On a hot and sultry summer day in Dallas in 1981, at a Chicken Shack
just east of Central Expressway, 21 year-old Frank Chesterfield, packing heat and
high on a cocktail of banned substances, pulled his pistol on 35 year-old Mason
Baxter and called for his wallet. Baxter
unwisely reached for the barrel of Chesterfield’s little gun and got a
grip. Chesterfield instinctively pulled
on his pistol but as he did so, his trigger finger pulled as well. He had meant to scare and rob Baxter, rather
than to shoot him. But shoot him he did,
and almost 40 years later, after a murder conviction in 1982, Chesterfield languishes
in a central Texas prison.
At grade 4, Frank had been a cute and academically needy 10
year-old, a tutorial student of a fellow public school teacher aspirant and a
friend of mine at Southern Methodist University (SMU). He had the skills of a first grader, at
best. His mother was in prison and his
dad long gone; his obese and ailing grandmamma
had Frank and his brother under her custody, but she had scant control. My friend went on to start a well-regarded
school for inner city youth but in the course of time lost touch with Frank. Frank dropped out of school in the midst of an
unhappy tenure at a North Dallas junior high school to which he was bussed and
at which he was weighed down by racial harassment.
Escaping any paltry efforts exerted by truancy officers, Frank hit
the streets, following the predictable route to small-time prosperity and
long-term squandering of life.
…………………………………………………………………………….
At about the time Frank was sent to the contemporary plantation, I
was watching an NBC Nightly News segment covering the explosion of crack
cocaine and gang activity on the streets of urban centers across the
nation. A video was shown of the housing
projects across from L. G. Pinkston High School, where I began to work as a
volunteer and shepherded other SMU students doing the same from the spring of
my sophomore year forward; this was also
the high school at which I began my paid teaching career after having student
taught at another inner city high school.
In the video, a young man in
his twenties was seen running from a male of similar age; a shot rang out and the man who had tried to
scamper away fell motionless to the ground;
viewers were told that the felled youth later died, the fifth to do so
in that year at the projects.
I was dismayed but not surprised.
I could see this coming during my years in West Dallas and vowed
to do everything I could to minimize and eventually end scenarios such as that
witnessed in the video.
This remains my mission, as a teacher and activist.
My experience at SMU both bolstered my vision of educational
excellence and gave me insight into why the education establishment had failed
and was failing students so badly--- and
what must be done to overhaul the system driven by the intellectual and moral
corruption of education professors and their acolytes.
………………………………………………………………………….
I knew that SMU was a first-rate university and fully appreciated
all aspects of my experience while matriculating, but only recently have I come
to realize that the approach to and implementation of curricular programming at
the institution was nonpareil.
At the time I attended, SMU featured well-defined requirements--- such as a full academic year of physical
education, two years of world language, and stringent math, natural science,
social science, and humanities course specifications--- assuring that students of all majors would
receive a broad liberal arts education.
The pride of the system, furthermore, was a sequence of liberal studies
(LS) courses covering two full academic years of classes replete with high
quality reading and lectures pertinent to classical western philosophy and
literature. The list of authors and
thinkers covered is stunning: Plato,
Aristotle, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rosseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Wolf, James Joyce,
Albert Camus, George Orwell, Paul Tillich---
to name only a few. There were
few African American, Hispanic, or Native authors in these courses emphasizing
western civilization and history, but this was also a time when programs and
concentrations were established for the study of the history and culture of
these ethnicities; students were
encouraged to take a selection of these courses, and many students, especially
from the cultural backgrounds covered, followed the counsel of their faculty
advisers and took advantage of these course offerings.
In my liberal studies, mathematics, physics, history, political
science, psychology, and history courses I had a stunning array of talented
professors. Bradley Carter was deeply
embedded in scholarly study of classic political philosophers and delivered exquisite
formal lectures. Ronald Davis opted for
a different pedagogy in his social and cultural history courses, assigning
students both common readings and others designated for a given student. He came prepared with a thematic scheme in
the manner of an adroit lecturer, but brought forward the knowledge sets by
calling on individual students for reports on their readings, integrating these
into the common readings, generating lively discussion, guiding students by class conclusion toward acquisition of a vast stock of information and critical
analysis thereof.
Behaviorist psychologists Charley Crumbaugh and Pat Campbell were
superb exponents of the school of psychology dominant at the time and forever among
my greatest influences. Their
counterparts in sensation and perception and in the psychology of motivation were
similarly astute. Professors
specializing in communism, constitutional law, and calculus were among the best
in the nation. Outside of my own fields
of study, premed students were the beneficiaries of the instruction,
quirkiness, and mentorship of Harold Jesky;
Jesky was not perfect: He was
sexist and tended to shepherd the careers of his personal favorites from his
courses in organic chemistry--- but he
was an institution unto himself and a professor of intimate knowledge of his
field and the medical profession.
…………………………………………………………………..
Thus, a student at SMU who applied herself or himself to studies,
both in those courses of the person’s major and in those of the outstanding
liberal arts curriculum, graduated from SMU as one of the best, most broadly
and deeply educated people in the nation.
Unfortunately, aspiring teachers had also to take courses taught
by education professors.
These professors were a rude contrast to the brilliant field specialists
one encountered in liberal studies and the subject area disciplines.
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