Inside American Education (16 page)

Educational theory too often focusses on the
desirability
of doing something, to the complete exclusion of the question of our
capability
of doing it. No doubt it would be far more desirable to travel through the air like Superman, instead of inching along in a traffic jam. But that is no reason to leap off skyscrapers. Our educational system is full of the results of leaping off skyscrapers.

Other countries whose educational systems achieve more than ours often do so in part by attempting less. While school children in Japan are learning science, mathematics, and a foreign language, American school children are sitting around in circles, unburdening their psyches and “expressing themselves” on scientific, economic and military issues for which they lack even the rudiments of competence. Worse than what they are
not
learning is what they
are
learning—presumptuous superficiality, taught by practitioners of it.

The “whole person” philosophy is not simply a theory of education. It has become an open floodgate through which all sorts of non-educational activities have poured into the schools, relieving many teachers of the drudgery of teaching, and substituting more “exciting” world-saving crusades in place of the development of academic skills.

Whether the crusade concerns the environment, AIDS, foreign policy, or a thousand other things, it is far more often pursued as a crusade than as an issue with arguments on both sides. Moreover, it is not sufficient that the students be propagandized in the classroom; they are taught to
act
on the onesided superficiality they have been given. At one time, the President of the United States received more letters from school children fulfilling classroom assignments on nuclear war than letters from any other group on any other subject.
⁷⁰

In the San Francisco public schools in 1991, teachers organized a letter-writing campaign in which thousands of students sent letters to elected state officials, protesting cuts in the school budget. One letter from an elementary school student
said: “I hate you. I would like to kill you.” Another letter asked about the official’s wife and children and said, “I’m going to set your house on fire and get my homies to beat you up!”
⁷¹
In response to public outcry and to angry officials, California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Bill Honig, sent out a memorandum to county and district superintendents, warning that “it would be legally safer to avoid such activities.”
⁷²
As for the ethics and propriety of using the children in this way, a spokesman for Honig’s office was quoted in the
San Francisco Examiner
as justifying such school assignments:

“It’s appropriate to have kids responding to a current issue directly involving their lives,” she said. “So having kids use class time to address public officials on current events is appropriate.”
⁷³

Those who emphasize the teaching of “issues” rather than academic skills fail to understand that “issues” are infinitely more complex and difficult to master than fundamental principles of analysis. The very reason why there is an issue in the first place is usually because no single principle can possibly resolve the differences to the mutual satisfaction of those concerned. Innumerable principles are often interacting in a changing environment, creating vast amounts of complex facts to be mastered and assessed—
if
one is serious about resolving issues responsibly, as distinguished from generating excitement. To teach issues instead of intellectual principles to school children is like teaching calculus to people who have not yet learned arithmetic, or surgery to people lacking the rudiments of anatomy or hygiene. Worse, it is teaching them to go ahead and perform surgery, without worrying about boring details.

“Role Models”

One of the most widely accepted—or at least unchallenged—dogmas in American education today is that students need “role models” from the same social background as themselves. From the kindergarten to the colleges and universities, the dogma holds sway that students are taught more effectively by people of the same race, ethnicity, culture, and sex as themselves.
Empirical evidence is almost never asked for, much less given.

Many of those who espouse this doctrine have the most obvious self-interest in doing so. Teachers and directors of bilingual education programs, Afro-centric programs in schools and various ethnic studies programs in college, all preserve jobs and careers for themselves—free of competition from members of the majority population—by using the “role model” dogma. So do feminists, homosexuals, and others. Administrators who have caved in to demands for various enclaves and preserves for particular groups likewise have a vested interest in this dogma, as a defense against critics. Around this solid core of supporters of the “role model” idea, there is a wider penumbra of those who wish to be
au courant
with the latest buzzwords, or to be on the side of the angels, as currently defined.

Historically, there have been good, bad, and indifferent schools where students and teachers have all been of the same background, where students and teachers were of wholly different backgrounds, and all sorts of combinations in between. There is no empirical evidence that any of those similarities or differences are correlated with educational results, and considerable indications that they are not.

One of the most academically successful of the all-black schools was Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., during the period from its founding in 1870 until its rapid deterioration in the late 1950s, in the wake of new rules for selecting students. In addition to producing good academic results in general during this period, Dunbar also produced an impressive list of “the first black” to enter a number of fields and institutions, ranging from West Point and Annapolis to the federal judiciary and the Presidential Cabinet.
⁷⁴
Its curriculum, however, was hardly Afro-centric and was in fact so traditional as to include Latin, long after most American schools had abandoned that ancient language. While Dunbar’s teachers were black, another equally high-quality black high school, St. Augustine’s in New Orleans, was founded and manned by whites of the Josephite order.
⁷⁵

Among the European immigrant groups, the first Irish Catholic children were taught by Protestant Anglo-Saxon teachers, at a time when such differences were very important socially
and economically. Later, when the Jewish immigrant children began flooding into the public schools, they were far more likely to be taught by Irish Catholic teachers than by Jewish teachers. Still later, among the Chinese and Japanese children of immigrants, it was virtually unknown for them to be taught by teachers of their own race, religion, or culture. Yet, from all this vast experience, no one has yet produced evidence that “role models” from the student’s own background are either necessary or sufficient, or in fact make any discernible academic difference at all.

The “role model” dogma is pork barrel politics, masquerading as educational philosophy. That this wholly unsubstantiated claim has been taken seriously in the media and by public officials is one more sign of the vulnerability of our minds and our institutions to vehement assertions—and to strident attacks on all who question them.

“Self-Esteem”

The notion that self-esteem is a precondition for effective learning is one of the more prominent dogmas to have spread rapidly thorugh the American educational system in recent years. However, its roots go back some decades, to the whole “child-centered” approach of so-called Progressive education. Like so much that comes out of that philosophy, it confuses cause and effect. No doubt valedictorians feel better about themselves than do students who have failed numerous courses, just as people who have won the Nobel Prize probably have more selfesteem than people who have been convicted of a felony.

Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something
earned
, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators. Too often, American educators are like the Wizard of Oz, handing out substitutes for brains, bravery, or heart.

The practical consequences of the self-esteem dogma are
many. Failing grades are to be avoided, to keep from damaging fragile egos, according to this doctrine. Thus the Los Angeles school system simply abolished failing grades in the early years of elementary school
⁷⁶
and many leading colleges and universities simply do not record failing grades on a student’s transcript. Other ways of forestalling a loss of self-esteem is to water down the courses to the point where failing grades are highly unlikely. A more positive approach to self-esteem is simply to give higher grades. The widespread grade inflation of recent decades owes much to this philosophy.

While the “role model” dogma is more obviously self-serving than the “self-esteem” dogma, the latter is not wholly free of self-interest. It is much easier to water down academic courses, replace them with non-academic activities, or give automatic high grades for either, than to take on the serious and difficult task of developing intellectual competence among masses of school children. Whatever the intentions of John Dewey or other pioneers of the Progressive education philosophy, its practical consequences have been a steady retreat from the daunting task of making mass education a serious attempt to raise American school children to a standard, rather than bringing the standard down to them.

The history of American education, from the time when high schools ceased to be a place reserved for an academic or social elite, has been a history of a steady displacement, or swamping, of academic subjects by non-academic subjects or academic subjects increasingly watered down. A blue-ribbon committee formed in the 1890s identified 40 subjects being taught in American high schools but, within two decades, the number of subjects expanded to 274. As of the period from 1906 to 1910, approximately two-thirds of all subjects taught in American high schools were academic subjects, but by 1930 only onethird were academic subjects.
⁷⁷

Even when the educational reform movements of the 1980s were successful politically in getting academic-subject requirements written into law and public policy, the response of many school systems across the country was simply to increase the number of academic subjects taught at a lower level—including courses taught remedially or even meretriciously, as former non-academic courses were re-named to look academic on paper. Sometimes the proliferation of pseudo-academic courses
led to an absolute decline in the number of students taking challenging academic subjects.
⁷⁸

The “self-esteem” doctrine is just one in a long line of educational dogmas used to justify or camouflage a historic retreat from academic education. Its success depends on the willingness of the public, elected officials, and the media to take such dogmas seriously, without the slightest evidence. American school children and American society are the ultimate victims of this gullibility.

PART TWO
COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

CHAPTER 5
Damaging Admissions

S
EEKING ADMISSION
to college has become such a stressful process for so many high school seniors that it is hard to realize how recent a social phenomenon the “selective” college is in American history. In 1920, for example, a survey of 40 of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the country found that only 13 turned away any applicants.
¹
Swarthmore College was one of the rare exceptions in having several times as many applicants as places for them.
²
Even for Harvard, the first year in which there were more qualified applicants than there was space in the class was 1936—three centuries after the college was founded.
³

As late as the period immediately after World War II, the Harvard admissions staff consisted of one administrator with a part-time assistant.
⁴
By academic year 1982-83, however, the cost of the admissions office staff at Harvard was more than $400,000 annually.
⁵
Today, even a small college like Middlebury has a dean of admissions with 17 people on his staff.
⁶
Large prestige institutions have not only large admissions staffs, but also outside consultants, a network of contacts among high school counselors across the country, mailing material
aptly described as “professionally produced brochures that Madison Avenue’s linest could be proud of,”
⁷
a “public relations machine that would make P. T. Barnum blush,” as one Cornell administrator put it,
⁸
and recruiting operations that extend across the ocean. Even though Harvard now admits less than onc-fifth of those who apply, it has a recruiting program which writes to approximately 25,000 high school students who have made outstanding scores on various tests and who have outstanding high school grades.
⁹

Colleges have become especially competitive as a result of the decline in the size of the college-age population. According to
The Chronicle of Higher Education: