The Heart is the Teacher

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

Henceforth, these book reports will be a time-saving device. You need not read entire books anymore. Read these condensed versions instead. You'll have that much more time for your own blog.

Today I read "The Heart is the Teacher" by Leonard Covello, published in 1958.

Covello's family came to East Harlem from Italy at the turn of the 20th century. Born in 1891, he spent his first nine years in Italy, where parents, teachers and religious leaders were martinets who believed in physical punishment. The parents wanted their children to have better lives than they themselves did, and they thought education was a way out of poverty. Nevertheless, children of poor families often quit grade school, never to return, because they were needed as wage earners on the farm.

Covello was fortunate to have good influences around him, including a female missionary who taught the young people of his East Harlem neighborhood Protestant values. Although she was not Catholic, his father thought her teachings were good for him anyway.

Covello's mother died when he was a teenager. Being the oldest boy in a poor family of seven children, he felt compelled to quit high school and earn money so the family could eat. He did quit school for a year, but then returned. He was not planning on college. His next door neighbor, who was sort of a big sister figure to him (whom he later married), and his friend, convinced him to apply for a scholarship to Columbia University. His neighbor had the teaching bug, and gave him confidence. He won the scholarship, and graduated college. However, he found the University lacking in lively debate and truly scholarly teaching. It was too easy. It was lame. He volunteered for the army in WWI, thinking he needed to prove that he did not deserve any special privileges just because he was an educated person.

Covello went to work at an American Express office, but was bored, when a friend of his asked him for a favor. The friend asked him to fill in for him for the remainder of the academic year, teaching unruly middle-schoolers in the inner city. Burnt out, the friend was transferring to a job teaching college students. Covello found he loved teaching.

His expressed his attitude thusly:

"I am the teacher. I am older, presumably wiser than you, the pupils. I am in possession of knowledge which you don't have. It is my function to transfer this knowledge from my mind to yours... certain ground rules must be set up and adhered to. I talk. You listen. I give. You take. Yes, we will be friends, we will share, we will discuss, we will have open sessions for healthy disagreement-- but only within the context of the relationship I have described, and the respect for my position as teacher which must go with it."

Covello became a teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School on the Upper West Side, and eventually, principal of the newly built Benjamin Franklin High School in the East Harlem section of New York City. He taught French, then Spanish, and finally, after he kept pushing for it, Italian. The school had not previously offered Italian. He truly believed in what Ben Franklin wrote, "If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."

Covello was passionate not only about teaching, but about helping his East Harlem community dispel its reputation for poorly educated, criminal immigrants. He co-founded a branch of YMCA, and implemented new programs to educate the local young people, and lower the crime rate. One such program was that the school served not just as a school, but a community center. It was open 24/7, so anyone could use its resources to spend his time constructively.

From the 1920's through the time of his mandatory retirement in the 1950's, Covello devoted almost his entire existence to the cause. Some people have the passion for teaching and leadership, and some people don't. This guy had it.