In Willa Cather’s great short story “Paul’s Case” we meet a kid who’s crapping out in school. Why is Paul doing so poorly, driving his teachers nuts? School is boring. He wants bright lights and glamour in his life. His drawing master tries to understand him:
…he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He added: “I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow.”
But of course this isn’t true. There is nothing wrong with the fellow. Paul just knows the score. After a check-forging binge that gets him a great room at the Waldorf he has a revelation:
The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wineglasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating repetitions of the Blue Danube from the orchestra, all flooded Paul’s dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne was added–that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass–Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
Now Paul would probably wonder a lot harder. At least in his day schools offered art. As Diane Ravitch in a recent interview said:
The biggest downside of NCLB is that it has promoted false, anti-educational values. Certainly high test scores are better than low test scores, but that is not all that matters in education. What about science, the arts, history, literature, foreign languages? My hunch is that NCLB is doing nothing to reverse the dumbing down of our children and our society, and may even be accelerating it.
Should that dumbing down worry us or are kids so dazed by “bewildering radiance” that for them schools have become a joke. Don’t ask Paul. He threw himself in front of a train:
He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.
