Inside American Education

...Parents who resist having their children braihwashed will need all the ammunition they can find...

...The anti-parent, anti–traditional authority emphasis implicit in the curriculum materials of many "innovative" programs nationwide is promoted by activist organizations and welcomed by susceptible educators willing to accept non-intellectual and even anti-intellectual fads that displace academic learning...

...No challenge to .the accepted dogmas of the moment is permitted, and this in institutions once dedicated to reasoned argument intended to illuminate diverse points of view...

...We are producing a student body of what Sowell calls confident incompetents...

...The classroom has become a huge laboratory for social experiment, pushed by special-interest groups in the name of sexual tolerance, or multiculturalism, or bilingualism, or peace, or even acceptance of death...

...Sowell has surveyed the whole sorry mess that has been made of American education and laid out for us just what has happened and how, done by whom and what for, and even suggested where to begin to get things right...

...Naturally enough, men and women whose intellectual interests and abilities are not outstanding will not resist the ever-growing intrusion of the non-academic into the curriculum...

...Sowell, who has made a study of racism in many societies, is also quick to point out that there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that bilingual or multicultural programs, or having "role models" of the same race as teachers, contributes in any way to the diminution of racism or discrimination...

...But perhaps the most telling count is that concerning the corruption of admissions standards in elite colleges and universities...

...It is to rob them of the capacity to think at all...

...Admitting large numbers of "minority" students has enhanced their liberal image and gained them hundreds of millions of federal dollars...

...In the ten years since, there have been innumerable attempts to diagnose and prescribe for the condition of our schools and colleges, increasingly enfeebled to the point where American students score among the lowest in international measures of everything but self-esteem...

...Depicted as outer-borough bigots by the Manhattan media and the special interest groups who wield such influence over the city's politicians, the angry parents won anyway...

...T he most basic cause of the decline of academic performance that has occurred throughout the system is, of course, the substitution of social for academic goals, with indoctrination taking the place of intellectual development and the corollary lowering of standards from the earliest grades up...

...Jeavercrook...

...Sowell is different from most of the authors who have been pointing out what ails American education, and not only because of the breadth of his view...

...And this in a time when spending on education has reached mind-boggling levels...

...Job barriers and job security succeed in keeping the most capable and talented out of teaching...

...It was a small victory in an enormous battle, a battle in which power is unevenly distributed...

...Among the misleadingly labeled programs that make up the new orthodoxy in education are "bilingualism," actually a separatist foreign-language program, and "multiculturalism," which promotes a sense of grievance among those encouraged to retain their identity as members of "oppressed minorities" and to condemn American society and Western civilization...

...The result is a document that may transcend its moment...

...Non-academic criteria have increasingly displaced academic records and test scores, as admissions officers have claimed to be on the lookout for promise of future leadership, something there is no evidence whatsoever they can assess or predict...

...The hypocrisy and double standards that are at work in college admissions...

...For one, he is an economist, who understands the perverse incentives that institutionalize educational mediocrity and is capable of laying out in sharp relief the interests of the various groups that, in their different ways, feed off federal money and student powerlessness...

...The disastrous results of preferential admissions are plain to see as campuses become increasingly segregated voluntarily, while officials turn a blind eye to the counterproductive effects of their cherished dogmas...

...S owell's indictment of higher education is just as unsparing...

...The values and beliefs children learn at home are generally very different from the vision of the world "affective education" attempts to put in their place by means of psychological conditioning techniques...

...Education degrees work like protective tariffs, insulating the products of the education-school establishment from competition...

...These are all proposals worth supporting if we are to take back the schools before they self-destruct...

...CI/ n February 1993 a local school board in New York City rose up in revolt against the city's chancellor of education, refusing to use curricular materials that would introduce first-graders to "non-traditional families," gay and lesbian parents, and the various forms of sexual activity possible when literally no holds are barred...

...Like the packagers of innovative programs for the public schools, the nation's campuses are served by a huge industry of race relations specialists and "diversity consultants...

...It is a model of reason and logic, common sense and clarity, and is therefore sure to be ignored and/or reviled by those who most need to hear its message...

...The creeping inclusion of non-academic courses and programs in the classroom—whether they are called "values-clarification" or "family-life education" or go by some other euphemistic title—amounts to an attempt to reshape the attitudes of children and young people...

...Sowell has managed to add something to the debate that has raged through scores of books since A Nation at Risk informed us that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war...

...Such measurement would, of course, have to be controlled and monitored from outside the education establishment...

...They will find no more useful weapon than this latest book by Thomas Sowell...

...Meanwhile, preferential admissions policies have tended to lead to substandard academic performance by minority students mismatched by "a systematic shifting from institutions where they could succeed to institutions where they were likely to fail...

...The only gainers are the organized ethnic activists who profit from these programs...

...Their response has been either to drop out, failures who might have been successes in a less manipulated admissions marketplace, or to turn from academic pursuits to social activism, agitating for more minority admissions, more minority faculty, more minority privileges of one sort or another...

...Above all, what is needed is some independent source of information so that parents, trustees, alumni, and legislators know what is really going on in classrooms and on campuses...

...For another, he goes beyond merely saying what's wrong to suggest specific remedies...

...It is Sowell's wisdom to see that the real danger is not the particular agendas being promoted in the schools but the very fact of the politicizing of education...

...The chancellor was sacked, leaving the children in some of the city's public schools a little more classroom time to spend on the academic learning that has been steadily eroded by the attention given to social propagandizing...

...the collusive practices engaged in by an academic cartel that sets tuition prices at whatever can be extracted from a family and from government subsidies—he is scathing on all of these matters...

...Among the points that Sowell brings home: • America's teachers are by and large an undistinguished lot intellectually, members of a powerful union with huge lobbying potential both at the state and federal level...

...Sowell is not exaggerating when he says that "Left-wing storm trooper power has won on elite campuses all across the country...

...To criticize the policies of racial body-counting in student admissions or faculty hiring is to be about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be today...

...They could be informed by means of an outside ombudsman, a state inspector general for education reporting directly to the governor, even by alternative student newspapers...

...Whatever the goals of the indoctrination zealots, their ultimate effect is not necessarily to determine what students will think for the rest of their lives...

...the losers are the schoolchildren whose lack of fluency in English and alienation from the larger society will be a lifelong economic handicap...

...Future generations of scholars (if any still exist) may well find in it the explanation of how a thriving educational system could, in half a century, be reduced to bankruptcy...

...Another is "ending the monopoly of schools and departments of education as gatekeepers of the teaching profession...

...School choice is an obvious one...

...His is not a political argument but an educational one...

...the crocodile tears that university presidents and deans weep over rising "costs," when those costs are anything, they choose to spend money on and often have little to do directly with student learning...

...The main effect of the confrontations they orchestrate is increasing separatism and polarization, a net result financed largely by the taxpayer...

...Perhaps the most damning circumstance Sowell points to is the increasing displacement of basic skills—indeed, of any pursuit involving familiarity with the works that have shaped our culture, and of the development of the capacity to reason rather than merely receive fashionable opinions...

...More money, Sowell demonstrates clearly, does not mean better education, especially when most of it never reaches the classroom but pays for bloated bureaucracies and a variety of other non-instructional costs...

...With vast sums of federal money available for such programs, designing and implementing special curricula for the school system has become a multi-million-dollar industrY...

...J t is hard to say whether college and university administrators have been more obtuse or more cowardly...

...Small wonder that the thrust for "back to basics" reforms and for more academic rigor generally has come from outside the educational establishment, from parents and businessmen rather than from teachers and school administrators...

...Certainly they have been venal...

...Never mind the cost to those students who fail to graduate or, if they stay the course, fail to receive a worthy education, shifting their efforts to the kinds of courses—the various "ethnic" studies for example—they can be sure of passing...

...Again, educators are "experimenting on other people's children with other people's money...

...They come from the lowest ranks of the college-educated, get their jobs through a monopoly on certification of those willing to waste their college years on worthless ed-school courses, and hold them by virtue of seniority...

...Standards, scholarship, and traditions that have stood the test of time are discarded as "irrelevant," while presidents, provosts, deans, and department heads stand by sanctimoniously, supporting the double standards that prevent alternative voices from being heard on campus and that enforce restrictions on free speech...

...Still another is the abolition of tenure and its ensuing lack of accountability, an objective that would also be served by publicizing the results of nationwide tests designed to measure just exactly what students have learned...

...Diversity is the big word on campus today, but it applies only to physical differences, not to intellectual ones...

...Yet Sowell goes even further, daring to characterize some of the most socially approved courses on campuses as substandard courses taught by unqualified faculty maintaining their precarious hold on academic life by building up a militant following and threatening to tar the institution with the brush of racism if their demands are not met...

...Like Gibbon dealing with the demise of empire or Tocqueville with the paradoxes of democracy, Sowell connects ideas with their consequences, theory with reality...

...the neglect of undergraduate education in favor of the research that earns government grants and institutional prestige...