Elite high school in the Fifties might have been over-competitive, but they helped young women and also young men to liberate themselves.
The Bronx High School of Science, where I was a student from 1954-57, was an intellectually elite school whose admittance was based on a competitive test offered to any applicants and the highest scores got the seats regardless of any other criteria such as race or attendance or prior grades. That strategy has weathered various attacks on pure merit because, as I understand it, a number of the members of the state legislature were graduates, along with those from Stuyvesant High School, another test based school, to which my son attended, and those from Brooklyn Tech, another test school at the time, and those legislators protected the process. There are now six of these test schools in New York City and the student body in Science and Styuvesant is overwhelmingly Asian, though at the time the students of all three were overwhelmingly Jewish and had just a few Blacks, one of those a girl who had been raised in North Carolina by her preacher father and a capable student and no one was distressed that she was admitted to Radcliffe.
I arrived at Science as a sophomore, having finished junior high school, and was housed in an annex, part of a different school, some blocks away, because the old main building was overcrowded as well as dilapidated. I took biology in a class that had no facilities to cut up toads or do other experiments, just using a textbook that must have been antiquated at the time because it concentrated on the functions of organs and the essentials of life, like respiration and reproduction, and very little chemistry. A friend who was an educator when I told him that years later said that wasn’t possible because the state required dissections, but the truth is that that never happened, but that didn't bother me because I became enchanted with Euclidean geometry and still remain thinking in terms of syllogisms as explaining that a democratic republic is based on the presumption that the citizenry are virtuous. And I wrote in English class about how present day geometry differed from what Euclid had arranged in his “Elements”. And there weren't lab courses in chemistry, though there was in physics, though quite perfunctory and not much deepening what was in the textbook, which was a lot about how machines worked: radios and refrigerators and steam engines. In other words, the instruction at Bronx Science was pedestrian when it came to the sciences. It was just the standard New York City curriculum, just more of it, and including technical drawing. I still have in my room my t-square used there and emblazoned by a friend as “Wengy”.
The main building in which Science resided was old enough that it was dangerous. Enough wooden seats had been torn out of the balcony that there were a number of exposed metal spikes and I wondered that no one had fallen and impaled themselves. My observations resonated with what was found in James Coleman’s report on whether desegregation after Brown vs. Board of Education had been declared by the Supreme Court. Coleman found that facilities did not make a difference in achievement and that integration made only a small difference. What mattered, I surmised, were the basic abilities of the students and the pressure on students by their teachers to make them achieve.
There were a number of good teachers at Science when I was there. That was because they grew up in the Depression and schooling was a safe birth and because women had difficulty getting into professions other than teaching and nursing. The department chair who taught me AP calculus had wanted to be a doctor but couldn’t manage the finances and found that he had always done well at math and moved in that direction. My AP English teacher chided the class for not knowing the kings of England from Henry VIII to Queen Anne because how could you appreciate Seventeenth Century English literature and environs otherwise. She took me down a peg by saying to me “Martin, you are clever, but what else?” I had not mastered a body of literature, as had her star student the year before, Julius Novick, who became a “Village Voice” theater critic. He knew much of Shaw in high school. What did I know?
My American history teacher (there was no AP History at Bronx Science at the time) was an old Lefty who treated the year from the colonists to the New Deal as a set of constitutional issues, not only the post Civil War amendments, but also the interstate commerce clause from John Marshall on the Fulton steamboat to Holmes’ dissent on the Lochner v. New York found that child labor laws were unconstitutional and what happened to FDR’s NRA, also to be found unconstitutional. He never offered his own political opinions and chided me for bringing to class copies of “The Daily Worker” more on my part to be outlandish rather than because I was becoming a Communist, which I was not, though in college and a bit afterwards, like many of the people I knew, championed cultural Marxism, which meant to disparage consumerism and alienation in the midst of an otherwise affluent society.
Though legend had it that Science students had their I. Q.'s branded on their foreheads, that was not true but it might as well have been. Science did have the usual high school affinity groupings. It was always in contention for city champion in swimming and tennis (though detractors said the anti-athletic nature of the Science students was shown by the fact that they did not do well at the major sports, like football and basketball. You just can’t win). And there was the yearbook club and the Forum, a political debating society that I led as a senior. But what held the place organized among the top third of the class was the relative prestige of smarts which exhibited itself in a number of ways. There was a correlation between grades and heads of many clubs and articulateness and ability at puzzles, chess and crosswords, and even trivia contests.Two friends of mine were amateur Kremlinologists and vied with one another to name which and under what circumstances were the Old Bolsheviks executed during the Great Purge of the Thirties. Sometimes, these tussles were informative. My literary friends, as I also traveled with the math crowd, asked me to identify A. R. Rosenthal and I quickly replied that he was the New York Times correspondent from Warsaw. (He later became the editor of the Times, already known at the time as an up and comer.) But my friends had in mind the person of the same name who was a poetry anthologist. I should have known my calling but I thought social studies was too easy and so not a test of intellect and stuck with math until my very limited abilities were repeatedly shown up.
I have as a result of Science been leery of people able enough to get rid of intelligence by introducing the ideas of “social intelligence” or “street smarts”. They are euphemisms for the real thing, intelligence, which is quickness of calculation including verbal argument. The rest are ways to make equally important what are other characteristics because intelligence is essentially undemocratic, just an attribute that remains stable after, let us say, the age of three. There are other things than being smart, such as being charming or moral. I had a modicum of smarts but my strong suit, I thought, was to be wise in that I could penetrate into social and personal situations better than most, even if my math scores were lacking and my buddies knew it. Everyone can cling to their strengths and everyone can find themselves the cutoff point at which a person is acceptable. A sociologist friend of mine found that patients in a facility for the retarded said that the high functioning ones regarded the low functioning ones as “dummies”, and so it is with all of us.
My best bud in high school and college and even later on was Marshall Berman who later on became a minor poof as a political theorist. The two of us were the ones who toured the churches on Central Park West and we would take long walks and argue whether God exists and later on whether Saul Bellow’s “Herzog'', when it came out, was just a caricature of an intellectual or, as he thought, the real thing. We dated the same girl in college, polite enough to inform one another when to call and wish her well when she was going back to school. We parted ways because he was badgering me about how I was mishandling my graduate education, which was true enough, but only in that I was just not producing, for some reason, the essays that would make my name. The two of us had been very competitive in college and he had gotten an even more prestigious fellowship for after college than I had, and so I became jealous of his increasing renown, but the real reason for our breakup was that he did not get along with Jane, the girl I married, whom he disliked because she was domineering, which was also true enough but which I found appealing. He tried to convince me not to marry her and I said it was not his business. Jane didn’t like Marshall because he was dirty, affecting for a while being “an aged hippie”, and she said that I should do better than to become a second or third generation “Partisan Review” intellectual, full of posturing and name dropping, and I agreed.
Dating at Bronx Science, and I expect in much of high school in New York City during the Fifties, was a ritualistic affair. I would meet a girl at her home so the parents could check me out. Then the couple might go to the Loew’s Paradise, a gigantic movie palace where the roof was studded with lights to simulate an outdoor theater, and see a movie. Then, a trip nearby to Krum's soda shop and then to her home where you kissed her in the vestibule of her building or necked on the living room sofa and, if you were lucky, could cop a feel. And then back home which seemed to me unfair in that I was traveling halfway across the Bronx in the snow when she was comfortably at home sleeping in bed. I also escorted girls to the Frick Museum which was cheap and impressed girls that I was interested in art. Boys didn’t talk with one another about their adventures but you could infer their practices from hints about a girl letting you go up in her elevator but only that far. I hope younger generations find better ways to manage their teenage sexuality. At the time, it was awkward and anxiety filled but nonetheless profound. I traveled for the first time to see West End Avenue where there were a classier type of Bronx Science girls. Many years later, a friend visiting his own son at Science looked at my yearbook album and found that one of the girls I knew but didn't date had lived in the same building I lived in for over forty years. Karma. I had achieved this childhood dream.
The girls at Bronx Science did not think of themselves as Feminists, a term reserved for two or three generations before when women got the vote. They were not activists, these members of the Fifties Silent Generation, when women were supposed to be devoted to husbands and family. One high school girl classmate of mine wondered whether having children was to be thought of as the form of creativity that women had, but other girls were struggling not to be defined by their feminine roles and I hardly thought it otherwise in that I also had other ambitions. Science girls weren’t trying to compete with men or achieve some kind of equality. They were just trying to achieve their own occupational ambitions. Science girls were as smart as Science boys and by in large part more sophisticated than their more callow male friends. There was no prejudice or discrimination against them though the math teachers worried the girls felt intimidated by the male math stars though they shouldn’t have and a guidance counselor saw to it that the stronger girl students got placed at good colleges while my own faculty advisor discouraged me from applying to Princeton because I might feel uncomfortable there as a nice Jewish boy even if in later years I found that the admissions office at Princeton had been looking for NYC types. As it was, I went to Columbia which was to get as good an education as anyone could get but resided at home. During my first year in college a friend in a big physics lecture course told me he felt uncomfortable having two girls from Barnard sitting high up in the seats to join the course. He had been to an all boy’s high school. Science sophisticated, I told him to just get over it.
Meanwhile the Science girls did what they wanted to do which was to become members of the professions even though many of those occupations had few women in them or prevented admissions for women. When in my sophomore year we all went to the auditorium of the main building of Science to hear a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt. The room was packed and she offered her usual platitudes about human rights, to which we all agreed. The girls in particular thought of her as a role model for girls becoming anything they could want to be. One girl wanted to become a rabbi but it was not allowed at the time, not even in Reform congregations, and even bat mitzvahs were not yet part of the scene. These girls did plan to and did become doctors and lawyers and mathematicians, this last a breakthrough not only for black women as that is shown in “Hidden Figures” but for any women. At Harvard Law, one girl was quizzed on the details of sex cases so, it was said, to toughen her up to deal with this subject matter but I thought, from a distance, that it was a case of hazing. But the girls persevered even though a Yale Law professor I knew who was in admissions insisted that women becoming lawyers was a flash in the pan. My wife noticed that after she broke through in the mid-Seventies of both escorting children to work while having a job for herself that required a bit of juggling, that in a few years a number of the parents in their private school did the same thing and there were consulting firms to advise women and institutions to manage that. That was Feminism in action.
I was deeply involved with the changes in women's roles during that period. My first serious love was a Bronx Science girl. She eventually became a law professor. The girl I loved and married had an even more illustrious educational pedigree than mine. Jane was a graduate of Hunter College High School and whose test exam for admittance was even more exclusive than was the case of the test schools administered by the New York City Board of Education. She went on to Vasser and then to graduate school in sociology at Columbia which is where I met her and she eventually became a management consultant to nonprofits with a stint in New York City government, one of those people who are part of the permanent bureaucracy in government and out that keep government going.
The two of us, like many other families of the time, the late Sixties and early Seventies, were redefining work and family roles. My wife was sure to remind her boss that she might have to interrupt work to do child rearing. I always took the children to their pediatrician appointments because it made her anxious about it but also because, as she put it, that I did not have a real job in that I was a college professor who just had to meet classes while she had to work more or less nine to five. But just as women were liberated into having careers, men like myself were liberated into doing a lot of child rearing. I still remember the pleasure of my children coming home from school, having some snacks, and then all of us sitting down in front of the television to watch “Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", which all of us found relaxing because of its calmness and good cheer. A satisfying way to pass the years.