Inside American Education (4 page)

At the college level, the world-saving agendas are even more blatant, as whole fields and departments have been created to promote particular causes, under such names as “environmental studies,” “peace studies,” and various racial or ethnic “studies” boosting group images, promoting ideological visions, and often serving as organizing and recruiting centers for political activism.

Much of the politicizing of education during the current era happens to have been done by the political left, and much of the exposure and criticism of it has therefore come from conservatives, but it would be a very serious mistake to think that this issue is basically political. Increasing numbers of honest people of liberal, and even radical, views have likewise been appalled at the prostitution of education for ideological ends. The liberal
Washington Post
for example, has criticized one of the widely-used curriculum guides by saying that it “is not education, it is political indoctrination.”
⁷²
The liberal
New Republic
has denounced the ideological version of “multiculturalism” as being “neither multi nor cultural,” but instead an attempt to impose “a unanimity of thought on campus.”
⁷³
Marxist scholar Eugene Genovese has urged “honest people across the spectrum” to stand up for academic principles and
to oppose “the new wave of campus barbarism.”
⁷⁴
In short, the politicization of education is not fundamentally a political issue, but an educational issue.

The educational consequences of ideological indoctrination efforts are likely to be far more serious than the political consequences. The ideologies of young people in schools or in colleges are not set in concrete. Most of the leading conservative figures of our time were once either liberals (like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman) or outright radicals (like Friedrich Hayek and Irving Kristol). The politicization of education is unlikely to have as much long run effect on politics as it does on education. It is not the particular goals of ideological zealots which are at issue here, but the damage they are doing to American education while pursuing those goals. The real issue is not political “imbalance,” as some conservative critics have claimed, for adding more teachers and professors from the political right, doing what those on the left are doing, would not solve the
educational
problem.

Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: “Haven’t any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?”
⁷⁵

These are not isolated incidents. Nor is the emotional shock treatment confined to this issue, as we will see in Chapter 3. A whole new social phenomenon known as “affective education” has spread across the country, seeking to re-shape the moral values, personal habits, and social mindsets of American children. Affective education is not to be confused with effective education. Indeed, it is one of many agendas which distract schools from effective education. The emotionalizing of education not only takes time away from intellectual development; it also casts teachers in the role of amateur psychologists,
though they are unqualified to gauge the consequences of their manipulations of children’s emotions. Beyond that, it is the very antithesis of education.

The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence. The attempts of schools and colleges to encompass far more than they can handle are an important part of the reason why they are handling education so poorly.

PART ONE
SCHOOLS

CHAPTER 2
Impaired Faculties

N
O DISCUSSION
of American education can be realistic without considering the calibre of the people who teach in the nation’s schools. By all indicators—whether objective data or first-hand observations—the intellectual calibre of public school teachers in the United States is shockingly low. While there have been, and continue to be, many schemes designed to raise the qualifications and performance of the teaching profession, the intellectual level of this occupation has, if anything,
declined
in recent times, just as the performance of the students they teach has declined. To understand why innumerable efforts to improve teachers and teaching have failed, it is necessary to understand something about the occupation itself, about the education which prepares people for that occupation, about the kind of people who become teachers, and about the institutions which attempt to educate American children.

THE OCCUPATION

There are well over 2 million school teachers in the United States—more than all the doctors, lawyers, and engineers combined.
¹
Their sheer numbers alone mean that there will inevitably be many exceptions to any generalizations made about teachers. However, a number of important generalizations do apply to the great majority of these teachers. For example, public school teaching is an overwhelmingly unionized occupation, an occupation with virtually iron-clad job security, an occupation in which virtually everyone has a degree or degrees, and yet an occupation whose lack of substantive intellectual qualifications is painfully demonstrable.

The National Education Association (NEA) alone has approximately one and a half million members and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has more than 600,000 members. Together, they represent the great majority of teachers.
²
Both organizations are highly effective lobbying groups at both the federal and state levels, and both aim much advertising at the general public, both to generate a favorable image of teachers and to get the public used to seeing education issues in a certain framework, favorable to the profession—for example, to equate more money for the public school establishment with “an investment in better education.” Everything from television commercials to bumper stickers promote their cause, unopposed by any comparably organized counter-propaganda. Moreover, huge political campaign contributions assure teachers’ unions favorable access to the seats of power in Washington and in the state capitals.

Given the political realities, it can hardly be surprising that public school teachers are among the most difficult of all employees to fire—regardless of the level of their competence or incompetence. Rates of pay likewise bear virtually no relationship to competence or incompetence, but are largely determined by longevity and college credits.
³
A teacher who ruins the education of generation after generation of students will be rewarded by continually rising pay levels.

Just how incompetent a teacher can be and still keep the job was illustrated by an extreme case in South Carolina, where a school tried to get rid of a teacher who had been warned repeatedly about her poor teaching and poor English. At a hearing
where she was given a ten-word vocabulary test, she could neither pronounce nor define the word “agrarian.” She could pronounce the word “suffrage” but defined it as “people suffering from some reason or other.” The word “ratify” she defined as “to get rid of something.” In her own defense, she said: “I’m not saying I was the best, but I don’t think I did more harm than anyone else.” A judge ordered her reinstated.
⁴

To complete the tightly controlled monopoly, both the supply of customers and the supply of labor are almost totally under the control of the education establishment. Compulsory attendance laws guarantee a captive audience, except for about 13 percent of American youngsters who attend private schools,
⁵
and official requirements of education courses for permanent tenure keep out the unwanted competition of potential teachers from outside the existing establishment. These multiple monopolies serve the interests of two narrow constituencies: (1) public school teachers and administrators, and (2) those college professors who teach education courses—courses notoriously unattractive in themselves, but representing the toll gates through which aspirants must pass in order to acquire tenure in public school teaching. “Emergency” or “provisional” credentials can be obtained to enter the classroom, but education courses are officially required to stay there permanently as a teacher.

INTELLECTUAL LEVELS

The extremes to which job security for the individual and job barriers for the profession are carried suggest a desperate need to avoid competition. This fear of competition is by no means paranoid. It is very solidly based on the low levels of substantive intellectual ability among public school teachers and administrators, and among the professors of education who taught them.

Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university. The word “contempt” appears repeatedly in discussions of the way most academic students and
professors view their counterparts in the field of education.
⁶
At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be “the widest street in the world” because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.

Nor is Columbia at all unique in this respect. “In many universities,” according to a study by Martin Mayer, “there is little it any contact between the members of the department of education and the members of other departments in the school.”
⁷
When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he told the institution’s overseers that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.”
⁸
More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, “the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work.”
⁹
Education schools and education departments have been called “the intellectual slums” of the university.

Despite some attempts to depict such attitudes as mere snobbery, hard data on education student qualifications have consistently shown their mental test scores to be at or near the bottom among all categories of students. This was as true of studies done in the 1920s and 1930s as of studies in the 1980s.
¹⁰
Whether measured by Scholastic Aptitude Tests, ACT tests, vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, or Graduate Record Examinations, students majoring in education have consistently scored below the national average.
¹¹
When the U.S. Army had college students tested in 1951 for draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students passed in the humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and mathematics, but only 27 percent of those majoring in education passed.
¹²

In 1980-81, students majoring in education scored lower on both verbal and quantitative SATs than students majoring in art, music, theatre, the behavioral sciences, physical sciences, or biological sciences, business or commerce, engineering, mathematics, the humanities, or health occupations. Undergraduate business and commercial majors have long been regarded as being of low quality, but they still edged out education majors on both parts of the SAT. Engineering students tend to be lopsidedly better mathematically than verbally, but nevertheless their verbal scores exceeded those of education majors, just as art and theatre majors had higher
mathematics scores than education majors. Not only have education students’ test scores been low, they have also been declining over time. As of academic year 1972-73, the average verbal SAT score for high school students choosing education as their intended college major was 418—and by academic year 1979-80, this had declined to 389.
¹³

At the graduate level, it is very much the same story, with students in numerous other fields outscoring education students on the Graduate Record Examination—by from 91 points composite to 259 points, depending on the field.
¹⁴
The pool of graduate students in education supplies not only teachers, counselors, and administrators, but also professors of education and other “leaders” and spokesmen for the education establishment. In short, educators are drawing disproportionately fromthe dregs of the college-educated population. As William H. Whyte said back in the 1950s, “the facts are too critical for euphemism.”
¹⁵

Professors of education rank as low among college and university faculty members as education students do among other students. After listing a number of professors “of great personal and intellectual distinction” teaching in the field of education, Martin Mayer nevertheless concluded:

On the average, however, it is true to say that the academic professors, with many exceptions in the applied sciences and some in the social sciences, are educated men, and the professors of education are not.
¹⁶