Future History, page 8
The first state government to address this situation was Massachusetts, the state which in the colonial era had in essence created the idea of public education in the first place. The state legislature created in 1837 the State Board of Education and appointed as its first secretary a remarkable fellow named Horace Mann, who lived from 1756 to 1859.43 To Mann can be attributed the basic outlines of the American education system as it exists, at least in theory, until today. But of course it has long since ceased to serve its original purpose.
Mann believed in what used to called civic education, i.e., the creation of a body of responsible citizens who would be the bedrock of the Republic. To that end he proposed, and the state legislature implemented, the first comprehensive system of public education in human history, and it was in its inception a truly elegant thing. There was to be a school year of specifically delineated parameters, tied, of course, to the growing seasons. One of the reasons that pupils attended school sporadically was that they were needed on the farm, so Mann proposed a school year that exempted the entire summer and provided extra days off in the fall and spring, so that sowing and harvesting needs would be accommodated. There was to be a mandatory school age, incumbent upon all families, from age 6 to age 12, with an official who would enforce attendance (the "truant officer.") Most importantly, the teacher was to be an educated and licensed individual, not a girl waiting to get married. Mann proposed (and, again, the state legislature implemented) the idea of the "Normal School," which was essentially a two year college that would train teachers.44 After two years of taking and successfully passing courses in civics, literature, mathematics, natural science, and art, the teacher would be granted a state license to teach. She (they were almost all women) would also receive a salary upon which she could actually support herself, as opposed to enough money to endow a hope chest.
Mann's system was soon adopted by the other states, and was thus able to provide structured education to the general public across the nation. Prior to the First World War the average American attended school until graduation from what came to be called elementary school. A much smaller number went on to high school, which was regarded as unnecessary unless the individual was planning a career requiring advanced skills (e.g., accountancy, stenography, nursing, etc.,) or planning to go on to college. As previously, very few people went to college. True, lawyers now had to go to college before law school and physicians to college before medical school, but college was largely a reserve of the wealthy elite.
Between the first two world wars, high school attendance increased but high school graduation still did not exceed 25 percent of the population. The Second World War, or rather the return to peace after it, changed all that, dramatically, irreversibly, and though unperceived at the time, subversively.
Hoping to cushion the return of sixteen million men from the armed forces to a workforce that could not possibly absorb all of them at once, Congress passed in 1946 the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly called the G.I. Bill. This law provided, among other veterans' benefits, federal subsidies to pay for college tuition. Designed as a way of allowing a slow and incremental reintegration of veterans into the economy, the G.I. Bill actually revolutionized American society by altering fundamentally the nature of American education. In the reciprocal nature of the market economy, a demand will create a supply, but a supply will also elicit a demand. In this instance, the sudden surge in availability of college tuition money caused colleges to sprout like mushrooms, and grown men whose fathers probably did not even attend high school now found themselves college freshmen. It was inevitable that as education spread, becoming part of a competitive market, its quality would decline.
This seems to contradict the basic capitalist assumption that competition improves the quality of the commodity being produced, but this is true only for material commodities that can be measured, subjectively or objectively, as successes or failures. Education is not such a commodity. For one thing, there really is no bottom line, as it were, because education is simultaneously a process and a result, and the result is measurable only in comparison with other similar results. As education began to decline in quality, schools (public, private, and parochial)45 experienced the same deterioration of assessment: a high standard of achievement was expected, but a minimum achievement level was accepted, and that minimum eventually became the norm. That lowered norm necessitated a lower minimum, which then in turn became the norm. This process continued sporadically but relentlessly, until it became possible in some parts of the country to graduate from high school without being able to write a coherent series of paragraphs or read a serious book.
A few (rounded) numbers tell the story:
As can be seen from these figures, more and more people were being "educated," that is to say, attending high schools and colleges and graduating from them. The expectation that this dramatic increase in graduates would not diminish the level of educational achievement was derived from an article of faith, not from empirical analysis. That article of faith was that, given the political fact of human equality, there must be equality of achievement across the board in school. Any examination which showed disparate results for any race or ethnicity, or for either gender, is obviously a flawed examination. Therefore, in order to assure equality of outcome, the methods of evaluation were increasingly broadened and cheapened to the point at which evaluations were functionally meaningless.
Any of the states of the Union, to use an old phrase, could serve as a paradigm for this deterioration; let us examine one state, New York, as a prime example.
By the middle of the 20th century New York had developed an admirable trifurcated public high school system. Uniform elementary education provided all students with the same basic curriculum in reading, writing, arithmetic, civics, general science, art, and music. By the time children reached 8th grade, however, their individual aptitudes and abilities had become manifest, and when they began high school they (or their parents, really) were offered three different types of education leading to three different types of diploma. The general diploma was designed for children whose future course was as yet unplanned. The curriculum for this diploma continued core general studies (English, history, some math, some science, art, music) with the addition of practical skill-developing activities such as woodworking, vehicle repair, draftsmanship, culinary skills, child care, home budget management, and the like. (In general terms, "shop" was for boys and "home economics" was for girls.) The commercial diploma, for children who seemed destined for business careers on the less than managerial level, provided courses in stenography, bookkeeping, typing, etc., in addition to the same core general studies of the general diploma.
The college-bound high school student, always a minority in this trifurcated system, would undertake the more rigorous academic program, which led to what was called a Regents' diploma.46 (The Board of Regents was the supervisory body of the public school system, though the Regents' diploma could also be earned in a private/parochial school.) The "Regent-level student" would take harder, more intensive courses in English (literature and composition), history (World and American), mathematics (Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Calculus), and science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, perhaps Geology or Meteorology), and at least one foreign language (the most popular being French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew, in that order.) Each course of study culminated in a Regents' Examination, and to earn the Regents' Diploma the student needed to pass a minimum of at least eight (one cumulative four-year exam in Literature and Composition, one in World History, one in U.S. History, one cumulative three-year exam in a foreign language, at least two in Science and at least two in Math.)
The system worked quite well, until some people began to question the elitist mentality they claimed was reflected in the sub-division of the student body, essentially creating an upper, middle, and lower class of students. The New York Board of Regents responded by creating another set of exams they entitled "State-Wide Exams," designed as required tests for the non-Regents level students, less intensive tests on history, composition, math and science, as well as new Regents' exams in stenography and accounting. This began to blur, perhaps rightly, the distinction between the academic and commercial programs. Concomitant with the rapid growth of colleges noted above, colleges also began to offer commercial programs leading to a bachelor's degree. Things seemed to be going well.
But the decay had already begun with, as usual, the noblest of intentions. Reluctant to bruise the self-esteem of children who were performing poorly, elementary schools began in the 1970's to engage in "social promotion," which meant promoting children from one grade to the next even if they had not mastered the skills and knowledge required for true promotion. The negative impact was cumulative. If, for example, a six year old had not reached the expected first grade reading and arithmetic level, he would be promoted to second grade anyway. The problem was that having not mastered first grade, he would be lost in second grade, but would then be promoted at years' end to third grade anyway. Eventually reality would catch up with make-believe, by which time the child might be both uneducated and uneducable. By the end of elementary school, an indeterminate but quite large percentage of children were incapable of doing high school level work, but found themselves in high school anyway. No high school would be willing to see half their students not graduate or drop out, so standards were further eroded, and the erosion was passed on to the colleges.
Education Departments and their professors in colleges, teachers' unions, and the omnipotent education bureaucracy, innocent of self-criticism, immune to public pressure, and unwilling to address root causes, thought that rearrangement of sequence would help solve the problem. Attention must be paid, they reasoned, to the different levels of ability at different ages. So elementary school, grades 1 through 8, was divided into grades 1 through 6, with grades 7 and 8 becoming junior high school. This did not help. The next shift was to make grades 7, 8, and 9 middle school (in some places still called junior high), with high school becoming grades 10, 11, and 12. Didn't help. Then high school was restored to grades 9-12 and middle school became grades 6-8. Didn't help. This was, as the old saying went, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.47 By the early 2000's the original cause of the problem, the practice of social promotion, was dying out, but an entire generation of children had been irreparably damaged by it.
Other corrosive factors were, of course, at work at the same time, in particular in the history curricula. The original purposes of studying history (preparing children for responsible citizenship, seeking lessons in the past to apply to the present, etc.) was replaced via the "self-esteem" movement by the goal of making children feel good about themselves, and that meant injecting ethnic, racial, and gender perspectives into the curriculum wherever possible. There being just so much information that any child can absorb, this meant removing other material that did not serve this purpose. (The acquisition of factual knowledge was soon to become irrelevant, as we shall see momentarily.) Students would be taught about Crispus Attucks and not Paul Revere, Abigail Adams and not Samuel Adams, Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass and not U.S. Grant, Amelia Earhart and not Charles Lindbergh. The emphasis was also upon the "politically correct" (i.e., Liberal Statist) heroes: W.E.B. DuBois and not Booker T. Washington, Betty Friedan and not Mother Theresa, etc.
The movement toward irrelevancy was not limited to history, of course. Science began to de-emphasize scientific theory and emphasize what was called "practical" science. We cannot explain what this meant, inasmuch as all science is practical, but the topical shift implies the change in purpose and perspective: How can we save the earth from the global warming for which the United States is largely responsible?48 How can we keep AIDS from spreading without abstaining from sexual activity of any and all kinds? How can people be stupid enough to believe in God? In literature, required reading was redefined on racial and gender lines, with the irrelevant "dead white European men" (or DWEBs) being largely excluded. This meant effectively eliminating almost the entire western literary tradition.
In the late 1980's another of the many pressure groups insisting upon changes in keeping with their prejudices declared that almost all academic distinctions be done away with. If the schools are doing their jobs properly, every student should be able to pass Regents' exams because, of course, human equality presupposes equality of outcome, and no one dare challenge either the assumption or the conclusion. So a new system was developed and implemented in the 1990's.
The new system required for high school graduation passage of a specific number of Regents' exams. Only the developmentally disabled, the mentally retarded, the autistic, were exempted from the requirements. The change was introduced slowly. At first a new Regents' exam-style test, the Regents' Competency Test, was administered as an alternative to the Regents' examination, but this was temporary and was phased out within a decade. From that point on, all students wishing to earn a high school diploma had to take and pass Regents' exams in English, history, math, a foreign language, and science.
But, needless to say, if the goal is for everyone to pass Regents' examinations, the method is to create Regents' examinations that everyone can pass. A high grade on such an exam was still an achievement, but the grading procedure was so skewed in the direction of passage, and the amount of knowledge needed was so scant, that the tests were almost impossible to fail. By the second quarter of the 21st century, many people who were receiving high school diplomas were functionally illiterate and unfit for any productive endeavor; and, of course, they then went on to college.
We have concentrated on the New York experience, but similar experiences afflicted all other state education systems.49 Occasional warnings and reforms had temporarily positive effects, but the general trend was downward, as the minimum became the norm and the new norm mandated a new minimum. The rot worked its way upward from level to level, until eventually even a college degree was not indicative of any true academic achievement. In most colleges, especially in the so-call Ivy League schools, grades lower than B- were rare. Some critics began to refer to the "Ivies" as the "almost impossible schools": almost impossible to get into, almost impossible to pay for, almost impossible to flunk out of. In most public colleges, a majority of students needed to take remedial courses before they qualified for actual college course work. Needless to say, the remedial courses, and the actual college course work, were almost impossible to fail.
While all of this was happening, what can only be described as special interest pressure groups began to buffet what was left of learning. In many of the major cities which served as magnets for immigrants, the polyglot50 nature of the student body led to three developments, only one of which had positive results. That was the implementation of programs entitled "English as a Second Language (E.S.L.)," which sought through the immersion method to help immigrant children learn English. It was generally successful. But the other two innovations, Bi-Lingual Education and Non-English Testing, benevolent though they were in intent ("the road to hell, etc…), proved self-defeating in the first instance and prohibitively expensive in the second.
The idea behind Bi-Lingual Education was that a classroom of children speaking the same foreign language would be taught in that language while also developing English language skills. The reality was that, for example, a classroom of Urdu-speaking Pakistani children speaking Urdu and being taught by a teacher who spoke Urdu would, well, have a class conducted in Urdu; few English language skills were developed. It had long been known that learning the English language was the most important adaptive behavior in the process of assimilation into American society; Bi-Lingual Ed retarded and sometimes completely prevented that process. It was a particular problem for Spanish-speaking children, because the large urban population concentrations of their ethnicity and the proximity of their places of national origin reduced both the need and the desire to assimilate.
With similar motives, the education establishment succumbed to immigrant pressure to have testing done in the native language of the child, whatever that language happened to be. (It should be noted that immigrants, especially illegal aliens, were important supporters of the Democratic [Liberal Statist] Party, which controlled most large municipalities.) As a result, states with standardized tests were obligated to prepare translations of each test into dozens of languages, and were also obligated to hire staff conversant with the languages to grade the tests. The absurdity of the situation (not to mention the onerous expense) reached its apogee in 2041 when, in Des Moines, Iowa, a woman named Cassandra Peterson (who was the local chapter chairwoman of the William Shatner Society) insisted that her daughter's 8th grade Earth Science test be administered in Esperanto.51 It was.
And then began the lawsuits. The convergence of interests between trial lawyers and the civil rights industry had created a salutary alliance that soon degenerated into a national plague. Initially the civil rights movement, rooted in a sincere commitment to social justice, used every available weapon in the fight against racism in all of its forms, and lawyers played an important part in the process. But it soon dawned on the less than scrupulous participants in the movement that money could be made from their endeavors.
The process once perfected was very simple. A "civil rights leader" would establish a charitable advocacy organization which would then target a business or an industry that did not conform to predetermined racial or ethnic expectations, and file a lawsuit against it on 14th Amendment grounds (or on the basis of state law, if possible.) To avoid costly litigation the business would accede to the organization's demands, and, to demonstrate its commitment to social justice, would also make a generous monetary donation to the organization. The organization, of course, paid a salary to the "civil rights leader" who ran it, a rather generous salary generally speaking. Under any other circumstance this practice would be called by its rightful name: extortion, more popularly called the protection racket. But by the late 20th century it had become impossible to say anything negative about any prominent "civil rights leader," because to do so would immediately brand the speaker as a racist by the Liberal Statist mass media.
