Our Children and Our Country
O'Brien, Dennis
OUR CHILDREN AND OUR COUNTRY William J. Bennett Simon and Schuster, $19.95, 234 pp. Dennis O'Brien Donald Reagan entered office with a pledge to • abolish the Department of Education; he came to...
...He claims that it is conservatism which now sets the terms of our national debate...
...And if he cannot seem to fit the curricular costs of modern science into his scheme, he glosses over the profound challenge toclassical assumptions injected into intellectual life by the rise of science...
...His appointment as "drug czar" by Bush may postpone his intention...
...Wnen he resigned from the Reagan cabi-net, Bennett announced his intention to write another book on education...
...They invoke the mission of the university as if they were reciting "the Nicene Creed...
...We are not ethically bright enough to discover the moral law each generation...
...Character is the subject matter of ethics and character is a product of time, not the rational insight of a moment...
...Whether U.S...
...As for Harvard's much-celebrated core curriculum reform, he regarded it as at best a "symbolic nod" toward proper culture...
...Conservative" is a bad word for "liber-als" and the recent presidential campaign almost banished the "L-word" from polite conversation...
...Bennett argues that the elementary schools have abandoned moral standards by abjuring character forma-tion...
...The philosophes had a powerful model for their rational transcendence of his-tory: the rise of natural science...
...Let me resort to medieval nomenclature and pretend that what we have is a replay of the perennial scholastic quarrel between the antiqui and the mod-erni...
...He found the spokesmen of higher education "exceedingly pious, self-congratulatory, and suffused with an aura of moral supe-riority...
...If Teddy Roosevelt found the presidency "a bully pulpit," Secretary Bennett seemed to his critics to have used his cabinet office as a "bullying pulpit" to castigate the educational establishment...
...Our Chil-dren and Our Country is a collection of major addresses from the secretary which contain his now familiar attacks on the economic inefficiencies and cultural defi-ciencies of education from K through Ph.D...
...On phys-ics the antiqui had it all wrong...
...The present volume is an "occasional" book, a collection of public addresses...
...So if there is progress of the human mind, it would seem to leave those old classics out of mind...
...American elemen-tary schools have abandoned character...
...What about the lean curriculum...
...It is certainly "conservatism" which sets the theme of Bennett's general attack on American schools...
...he wrote a book on "The Progress of the Human Mind...
...Thus it is no surprise that the book comes with a strong endorsement from Jack Kemp...
...Condorcet is a typical spokesman...
...He thinks education can be done on the cheap because he is fixated on reading Plato-not only a worthy notion but requiring very little high-tech gadg-etry...
...Our modern moderni are the direct descen-dants of that most unhistorical cultural moment, the Enlightenment...
...education is eco-nomically fat I leave to another forum...
...The main burden of this collection is not economics but the cultural betrayal of American schooling...
...piling up past experience in "classical" wisdom may well be the best way to move beyond bumper-sticker moral philosophy...
...To Reclaim a Legacy, during a 1986 symposium held at Yale University...
...Bennett ends this collection with an address to the Heritage Foundation en-titled "The Future of American Conserva-tism...
...Instead of applauding "classical" models of high character, we get courses in "values clarification" that manage to clarify moral choice down to zero...
...The salient principles of the antiqui are character and classics...
...Bennett is of the antiqui...
...It is worth considering why the Bennett conserva-tive agenda appeals to a sensibility as genuinely Catholic as Percy's...
...It was the philosophes who could be said to have invented the "L-word" and the spirit of education, high and low, to which Bennett takes vehement objection...
...The current debate about proper school-ing is difficult to state because all the easy labels are so fraught with polemic that half of the audience is likely to abandon rational thought in the first paragraph...
...For the philosophes, it is not history that gives the clue to the action-history is a record of priestcraft and oppression- rather, it is reason that discovers the moral law above the sorry record of the past...
...It certainly left out the "Middle Ages" (an Enlighten-ment coinage for the dark period between Greek rationality and modern science...
...This is a deep quarrel...
...Bennett pre-fers Madison's taste for continuity...
...Basically, I think Bennett is correct: morality is historical...
...it may surprise some readers of Commonweal that the book jacket also carries an en-dorsement from Walker Percy...
...The uniting concept between character and classics is history, and Bennett re-peatedly inveighs against the historical ignorance of students at all levels and advocates a deep dose of the past in his own curricular suggestions...
...There are no easy formulae for a philosophy of modern education...
...I have written in various places about the inadequacy of Bennett's broadsides on the economic status of colleges- "filthy rich" was I believe the elegant rhetoric of his assistant, Bruce Cames...
...If Aristotle misplaced the earth in the universe, why should one trust him on ethics...
...Col-leges and universities betray the central democratic values of Western civilization by downplaying its great classics as "sexist, elitist, imperialist, bourgeois, ethnocentric, racist, selfish, and solipsis-tic" (a litany of epithets applied to Ben-nett's earlier book...
...The two are intimately connected...
...Bennett quotes Jefferson, an ardent fol-lower of the French enlightenment: "The earth belongs to the living...
...To understand the centrality of history one must turn to the assumptions of the moderni...
...If and when Ben-nett writes on education again, I hope he engages the argument on a level beyond the well-placed polemic of this text...
...he came to the end of his term with a Secretary of Education, William J. Bennett, who was the most articulate and visible apologist for the Reagan years...
...Ethics is up for rational grabs in every generation...
...Moral law was to be rationally discovered in the manner of physical law and then applied to the progress of humankind...
...On the occasion of Harvard's 350th birthday Bennett, as the highest education official * in the land, was given a ripe opportunity to bully his favorite institutional target...
...American colleges, the classics...
...The principal defect of Bennett's gen-eral critique of education, however, is that it fails to come to terms with natural science...
...President Stephen Trachtenberg pointed out his institution was Hartford not Har-vard...
Vol. 116 • March 1989 • No. 6
