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NOTEBOOK - failure of American public education
Lewis H. Lapham
Harpar’s Magazine August 2000

School bells

Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can
alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home a friend, abroad an introduction, in solitude a
solace, and in society an ornament.... Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning
savage.
--Joseph Addison


Between the winter primary campaigns and the summer nominating conventions the two principal
candidates for president discovered--much to their dismay and seasonable surprise--"the crisis of
literacy" in the nation's public schools. The opinion polls were showing 76 percent of the
respondents more concerned about the shambles of American education than about any other
problem on the political agenda, and for nearly three months on any evening's news broadcast if
Al Gore wasn't to be found seated on a tiny classroom chair in North Carolina or Ohio, George
Bush was to be seen reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to kindergarten children in California or
Wisconsin.
The photo op was always smiling, the lesson invariably grim. The boys and girls weren't learning
how to read, didn't know the difference between an aardvark and an anarchist, couldn't count to
twenty or point to California on a map. The time had come to do something "bold" and
"innovative," maybe even something "revolutionary," about the rising flood of ignorance that
threatened to spill over the sandbags of the American dream. Unless everybody began to pay
attention to the instructions on the blackboard, the United States could lose it all--the cruise
missiles and the stock options, the ball game and the farm.
The news was bad but not unfamiliar. For the last twenty years the communiques from the
nation's classrooms have resembled the casualty reports from a lost war. Ever since the early
hours of the Reagan Administration, anxious committees have been publishing statements about
the dwindling supplies of verbal aptitude and mathematical comprehension, about the urgent
need for more money and better teachers, about next semester's redesign of special programs
for the poor, the foolish, the outnumbered, and the inept.
The expressions of alarm I take to be a matter of pious ritual, like a murmuring of prayers or the
beating of ornamental gongs. If as a nation we wished to improve the performance of the schools,
I assume that we could do so. Certainly we possess the necessary resources We are an
energetic people, rich in money and intelligence, capable of making high-performance
automobiles and venture-capital funds, and if our intentions were anything other than ceremonial,
I don't doubt that we could bring the schools to the standard of efficiency required of a well-run
amusement park. Over the last twenty years we have added $10 trillion to the sum of the national
wealth, cloned monkeys, reconfigured the weather, multiplied (by factors too large to calculate)
the reach and value of the Internet.
Why, then, do the public schools continue to decay while at the same time the voices of the
proctors poking through the wreckage continue to rise to the pitch of lamentations for the dead?
Possibly because the condition of the public schools is neither an accident nor a mistake. The
schools as presently constituted serve the interests of a society content to define education as a
means of indoctrination and a way of teaching people to know their place. We have one set of
schools for the children of the elite, another for children less fortunately born, and why disrupt the
seating arrangement with a noisy shuffling of chairs? Serious reform of the public schools would
beg too many questions about racial prejudice, the class system, the division of the nation's
spoils. A too well-educated public might prove more trouble than it's worth, and so we mask our
tacit approval of an intellectually inferior result with the declarations of a morally superior purpose.
The sweet words come easy and cheap, and, if often enough repeated, they gain the weight of
hard decision and accomplished fact.
On their tours of the country's schoolrooms, candidates Bush and Gore produced lists of brisk
suggestion, stressing the principle of "accountability" (on the part of teachers as well as students
and state legislatures), underlining the importance of frequent quizzes, recommending additions
to the cafeteria, improvements for the gym. They might as well have been scattering flowers or
dispensing incense. That they had little intention of doing anything else could be inferred from the
amounts of money they pledged for the projects of reclamation. Bush offered $13.5 billion over
five years; Gore proposed $115 billion over ten years--both negligible sums when compared with
the price of an aircraft carrier or the annual cost of the milk subsidy. The federal government
provides only 7 percent of the funding allocated to the nation's public schools, and when the
candidates talked about making "major investments" they were speaking the language of
diplomatic protocol. The American public school was a setting as foreign to their experience as
the breadfruit market in Zanzibar, and here they were with the native children and the local
dignitaries, posing for pictures and admiring the handicrafts. They could have mentioned any
number--$250 billion in three years, $500 billion in six--and nobody would have questioned it. Nor
would anybody have expected them to make good the promise or send the check. It was enough
that they dropped by the story corner, greeted the geography teacher, and remembered the dates
of the Civil War.
If either presidential candidate were to make the mistake of exposing the educational system to
the rigors of "revolutionary change," who would thank him for his trouble? Not the politicians, who
depend for their safety in office upon an uninformed electorate, apathetic and disinclined to vote,
unable to remember its history or name its civil rights. Not the marketers of the gross domestic
product, who depend upon the eager and uncritical consumption of junk merchandise in every
available color and size. Not the ringmasters of the national media circus, who play to the lowest
common denominators of credulous applause. Not the sellers of sexual fantasy, the proprietors of
gambling casinos, the composers of financial fraud, the dealers in cosmetics and New Age
religion. The consumer society rests on the great economic truth proclaimed by P. T. Barnum (the
one about a sucker being born every minute), and the country's reserves of ignorance constitute
a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo. As a
nation we now spend upward of a trillion dollars a year on liquor, pornography, and drugs, and
the Cold War against the American intellect yields a higher rate of return than the old
arrangement with the Russians. Unless obliged to make a campaign or a commencement
speech, who in his right mind would want to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs?
The question sometimes occurs to me when I attend one of those conferences addressed to the
sorrows of American education and convened under rubrics along the lines of "Investing in
Human Capital: Leadership for the Challenges of the Twenty-first Century." After the keynote
speech--usually a requiem for the 70 million functional illiterates in the country unable to read the
Constitution or a complicated menu, sometimes a sermon about the high school girl in Oklahoma
who thought the Holocaust was a Jewish holiday--the participants adjourn to workshops where
they complain about the failure of the schools to deliver "high-quality product to the
infrastructure." They seldom discuss the powers of the human intellect or imagination. Construing
education as a commodity and the graduating classes as an assembly-line product (like peeled
potatoes or empty aluminum cans), they talk about the manufacture of contented computer
operators who can process insurance forms and change Italian lire into French francs or British
pounds. As often as not it turns out that somebody in the crowd owns a company that leaflets the
schools with films, textbooks, and computer software (a.k.a. "curriculum materials") touting the
wonders of its consumer goods. Revlon offers a lesson in self-esteem that investigates the
differences between good and bad hair days; the Campbell Soup Company once handed out the
"slotted-spoon test," which asked the students to compare the texture of Campbell's Prego with a
competitor's Ragu. The students who failed to find Prego the thicker of the two sauces failed the
lesson in "the scientific method."
A similar bias shapes the strategies of Channel One, the for-profit distributor of educational
services that provides impoverished school districts with computers, television sets, and access
to the Internet. The schools in turn deliver a captive audience of 12 million students obliged to
watch, every day, ten minutes of news programming and two minutes of commercial advertising.
ZapMe!, another company that supplies educational paraphernalia, requires a million students in
forty-five states to spend four hours a day in front of a computer screen that flashes commercial
messages in the lower left-hand corner while they do their studies or browse the Interact. Three
times a year they must bring their parents a marketing packet that installs the same software in
their computers at home.
The United States is the only country in the civilized world that grants the commercial interests
unfettered access to the minds of its children, and it should come as no surprise that the reading
skills of American students improve during their primary-school years and then rapidly decline.
Once inducted into a sixth- or seventh-grade classroom, they make less progress than their peers
in Britain, France, Germany, or Spain. The instruction in the uses of the Internet prepares the
class for the art of shopping, not for the art of reading.
The official mourners at the bier of American public education never fail to say something sad
about "abbreviated attention spans" and the "diminished capacity to think," and apparently it
never occurs to them that both those habits of mind sustain the profits of the credit-card industry
and the banks.
Nor does it occur to them that if much of what passes for education in the United States deadens
the desire for learning, the achievement is deliberate. High schools in large cities possess many
of the same attributes as minimum-security prisons--metal detectors in the corridors, zero
tolerance for rowdy behavior, the principal a warden and the faculty familiar with the syllabus of
concealed weapons. Defined as day-care centers for the restless poor, the schools regulate the
supply of unskilled labor, holding adolescents off the market until they have been hobbled by the
rope of debt and injected with the virus of unbridled appetite for goods and services they can't
afford to buy. The double bind instills the attitudes of passivity and apprehension, which in turn
induce the fear of authority and the habits of obedience. An active intelligence tends to ask too
many rude questions--of doctors and politicians, of the loan officer at the mortgage company or
the nice man at the police station--and the schools do what they can to hold it for ransom and
keep it at bay. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education found one third of
the country's teachers lacking a thorough knowledge of the subject in which they gave instruction;
textbooks that satisfy the requirements of ideological doctrine in lieu of literary expression
inoculate the class against the danger of reading. To learn to read is to learn to think, possibly to
discover the strength and freedom of one's own mind. Not a discovery that the consumer society
wishes too many of its customers to make. Few pleasures equal the joy of the mind when it's
being put to creative use, but the commercial markets have an interest in promoting the line of
costly synthetics, and against the powers of the individual imagination they offer prescription
drugs and prerecorded dreams.
Every now and then a hint of what's afoot shows up in the television advertisements selling the
miracle of a cell phone or a retirement investment fund, and I can still remember seeing (last year
or maybe the year before) a Merrill Lynch commercial that put the proposition about as plainly as
it can be put.
The cautionary tale opens on the stage of a grammar school auditorium. It is prize day, and the
principal on the podium is handing out a scroll--"For the best science report, Neil Gallagher and
his team for `Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Trout.'" Gallagher is a fat kid, a nerd aged nine or
ten; his teammates, a black boy and two white girls, stand and smile. Close-up shots of other
kids, all nerds, applauding wildly. Gallagher shuffles off the stage, and the principal welcomes a
very pretty girl, white and rosy-cheeked, a picture-perfect eleven-year-old wearing a charming
necklace and all elegant dress.
"And finally, this year's winner, Robin Van Ness and the Merrill Lynch team, for their report
`Investment Strategies for Today's Bio-Technology Market.'"
Robin smiles as winsomely as a beauty queen, and the surprised kids in the first five rows turn
around in their seats to see four handsome adults standing in the back of the auditorium--except
for the principal, the only other adults present. The Merrill Lynch team. Way cool, very smooth.
The team (two white men, a black man, a white woman in an Armani suit) glows with parental
happiness and pride. Expressions of amazement on the faces of the kids, who have seen a great
light. Wonderful day for Robin. Wonderful day for American education. Loud applause, students
rising to their feet, and in luminous print on the top of the visual, the words, "Now everyone can
access the thinking of the world's most honored research team." The Merrill Lynch logo fills the
screen, the voice-over (feminine and soft), saying, "ml dot-com: the smartest place to invest
online."
End of lesson, boys and girls, and nothing more to learn. Why fool around with penniless trout
when the swell people at Merrill Lynch can make you rich enough to buy a river in Montana? Why
go to the trouble of learning how to read when you can grow up to be president of the United
States without knowing how to write a grammatical sentence?
Candidates Bush and Gore voiced their alarm about the failure of American education in such
feeble, made-for-hire prose that they refuted their own message about "the crisis of literacy."
What crisis? If the language of politics becomes the stuff of sound bites, and if the electorate
doesn't object to the secession of the confederacy of the rich from the union of the poor, asks for
little else except the comfort of being constantly amused, believes the fairy tales about the
invincible missile shield, who can say that illiteracy is not a consummation devoutly to be wished.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Harper's Magazine Foundation



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