Massachusetts News 

August 2--We again report the views of Dr. John Silber without the filter of a liberal press.  Although none of us will agree with everything he believes, he will certainly stir all of us to a greater understanding of the issues as distilled by him after years of experience. 

Silber: We need better management of each school. Typically principals have been selected as former football coaches because they were big enough to maintain some kind of physical authority over the students. But some of the best principals I have seen are wiry, little women who could whip a bear with a switch. They don't have to be bigger than the bear in order to subdue the bear; they can subdue the bear just by their intelligence, just by their emotional intensity. And only people who are highly intelligent and well educated who also possess management skills should be put into these positions. You can't have a first-rate school without a first-rate principal. That's a fact. And you can't have a good school system or at least you're unlikely to have a good school system unless you have a first-rate superintendent. 

MassNews: Are there too many "administrators"? 

Silber: Our superintendents have surrounded themselves with assistant superintendents, associate superintendents, a director of curriculum, and wasted millions of dollars that have been kept out of the classroom. 

MassNews: Is there a difference between public and private schools? 

Silber: It is very interesting that in the Archdiocese of Boston, 54,000 children are being educated and the administrative staff numbers about 12 people. In Boston, you have roughly the same number of students, and you've got administrative staff in the thousands. That's where the money is being thrown away. We should get rid of all of that because it dilutes the authority of the principal. The principal ought to be held to account and he shouldn't have to explain everything he's done to this curriculum expert and to this division sub-superintendent and then to this associate superintendent, and then to the superintendent. He ought to be able to control his own turf with very little reporting requirements beyond being open to inspection at all time. 

MassNews: How can we achieve equality and excellence? 

Silber: If you want equality in education, there's only one way to get it and that's to reduce everybody to about the fourth grade level. This society will not survive on that basis. The economy won't survive and the defense mechanisms won't survive. You can't staff an army with persons of that low quality, you can't staff a police force, you can't staff city government, you can't staff the schools, you can't do anything with that low-level of equality. You cannot accept that. Democracy requires equality of opportunity. 

You won't have equality of opportunity without early childhood education, and without intervention in the home at an earlier age than that. I believe the legislature is going to support programs that I have advocated to bring someone into the home of our children at age two to teach parents how to read to them and how to play with toys that are educational. That early intervention is absolutely essential to equality of opportunity. If there's no place at home to do the homework, there's got to be a place at school to do the homework. If there's nobody at home to keep these children off the street, there's got to be summer programs in the schools that give these children an equivalent to what the children in middle-class families get when there was at least one parent or a grandparent at home to look after the 24-hour-a-day needs of nurturing for that child. This is the democratic requirement, equality of opportunity but not equality of achievement. 

MassNews: Should we strike for equality in achievement? 

Silber: We need to urge as much diversity in achievement as possible in order to ensure the advantages to our country and to each community of persons of enormous talent. We need people who can create businesses that create jobs. Think how many people Bill Gates has put to work. Other people of far less ability than Bill Gates are working for Microsoft. There are janitors working for them. There are people who are driving trucks and driving buses and people who are sweeping streets and washing windows who are as smart as some college professors, but they may not have the interest or the opportunities to have become professionals or college professors. 

The idea that the only purpose of education is to make money is one of the worst things that have come along. The purpose of education is self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment includes recognizing one's strengths, one's weaknesses, one's potentialities and one's greatest interest. Look at some of the young people who are working at Goodwill. These are usually people who have certain serious disabilities. Goodwill is a marvelous program because it trains those people to do jobs that are needed in our society but they are not jobs that call for a high level cognitive performance. Somebody has got to do that work. What are we supposed to do? Recruit people from some foreign country who are willing to come do the job that we're not willing to do? I think society has to be self-sustaining and there has to be dignity and responsibility for those who are fulfilling every societal need no matter how so-called menial that task may be. 
I have just as much respect for the janitor who cleans my office as I do for any full professor at Boston University. He's very intelligent, but what he does intellectually is not comparable to what is done by our professors. That doesn't reduce his human dignity, doesn't reduce his importance. And I can't do without him -- but I can do without several members of this faculty. He's just as important to the successful operation of this university as anyone. And that has to be recognized. He also makes wine and he makes wine very competently. I don't think there are very many faculty members who can make wine as effectively as he can. We have to respect individual variations and not say the only people worthy of esteem are intellectuals. That's just false. 

MassNews: Is that what you meant when you said that you don't see any reason why a garbage collector should not be paid as much as a school teacher? 

Silber: Yes. I believe that firmly. I don't see why any garbage collector should be paid less than the college professor should. How many college professors want to spend their life picking up crap? That's not a very attractive job but there's something wonderfully attractive about the job of a school teacher and a college professor, provided the school teacher doesn't have to engage in combat and provided the school teacher doesn't have all of the joy of her profession taken away by work rules imposed by the union that says she can't stay after school and work with the group on a volunteer basis if she wants. 

You can't harass a teacher like Jaime Escalante without undermining his joy of teaching. He took a group of poor Hispanic kids and taught them to handle calculus and trigonometry and to do well on an SAT test. Then because his students do well the authorities accused them of being a bunch of cheaters. That's the way you take joy out of a man's profession. It didn't work with Escalante because he was so damned courageous. He just went in there and said, "OK. Give it to us again" And the kids took it again under very carefully monitored circumstances and performed just as well as they had the first time. So that's the way that he defended the quality of his work. But think of the joy that he had in taking a group of children that people thought were ineducable and having them perform at high levels comparable to the levels of private schools on a subject as difficult as trigonometry or calculus. This is the joy of teaching. 

This is the joy of teaching and this why people can give their lives to teaching. They are in a position of Pygmalion. This is the Pygmalion opportunity: You can create Galatea, you can create a human being. And good teachers are engaged in the process of creating fulfilled human beings. And there is nothing more exciting or more wonderful than that. Normally it's a clean profession if a school is run well, and the students who are not sufficiently civilized to operate within the reasonable expectations of a classroom are put into an alternative school. When that is done, it can be a real joy to be a teacher. 

Teachers can also enjoy a rich family life, to spend time with their spouses and children and have a life outside their profession at the same time that they have a profession. You don't have to say to them what you have to say to nine of out of ten hotshot lawyers -- get a life. A hotshot lawyer is typically working about 18 hours a day, six and seven days a week.  And there's a lot of money in it but there's not much of a life in it outside the profession itself. In teaching it's different. 

MassNews: Can schools help inculcate morality in children? Can they do it without religion? 

Silber: Plato wrote a very interesting dialogue called The Eurythro in which Socrates interrogates a religious young man who is suing his father for impiety. Now, it's pretty presumptuous for a youngster to decide that his father is impious and is violating the commands of the deity, but this young man was very cocksure that he knew what piety was. So Socrates asked him to explain it. And it turns on a question of whether some act is pious because it is pleasing to the gods or whether it is pleasing to the gods because it's pious. Socrates satisfactorily demonstrates that the gods are pleased by piety because it's pious. It's not pious just because it's pleasing to the gods. 

Let's suppose that we served in a religion like the Aztec religion in which we thought that killing somebody on a sacrificial stone was a good thing to do at every winter solstice. I think the proper criticism would be that their god is mistaken or maybe that it's not a god at all but a superstition operated by those people. I don't know any better way to find out what God's will is than to find out what one's moral obligation is and what's the best thing to do and then figure that God probably endorses that. That's the closest to the understanding of what God has in mind that I see. If I couldn't justify the argument against killing without appealing to God, I think I would be a pretty poor philosopher. I think the fact that we have a very good golden rule in almost every culture of which we have any knowledge tells you something. If you want to know what's the right thing to do with regard to someone else, put yourself in the place of that person. Then you get a pretty good idea of whether what you want to do is right or what you want to do is wrong. 

MassNews: What's your opinion about Columbine High School? 

Silber: In Columbine the two kids that did all the shooting, they didn't have any understanding of how those people who were being shot felt. I suspect the problem was that those kids when they were young pinched their young siblings or other children and were never pinched back. You know the idea that we can avoid any kind of physical punishment is another new invention of psychologists who don't know what they're talking about and educators who don't know what they're talking about. The best way to introduce a child to empathy is if child A hurts child B, hurt child A in a way roughly comparable to the damage done to child B. The punishment should not inflict any serious injury but should cause a sufficient amount of pain to make him realize what he's done to somebody else. That has a wonderful curative effect. 

The one time when our children could be guaranteed a spanking was when they ran into the street. Why did I do that? I wanted to hurt them bad enough, to make them feel sufficient amount of pain so that they were never hit by a car. If they stopped, looked both ways, nothing was coming and then crossed the street, fine. But if they darted into the street without looking, and I caught them they could be guaranteed a spanking, regardless of the reason. They got a spanking because I wanted to save their lives.You never spank a child with a diaper on because you'd have to really introduce a physical injury to the child before the child feels the sting. But if you take a small switch and just strike the child on the leg, it hurts like hell immediately and doesn't hurt at all over a long period of time. Intelligent use of physical punishment with very early children is a way of introducing moral responsibility at a later stage of development where they understand what's right and wrong and they understand the effects of what they're doing on other people. 

MassNews: Are you suggesting that unless you justify your morality on a 
rational basis, it's not defensible. 

Silber:  No. I don't think it's off the table at all. But you're talking about the public schools in Massachusetts. Its off the table in the public schools in Massachusetts because that's the law. It's not because I think that's the ideal way to do it. If you go to Roxbury Latin, religion is a part of their curriculum and they offer a superior form of education.  I think that's wonderful.  I don't have any quarrel with that at all. But you can't do that in a public school. So you have to track the argument. What I'm talking about is how you can teach character and morals in the public schools in Massachusetts where you are prohibited from the introduction of religious arguments. 

But the religious argument is always an argument by authority. Jesus said, do such and such. But you've got to come back and ask why Jesus said it. Jesus allowed somebody to get an ox out of a ditch on the Sabbath because he put himself in the place and point of view of the ox, and considered the value of the ox to the owner of the ox. The ox in the ditch not only is suffering but may die or be permanently injured in its struggle to get up, and thus the person who owns the ox may suffer a loss he can't afford. Landowners had rules about "gleaning" -- farmers were required not to go back and try to sweep up every last bit of grain that was in the field but leave some for the gleaners. This was a form of social welfare out of concern for those who didn't have a farm to work, so that they could get something. There are good arguments that you can make about most of these. 

If you're Moses, out there in the desert, you've got to keep this band of people together working harmoniously until you can find some place to live in a surrounding that is as the Bible says -- "a land filled with milk and money." But there's no milk and money out there, just sun, sun, sun, more sun, and sand, sand, sand more sand.  Not very pleasant. You've got to hold them together. Well, what would you say? Wouldn't you say that killing each other is wrong? If you didn't say that killing each other is wrong, that band wouldn't last very long. If you want to avoid killing, what do you do? You tell people to stop coveting your neighbor's property. Stop coveting your neighbor's wife, your neighbor's ass or anything to do with your neighbor. And ass means donkey. The other meaning of ass was covered by don't covet your neighbor's wife. If you can stop coveting things that don't belong to you, then you don't steal. And if you don't steal and you don't fornicate which also comes from coveting your neighbor's wife or your neighbor's daughter, you're more likely to live in harmony with other people. 

I don't know -- maybe you can get away with saying that you don't need to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. But you can't get along without love thy neighbor as thyself. So if you were Moses, I think you'd come up with most of the Ten Commandments. I don't think there would be very many that you'd miss. You might not say, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, but it was the Jewish religion that gave you a day of rest. It took a long time to achieve that universally particularly in countries that weren't Christian or weren't dominated by the Jewish religion and there were very few of those. And they were very small. 

The Christians and the Muslims were the ones who introduced a day of rest in society, and now geniuses have figured out a way to get rid of the day of rest. They insist on the right to keep their stores open on Saturday and Sunday and get rid of all those blue laws. They can't possibly make more money. The only way they can make more money is by a shop that stays open seven days a week competing with a shop that stays open six days a week. But if there were a prohibition where none of the shops were open on the seventh day, they'd all maintain the same amount because there's only a certain amount of money to be spent. But society loses a day of rest, in which families can get together, in which parents can be with their children. You can make a very strong argument in terms of education and moral and spiritual development for having a day of rest for everybody. 

MassNews: But what would you say to people who think that religion is being inculcated in the public schools and it's a religion of secular humanism? 

Silber: I think there is no doubt about it. Don't believe in anything. That's the sure thing. But the people that try to impose creation as a scientific doctrine in the schools I think are making a comparable mistake. 

MassNews: That's not a big issue in Massachusetts. 

Silber: No, it's not a big issue. It's an excuse to try to slap down Robertson and the so-called religious right. 
 
MassNews: Whereas in Massachusetts the issue of homosexuality in the public schools is a big issue. 

Silber: Well it's not a matter of tolerating it, you've got to advocate it and it seems to me that's an imposition and one that Horace Mann attempted to guard the public against. In his writings, he was explicit. Never introduce into the curriculum of the public schools a controversial issue, an issue on which there is not overwhelming public support. Sex education too. A large number of parents don't want sex education in school. I don't want the public school teaching my daughter how to put a condom on a young man's penis. I don't want her to do that. When she gets married that's time enough. In the meantime, it's abstinence. I expect that she's not an animal and consequently she can control her desires. And I want to raise that daughter to understand that as a human being desires can be controlled. The reason I'm not a fat man is because I don't eat more than is necessary to control my weight. It's not because I just naturally can't gain weight; I can gain weight easy. I can gain half pound a day with no sweat. I don't because I restrict the amount that I eat. A human being has the capacity to control his desires. That's what I want to instruct my children and I don't want somebody to say you can't expect them to abstain until you're married and until you can assume the responsibilities for the nurture of a child which may very well be the consequences of copulation. No, they want to sit there and say, "Bring a banana to school so we can teach you how to put a condom on." I think that's totally inappropriate. 
 

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