it with something purposeful, the Oak Hill inmates, or the caged
anywhere, would welcome them.
Students at impoverished high schools and prisons have little in
common with the scrubbed and sparkling college folk crossing kempt acres at
overpriced universities to pick up three credits listening to the Awesome One.
They are long shots to make it, not the sure-shots. Would the odds be lowered
if celebrities showed up to teach? Id bet on it.
Colman McCarthy directs the Center for Teaching Peace,
Washington D.C. His e-mail address is colman@clark.net
National Catholic Reporter, March 16,
2001
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