The calamity that is American Education

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The following is from:

Thomas Sowell. Inside American Education. Chapter 1.

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Preface

LIKE MANY other people, I have long been appalled by the low quality and continuing deterioration

of American education. However, after doing the research for this book, I am frankly surprised that the results are not even worse than they are. The incredibly counterproductive fads, fashions, and dogmas of American education—from the kindergarten to the colleges—have yet to take their full toll, in part because all the standards of earlier times have not yet been completely eroded away. But the inevitable retirement of an older generation of teachers and professors must leave the new trends (and their accompanying Newspeak) as the dominant influence on the shaping of education in the generations to come.

Much has been said about how our young people do not meet the academic standards of their peers in other countries with which we compete economically. While this is both true and important, their academic deficiencies are only half the story. All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by psychological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also promote an emotionalized and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society. Worst of all, the psychotherapeutic curriculum systematically undermines the parent-child relationship and the shared values which make a society possible.

Parents who send their children to school with instructions to respect and obey their teachers may be surprised to discover how often these children are sent back home conditioned to disrespect and disobey their parents. While psychological-conditioning programs may not succeed in producing the atomistic society, or the self-sufficient and morally isolated individual which seems to be their ideal, they may nevertheless confuse children who receive very different moral and social messages from school and home. In short, too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.

At the college and university level, the intrusion of nonintellectual and anti-intellectual material into the curriculum takes more of an ideological, rather than a psychological, form. New courses, new departments, and whole new programs concentrate on leading students to preconceived ideological conclusions, rather than developing the student's ability to analyze issues so as to reach independent conclusions. The particular subject matter of these ideological courses and programs may range from race to the environment or foreign policy, but the general approach is the same, not only in its fundamental anti-intellectualism, but also in its underlying hostility to American society and Western civilization, and the tendentiousness or even dishonesty with which it attempts to indoctrinate. Here again, the danger is not that these methods will succeed in achieving their goals, but that they will undermine or cripple education in the attempt.

Thomas Sowell

Hoover Institution

Decline, Deception, Dogmas

VIRTUALLY EVERYONE has heard how poorly American students perform, whether compared to foreign students or to American students of a generation ago. What everyone may not know are the specifics of how bad the situation has become, how and why the public has been deceived, or the dogmas and hidden agendas behind it all.

The general decline in educational performance that began in the 1960s encompassed elementary and secondary education, as well as education at the college level. The evidences of this decline include not only results on a variety of objective tests, but also first-hand observations by teachers and professors, and dismaying experiences by employers who have found the end-product seriously lacking. The most widely known decline was in the scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). However, scores also declined on the rival American College Testing Program (ACT) examination, as well as on the Iowa Test of Educational Development, and on a variety of local tests. As of 1991, only 11 percent of the eighth-grade students in California's public schools could solve seventh-grade math problems .

Significantly, this era of declining academic performance has also been a period of rising grades. American high schools gave out approximately twice as many C's as A's in 1966, but by 1978 the A's actually exceeded the C's. By 1990, more than one-fifth of all entering freshmen in college averaged A minus or above for their entire high school careers. At private universities, entering freshmen with averages of A minus or above were an absolute majority — 54 percent.

Similar grade inflation has become common at the college level. Between 1958 and 1988, the average grade at Dartmouth rose from C to B. More specifically, the Dartmouth student body's grade-point average rose from 2.2 in 1958 to 3.2 in 1988. At the University of Chicago, the once common grade of C constituted only 15 percent of all grades by 1988—yet Chicago's grades are considered "comparatively low" relative to grades at comparable institutions around the country. At Yale, for example, the proportion of grades that were A's never fell below 40 percent during the entire decade of the 1980s. At Smith College, likewise, A's were 40 percent of all grades by the end of the 1980s—a tripling of the proportion of A's over a period of 25 years—and A's and B's combined constituted more than 90 percent of all grades. Rare is the college like Franklin & Marshall, where the student body's grade-point average has remained consistently below B over the years.

Among the factors behind nationwide rises in college grades, in addition to more lenient grading by professors, have been such widespread practices as not recording failing grades on the student's records, allowing students to withdraw from class when a failing grade is impending, and ordinary cheating. Between 1966 and 1988, the proportion of students cheating increased by 78 percent, according to a national survey.

These two trends—grade inflation and declining test scores—are by no means unconnected. Without the systematic deception of parents and the public by rising grades, it is highly unlikely that the decline in performance could have continued so long. The deeper question is—Why? Whose purposes are being served, and whose agendas are being advanced, as American education declines?

Performance and Deception

Perhaps nothing so captures what is wrong with American schools as the results of an international study of 13-year-olds which found that Koreans ranked first in mathematics and Americans last. When asked if they thought they were "good at mathematics," only 23 percent of the Korean youngsters said "yes"—compared to 68 percent of American 13-year-olds.'" The American educational dogma that students should "feel good about themselves" was a success in its own terms—though not in any other terms. A related educational dogma is that learning must be enjoyable to be effective. However, another international study found that a higher percentage of Japanese twelfth-graders disliked mathematics than did their American counterparts—but the Japanese did much better on mathematics tests."

When nearly one-third of American 17-year-olds do not know that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, when nearly half do not know who Josef Stalin was, and when about 30 percent could not locate Britain on a map of Europe,¹² then it is clear that American educational deficiencies extend far beyond mathematics. As for trends over time, perhaps the best-known and most revealing statistic is that scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), taken by high school seniors applying for college admissions, began declining in the early 1960s and did not begin to rise again until the early 1980s. This decline was gradual but steady, falling from a composite verbal-and-quantitative score of 980 in 1963 to 890 in 1980 and 1981. Despite a small upturn, the average SAT score has never returned to the level it reached more than a quarter of a century ago. As of 1990, the average combined verbal-math SAT score was 900-10 points above the low of 1980 but still 80 points below the high of 1963. As of 1991, the average verbal SAT score dropped to an all-time low.

Even these data do not capture the full story of educational disaster in American public schools. Members of the educational establishment often try to downplay such evidence by dismissing the importance of mere "facts" acquired by "rote" memory." Unfortunately, as we turn from simple knowledge to more complex abilities in reasoning, the full debacle of American education becomes even more painfully clear. An international study of thirteen-year-olds showed that American youngsters fell further and further behind, the more they were required to think.

When given science questions on "everyday facts" American youngsters did almost as well as Korean youngsters, answering correctly 96 percent of the time, as compared to 100 percent among the Koreans. But when required to "apply simple principles," a significant gap opened up, as Koreans answered correctly 93 percent of the time and Americans only 78 percent of the time. Going on to a higher level, requiring students to "analyze experiments," Korean youngsters answered correctly 73 percent of the time, while Americans answered correctly only 42 percent of the time. At a still higher level of analysis, where only 33 percent of Korean students could answer correctly, only 12 percent of Americans could answer correctly. In short, while American youngsters could pretty much hold their own at the level of simple facts, the advantage shifted decisively in favor of the Korean youngsters when thinking was involved, becoming more than a two-to-one advantage when more sophisticated levels of reasoning were reached.

Science is not the only field in which American students are lacking in knowledge and—more importantly—in the ability to tie what they know together to form a coherent chain of reasoning. Many American students seem unaware of even the need for such a process. Test scores are only the tip of the iceberg. Professor Diane Ravitch, a scholar specializing in the study of American education, reports that "professors complain about students who arrive at college with strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively for their beliefs." As Professor Ravitch concludes: "Having opinions without knowledge is not of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a positive indicator of ignorance." In short, it is not merely that Johnny can't read, or even that Johnny can't think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

Psycho-Therapeutic “Education”

The phrase "I feel" is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say "I think," or "I know," much less "I conclude." Unfortunately, "I feel" is often the most accurate term—and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them. When a reporter who spent months in a Los Angeles high school asked graduating seniors what they had learned, he received this reply from a boy described as "the smartest student in the class":

I learned that in the Vietnam War, North and South Korea fought against each other, and then there was a truce at the 38th parallel, and that Eisenhower had something to do with it.

The reporter asked: Would it bother you to know that the things you learned were wrong?

The answer was: Not really. Because what we really learned from Miss Silver was that we were worth listening to, that we could express ourselves and that an adult would listen, even if we were wrong. That's why Miss Silver will always be our favorite teacher. She made us feel like we mattered, like we were important.

The teacher herself saw her role in very similar terms:

I want to be real in class and be a human being. . . . And I want my students to know that they can be themselves and I'll still listen to them. I want every one of them to have a chance to express himself or herself. Those are my priorities.

Neither this teacher nor this school was unique. A large literature has urged teachers to be nonjudgmental, to “humanize” the classroom to raise the “self-esteem” of students. A leading writer on such matters, the late psychotherapist Carl Rogers, spoke of "helping students to prize themselves, to build their confidence and self-esteem," of "teachers who are real persons" and who "humanize their classrooms." ' It was assumed that intellectual development would be part of this process. The Los Angeles reporter's observation, however, was that the students he saw "know little in the way of organized thought processes or even basic ways of solving intellectual problems." While the reporter noted the "sincerity or intensity" of the teachers, he nevertheless concluded: "A human being who has not been taught to think clearly is a danger in a free society."

Too many American students learn neither an intellectual process nor a knowledge base, nor acquire habits of study. Writer Mary McCarthy, after a stint on campus as a visiting professor, said that today's college students seemed "almost totally ignorant of the whole period spanned by my life, to say nothing of what happened before." More generally, a Carnegie Foundation survey of faculty members found that 67 percent of the professors reported "a widespread lowering of standards in American higher education," 75 percent characterized their students as "seriously under-prepared in basic skills," and 62 percent reported "grade inflation" as a problem at their colleges. Moreover, 55 percent said that undergraduates at their institution "only do enough to get by." Just how little that is may be indicated by the fact that only 33 percent of college students put in 16 or more hours of study per week outside of class in 1985—and this declined to 23 percent by 1988. As of 1966, 52 percent of all college freshmen had checked at least one book out of a library during the preceding year. By 1990, only 27 percent had done so .²⁸

Educators and parents are not the only ones dissatisfied with the kinds of students American schools are turning out. A survey of Fortune 500 companies showed that 58 percent complained of the difficulty of finding employees with basic skills. The Chief Executive Officer of Pacific Telesis reported: "Only four out of every 10 candidates for entry-level jobs at Pacific Telesis are able to pass our entry exams, which are based on a seventh-grade level." In 1989, New York Life began air- lifting its health insurance claims to Ireland for processing, because American workers made too many mistakes.

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Excuses for Failure

The responses of the educational establishment to the academic deficiencies of their students today include (1) secrecy, (2) camouflage, (3) denial, (4) shifting the blame elsewhere, and (5) demanding more money.

"Confidentiality" policies maintain secrecy, while inflated grades and a policy of not recording failing grades help many institutions to camouflage the facts, so that optimistic public statements can effectively deny what is happening. When the facts become so blatant as to overwhelm these defenses, the strategy is simply to shift the blame to some other factor—outside the educational system. These include both social factors and financial resources.

Social Factors

Although educators have been quick to blame the failures of the schools on factors outside the schools, there has been remarkably little critical examination of these claims. It is unquestionably true that the home backgrounds of children influence how well they do in school, and that these backgrounds vary by social class and by race. However, to say that an influence exists is not to say that it explains the particular pattern that we see.

Many have tried to use the changing social mixture of students in American schools and colleges as an explanation of declining test scores, American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker used this tactic during a 1986 debate at the University of California at Davis. During the period of falling SAT scores, Shanker said, schools had "discouraged students from dropping out," thereby retaining "more difficult youngsters," whose scores presumably lowered the average.

In reality, however, SAT scores declined at the top, not because there were more low scores averaged in. More than 116,000 scored above 600 on the verbal SAT in 1972 and fewer than 71,000 scored that high ten years later. Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, median SAT scores dropped at colleges from coast to coast, including the most prestigious institutions. Both verbal and quantitative SAT scores declined at Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, the University of Chicago, Oberlin, Rice, Brandeis, Carleton, Pomona, Reed, Whitman, and Davidson, for example. The composite score decline was more than 100 points at Brandeis and Reed. As Diane Ravitch put it: "The shrinkage of the top scorers has proceeded steadily since the 1960s and obviously is unrelated to the overall composition of the test group." Obviously—except to the educational establishment.

The false argument that retaining a higher proportion of low-performance students accounts for low average scores is also used to excuse the dismal performance of American students in international comparisons. But virtually all 13-year-olds are in school in all the countries surveyed in international mathematics performance surveys. While some countries have a smaller proportion of their students remain in school to reach the last year of high school than the United States does, Japan has an even higher proportion staying in school to finish than the U.S. does, so selectivity can hardly explain the superior performance of the Japanese. Carnegie Foundation President Ernest L. Boyer has claimed that for "a small percentage of students" at the top, "the American high school provides an outstanding education, perhaps the finest in the world." However, this wholly unsubstantiated statement is contradicted by the results of international tests. The top 5 percent of American high school seniors scored last on algebra and calculus tests administered to the top 5 percent of twelfth-graders from a dozen countries.

While it is undoubtedly true that there are many negative Factors at work in many low-income neighborhood schools, especially those in the inner-city ghettos and barrios, that does not automatically explain away the declining academic performances of American schools in general. Black and Hispanic students have lower than average test scores on such examinations as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, but their SAT scores cannot explain the national decline, for Hispanic scores have risen during much of the national decline, and black scores have risen still more.

Even in low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods, Catholic and other private schools have often produced far better academic results than the public schools in the same areas. The public schools' usual attempts to escape comparisons by claiming that Catholic and other private schools have children from higher-income, better-educated families will not work in these particular cases. A Rand Corporation study not only confined its sample of Catholic schools to those in low-income ghetto and barrio neighborhoods in New York, but also included youngsters whose parents did not pay to send them to Catholic schools, but whose tuition there was paid by private individuals who wanted to enable an unselected sample of public school children to attend Catholic schools, to see if these unselected youngsters would also do better than those remaining in the public schools. The youngsters who transferred into the Catholic schools did significantly better than their peers who remained in the public schools, even though these transferees from the public school came mostly from single-parent households on welfare and entered the Catholic schools two or more years behind on placement tests, some scoring in the bottom tenth. For that matter, some special public schools located in poor neighborhoods also did much better than most other public schools. In short, better schools produce demonstrably better results, even in the worst neighborhoods.

The serious social problems of many inner city youngsters cannot explain the downward trend of American education in general, nor even fully explain the educational catastrophes in bad neighborhoods. The fervor with which various social problems are seized upon as explanations of American educational deficiencies is not based on any evidence that will stand up under scrutiny. These explanations are only a symptom of the desperate necessity of shoring up the dogma that educational failures could not possibly be the fault of the public school system.

Financial Factors

When all else fails, spokesmen and apologists for the education establishment blame a lack of money—often expressed as a lack of "commitment" by the public or the government—for their problems. The issue is posed as how "serious" the public, or its political leaders, are about "investing" in the education of the next generation. This cleverly turns the tables on critics and loads guilt onto the tax-paying public for the failures of American schools and colleges. Implicit in all this is the wholly unsupported assumption that more money means better education. Neither comparisons among states, comparisons over time, nor international comparisons, lend any credence to this arbitrary (and self-serving) assumption.

States that spend more per pupil in the public schools do not generally have any better educational performance to show for it. The correlation between financial inputs and educational outputs is very weak and shaky. Connecticut, for example, spent more than $4,000 per pupil in 1984 but student test scores were lower than those in Vermont, which spent just under $3,000 per pupil. Rhode Island also spent close to $4,000 per pupil and had the lowest average SAT scores of the three. New York state spent more than $5,000 per pupil that year, finished just barely ahead of Rhode Island, and significantly behind Vermont. One could cite other cases where the more expensively educated students did better but, over all, there is no real evidence to support the claim that more money means better educational quality. More affluent communities are typically better-educated communities, where parents emphasize education to their children, and may be more willing and able to put more money into the local schools. But it is by no means clear that whatever better educational results come out of this combination of circumstances is due to the money. A highly respected Brookings Institution study concluded: "When other relevant factors are taken into account, economic resources are unrelated to student achievement."

One reason why spending has so little effect on educational performance is that most of the money never reaches the classroom. Studies of the Milwaukee and New York City school systems show that less than half the money spent per high school student in New York or per elementary school student In Milwaukee actually reached the school—and less than a third of the total expenditure went to classroom services. Over a period of a quarter of a century, teachers' salaries have been a declining percentage of school budgets, as bureaucracies and other non-instructional costs absorbed the growing sums of money being spent on the educational establishment.

Looking at money input and educational output over time makes the education establishment's claims of inadequate financing look even more ridiculous. The period of declining test scores was also a period when expenditures on education were rising—rising not only in money terms but also in real terms, allowing for inflation. Per-pupil expenditures rose 27 percent in real terms during the decade of the 1970s and 29 percent in real terms during the decade of the 1980s. This was after a huge 58 percent increase in real terms during the decade of the 1960s—which was the very decade when the long decline in performance began. Financial input was not lacking. Educational output was lacking—and still is.

An international look at per-pupil expenditures likewise gives the lie to claims that more money produces better education. Despite claims that money is needed to hire more teachers to relieve "overcrowded classrooms," the United States already has a smaller average class size than a number of countries whose educational achievements are higher. Japan, for example, averages 41 students per class, compared to 26 for the United States. In mathematics, where the performance gap is especially glaring, the average class size in Japan is 43, compared to 20 in the U .S. Within the United States, the ratio of pupils to teachers declined throughout the entire era from the 1960s to the 1980s, when test scores were also declining.

In over-all per-pupil expenditure, the U.S. ranks near the top, even though the performance of its students often ranks at or near the bottom. American elementary and secondary school pupils receive more educational expenditures each than pupils in most Western European countries, more than pupils in Canada, more than 50 percent higher expenditures than in Japan or Australia, and more than twice the per-pupil expenditure in New Zealand. Our schools are already turning out some of the most expensive incompetents anywhere. Making them still more expensive will not change that.

Here too the education establishment has resorted to deception, in order to deny plain facts and claim more money. Instead of comparing real expenditures per pupil in various countries. they compare the percentage of annual national output devoted to education, as "a measure of national effort." Because the United States has the largest national output in the world, the percentage going to education is lower than that in some other countries, though not usually by much. But percentages are not a measure of resources. Existing resources devoted to educating pupils in the United States already exceed what other nations have found sufficient to produce much better results. It is not "national effort" that is lacking. What is lacking is the educational system's ability to deliver results after it has been supplied with ample resources.

Higher Education

At the college level, the claim that more money translates into better education is likewise blatantly fallacious. As increasingly vast sums of money have poured into colleges and universities over the past half-century, one of the most striking results has been that professors have taught fewer and fewer classes, and have done more and more research. When Jacques Barzun wrote his classic Teacher in America back in the 1940s, he referred to a typical college professor spending 15 hours a week in the classroom. Today, even half of that time would be considered an excessive teaching load at many institutions. Indeed, 35 percent of today's faculty teach undergraduates only 4 hours a week or less. At research universities, 51 percent of the faculty teach undergraduates only 4 hours or less, and fewer than 10 percent spend as much as 11 hours a week teaching undergraduates. However, more than half of research university faculty spend 11 or more hours per week on research.

College professors, like elementary and high school teachers, often claim that their time in the classroom underestimates how much time they spend on instruction, because it omits the time spent preparing lectures, grading examinations, and the like. For university professors, the teaching of graduate students must be added to their undergraduate teaching load, though graduate seminars often require little or no preparation on the professor's part, when they serve primarily as a forum for the presentation of students' papers. Still, a study of the total time spent on duties relating to instruction showed an average of only about 15 hours a week among faculty at research universities, slightly less than the time spent on research—and less than one third of all their weekly working hours, including time spent taking part in various scholarly activities and earning additional money with outside consulting, lecturing, or other activities. More money for higher education will never mean more teaching—much less better teaching—as long as that money goes into reducing teaching loads and financing more research.

At Harvard, the number of faculty members more than doubled between 1952 and 1974, while the undergraduate student population grew by only 14 percent. Yet the number of courses enrolling undergraduates actually fell by 28 percent. At the University of Wisconsin, a study found that only about one-fourth of the economics professors taught two courses in the semester surveyed. As long as research competes with teaching for the time of professors, throwing more money at colleges and universities is unlikely to improve either the quantity or the quality of education. The amount of money currently being thrown at higher education is already so large that there are literally dozens of institutions receiving more than $100 million each in research and development funds. Johns Hopkins University receives more than $500 million The money it receives in tuition payments is less than one-fifth its annual receipts. In academia, as elsewhere, money talks—and what it says is "research."

It is not only the attraction of research money that lures professors out of the classroom. The spread of the publish-or-perish principle reinforces a drive for research at the expense of teaching. More than three-quarters of all faculty members at four-year academic institutions say that it is difficult for anyone to get tenure in their department without publishing. In research universities, more than 90 percent say so. One symptom of the relative importance given to teaching versus research are the many instances of untenured faculty members who receive teacher-of-the-year awards, only to be told that their contracts will not be renewed. During a recent span of years at M.I.T., three out of four untenured recipients of such awards were denied tenure.

None of this is meant to claim that research is not important, nor even to assess its relative importance compared to teaching. The point is simply that more money does not translate into more or better education, at the college or university level, any more than elsewhere in the American educational system.

Dogmas and Agendas

American education is undermined by numerous dogmas and numerous hidden agendas. The dogmas fall into two general categories—dogmas about education and dogmas about the larger society. "Self-esteem," "role models," "diversity," and other buzzwords dominate educational policy—without evidence being either asked or given to substantiate the beliefs they represent. Sweeping beliefs about the general society, or about how life ought to be lived, likewise become prevalent among educators without empirical verification being required. More important, world-saving crusades based on such beliefs have increasingly intruded into the classroom, from kindergarten to college, crowding out the basic skills that American students lack. Some of this represents changing view's among educators as to the role of education. Behind much of the world-saving curriculum, however, are the organized efforts of outside interests and movements, determined to get their special messages into the classroom.

For example, a pharmaceutical company which manufactures birth control products supplies thousands of so-called "sex education" kits to high schools. Automobile interests promote driver education. Such commercial interests are joined by psychological experimenters, disarmament advocates, crusaders for world population control, and innumerable other "causes" that invade the classroom to absorb time sorely needed to teach American children to read, write, do mathematics—and to learn to think critically, rather than repeat propaganda.

Unfortunately, the educational establishment itself is heavily involved in non-educational issues, fashions, and crusades. A symptom of this mindset can be found in the February 1990 Issue of PTA Today magazine, published by the National Parent-Teacher Association, featuring articles on (1) diet and cancer; (2) food allergies; (3) radon gas dangers; (4) medicines; (5) vaccination; (6) speech disorders; (7) aging and dying; (8) AIDS; (9) teenage drivers; (10) corporal punishment and (11) being a hospital patient. Not one article dealt with the educational basics in which American schools are so deficient. Instead, the focus was on matters of personal lifestyle and general world-saving. The largest teacher's union in the country, the National Education Association, likewise often wanders far afield from education, to promote all sorts of ideological crusades. At the N.E.A.'s annual meeting in 1991, for example, delegates passed resolutions on things ranging from nuclear weapons to immigration, housing, highways, environmentalism, and "development of renewable energy resources." These political interests of the education establishment often find their way right into the classroom, as children are given assignments to write letters to public officials, in order to forward such political agendas, whether to urge the President of the United States toward a certain policy on nuclear weapons, or to demand that state legislators appropriate more money for education. It speaks volumes about today's educators that a captive audience of school children would be used in this way.

At the college level, the world-saving agendas are even more blatant, as whole fields and departments have been created to promote particular causes, under such names as "environmental studies," "peace studies," and various racial or ethnic "studies" boosting group images, promoting ideological visions, and often serving as organizing and recruiting centers for political activism.

Much of the politicizing of education during the current era happens to have been done by the political left, and much of the exposure and criticism of it has therefore come from conservatives, but it would be a very serious mistake to think that this issue is basically political. Increasing numbers of honest people of liberal, and even radical, views have likewise been appalled at the prostitution of education for ideological ends. The liberal Washington Post for example, has criticized one of the widely-used curriculum guides by saying that it "is not education, it is political indoctrination." The liberal New Republic has denounced the ideological version of "multiculturalism" as being "neither multi nor cultural," but instead an attempt to impose "a unanimity of thought on campus." Marxist scholar Eugene Genovese has urged "honest people across the spectrum" to stand up for academic principles and to oppose "the new wave of campus barbarism." In short, the politicization of education is not fundamentally a political issue, but an educational issue.

The educational consequences of ideological indoctrination efforts are likely to be far more serious than the political consequences. The ideologies of young people in schools or in colleges are not set in concrete. Most of the leading conservative figures of our time were once either liberals (like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman) or outright radicals (like Friedrich Hayek and Irving Kristol). The politicization of education is unlikely to have as much long run effect on politics as it does on education. It is not the particular goals of ideological zealots which are at issue here, but the damage they are doing to American education while pursuing those goals. The real issue is not political "imbalance," as some conservative critics have claimed, for adding more teachers and professors from the political right, doing what those on the left are doing, would not solve the educational problem.

Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: "Haven't any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?"

These are not isolated incidents. Nor is the emotional shock treatment confined to this issue, as we will see in Chapter 3, a whole new social phenomenon known as "affective education" has spread across the country, seeking to re-shape the moral values, personal habits, and social mindsets of American children. Affective education is not to be confused with effective education. Indeed, it is one of many agendas which distract schools from effective education. The emotionalizing of education not only takes time away from intellectual development; it also casts teachers in the role of amateur psychologists, though they are unqualified to gauge the consequences of their manipulations of children's emotions. Beyond that, it is the very antithesis of education.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence. The attempts of schools and colleges to encompass far more than they can handle are an important part of the reason why they are handling education so poorly.

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I attended a small one-room country school from grades one to eight. I believe I got a good basic education at that small school. And I believe I got a far better education than most children receive today in our large elementary and secondary city schools. The teacher in that small school never did any lecturing. I would say the instruction was rather similar to what one would get in home-schooling. The instruction was all basics: Reading, writing and arithmetic and basic subjects like geography, history, and science (science didn’t really interest me in grade school — but I liked history and geography). Also, every so often the entire school engaged in some art project (like finger-painting).

I have described the teaching in that little one-room school in the article Basic Principles of Teaching.

I would point out that the knowledge and skills required to teach in this type system are simply a good knowledge and understanding of the subjects that are taught in grammar school: arithmetic, English grammar, world history, geography, etc. The teaching process is similar to that of a parent who is homeschooling his child. No special training is required. Knowledge and good common sense are the main requirements. The textbooks do all of the teaching and the quality of the instruction depends almost completely on the quality of the textbooks and other teaching material used.

It is my opinion that the source of most of what is wrong in American education today has its source in America’s teacher’s colleges. Wrong ideas, wrong outlooks, wrong assumptions. I think the teachers in America today are doing gigantic damage and I think the root of the problem is the foolish ideas, outlooks and methods instilled into teacher’s minds in teacher’s colleges — in teacher training courses. And underlying all of the foolishness is modern psychology.

When I was a boy the book that had by far the biggest influence on me was the Bible. And it is still the most important book of all for me. All that I am is built on that solid foundation. America has abandoned the Bible and Christianity and that is the fundamental cause of all of its many, many problems.

To me the only real benefits I received from my four years of high school were from the algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, and biology subjects that I took. If a person were not interested in mathematics or science, I don’t think he would miss much in simply having a good eighth grade education. I was from the country and never went to any of the school football games or social activities of high school. I was a loner and was not interested socializing. I was required to take gym, and I liked it, but I don’t think it was very important. Latin was offered but I didn’t take it.

9 Mar 2024