Teaching Education and Learning from It

This semester, I am teaching Education Law. The course is a new "prep" for me. I told the students it was about us, and, as it turns out, I did not fully comprehend its prodigious scope. Every day, one of the subjects we are covering appears in newspaper headlines, with the implication that schools are only one forum for our controversies over public policy to be fought. Whether it is racial disparities, gender equity, bathroom access, mandatory vaccinations, student discipline, or gun violence, the arguments that adults have about how to structure society can be expected to extend into the classroom.

It has been so since time immemorial. In Plato's Republic, the city is akin to the individual. Thanks to a program of moral education, the city can be constituted from individuals. Horace Mann, John Dewey, Jane Addams and the others who contributed to our distinctive concept of public education -- free, supported by the state, compulsory, and non-sectarian -- all envisioned a project of improvement that depended on the schools as but a base. They would scale up from the one room or settlement house, to a diverse democracy.

Students commonly are curious about teachers. They imagine us to lead secret lives, transcending an assigned role. I asked them to share with me their educational history, and I reciprocated. While we, I suppose, would prefer to believe we are more than the product of genetics modified by our environment, it is useful to have a sense, as each of us tries to establish about new acquaintances, of where it is we're coming from, literally and figuratively.

I offer here, then, a summary of my career before my career. We all have a pre-history such as this. Perhaps understanding our respective pasts will enable us to appreciate our collective future.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, “the Motor City,” once the fourth largest in the nation, in the 1970s. A magnificent wreck, the place represents the best and the worst of an American Century, from industrialization as Henry Ford perfected the assembly line deindustrialization as "Buy American" failed to persuade the public to remain loyal to domestic brands that once commanded almost all of the automotive market. What made it, car culture, also unmade it, as sprawl crossed Eight Mile Road into cornfields where initially white and even black families, the blue-collar middle class that was born, could purchase a bungalow in front of which they could park the vehicle they had built. The Great Migration brought African Americans to "Black Bottom" and Inkster. White flight that preceded the riot took their neighbors away farther and farther in every direction from Grosse Pointe to Downriver.

The best field trip in school was to the mighty River Rouge factory. Self-contained, a model of "vertical integration" into which raw materials arrived and out of which finished products emerged, it ran 24/7, the smokestacks a symbol of modern progress. On the tour, we walked across catwalks, in awe, looking down at the molten metals cascading in orange, giving off sparks that floated away, enveloped by stench and heat, unable to hear the guide against the din of manufacturing. Later, I was told by experts that among the social problems for the locality was the difficulty keeping students interested in education at all. They could drop out, after all, and get a job easily enough. It was the best employment available: the so-called "Treaty of Detroit" between the Big Four and the UAW promised excellent wages, and, since there were real pensions with health care, you could put in 30 years and be retired at 48, ready to hunt and fish up north at your own little cottage.

I attended public schools in Livonia, Northville, and Canton, all bedroom communities of western Wayne County, skipping the fifth grade and graduating from high school at age 16 in 1984 (not clear it’s a good idea to be younger; would have been a better hockey player if older), on a campus shared by two high schools at the time (three high schools now). The one I attended had an enrollment of approximately 600 per class, with its twin having a similar population. That added up to 3600 teenagers. You could take classes from the adjacent school, as I did when I enrolled in an advanced version of Biology I. The population of the area increased at such a pace that the high school had to be reduced from four grades to three grades, so that my freshman class was not followed by another freshman class. Unless you're from there, you would be surprised that the municipalities were divided not only by race and wealth, but also by car company. There were enclaves where the GM executives congregated, as there were counterparts where Ford laborers were concentrated. Canton was at the periphery of sprawl, about 30 miles from downtown Detroit and much closer than that to Ann Arbor. There was a stretch that was yet undeveloped. It was predominantly cornfields when we moved there. Our house was on a dirt road. The prior owners were well-known proprietors of an automobile dealership. There was no escaping the foundational meaning of the internal combustion engine.

The educational institutions reflected the racial segregation of the city and the suburbs, statistically the most extreme of major metropolitan areas at the time. The de facto pattern was the subject of the long-running Milliken litigation. The Supreme Court struck down a plan for busing that would cross the civic boundaries. The North was as hostile, if not more so, than the South, to close contact of colors of the skin. The city was to be the city; the suburbs, not the city. The city piped its water out to the suburbs in another prolonged dispute. The stigma of downtown was palpable. Hatred was open. East Detroit renamed itself "Eastpointe." The vowel at the end seemed to connote class. There were virtually no African Americans in my high school, a handful of Latinos, and few Arab Americans; the total number of Asian American students, counting me, was probably fewer than three in my class. Bullying was the norm. Teasing and taunting, up to and past the point of threats to physical safety, were the childhood cruelty that defined the playground. Yet the rule was not to complain, because you had to be able to take the joke. Besides, it was true that your parents were foreigners were accents, concerned with a straight-A report card, not with what went on beyond the books.

I subsequently attended the Johns Hopkins University, earning a degree in writing and graduating at about the midpoint of my class. I then returned home to enroll at University of Michigan Law School, intending to pursue an academic career after gaining experience in actual litigation. I also have had non-degree formal education at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (recently defunct); the San Francisco Center for the Book; and Harvard Graduate School of Education. I continue to study photography. Throughout, my performance has been lackluster. I have consistently done well, but not as superlatively as standardized tests suggested was possible. I have ranked in the top ten percent at best, not the top one percent as predicted. I blame nobody but myself. As a kid, I possessed neither motivation nor dedication. Only with maturity have I cultivated the real skills I need, of organization and resilience, to apply math and reading comprehension.

Of greater utility to my law students than the doctrine I impart, which is my responsibility to cover, is inspiration, which I merely hope to give. Education is mutual. Our attitude toward it establishes our life prospects. Although I am primarily an autodidact, I have appreciated teachers. The best I had gave me a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. We are still in touch.

Thus the most important lesson I learned from the influence of teachers is to think for myself. I grew up to be a teacher, because I have always been a student.