Education in America: 1. What Has Happened?

Dr. Roche is Director of Seminars for the Foundation for Economic Education. He has taught history and philosophy in college and maintains a special interest in American education.

In what must surely be his most quoted remark, the nineteenth cen­tury novelist, Thomas Peacock, commented that anyone talking about education was the bore of all bores since his subject lacked a beginning, a middle, or an end. Anyone attempting to write on the subject would seem, therefore, to undertake a difficult assign­ment. Yet, what other topic has had so much written about it, so little of which is read? With his usual blunt Yankee insight, Emer­son summed up the current atti­tude on such treatises:

It is ominous, a presumption of crime, that this word Education has so cold, so hopeless a sound. A trea­tise on education, a convention for education, a lecture, a system, affects us with slight paralysis and a cer­tain yawning of the jaws.

I know what Emerson meant, yet must risk that slight paralysis and yawning of the jaws in my reader. Why? Because it seems painfully clear that our society is breaking down rather than ma­turing and because this trend seems likely to continue until we face and correct certain funda­mental misconceptions in our ed­ucational framework.

In the last century, men of good will seemed naively confident that the mere communication of knowledge could change the world. All problems, all social difficulties, could be corrected if only igno­rance could be conquered. Unfor­tunately, knowledge and ignorance are at best highly relative terms. The problem is further aggravated when we ask the question, “Knowl­edge and ignorance of what?” Sadly enough, that issue was all too seldom faced when we were constructing the philosophy and institutions of modern American education.

The Mixed Blessings of Universal Education

Following the lead of the nine­teenth century, modern America and most other nations of the Western World have established universal institutionalized educa­tion. However, there are some signs that ignorance has not yet been vanquished. There also are signs that such knowledge as has been imparted has brought little progress toward “the good so­ciety.” Worst of all, there are signs that teaching everyone to read may be less than an unmixed blessing:

… teaching everyone to read opens minds to propaganda and indoctrina­tion at least as much as to truths; and on political and social matters it is propaganda and indoctrination rather than truth that universal education has most conspicuously nur­tured.’

Modern dictators have made very effective use of universal institu­tionalized education.

As universal education has failed to provide the utopia ex­pected of it, the Western World in general, and the United States in particular, has begun to sus­pect that even our advanced, lit­erate, “modern” civilization on which we so pride ourselves may prove to be mortal after all. We are beginning to suspect that civ­ilizations can die as well as grow. Moreover, we are becoming restive as we see some of the signs of decay around us. We are begin­ning to suspect that there are other obstacles blocking our path to an ideal society, obstacles de­rived from the human condition, obstacles not easily overcome by merely providing larger and larger schools, more and more books, and more and more of all the other trappings of universal institution­alized education. The differences we note between an “educated man” and a “good man” should cause us to re-examine what we mean when we use the word “ed­ucation.”

Surely, education should be helpful rather than harmful. Surely, education should be encouraged to the utmost. At least this is the way we all talk about the subject. Do we really mean it? More im­portant, should we really mean it? The answer to these questions depends on what sort of “educa­tion” we have in mind.

Perhaps the most “educated” people of antiquity were the Greeks, yet they destroyed them­selves. The Germans have been among the most literate and most completely “educated” people of modern times, yet succumbed to the siren song of an Adolf Hitler. Despite the fact that much of what passes for “education” pro­duces undesirable results in whole nations, despite the results it has been producing lately among many well-endowed young people within our own society, we still find in the minds of most people that “more education” is the answer to all problems.

An alarming percentage of our citizens, it is to be feared, stop with the word “education” itself. It is for them a kind of conjuror’s word, which is expected to work miracles by the very utterance. If politics becomes selfish and shortsighted, the cure that comes to mind is “educa­tion.” If juvenile delinquency is ram­pant, “education” is expected to pro­vide the remedy. If the cultural level of popular entertainment declines, “education” is thought of hopefully as the means of arresting the down­ward trend. People expect to be saved by a word when they cannot even give content to the word.²

Shortchanging the Students

Twentieth century America is a society in which all children go to school. Yet, today our cities are populated by children worse be­haved and more socially dangerous than the less “educated” young­sters of former times. Let me hasten to insist that I am not against children learning to read. In fact, one of the complaints which can be leveled against mod­ern education is that large num­bers of high school graduates are scarcely able to read and quite unable to write a coherent para­graph.

It- is not that our young people have been underexposed to “edu­cation,” but rather that they have been badly shortchanged in what they have received. Meanwhile, many of our high school and col­lege graduates who have learned to read have then been condemned to spend their time with books and lectures calculated to under­cut those human values that make for the good society. The resultant generations of young people with little or no knowledge of the na­ture of man, and a scarcely better understanding of the economics, politics, and social concepts that have been produced by the great thinkers of the Western World, continue to pour from our “edu­cational” system. Surely, these young people cannot be blamed for the direction of our society. Sure­ly, a system which produces young people, some of whom cannot read, many of whom cannot think, and most of whom lack knowledge of their own heritage and the moral values which underlie it, is a sys­tem which needs serious attention. We have been pouring unlimited amounts of money into the me­chanics of the education of our young. Perhaps it is time we be­gan to devote a little thought to the subject as well.

Meanwhile, we Americans seem to have almost no idea what to do with our children. School, in many cases, seems to be a convenient place to file our young people until the draft boards or the labor unions absorb them. As parents and future employers, it appears that at least a part of our concern for more and more years of “edu­cation” is to get the youngsters off our minds. This seems to be evidenced by more preschool edu­cation, by the extension of the high school years through the thirteenth and fourteenth grades at junior colleges, by our assump­tion that nearly all young people should now attend at least four years of college, and more and more of these same people attend graduate school as well. In the process we have cheapened the bachelor’s degree to a level in­ferior to what an eighth grade diploma once constituted and we have made the Ph.D. degree a mere license to teach. “What price education?”

Surely, American education suf­fers from an almost unbelievable amount of aimlessness and confu­sion. We spend more on our edu­cational institutions than have most societies past or present. Yet, as our buildings grow larger and larger, the graduates from them seem to be less and less prepared, in either mind or character, for carrying on our civilization. It is widely assumed, and correctly so, that our prospects as a nation and as a civilization rest upon our abil­ity to inculcate skills and civilized values in our young people. Such a task is so important that our society cannot any longer afford to let it drift as it has been drift­ing. As one critic has suggested, “Is it possible that ‘education’ is too important to be left to the educators?”

Jeremiahs Seldom Popular

Of course, it’s possible to light­ly dismiss such questions. Criers of doom are always warning that the end of civilization is in sight, but the sun usually seems to rise the next morning. Isn’t it true that in our developing technology and in our scientific achievements we have been advancing steadily? Isn’t it true that we have more material possessions than any oth­er civilization, past or present? Yes, but it also is true that history is filled with the records of dead and dying civilizations; civiliza­tions which in most cases achieved the greatest bloom of prosperity and self-satisfaction at the very time when they had so lost their way, and so departed from the very values which gave them di­rection, that their own decline and decay had already begun, unno­ticed by most people.

There are usually on the scene some people able to sense the turn of events; but Jeremiahs seldom get a good press in their own so­ciety. People don’t like to be told such things. One of the warnings concerning our own failing as a civilization comes to us, however, from a man well publicized throughout the Western World. In 1923, Albert Schweitzer commented in his Civilization and Ethics:

My subject is the tragedy of the Western world-view… Our civili­zation is going through a severe crisis…. Most people think that the crisis is due to the war but they are wrong. The war, with everything connected with it, is only a phenom­enon of the condition of unciviliza­tion in which we find ourselves.

Our “uncivilization” was attrib­uted by Schweitzer to the great gap which has opened up between our material and spiritual under­standing. He sensed that modern man was becoming dependent upon larger and larger economic, social, and political aggregations of pow­er. He warned that, in the process, the individual man was finding it increasingly difficult to identify and establish his own personality. American education serves as a prime example of modern man’s emphasis upon the material rather than the spiritual, an emphasis upon larger and larger aggrega­tions of collective authority and organization within which indi­vidual personality finds a smaller and smaller place. Let anyone who doubts this attend the massive public high school or gigantic state university campus of his choice. What we teach and how we teach it makes it harder and harder for the individual to find and defend his place in the sun.

Progress and Regress

This peculiar composite of ma­terial progress and spiritual re­gress leads us directly to one of the dichotomies of our age. While technicians and scientists radiate optimism in their prediction of a glorious future, most of the popular writers of our time, concerned with the human condition, view the present as an absurd joke and see the future as hopeless. All too many modern writers see the uni­verse and human life as essen­tially meaningless. If anyone might doubt such a sweeping statement, let him consider the literature which our young people read today in the high schools and colleges of America. The same overwhelming impression of the meaninglessness of human life can be detected in conversation with many young people, or in even a casual perusal of the press and theater of our time.

A Dead End?

It may be that in our pursuit of “education” we have been pursu­ing the wrong ideas. Our Ameri­can educational system might be compared to the glorious promise of the nineteenth century frontier roads leading to the West. They offered a majestic appearance as they left the East, with planted rows of trees on either side to tempt the traveler. But, as Emer­son remarked, they soon became narrower and narrower and ended in a squirrel track running up a tree. There are some signs that, for all of our grand hopes and great expenditure, our institu­tional educational framework may likewise be leading us up a tree.

Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle stated the question most suc­cinctly: “Consideration must be given to the question, what con­stitutes education and what is the proper way to be educated.” The answer appears to be one for which Western man is still search­ing. Perhaps it is time to remind ourselves of historian Herbert Butterfield’s injunction:

Amongst historians, as in other fields, the blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own pre-suppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any…. It must be emphasized that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support.

Professor Butterfield would get little hearing for his remarks throughout much of the academic community today. Still, he may be right. We may have become so busy discussing “education” with the current clichés and shallow value judgments which we have come to accept, that we are over­looking some philosophic and in­stitutional flaws of grave magni­tude. Perhaps the time has come for a serious and sustained effort in thinking through the goals and means of American education. It is past time for all of us to be­come interested in the subject, especially since educators in many cases respond to criticism “by re­doubling their efforts and forget­ting their aims,” as Robert Hutch­ins has said. Surely, we can do better.

Actually, this soul searching and re-examination of American education has been under way in this country ever since World War II. Many people are deeply concerned about various practical or philosophic aspects of one level or another of American education. But no single level of education can be considered in a vacuum. The students of colleges are, after all, the graduates of American high schools. The teachers of high schools are the graduates of Amer­ican colleges and universities. Not only are various levels of Ameri­can education interrelated, but the practical and philosophic as­pects of the problem feed back upon one another to produce a complex of relationships which deserves a careful treatment with­in the compass of a single study.

Aspects of the Problem

Some of the problems we will be examining in an effort to achieve an improved understand­ing of American higher education will include:

(1)    What should we be trying to teach? What is the nature of the underlying moral framework which society must pass from one genera­tion to another for its own self-pres­ervation?

(2)    How does education fail when it departs from such an underlying moral framework? What have been the results of such a departure in our own society?

(3)    What of the problems of size and the problems of population which confront our schools with overcrowding, lowering of standards, and many related difficulties?

(4)    Why is it that child-centered education, education essentially with­out discipline, is a disaster, both for the child and for the society in which he is to assume a role?

(5)    What of the role played by the educationists and the largely dominant philosophy currently pur­sued in American education?

(6)    What of the failures in higher education, stemming from institu­tional inertia, excessive specializa­tion, the committee mentality, the “publish or perish” syndrome, and the other shortcomings of the college and university community?

(7)    What of the college revolts of our age? Who is responsible: stu­dent, faculty, or society? More im­portant, where do we go from here?

(8)    What of the problem of public versus private financing and philos­ophy for all levels of American ed­ucation?

This listing of vital questions con­cerning American education could be extended. What of the public and private roles in research and technology? What of the problem of vocational training? What in­volvement should private indus­try have in this question? What are the wellsprings of that hu­man creativity which has allowed society to advance as far as it has and how can those sources best be safeguarded within our educational system? What of the many good jobs being done by good people on various levels of American education and how can they best be preserved in a re­vamped system? And finally, what sort of a philosophy of education could best provide for America the trained, disciplined, truly hu­man, young people so desperately needed if our nation and the Western World are to survive?

An attempt to answer all of these questions is, of course, am­bitious. But such a task is made far easier by all the modern cri­tiques of education on its various levels which have been undertaken by so many highly qualified peo­ple. Even more important, the whole rationale for a proper phi­losophy of education derives from a large number of distinguished thinkers, past and present, who have perceived the basic truth that how a civilization deals with its young and creative minds is the final key to the future of that civilization.

With a tip of our hat toward all those better men who have gone before, let us examine some of the problems of American educa­tion.    

The next article of this series will discuss “Freedom, Morality, and Education.”

 

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Education for Privacy

I suggest that over the door of every academic cubicle there should hang the sign which Thoreau had over the door of his hut: “My destiny mended here, not yours.” In short, I propose to make a plea for education for privacy.

MARTEN TEN HOOR