Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (126 page)

Even more tragic and painful was the loss of illusions over education. This was, indeed, the central mirage of the decade of illusion. It was an old liberal belief, popularized by Macaulay, that universal education alone could make democracy tolerable. That accomplished manufacturer of progressive clichés, H.G.Wells, had defined modern history as ‘a race between education and catastrophe’. This belief survived the melancholy fact that the nation which took Hitler to its heart and waged his fearful war with passionate industry was easily the best-educated on earth. In the 1950s the myth that education was the miracle cure for society emerged stronger than ever. No one believed in it more devotedly than Johnson. As President he said: ‘The answer for all our national problems comes in a single world. That word is education.’
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Johnson reflected the conventional wisdom of his day. In the late 1950s, C.P.Snow had argued that there was a direct causal link between the amount of money invested in higher education and a country’s
GNP
.
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E.F.Denison showed that, over the three decades 1930–60, half America’s growth was accounted for by the expansion of education, especially of the universities. The same year, 1962, Fritz Machlup calculated that the ‘knowledge industry’ accounted for 29 per cent of America’s
GNP
and was growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole.
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In the 1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, the President of Berkeley, Clark Kerr, America’s leading academic statesman, argued that knowledge was now the ‘leading sector’ in the growth of the economy. ‘What the railways did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century’, he argued, ‘may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.’
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Against this background, the 1960s became the most explosive decade in the entire history of educational expansion. The process in America had begun with the 1944 ‘
GI
bill’, allocating public funds for the college education of returned veterans, and continued with the 1952 Korean War
GI
bill. The 1958 National Defense Education Act doubled the Federal education budget and, for the first time, made central government the financial dynamic of education. The number of state teachers grew from 1 million in 1950 to 2.3 million in 1970, as spending per person rose by over 100 per cent. The growth of higher education was the most marked because it was now contended it should be universally available. ‘The important question’, an official report argued, ‘need be not “Who deserves to be
admitted?” but “Whom can the society, in conscience and self-interest, exclude?”’, since nobody could be ‘justly’ denied a university education unless ‘his deficiencies are so severe’ that even the ‘most flexible and dedicated institution’ could not help him.
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The phenomenon was international in the West. In Britain the 1963 Robbins Report led to the doubling of university places within a decade, with a projected student body of 2 million by 1981. Similar expansion plans were adopted in France, Canada, Australia, West Germany and elsewhere. The American experience was most striking because of the statistics involved. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of American colleges and universities rose from 2,040 to 3,055. During the ‘golden years’ of expansion, new ones were opening at the rate of one a week. Students rose from 3.6 million in 1960 to 9.4 million in 1975, the bulk of the increase (4 million) coming in the public sector. Including non-degree students, they passed the 11-million mark in 1975, at an annual cost of $45 billion.
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It was confidently expected that this vast investment in human resources would not only stimulate growth still further but achieve moral and social purposes by furthering the
embourgeoisement
of the working class. It would make ‘middle-class democracy … with all its freedoms’, as Clark Kerr put it, ‘the wave of the future’, thus ensuring general contentment and political stability, and in particular underpinning the enlightened capitalist system which made it all possible. In fact the reverse happened. At the pre-college level, while spending doubled, then trebled, educational performance fell. Some decline had been expected as the system absorbed large minority groups, but not of this precipitous magnitude. The best index, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, showed over the years 1963–77 a forty-nine-point decline in verbal and thirty-two-point decline in mathematical skills (on a scale of 800).
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In the mid-1970s a rash of gloomy reports suggested that more, and more expensive, education did not solve any social problems.
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Crime-rates among children in full-time education rose inexorably. In the second half of the 1970s, opinion turned against the education process, as cities and states cut their teacher forces. The end of the post-war ‘baby boom bulge’ was only one factor. The chief reason was loss of confidence in the economic advantages of more education. Over the years 1970–8, some 2,800 public-sector schools and colleges were shut, the first time this had ever happened in American history. By the mid-1980s, public-sector enrollments were expected to decline by 4 million.
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By 1978, American workers had an average of 12
years schooling, and 17 per cent had a college degree. But graduates (especially women) were finding it increasingly difficult to get professional or managerial employment. The ratio between length of education and
salary declined sharply. Equalizing educational opportunity, it was found, did not promote greater equality among adults.
¹²⁰
So the attractions of university declined. The proportion of young men starting college, which rose rapidly to 44 per cent in the 1960s, fell to 34 per cent by 1974. It levelled off among women, too.

Nor did more education promote stability. Quite the contrary. As it happened, this had been foreseen by Joseph Schumpeter, who had been born in the same year as Keynes, and who had some claim to rival him as the greatest economist of modern times. It was Schumpeter’s view, first expressed in an article he wrote in 1920, expanded into
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(1942), that capitalism tended to promote its own self-destruction in a number of ways. Among them was its propensity to create, and then give full rein to, by virtue of its commitment to freedom, an ever-expanding class of intellectuals, who inevitably played a socially destructive role.
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This point was overlooked in the university-expansion plans of the 1950s and 1960s, though it had in fact already been vindicated, to some extent, in the 1930s. At all events, Schumpeter was certainly proved right in the Lyndon Johnson era. The first signs of radical student interest in social and political issues appeared in 1958. In spring 1960 came the first ‘sit-in’ protests, demonstrations in San Francisco against the House Un-American Activities Committee, and West Coast ‘vigils’ against the execution of the fashionable murderer, Caryl Chessman. Protests against university training corps, loyalty affidavits, fraternity and sorority discrimination and other matters of university discipline – or simple civil rights issues – broadened into directly political campaigns.

At first, student activism was welcomed, as a sign of ‘maturity’ and ‘awareness’. The earliest sign of large-scale violence came during ‘freedom summer’ in 1964, at Clark Kerr’s own university, Berkeley. What was supposed to be the ‘leading sector’ in
GNP
growth became a leading sector in something quite different: the ‘student revolt’. By December the Governor of California had called in the riot police and Berkeley had become the world’s chief ‘political’ campus.
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Johnson’s Great Society programme merely poured fuel into this gathering conflagration. The next year 25,000 students invaded Washington to protest against the Vietnam war. In 1966–7, more and more campuses were ‘radicalized’. The ‘campus riot’ became part of the college culture, as university presidents compromised, surrendered or abdicated. On 23 April 1968 there was a devastating smash-up at Columbia, one of America’s leading universities. Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School was called in to report, and did so in the smug optimism of the time: ‘The present generation of young people in our universities are the best informed,
the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known.’ As Lionel Trilling sourly commented, Cox ‘celebrated as knowledge and intelligence’ what was in fact ‘merely a congerie of “advanced” public attitudes’. Cox, he insisted, was deriving his values not from knowledge and experience but from the young: their ‘certification’ was enough to prove them sound.
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Whether or not the students were the most intelligent in history, they were certainly the most destructive. Cox-type complacency did not survive summer 1968, especially after the wild Paris student riots in May, which began a new and much more savage cycle of student violence all over the world but especially in America. The National Student Association claimed there were 221 major demonstrations at universities in America during 1968.
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It was student radicals who ran the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, which knocked Johnson out of the presidential race in New Hampshire. But student power was essentially negative. At the Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968 students fought a pitched battle with 11,900 of Mayor Daley’s police, 7,500 of the Illinois National Guard, and 1,000
FBI
and Secret Service agents. They won the media contest in that they succeeded in branding Daley’s law-enforcement a ‘police riot’, but they could not get McCarthy the nomination, nor could they prevent the man they hated most, Richard Nixon, from becoming president. When in 1972 they finally secured the Democratic nomination for their own choice, George McGovern, the only result was to secure Nixon a landslide.

What student violence did above all was to damage American higher education and demoralize its teachers. Reflecting on it in 1971, Professor Louis Kampf, in his presidential address to the Modern Languages Association, said that since 1968 ‘the young go into the profession with dread, the old can scarcely wait for retirement, and those of the middle years yearn for sabbaticals’.
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The great German scholar Fritz Stern, noting the ‘excremental language’ of student activists, saw it as the only novelty: the rest reproduced the pattern of extremist behaviour among the students who led Germany in putting Hitler into power.
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The promotion of student violence by the well-intended expansion of higher education was an excellent example of the ‘law of unintended effect’. The attempt by successive presidents to obtain justice for American blacks was another. Here again, good intentions produced death and destruction. The problem was seen as threefold. First, to end segregation, especially in education. Second, to enable blacks to exercise voting rights. Third, to bring black incomes into line with white ones. It was believed that if the first two were solved, the third would ultimately solve itself. In 1954 the Supreme Court
had ruled that public-sector education must be integrated. The problem was to get the law enforced in practice. In 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied the Supreme Court, Eisenhower dispatched troops to Little Rock to enforce compliance. Again, in 1962, Kennedy used troops to enable a black student, James Meredith, to attend the hitherto all-white state university of Mississippi. It was Kennedy’s policy to proceed by executive action: that is, to use Federal power to make the existing law stick. The difficulty with this procedure was that it moved from one public confrontation to another, and in the process a huge and increasingly militant civil rights movement was created, from which white liberals were progressively eliminated. Physical action was seen by blacks as the answer, and as with the agitation Gandhi created in India, protest tended to degenerate into violence. The real solution was to get blacks voting quickly, because once politicians needed their votes, concessions would follow, even in the deep South. Eisenhower had put through Congress two weak Civil Rights acts, in 1957 and 1960. Kennedy eventually tabled a much stronger one, but it was blocked in Congress. Johnson was much more successful. He pushed through a monumental Civil Rights Act in 1964 and immediately after his November election victory he got to work on a bill which became the decisive Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the state of Mississippi, which had a higher proportion of blacks (36 per cent) than any other, only 6 per cent were registered to vote, because of complicated tests and other barriers. The new Act had the right to vote enforced by Federal examiners, and within thirty days of its enactment, black registration in Mississippi rose 120 per cent. By the end of 1970, the percentage of registered black voters in the state was comparable to white registrations (71 to 82 per cent) and in 1971 fifty blacks were elected to public office in the state.
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By the early 1970s, the black vote had become a significant factor in many states of the old South, thus bringing about a progressive transformation of Southern politics.
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