Our Children and Our Country

...A fortiori, therefore, Bennett argues against the view that teaching is a specialized mystery—a mystery guarded and handed down from expert to expert: Like so many other groups in America [writes Bennett] educational leaders began to view themselves as a confederation of experts, sanctioned by training, tied together by professional associations, supported by science, and aided by elaborate research techniques...

...But this void is precisely what some educationists prefer and advocate: For example, in 1985 the New York Times ran an article quoting New York area educators proclaiming that "they deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong...

...The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors...

...whatever did not contribute "rather directly to the appreciation of methods of human betterment" had no claim to be included in the curriculum...

...The most effective method to teach reading to most children is to establish in their minds the relationship between letters and sounds...

...As a result of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare decreed in 1970 that affirmative action had to be taken to rectify the language deficiency of schoolchildren whose home languagewas not English...

...A document published by the National Educational Association in 1917, The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, laid down the principles which for decades governed the training of schoolteachers, and hence the character of class teaching...

...Bennett answers these absurd accusations, and this chapter perhaps best encapsulates the arguments and attitudes advanced in this collection...

...In another state, the trend was toward ethnocultural courses...

...During the same two decades money spent on education each year per student more than doubled, and the average class size shrank...

...is more important to the nurture and protection of a child than a parent, and that a sensible government will recognize—and indeed take advantage of the fact—that seldom can it match or replace the care a parent can offer...

...Their confidence in their own expertise became so optimistic, in fact, that one educator predicted that "through the knowledge of the science of human nature and its work in the industries, professions, and trades, the average graduate of Teachers College in 1950 ought to be able to give better advice to a high school boy about the choice of an occupation than Solomon, Socrates, and Benjamin Franklin all together could give...

...The first reflection which occurs to one on approaching the book—indeed on looking at the dust jacket with its description of the author as Secretary of Education—is to wonder why a country like the U.S., with its federal Constitution and considerable dispersal of public powers, should at all have such an office...

...It is also the one which is most self-reflective...

...That education should be the affair of the government we can understand in the Greek polls with its stifling lack of a distinction between the private and the public, and with its ruling assumption that the polites is, from birth to death, under the control of his polls...

...But in 1974, 1978, and 1984, Congress insisted that school districts seeking federal funds should educate children solely through their native, non-English language in the belief that instruction should be given "with appreciation for the cultural heritage" of minority, non-English-speaking (and chiefly Hispanic) children...

...Moral issues are continually arising which raise great, sometimes agonizing, perplexities: nuclear war, abortion, euthanasia...

...He remarks that the most important role of the Department of Education in its brief history has been to provide information...

...William Bennett's mind, as this book discloses it to be, is a heartening example of what this civilization can nurture, and eventually call upon for its protection and defense...

...Secretary of Education—an office he held between 1985 and 1988...

...As Bennett sees it, there is the same great disproportion between the enormous sums accruing to universities from fees, corporate benefactions, and foundation grants and the mediocrity of the results...

...and in 1985, 61 percent of all high school seniors (i.e., roughly two million) had million) had tried illicit drugs...

...But unless there has been education in moral literacy, these issues remain suspended in a relativistic void, where one value or one solution is seen to be as valid as the next one...

...Universities, however, have abandoned the central task of giving students a liberal education, so that they now "tend to lack a knowledge of their own tradition, they often have no standpoint from which to appreciate any other tradition, or even to have a sense of tradition...

...The consequences are visible and disquieting: a survey of eleventh-graders conducted in 1986 reveals that two-thirds could not place the Civil War within the period 1850-1900, one-third did not know that the Declaration of Independence was signed between 1750 and 1800, and one-third did not know that Columbus sailed before 1750...

...In modern times, that children's education should be primarily the affair of the state is the invention of European enlightened absolutism—a political tradition at the opposite pole from that embodied in the U.S...

...The need to teach them arises from the fact that though they are generally known and accepted, children are not born with a knowledge of them...

...Also, as Bennett notes, in one state, history teachers were being encouraged to emphasize concepts that transcend "any given historical situation...

...School education in the formal sense has also in many respects failed...

...It has rather to do with the abdication of both school and university in the field of moral education...

...The policy, in Bennett's words, was "confused as to purpose and overbearing as to means...

...His modest estimate of what the federal government, or perhaps any central public authority, can do in this sphere goes together with his insistence that no one Elie Kedourie is professor of politics at the London School of Economics...

...What has been substituted for a liberal education is a cafeteria-style curriculum lacking any coherence or rationale...

...enjoys the highest rate of teenage pregnancy of any industrial country...

...And it is only by drawing on this tradition that we incorporate new generations into our common world...

...Another episode in pedagogical doctrine and policy recounted by Bennett is also worth considering...

...One's own experience in teaching undergraduates even in good U.S...

...For here is a public official with a cultivated and scholarly mind, whose discourse is both clear and coherent, and who feels no need to adopt a politic disguise for his views, or wrap up his meaning in bland circumlocutions...

...in another, the focus was on problem solving, decision making...

...Here, too, pedagogical theory may account for this state of affairs...

...But they will discover fairly quickly how mistaken they are...

...the U.S...

...One of the latest is reflected in the view, which some university teachers have now adopted, that Western values and the Western civilization of which they are the expression are nothing special and should have no privileged place, or perhaps no place at all, in the curriculum...

...Mr...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 41...

...Among the many important points he makes here is that, of all civilizations, the Western is the most self-aware and self-critical, and the one which has learned to be open to other cultures, to study and to learn from them...

...The overwhelming evidence is that this policy, which in seventeen years has cost $1.7 billion, has in no way benefited those it was designed to help...

...This report declared that the major purpose of modern education is to promote what it called "social efficiency...

...One fundamental requirement in the education of the young is the inculcation of moral literacy...

...homicide among young people and juvenile arrests more than doubled...

...In geography, the picture is similar...

...Constitution...

...In a chapter on "Moral Literacy and the Formation of Character," very Aristotelian in its echoes and resonances, Bennett declares that if we want our children to possess the traits of character we most admire, we need to teach them what those traits are...

...Yet during the same period, aptitude test scores fell eighty-five points...

...If all choices are equivalent to one another, a radical nihilism will sooner or later prevail which no society cansurvive...

...If I come from the position of what is right and what is wrong,' he explained, 'then I'm not their counselor.' " Now, once upon a time a counselor offered counsel, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering "choices" or "options...

...Given the nature of speeches usually delivered by public men and politicians, it is likely that readers will come to such a book with low expectations...

...And in teaching these traits, we are not reinventing the wheel, but rather drawing on the moral traditions which are transmitted from one generation to the next...

...According to the article, when the students asked the counselor's opinion, "He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them...

...universities would confirm these findings...

...Here, there can be seen a direct connection between pedagogical theory and mediocre results...

...In a chapter, "Why Western Civilization...

...Too many children have failed to become fluent in English, and have thus been denied the opportunities of employment and self-improvement which might have been open to them...

...One means of rectification was to use the schoolchild's home language at school in order to help him learn English...

...Bennett seems to be very much aware of all this...

...OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COUNTRY: IMPROVING AMERICA'S SCHOOLS AND AFFIRMING THE COMMON CULTURE William J. Bennett/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Elie Kedourie This book is a collection of twen- ty- four speeches and lectures which William Bennett delivered as U.S...

...In the course of that session the students concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return $1,000 she found in a purse at the school...

...the OAH predicted that history would be supplanted by more "relevant" courses such as consumer affairs, ecology, and multicultural studies...

...From 1960 to 1980 federal welfare spending rose 437 percent—from $69.2 billion to $302.8 billion...

...It is not surprising that an inquiry undertaken in 1975 by the Organization of American Historians should have found that in some states virtually no training in history is demanded from secondary school teachers...

...Again, instead of being inducted into the history of their own country, and given a grounding in the elementary facts of geography, schoolchildren "are submerged in a mass of extraneous information, derived from disciplines like anthropology, sociology, law, economics, and psychology...

...The pieces are hortatory exercises in which the author seeks to clarify for his (mainly professional) audiences the meaning and implications of school and university education, to warn of features and trends he believes to be undesirable and alarming, and to offer possible remedies...

...T he most radical distemper which William Bennett identifies in both school and university has to do not with pedagogical theories or the prevalence of cafeteria-style curricula...

...In 1984, for instance, corporations gave $1.25 billion and foundations $1 billion...

...Ninety-five percent of university students in North Carolina did not know the approximate population of the U.S., or in what countries Baghdad, Lisbon, Madras, Manila, Capetown, and Budapest are located...

...This relativism is both insidious and powerful, and it takes many forms...

...Bennett opposed this view in a report on the humanities in higher education published in 1984...

...But for a half-century, the "look-say" method, which relies on a 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 child memorizing the appearance of entire words, was persistently followed in the face of much evidence that it did not work...

...But to judge from facts and figures disclosed in this collection, there is little evidence that schoolchildren have benefited from the ministrations of such superior beings...

...In 1986 a panel of professors from leading colleges and universities denounced Bennett's views as "sexist, elitist, imperialist, bourgeois, ethnocentric, racist, selfish and solipsistic...