The Time of Our Lives (5 page)

These days anyone who enters the public arena is immediately cut from the herd and ear-tagged like a critter on a cattle ranch. Cable television anchors, radio talk-show hosts, and blogosphere commentators tag anyone who crosses their line of sight, and once on, the tag is tough to remove.

On Fox News, the scarlet-letter tag is “liberal,” attached with a sneer. Keith Olbermann has special enmity for conservatives, for a while tagging a number of them as “the worst person in the world” during his popular run as an MSNBC commentator.

I’ve found myself in both camps, especially in election years.

In the closing days of the 2008 election I was attacked from the left when, on an episode of
Meet the Press
with guest John McCain, I reminded our viewers that it was the anniversary of his capture in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Earlier in that campaign, the liberal blogosphere lit up when I reported on
Meet the Press
that the one area in which Barack Obama continued to trail McCain was the public’s confidence in his qualifications to be commander in chief.

To my mind, those were two relevant, objective facts worth noting in a campaign, but to the ideologues on the left, they certified me as a conservative sympathizer. The right is even more vigilant for any perceived signs of liberalism, picking over every utterance, written phrase, or personal reflection.

For a public person this comes with the territory, but sometimes the reach is exaggerated to the point of being amusing. On occasion, when asked about the place of racial issues in the campaigns, I’ve said that my perspective is helped by the personal realization that in the early, formative stages of my career I was aware that if my skin pigment had been one shade darker I would have been denied opportunities at every turn, in Omaha, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to declare me a “self-hating liberal.” Rush, of all people, should know that those of us who make a very good living listening to the sound of our own voices are incapable of self-hate. We think we’re grand, and I include Rush in that fraternity.

Rush is at least an original, and his power is indisputable. He relishes his influence and the financial rewards that come with it. However you regard his message or personal style, he has earned his fortune by creating an enormous audience of the faithful, or “ditto-heads,” as they like to be called.

A ditto-head is someone who worships at the altar of Limbaugh’s preaching, never questioning his conclusions or reasoning. Equivalents can be found on the left as well, slavishly loyal to the shibboleths spouted by the liberal faithful. You’ll find very little self-doubt or second thoughts on left-leaning websites such as Daily Kos or MoveOn. Org.

THE PAST

More than twenty years ago, a wise American who had served at the highest levels of the academic, public, and corporate world warned against just such a condition in American life.

He was John Gardner, a PhD graduate of Stanford University; U.S. Marine Corps officer during World War II; president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; secretary of health, education, and welfare in the LBJ administration (he quietly resigned over Vietnam); and board member of the Shell Oil Company, American Airlines, and Time, Inc., among others.

Gardner founded Common Cause, the citizen-based organization that brought together disparate groups to work on the problems of a changing America. He was also a member of President Reagan’s task force on private sector initiatives.

Few members of America’s leadership class had the depth and breadth of his experiences, and fewer still commanded the personal and professional respect that Dr. Gardner did. He embodied what the Founding Fathers must have had in mind when they envisioned a republic of engaged citizens.

As Gardner watched the rise of special interest groups across the political and economic spectrum in the sixties, he had serious concerns. In his seminal book
On Leadership
, Gardner wrote, “Unfortunately a high proportion of leaders in all segments of our society today … are rewarded for a single-minded pursuit of the interests of their group. They are rewarded for doing battle, not compromising.”

In a chapter called “Fragmentation of the Common Good,” he asked,

How many times have we seen a major city struggling with devastating problems while every possible solution is blocked by one or another powerful commercial or political or union interest?

We are moving toward a society so intricately organized that the working of the whole system may be halted if one part stops functioning.

He continued, “A society in which pluralism is not under-girded by some shared values and held together by some measure of public trust simply cannot survive.” That was written more than twenty-five years ago and is truer now than it was then.

To emphasize his point, Gardner concluded, “
Pluralism that reflects no commitment whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk
.” The italics were his, to underscore his concern.

I miss John Gardner as a fellow citizen. I came to know him personally, and I was always impressed by his quiet but forceful commitment to the common good. We have too few of those voices these days.

THE PROMISE

Another was the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, Renaissance literature scholar and president of Yale University. I collected his speeches, including the one he made to the incoming Yale freshman class in 1980. He said to these bright and no doubt anxious eighteen-year-olds that he understood their unease. “What is the point of it all?” he guessed they might be wondering. “And will anyone tell me or am I expected to know?”

Giamatti, a true Renaissance man in his scholarship and wide-ranging interests, then reminded the class of something I trust they carried with them through Yale and beyond. “You are not expected to know,” he said, “but you are expected to wish to know.”

What better advice for a young man or woman on the cusp of what passes for the real world? Think. Reason. Explore. Question.

He went on to raise a rhetorical question—“Why does any ideology tend to be authoritarian?”—and then answered it: “These closed systems are attractive because they are simple and they are simple because they are such masterly evasions of contradictory, gray, complex reality. Those who manipulate such systems are compelling because they are never in doubt.”

To a later class of Yale, he noted that the twentieth century was coming to a close. “The fact is,” Giamatti said, “nothing is old or tired or declining for you. You are new. You do not need the worn intellectual cloaks of others; you must weave your own, with which to walk out into the world.” He sent them on their way with a charge to be remembered by all: “Do not become one of those who only has the courage of other people’s convictions.”

Dr. Giamatti left Yale for his other passion: He became the commissioner of Major League Baseball, a game he loved and wrote about with the pen of a poet and the hard lessons of a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan.

“Baseball,” as he so memorably put it, “breaks your heart.”

It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it, buffer the passage of time. To keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

I became acquainted with Giamatti while teaching a guest lecturer course on politics in the television age in the late seventies. He monitored my course and invited me to lunch after I wrote a whimsical piece in
The New York Times
about grade inflation at Yale. I had lamented the absence of grade inflation during my undistinguished undergraduate years at the University of South Dakota, and apparently some of the Yale faculty were not amused.

Bart was on my side, laughing as he encouraged me to keep assigning term papers and grading them on a meritocratic scale.

When he died at age fifty-one in 1989, America lost a brilliant scholar and a brave, wise voice.

Gardner and Giamatti’s counsel to find a way into the future
together
without absolutely surrendering our most cherished beliefs takes on a new urgency when we contemplate these numbers: There are a little more than 311 million of us now. By 2050, that number is expected to exceed 440 million. That means more efficiency and cooperation will be required in every part of our lives, from jobs to food, politics to security, medicine to energy, culture to education.

We have much to learn, and the schoolhouse is a place to begin.

CHAPTER 3
 

K Through Twelve and the Hazards
Along the Way

FACT:
The U.S. Department of Education estimated in 2010 that more than forty million Americans are functionally illiterate. According to the federal agency, 10 percent of students at four-year colleges take remedial reading courses. American fourth and eighth graders rank, respectively, eleventh and eighth in the world in international science aptitude tests. By grade twelve, American students are near the bottom of the international scale. America’s African American and Hispanic minorities are much further down the scale in reading, math, and science.

QUESTION:
In 2010, President Obama’s big educational initiative, Race to the Top, offered states a total of $4.35 billion in grants to change their education policies to make them more effective. That is less than what the Department of Defense spent in Iraq in June of the same year. Does that make sense to you?

I
n 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued a report called
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform
. It concluded that the foundation of the American education system was being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatened our future as a nation and as a people.

That report was issued almost two decades ago, before China and India began moving up the economic food chain. By 2009, the United States was falling even farther behind. American fifteen-year-olds ranked twenty-fifth out of thirty-four countries in math, fourteenth in reading, and seventeenth in science.

What does that tell you about their ability to meet the even greater demands of higher education or to be prepared for the modern workplace?

The American Dream is freighted with so many interpretations it defies a tidy, all-inclusive definition, but if there is a common denominator it is education. It is part of our country’s promise and lore, from Abe Lincoln educating himself by the light of a fireplace, to the kind of rural one-room schoolhouse my mother attended, to the power of our vast system of higher education, stretching from the ivied halls to the new for-profit institutions and all the large and small public and private colleges in between.

Five years after the
Nation at Risk
report, I was in Seoul, South Korea, for the Olympic Games, which were being telecast by NBC Sports. NBC News had a significant presence because there were reports of possible terrorist attacks taking place during the games. It was showcase time for Korea, which had begun to flex its well-toned industrial muscles in the world markets.

Because of the time difference I anchored
Nightly News
at 5:30
A.M
. Seoul time. We broadcast from a building roof overlooking a local junior high school. The first morning when I finished at 6:00, I was startled to see the school courtyard crowded with uniformed students, hunched over their textbooks, studying by flashlight, waiting for the doors to open at 6:30.

They were there every morning during my stay. I returned to America to share that story with friends and audiences. I would be met with smiles of appreciation, but through the nineties American education remained stuck in old conventions and failing schools.

I was reminded of that Seoul experience when I read U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan’s account of a meeting between President Obama and South Korean president Lee Myung-bak. Duncan recalled President Obama’s asking his Korean counterpart, “What is the biggest challenge you have in education?”

President Lee answered, “The biggest challenge I have in education is that the parents are too demanding.”

THE PAST

Those South Korean parents share a cold, rocky peninsula with a lunatic nuclear-armed regime just to the north. China hovers over them like a dark storm cloud, ominous and intensely competitive. China tried to conquer South Korea in the early 1950s, and when the United States rushed to its aid in the first shooting war between the West and China, nearly thirty-four thousand Americans died.