Life sketches, p.20
Life Sketches, page 20
The second day the party made its way through an area known as the Roaring River section and over into Deadman Canyon. “This was really a very hard day even for some of the experienced mountain men in the group,” Scoyen writes, “and Alfred must have suffered a good deal.” Among other things, the temperature was at least twenty degrees above normal, and the trail was unpleasantly dusty. But the party made a wonderful camp that evening in Deadman Canyon beside a mountain stream on the edge of a beautiful meadow. The serrated walls of the canyon on both sides rose up 3,000 feet. Day’s log: sixteen miles; dropped from 9,000 feet to 7,000; camped at 8,200.
“The next day,” Scoyen writes, “we ran into one of those things that travellers with a pack outfit in the mountains dread, but which occur quite frequently—lost stock. Usually the packer gets up at daylight and brings in his string. This is based on two things: first, in the mountains you start operations about daylight, and also your stock will start to wander about that time, just as a matter of principle. We waited about two hours and the packer had not yet returned from his search. Finally he did come back and said he had followed the tracks of mules and horses which he figured were those of our outfit on up the trail for about four miles. However, he came in sight of another camp and, of course, was disappointed to find he had been following the wrong tracks. As soon as we learned what had happened, we started to circle the area where our horses and mules had been grazing, and finally ‘cut’ their sign. Following them, we found they had gotten through the fence on the down stream side of our camp and were grazing peacefully along the trail about a quarter of a mile away!”
The mountain men had promised Alfred that with an early start that third day, they would be able to find him some very good fishing in the evening. But under the circumstances they did not start moving until about ten o’clock and reached camp late, at five in the evening. The trip was up Deadman Canyon, named for a sheepherder who died there seventy years ago, and over Elizabeth Pass, the location of the story in Stewart Edward White’s The Pass and named for his wife. Heavy floods of the year before had done a lot of damage to the trail in the canyon, and much of it had not been repaired. The going, therefore, was slow. Finally the party reached the top of the pass and then went down to the headwaters of the Kaweah River and camped at a place called Lone Pine Meadow. By that time Alfred had lost all interest in an additional three-mile ride to a lake that was famous for its golden trout. Rundell says, however, that “he [Alfred] prepared a fine evening meal with the touch of a German gourmet.” Day’s log: ten miles; climbed from 8,200 feet to 10,200 feet; camped at 9,000 feet.
“The next morning,” Scoyen writes, “which would be our last day on the trail, when everyone woke up, of course his first thought was, ‘Where is the stock?’ Looking around, we saw them high up on the mountainside above camp. Rounding them up was easy, because Lou Gannaway merely let out a few cowboy yells and in a very short time they all came trotting into camp.” That day the party rode back to Wolverton. The Great Western Divide stood at their east as they rode, its peaks rising to 12,000 feet; and mountain slopes broke sharply downward from the trail 5,000 feet into the canyon below. Much of the solid granite around them had been given a high polish by ancient glaciers. As they went downstream, the country became much less rugged. “We were all more or less relaxed,” Rundell says, “in the belief that the most hazardous trails were behind us. We were going down grade when suddenly old Jim’s right front foot slid and wedged between two solid rocks in the trail. I saw him step once with the other three feet, and then the horse seemed to catapult the man off the trail. The horse remained upright, but Al was thrown to the ground close to the horse’s front feet. Neither moved a muscle for what seemed an eternity. The rest of us froze in our saddles for a second so as to prevent exciting old Jim; but he and Al had the situation well in hand with a silent air of nonchalance until Clarence Fry could reach them, while I attempted to keep the other horses quiet. It so happened that the embankment was overgrown with grass and brush which broke the fall, and Al was none the worse for the experience. Considering the country we had been over, the odds for such a thing happening at a place where serious consequences did not result were at least 100,000 to one. Major credit must be given to Jim, who showed that he was a mountain horse of many years’ experience. Most animals, including man, thrash about wildly when they suddenly find themselves with a foot trapped. However, old Jim stood still until the foot was freed. If he had moved at all, most of the footprints would have been on Al.”
“The trail was so dusty,” Scoyen writes, “that I was in the habit of riding far enough ahead so that the air would be clear by the time Alfred came along, therefore I did not see this particular accident and knew nothing about it until the party caught up with me some time later. To say that Alfred was lucky is certainly a mild statement of the situation.” The party went on without event over the High Sierra Trail and reached home at three o’clock. Log: sixteen miles, from 9,000 feet to 7,000 feet.
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The story is not yet complete. Alfred is still disappearing from time to time. As this is written, he is off in the Southwest, visiting parks. “Incidentally,” Superintendent Scoyen writes in April, 1952, “I have just received a postcard from Alfred mailed to me from Big Bend National Park, in which he states he has gone back into the mountains again and observes the trails are not nearly as rugged as he found them in these parks. I have spent considerable time in Big Bend also, and assure you that Alfred’s judgment on the matter is sound. However,” Scoyen adds, “he did not indicate his preference.” The trips are not just jaunts now. Alfred is beginning to dig deep. He seems to be exploring not merely terrain, not merely history and inheritance, but something more complex; something to do with our past and our future that has become important to him and that he, as a publisher, would like to make important to others. It is nice to see a man of sixty grown so young. “A thing you have to say of Knopf,” writes Freeman Tilden, “is that he is integral. He doesn’t try to be several other people, and if he doesn’t feel in the mood, he doesn’t invent emotion. We have in the parks, the primeval parks, many look-offs at the roadsides that we facetiously call Oh and Ah. Alfred can take in these surprising tours de force of Nature without saying ‘Oh’ and ‘Ah.’ But he feels the impact where it does him and the Park Service the most good.”
“A.A.K.’s Love Affair,” in Alfred Knopf at 60, privately printed, 1952.
Janet Train
In a mixed white-and-Negro neighborhood in a small city in southern Illinois, huddled next to a corner grocery store, a one-story, two-family tenement stands. Its bricks are old and spalled; the mortar crumbles between the uneven courses. The once-white paint on the wooden sills is cracked, and the screens are rusted and torn. A narrow alleyway between the store and the house leads to the back door of one half of the tenement; the front door is never used. Along the rear of the house runs a sagging wooden porch roof, but no porch; on the bare ground beneath the roof are piles of rubbish—empty tins, broken dishes, discarded parts of a cheap clock, a rusted toaster, a burst bag of hickory nuts. A sheet of moldy pressboard is nailed over the back door to keep out the hostile wind from the plains to the south of the city.
Inside are but two rooms, a living room and a kitchen, both of which double as bedrooms, and both of which are in disorder. In the former stands an ancient oaken rocking chair; a bureau, on top of which, besides a small radio, is a slovenly heap of toilet articles and clothes that want mending; a dirty, broken-down couch; and a cot heaped with bedclothes. The linoleum on the floor is worn through to the fabric and even to the underlying wood in many places, and the plaster on the walls is cracked and falling. There are no pictures. The whole house is warmed by a small space heater, on which is balanced a spoked laundry rack draped with damp sheets and underclothes. The floor is littered with shoes of several sizes, a pair of moth-eaten felt slippers, a wastebasket full of papers and garbage, and bundles of lint which stir in the drafts. In the kitchen, besides a stove and sink and table, there is a big rollaway bed, which for a long time has neither been rolled away nor even made.
Here and there, under beds and seats, in corners, wherever they can be tucked away from the pattern of traffic of the family of five that lives in this unkempt rented house, are a number of cardboard cartons containing treasures that are something of a surprise in this place.
They are books, scores on scores of books.
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In this poor home lives Janet Train, a girl of twelve, who may be very bright. The books are hers. She seems to have enough intelligence to go eventually to college. She might well become a journalist, or possibly a medical doctor. She might make a fine teacher. Above all, she could become a discriminating voter.
But at the moment—even though this sixth-grade slum girl is being educated in a school system with a full intelligence-testing program, and though she lives in a city where a Youth Development Commission has been set up by a team from an outstanding university for the purpose of discovering and freeing young people’s talents—her chances of going to college, of becoming a writer or doctor or teacher, seem very poor indeed. She is a leading candidate for the American talent scrap heap.
Far worse—if one has in mind the health of our democratic society—she is not being given anything like adequate preparation for making those crucial choices, for giving those thought-out consents, that are the essence of our freedom.
The facts on the annual talent losses in the United States—on the failure of our schools and colleges to meet the growing demands of our society for expert physical and social scientists, engineers, medical specialists, psychologists, and teachers, as well, alas, as for poets and senators and prophets and wise men—have been advertised widely in recent years. But these advertisements have mostly been in the name of a negative: a perceived slippage of the United States in technological competition with rival nations.
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The root of the waste of American talent lies paradoxically in a fantastic betterment of American society—in the expansion of its education, in less than two handfuls of decades, from a privilege for the very few to a facility for the very many. Since 1870, while the total population has about quadrupled, secondary-school enrollment has been multiplied more than eighty times. At the beginning of this century only one in every five American youths attended high school; now four in five do. At the beginning of the century only one young man or woman in fifty went to college; now one in five does.
As our school system expanded, our educators pitched their teaching to the mythical average student. Actually this tendency, founded on our pervasive belief in equality, has a long tradition here. “A middle standard is fixed in America for human knowledge,” Tocqueville wrote early in the nineteenth century. “All approach as near as they can, some as they rise, others as they descend.” The aim of our more recent mass education was to lift the whole mass, and lifting the mass seemed to require paying regard to the center of gravity, in order that balance might be maintained as the mass rose. The application of this method in mechanics leads to equilibrium; in education it has led to mediocrity.
Janet Train’s intelligence has been repeatedly measured. The I.Q.s assigned to her have been, as will be shown, practically meaningless. But what is significant about this child of the slums is her consistency in one area of ability: on every standard intelligence test she has taken since her first-grade year, she has stood in the top one per cent in the whole country in verbal ability for her age. She is an avid reader, a hoarder of books. She uses language clearly and correctly. She can study, assimilate, remember. In a time when grammar is rather out of fashion, hers is good. She spells accurately. She knows what words mean, and she likes to use them.
But nothing is being done about Janet Train’s evident talent for the only means we human beings have of understanding one another. Her intelligence—the first essential for considered choices and wise consents in a democracy—has been ill served.
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What is intelligence? What is an I.Q.? How can we know what Janet Train has in her head?
Psychologists have given many definitions of intelligence: “capacity for learning,” “the power to deal with novelty,” “relational thinking,” “the force which produces adequate performance, right solutions, correct learning.” Intelligence is able to put together, to build; it is, as one psychologist has said, the “capacity for the right completion of complex forms, both material and immaterial, from fragments.” Thus intelligence builds a dinosaur’s skeleton from a few bones; but we must beware, for intelligence also built the Piltdown man, a forgery, from spurious fragments. In other words, intelligence is not in itself right and good. It is capable of breathtaking forgery, magnificent lies, prodigies of evildoing. Yet it is also the instrument that human beings must mainly use to better themselves, for without it they could not make plans.
Leta Hollingworth, who was one of the first American educators to show concern for able students, once reduced all this to a homely and wise definition: “Intelligence learns how to do and how to get what is wanted.”
This is a proper emphasis. What is wanted comes first; the capacity to get it is secondary. Intelligence without desire is of no use to society—and this may be the trouble, up to now, in the case of Janet Train. It may also be one reason why the I.Q., as such, is in rather ill repute these days in spite of our need for bright people.
But a more important reason why the I.Q. is unpopular is that so few people, even teachers, have a clear idea what they mean when they use the term.
The idea behind the I.Q. is that if a quality exists, it exists in some quantity and therefore can be measured. Early in this century the French psychologist Alfred Binet, proceeding on the hypothesis that there was a pervasive, unitary characteristic in each individual, a “general intelligence,” constructed a remarkably simple, durable examination to find and measure that supposed characteristic. This test was later adapted for use in America by Lewis M. Terman and others and became the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. It had to be given to one child at a time by a trained examiner. The I.Q., or Intelligence Quotient, was devised as a way of expressing the results of this test. It stood for the relationship between the individual’s actual and “mental” ages at the time of the test, and it was derived by dividing the latter by the former and multiplying by one hundred; a given “mental” age represented the average performance by a large number of persons who had been given the test at that age. For example, a child whose age was actually ten and who did as well on the Binet as the average fifteen-year-old who had been sampled for the test was assigned a mental age of fifteen and an I.Q. of 15 ÷ 10 × 100, or 150.
Following on Binet’s work, a British psychologist, Charles Spearman, developed a theory that in every intelligence there was a pervasive, “general” factor, and a predominating “special” factor, one of a large number of isolated factors related to specific activities. An American, L. L. Thurstone, carrying this idea farther, recognized the presence of a number of “group” factors, or “primary abilities,” narrower than Spearman’s “general” but broader than his “special.” Among them were the capacities, for instance, to grasp verbal meanings, to use numbers, to see spatial forms and relationships, and to perceive things at a characteristic rate of speed. This tendency, known as “factor analysis,” has been carried forward over the years, sometimes to absurd lengths.
Next, a rather large number of multiple-factor intelligence tests were invented which could be given simultaneously to groups of people by untrained examiners. These were the so-called group tests of intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes. Some of these tests were better than others. Some were hurried into widespread use before they had been validated by sufficiently large or sufficiently representative samples of the American student population, and none of them had behind them the many tempering years of school and clinical experience the Stanford-Binet had. It developed that there could be, moreover, a dangerously wide gap between the controlled laboratory use of these tests during their development and the handling of them in ordinary classrooms by teachers untrained in psychology. Since testing takes time and time is precious in school, the group tests were soon abbreviated and truncated. A trained examiner of an individual child can draw the best out of the child and can make allowances for the way the child feels on a given day, or can even decide that a retest is needed; group tests cannot cater to a headache here and a daydream there.
