The Zurier family represents three generations at Classical. From left are Rachel, her father, Sam, and her grandfather, Mel. The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

They were nice enough to invite me and I was pleased to go.

It was last Wednesday’s Classical High School Alumni Association dinner at the Providence Marriott.

I was never part of Classical’s family. Indeed, I was more like a guest, who overstays a visit to your home and, on finally departing, leaves an uproar in his wake.

Almost 40 years ago, I wrote a six-part series about the capital city’s college preparatory school that was a captive of tradition and did not give its students — who were very bright — the respect, freedom, and opportunities they deserved.

I can’t judge the quality of today’s Classical experience. I did drop by last Monday for a quick update, with the most spectacular change being in the demographics of the student body. Once monochromatic, it is now almost two-thirds minorities.

I also was drawn to the Marriott dinner by the bittersweet nature of what it represented. Classical needs money; the school’s grads have revived the alumni association to help raise it.

And I applaud them for it.

I repeat: I applaud them for it.

Yet I also find it sad that they have to do it, that Providence and the state cannot properly finance this school and other schools.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think public schools should be paid for by taxpayers and not have to rely on the generosity of alumni to rescue them.

When I asked alumni association president Guy Pirolli ’73 about having to raise money for Classical — a long-term commitment well beyond this dinner — he conceded, “It is sad, it’s a sign of the times.” But looking on the bright side, he said, “It’s a celebration of the school.”

Wednesday’s dinner, where the fare featured such items as chicken, salmon and cheesecake, honored six grads, including 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Bruce M. Selya and Kids Count executive director Elizabeth Burke Bryant.

Mayor David Cicilline, who used to live in Narragansett and went to Narragansett High, stood beneath a purple Classical banner, facing a sea of more than 200 faces — almost all of them white — at tables covered with purple tablecloths, and declared:

“This room is really filled with brilliant examples of the power and importance and value of public education … Each success story here was because Classical gave them an opportunity … Every single child in our city today deserves the very same opportunity.”

He congratulated the alumni for understanding that the times demand private efforts to supplement taxpayer financing. “We need the support and the active engagement of you in this fight to protect and improve public education in this city and in our state. There is no greater responsibility that we have.”

With Channel 6 meteorologist Steve Cascione ’73 as emcee, it was an upbeat evening.

I had a chance to talk with three Classical-educated generations of the Zurier family.

Former Gov. Bruce Sundlun, a Classical track star who would have graduated in 1938 but whose father pulled him out and had him finish at Tabor Academy, was there.

I enjoyed seeing Colleen Garrahy Mahoney ’75, whose father, Joe, was then lieutenant governor and later governor.

She was telling me that Classical’s “very structured” operation grounded her well for the University of Rhode Island. Yes, she said, she worked hard in high school. “I had to be prepared for Miss Criscione. She had a quiz every day in French.”

A jubilant Classical principal Cheryl Gomes accepted a check for $10,000, and said, “When you’re running a school these days there are always shortfalls with finances.”

She said the money would, for example, go a long way to helping with expenses for the Science Olympiad team, which she boasted often represents the state in national competitions.

She wants to put money into music and visual arts programs.

Indeed, Gomes tells me she often wakes up at 3 in the morning worrying. “We don’t purchase textbooks the way we should … Our textbooks are very old in many cases.”

There’s a need for more modern computers.

I remember Classical as a new building. Now there are roof leaks. When I visited last week, the elevator was on the blink.

From the Marriott podium, alum after alum delighted in reminiscing.

Pride was the order of the night, although from the present generation there was something of a discordant note. Emily Perry, valedictorian of the Class of 2008, expressed gratitude and enthusiasm, but also said:

“While we have several teachers who truly care and are good at their job, there are far too many who operate on cruise control.”

She said administrators must demand more from teachers, and teachers must demand more from students.

That had a familiar ring.

On the front page of the Jan. 26, 1969 Providence Sunday Journal (price: 35 cents), I wrote:

Where is the Classical High of yesteryear?

Right across the street from where it has been since 1897, right across the street teaching the same subjects in the same way in an age when men fly to the moon and back.

This was the start of Classical High: the myth and the reality, the series that represented weeks of reporting in late 1968, when the school moved into its new facility.

I spent day after day sitting in class or talking with administrators, teachers, students, alumni, parents and outside experts in education.

I concluded that Classical was doing a disservice to its bright student body, imposing outdated or unjustified course requirements — everyone had to take at least two years of Latin — and was putting a premium on tedious memorization and frequent quizzes, three or four a week in most classes. One young alumnus told me, “We were made to believe that if we weren’t going to be quizzed on something it wasn’t worth learning.”

One day I walked into an advanced English class and saw that the teacher, as homework, assigned her students to write out — in a phrase or two — the meanings of words that footnotes at the bottom of page after page of The Merchant of Venice already defined.

When I questioned the wisdom of requiring students to write out information easily found in the footnotes, the teacher said it would aid “memory and comprehension.”

When I mentioned the footnote assignment last week to principal Gomes, she grimaced.

Today, at least on the surface, Classical has changed in several ways.

Latin is no longer required, of course, and Gomes says the 100 to 130 students who take it in any given year fill the schedule of only one teacher.

The most popular foreign language is Spanish, and another favorite is Japanese.

As for quizzes, Gomes estimates that students get only “about two” a week per course. If kids are to learn at a high level, she says, all research indicates they have to do more than memorize. (A statement of Classical “beliefs,” posted in the lobby, commits the school to “developing critical-thinking/problem-solving/real-world application skills.”)

When I did the series, Classical had 1,215 students. Only 25 were black. In those days, there was a lot of focus in Providence School Department circles about the numbers of white and black students in the various schools. There weren’t enough Hispanic or Asian students in the system to figure in the dialogue.

Gomes, a 58-year-old black woman, was graduated from Hope High in 1967. She says her parents wanted her to go to Classical but she found the paucity of blacks there to be a turnoff.

Classical today has 1,032 students, of whom 65 percent are minorities.

The roll includes 359 whites, 351 Hispanics, 207 blacks, 108 Asians and 7 Native Americans.

Gomes says the diversity is remarkable for Providence and the state. Classical’s college preparatory mission is a common denominator among its students and teachers.

Says Gomes, “It’s a school with a purpose.”

Applicants are judged by entrance exams, previous school marks and recommendations.

Gomes says everyone comes to Classical expecting to go to college, and, in any particular graduating class, 95 to 98 percent do so.

Gomes provided me a roster of where 2007 graduates were heading to college, but there were no data on how many went where. Many schools were local, including Bryant, CCRI, Providence College, Rhode Island College and URI. Some, including Alaska Pacific University and the University of Edinburgh, were far away indeed.

Four Ivy League schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania — were included. Four — Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton and Yale — were not.

In Classical’s profile on the School Department Web site, I was interested to see that, according to figures from last June, 74 percent of the students were reading on or above grade level. (For writing performance, it was 79 percent; for math 69 percent.)

I would have thought that, in a college preparatory school, the figures would be 100 percent.

Gomes said the school wonders if all the students take the standardized tests seriously. With some students, she said, “If there’s not a grade attached to it, they don’t put any immediate importance to it.”

Still, the Classical scores easily outshone those at other Providence high schools. Take reading. While 74 percent of Classical students were on or above grade level, the figure at Mount Pleasant was 22 percent. At Central, it was 13. Hope High has three schools within the school. In one of them, 24 percent of the students were reading on or above grade level; in the others it was 18 and 17.

My 1969 series touched off a firestorm in the Classical community. As the series was winding up, my colleague S. Robert Chiappinelli wrote that principal William Macdougald called it “grossly unfair,” and teachers and students called it “ill-timed” and “distorted.”

Many questioned my qualifications to write it. I had no qualms about that, although, looking back, it is remarkable that I could be so cocksure about everything at age 24.

At Wednesday’s dinner, I chatted with Arnold Bromberg ’69, a senior when the series came out. Bromberg, who helps run his family’s Benny’s stores, is on the alumni association board.

When the series was published, he said, the kids thought it unfair and that it was saying “that we weren’t as smart as we thought we were, because you were telling people that we weren’t.”

Which is ironic, because the point of the stories was that the kids were indeed smart and the school wasn’t doing them justice.

Having recently revisited the series, Bromberg said he now understands what I was driving at.

Most of the students, he said, probably didn’t read every word. “Our parents certainly did!”

When I was doing the series, I interviewed lawyer Mel Zurier ’46, who later chaired the state Ethics Commission. He was at Wednesday’s dinner, as were his son, Sam ’76 , and Sam’s daughter, Rachel, Class of 2010.

When Mel Zurier was in school — a classmate, incidentally, of the late Ed Burke, father of Elizabeth Burke Bryant ’75 — Classical still was in its old building. The composition of the student body is different now, Zurier says, but everyone still wants to go to college. He says it’s important that Classical exist. “There has to be something which people can strive for.”

Sam Zurier, a lawyer and former Providence School Board member who co-chaired the dinner, says, “I was not always a happy student. I remember I gave a scathing speech at graduation.”

But when he entered Yale and looked around at his classmates, he said, “I realized that I had actually been pretty well prepared for college, and I came to appreciate the school more.”

Rachel Zurier, 15, says, “I love Classical.”

Students are diverse and friendly, she says, and, yes, the work is challenging. It’s not a school, she says, for people who “don’t want to learn.”

Which brings me to Judge Selya ’51, who traces his famous command of vocabulary to studying Latin at Classical. “If you have an inquisitive mind, you get caught up in the structure of words and in the etymology,” he told me Wednesday.

Selya said Classical imparted a thirst for knowledge, with lots of homework and demanding classes.

Did he have to work hard? “I’ll never confess as to whether I worked hard or not. I got good grades, that’s what counted.”

He chuckled, and I had to admire the judiciousness of his response.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com