Core Knowledge and Engaged Scholarship ...

I'm doing two workshops in Atlanta tomorrow on the Civil Rights Movement for groups of K-12 teachers from across the country at the national conference of Core Knowledge, a foundation established by the University of Virginia's E. D. Hirsch in 1986. He is, of course, best known for his book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

Doing these workshops set me to thinking about the fairly large divide between the professorate and K-12 faculty. There was a time when it wasn't so. A faculty member at Louisville's Male High School was deferentially called"Prof Smith" in our local church there and the University of Louisville's David Maurer was well known to us in high school because his wife, Barbara, ruled the Latin roost at Fern Creek High School. The woman was a genius of a teacher and knew just where the boundaries were. When last I talked to her by telephone on a brief flight through Louisville, I called Mrs. Maurer. Many years had passed and she didn't altogether even remember me, but I wanted to pay tribute to her stern authority as a teacher. She cut me off."Oh, I was a bitch," she said.

In the meantime, I had done student teaching as an undergraduate at Duke. I was assigned to an eighth grade class in a white junior high school and ended up even leading girls p. e. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with that. But I was also participating in civil rights demonstrations in downtown Durham. After my picture appeared on local television, one of my students was found drawing a picture of me in his notebook."Nigger lover," it said under the drawing. I wasn't allowed to teach the unit on African history that I had planned for that semester. My teaching supervisor threatened to withdraw me from student teaching. The threat was a serious one because had I not successfully completed student teaching, I would have lost credit for all of the other courses I had taken that semester. A whole semester's work lost and graduation delayed. I survived by not getting arrested until my student teaching was completed and all requirements for graduation met.

It's all so ironic. Engagement in the civil rights movement is now valued. As I told a friend several years ago,"I'm a bloody relic." He wasn't too impressed with that, but I'm also a scholar of the movement and knowledge of it is" core knowledge." I hope Mrs. Maurer would be proud of me. I only wish the supervisors of my student teaching could be with us tomorrow.