Best Taught Subject

The Best-Taught Subject In High School

By Dorothy J. Farnan

Chairman – English Department

Erasmus Hall High School, New York City

“Nor law nor duty bade me fight

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove me to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.”

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

Someone once said that the best taught subject in the American High School is football. Not only are the players given theory, they are also given hours of practice in that theory. The standards are severe.

Of a large school of aspirants, seldom more than 25 are chosen for the squad. And only one or two ever gain high recognition in the course of the four academic years. The final “examinations” are those difficult, glorious games upon the field.

For what advanced English class is the incumbent willing to go without sweets, refuse tobacco, and alcohol, limit his social life in order to sleep his eight to ten hours? For what advanced biology is he willing to plow through sleet and roll in the mud and risk breaking legs and arms and nose and neck in order to perfect his skill and to achieve success? For what advanced Algebra is he willing to memorize signals and to learn plays as complicated and elegant as musical ornamentations in a Chopin prelude? Laden with the hot armorial gear, for what but scrimmage is he willing to give up all his golden autumn afternoons?

Of course, there is the glamour of the game.

There is the smoke curling from bonfires on the way to the field, the spice of autumn in the air, the hush of leaves, the sharp pleasure of homecoming. There is the hope of the scholarship and the All-American status someday.

There is his school. There is the love light in the eyes of all the golden girls. There is the rush of the field, the music, the chivalric banner flying, the hopes all centered in a play, the exultation of the touchdown - all other cares forgotten.

One would be a fool not to see the glamour. But one would be a fool indeed not to see more. The young athlete lives these years of almost monastic austerity because he is proud of having been able to endure.

The more difficult the game, the more strict the coach; and the more inclement the weather, the more he remembers those days of his youth, and the prouder he is of himself and of his Game. Indeed, the more he has sacrificed, the harder he has worked, the more he is convinced that it was the Game that developed his character, the Game that made him a man, and the Game that is proof of that manhood.

And, in a sense, he is right. It is his having endured and his having passed the test of the Game that gives him his image and allows him to respect himself. Whether his I.Q. is that of a Frank Ryan or of some general student in high school, it does not seem to matter.

His involvement is the same. Football is the best-taught subject in the American High School because it is probably the only subject that we do not try to make easy. We have watered down the social studies curriculum - Students do not even have to learn ancient history anymore. We have emasculated English. We have stopped believing in grammar (though “Grammar,” as Moliere says in his Les Femmes Savantes, “knows how to control kings”).

We have relegated composition to the flaccid, permissive rule of the spoken word from Madison Avenue. We give short-stories instead of DeCoverley and undistinguished modern prose instead of the classics. Or we water down the classics. This still shocks me after all these years. I think that it is high time that we began taking English and French and Latin, and history and mathematics and chemistry and biology and physics as seriously, and for all our students, as we take football.And I think it is high time we got some pointers from the coach.

“There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather, And life is itself but a good game of football.”

–Sir Walter Scott Song

We attempt to make learning “interesting” and “fun.” As a result we have made it neither: we have succeeded only in making it deadly dull. The student has lost respect for us and for the subjects we teach. He wants to grow up; he does not want his life made easy. Football is the challenge he wants. Football fires his imagination. He identifies himself with the football hero, because it is in this image that he wishes to see himself. He wants to have the opportunity of facing an adult world on its own terms: with courage, with endurance, with competence. In short, he wants to work hard at something so that he can respect himself. If he does not perform well, he knows it, and he expects to be failed. If he performs well, he can be proud of himself.

I have never known a student to point with pride at having passed an easy subject. The student also wants the world of ideas. He does not want, for example, to write compositions about “My hobby” or “The trouble with my Older Sister” or “A Problem I am Having at Home.” He wants to write about the ideas stimulated by the reading of great literature. He wants to be and to work and to think as hard in his academic classes as he is made to work and to think on the football field.

If we can make the academic subjects as difficult, as challenging, as exciting, as adult as football, perhaps we can make them glamorous, too –so glamorous, in fact, that the student will now and then spend the lamplight over his books “because he wants to.” We will never make academic subjects glamorous if we continue to emasculate the curriculum and demand of the student less than his very best.

Let us have some mental scrimmage, too. We have tried for at least 40 years to soften the blows of academic reality for the students in our high schools. The results have been less than distinguished and often downright disastrous. Now is the time for a change, a time to learn from our mistakes. I have heard very few educators say, “Football isn’t important,” but I have heard them say, “Grammar isn’t important.” I once even heard a professor of education say, “subject matter isn’t important.”

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Sir Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist and Poet - 1771 – 1832)