Posted on by rjonakait

Bless the Teachers, Especially Miss Dahlberg

With a new school year about to begin, I have been thinking about my own school days. I thought I came out of high school well educated for an eighteen-year-old, but I quickly learned otherwise at college. Those who had gone to top secondary schools such as New Trier or Stuyvesant or elite prep schools were much better prepared for college than I. Mine was a good basic education. I knew a lot of history, for example, but much of that was merely dates and names. I had not been challenged to think about historical causes, trends, or ramifications. I could excellently summarize the classic novels I had been assigned, but I could not probe them for any deeper resonances or cogently assess what made some books better than others. And so on. Even though many of my college classmates brought more to their study than I did, I was arrogant enough about my own intelligence to think that they were not smarter than I was. I thought that I could catch up and outdo most of them, but it took a while and a lot of effort.

What hurt the most, however, was my writing ability. I admired writers and thought I wanted to be one. My high school writing assignments always came back with an “A” and a note or two of praise. I was a natural I thought. My hopes were dashed when my first college paper was returned with a bold, underlined “You can’t write!” I examined what I had turned in, and I realized that my professor was right. I took as many courses as I could that forced me to write, and I started to read books about how to write, something I have continued for most of my life. After much practice and study, I was able to write competent, clear, and succinct prose, but it still required a good deal of effort. Writing still does not come easily, but I take pride in many of the things that I have written, which, as a lawyer and an academic, has been a lot. I am never the stylist I would like to be, but I keep trying.

Looking back, however, I have realized that, while my secondary education could have been better, the fact that I was able to learn and catch up with my colleagues came at least partly from good, caring elementary school teachers. I benefited from the few opportunities that women had when I was young. Bright working women at that time disproportionately went into school teaching because only nursing and secretarial work seemed possible as other career choices. More on them in a moment.

My first male teacher didn’t appear until the seventh grade when I had Mr. Cutting for social studies. (In high school I had more male teachers. The math teacher was excellent; the English teacher was good; a physics teacher was bad; and the German teacher was awful.) I liked Mr. Cutting even though I don’t remember much about his classes. An old friend remembers Weekly Reader quizzes on which she shined. I do recall his reaction the day after Sputnik’s launch when he said that the United States was no longer the leader of civilization. I did not understand that, but I did grasp that the Russian entrance into space was a monumental event.

I remember Mr. Cutting more on a personal level. He was a member of the First Baptist Church I attended. (There was no Second Baptist Church or any other American Baptist Church in town, but we were still the First.) The church was small, but I don’t think I ever saw him in attendance. Our membership in the same church, though, may have been why he went out his way for me. He got me several parttime jobs that a youthful boy who did not like to work could handle. He helped me learn how to thread and operate the school’s film projector. After having mastered those mechanical skills, he asked me to man (boy?) the projector at the Masonic Lodge where he was a member. No embarrassments come to mind as a result, so everything must have proceeded smoothly.

Another teacher at about the same time also reached out to me to do some work. Miss Bass was like other teachers who seemed old and not quite human to me. She lived in an apartment near the waterfront and hired me to wash her walls. (In this town of one- and two-family homes, this was the first time I had been in an apartment building.) It made me very nervous. I did not talk easily around adults, but she regaled me with stories about the trips she and other teachers took during vacations. I realized for the first time that teachers might have a life outside a classroom–a life, in fact that might be quite interesting. Nevertheless, it came as a shock that teachers had any life, any existence, when they weren’t in school. P.S. I also learned to start wall-washing at the bottom so that soapy water near the ceiling would not leave streaks as it ran down the wall.

I was sometimes asked to stay after school to clap clean the blackboard erasers in the school yard. One time upon bringing them back, my first-grade teacher told me that she was getting married during the summer and would not be returning to teach the next year. I never had a Mrs. Teacher; all the women teachers were single. (In some school systems in those days, married women were excluded from the profession. I don’t know if that was true in my town.) She then showed me a photo of her in a bathing suit. This perhaps could get her fired today. I did not tell anyone about it, maybe because I did not fully understand my reaction to the picture. She was awfully good-looking in that bathing costume.

Sixth grade was, in retrospect, the one most important to me. Before that year, school simply filled up part of the day. I did fine, but in sixth grade I felt for the first time that I wanted to learn and that I could learn. That had a lot to do with the teacher, Miss (of course) Ebba Dahlberg. I don’t remember anything particular that she taught me, but she imparted a desire to learn and somehow an ability to learn. (And yes, she had a life apart from the classroom. I did not know what to think about the fact that she had been in a women’s branch of the armed forces in World War II and had parachuted out of airplanes!) She also went out of her way for me. She saw that I was a reader and perhaps knew that there were few books in my house. She seemed also to understand that there was little left for me to explore in the children’s section of the Mead Public Library. One day Miss Dahlberg took me to the library to talk with the librarians. Miss Dahlberg convinced them that I should be able to use the adult section of the library. After that I got adult “privileges,” which Miss Dahlberg noted to me in a whisper should be a secret from others. This is not something that was part of her duties, but it opened up worlds for me. Later on, as an adult, I found her address in the upstate town where she had retired and wrote her a letter thanking her. She probably had no idea who I was, but in her reply she was grateful that I remembered that she wrote on the blackboard with yellow chalk, which she had purchased out of her own funds and used because she thought the students could see it better.

Looking back at my education, I realize that my secondary schooling did not prepare me for college as well as I might have hoped. On the other hand, before that, teachers, without my being fully aware of it, taught me how to learn, and that has served me well my entire life. That gift came from bright and caring teachers. I am so thankful for the good teachers that I had. And I know that there are still many all around this country. It’s a reason why we need to support them and our schools.

Posted on by rjonakait

Baptists–American, South, and Right

          The Southern Baptist Convention gathered last month. It got a good bit of media attention because controversies are raging within the group over sex and race—volatile topics to say the least. The issues concern how the Baptists have handled sex abuse claims within its ranks and over the presentation of racial issues, particularly Critical Race Theory. A third issue–“sermongate”–has emerged over the “borrowing” without attribution by one prominent Southern Baptist minister of the sermons of other religious leaders.

The election of the head of the SBC was fiercely fought between a candidate labeled as conservative and another called a moderate with the moderate winning. “Moderate,” however, should be viewed in the context of current Southern Baptists. Elsewhere he might be seen as an extreme conservative. The controversies are especially important because Southern Baptist Churches have been losing parishioners, especially young adults. Southern Baptists are also concerned about waning political influence in a time when political power might mean choosing between conscience, religious principles, and alliance with Donald Trump, a person not well known for his conscience or religiosity.

Southern Baptists are an important institution because they are the largest American Protestant denomination, but I am especially interested in them because I was raised a Baptist. My family’s strain was that of the American Baptist Convention, which now has the name American Baptist Churches. (Earlier it was Northern Baptists.) There are many different versions of Baptists, but all practice adult, not infantile (ok, infant) baptism, and baptism not by merely the sprinkling of water but by full immersion of the believer.

          Baptists practice adult baptism by immersion because of the Bible. The Bible is divinely inspired, Baptists believe, and the ultimate authority for leading a Christian life. Baptists find no scriptural support for infant baptism. The biblical baptisms of Jesus by John the Baptist and one performed by Phillip were of adults, and there is nothing to indicate that John the Baptist’s other baptisms were not also of adults.

          According to Baptists infant baptism is a man-made ritual, and it is not Christian to use man’s rituals over those of the Bible. And while it takes some extrapolation to conclude that immersion is required, the Bible does say that Jesus and others came out of the water. Other passages also seem to support that the biblical baptism was by dunking, including the verse–I think it is in one of the Romans–that says baptism symbolizes life, death, and resurrection. Sprinkling or the thumb’s spreading of water on a forehead doesn’t really seem to be a good symbol of that.

          Baptists maintained that the only biblically-based rituals were adult baptism and the Lord’s Supper. So on the first Sunday of every month we had communion. Little cubes of Wonder Bread and shot glasses of Welch’s Grape Juice were passed around. (As frugal as the church and its congregants were, it might not have been Welch’s, but an off brand.) I liked communion, but it raised some of my first doubts. I was told to take the Bible literally, but our church also commanded teetotaling. When I asked why communion served no wine, I was told that when the Bible said “wine,” it meant grape juice. Hmmm, I thought to myself.

          Adult baptism and communion and the Bible. Any other ritual or source comes from man and not God. No genuflecting. No stations of the cross. No Book of Common Prayer. No required kneeling. No incense. No icons. No required head covering. No rosary. No “mandatory” church attendance. No prayers other than to the Trinity. No saints. (It still bothers me to hear “The Gospel According to St. Mark.” No, it is the Gospel according to Mark.)

          Baptists are not only separated from other denominations by the lack of ritual but also by the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. The only churches Jesus and his apostles recognized were no larger than a congregation, and Baptists maintain that is what the Christian church should still be. Nothing is above an individual church. No one imposes a minister, priest, or vicar on a Baptist church; the congregation selects its leader. No bishops; no presbytery. Each congregation is supreme.

          American Baptists did not have saints, but there was a theological progenitor—Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island after he was “asked” to leave Puritan Massachusetts. He established the first American Baptist church in Providence. Williams should be considered one of our most important Founding Fathers, but he seems to be almost unknown today. When I used to walk by the Roger Williams Hotel on Madison and 31st Street in Manhattan, I wondered how many of my fellow passersby had any idea who Roger Williams was. The hotel was built on land leased from the neighboring Baptist church, and, I once heard, was owned by the American Baptist Church. Times change. The hotel was sold, and now has what seems like a brand-tested name, The Roger.

          Williams was a remarkable man. Unlike many of his American contemporaries of the early seventeenth century, he treated the Indians with respect maintaining that the Native’s land had to be purchased not just seized for the English to have lawful title to it. He produced a primer of the complex Algonquian language. (Bill Bryson in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language states that this work “is a feat of scholarship deserving of far wider fame.”) But Williams should be better known because so much of his thought, expressed in his voluminous writings, broke from conventional thinking and was the foundation for many of the bedrock principles of this country—sovereignty in the people, equality of people, liberty of individual conscience, and separation of church and state.

          Williams made the radical argument for his time that governments were not divinely inspired. Nowhere in the Bible does Jesus pick a government or endow rulers with authority. Instead, Williams contended, sovereignty is with the people. Just as people come together and join with God to form a church and then pick its ministers, the people come together to form a government and grant authority to its rulers.

          This led Williams to reject the common notion of his time that the state must enforce God’s laws to prevent religious errors. Instead, since the state gets its powers from the people, government is invested with all the errors of the people. Any attempt to enforce religion by the state will always be error-filled and will, in essence, be an attempt for people to have sovereignty over God. Thus, long before Jefferson, Williams called for a “wall of separation” between church and state, a wall he called for to protect not the state, but religion. He believed that religion always suffered when it was protected or required by the state. For Williams, the church is sheltered by spiritual weapons and harmed by government efforts to enforce religion. God makes Christians, not a government. When religion and politics are mixed, the result is not true religion, but politics.

          For Williams, the progenitor of American Baptists, religion was a personal thing. A person’s conscience is God’s line of communication to the individual. Because humans are imperfect, they might be wrong about what conscience demands, but since conscience comes from God, it is a sin for a person to act contrary to her conscience, even a mistaken one. If I (or the state or a religious leader) forces you to act in opposition to your conscience, I am forcing you to sin, and by forcing you to sin, I am sinning.

          In other words, all must be allowed to worship as their conscience dictates, and no one should be required to worship or support religious practices against his conscience. Jesus did not force or coerce anyone to God. Man, then, can’t force anyone to faith.

          A mistaken conscience can be corrected only by persuasion, not by force or coercion. An appeal to conscience, for Williams, required the related God-given ability of reasoning. Conscience demands proof, and proof comes from intellectual rigor. Proof has to satisfy reason or be from the Bible or from a writing that convinces an individual that it was divinely inspired. Thus, Williams rejected the Quakers who were led to Christ by a movement of an ill-defined spirit within the person. Such movement did not, could not, satisfy reason.

          These views led not just to liberty of conscience and toleration on religious matters, but on all subjects. And since Jesus did not indicate that one soul mattered more than another and that all individual consciences should be respected, it meant that society should treat all equally.

          (I have refreshed my understanding of Williams’s life and teachings primarily from Roger Williams: The Church and the State by Edmund S. Morgan; Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty by John M. Barry; and Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.)

These Baptist precepts have led me both to my religious sensibilities as a youth and to my political thinking as an adult. The religious and the American neatly coincided. Just as people come together with God to form a church, the people of America came together to form a country—“We the People . . .” Sovereignty does not belong to the authorities, but starts with ordinary individuals. Both the church and America are founded on freedom of conscience. Religion cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of individual reason and persuasion. In America, a political view cannot be imposed, forced, or coerced; it is the result of an individual decision.

(continued June 19)