Superintendent

     Here are some notes from the pad of a reporter who has interviewed Herbert Gilkeyson, the newly appointed superintendent of the Freeport city school system. Gilkeyson came from a similar post in Carson, Calif. This is his first day on the job. He is 45; married; the father of three boys, 17, 19, and 20. His wife, Lauren, has been an elementary school teacher for the past 12 years. He was a high school teacher in Huntsville, Ala., and a principal in Savannah, Ga. He graduated from the University of Florida and earned a master's degree and doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University.

     Urban education is challenging for all of us. There are 180,000 children and more than 10,000 administrators and teachers in the system and all of us must work together.
     I see my first job here as the education of our teaching staff and the re-establishment of public trust in the teacher, who is the carrier of the major values of civilization.
     Teachers seem to have forgotten their task over the past two decades. It isn't to give custodial care, to supervise the activities of their students, but to direct them toward learning. We will be stressing the fundamentals here.
     I like what Gilbert Highet says in one of his books. Here is the quote: "There is one particular danger in educational theory…the notion of education by doing instead of thinking. In practice this often means that teachers are happy when their pupils are engaged in more or less harmless social activity, and that they do not want them to sit alone, reading and learning to think, through assimilating other men's and women's thoughts and then forming their own ideas."
     Our teachers will have to try to instill in students the value of thinking, and the pleasure that can be derived from it. Nowadays, our teachers have surrendered to the simpler pleasures of a leisure society. I am called an educational conservative. I don't think so. I think a teacher who realizes that the poetry of Keats and the plays of Ibsen and Shakespeare make more sense and ultimately give more pleasure to people than the words of a popular song is a good teacher.
     Once the teacher begins to make demands on the students so that they can think for themselves, the public will begin to trust the teacher. Why should voters approve bond issues and pay raises when their children in high school can't read a fifth-grade story book and can't add a column of figures? We must return to the basics in our educational system.

     In the clippings about Gilkeyson's appointment two months ago, one of the stories quotes the reaction of the head of the local unit of the National Federation of Teachers, Helen Carruthers, a fifth-grade teacher, as follows:

     We neither oppose nor endorse the appointment by the school board. Dr. Gilkeyson is a well-known administrator whose ideas are what many of our members describe as conservative. He is a believer in a return to the school of discipline. We shall see whether his ideas are workable in this community.

     You call Carruthers and ask if there is any change in the NFT's attitude toward Gilkeyson. She replies:

     We will cooperate in every way with Dr. Gilkeyson in his attempts to administer a harmonious school system.

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