Inside Room 307

Abstract

Remember J. D. Salinger's Seymour, An Introduction! The wit and wisdom and timidity of the fifties? After analyzing his extraordinary brother, Buddy Glass, age 40, considers his own career of college teaching and compares it to a religious calling. have a nine o'clock class, he concludes. know not always, but I know there is no single thing I do that is more important than going into that awful Room 307.... [The students] may shine with the misinformation of the ages, but they shine. This thought manages to stun me: There's no place I'd really rather go right now than into Room 307. Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong? Seymour, An Introduction was published in 1956, a generation ago as time was once measured many generations ago, it would seem, in the recent history of our troubled teaching profession. The contemporary classroom is hardly a little piece of Holy Ground (if it ever was). We need only recall the record of our generation to see how teaching has been buffeted by social crosswinds: a racial revolution that began in the 1950s, followed by student rebellions, a women's movement, a gay rights effort, and, in the 1970s, the pervasive phenomenon of open admissions. A declining job market. Violence in the classroom. Truancy and drugs in the schools. Throughout these embattled years teachers became unionized, administrators bureaucratized, the curriculum less structured and more sensitive so it seemedto current cultural conditions as words like relevance first grew fashionable and then turned hollow with repetition. A media explosion did more than provide a few audiovisual aids in schools; it influenced the traditional process of education profoundly by concentrating attention on the moment, by crowding the mind with thousands of current, disparate images from everywhere in the world, by creating an impatience with the past and with deliberate learning. Community colleges were established and dramatized the increasing demand for career education as well as the need for basic skills. The proportion of students in college increased greatly; everyone appeared to be studying beyond high school in one institution or another and the distance between the world of work and the world of learning narrowed. Academic programs evolved in response to the demands of local industry or to the immediate career goals of students, and colleges of liberal arts and science shrank in significance. The process of higher education (in all but a few small liberal arts colleges) changed rapidly during these two decades, although the facultyconcentrated within the traditional disciplines did not. As faculty determined curricula less and less, as external forces controlled new programs that would encourage enrollment, as academic politics delayed the development of a coherent core curriculum, the prestige of the classroom teacher diminished. He was not al-