The “Softening” of Public Education in America
When a given area of society is experiencing crisis, Americans expect a solution to the problem. In 1994, the National Education Association in conjunction with “the nation’s leading education associations” attempted to do just this: provide a new initiative to make public education better. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the bipartisan commission came back to Congress with its proposed “reform program.”1
Controversy erupted when the report reached the desks of U.S. Representatives and Senators. The reason for the outrage lay in the findings of this curriculum proposal. The classics, innovators, and achievers of the Western world were thrown out; in their place stood a host of dubious substitutes including the poems of the Native American, Speckled Snake, the radical social activism of Dolores Huerta, and the pop music of Madonna. Gone were “patriarchs such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Albert Einstein.” According to the revisionists, “The defining institutions of the future” were “[p]olitical phalanxes like La Raza Unida and the National Organization of Women.”2 In response to public outcry, the Senate adopted a 1995 resolution condemning the reform. While the congressional response appeared to be a triumph, cynics knew otherwise. The same radicals who authored the report were the very persons whose ideas had been running the American educational establishment for decades anyway.
How could the supposed leaders in public education be so out of touch with the people of the United States? According to E. D. Hirsch, an outspoken critic on the quality of public education in America, public education is held captive to certain ideological elites whose theories have ultimately made “K-12 education . . . among the least effective in the developed world.”3 These educators promote “the very antifact, anti-rote-learning, antiverbal practices that have led to poor results. . .”4
Hirsch cites sobering statistics that prove that far more American children score poorly on standardized tests than do their counterparts in other comparable nations such as Taiwan and Japan. Those countries are doing a far better job across the board of educating their people.5 Hirsch draws the obvious conclusion: the public schools are failing significant numbers of children. A corollary thus follows: the system is oppressive to those who do worst—minorities and the poor.6 Herein Hirsch finds a bitter irony: those who claim to want to help the poor and minorities the most wind up hurting them the worst through their failed education policy.7
In his penetrating analysis of American society, political expert Michael Barone has clearly explained conditions of this phenomenon in Hard America, Soft America. Following John Dewey, American educators fell captive to a radical egalitarianism and convinced themselves that practical skills were as important as traditional learning. Writes Barone: “A well-publicized education manifesto published in 1944 proclaimed, ‘There is no aristocracy of ‘subjects’ . . . Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and homemaking are all peers.’”8 As “progressive” education gained steam, American education got increasingly “soft” and less effective.
Barone, however, noticed a strange phenomenon: “I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.”9 But the reason for this is simple: once a young adult hits the workforce, he enters “hard” America—a place where competition forces people to produce excellent work or lose out in the marketplace. It is a shame that eighteen-year-olds are forced to play catch-up.
For American society to remain healthy, it needs thoughtful, well-read, and well-prepared citizens. And therein lies the peril. Without a return to standards and traditional learning, the nation that has helped keep the world free for democracy faces a deadly enemy: a nation of poorly educated children.
| 1 |
Gilbert Sewall, “The Postmodern Schoolhouse,” in Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture, eds. John Thornton and Katherine Washburn (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 58-59. |
| 2 |
La Raza Unida is a fringe political party whose primary concern is solidarity with Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal, living in the United States. See Sewall, 59. |
| 3 |
Eric Donald Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 1. |
| 4 |
Ibid., 69. |
| 5 |
Hirsch goes on to explain, “Fairness and excellence invariably go together in national systems of education because the educational principles and arrangements that elicit the best performances and highest competencies from advantaged students also elicit the best from disadvantaged students. If every child in every grade has to meet a high level of achievement, and if the teachers are able professionals who make sure that the goals are met, all students will learn.” See Ibid., 213-214. |
| 6 |
For example, Hirsch notes that by the time young people reach adulthood, with respect to employment, “Most of the existing wage disparity, that is, some 12 out of 16 percent, can be explained by a disparity in actual educational attainment,” 5. |
| 7 |
See Kairos Journal article, "Was Pearl Harbor Hurt in the Bombing?" |
| 8 |
Michael Barone, Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for America’s Future (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), 26. |
| 9 |
Ibid., 12. |