An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement. In the spring of 1953, as I left our apartment house for the last of a series of grueling law school exams, I met a young woman I knew to be in the school of education. I sympathized with her about how hard she must have been studying. She said she had studied not at all since there were no examinations. “How can they grade you, then?” “We are graded on class participation. “That struck me as preposterous, but the full dimensions of the calamity such a philosophy portended did not then occur to me.
The problem was both that budding teachers of the young were allowed to avoid competition in the mastery of any subject matter and that educational faddishness—grading adults on class participation rather than knowledge—was apparent. The endless pursuit of fads is a way of avoiding conventional (bourgeois) methods and standards. A few years later, in a good private day school, my son was taught the “new math,” in which, supposedly, he would learn the rationale behind arithmetic rather than engage in such foolishness as rote learning of the multiplication tables. Meanwhile, Japanese children were learning the multiplication tables by rote, and ended up far ahead of American children in mathematics.
Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the self-esteem movement, three other products of the egalitarian passion, divert resources from real education and miseducate. The United States spends more on education than do other Western industrialized nations, and gets less in return. This is not only harmful to individuals and to our competitiveness internationally, it is a likely source of considerable social unrest and antagonism. The failures of public education have had a devastating impact on poor black children. They are often not given even the most rudimentary education that might enable them to compete in the American economy. A growing uneducated black underclass, without prospects for a decent life, is creating social chaos and will create more.
The result of our egalitarian passion is that Americans, white as well as black, have allowed themselves to become progressively less competent. That fact is attested to in myriad ways: SAT scores keep declining; American students fall well behind the students of many other nations on international science and mathematics tests; even college students frequently lack basic historical and geographical knowledge. Our system of public education at the primary and secondary levels is not performing as well as it did half a century ago, and in places its performance is a disgrace. Universities must offer remedial courses to bring their entering freshmen up to the point they should have reached in mid-high school. Less and less of the four years of college can be spent on what we used to think of as college level studies. Intellectual rigor inevitably suffers as grades are inflated and graduate students are substituted for professors in teaching undergraduates.
Egalitarianism led Americans gradually to extend education to all youths, which was admirable, but egalitarianism also led to the notion that the education must be pretty much the same for all levels of ability. Those with higher levels of academic talent were no longer pressed to achieve as they once were. Not long ago a newspaper printed an examination that all high school graduates were once expected to be able to pass if they intended to go on to college. The test, if I recall correctly, was given between the turn of the century and World War I. I could not begin to answer most of the questions, nor could most of the educated people I discussed it with.
The difference between education today or education in the last sixty or seventy years and what it was before that is to be measured in light years. The future novelist Willa Cather’s studies at the University of Nebraska in 1891 included three years of Greek, two years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Robert Browning and the nineteenth century authors (Tennyson, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Ruskin), French literary classics, one year of German, history, philosophy, rhetoric, journalism, chemistry, and mathematics.
The self-indulgence of radical individualism has meant less homework and more television watching. Television, which is replacing reading as a leisure activity among the young, is a major contributor to vacuity. A professor of communications says that his students “tend to have an image-based standard of truth. If I ask, ‘What evidence supports your view or contradicts it?’ they look at me as if I came from another planet. It’s very foreign to them to think in terms of truth, logic, consistency and evidence.”4 Though this is a problem across class lines, the situation becomes desperate for the poorly educated, who are less and less equipped to perform in a modern economy.
But lowered intellectual standards are by no means the whole tale of the degradation of primary and secondary education. We have seen that feminist and Afrocentric propaganda has made harmful inroads in the lower schools’ curricula. But the sweep of modern liberal politicization is far wider. The most notable recent example is the National History Standards5 funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Standards were intended as guidance to teachers, curriculum planners, and textbook publishers. In keeping with the modern liberalism that dominates the education establishment, the Standards prescribed a multicultural curriculum that minimized the achievements of Europeans and their descendants in America in order to focus attention on Africans and Indians.
Although Africans were brought to America as slaves, it is difficult to see an important connection between American history and the direction to students in grades 5 to 6 to “Draw upon stories of Mansa Musa and his great pilgrimage to Mecca in order to analyze the great wealth of Mali, its trade in gold and salt, and the importance of its learning center in Timbuktu” or the direction to students in grades 7 to 8 to “Draw upon historical narratives of Muslim scholars such as Ibn Fadi Allah al-Omari and Ibn Battuta to analyze the achievements and grandeur of Mansa Musa’s court, and the social customs and wealth of the kingdom of Mali.”6
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this extensive detour into the achievements and grandeur of Mansa Musa has nothing to do with teaching American history and everything to do with promoting black self-esteem and demanding acknowledgment by-white students of a marvelous African past. Whatever its place in a different course, the placement of this material in required American history courses is designed to make sure that students cannot avoid this propaganda.
Students in the seventh and eighth grades are asked how “Columbus’s description of the peaceful and pleasant nature of the Carib Indians contrasted] with his treatment of them?”7 One wonders whether students are to be informed that the Caribs’ predations against their Indian neighbors forced the latter to migrate or that the Caribs were cannibals who tortured and ate their male captives. Never mind, since Columbus was a European, it is the Caribs on whom victim status is bestowed.
“Native American” and European views of land are contrasted, the latter believing in private property and the former believing that “land was not property, but entrusted by the Creator to all living creatures for their common benefit and shared use.”8 Were the students to be informed that private ownership results in greater preservation of land than does common use? Or that private ownership is a sign of advanced civilization, not suitable to primitive and often nomadic Indian tribes? On and on it goes. William Penn’s friendly relations with some tribes is contrasted with wars between settlers and Indians in Virginia and Massachusetts. The comparison is misleading. Penn’s friendly relations with the Indians was not a model to be emulated, as the Standards seem to suggest. Indians ravaged the settlements of western Pennsylvania. The settlers begged Philadelphia for help, but the Quakers there preferred to ask themselves what they had done to justify the savagery to the west. Where had they gone wrong?9
Lynne Cheney, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, authorized a grant that went to the development of the Standards, an act she has come to regret. She points out that the Standards do not mention the Constitution even once. Students are told to conduct a trial
of John D. Rockefeller for his “unethical and amoral business practices … in direct violation of the common welfare.” No matter that much recent scholarship has shown that the legends about the “robber barons” are without foundation and that Rockefeller, in addition to being a philanthropist on a gigantic scale, developed the oil industry to the benefit of American consumers. Students are instructed to consider the achievements of Aztec civilization but not the practice of human sacrifice. McCarthy and McCarthyism get nineteen mentions, the Ku Klux Klan seventeen. Harriet Tubman, a black who helped rescue slaves through the Underground Railroad, is mentioned six times. By contrast, Henry Clay and Ulysses S. Grant are each mentioned once. There is no mention at all of Daniel Webster, Robert E. Lee, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, or the Wright brothers. George Washington appears fleetingly but is not identified as our first president. The foundings of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are considered noteworthy, but the first gathering of the U.S. Congress is not.10
The National Standards were politically correct. The contributions of the West were trivialized or ignored while those of Africans and Indians were magnified; males who had played important roles in our history were dropped out; organizations and events that reflected poorly upon us were stressed. So outrageous were the messages the Standards would have foisted upon the young that Congress rebelled. The Senate condemned them by a vote of 99 to 1, and the lone dissenter thought the condemnation inadequate.
A new version of the history Standards, much less political and biased against America, appeared in April 1995. But bias is still prominent. Students are to learn about the religious beliefs of American Indians and Africans but are to be given nothing about European religion (i.e., Christianity). Students are to analyze modern feminism, described as “compelling in its analysis of women’s problems and the solutions offered,” and fifth and sixth graders must be able to explain why the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. Fifth graders receive a thorough indoctrination in Watergate and are informed that Ronald Reagan was called “Herbert Hoover with a smile.”11
The new standards are widely praised in the universities, though why words like “non-ideological” and “non-partisan” should be used is something of a mystery. Perhaps the warm reception is given because another battle is too painful to contemplate. More likely, Standards that ignore Christianity, advocate feminism, and lean to the left politically seem balanced to the modern liberals of the universities.
Matters do not improve at the university level. Anyone who reads newspapers and magazines is surely aware of the politically correct terror that has overtaken many of our institutions of higher learning, and is probably aware of the preposterous courses being offered in matters such as comic books and of the inflation of grades. But what the press reports is usually anecdotal. The National Association of Scholars (NAS), by contrast, has conducted a systematic study of what has happened to university educations over a period of almost eighty years in fifty highly selective institutions.12 The NAS studied the catalogues of these universities for the academic years beginning in 1914, 1939, 1964, and 1993. The findings are devastating. They bear out in full columnist Robert J. Samuelson’s conclusion: “You should treat skeptically the loud cries now coming from colleges and universities that the last bastion of excellence in American education is being gutted by state budget cuts and mounting costs. Whatever else it is, higher education is not a bastion of excellence. It is shot through with waste, lax academic standards and mediocre teaching and scholarship.”13
What has gone wrong appears to flow from a poisonous combination of radical egalitarianism and radical individualism. Egalitarianism means that faculties have lost the self-confidence to tell students what it is they ought to learn. Radical individualism causes students to resist dictation by college authorities and faculty, to prefer following their own interests to learning what the institution wants taught. These two forces press higher education in the same direction. Hence the startling decline in required courses. But, as the NAS points out, the existence, number, and nature of required courses indicates an institution’s educational priorities, what it thinks an educated person should know. To the degree that higher educational institutions have such priorities and tend to agree with one another, they help maintain a common culture.
Yet the number of required courses has undergone a rapid decline in recent years. The NAS report deals with this in a chapter entitled “The Dissolution of Structure,” which shows that the dropping or easing of requirements—begun as a slow evolution by 1939—had become a rush by 1993. General education programs were 55 percent of requirements in 1914 and only 33 percent in 1993. That does not tell the full story because in 1914 no exemptions from general education requirements were allowed in 98 percent of the courses, but by 1993 that had dropped to 29 percent. The loss of general education requirements is an educational disaster, producing students who have information about narrow corners of subjects but no conception of the larger context that alone can give the niches meaning. In college, my son was not offered a survey course in history and wound up studying such niches of history as the Weimar Republic. The college had given up on the idea that there was a central body of historical knowledge all educated persons should have. That is true across the board, not just in history. It will be a few years yet before America discovers what the decline of general knowledge means for our well-being.
The other two chapters of the report make equally dismal reading. “The Evaporation of Content” reveals, for example, that from 1914 to 1939, the percentage of institutions with literature requirements fell from 57 percent to 38 percent, where it held steady into the Sixties. By 1993, only 14 percent of institutions had such requirements. The same pattern held true in philosophy, religion, social science, natural science, and mathematics. Though distribution requirements increased, so many courses are often included in each curriculum category that the purpose once served by required general courses is not served.
“The Decline of Rigor,” the third and last chapter, states that the data from the catalogues “paint a discouraging portrait of diminishing rigor at the most prestigious colleges and universities in our land. Thus, by 1993 students graduating from these elite schools not only had fewer assignments to complete but were asked to do considerably less in completing them.” The NAS stated that the degree of rigor in a curriculum is important to more than how much the student learns. “It also has implications for character formation. The ability to work hard, to persevere in exacting tasks, and to master detail are all critical in determining individual achievement. By the same token, the degree to which these qualities are found among a society’s leadership has a direct influence on that society’s overall strength and vitality.”14
The evidence showed a decline in freshman preparation. Between 1964 and 1993, combined verbal and mathematics SAT scores declined 7.3 percent, and this was concentrated especially within the highest percentiles of test takers, the group from which the elite schools draw their students. The catalogues also revealed severe drops in admission requirements. This in turn led to the need for remedial courses in a variety of subjects. These were attempts to bring students up to the level at which they could do college work. Colleges were teaching what high schools should have taught. In 1939 and 1964, no college offered credit for completing what was essentially a high school course, and students who completed the remedial course were invariably required to take and complete the standard college course on the subject. The situation with respect to writing or composition courses is illustrative. By 1993, thirty-one out of thirty-five schools with remedial courses offered college credit for them, and in only four of the twenty-six cases where a regular writing requirement existed was the subsequent completion of that course required. One can only conclude that students were permitted to go forward without college level writing skills or, perhaps more likely, that the standard offering had been diluted so that it hardl
y differed from the remedial course.
What seems conclusive evidence of the decline of rigor is that the average number of days classes were in session during the academic year dropped precipitously over the period examined. The average was 204 days in 1914, 195 in 1939, 191 in 1964, and then a dramatic drop to 156 classroom days in 1993. The length of the standard class period, which was 59.8 minutes in 1914, had declined by 6.1 minutes by 1993. Equally telling is the trend of the days of the week in which classes are in session. In 1914, 98 percent of the institutions studied scheduled Saturday classes. This percentage kept declining until in 1993 only 6 percent had Saturday classes. The NAS refers to the “widespread impression within academe” that “even Friday classes are becoming a rarity.”
The willingness of students to attend Saturday classes is as good an indicator as any of the seriousness with which they take their studies. When I first went to Yale law school to teach in 1962, Saturday morning classes were standard. I scheduled all my classes for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and thus had the three days of the first half of the week free for writing. The students did not mind the arrangement, some of them brought their weekend dates to class. When I returned to the law school from government in 1977, I learned that students would not take courses with Saturday classes and most would not attend Friday afternoon classes. The object was to get out of New Haven for the weekend as rapidly as possible. The change signified a loss of seriousness about education and intellectual work. The faculty accepted the new attitude, as indeed they had to unless they banded together to insist upon offering Saturday classes. The faculty, in this and other matters, did not care enough to act.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 30
