Letter to the editor: We don’t need to be known as the town that built the most expensive high school in America

On the evening of November 13^th in the Special Town Meeting, the Members voted overwhelmingly against an Article supported by the  group, LHS4ALL with its proposed delay on going ahead with the Bloom plan for a new Lexington High School. While a new school is certainly called for, and while the LHS4ALL plan has its debatable aspects, as a result of the meeting I wondered a good deal at the now almost irresistible drive ahead for the Bloom plan.

As a member of the faculty of the University of Houston I taught students in the Honors College what is known as “the Great Books.” During my time there—looking for inspiration, among other things—I undertook a study of famous teachers. In that study I came across the name of Mark Hopkins in an account of the education of James Garfield, who later became the 20^th President of the United States.

In 1854 Garfield became a student at Williams College in western Massachusetts. He was particularly impressed while there with the college president, Mark Hopkins —a teaching college president, by the way — who had responded warmly to Garfield’s letter inquiring about admission. Garfield later famously said of Hopkins, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student on the other.”

Of Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois in his famous 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth” wrote: “There was a time when the American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of human training. But in these eager days it would seem that we have changed all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills and a hammer to this outfit, and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark Hopkins.”

The physical plant, while helpful and useful, has never been a principal instrument in the education of men and women. As Du Bois—and Garfield—would say, we need the services of Mark Hopkinses more than anything—and beware preoccupation with “the log.”

I think we kid ourselves by thinking young people must have the finest physical plant money can buy in order to grow and prosper intellectually and morally, to help them mature in mind and in character. It seems to me that something of that understanding would lead to greater skepticism about the need for a $650,000,000 high school, but this has not significantly informed the Town government’s drive to build it. And yet a not insignificant minority of citizens of Lexington would agree that the Bloom plan is leading precipitously to a degree of spending which is so prodigious that the Mark Hopkins angle cannot help but be given shorter shrift, no matter how much one says “we need both! — the perfect (and perfectly expensive) plant and the best of teachers.”

The dire warnings at the November 13^th meeting that delay now, at this juncture, can only make the school still more expensive when it’s built, and make student suffering in the present plant more prolonged, far outpaced the reality of the situation. Being in a hurry to get things done can lead to costly and unwise decisions. There’s a lesson from target shooting with rifles that applies here: if you want to hit the bull’s eye you should “squeeze, and not jerk” the trigger, lest get off your shot hastily and miss the mark. Let’s “squeeze,” then, and not fire too quickly.

We don’t need to be known as the town that built the most expensive high school in America; better to have it said that Lexington produces graduates like James Garfield. That is where the stress should be, far more than the creation of the palace which seems more and more what the new school will resemble.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Cooke