McWhorter: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration

Money quote: “That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.”

…Which is why it depresses me endlessly when these goals narrow in the way they so often do today. So many teachers or professors seem to think that during the short time we have students under our influence, our primary job is to instruct them in how to illuminate injustice.

The field of education, for example, is a rich subject — “How many miles to the heart of a child?” asked the lead character in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s 1949 musical “Lost in the Stars.” But in “What’s College For?” the author Zachary Karabell describes something sadly familiar these days: a professor focused on telling students how America’s educational apparatus perpetuates class stratification.

The film critic David Denby, in “Great Books,” his volume about Columbia University’s core curriculum, described an instructor whose only apparent interest in Aristotle was in condemning his sexism and racism, rather than exploring the broader scope of his writings. I once sat in on a course about Black film in which the main theme class after class was how each movie exemplified negative stereotypes. The artistry, the richness, the reasons the films were meaningful to Black people were considered of lesser interest. Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, every word of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” William Levi Dawson’s “Negro Symphony” from start to finish — all of these can be laboriously interpreted as demonstrations of the abuse of power. But doing so misses their true value.

I would hate to see anyone put that kind of teaching to use when entering Michigan Central Station — to internalize the idea that upon encountering that magnificence, one’s thoughts should be primarily about injustice. Certainly the Black porters there worked under less than ideal conditions; white passengers often saw them as barely human. (The convention back in the day was to call all Black porters “George,” because who cared what they called themselves?) It’s important to remember these facts. But even amid that bigotry, Black people had the same capacity as white people to see beauty. And they have the same capacity today.

On the way to Michigan Central, I was talking with a Black guy named Anton who had grown up nearby. As the building came into view, rising so majestically into the day’s overcast sky and set diagonally to the main road, I shouted, “Goddamn!” At the very same second, Anton exclaimed “Look at that! There it is, man!”

That feeling of hunger to see, to know, that sense of awe and joy — that is what education should foster.

Source: Viewed From Any Angle, This Station Is a Wonder and an Inspiration