Issues and Goals in the Debate

...It is perhaps not too strange that we need Mr...

...Or, while it is true that in 23 percent of the schools neither physics nor chemistry are offered in the 11th and 12th grades, these schools account for less than 6 percent of all the students enrolled at those levels...

...These questions suggest that the aims of education one posits, the critiques of education in which one indulges, the extent to which one senses a crisis, and the terms in which one defines that crisis depend most importantly upon one's values regarding what social life should be like in general, and on one's presuppositions regarding what is equality and justice in human social relations...

...And even if we knew exactly where Soviet education was going, the information would be of limited relevance...

...It is his present powers which are to assert themselves...

...It is that of the person who stands on the following assumptions: 1. Maximum equality of opportunity—at virtually whatever cost—is the sine qua non of a democratic society...

...Conant understands this and he has repeatedly emphasized that American education must keep its eye on its own goals and be strong in its own terms...

...What stands in the way of a clear statement of the real issues...

...Gardner to remind us that education is one aspect of a total social system...

...to face the facts...

...or the problems facing teachers in the occasional jungles which some schools prove to be, in which to maintain discipline is difficult enough, without hope that any educational content will be transmitted...

...These are seen, for the better off, as best achieved in the educational process, and through quick exit to the factories for the worse off...

...For instance, Hannah Arendt recently insisted in an article in Partisan Review, that only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics, and that in America education plays a different, and politically an incomparably more important role than in other countries...

...If, further, as the most recent data suggest, cancer and mental disorders selectively strike lower class persons, how much of a price is this compared to the possible benefits for even further emphasis upon the so-called excellent...

...For now they are joined by authoritarians in the guise of lovers of mankind and elitists in the guise of democrats...

...2. Intolerably low salaries and prestige for teachers, resulting in the continuing lowering of the level of personnel recruited for the teaching profession...

...Finally, let me call your attention to a clarification of the issues which is presented with succinct brilliance in a document entitled The Child and the Curriculum...

...I do not think it critical that we match the Soviet rocket for rocket and technician for technician...

...No politics in education in England, of course, where the cutoff point of 11 years (decided 30 years ago as a convenience to teachers of modern languages) separates sheep from goats more surely than the Lord's hand ever was able to...

...that it would be no difficulty whatsoever to outrun the Soviet, if we wished, by the simple expedient of becoming a totalitarian society...

...and to be willing to debate responsibly in public rather than organize privately against each other...

...5. The life and quality of our culture depend in the last analysis on the sound democratic functioning of our schools...

...But I fear that the nominal agreement may be just that and no more, and may at best be limited to minor curricula revisions, and these only nominal...

...If it were true that the primary purpose of the educational system is to serve as the para-military training school for future combat with the Soviet Union, then the claimants on that side have been too feeble in their criticisms of American education...

...Nor is it critical that so many high schools in the country apparently fail to include in their curricula the subjects we ordinarily associate with a good liberal education...

...8. A systematized demotivation of all levels of the school population by the doctrines of "play it safe" and "play it cool," tied integrally to the goals of adjustment, bovine-like happiness, and peace of mind...

...3. The desertion by the community, the family and the agencies of social welfare of many of their responsibilities and the fobbing off of these upon the schools and teachers, so that the school system has frequently to function as everything from a free breakfast canteen for undernourished children to the agent of moral and social discipline...

...But it is a reminder that we may well repeat over and over again...

...Indeed not...

...All of these cases are somehow unpolitical, apolitical, and, at best, politically unimportant...

...b. A systematic failure to consider education as a social system, and the attendant failure to recognize the numerous and significant ways in which teacher, pupil, parent, superintendent, principal and boards of education are interlocked in a series of mutual dependencies...

...It is equally evident that this debate would be most salutary if it were being conducted with adequate knowledge on all sides, and more important, with a common concern for the common welfare...

...The future direction of Russian education is not clear...

...I have thus chosen not to mention such matters as Conant's recommendations regarding different standards for required and elective courses...

...or the possible revolutionary implications of such experiments with small classes as have recently been reported in the press...

...As John Gardner has said in his forward to Dr...

...What is in fact true, and far more critical, is that for every one child who graduates high school and goes on to college, there is at least one other child, who, though equally qualified, on both aptitude and achievement scores, does not go on to college...

...So we must ask now whether and in what regards it is proper to talk of a crisis in education...

...6. We have no decent factual basis on which to stand with regard to the distribution of talent in the population other than that there is probably available in every class segment an equally wide and diverse range of abilities which are capable of being equally recruited and equally motivated to conscientious performance only under conditions of equal life situations...

...4. The exploitation by various community agencies of the talents, time and energies of school children, for non-school activities, resulting in serious attrition of the available time for study and free play...

...No more need be cited from Miss Arendt, whose contributions to political philosophy and social action have recently been discussed in another DISSENT forum, except to note that her nostrum is not unlike that of the good Admiral, or Congressman Carrol Reece...

...If I have here omitted numerous details the reasons of space are obvious...

...9. A failure to place equal value upon and to reward equally for: (1) excellence, and (2) performance up to the level of ability, whatever the absolute level of excellence or mediocrity this may be...

...I see these as critical from a particular point of view...

...8. The schools are the primary agencies of social mobility...

...But at least some ideas can continue to merit respectful consideration, no matter who their partisans may be...

...And is it not true, finally, that the discovery process is geared systematically into the structure of class inequality...

...The crisis in American education today is defined by the following features of American life in general and American schools in particular...

...The eagerness with which the schools not only accept but go out of their way to seek these new responsibilities is one of the most shocking, albeit understandable, aspects of the crisis...

...III There is here a kind of calculus of social energy about which none of us is wise enough...

...Thus, if it could conceivably be true that the primary goal of American educational policy was to train enough people to staff Admiral Rickover's crew of technicians, and all such future and analogous crews, it follows quite properly that the educational system is not functioning as well as it might...

...I am suggesting in short that we cannot properly join issues in this great public debate if we pose only one set of curricula against the other, one set of teacher training institutes against another, or one set of slogans about the aims of education against another...

...But save as the teacher knows, knows wisely and thoroughly, the race-expression which is embodied in that thing we call the Curriculum, the teacher knows neither what the present power, capacity, or attitude is, nor yet how it is to be asserted, exercised, and realized...

...If, finally, for our purposes here, it can be shown—as indeed it can —that every step upward on the educational ladder is accompanied by some matching step up the ladders of income, leisure, luxury, and exposure to the best which our culture has to offer, is this price worthy of being paid, in even more differentiated form in years to come, on behalf of the cult of excellence...

...to stop being defensive...

...Let me now therefore try to pull together my remarks by enumerating a number of the basic issues which confront us in education today and which I see as critical...

...What is critical, by contrast, is that two-thirds of the teachers come out of schools of education and departments of education which are formally under the control of liberal arts faculties and deans who, with the utmost impropriety, have disdained to exercise their proper jurisdictions over courses and standards...

...Nor is it critical, in and of itself, that the so-called gifted children of the nation are failing to receive a proper education, because, as put, this is an absolutely untestable and probably unwarranted statement...

...The second of these final assumptions is the utterly trite yet urgently correct observation that social gains always involve some social prices...

...The author ends his brief 30-page analysis with the following statement: The case is of the Child...

...Nor are all the extremists mere popular journalists and embroiled admirals...

...Two further assumptions may be stated before defining the ingredients of the crisis in the education...

...It is impossible to evaluate an educational system apart from the society which it both reflects and serves...

...Perhaps as a temporary expedient for boards of education, under pressure of concrete and powerful political forces, a good deal of nominal agreement may thereby be secured...

...Most evident of all is that enormous passion is being wasted on phony moral judgments, heated assertions of untruths, and unthoughtful denials of viable alternatives...

...In this regard I am unfortunately joined by such a luminary theorist as Dwight Eisenhower...

...2. Maximum training of all levels of talent up to their own natural limits is the sine qua non of a democratic society...

...It is strange to see the frequency with which former and soi-disant socialists and democrats join hands with elitists of various stripes to promote a clamor about the mistreatment of the excellent and the gifted, only pausing most occasionally and hurriedly to acknowledge the fact that the strength of any society depends, in the best senses of the term, on the maximum discovery, motivation, recruitment and training of all levels of manpower to their fullest expression...

...1. A persistent unwillingness on the part of the American public to pay the taxes necessary even for the minimal discharge of those obligations they now expect of the schools, not to mention those larger expectations they have under the impetus of the recent attacks upon the educational system...

...But in fact, the translations of these unspecific mottoes end up, on the one hand, in an advocacy of support of parochial education with public funds, and, on the other hand, in an insistence that no public funds should be so diverted...

...Nor do I think it critical that one third of the teachers of the nation come out of teachers' colleges, and that approximately one fourth of their curricula are given over to methodology, psychology and administration (not "almost totally," as Rickover falsely claims in his St...

...Sensible generalizations about Russian schools are made doubly difficult by the recent switches in Soviet educational policy...

...Nor is education a matter of politics in France, where control of the public school system has been a matter of internal warfare for fifty years, nor in Russia, where the school system is a direct arm of the political bureau, nor in Latin American countries, where the schools and universities are the concrete bastions used by revolutionary students...

...And they would be far better off if they were out discovering what it means to work for a living under reasonably bad conditions, with inadequate self-direction, inadequate pay, continuously lowering horizons of life possibilities and the regular exercise of misplaced authority...

...My italics—MT...

...For the facts are not as usually stated...

...For the question whether the schools are doing a good job can be answered with both a vehement "yes" and a vehement "no," depending upon what one thinks the schools should be doing, and upon the related sets of values which one is willing or not willing to sacrifice in behalf of these educational ends...

...The fact, above all, that the litigants bring very different sets of intentions to the forum and hence end with very different recommendations...

...That was written in 1902 by John Dewey...

...Iv Now then to the summary statement...

...Or, while it is true that more than half the high schools in the country offer no modern language, these schools include only about 10 percent of all the high school students in the country...

...If it can be shown that the rate of Negro infant mortality in New York City is almost twice that of white infants, how much of a price is that and is it worth paying for the continuation of the present system of class recruitment of the successful, the wealthy, the healthy and the educated...

...Similarly, if it were true, as the most egregious extremists among the professional educators have been claiming, that the proper function of education is systematically to fit children at whatever their tested level of capacity into the context of social life, then entirely too much time is being wasted on academic and vocational subjects in a curriculum which keeps children at a childish level for about 10 years...

...4. Maximum mobility is desirable...

...Here parents and teachers participate perhaps equally with the students...

...11 If I have seemed to dwell unduly upon the nonsense issuing from the most vituperative critics, rather than the defenders, of the school system, it is not out of any greater simpathy for either extreme but rather out of the realization that the educationists are pushovers in a public argument, however firmly entrenched they may be in private infighting...

...This is true not only of those relatively uneducated segments of the community that have most at stake, but also of those relatively educated segments that promote their own parochial stakes with vigor...

...The first insists that at any I26 given moment in its history a nation discovers itself to be faced with certain problems for which collectively it is responsible...

...If it can be shown that of every 100 major crimes known to the police, some 3 or 4 end up in imprisonment, and that the average victim happens to be a grammar-school-educated Negro caught out of his own neighborhood—what does this tell us about the selective benefits of education and of the screening process by which the more "gifted" members of the population accrue for themselves a disproportionate exemption from the consequences of their acts...

...And is it not painfully and patently true that there is today no true equality of opportunity to have one's talents discovered, and to be motivated to train those talents, and then to locate them most advantageously in the division of labor...

...The result is subversion of the proper structure of power, authority and decisionmaking regarding school policies...

...From this point of view, entirely too much time is being wasted in American schools on such useless things as literature, history, social studies, and even on those aspects of mathematics and science not directly relevant to military technology...

...A resolute unwillingness—however understandable—by the extremists on both sides of the issue to admit shortcomings...

...Conant's new book on the American high schools: The surge of publicity about Soviet schools has produced more false impressions and foolish conclusions than almost any other element in current discussions of education...

...How shall we calibrate the prices we are willing to pay—in morale, loyalty, alienation, rates of pathological disorder— for the presumed profits of continuing to discriminate at virtually every level of schooling on the basis of direct and indirect effects of class origins...

...Let me state first what issues I think are not critical, at least not in the highest sense of the word, however problematic they may be and however demanding it may be that they be rectified...

...This is symbolic of the failure of the doctrine of the "equal worth of all men," by which we ought simply and easily to be guided in our actions so that we never make the mistake of punishing those whose native talents are low, for the facts of their birth, nor reward those whose native talents are high, for the facts of their birth...

...Albans speech...

...5. A fundamentally low level of knowledge and thought about, and active participation in, the major issues confronting local school systems...

...Is it not further true that when such equality of opportunity is absent, the so-called aristocracy of talent is an aristocracy of discovered talent...

...Where this refers to the disadvantaged position and undesired behavior of certain historically underprivileged segments of the population, then, the na tion has no moral choice than to chart its rates and directions of development so as to enable those underprivileged segments to catch up, even, if need be, at the cost of growth of other segments...

...For we may find that there is precious little real agreement, when we operationally translate our slogans, aims and curricular titles into ongoing relationships between teacher and student and school and community...

...For instance, while it is true that 11 percent of the high schools of the country offer no biology courses in the tenth grade, this accounts for only 3.3 percent of the high school students in the tenth grade...

...All appealing slogans...

...I am mindful of the fact, for instance, that both the Catholic Church and the most ardent advocates of separation of church and state are agreed on the importance of separation of church and state—in name...

...And the critics, endorsed by much vulgar crowd sentiment, have been able to disguise the flimsiness of their arguments by cloaking them in stern warnings about the national defense, the history of our country the urgency of common sense, and the love of excellence...

...The significant fact is that for the sake of certain theories, good or bad, all the rules of sound human reason were thrust aside...

...his present attitudes which are to be realized...

...And we must ask, if we correctly describe such a crisis, in what ways we can proceed, within the limits of reasonable resources, to reduce the critical elements in the situation, and to provide for the kind of development in education which will come to meet more adequately our expectations...

...This sounds beguiling...

...No wonder, then, that there is little joining of issues...

...to explore possible areas of agreement...

...Nor again may we properly say that the gifted are being mistreated, unless simultaneously we declare that the less gifted are, at their own levels of competence, being systematically short-changed in both the total social process and the particular educational process to which they are exposed...

...or the problems raised by the psychic deficits which students import into the schools and what can happen to the best of intentions, teachers and curricula under the impact of the explosive expression of these feelings...

...These children would then be better off at work, and, in their spare hours, attending more frequently the mass rallies at which are peddled the nostrums by which the bad life is made to smell good for a moment before its rancidness comes through nice and strong...

...If there is a crisis here, then, it is perhaps as much a function of a class-biased mode of selection for further education, whatever its quality, as is it a function of the socalled low quality of education given to the undemocratically selected minority that does go on to college...

...This leads to built-in false values in teacher-pupil relationships, and to a strengthening and hardening of class arteries...

...that the direction and content of education must reflect the commonly shared po litical and social goals of the society...

...Or, to follow Miss Arendt further, in her "history" of progressive education: "What in Europe has remained an experiment, tested out here and there in single schools and isolated educational institutions, and then gradually extending its influence in certain quarters, in America about 25 years ago completely overthrew, as though from one day to the next, all traditions and all the established methods of teaching and learning...

...And entirely too many people are being sent through the school system, when they might more properly be serving as stewards, valets and chambermaids, to minimize the hours which the "gifted" need to spend on these fringe aspects of their development...

...to examine their positions...

...Partly, perhaps importantly, this is due to the fact that in so doing they might call attention to the mediocrity of many of their own offerings...

...Their common remedy is: Authority, more authority and still more authority...

...Must one suffer being called an enemy of excellence and an advocate of mediocrity, if he insists on calling attention to the prices which one pays when in our education system we substitute, for the aristocracy of birth, which former social revolutions took so long to overthrow, an aristocracy of talent...

...But if the schools need to be stripped of the slogans which hide their incompetencies, so do the critics need to be denuded of theirs...

...7. An egregious emphasis on the cult of success, defined at least partly in terms of occupational position and income...

...Professor Sidney Hook has averred that a great deal of agreement on curricula can be garnered among even the most philosophically-opposed adversaries, by the willing though temporary suspension of philosophical disagreement and the temporary adoption of a posture of philosophical neutralism, until the areas of agreement have been explored...

...I shall not go into details," continues Miss Arendt...

...his present capacities which are to be exercised...