In 1994 Mark Gerson was graduated summa cum laude from Williams College. In his senior year he wrote his first book, 

The Neoconservative Vision: 
From the Cold War to the Culture Wars.

Since then he has contributed to the Wall Street JOURNAL, COMMENTARY and The NEW REPUBLIC and writes extensively about basketball. He is now [1997] finishing  law school at Yale.

Raised in a middle class Jewish family in Short Hills, New Jersey, an
affluent suburb of New York City, he spent four summers working as a
teen counselor in a camp for poor, disturbed children and adults from New Jersey suburbs within ten miles of his home. Having been accepted at Yale Law School, he planned to spend his year after Williams College teaching in the New Jersey public schools. This was to be under Governor Tom Kean's Alternative Route Program for college graduates without degrees in education. Despite resumes sent to eight public school districts, he received only one reply and no invitations to an interview. He was told that this was because he did not know anyone in the school systems able to exert influence on his behalf. He then applied to two Catholic schools. The posh St. Augustine's High in Newark turned him down, he was later told,
because he was "too Jewish" and they already had Ben Cohen, the school's baseball coach who suffered from the same liability.

In late summer he followed up an ad and phoned Sister Theresa, the
principal at St. Luke High School in Jersey City. He was invited to
interview the next day. He discovered a stark inner-city school: no trees, no grass, no sports fields but also with not "an errant wrapper, can, or piece of garbage anywhere near the building." When he entered the building he discovered that the small building was not just high school but K-12. After filling in forms and an interview with Sister Theresa he was phoned the next day and welcomed to the staff. For the princely sum of $15,600 a year and benefits he would teach five sections of tenth-grade United States history. The school had 430 students from 42 countries. More than half were on welfare. Few were white. Many came from broken homes.

In eight chapters, Mark Gerson introduces a number of his students and shares their woes, their passions, their fractured, colorful, frequently obscene English, their values and their strengths. In his interview with Sister Theresa, Mark agreed with the need for strict discipline. For he had found during his summer counseling that only when given an enforced structure did his charges do well. He applied his knowledge during the year of the Oklahoma City bombing, tensions in Haiti and the O.J. Simpson trial.

Mr. Gerson frequently contrasts the approaches common at Williams College with those of his high school students. On race: Williams students spoke with all the care of walking through a minefield. At St. Luke racism, like everything else on the minds of the students was defiantly slammed down on the table. The St. Luke kids hated racism, homosexual behavior, unfair treatment of themselves and demanded that criminals be punished harshly.

Their favorite subject at all times was religion. For most of them the
persons they admired most were their parents and they were most grateful for their religious and moral guidance and the example many parents and grandparents set of working hard and expecting the best from their offspring. Four or five times a year the student body, with Catholics in a small minority, had to attend Mass together. All were completely silent during the service and after Mass all teachers experienced that they always taught their best classes of the year. Mark loved teaching the religious dimension of American history and his students were never more attentive than when learning of Puritans, the Great Awakenings or the piety of Civil War soldiers.

Other favorite topics of the students were economics and the U.S.
Constitution. Mark won the boys' respect by playing better basketball than they did. He could not stand rap music and, reluctantly, used detention periods to force them to listen to recordings of Frank Sinatra, a Jersey City native. The results were mixed. Ethical topics always triggered passionate discussions as, for instance, the long ago duel in New Jersey between Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. After much discussion the class consensus was wistful longing for the era of 1803 when men fought fairly and the families of the slain did not seek revenge. Jamal wrote an eight point set of rules to regulate contemporary gang violence. If there has to be violence, the students concluded, let it take place with rules and fair play.

Politically, both faculty and students of St. Luke were apathetic. The
students only knew that they despised hypocrisy and they despised
Republicans, portrayed by their parents as protectors of whites, especially rich whites. At the same time the students absolutely and unconditionally despised welfare, an attitude which Mark told them put them in the Republican camp. Most of the students had service jobs before or after school. On the job they were trained to respect their bosses and their customers. This spilled over to respect for their teachers at school. The students worked hard as teens and expected also to work hard as adults. So they loved the academic topics of money and economics.

Gerson found some resentment of immigrants, of whom there were plenty in the student body. The immigrants naturally helped newly arrived students. None of them wanted to speak Black English or were turned on by rap music. They sought mainstream success. And the immigrants took their values primarily from their immigrant parents. As Leeza wrote: "A large percent of my ideas come from my parents. I would say my morals; my religion, my rules of everyday life; knowing what is right and wrong, come from my parents. Parents...also protect and shelter you from wrong worldly influences."

IN THE CLASSROOM concludes with a meditation running over a score of pages trying to understand America's two worlds: typified respectively by the inner-city Jersey City where he was teaching and Millburn/Short Hills where Mark Gerson had grown up and was still living with his parents. These two worlds are almost incomprehensible one to another, he concludes. The only solution has to be face-to-face interactions among people who in some sense see themselves as equals. Among his students a start was made via family relations. Cousins were family, were your equal. Through them you could understand being richer or poorer, going to Catholic school or public school. Rich people had maids who lived in the inner city, but they and their servants were not equals.

Mark Gerson also contrasted rules-driven public schools (and he had
attended a great one) and Catholic schools with their ethos of compassion and sacrifice. Catholic schools were the clear winner.The author concludes with the utopian recommendation that all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 do a mandatory year of Federal service--to bring the two American nations together. More practically he calls for more private donations to help poor or working poor families afford Catholic and other faith-based schooling for their children.

Mark Gerson is a very young man, as was Thomas Jefferson in 1776. We shall hear more from Gerson. Of that we can be sure.

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For the ASHEVILLE TRIBUNE