School Days, Then and Now

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan's surprising concern over the education problem in the U.S. is rooted in his own deeply fulfilling school days back in Illinois.

"I don't know how it is today," he said in an Oval Office interview last week. "It [school] was a major part of your growing-up life. Everything about it. The whole atmosphere."

He never had to be forced or enticed to learn. He never got an F. His main problems during 16 school years were diagraming sentences in grade school and trying to take part in too many activities in high school. His diagraming difficulties came to an end when it was discovered he was so nearsighted he could not see the blackboard. He resolved his overscheduling dilemma in high school by choosing school plays over basketball.

"We lived above the high school athletic field," he recalled, "and every day home from school and down I went. I spent every minute in the track and football season watching the athletes and dreaming of some day being one of them. I was a voracious reader. I went to the public library about once a week and took out a couple of books. I went through all the books about Frank Merriwell at Yale and the Rover Boys--the college experience and the emphasis on dying for dear old Rutgers."

In Reagan's early world, teachers were special figures of "trust and faith" who were, "like the clergy," instructors in "moral precepts" as well as in book learning. His high school English and drama teacher, B. J. Fraser, is one of those who changed Reagan's life, and he will never forget it. Fraser not only formed a drama club but urged his student writers to turn their imaginations loose. "I developed a great taste for writing then," recalled Reagan. "I sometimes went way afield and did a humorous twist on what he asked for. I wasn't long in noticing he would have several of those read in class, and I was always called upon to read mine. Maybe that's where the ham began. I would write with the idea that I was going to read this aloud."

"It was B.J.," continued Reagan, "who said doing a play should be educational also. He reached out. In college it was the same thing. There I played Captain Stanhope in Journey's End. I never was so carried away in the theater in my life. I was in the war as far as that play was concerned."

Much of Reagan's studying, he admitted, was done to stay eligible for his extracurricular activities. His marks, he said, were average or above. But when he found a subject that caught his fancy, like English, he got top grades. He had to take biology and physics and benefited, he said, because he "found out that was not something I was interested in. I remember surprising myself in mathematics. In algebra in the final examination I got 100."

Reagan's grade school and high school success was repeated at Eureka College, the tiny (250 students) institution in Eureka, Ill. He grew especially mellow in this reverie. "Most of the things that happened in my life started there," he said. "To this day I am not a fan of the great universities. This is not to deprecate them. But sometimes I think they are assembly-line diploma mills." Eureka was intimate and manageable, people clinging to each other in hard times, struggling to better themselves through education. "When faculty members had to go out, they would ask you to babysit," said Reagan. "You would take your girl and sit in front of the fire. When they came back, you would sit around and talk and there was as much college there as in the classroom."

"You can't hide in a small school," insisted Reagan. "There isn't anyone who can just go to class, come back, study and graduate. Everyone's got to participate, whether in the drama club or student politics." That's the way it was for Ronald Reagan. That's the way he would like to see school again for young Americans. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.