What Went Wrong With American Education
Bakshian, Aram Jr.
"What Went Wrong With American Education" concentration on, of all things, corruption in government. Fretting about corruption in government, in times like ours, is like worrying about the possible spread of mononucleosis at a sex...
...Make 'em Cry You go to the movies in a funk, some film matches your temperament that day...
...Let a virtuous government sneak into power, and it straightaway grabs the citizen by the ears and tries to lift him up into the realms of light, cf Robespierre (like Weicker a wearer of tinted spectacles...
...Besides providing much helpful information on current student opinion, the role of the federal government in determining educational policy, and the impact of New Left violence, Witonski also states an interesting case concerning underlying causes...
...11, Box 360, Blooming~on, Indiana 47401...
...One almost bemoans the passing of that extinct class, the slightly neurotic, rather despotic but wholely dedicated spinster teacher and/or austere teaching nun who at least succeeded in pounding the basic elements of mathematics and reading into their balky charges, along with a modicum of civility, clarity of thought and expression, and hygeine...
...On a light level, for instance: in the spring I went off to Brother Sun, Sister Moon: perfectly charming to look at, lovely kids, Nature natural, greener than green, and on in that vein...
...While aggravated by Dewey and his more rabid successors, he says, the root problem of American education goes all the way back to the beginnings of the Republic and the ingrained Yankee notion that mass "practical" education is the desirable goal of our educational system...
...Although that hastily-reached decision involved abandoning a generous scholarship, offending a number of well-intentioned educational bureaucrats, and inflicting a measure of short-term anguish on my immediate family, it turned out to be the right one...
...The conflicting approaches, bi-level emotions, reasoned film reviewer's backlog of experience fighting with the eternal little boy movie-lover's wonderment that the thing up there can move and can move me--all this conjoins not to produce, as one would hope, a well-made critique the next day, but to leave me with two sets of notes, as though two different heads saw the same film, the same night, the same two hours of, say, Scarecrow...
...Its only accomplishment has been to place more meaningless, devalued diplomas into the hands of more mediocre people than ever before...
...And while you're at it why not use the form on the back page to send a gift subscription to someone you know who will enjoy reading The Alternative...
...Sometimes, not infrequently, one finds two sets of conflicting reactions, thought patterns, approaches, operating during a film viewing...
...I would too, were Scarecroufs only memory for me an awareness of its tricks played on me...
...This film calls, perhaps, for the thoroughly ruthless critic (John Simon, maybe) to eviscerate its cheapjack emotionalism, to expose its manipulativeness, and to give no quarter even to the merits of the film, which are several, if overwhelmed by the faults...
...Make 'era Laugh...
...but the inane screenplay, the acting, the asinine cavorting about and silly resonances of current events to give, ugh, "relevance" to Saint Francis...
...Or the sun's tickling every fiber, the one you love loves you truly, truly dear, and shows it...
...But, moan the Weickerites, government must set a good example...
...All right, I say to myself: now hold on, separate your aesthete's eye from your critical glare, get it in perspective, let that witless cartoon-strip of a live-action movie have it...
...The temper we carry into the theatre, as much as the film itself, conditions the opinions we take from the experience to--in my case--the typewriter...
...and see to it that noncollege material is channeled into practical trade and technical training centers...
...Raise standards...
...Max, played by the estimable Gene Hackman, is just out of jail for fighting, a pattern he's developed of busting up people and places 'til he gets busted again and again himself...
...While a utilitarian function continues to be served by result-oriented departments such as engineering, chemistry, and medicine, the old goal of a true liberal education--the original aim of the university as an institution--has been drowned by successive waves of instrumentalists, social reformers, and substandard students and faculty, always in the name of some higher cause...
...eliminate second-rate universities, faculties, and students...
...set up a dual secondary school system that separates wheat from chaff, along European lines...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...11, Box 360, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Enclosed is $ . . . . ~for a...
...you emerge proclaiming it a "majestic cinema treatment of a universal theme...
...Yet they are often disturbed by the obvious results--more and more youthful meatheads leaving the university in even worse shape than they entered it...
...ew . . . . . . . xenewal subscription rather eccentric move on my part ten years ago would clearly be the rational thing to do today...
...Max is heading East, first to Denver to see his sister, then to Pittsburgh to set up a car wash with a small reserve of money...
...Simon, I should guess, would be savage...
...Fretting about corruption in government, in times like ours, is like worrying about the possible spread of mononucleosis at a sex orgy...
...What does Witonski suggest by way of improvement...
...Which I did...
...Unfortunately (but not unpredictably) the shift from traditional standards of educational excellence to mass social conditioning has resulted in more student alienation from American society, not less...
...Good luck, Peter, but don't hold your breath...
...all's well, and some sing-a-ding-a-ling flick seems like the happiness masterwork of the decade...
...You still have time to take advantage of the present low price and save, especially by subscribing for the long term...
...Bosh...
...Since Witenski is also a literate fellow with an ample measure of wit, it also reads well, despite a few traces of hastiness in preparation...
...And, judging from my recent contacts with the academic world, and the devastating picture painted by Peter Witonski, what might have been a Subscription Rates Are Going Due to increasing production costs we regret t h a t The Alternative's subscription rates will increase with the next issue...
...In 1943, for example, that benevolent old fluff, James Bryant Conant, then President of Harvard, righteously proclaimed that "the primary concern of American education today is not the development of the appreciation of the 'good life' in young gentlemen bern to the purple . . . . Our purpose is to cultivate in the largest possible number of future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free...
...A free and happy people needs occasional reassurance that the government is less honest, truthful, and virtuous than it is...
...What seems to have been forgotten by Dr...
...The Alternative, c/o The Establishment, R.R...
...Intimidated by their ever more grubby offspring, and in hopeless awe of the higher education label, they continue to dump their postpubescent charges into academia's lap in the vague hope that, after four years there, little Ernest and Ernestine will be ready to face life or matrimony without further parental bankrolling...
...Max at first tries to avoid hooking in with Lion, but at last their inability to hitch a ride brings them together, Max sweeping The Alternative Educational News Service is a bi.weekly publication which offers feature stories, book reviews, research and background material for student publicotian~ .For o free subscription send the name and address of your campus publicotian to: The Alternative Educational News Service, R.R...
...At the picture's start, he crosses paths in some isolated area with one Lionel (whom Max rechristens "Lion"), acted by A1 Pacino, like Hackman an actor of diverse talents, some most likely still untapped...
...Like so many mounds of overlarded hamburger, they graduate, after four years of aimless oozing, having 22 The Alternative November 1973 thoughtlessly absorbed large doses of the mental meat tenderizer of American academia----clich6 leftism...
...J u s t complete the coupon below and mail it today...
...Conant and the worse things that have come after him is the fact that civilized institutions--~ they artistic, economic, academic, or governmental--require a certain number of civilized maintenance men...
...Left to their own devices today, the same class of adolescents have somehow managed to spawn twin epidemics of illiteracy and venereal disease in the most overschooled, overmedicated society in the world...
...Those days are gone, however, and now the machines are beginning to break down...
...Peter Witonski has done some serious thinking on the deeper causes of the breakdown and reached some interesting conclusions...
...This was the logical precursor of the current devaluation in academic standards and climate in which, "while grades are rising at colleges and universities across the land, scholastic aptitude scores are falling...
...The parents who pay for this questionable operation seem to accept it as a moral duty, unquestioning...
...When government goes heavily into the goodness business, as under Roosevelt II or John Kennedy, and the newsmerchants cooperate in the hoodwinking of the public, tyranny looms...
...I for one welcome the relatively minor and innocuous misdeeds of the Nixon Administration as healthy signs, portending as they do a decline in the moral tone of government, and a consequent expansion of the citizen's freedom, undreamed of since the days of Ulysses S. Grant...
...The Alternative November 1973 23...
...Until we follow such a course, too many unqualified college instructors will be teaching (or, rather, attempting to teach) too many unqualified college students with abysmal results to themselves and the institutions they supposedly serve...
...His latest book is a useful guide to anyone seriously concerned about the state of American education at all levels and how it might be salvaged...
...But it isn't always that simple...
...R ,iew What Went Wrong With American Education by Peter Witonski Arlington House $6.95 Ten years ago, on an uncommonly hot September afternoon, having spent thirty minutes perspiring in queue to register for an idiotic freshman geology course at George Washington University, I reached a decision...
...I concluded that while a few things in life are worth standing in line for, American higher education is not one of them...
...These maintenance men used to be supplied by selective, traditionally structured universities that emphasized a rich appreciation and understanding of western civilization...
...Scarecrow tells of two losers...
...They're an unlikely pair, the beffo-socko and the tender innocent...
...Perhaps the greatest irony of all these reform movements is that, besides destroying the traditional values of a university education, they have consistently failed to achieve their own avowed goals...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
