"Its Problems Didn't Make Permian a Bad School, Just a Typically American One"

I have been rereading the book Friday Night Lights this past week, and in addition to being an account of the Odessa Permian football team, it's a history of the town and the high school. In the "School Days" chapter, there's a long section on academics that begins on page 130, which I'll excerpt and edit here. What surprises me about this passage--though perhaps it shouldn't--is that the author, H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, was out in West Texas exactly twenty years ago. The mood here sounds like something I wouldn't expect two decades ago:

It was not uncommon for teachers at Permian to teach for only a quarter or a third of the period and then basically let students do whatever they wanted as long as they did it quietly. It was also unusual to find teachers who demanded from students their very best, who refused to succumb to the notion that there was no reason to challenge them because they simply didn't care. . . .

Many teachers felt that no matter how creative they were in the classroom, it wouldn't make a difference anyway. They talked about a devastating erosion in standards, how the students of today bore no resemblance to the students of even ten or fifteen years ago, how their preoccupations were with anything but school. It was hard for teachers not to feel depressed by the lack of rudimentary knowledge, like in the history class in which students were asked to name the president after John F. Kennedy. Several students meekly raised their hands and proffered the name of Harry Truman. None gave the correct answer of Lyndon Johnson, who also happened to have been a native Texan. . . .

"It still amazes me when I give a test in grammar and the kids can do it," said English teacher Elodia Hilliard with more than a touch of sadness in her voice. "It used to be the other way around. I used to be surprised whenever they didn't know it. Now I'm amazed when they do know it." When Hilliard looked around the classroom, she saw students with no direction, and she wondered if they saw any point at all in being well read and intelligent. She listened to parents who, rather than promising to try to motivate their children, made excuses for them--the homework was too hard, or the book they had been assigned had too many cuss words in it. Even when she got them to read, the leap to conceptual, creative thinking seemed as far off as a trip to Jupiter. It almost seemed to her and other teachers as if the students were scared of it.

There was a time when she had unflappable faith in her profession, when she had encouraged the best and brightest to follow in her footsteps and spread the gospel of literature and grammar with evangelical zeal. But not anymore. "I really felt we made a difference. Now I'm beginning to wonder. I don't know. I'm really uncertain."

I'll try to find out if Hilliard is still in Odessa. In the meantime, to mark our first day of school, on Monday I'll post an interview I did with a friend who just completed his first full year teaching junior high.