Jerry Brown: Latin Scholar and One-Time Almost Priest
California's governor gets reflective on the meaning of education and its future in his state.
What is a green leaf?
You might expect this question to come up beside Walden Pond, among Shakespeare's sonnets, or maybe in a basement where people have been smoking green leaves. But no, this was the question California Governor Jerry Brown asked the audience—or, asked himself, really—at The Atlantic’s Silicon Valley Summit on Monday while sharing his thoughts on bringing the common core curriculum to California schools.
It is a question Brown first faced on an exam long ago. "There was only one question: 'Write your impression of a green leaf.'" No matter what answers he came up with—green, leafy, green-looking, leaf-like—he couldn’t find an answer that satisfied him. "I thought, This is just a bunch of clichés—this is not my impression of a green leaf. So I started thinking, How do you have an impression? And I would walk by a tree and think, Where’s my impression? I don’t feel anything. Am I dead inside?"
This portrait of the governor as a young man was illuminating, to be sure, but his parable had a point. "This is a very powerful question that has haunted me for 50 years, but you can’t put that on a standardized test," he said. “There are important educational encounters that can’t be captured in tests."
"There are important educational encounters that can't be captured in tests."
Throughout his interview with Atlantic Editor-in-Chief James Bennet, Brown proved that he spins a pretty erudite game. A question about California’s once and future budget woes, for example, transformed into a Latin lesson. The two had been discussing the California government’s decision to raise taxes on the wealthy. "The debate around cuts and taxes nationally in Washington is utterly frozen. What message would