When I graduated from East High, the school had recently been declared by Time magazine one of the best public high schools in the country. Time was of course no better judge of such things in 1958 than it is today, but the notice did swell our heads a bit. It reinforced our own sense that there was indeed something pretty exceptional about our school. Having now been out in the world a while, I think Time may have been right about East. It was a superb school, blessed with a vigorous spirit of open inquiry that encouraged us in a variety of ways, inside and outside the classroom, to get to know ourselves and our world.
I've never quite outgrown that harmless affliction, "school pride," as my children who've often heard me go on about East High will attest. So it was with amazement and a sinking heart that I read of your school board's recent response to student organizations at East. Could this narrowness, this fear of difference, this cruel blindness to the welfare of the school's students really have become the operative standard there?I never thought I'd be looking back to the Eisenhower era for a model of intellectual honesty, to the McCarthy era for that wholesome, self-confident spirit of skepticism that welcomes the questioning of inherited values, to the period before the civil rights movement for a standard of humane accommodation and tolerance. Back in the much-maligned '50s, these were at the heart of an East High School education.
It is painful to see a beloved, enlightened and enlightening institution reduced to a national laughingstock. It is worse to contemplate the harm its deterioration must represent in the lives of the thousands of young people who are the victims of that atrophy. Is there a school board election soon in Salt Lake City? I trust the good people of Salt Lake City will give the backwoods bigots on that board the prompt boot they've earned.
Robert Pack Browning
Berkeley, Calif.