We all know that something is a little rotten, regarding the
quality of education in the United States, from kindergarten to
commencement. In the nineties it was Goals 2000, a federal rubric
of standards, that got people thinking about what history we were
all being told we had had. More recently the President allied with
Sen. Kennedy to leave no child behind. Periodically there are
screams that teachers should be fired if they do a bad job. We
shake our educational system like a crying baby. The outcome is
about the same — brain damage. The AP reports the latest results of our lugubrious game:
Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle
many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card
offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food. Those are the
sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the
first to target the skills of students as they approach the start
of their careers.
Hard cheese, indeed — but one would take a little solace from
the idea that the academy isn’t where one ought to go to learn how
to excel in the canned goods aisle. We can’t fairly condemn our
universities for not spending their time teaching home economics
instead of, say, critical reading and analysis.
But then one gets to paragraph four in the AP report:
That means they could not interpret a table about
exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper
editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest
rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about
parental involvement in school. The results cut across three types
of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding
documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or
restaurant tips.
It’s a banal disgrace that a freshly minted alum doesn’t quite
know where to begin in tipping the waiter at his own graduation
dinner. It’s true, on the other hand, that radically alienated
social classmates — remember Bush the Elder and the price of milk
and bread? — can be useful and even critical to running the
national show. And long division is not among the keys to
exercising the mental requirements of proper political
citizenship.
But here’s what is: critical reading — the deployment of
actively reasoning literacy. “There was brighter news,” the report
said, with what in Britain would count as withering sarcasm.
“Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly
higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said
that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of
adults includes those with much less education.” As the countryside
fills out with the truly stupid — not the merely uneducated who
once ran America with fierce and steady competence — our dim-bulb
collegians look bright by comparison. Well.
The problem with trying to erect a culture on this system of
trembling crutches is manifold. Not only is it virtually impossible
to get a comprehensive public-school education in the historical,
political, and philosophical development of Western civilization,
in many circumstances subjects like history are given deliberately
the back seat (or thrown out the car) in favor of bastardized
“sociology” courses. This is pretty putrid considering it’s
math-related performance where our tested coeds suffer the most. In
college, of course, you’re taught how to “question” anything you’re
told, anything you’ve been taught, or anything you think, and
though this works quite fine in sexual situations on campus in the
real world it begs desperately for the application of reason that
most graduates have to learn, if barely, in law school. (Whereupon
other embarrassments float to the surface: one eyewitness reported
of a classmate who was not aware, halfway into Constitutional Law,
that the Congress was in fact a bicameral legislature. Class, get
out your dictionaries.)
THE POINT IS NOT, as so many officially fear, that teaching a
soup-to-nuts curriculum of Greek, Hebrew, Roman, British, and
Continental studies will freeze out our students from the broad
world of ideas and challenges that supposedly marks the
cosmopolitan multicultural education. As any college professor
knows, Western civilization has hatched its own spinoffs and
antitheses enough times over to train harbingers of its own
destruction. What critic of the West hasn’t taken walks at the
beach with Marx? Anyone who thinks that Aquinas and Nietzsche
really belong on the same shelf is a degenerate racist,
categorizing sheerly by lumpen ethnic terms.
The only thing sillier and more profane than thinking all white
Westerners think alike is knowing they don’t and pretending they
do. What else could explain the compunction that teaching polar
opposites like Burke and Robespierre is culturally limiting? But
then you look at a figure like Toussaint L’Ouverture, about whom
whole books have been written, who led a blazing life in a time of
madness, and realize that, so long as you get the kids to repeat
the name and appreciate why slaves might be impelled to revolt, you
have done your job on the Haitian rebel as far as the educational
system is concerned. The fact is that Western civilization is wide
and deep enough to conduct even a purposefully multicultural
education inside of it; what this means is that (as was the case in
one instance, I recall) a sixth-grade class needn’t “skip” ancient
Rome because — having spent all spring coloring in life-sized
sarcophagi and building sugar-cube pyramids — “we ran out of
time.”
IT IS DIFFICULT NOT to conclude that we are doomed, educationally,
to a nationwide network of defective mental trade schools, where
our “kids,” who at the age of 25 once ran businesses and dressed
like adults, are being diseducated at both ends. Lacking the
lower-order skills that get a person successfully through their
daily life without getting suckered into bankruptcy or stuck on the
freeway without any gas, today’s students are short of higher-end
skills — rational thought, analytical discrimination, the spark of
life called nimble reason — to the point of deprivation.
Physically, these mental characteristics translate to squalid
obesity, but that, as they say, is another story. I’m sure there’s
a quarterly report coming out for that one, too.
James G. Poulos is a writer and attorney living in
Washington, D.C. His commentaries are found at Postmodern
Conservative.
