Maybe I’m just fat and happy in a fool’s paradise. Maybe I’m a cock-eyed optimist, immature and incurably green. Maybe I have spent my life in such a protected bubble of cultural and social privilege that I can’t even conceive of the troubles all around me.
Or maybe I refuse to let the purveyors of gloom sell me a bill of goods as to the future of our society. I have a front-row seat to that future, thanks to my life spent teaching the best and brightest. I spend part of my week in the company of the extremely talented, part of it in the company of the extremely bright. And sometimes I find both qualities in the same student. Even the rank-and-file amongst my students are far removed from the norm in either or both the talent or brains departments. And all share dedication and drive, not necessarily towards the same goals. Aimless drifting is conspicuous in its absence. It will be a very rare student of mine who becomes a burden to society. From where I sit, the future is as bright as it ever was.
Anybody who thinks that UC Berkeley is a haven for gooey stoners, wild-eyed Leninists, and Birkenstocked anarchists hasn’t been around the place for the past 35 years. You never saw such a gathering of well-raised, polite, ambitious, and altogether engaging young people. The alarmists would have you believe that an education at UC Berkeley is spiralling out of reach except for the well-heeled. But I have news for those doomsayers: the campus is bursting at the seams. I teach in a program that serves those students who are admitted for the spring semester; they are fully qualified academically for Cal but the university just doesn’t have enough room in the fall class. So our program provides a place for 700+ of those students, giving them a Cal-quality education (and then some) during their fall semester. My Music 27 class at Berkeley is every teacher’s dream: energetic, committed kids who pay attention, show up, work hard, do the best they can, and wind up getting a whale of a good introduction to the sweep of Western music. About the only behavioral problems I run into come from the occasional kid who puts ambition ahead of moral sense. That isn’t to say that all of my students at Cal are there because they’re dedicated to music and art. Many of them choose to fulfill a number of their breadth requirements while in the Fall Freshman Program, so they can concentrate more on their majors starting in the spring semester. Motivations run the gamut, from the kids who are determined to make bundles in investment banking to the imaginative dreamers who know that they want something special, even if they don’t quite know yet what that is. I even get some kids who will go on in music, even if as a minor rather than a full-time commitment. Any teacher who wouldn’t be jazzed by working with such students needs to find another job.
My Conservatory students are just as inspiring. Many of them could distinguish themselves at Cal or Stanford, but they have chosen a different and somewhat riskier path. They have chosen to specialize, to make a bid for a life in music, one of the toughest professions around in which to make a living. But if a Conservatory serves no other purpose, it provides those students access to people who do make their living in music. And those folks aren’t just making their living in that weird self-perpetuating academic cycle of teaching students who become teachers, always remaining in the ivory tower. Conservatories have a blue-collar feel about them; the professors typically are or were working musicians with busy professional lives beyond the Conservatory walls. So students can interact with working pros, the very people who can ensure that they have a solid practical grounding in the essentials of the profession in addition to providing them with a broader education.
Given the expense and the difficulty of getting into (and remaining in) a Conservatory, none of those students is even remotely median. Some might come to us with academic problems, some with language problems. Some might need to be dragged kicking and screaming into theory, eartraining, history, or general education classes. But there’s not a slacker in the bunch. They’ve all made a serious commitment.
I’m not such an optimist as to ignore that a distressingly high percentage of young folks in the USA are emerging from twelve years of desultory public education with little to show save elementary literacy and maybe a few disassociated facts. Far too many Americans are ignorant of science, math, the arts, literature, civics, and the like. The United States is tragically steeped in superstition, shot through with ignorant religious fundamentalists who should be dismissed as silly crackpots but are given a public forum instead. Poorly-educated minds are easy prey to their simplistic notions, their blatant stupidity, their shoddy thinking. And there are far too many poorly-educated minds in our society. But has it ever been all that different? That little red schoolhouse of popular myth was mostly an educational disaster zone rather than a shining model. Literacy rates used to be far lower than they are now, and not just in the USA.
It’s also clear to me that the United States is failing to take proper care of itself. The Bay Area, so recently an exemplar of everything bright and good in American life, has a distinctly run-down feel. San Francisco itself is a fairly new city, all the more so given the need to rebuild portions from scratch following major earthquakes. And yet sizeable areas—including the neighborhood immediately surrounding City Hall—are seedy and unkempt. The same is true all around the Bay Area save the high-income enclaves. The infrastructure is crumbling, services are shaky at best, entire sections of towns and cities have become dead zones to be entered only at high risk. Not only are such areas growing, they’re moving closer to the safer areas. Just two blocks south of the main UC Berkeley campus you enter a slum-in-progress pestered by druggies, vagrants, and petty criminals. How did this happen? How could it happen? Recently I depended on Google street view to see the RCA Victor Oakland recording studio and pressing plant where the San Francisco Symphony made its first recordings back in 1925. I would have driven over to examine the now-abandoned building for myself and take some pictures, but I wouldn’t enter that neighborhood without an armed convoy, even in the middle of the day.
The poor will be with us always, but the dividing lines between Have and Have Not have definitely widened. I’m not blind to the challenges of the future. But I teach some of the people who will be facing those challenges. How they will respond will be their own concern; I’ll be long gone. But I think they’ll make a better world, just as we have, for the most part anyway. It’s too easy to lose sight of the enormous progress we’ve made over the past fifty years. But the evidence is right there before me every day, in the form of a generation of bright, committed, and inspiring students. For them to be here at all, we must have been doing something right.