The End of Education (7 page)

I do not say, of course, that schools can solve the problems of poverty, alienation, and family disintegration. But schools can
respond
to them. And they can do this because there are people in them, because these people are concerned with more than algebra lessons or modern Japanese history, and because these people can identify not only one’s level of competence in algebra but one’s level of rage and confusion and depression. I am talking here about children as they really come to us, not children who are invented to show us how computers may enrich their lives. Of course, I suppose it is possible that there are children who, waking at night, want to study algebra or who are so interested in their world that they yearn to know about Japan. If there be such children, and one hopes there are, they do not require expensive computers to satisfy their hunger for learning. They are on their way, with or without computers—unless, of course, they do not care about others, or have no friends, or little respect for democracy, or are filled with suspicion about those who are not like
them. When we have machines that know how to do something about these problems, that is the time to rid ourselves of the expensive burden of schools or to reduce the function of teachers to “coaches” in the uses of machines (as Ravitch envisions). Until then, we must be more modest about this god of Technology and certainly not pin our hopes on it.

We must also, I suppose, be empathetic toward those who search with good intentions for technological panaceas. I am a teacher myself and know how hard it is to contribute toward the making of a civilized person. Can we blame those who want to find an easy way, through the agency of technology? Perhaps not. After all, it is an old quest. As early as 1918, H. L. Mencken (although completely devoid of empathy) wrote, “… there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.”
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Mencken was not necessarily speaking of technological panaceas, but he may well have been. In the early 1920s, a teacher wrote the following poem:

I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victrola, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, then closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers.

I know a false god when I see one.

There is still another false god that has surfaced recently, and we must not neglect it. Like the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology, it leads us to a dead end. But unlike them, it does not merely distort or trivialize the idea of public education. It directs us to its end.

This god has several names: the god of Tribalism or Separatism; most often, in its most fervently articulated form, the god of Multiculturalism. Before saying anything about it, I should specify that it must not be confused with what has been called “cultural pluralism.” Cultural pluralism is a seventy-year-old idea whose purpose is to enlarge and enrich the American Creed—specifically, to show the young how their tribal identities and narratives fit into a more inclusive and comprehensive American story. The term
multiculturalism
is sometimes used as a synonym for cultural pluralism, and in such cases, we have a semantic problem that can be clarified with relative ease. But more often than not, the term is used to denote a quite different story. In its extreme form, which is the god I will confront here, I would judge it to be a psychopathic
version of cultural pluralism, and, of course, extremely dangerous. In what follows, I will put quotation marks around the term
multiculturalism
to indicate that no argument is being made against the acknowledgment of cultural differences among students. I am using the term to denote a narrative that makes cultural diversity an exclusive preoccupation.

Although this god is by no means as widely accepted as the others I have discussed, there are several states (for example, New York and Oregon) that have been deeply influenced by it and serious about urging that schooling be organized around it. Because of an expanding interest in “multiculturalism,” as well as the passion of its adherents, it has been deemed dangerous enough to have provoked the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to write a refutation of it,
The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
. Although Schlesinger’s book will, I believe, stand as the definitive critique of “multiculturalism,” there is at least one point he does not stress enough, and which should be the beginning of any discussion of this reversion to undiluted tribalism. I refer to the fact that those who advocate a “multicultural” curriculum, especially those who speak for an Afrocentric bias, understand better than most (certainly better than, say, the U.S. Secretary of Education) the need for a god to serve; they understand that the reason why students are demoralized, bored, and distracted is not that teachers lack interesting methods and machinery but that both students and teachers lack a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons. It does not go too far to say that the “multiculturalists” are the most active and dedicated education philosophers we have at the moment. They are not especially interested in methods or machinery and, generally, are not competent to speak on such matters. But they have a story to tell, and they believe their story can serve as a foundation
to schooling. The trouble is that it is a terrible story, at least for public schools.

Like many important narratives, this one includes concepts of good and evil. In its most frightening version, evil inheres in white people, especially those of European origin and learning. Goodness inheres in nonwhites, especially those who have been victims of “white hegemony.” At least one “multiculturalist,” Professor Leonard Jeffries, of City College of New York, has a biological explanation for these characteristics. He believes that the qualities of good and evil are determined by the respective quantities of melanin in the bloodstreams of different races: the more melanin, the more good; the less melanin, the more evil. One might say that this is the equivalent of the concept of Original Sin in the Christian story, with this difference: The Christian story provides a means by which Original Sin can be overcome. Jeffries’s account of the source of evil leaves no opportunity for redemption.

Of course, many adherents of “multiculturalism” do not agree with Jeffries and, in any case, do not require a biological basis for believing in white, European evil. History, they argue, provides abundant reasons, most particularly in the fact of white oppression of nonwhite people. To “multiculturalists,” such oppression is the key to understanding white history, literature, art, and most everything else of European origin. It follows from this that all the narratives of the white, European races are to be seen as propagandistic means of concealing their evil, or, even worse, making their evil appear virtuous. There is no possibility of proceeding in a fair-minded way, the “multiculturalists” believe, unless the narratives of white Europeans are overthrown. A particularly vigorous expression of this view is provided by four authors from the Rochester, New York, school district: “[The] legitimation
of dominance, naturalization of inequality, and filtration of knowledge are being challenged in the current debate over what is ‘standard’ school knowledge. At issue in this debate is the struggle over accuracy versus misrepresentation, emancipatory versus hegemonic scholarship, and the constructed supremacy of Western cultural knowledge transmitted in schools versus the inherent primacy of the multiple and collective origins of knowledge.”
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If we leave aside the vagueness, if not incomprehensibility, of such phrases as “emancipatory scholarship” and “inherent primacy,” it is clear enough that the authors believe the schools are the battleground where the struggle for a new narrative must be fought. They conclude this paragraph by saying that Eurocentric knowledge must be replaced, since “[such] a singular, monovocal curriculum is one of the last institutional terrains of white, patriarchal, ruling-class hegemony.”

This is clearly not the language of “cultural pluralism,” which would have among its aims celebrating the struggles and achievements of nonwhite people as part of the story of humankind. In fact, the authors explicitly denounce any efforts to “heroize” (their word) such figures as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They believe that the “heroizing” approach conceals the “holocaustal atrocities, economic benefits, and dehumanization of [slavery’s] perpetrators.” Obviously, what “multiculturalism” aims at is not reconciliation with Eurocentric history and learning, but a thorough rejection of it so that a new beginning may be made, a new narrative constructed.

In order to accomplish this, the “multiculturalists” must do two things. First, they must reveal and highlight those ugly parts of history that are usually excluded from the various Eurocentric narratives. Second, they must show that the
more humane parts of those narratives have their origin in nonwhite cultures.

The first task is relatively easy, since all narratives conceal or sanitize unsavory if not indefensible chapters. Narratives are not exactly histories at all, but a special genre of storytelling that uses history to give form to ideals. “The purpose of myth,” Claude Lévi-Strauss reminds us, “is to provide a model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
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That is why no serious harm is done to the great story of Christianity by revealing that a particular Pope was an ambitious, unscrupulous schemer. Neither is it lethal to speak of the Inquisition. The reality is that there has never been a Christian—not even St. Francis or Mother Teresa—who has lived in every particular a Christian life. The story of Christianity is only in part a history of Christians. It is largely the story of the poignant struggle of people to give life to a set of transcendent ideals. That they have stumbled on the way is embarrassing and sometimes shameful, but it does not discredit the purpose of the story, which in fact is about the discrepancy between reality and the ideal.

The same is true of the American story of democracy. To point out that the Constitution, when written, permitted the exclusion of women and nonproperty owners from voting, and did not regard slaves as fully human, is not to make a mockery of the story. The creation of the Constitution, including the limitations of the men who wrote it, is only an early chapter of a two-hundred-year-old narrative whose theme is the gradual and often painful expansion of the concepts of freedom and humanity. How difficult that struggle has been was expressed by Abraham Lincoln in 1856 in a response he made to the presidential campaign of the Know-Nothing party. “Our progress in degeneracy,” he observed sardonically, “appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation, we
began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘All men are created equal,
except Negroes.’
When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ ”
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The Know-Nothings did not get control, but we know nonetheless how that reversion to degeneracy was stayed, at what cost, and how we have continued the journey that Jefferson charted. That we are far from reaching the goal is made abundantly clear by the robust complaints of those who are not yet adequately represented, including the “multiculturalists.” But the point is that it is possible, by ignoring its transcendent ideals, to tell America’s story as a history of racism, inequity, and violence. Is this the story we wish to be the foundation of American public schooling? If the answer is, Yes, because it contains truth, then we must turn to the second task of the “multiculturalists” to see if they are mainly concerned with truth-telling. That task is to show that the humane parts of the Eurocentric narrative have their origins in nonwhite cultures. Schlesinger’s book documents the failure of “multiculturalists” to come even close to the truth. He shows that according to respected historians, including black historians, most of the claims made by “multiculturalists” are propagandistic fantasies. These include the claims that black Africa is where science, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and other great humanistic achievements originated; that ancient Egyptians were black; that Pythagoras and Aristotle stole their mathematics and philosophies from black scholars in Egypt; that most American blacks originated in Egypt; and that the enlightened parts of the U.S. Constitution were based, in some measure, on political principles borrowed from the Iroquois. Schlesinger is so discouraged by the abuse of history reflected in these claims that he concludes:
“If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.”
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One might reply to Schlesinger that neither historical balance nor truth is the issue here. What is being attempted is the creation of a new narrative, similar in point and method to the process by which, for example, American colonists constructed a mythology of the Pilgrims as democratic nation-builders. In that instance, history was used, invented, or forgotten to suit the needs of the story. The story, as we know, has been hugely successful. Americans know about Miles Standish but not about Squanto and Wituwamet. Americans celebrate, even revere, Thanksgiving, but they do not know (or, if they do, give it little weight) that some Indians call Thanksgiving the National Day of Mourning.