Pierson F. Melcher

 

A child of The Great Depression and World War II, Pete Melcher was born just three years prior to the stock market crash of 1929. Thus his life spans the last three quarters of the 20th century and the staggering changes which have occurred during that time. As a child he saw horse-drawn vehicles performing most of the transporting of goods in Philadelphia, while gas street lights in some places were still lighted by hand every night. Air travel was a rarity in relatively primitive planes. Then like just about every other male citizen he was thrust into the maw of the greatest war the world has yet seen, moving around many of the now-fabled islands of the Pacific Ocean with the Army Air Corps.

After a very brief flirtation with the insurance business, he chanced into a teaching post and never looked back. Teaching English in New Haven, CT, Carpinteria, CA, Austin, TX, and St. Louis, MO, while also picking up administrative experience were all preludes to his becoming headmaster at a school in Los Angeles, CA, with the task of converting it from a family run proprietary school to a non-profit school. From there he went to another school in Waterbury, CT, to bring some new life to the dying cause of girls' single-sex education. That in turn led to his founding and constructing a girls' boarding school in Southborough, MA, a school noteworthy for its fresh and successful approach to single-sex education. When that school was absorbed by its sponsoring neighbor, a single-sex boys school, he went on to Jacksonville, FL, to repeat the revival of a girls' school.

Mr. Melcher finished his career with an additional seven years as a school management consultant to over 100 schools in every part of the United States. These consulting assignments gave him a depth of perspective in school operation and management which ultimately persuaded him that independent schools had much to offer the nation as illustrations of different models of management, both good and bad. It also made him realize that the general citizens' view of public schools competing with independent schools was preventing a deeper and richer relationship in which cooperation and mutual exploration of new ways of doing things could help all children in all schools. Finally, his wide and deep experiences also brought him to the realization that the United States is at risk of losing its edge in the world economy unless it reexamines the principles on which the education system was founded.

 

"I just put down one of the best written, most penetrating books I have ever read on the subject of American education. No one today who is at work in the field of education, or with children in school, should miss this volume. Published in August of 2002, Pete Melcher's book is a brilliant and loving effort to bring attention to an ailing patient. With authority and hard won wisdom he takes us on a long walk from our pine board frontier beginnings to the cement steps of Columbine." From a review of It's the Teacher, Stupid! by James Hunter

 

Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Pierson F. Melcher: I grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the middle child between my brother who was four years older and my sister who was two years younger. Curiously, although the family was a "bookish" family which reveled in rhetoric, so to speak, it was not a family that -- as a whole -- read a lot of books. My mother tended to read the Reader's Digest and romantic fiction. As for my father, he was so busy most of the time that I seldom saw him read anything but the Bible, although I know he read much during his life..

Nevertheless, books were always around us, several shelves of them being in prominent display in the living room. While we were still young -- as I recall up to the age of nine or ten -- my father would almost every night, no matter how busy he was, read to my sister and me. He would sit in the middle of the living room sofa with me on one side and my sister on the other, and in this manner he probably read all of Charles Dickens' novels to us, for example, as well as other things equally good. (I don't know what he did with my brother in reading. My brother was just enough older than I to make his life quite different and quite separate.)

I was always given books for Christmas and birthdays, and, above all, we listened each week to the rolling cadences of my father's sermons. He was an old style minister in a denomination which stressed the ministerial role in all worship services. Consequently, he took his sermons very seriously. He would select a piece of biblical text and expound its meaning in excellent prose with a beginning, a middle and an end, all tightly reasoned and without any condescension in his vocabulary. Even when I was bored by it, I admired his oratory. It had a large influence on my adult writing and speaking styles.

Then there was school. I was fortunate enough to have in my junior and senior years of high school teachers who pounded writing into our heads by all the tried and true methods of composition instruction. We studied grammar. We diagramed sentences. We wrote paragraphs of every type. We wrote precis until we were sick of them. We did a major paper every week. In short, these teachers were tough, knowledgeable and disciplined. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And all along the line, from second grade on up to twelfth, we were urged and encouraged to read, given gold stars beside our names on the bulletin boards every time we completed a book, and so on. As the Gospel According to St. John begins: In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word was God! So was it in my life.

But the taste and depth of the literature which we read along with that composition instruction was also critical. We read Shakespeare (NOT abbreviated cartoon versions; rather entire plays in the original forms) as early as the eighth grade, for example. We read good poetry every year in quantity. And above all, we were encouraged to write for the school literary magazine. I wrote a good bit of poetry for that publication.

 

Pageonelit.com: Why did you write IT'S THE TEACHER, STUPID! THOUGHTS ON RESTRUCTURING EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES? How has your professional career aided you in writing this book?

Pierson F. Melcher: It's the Teacher, Stupid! is the product of nearly 40 years as first a teacher, then a headmaster, then a trustee, and finally a consultant to other schools. In this manner I dealt in one way or another with over 100 schools and with their students. Probably the pinnacle of that experience was my founding, planning, designing, constructing and implementing a girls' boarding high school in conjunction with one of the oldest and most well-known boys' prep schools in the United States. This whole incident was, in the minds of most people in the school business, strictly a tour de force. Some said It was Melcher's folly!

Coming at the least favorable time in the history of girls' boarding schools, the Southborough School was a vehicle for putting into practice all that I had learned for the previous 22 years. It was a time when such schools were closing and/or going bankrupt in relatively large numbers. The surface reasons were obvious: in 1972 drugs were seeping out of the college campuses and into the secondary schools in quantity for the first time in history, thus making parents very wary about sending their children to boarding schools, especially their girls. And even more to the point, single-sex education, which had been the norm in most private schools up to that point (and even in some public schools -- Philadelphia's Boys' High and Girls' High, for example), was now being discarded wholesale by parents, students and teachers alike for reasons that ranged from the social growth of the students to the usual rationalization of the enrollment appeal which translated into dollar signs! All of the experience of the previous 100 years which pointed to the good features of single sex education were ignored and/or discarded as being antithetical to the modern concepts of adolescent maturation.

That we were throwing out the baby with the bath water never seemed to occur to anyone in those most heady and bra-burning times. It was in the minds of many, including me, the ultimate failure to maintain schools as mind training institutions and the final coup de grace to those who were still attempting to keep schools as centers of learning instead of social and welfare institutions. Of course we should have known better, since our schools were based on the concepts and models instituted by Otto von Bismarck, the Emperor of Germany, who used schools as a means of exerting discipline over diverse populations which he was trying to unite
and of training civil servants to maintain the huge bureaucracy of a modern national state.

But to return to the main point, the new girls' boarding school was a success from the beginning as far as education and enrollment were concerned. That it was underfunded and taken over by threat of mortgage foreclosure by the boys' school that owned the land it was on before it ever had the chance to gain its own fiscal stability did not change the fact that it was a model of successful change, meeting contemporary conditions without throwing out the combined wisdom of 100 previous years. Any reader wishing to know more about it should obtain a copy of my book entitled: The Flame and the Phoenix: the Education of a Schoolmaster.

The net conclusion of all this anecdotal discussion is that The Southborough School was a five-year opportunity for me to put into place everything I had learned of a practical nature for a specific type of school. It also brought me to the realization that while all schools, public and private, have differing obstacles to success, they also have one common characteristic or element upon which their success stands or falls: teachers. Further, I realized that all of the obstacles and problems are more or less present in differing quantities and ratios in all schools and that my hard-won knowledge of education and school management, coupled with my continuous attempts to keep up with what was going on in public education, gave me the material and the understanding needed to offer a diagnosis of the overarching problems of public education. Of course, the day-to-day specific problems of managing a tough inner-city school are best solved at the practical level by teachers and administrators who have wrestled with them in cooperation with the local parents. But there are no great mysteries of management and structure on the theoretical level to which others cannot contribute, and which others cannot aid in analyzing.

Has my career be aided by this book? No. Will it be? Not likely, because I am now retired. It is nothing more nor less than my attempt to aid in an impending education revolution.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: In your opinion, how has education and teaching changed in the United States in the past fifty years? Is this for the good or the bad? Please explain. What makes one teacher better than another?

Pierson F. Melcher: The "dumbing down of America" is something that I have watched and despaired ever since I became involved in teaching over 50 years ago. As I have indicated in answer to previous questions, it is a product of the increasing politicizing and institutionalizing of our schools. Are the teachers better or worse? :Probably not in terms of paper qualifications. After all, one of my elementary teachers 2nd grade was only a normal school graduate and was without doubt one of the very best teachers at that level.

But what distinguishes our problem now is that the societal an political problems of our nation, coupled with the almost total dominance of money as a controlling factor in all occupations and professions (see my book for lots on this point) have resulted in increasingly badly educated and ill-informed teachers coming into the classroom together with increasing bureaucratic interference and politically dictated curricula. The result is not the fault of the teachers who are, after all, only jumping through the hoops supplied by others. But the result in the classroom is increasingly the halt leading the blind, not to mention the outright shortage of intelligent bodies.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: You say, "Teaching is an art." Please explain.

Pierson F. Melcher: Yes, teaching is an art not a science. If it were a science, we could reduce it to a set of principles which result in college and graduate school curricula capable alone of turning intelligent, reasonably educated adult human beings into teachers. But the fact that teaching is an art means that regardless of the scientific preparation implied by the foregoing statement, only some persons trained in such a manner are truly successful in the classroom. Further, all the standardized tests in the analog and digital kingdoms of Princeton, New Jersey, will not BY THEMSELVES solve the problem of sorting out these individuals. The only way to do that is to have the principal of a school (who must have excellent judgement with regard to
people) use that judgement IN ADDITION TO the scientific training approach to select his or her teachers wisely. No one yet understands the chemistry of person-to-person relationships, but while many mistakes are made when subjective judgement is used, many more are made when we allow standardized measures to rule the selection and/or the training processes. Certain subject matter and certain skills can certainly be taught. But the art of teaching is either there or not in any given individual.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Why are teachers paid so poorly when they are so vital to the success of each generation?

Pierson F. Melcher: My book seeks to explain the answer to this question early on. Teachers got a bad rap centuries ago when they were little more than drill masters or pedants. If they tried to do much more, they were just as apt to be put to death by sovereign powers who saw education as a threat. And one can trace these attitudes throughout the ages. New ideas are always anathema to established power and definitely not to be encouraged.

Even more important, in the past century of public education, we have tried to finance our schools with property taxes. In most cases this has meant poor facilities and poor instruction in poor districts and what passed for good instruction and good facilities in rich districts. In some wealthier districts today, teachers are paid a reasonable wage when compared to truck drivers, garbage collectors and salespeople (all of whom, by the way, probably deserve what they get!). But even in these districts they do not come close to medicine or law in the salaries paid.

Until and unless the general populace realizes that entrusting its children to less than excellent education is devastating in the long run, and until that realization is accompanied by a willingness to finance education at the level that will produce such excellence, we are doomed to continue in the failure mode until the system collapses of its own weight. We must develop a financing arrangement which invests equal dollars for each child in the system, regardless of other factors, and which is substantial enough to enable the payment of salaries competitive with law and medicine.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you feel that church/prayer should stay out of the schools? Should an individual have the right to pray at his desk? How do you feel about Patriotism in/out of our schools? Please explain.

Pierson F. Melcher: Regardless of what I think about prayer or any other religious observance which might smack of indoctrination in our schools, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that such observances or practices are unconstitutional. The reasons are clear and logical. If our nation is truly a nation which welcomes all races, ethnicities, religions and other groupings of humanity and, indeed that is what we have been, have fought and died for, and should be proud of then we must avoid playing favorites. Unless we equally present all religions in our classrooms, an impossibility, then we need to keep religion in all forms out of those same classrooms. That should not indeed must not be permitted to ban from the classroom all appropriate use of or reference to The Bible, for example (it is, after all, the source of most of the metaphor in our daily language and in our literature), nor should it prevent other forms of values instruction.

Patriotism is something else again. Although as a formal part of our school programs I find no compelling reason in favor of flag-raisings with or without the Pledge of Allegiance, or singing of the Star Spangled Banner (largely, I guess, because I am repulsed and disgusted by the tasteless maulings that those expressions of affection for our nation receive daily at sporting events and other non-patriotic occasions), nevertheless, I find nothing about those practices which merit their being thrown out of school. They are, after all, a valuable form of ceremony which teaches a child how to structure his or her life in a chaotic world. I doubt, however, that true patriotism can be taught (although blind obedience to national power can, as Adolph Hitler taught some of us a few decades ago!!). Patriotism is rather, in my opinion, the result of teaching our nation's history, geography, government, social practices and other aspects of knowledge about our nation. But I draw the line at what at lest one state has recently proposed: compulsory classes in patriotism for all grade levels! When will we ever learn that it simply is not possible to use schools to beat the drum for every politician's private causes.

And by the way, I am proud of my country and am a World War II veteran.

 

Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback from readers? What do they say to you about their interpretations of IT'S THE TEACHER, STUPID! THOUGHTS ON RESTRUCTURING EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES? Any negativity?

Pierson F. Melcher: The most negativity I get from my readers is based upon the title of the book. There are some who think that I am insulting them, when in fact I am simply using for its shock value a slightly altered famous line quoted by one of our Presidents about the importance of economics and the need for him to remind himself of that fact every morning while shaving. Other criticisms are usually simply aimed at me personally as being an independent school person, which somehow among some groups of people seems to disqualify me as an educator.

But the bulk of the early readers and I hasten to say that they are not numerous yet because publication was only a short while ago and the critical reviews have not yet come in have offered comments most gratifying (It is a very well written book that presents dramatically the point of view with which I strongly agree; or It's wonderful to have you remind us of the centrality of the teacher; or The book is pure gold; or Great book!), and the people writing such comments include the founder of a prominent language school, a nationally and internationally recognized school consultant, the Executive Director of a leading national school association, the President of a well-known Maryland college, and others.

 

Pageonelit.com: Who are your favorite writers and why?

Pierson F. Melcher: My favorite writers must include the poet, T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets, while somewhat difficult to follow for some, is a brilliant example of using that medium not so much to report his ideas to his readers as actually to develop them before our eyes through the medium of his verse. My favorite prose writer is Melville, whose verbosity is, in my opinion, more than offset by the sheer arrogant power of what one of his interpreters would call his "quarrel with God." All of our literary and psychic heritage before him is reflected in one way or another in that great novel.

But having named two authors in this manner and having thereby opened myself to the second-guessing and the guffaws of every person with different ideas, I also want to make clear that I almost do not have favorites. I like nearly everything that I read on any subject whatever, prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction, as long as it is well written and as long as I can learn something from it. Great writers are like all great artists: they lift our lives and expectations to a higher plane.

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Pierson F. Melcher:What's next? I am not sure, but I am leaning in the direction of a book about music as it has impacted my life in a thousand ways, making that life among other things a series of moments of great joy.

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Pierson F. Melcher: The last book I read was a re-reading of Joseph Conrad's, Lord Jim, but also quite recently I read and enjoyed very much a new novel entitled, Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund. That brilliant novel builds on Moby Dick without surrendering any of its own identity in a gripping tale of slavery and other aspects of American life which Melville touches on barely if at all.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing.

Pierson F. Melcher: Other hobbies? Travel, when my health will permit. That has had great influence on my writing. In fact, my first book was entitled, Year of Wonder, 1968, an account of a six-month sabbatical in Europe with my family during of the Cold War.