| Photo by Jane Scherr |
David Gardner Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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A theme that comes out again and again when one looks at your vitae is your role as a public educator, an educator of the public about important issues, taking the bully pulpit on both the report on excellence in education in the United States and you were also, I believe, involved in the commission that emphasized the need for internationalization of the curriculum. Tell us a little about that role. It's both an insider role and an outsider role. You were just telling us that you had to educate the governor in private meetings but you also have to take the bully pulpit and win the public.
Well, I really believe that democracy works. I mean, on balance, over time. I have a lot of respect for the average citizen. In the end they're going to get it right, they're not going to get it wrong. They'll make mistakes but in the end they'll get there. And therefore it seemed to me that one of the most important things I could do in the responsibilities I've had is not to act in ways that suppose people don't really understand and we're going to have to tell them. What I've got to do is help bring them along, help inform them, recognize that they won't always get it but in the end they really will.
And so, with respect to our report A Nation at Risk, which dealt with the
quality of K-12 in the United States, we were halfway through our work, the
staff had prepared a draft of about 225 pages. I went up in the hotel room and
started to read it and promptly went to sleep. It read like a Masters thesis.
This is going nowhere, I thought to myself. So I got together with Glenn
Seaborg from Berkeley who was on our commission and Bill Baker, head of
AT&T Labs, Governor Quie from Minnesota, Jerry Holton from Harvard and
some others.
And I said, "Do you have the same reaction to this that I did?"
Yes. We discussed it. I then said, "Look, we're asked to make a report to
government. Well, we will do that. But let's just pretend we're making a report to
the government. What we really want to do is write an open letter to the
American people because we need their understanding, we need their support, we
need their involvement. And moreover it will change the whole character of the
report. We'll write it in plain English. It'll be brief. It'll be to the point.
Unlike the tome we were reading last night." Everybody agreed that this was a
good idea and it was exactly what we did.
When we presented it to President Reagan there was a press conference that morning in the White House. They had very good questions. We had no press release, which obliged the reporters to read the report; and it was short enough that they could do so. They had read it. They liked it. So it was a very encouraging response from the press that morning. The last question, however, was asked by Ted Fiske, who was the education editor of The New York Times. His question was, "After Sputnik went up there was a similar commission to yours. Their report had a whole series of proposals for the government to do this and to do that, very tangible. None of that's in your report so why should we take it seriously?" And Secretary of Education Bell was there and I was there, and he turned to me and Ted said, "I think you should answer that question." "Okay," I said. And the point I made was the one I just did Harry, that the commission believes that in our society the government works best if the people are informed.
Now we could have written a report to the government, but if the people weren't interested nothing would have happened. If the people are interested government soon will be. That was the answer I gave, and I believe that. And that's why that report succeeded, I might add, in kicking off a major set of reforms in K-12 education in the United States. So I've always believed that. When I was at Utah we adopted new admission standards to the University of Utah, the first time we'd had any, really. And we put them in a full page ad in the state's major newspapers Sunday morning. Our alumni paid for it. Spelling it out, why we wanted four years of English, what we meant by English, and so forth. Teachers put that on their doors all across the state in their classrooms, superintendents reinforced this. And I've always believed, therefore, that if you go to the people in the end you're going to be much further ahead than trying to do it outside of their purview.
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