Air Force Staff Sgt. Wallace Tidwell was wise beyond his 40-plus years when I met him early on the morning of March 29, 1974.
I had just arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, with a group of other equally green recruits from around the country. Tidwell was our military training instructor, responsible for turning us from scraggly, clueless civilians into well-drilled, sharp military personnel.
Tidwell made two things clear to us immediately: He told us we could make no excuses if we messed up, and then told us what excuses are. This being a family newspaper and what all, I can't print those remarks.
But I can tell you what Tidwell said about "hand-holding." Those of us who couldn't cut the mustard would not have our hands held by the instructors. There would be no remedial help, no one coming to our rescue if we didn't meet the standards of basic training. Being shipped out to a motivation platoon awaited us, and once he gave us an idea of what went on in motivation platoons, we were kind of motivated to learn what we had to learn, as quickly as we had to learn it, and get the hell out of basic training.
I don't know if Tidwell is still alive, but if he is, Andres Alonso, head honcho of Baltimore's public schools, might want to have a chat with him about that "hand-holding" thing. Because hand-holding is just what Alonso is proposing for "academically struggling" students at elite and revered city institutions such as City College, Polytechnic Institute and Western High School.
Standards at those schools are high and the work is tough, the better to prepare graduates to compete in rigorous and elite colleges and universities like Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When alumni of City College, Polytechnic Institute and Western get to colleges and universities like those, they're not going to have their "hands held." There will be no administrators who are going to say, "We know you're bright and academically able, so if you're flunking out, it must be our fault. We'll put in place programs that will guarantee your success."
That is, basically, what Alonso is saying. Here are Alonso's exact words, according to reporter Sara Neufeld's story that appeared in Monday's paper, when asked about the numbers of students who had to transfer from elite schools for academic reasons:
