On a recent trip to Detroit (my first, somehow) I was pressed for time, so I skipped the Detroit Institute of Arts and the aquarium and headed to Michigan Central Station, a shining jewel of the city’s resurrection. It was so beautiful that I felt I might almost have a heart attack. The experience left me thinking not just about the grandeur of the building and the tremendous labor that brought it back to life but about what education should be — and should not be.
Opened in 1913, the station was a grand depot, a sibling of New York City’s Grand Central designed by the same firm, with an office building on top of it as had once been proposed in New York. Michigan Central was a wonder in its day, but after World War II, rail travel lost ground to airplanes and cars.
By the 1970s the building was little but a half-closed Amtrak stop, and in 1988 it was shuttered. The once magnificent structure decayed into a crumbling husk, flooded on its lower levels, plundered for parts, sprayed with graffiti, with windows shattered and gone. Its devastation was, in its way, almost as awesome as what it once had been, much like the Titanic as it looks now, at the bottom of the ocean.
Over the past seven years, however, Michigan Central Station was painstakingly restored, through a mix of the oldest craft techniques and the latest digital technology. Three thousand people rebuilt everything from the massive structural elements to the tiniest aesthetic details, recreating clocks, moldings and décor from old photos and scraps recovered from the wreckage. The work was so extensive and so creative that the station even houses a museum to explain how it was all done. (Restorers: Regarding that message you found in a bottle lodged in a wall, are you sure the word you consider illegible is not just “ceiling”?)
I stepped into the station and time stopped. The vaulted ceilings, the big lovely windows designed to keep things cool in an era before air-conditioning, the elegant curve of the arches, the hints of Greco-Roman frivolity — all just wondrous. (And the linguist part of me enjoyed seeing how words on old signs that we now keep together were separate: suit cases, sight-seeing, foot ball.)
Detroit is full of this kind of beauty, so abundant you can walk by it a few times without even noticing. That’s what I did with the David Stott Building, an Art Deco skyscraper towering over the corner of Griswold and State Streets, until I looked up and thought, ouch, how pretty! I stood on that corner snapping pictures and wondering how architects make such breathtaking things. I had a similar feeling once in Washington when I happened to walk by the Kennedy-Warren apartment building. I was so floored by its doughty sprawl, nestled splendidly into the woodsy slope behind it, that my heart actually beat faster. I sat on a nearby bench for a good 20 minutes just agape.
That kind of stolid prewar architecture for some reason seizes my emotions in the same way that music does, but I couldn’t tell a balustrade from a spandrel. Ask me what the David Stott Building looks like and the best I can say is “brownish on the bottom, orange further up, with bricks, pulling in way back up top.” I am enthralled but inarticulate. And that’s what got me thinking about education.
One goal of teaching is to give students the tools to articulate what they experience. You don’t need a specialized vocabulary to know that you like a piece of music, or that the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute” is a sweet jam. But when I teach the course my university calls Music Humanities, by helping students learn precise terminology, I can help them identify what precisely makes that song so pleasing, how the different elements work together, why they produce the effect that they do.
Another goal is to expand the range of what students encounter, to introduce them to splendors they may not yet know, in the vein of the cultural critic Matthew Arnold’s elevation of “the best which has been thought or said.” What makes those seemingly static religious paintings of the Middle Ages invaluable? What was genius about how Charlie Parker played the saxophone? Why should you not dismiss Wallace Stevens’s poetry as impenetrable self-indulgence from the occupant of a Connecticut porch? The answers are not always obvious. Teachers help bridge the gap to what might otherwise seem remote, arch or even geriatric.
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.
Two additional thoughts
I don’t read enough fiction, and unforgivably little by living authors. Yet I have been floored by Zeeva Bukai’s novel “The Anatomy of Exile,” a story of a Palestinian and an Israeli family after 1967. It left me awash in thoughts about the power of love and the essence of home. Certainly the book gives insight into on-the-ground experience in a region it is too easy to pontificate about from afar. But I would have loved “The Anatomy of Exile” if it were set in Fiji or on the moon. Awe and joy for this marvelous novel.
And I have similarly high praise, of a different emotional tenor, for “Boop! The Musical,” running on Broadway. I had the best time I’ve had at a musical in 10 years. Jasmine Amy Rogers gives the performance of a lifetime as Betty Boop; everybody else is top-notch; and I have to hand it to the sound people: If you had told me we were hearing a 25-piece orchestra instead of the actual 15, I would have believed it. Stephen Sondheim, Jason Robert Brown and such are golden, but sometimes you just want to sit back and have a fun time. My daughters loved “Boop!” just as much as I did. We’re going back for seconds.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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