It was like opening the New York Times on a Wednesday morning in February 2008 and seeing the headline “Lindbergh Baby Kidnapped” or “Hitler Marches Into Rhineland.”  Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” where the same thing keeps happening over and over. Definitely déjà vu, as actress/author Simone Signoret put it, all over again.

The headline in question: “Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions.” And this time around it’s not farce, it’s still tragedy. Because the same headlines announcing the same deplorable facts appeared 25 years ago, and nothing seems to have changed in the intervening years.  Yes, there have been many kinds of changes in the schools since the mid-1980s, but improvement in what  really counts – what young Americans know about their country and their world – is not  among them.

Anxiety about the state of schooling in America was launched in 1957 with Sputnik, the USSR satellite program that served to warn that the U.S. was falling behind in the technology race. Finally, in 1983, a blue-ribbon commission was created by the Reagan administration to investigate the question of what had been happening to America’s schools. The result was a brilliant report titled “A Nation At Risk,” which declared, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world” and identified the dimension of the problem “that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility…. the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people…. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. 

As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge….We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.” 

A gauntlet had been thrown down before the educational establishment, and plans for reform seemed to come from all directions.  But before settling on the diagnosis and cure, the symptoms have to be identified.  This was the purpose of a ground-breaking book by education historian Diane Ravitch and policy expert Chester E. Finn, Jr., titled “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature.”

Analyzing the results of a test administered to a sample of high-school juniors of different races, sexes, income levels and geographic regions, Ravitch and Finn revealed some shocking numbers. Little more than half could answer the questions on literature or history.  Only 20% could identify Joyce or Dostoevsky, fewer than 25% could identify Henry James or Thomas Hardy, only one in three knew Chaucer was the author of The Canterbury Tales, 65% did not know what 1984 or Lord of the Flies is about.

It gets worse. One third of these American high school students could not identify the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as coming from the Declaration of Independence and even those who identified the phrase correctly could not articulate the document’s significance; some who found the phrase familiar thought it came from the Gettysburg Address. 

Three quarters of the students did not know when Abraham Lincoln was president; three of every ten could not place the Civil War in the proper half-century. More than a third could not place the writing of the Constitution in the proper half-century. Map questions revealed only the most elementary knowledge of American or European geography; many girls, black and Hispanic students had trouble locating Great Britain. For the most part what information or misinformation students had about world events and great works of literature seem to come from movies and television rather than from school.

Fast forward to last week’s New York Times article. Twenty-five years after the wake-up call of “A Nation at Risk,” twenty years after the depressing answer to “What Do Our Seventeen-Year Olds Know,” the news in 2008 is that our schools still aren’t doing their job and that our high school students remain ignorant of basic U.S. and world history and literature. The familiar story reported by the Times: Fewer than half of today’s American teenagers today asked questions from the 1986 survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World “some time after 1750.”  (The Times adds to the last sentence “not in 1492,” in case some of its readers might not know the date either.  After all, they are products of America’s schools.)

Other results were equally appalling when one considers that these are the citizens who will choose the next generation of the country’s leaders – and who might even be among those leaders themselves.  About a quarter of today’s high school juniors were unable to identify Hitler as Germany’s leader in World War II. The rest guessed he was a munitions maker, an Austrian premier or the German Kaiser.   Roughly half knew Job as the Biblical figure embodying patience in the face of suffering. The other half thought he might have been a builder, a warrior or a prophet. While the past and its great works remain a mystery to most American teenagers, what they do know illustrates the emphasis on race in today’s curriculum. Although uncertain about Abraham Lincoln, most were familiar with Martin Luther King, Jr. and knew the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird.

                                                                           II

What had been happening in the years between the strikingly unchanging survey results? While authors and educators like Diane Ravitch and Core Curriculum innovator E.D. Hirsch, Jr. were in the forefront of those arguing for the value of the liberal arts and researchers like the late reading expert Jeanne Chall were demonstrating that phonic decoding is the most effective way to teach reading, they were outnumbered and out-shouted by ideologues. Educational fads trumped common sense and common experience.

Beginning in the sixties, the mission of the schools has been redefined. The institutions training our teachers have come to see their job not as transmitting our culture but as changing it, not as passing on an understanding of the history and traditions of a democratic United States of America but as pursuing an agenda of far-left social activism. The U.S. – oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic – needs to be set on the path toward greater equality, not just of opportunity but of results. Equality should be enforced by legislation if necessary, and the elitism of demands for excellence should be scrapped. 

For the past half century this has been the message young people who want to be teachers have been getting along with a curriculum heavy on pedagogical methods and light on subject matters – a lot of emphasis on how to teach and very little knowledge of anything to teach. Curriculum has taken a back seat to methodology – it doesn’t matter what children read as long as they can handle the vocabulary well enough to be moved on to the next grade. And with fads like “whole language” taking the place of phonics, this meant simple “basic readers” indeed.

Whole language, based on word recognition rather than learning to associate letters with sounds, is a product of the reigning educational philosophy known as “constructivism.” The idea, which goes back for its origins to Rousseau, is that children will construct their own learning naturally, like flowers unfolding. It follows that teachers should resign their positions of authority in front of a structured classroom, becoming “facilitators” of the process by which small groups of children (preferably around small tables or seated on rugs on the floor) figure things out for themselves.  By a similar process, which has been characterized as “fuzzy math,” they will estimate answers to numerical problems, a method that says grasping a general concept is more important than arriving at an exact answer. All of this has prepared a couple of generations of American schoolchildren to be barely literate and hardly able to deal with simple arithmetic.

By the time these students reach high school, a vast dumbing-down has become necessary to keep them afloat. When third grade is the new eighth grade, much has been lost along the way. Lowering standards to eliminate “inequality,” so that everyone can be said to be as smart and as accomplished as anyone else, has bred a hostility toward merit. “Self-esteem” is fostered through group identity, not achievement. And that identity is not understood as that of an American citizen but of some group perceived as oppressed by white America. So “multiculturalism” has come to mean valuing – and studying – any other cultures but our own. And “diversity,” the newest shibboleth, has come to mean different genders or skin colors, but not different ways of thinking.

                                                                          III

Ironically, the high school students winning prizes for scientific innovation today are overwhelmingly immigrants or the children of immigrants, largely of Asian descent. What distinguishes them from their underachieving fellow students is the motivation that begins at home, in the family that values education as a step to a better life. Too many American parents are complacent about their children’s schooling, failing to ask what a passing grade really means or inquire as to what goes on in their children’s classrooms.

In the end, learning is something that takes place between teacher and child. Buildings, technology, and all the things money can buy have little to do with it. Someone who loves a subject and knows it thoroughly and can pass that knowledge and that passion on to the young is the bedrock of the learning process, starting when schooling begins and going on into young adulthood. It’s not class size or teachers’ salaries, charter schools or vouchers, or all the other kinds of structural tweaking to which the schools have been treated by assorted legislators and billionaires.  It’s the quality of teachers with which change for the better will have to begin.

The largest accrediting agency of teacher education programs in the country, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, has been running the show for decades now. Its policy states explicitly that schools of education should see teachers “as agents of change” with “a commitment to social justice.” And for years now Columbia University’s Teachers College has led the way in turning out teachers whose mission is defined by a faculty that despises the very idea of an American common culture.

The politicization of the schools has had some bizarre consequences. Not least of what has been lost in the redirection of high school and college courses around themes of “social justice” is the literary patrimony. Standard English is the language of oppressors, those dead white males who left behind the creations of genius. There goes the 19th Century novel, lyric poetry, drama from Shakespeare on, and all the treasures that have enriched Western culture in centuries past. The present gatekeepers of our culture have little use for imaginative literature or the recorded sweep of history through biography, for tales of early heroism, adventure and tragedy. They decry the study of dates, times, eras as “mere facts.”  What used to provide a window on the world for the young has been replaced by a curriculum so deadening and so boring that the country’s young turn increasingly to the purveyors of mass media for their views and their values.

A former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, hardly a Right-wing fanatic, has said that many college seniors graduate “without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers….Few are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never…acquired the knowledge necessary to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy.”

So we are failing to educate an informed citizenry, an efficient workforce, or a people proud of their nation’s special character. Unable to articulate its worth, unaware of its gifts to them, how can the coming generations be expected to defend it?

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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