Article #3 in a Five-Article Series >>>>> Culpability of Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools for the Murder of George Floyd >>>>> MPS Decision-Makers and Cabinet Chiefs Must Understand How We Got in this Pre-12 Education Mess

Given that the wretched system of preK-12 education in the United States produces knowledge-deficient citizens who vote on the basis of intensely selfish preoccupations and who have no comprehension of one another when facing off in tense situations between police and community members, we must overhaul the processes that created the conditions and context for the murder of George Floyd.

 

This becomes, should have long since become, a moral imperative for eminently good hearts at the Minneapolis Public Schools as Associate Superintendent of Special Education Rochelle Cox;  Finance Chief Ibrahima Diop;  Operations Chief Karen Devet;  Human Resources Chief Maggie Sullivan;  and Chief of Staff Suzanne Kelly first to gain comprehension of the stark immorality of the system wherein they perform their own jobs so magnificently;  and then as immediate moral imperative act to induce the needed overhaul in academic and ethical instruction.

 

As they endeavor to gain the needed understanding of systemic deficiency and immorality, and prepare to take action, they must first understand how we got in this preK-12 education mess.

 

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In the annual report from the Minnesota Department of Education in September 2018 on the results of Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading for the 2017-2018 academic year we found out that just 60 percent of Minnesota students were proficient in mathematics, the same figure as that for 2016-2017;  for reading the comparable figures were 59 percent in academic year 2016-2017 and 57 percent in 2017-2018,a two percentage point decline.

 

Year after year, right up to academic year 2019-2020, we get these same dismal results.

 

For the indicated academic year in the Minneapolis Public Schools, reading proficiency rose a bit over those two academic years, from 43 percent to 45 percent, with math proficiency flat at 42 percent.  In that school district, one-third of graduates who matriculate at colleges and universities need remedial instruction.  And most graduates walk across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, so deficient are they in key knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, quality literature, English composition, and the fine, vocational, and technological arts.

 

How did we get in this mess?  

 

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Thomas Jefferson, for his many human failings, was a visionary of citizenship in the democratic society who said that "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves;  and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

 

The 19^th century educator Horace Mann developed this Jeffersonian notion of an educated citizenry by asserting the need for common schools that would provide citizens with shared knowledge as the basis for participation in democracy.  Across the nation, teachers in one-room rural and larger town and city schools imparted knowledge and skill sets in reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and literature.  Often, teachers used the popular McGuffey Readers that were by no means ethnically representative but did provide substantive information and gave students experience with high-quality literature.

 

Two views of education for African Americans came from Booker T. Washington, who stressed vocational education and the development of economic independence before insistence on full citizenship rights;  and W. E. B. DuBois, who took a view consonant with that of Jefferson and Mann and asserted that a “talented tenth” of the African America population should lead the way to informed political participation.  And indeed, such African American luminaries as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and DuBois gave testimony to the power of knowledge as they held the ideals of the United States constitution before a nation that was not living up to the ideals expressed in that document;  the speeches of those three are replete with references to history, government, and literature.

 

Schools in the United States at the 19^th-20^th century divide were of widely varying quality.  Most students did not attend school past grade six.  But by the first two decades of the 20^th century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin.  An intermediary institution, junior high, also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.

 

At that turn of the 19^th into the 20^th century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers;  these varied widely in quality but in general assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic curriculum.  But by the second decade of the 20^th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation.  Education professors, now ensconced in university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of knowledge was not important.

 

The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical preparation for life.  More clearly, William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge and skill sets.  Heard in 1918 penned an article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name;  in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker, published the book,  The Child-Centered School.  In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive” education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.

 

This view of education took many decades to prevail in the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation.  Many teachers had trained as field specialists.  Many parents of immigrant populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the educational ladder to success.  But paradoxically in synch with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20^th century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an academic curriculum .  Such populations were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-makers won to the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy expectations of university admissions offices.

 

During the late 1960s, the “progressive’ creed thrived in a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center;  “progressive” ideology now dominated among teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education. 

 

This was terrible timing:

 

In ferocious irony, advances in civil rights made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans positioned to climb the economic ladder;  and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less likely:  African American middle class flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the poorest of the poor.

 

Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980. 

 

Gang activity proliferated. 

 

Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural affinity.  And with the triumph of “progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the conditions of inner city life.  Mainly white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning, projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by individual teachers and their students---  all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge could proceed.  The mantras of education professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.

 

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By the late 1990s, a movement for academic standards and objective assessments ultimately produced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, but telling disaggregated data results proved embarrassing to the education establishment, which went to work on those Democrats (in Minnesota, the DFL) to which the teachers unions give so bountifully;  and those on the right, supporters of Republicans, came to object to strict federal mandates.  No Child Left Behind gave way to waivers under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top moniker, which in Minnesota produced the murky Multiple Measurement Rating System (MMRS);  and then the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2016) produced the even murkier North Star Accountability System (NSAS). 

 

The latter system, rolled out by Brenda Cassellius and staff at the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in autumn 2018, like MMRS relieves the pressure on school officials by relegating objective measures such as the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to status as just one factor among many---  including graduation rates, student attendance, incremental academic progress over time, incremental progress of English learners---  for rating school and district programs.  Cassellius and the other North Star explicators at MDE asked the public to believe that six Regional Centers of Excellence (RCEs), each staffed with seven or eight members (totaling 45 for all six centers), are going to provide the needed assistance for addressing the abysmal academic performance of Minnesota’s students.

 

This North Star Accountability System continues to prevail under new Education Commissioner Mary Cathryn Richter,  who was appointed by newly elected governor Tim Walz during academic year 2018-2019.

 

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Charter schools and school choice programs have been part of the educational landscape of Minnesota since the early 1990s.  But charter schools are typically even worse than the mainline public schools, and choice programs have been a diversion from the fact that few schools in Minnesota provide true excellence of education by comparison with the nations of East Asia and those such as Germany, Finland, Canada, Poland, and Australia that far outperform students in the United States on the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA).

 

We got in this K-12 mess in Minnesota, with unfortunate resonance throughout the nation, with the unfortunate coincidence of an anti-knowledge approach to education, residential patterns traceable to a racist history, unprepared urban school districts that have never dedicated themselves to the education of students of all demographic descriptors, and the growth of charter schools and choice programs that exacerbated the problems.

 

We got in this mess for highly identifiable reasons.

 

Now, according to the precepts given in the chapters below, we must get out.

Article #2 in a Five-Article Series >>>>> Culpability of Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools for the Murder of George Floyd >>>>> The Failure of MPS Decision-Makers to Be Adults >>>>> The Need for the Articulation of Moral Values

Among the many sins of decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools is the failure to be adults.

 

Adults accept responsibility for guiding youth academically and morally. 

 

In the Introduction to this series as you scroll on down the blog, I summarize what is necessary to overhaul curriculum for knowledge intensity, consonant with the core message in these articles that failure to create a knowledgeable citizenry establishes the dangerous context for the murder of George Floyd.  The key message of this article is that locally centralized schools systems have also failed in the responsibility to articulate moral values.

 

Families serve as the first conveyor of moral values to children.  Freud called the part of the personality that carries these initially parental moral messages the “superego.”  At best, the superego instills transcendent empathy and altruistic inclination on the part of the evolving child, with the possibility that parental instruction can also be powerfully supplemented by friends and other people and situations in the moral environment.   And behaviorist B. F. Skinner would say that ultimately the ever-developing person is only as morally good as her or his environment induces the person to be.

 

The school experience provides the other, in many ways more important, conveyor of values to students.  Moral values will be transmitted either tacitly or explicitly.  As it is, conveyance tends to be tacit, since decision-makers in locally centralized school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools fail to take a forceful stand either as to curriculum or moral values.  The putatively “progressive” approach to education that originated at Teachers College of Columbia University in the 1920s and insidiously took hold from the 1970s forward to this very year of 2020 exalted the child’s own ability to create the education appropriate to her or him upon activation of personal interest.

 

All of the key supplemental intellectual detritus spewed forth by those campus lightweights given the undeserved appellation of education “professor” followed from this view of the child and of education.  By the 1990s, the self-esteem movement produced classroom presences who did very little teaching but often showered children of highly variable academic accomplishment with praise inappropriate to school performance or classroom behavior.  Thus, decision-makers and teachers at MPS and other locally centralized systems failed dually: 

 

(Non-)educators in preK-12 systems not only failed to provide the precious young people under their responsibility with a substantive education;  just as corruptly, they failed to convey a firm code of ethics:

 

Administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have failed in their adult responsibilities to develop youth either morally or intellectually.

 

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Ironically, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), as moral instruction is called by the organization known as CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), is avowedly the driving force at the Minneapolis Public Schools as led by Superintendent Ed Graff.  But Graff is not only an academic lightweight;  he is also reprehensible in not even following through with promulgation of SEL tenets:  Many an administrator and teacher in the system will testify as to the neglect of any vigorous explanation of those tenets or effort to implement the formulation’s five key emphases:  self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

 

Four years into the tenure of Ed Graff as MPS superintendent, the district’s students continue to suffer from both a vacuous academic program and the lack of ethical instruction.  Social and Emotional Learning not only could not ever serve as the driver of academic advancement;  the formulation, while advocating the development of desirable personal qualities, is vague as to any code of ethics.

 

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Administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have poor grasp of the world’s great religious and ethical systems.  They should be about learning these post-haste.  Study of these systems would serve as guide to the code of ethics to be imparted to the students whose moral and academic instruction they are bound to serve as sacred duty.

 

Judaism represents a grand struggle over millennia to understand the Divine, find purpose, and act ethically.

 

Hinduism conveys a sense of the fragility and impermanence of terrestrial life and the imperative to end the necessity of multiple earthly sojourns by achieving an elevated understanding of Truth.

 

Buddhism focuses relentlessly on the problem of ego, human striving, and unceasing desire---  and the necessity in the moral life to move from selfish concerns to compassionate thought and action for the benefit of all sentient beings.

 

Christianity stresses the power of Divine Love active in the world.

 

Islam emphasizes avoidance of idolatrous distractions for focus on the one Supreme Divinity.   

 

And animistic belief systems focus on the ubiquity of Divinity in Nature.

 

From these great world systems of belief, thoughtful adults should be able to communicate to young people of various cultures and ethnicities a system of values that emphasizes

 

>>>>>  the paramount imperative to Love one’s fellow human beings;

 

>>>>>  the moral duty to act upon that Love with compassion for all humankind;

 

>>>>>  to abjure violence and to seek resolution of conflict through mutual understanding;

 

>>>>>  to constantly identify one’s own good with the good of all humankind;

 

>>>>>  to acknowledge the need to satisfy material needs but to recognize that Meaning is found only in empathetic understanding and beneficent action.

 

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Failure of administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to model ethical conduct and convey a clear set of moral values both represents and promotes the failure of our society to do the same.

 

And a society without a common set of public ethics creates the circumstances whereby George Floyd and others are robbed of both life and Life.

 

George Floyd was murdered because physically grown people have failed to be adults.  

Article #1 in a Five-Article Series >>>>> Culpability of Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools for the Murder of George Floyd >>>>> Introduction

Crystalized in the curricular approach and the quality of personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are the two root causes of the George Floyd murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. 

 

Curriculum at the Minneapolis Public Schools is knowledge-deficient.  Administrators who make decisions regarding the academic program, most especially at this juncture interim academic chief Aimee Fearing and superintendent Ed Graff, have meager credentials;  and the teachers whom they oversee have very limited knowledge bases. 

 

In all manner of subjects, knowledge-poor curriculum and teachers leave students with little information by which to evaluate national events or to inform participation in the political process.  This is now weighing especially heavy with regard to student information bases in history:  Students who manage to graduate from MPS and other locally centralized school districts go forth as uninformed citizens whose ignorance of history now degrades our body politic and our mass protests.

 

Lack of historical knowledge and knowledge-poor curriculum killed George Floyd:

 

Very few people have the barest understanding of United States history.

 

Perpend:

 

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison produced the most cogent syntheses of the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke (author among other works of Second Treatise on Government) and Montesquieu (Spirit of the Laws).  Jefferson imbibed the works of Locke and worked his innovation on Locke’s emphasis on the fundamental freedoms of life, liberty, and property, changing the latter to the “pursuit of happiness.”  Montesquieu most clearly articulated the division of a national government into three equal branches that especially in separating the judiciary from the executive and the legislative thrust a seminal notion into the ether of political theory.  Madison’s synthesis of Enlightenment ideas as principal author of the United States Constitution represented an enormous advance in the production of a political framework for the establishment of nationhood.

 

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their colleague George Washington, the latter both as head general in the American Revolution and first president of the new nation, created a political entity that rivaled, with the potential to exceed, Great Britain as the world’s paragon of democracy.  But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, were imperfect, as was the nation that they created:  Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all expressed misgivings about the institution of slavery while amassing fortunes on the basis of that very institution;  and the new nation was established on the basis of a citizenry limited as to gender and ethnicity. 

 

The great democratic treatise that is the United States Constitution tacitly gave the vote only to white male owners of considerable property, counted Native Americans not at all and those in bondage as three-fifths-persons for the purpose of determining representation in the United States House of Representatives.  Seventh president Andrew Jackson has been considered by many historians as the chief executive most responsible for expanding the electorate to include those white men who did not own property;  he had also led military battles against Native Americans, proposed removal from land sought by white settlers, and was a vigorous proponent of slavery.

 

Thus, the architects of the nation that would in time, on the basis of constitutional amendments and the capacity for legislative innovation, tend toward increasing democratization, were all proponents of slavery who launched a nation upon racist assumptions and a limited notion of “the people.”

 

Those are the facts.

 

What do we do with the contradictions?

 

Do we jerk down all sculptured monuments and all nomenclature on edifices honoring those most responsible for establishing the foundation of the United States as an imperfect experiment in Enlightenment values, founders who could be construed as racist and sexist believers in democracy and republican governance?

 

Perhaps we should dismantle those monuments and remove those names;  but as we do, we should be aware of the ironies that should instill in us enormous feelings of cognitive dissonance.

 

Slavery was widely practiced and accepted in various forms throughout the world by the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries;  the long tenure of that institution on the international stage waned as the 19^th century unfolded.  For citizens of the United States, the greatest shame is not having embraced the institution of slavery during a time of the institution’s historical entrenchment, but in promoting post-manumission forms of that same institution, with ever more virulent racism.  In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction and the 1896 Supreme Court decision for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, conditions abided wherein the Jim Crow system and vigilante violence induced African Americans to flee from the rural South to the urban North, where they were typically residentially confined to certain areas at the urban core.

 

Nearly 100 years ensued between 1877 and the legislative initiatives of the 1960s that ended most legal forms of discrimination.  White and African American middle class flight left behind an increasingly impoverished population at the urban core, including areas such as North Minneapolis and those areas of South Minneapolis extending from East Lake Street.   And at that historical moment an approach to education, transmitted increasingly from the 1920s until taking firm hold by the 1970s, denied a knowledge-intensive education to those most in need of knowledge and skills necessary for highly remunerative employments and civic participation.

 

Thus it is that administrators and teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools are themselves knowledge-deficient and send forth students who become the uninformed citizenry that we now have.  If one examines the life of George Floyd, one observes a noble but at best partially successful effort to escape conditions of life at the urban core.  And if one considers the impoverished knowledge base of Derek Chauvin and his low comprehension of the origin of conditions prevailing in the community he was pledged to serve, one discerns that the incident poignantly demonstrates the danger ever abiding in our knowledge-poor society.

 

The citizenry is produced mainly by the institutions of family and public education.  Public education is the main conveyor of attitudes and information shared by the populace as a whole.  The shortcomings in ethical values and subject area knowledge in the curriculum of locally centralized systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools produce the level of immorality and ignorance that we now witness in our society.

 

Thus, the United States is now mired in a predicament produced by ignorance of history and an intellectually corrupt approach to preK-12 education.

 

As our own urban example, the Minneapolis Public Schools must be overhauled to produce knowledge-intensive curriculum and citizens who go forth with necessary knowledge of history and of the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science, economics, government, psychology, and the visual and musical arts.

 

As the situation now abides, decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools are prime culprits in creating our current national morass.

 

They must change.

 

Or they must go.            

Maybe I'm Amazed >>>>> Wednesday, 23 June, Chapter Four, “The Big Trip,” 1975-1976 >>>>> >A Teacher’s Journey from Southern Methodist University to North Minneapolis: Foundations for Overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools< >>>>> A Memoir >>>>> Gary Marvin Davison

In the aftermath of the mystical Joshua Tree National Monument experience, Barbara and I continued our journey into the mystic. 

 

Before us lay Anza-Borrego State Park, the San Diego Zoo, and that same city’s Ocean Park.  The area included a couple of minor challenges for us, the first a pebble that kicked up from the road and cracked our windshield, the other our first and only break-in of the van at any time on the road.  The robber took our Coleman stove and propane heater. 

 

We did not have absolute need for the heater, which had afforded welcome warmth in the Great Smokey Mountain National Park but otherwise had seen minimal use due to the geographic planning of our trip;  a good number of hours in Glacier National Park in the mountains of Washington State did lie ahead of us, but we would conduct that viewing entirely during the daylight hours and descend from the heights to make our camp for the night. 

 

The greatest loss was the Coleman stove;  I decided, though, not to replace the device of utility for preparation of the hot meal at dinner:  Barbara was passing on supper most evenings anyway, and I determined that with just five weeks left on the road by that point in early May 1976 that I could go with peanut butter sandwiches and other such fare at suppertime.

 

As to the cracked windshield, we visited our local insurance company affiliate and quickly got the van into the shop.  We had pulled over at the toney San Diego suburb of La Jolla, convenient then after the shield was healed for a foray to that area’s coastal overlooks with splendid views of the ocean.  The suburban locale also afforded us another contrasting view of life in the ‘burbs by comparison with the more challenged areas at the urban core, serving as inducement for some Coleman stove snatcher to requisition goods for resale.    

 

We departed San Diego for a ride northward on Highway 1, past the estate of William Randolph Hearst, with best regards to Siamese Patti, and on to a magnificent beachside camping location for the evening.  On we went to observe the Carmel take on human bliss, thence to the Los Angeles area for a ride around Beverly Hills, Hollywood with stop at MGM Studios, and my first trip to Disneyland (Barbara reveled in a return visit, the joy of which was magnified against a backdrop of delightful childhood memories of a familial jaunt when she was ten years old).  We did take a moment to remember that this now iconic world playground in time had generated astonishing wealth for a chain-smoking lecher of fascist inclinations.  As ever, we contrasted the wealth of toney neighborhoods and images of one kind of America with the scenes along Sunset Strip and in blighted neighborhoods that spawned gangs whose rage emanated from multiple ethnic sources.

 

Moving on up the coast to Bay Area, we hit San Francisco for a ride on the trolley cars, a look at Haight-Ashbury, and sublime moments in the Fisherman’s Wharf area, complete with street entertainers and some of the world’s best chocolate at Ghirardelli confectionary.  We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge as in my imagination Willie Mays ran down a fly ball in Candlestick Park, cap flying over joy in days spent on a diamond found not on manual digits.  Across the Bay, we roamed Berkeley and Oakland, replete with sites reminding us of the area’s alternative lifestyles, higher education striving to reconcile the elite and the unconventional, and the glory days of the Black Panthers that had hit so recently and ferociously and dimmed just as quickly.  

 

Up the coast we sojourned, through the wine country and the Redwoods to Portland, Oregon, and nearby Crater Lake National Monument; the Seattle coast with its fishing boats, sails afloat, and Spindle-Top Tower bequeathed by the World’s Fair.  The beauty in ice and green at Glacier National Park remained in our visions as we were graced in our descent southward with the scenes afforded by rural Idaho, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, the mountains and plains of Montana and Wyoming, and yet another cognitively dissonant experience in the classic city of the Old and New West:  the Wyoming capital of Cheyenne.

 

Barbara and I had several weeks earlier decided to crown our trip with a foray back to Denver for attendance at the concert of Paul McCartney and Wings, part of the band’s wildly successful Wings Over America Tour, staged at McNichols Arena.

 

As we reflected on the manifold sites and experiences bestowed on us during the Big Trip, we derived new meaning from the melodic declaration:

 

Maybe I’m Amazed

Tuesday, 23 June, Chapter Four, “The Big Trip,” 1975-1976 >>>>> >A Teacher’s Journey from Southern Methodist University to North Minneapolis: Foundations for Overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools< >>>>> A Memoir >>>>> Gary Marvin Davison

Barbara and I had planned the Big Trip so as to conduct our sojourn in the Northeast during the autumn, for viewing the foliage along with the myriad historical and cultural sites, and thus exiting before the winter months ensued.  We had a propane heater but used it only three times, most notably in the midst of a winter wonderland bestowed on us by Divinity while we camped within Great Smokey Mountain National Park.

 

The months ahead continued to present us with scenes bespeaking the wonder and the horror that is the United States.  We witnessed via mental images provided by forts and battlefields and plantation homes and national parks the spectacle of Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomatox;  the foremost advocate of liberty retreating to his slave-powered plantation at Monticello;  the architect of the leader of colonial army and nascent nation overseeing his own human chattel at Mount Vernon;  and the genteel aristocracy of South Carolina sustaining slavery beyond slavery in the quintessential city of the Old South, Charleston, South Carolina.

 

We swept into Florida to see Augustine, the old fort of the Spaniards and the longest-lived continuous community extending from colonial days to the present;  Everglades, full of alligator and tropical splendor;  and Miami, with marvelous beaches and an amalgam of American ethnicity;  the Keys, where wealth abides and respite from urban tension is sought and found.

 

On we traveled into the deepest of the Deep South, inviting more images to assume their vital task in promotion of the cognitively dissonant USA:  Underground Atlanta;  Tuskegee Institute; the capital and capitols of Montgomery, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi;  Memphis, where Jerry Lee rubs elbows with Elvis and Elvis imbibes African American sound and culture on Beale Street;  New Orleans where ethnicities blend tonally in the French Quarter while atonal discord describes other corners of the city and most of the state;  and Little Rock, Arkansas, home of Central High School, the Little Rock Nine, Daisy Bates, Orville Faubus, and National Guard troops belatedly cast into the chaos by a dithering Eisenhower.

 

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By the light of a propane-fueled lantern at roadside campsites in Louisiana, I devoured two 500-page books covering the expanse of European history that dominates the specialized subject area history test of the SAT that I decided would work to my advantage as Barbara and I focused our applications for graduate school on the Philadelphia’s Temple University, the University of Indiana, and the University of Iowa.  All of these universities were offering us good financial aid packages and featured the programs in Asian studies that we sought.  Temple for me had the advantage of location in an urban center, where my focus on life at the urban core could be combined with my academic quest.

 

I took the test at Tulane University amidst our exploration of New Orleans.

 

After the familial holiday visits and Jan’s January 1976 marriage to Phil Whitcomb, Barbara and I went forth to the Tucson period of work and monetary replenishment.  I worked a shift extending from early morning into early-mid-afternoon at a McDonalds that left me lots of time to read as the sun rose high and the splendid sunsets loomed.  Barbara, she of the genius IQ and future professorship, had the ignominy of being turned down for a job hawking pretzels at a stall in a mall;  she soon settle into a server’s job at Bob’s Big Boy, as in the national chain from which McDonald’s ripped off the so-called triple-decker Big Mac.

 

Tucson afforded us never-ending fascination.  We were on a tight budget that yielded my productions of meatless spaghetti, bean burritos, and the occasional utilizations of ground beef in chili and hamburgers.  Our entertainment on Friday and Saturday evenings tended to be to hang out at a shopping mall watching people while luxuriating in the delights of a five-dollar plurge for two fudge ice cream cones from the purveyor of the moment, Swenson’s.

 

Our $100 per month apartment was located at an intersection at which the point of a “V” was formed from the coalescence of two of the busiest streets of the city.  The fire and police sirens, along with nocturnal knockings from folks inquiring as to the whereabouts of the unstable and seemingly unseemly assortment of recent residents in our abode provided many an exciting overnight cavalcade of human drama.   

 

The Tucson experience was formative:

 

As long as good health abided and our skin remained white, Barbara and I knew that we need never fear economic dislocation or the need to adapt to the circumstances of the moment.

Monday, 22 June, Chapter Four, “The Big Trip,” 1975-1976 >>>>> >A Teacher’s Journey from Southern Methodist University to North Minneapolis: Foundations for Overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools< >>>>> A Memoir >>>>> Gary Marvin Davison

The presidential election of November 1976 was about a year away as we pulled into Washington, D. C. and headed for the public galleries of the United States Capitol Building to view a session of the U.S. Congress.  What we witnessed could have been seen as a nascent form of the Democratic primary election season, and a review of major players in United States politics of the past half-decade:  Below our appreciative eyes appeared Frank Church, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Shirley Chisholm, George McGovern and Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson.  Notable among Republicans on the floor were Robert Dole and Howard Baker, the latter of whom had emerged as a hero of the impeachment process as one of those leading members of the GOP who had ultimately pushed the impeachment case against their party’s own president, Richard Nixon.

 

For Barbara and me, this was one of many such scenes on the Big Trip wherein images of our youth and young adulthood came alive in our visual spectrum.  The visit in the nation’s capital was a joy.  We opted to pass on the Smithsonian for a later trip of the singular focus the complex requires for a viable viewing.  Instead, we walked the grounds to and around the Washington and Lincoln memorials, toured the Whitehouse, had a highly informative foray around the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and drove around the city to bear witness to such contrasting scenes as the impoverished neighborhoods of the urban core and toney neighborhoods saliently represented by Georgetown.

 

We departed the nation’s capital with much of the conventional tale of the nation’s founding and putative status as a democratic republic bouncing around our brains, full of images, information, and insights from our rambles through New England and the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington.  As is the case for many a child who first becomes privy to the religious faith of parents before working her or his own spiritual innovations thereon, Barbara and I appreciated having the visual images and verbal accounts of places firm in the nation’s story as conveyed in fact, myth, and legend to contrast with the truth that we sought relentlessly.

 

As we turned toward the South, the story and a counter-story also true but more recondite in the North would bolster the images and augment our rapidly accumulating store of facts regarding the tale and the reality of life in these less than United States.