EDUCATION FOR EQUALITY?
Kramer, Steven Philip
EDUCATION FOR EQUALITY? STEVEN PHILIP KRAMER It is not acceptable that standards be lforered to junior-high levels The world "equality" can mean many different things. To the Church Fathers, it...
...This farce is of course supported by the educational establishment, because it needs some justification, or because educationists have been inbred enough to believe their own malarky...
...Now, we suddenly discover the consequences of these programs, and it may be too late to do anything about them...
...It is not acceptable that vast numbers of students should flunk out or that the standards be lowered to junior high school levels...
...Public and secondary education seems to be producing expanding numbers of functionally illiterate students...
...What is particularly frightening is that the very people who accept and support this process of forced cretinization consider themselves radicals...
...And we can hardly expect much improvement until 1980 at the earliest, since Ford, if he manages to avoid a fatal fall on a banana peel, will probably remain absentee landlord of the White House till then...
...Socialists would extend political equality to social equality, "from each according to bis ability, to each according to his needs...
...To the Church Fathers, it meant that all men were equal before God, if not before Caesar...
...It is not only that teachers are intimidated by their Students (or their principals), or that they choose the primrose path out of sheer laziness...
...Vocational" education will accomplish nothing unless new kinds of employment develop...
...University faculties are in a weaker position now than at any time since the Depression...
...There are more and more English teachers who refuse to teach grammar (cf...
...What steven pbilip kramer, a previous contributor, teaches in the Department of History at the University of New Mexcio, Albuquerque...
...Those who do not believe in culture do justice to themselves, to paraphrase Robespierre...
...It would be a mistake for the faculty to become merely a special interest group...
...But we live in a difficult world, and only complex reasoning can comprehend its realities...
...Let us beware lest we level culture to barbarism, while maintaining the rule of our own barbarian princes of the Bureaucracy, the Corporations, and the Military-Industrial Complex...
...In the meantime millions of people go to high school...
...What education can produce is the mental competence necessary to understand the present system and to challenge it...
...They have been unable to do so because those goals have been impossible to fulfill...
...Education for equality" serves as a convenient dodge, a means of justifying present inequality in the name of a mythical future in which social mobility will produce equality...
...They are also affected by an ideological revolution (or ccunter-revo-lution) within the teaching profession...
...A vast reserve army of unemployed teachers has built up...
...Is it not repressive to impose any structure on any individual, even "standard white English" on whites...
...Perhaps that is one reason why the term is not usually defined...
...What certainly is called for is an intermediate year in which students would be prepared in basic skills before embarking on the normal freshman course of study...
...Salaries have not kept up with inflation, and nte administrators are beginning to talk about salary freezes or even salary cuts...
...it can, however, help them to realize their full potential...
...a cruel delusion...
...Don't hold your breath...
...First, the University cannot help to provide jobs so long as the economy is not prospering...
...The result is that faculty is more and more turning to unionization, but more out of despair than hope...
...Second, at the moment the University serves at teast as much as an instrument for debasing culture Krar encouraging and diffusing it...
...The lowest achievers in the schools reported getting the most praise from their teachers...
...Just as in Rome, the enemy is within...
...If the City University of New York should fire many of its faculty, the labor market will be even more seriously depressed...
...The declension ends in solecism...
...The consequences for all students, and in particular minority students, are disastrous...
...One of my middle-aged colleagues said to me: "About ten years ago, we began what amounted to open admissions, without much thought or consideration...
...The struggle to get a job, to hold a job has become unbearable for junior faculty...
...A shorter work week, and a new relationship between individual and social organization of work may well be necessary...
...Others accept the idea that if education equals repression, teaching "white culture" to minorities equals cultural genocide...
...The Jacksonians gave men equal political rights, and asserted that one man was as good as the next, whatever their economic difference...
...In other words, those who do the worst work have been led to believe they are doing satisfactory work...
...They require fundamental social reform, not the sort of tinkering that educational change has represented...
...Unions are necessary, but it is also important that the faculty speak out about the general issues confronting education...
...Minority students were receiving completely unrealistic grades...
...Technological advance on a large scale will require increased planning and governmental intervention...
...Unemployment has doubtless demystified many about the value of college education for "equality...
...For without this, our sensibilities will not survive the forces of Madison Avenue and Wall Street, for whom naught is beautiful save that which is ' green...
...Despite substantial financing and a captive audience, the schools have not been able to attain the goals set for them, with remarkably little change, for the last century and a quarter...
...Until this stagnation is ended, the "relevance" of the University will seem strained...
...Unionization is a recognition that those days are over, that the faculty must defend itself in order to survive...
...At the end of his monumental study of the Roman Empire, Michael Rostovtzeff writes...
...I am not saying that we should throw out of the University all students who are ill-prepared...
...Role of the University Although America stands at the brink of a great revolution in the means of production (through automation and cybernetics), it seems as if the "free enterprise" system is no longer capable of bringing about this transformation...
...But one might also stop to consider the effects of this whole mind-set on the quality of higher education...
...We must answer Rostovtzeffs question of whether "it is possible to extend a higher civilization to the lower classes without debasing its standards and diluting its quality to the vanishing point" in the affirmative...
...Our civilization will net kutt wsim it be * dyfliartioo not ol one class, tat ogtfee masses...
...Those who simply show up for class, the study said, got a C. Thus it is a system with carrots and no sticks...
...Students' Rights to their own Language" in College Composition and Communication, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, Fall 1974...
...He is now very pessimistic...
...Education cannot make men intellectually or morally equal...
...The evolution of the ancient world has a lesson and a warning for us...
...Christopher Jencks has shown that education and economic success are not closely related...
...On the other hand, a radical goal: the development of critical thinking which can see the limits of our society and have the imagination to offer alternatives...
...At the same time, technological advance may decrease, rather than increase, the number of jobs in the long run...
...The man who said this is a fine scholar and teacher...
...Unless one defines the meaning of "education for equality," the term means next to nothing...
...To the Founding Fathers, it mean .that all men (at least white men) were equal before the law, though not equally fitted to make the law...
...Insofar as faculty is still committed to standards, and attempts to assert them vis-a-vis a student body less and less capable or willing to meet them, the faculty seems like an "enemy of the people...
...The goal of education must be twofold...
...Strict faculty is in danger of losing enrollment to its more "with-it" colleagues, and if it loses enrollment, may also lose its jobs...
...Schools are closing...
...On the cultural level, the effects of educational "democratization" are rather disturbing...
...The present system does not lead to equal opportunity, but only to a deterioration of culture and a misuse of human potential...
...But the world can only be changed, at least for the better, by truth and understanding...
...Similarly for departments as a whole...
...This same principle is now extended to individuals...
...to college . . . to graduate school in the belief that they will rise up to the lower middle . . . middle . . . upper class...
...It is not, of course, their fault if public education has collapsed and if their family background impedes them...
...These local maoists have forgotten that in order to change the world one must understand it...
...And Michael Katz wrote in 1971, in Class, Bureaucracy, and the Schools, that "the powers of schooling have been vastly overrated...
...An ignorant population easily becomes the victim of demagogues and neo-fascists...
...Students who go to college simply for social mobility are not likely to be good students, particularly if they are badly prepared...
...Romanticism has been carried to the point that any interference with the "spontaneity" of the student is seen as cultural genocide...
...The future of American society will not be bright unless we strive both for economic and social equality and the preservation and free development of high culture...
...the main phenomenon which underlies the process of decline is the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses and the consequent simplification of political, economic, and social life, which we call the barbarization of the ancient world...
...At the core of the present quandary of higher education are two facts...
...It becomes oppressive to impose a scientific or humanist culture on "die people...
...Wherefore hauntest thou us, O ghost of Rousseau...
...What faculty really wants is a return to the time when it was involved in basic decision-making, when administrations possessed only modest powers and modest personnel...
...The New York Times reports (October 15, 1975 "Study Refutes View of Minority Learning") that the reason for bad performance by blacks and Mexican-Americans was not that they had low self-concepts...
...One wonders whether the public schools are about to collapse, or whether they have collapsed already...
...Yet the faculty no longer finds itself the natural spokesman for the students, as was often the case during the Vietnam war...
...It cannot produce political equality, because political power is closely related to economic position...
...What seemed plausible ten years ago at a time of prosperity seems absurd today...
...It cannot produce economic equality, because that would require a full-scale alteration of the social system...
...It is not even clear that education can produce social mobility...
...More and more jobs are one-year or terminal positions, and the number of part-time "piece-work" jobs is ever inciasing...
...Teaching diction and writing is so difficult anyway that it becomes personally and politically easier for a teacher to cop out...
...On the one hand, a conservative goal: the preservation of culture, of real culture...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 3
