The View From 1776

Before the student-anarchist activism that upended educational practices in the 1960s, black students performed at around 80% of white students’ test score levels.  And the gap was narrowing year by year.  Today those performance levels are roughly 50% lower.

What went wrong?

First and foremost was President Johnson’s Great Society entitlements programs, which delivered the message that blacks and Hispanics were not as economically successful as whites, because whitey had rigged the system against them.  If you were poor, it was not your fault, and there was no reason for you to study and work hard in school.  Whitey would prevent you from succeeding.

As Bill Cosby points out in his lonely crusade, black role models became people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, political parasites living off pseudo-civil-rights extortion.  Or athletic and entertainment stars, who sent the message to black and Hispanic teenage boys that men are entitled to unlimited sexual promiscuity, fathering several children by different women and taking responsibility for none of them.

Victimization became a life-style and living off welfare, a career.  Educational quota systems, whether we call them diversity or affirmative action, became, not a way to bring up black and Hispanic educational performance, but a guaranteed way to drag all educational standards downward.

George Will describes the pandering of Obama’s Education Secretary and his failure to acknowledge the real reasons why blacks and Hispanics fall well short of the levels of educational competence they displayed in the 1950s.

Let’s hope that it’s not the former, which would appear to involve use of taxpayers’ funds to inculcate the secular religion of socialism.  Indoctrinating students with the views of Messrs. Ayers and Alinsky is reminiscent of Lenin’s statement to the Soviet Commissars of education that the job of education is to make students hate their parents, if the parents are not communists.

For a report about one teacher’s use of OFA internship material for class work, see Gov’t Organizing Radicals In Our Schools and Obama’s Organizing for America Organizing in High Schools.

This sort of thing, in any case, is what has infiltrated public education increasingly since the 1920s, under the impetus of socialist John Dewey’s progressive education, propagated by Columbia University Teachers College.

FEBRUARY 7, 2010, 7:26 P.M. ET
Milwaukee’s Voucher Graduates
More evidence of ‘what works.’

President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget calls for a 9% increase in federal education spending, and he has famously said that the money should go to “what works” in education. So he ought to take another look at Milwaukee, where the nation’s oldest and largest publicly funded school voucher program is showing academic gains.

A report released last week by School Choice Wisconsin, an advocacy group, finds that between 2003 and 2008 students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program had a significantly higher graduation rate than students in Milwaukee Public Schools.
“Had MPS graduation rates equalled those for MPCP students in the classes of 2003 through 2008, the number of MPS graduates would have been about 18 percent higher,” writes John Robert Warren of the University of Minnesota. “That higher rate would have resulted in 3,352 more MPS graduates during the 2003-2008 years.”

In 2008 the graduation rate for voucher students was 77% versus 65% for the nonvoucher students, though the latter receives $14,000 per pupil in taxpayer support, or more than double the $6,400 per pupil that voucher students receive in public funding.

The Milwaukee voucher program serves more than 21,000 children in 111 private schools, so nearly 20% more graduates mean a lot fewer kids destined for failure without the credential of a high school diploma. The finding is all the more significant because students who receive vouchers must, by law, come from low-income families, while their counterparts in public schools come from a broader range of economic backgrounds.

Vouchers are of course taboo among most Democrats, and Mr. Obama has done nothing to stop Congress from killing the small but successful voucher program for poor families in Washington, D.C. The Milwaukee program has survived for 20 years despite ferocious political opposition, and it would have died long ago if parents didn’t believe their children were better off for it.

Harvard’s Professor Henry Lewis Gates is, of course, not solely responsible for the muddle-headed mess that is American education today.  But the politically-correct, identity-politics education, of which he is a champion, has destroyed the historical purpose of education, leaving us an ignorant and divided people.

Student radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s demanded “relevant” subjects, but those subjects gave them no useful knowledge or skills, thus leaving them outside the mainstream of employment and contributing to their bitterness and feelings that they were victims of discrimination.

Black studies and the other identity-politics specialties are radicalizing preparation for work as community organizers.  Their effect is to establish a separate culture that is critical of the ethos upon which the United States was founded.

They produce attitudes like Michele Obama’s declaration in February, 2008: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country...” and her 1985 Princeton senior thesis: “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before.  I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.” 


One of Professor Gates’s notorious fellow black-studies teachers was City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries, who in the 1970s spoke of Africans as “sun people” and whites as “ice people.” In forthright Afrocentist bigotry, he proclaimed that “whites are cold and cruel; blacks are warm and compassionate.” Jeffries was outspokenly and viciously anti-Semitic, attributing the slave trade and racial oppression to the Jews (in fact, the slave trade originated, and still does, with African Muslims who bought captives in tribal warfare, then sold sold them to slave dealers).

Professor Gates’s black studies field, and similar ones such as feminist studies, queer studies, and Hispanic studies, have steered too many callow students away from hard academic subjects and taught them to wallow in self-pity, to carry a chip on their shoulders, and to see the United States as an imperialistic, oppressor nation. 

Near-bottom-of-the-list performance of American students in science and math, compared to students in other countries, can in part be laid at the feet of Professor Gates and his fellow professors in the racist and sexist academic specialties.  Since the late 1960s, they have attracted too many aspiring, minority students away from analytical fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics and finance, and foreign languages.  Academic standards in soft subjects like black studies, are lower than in the hard subjects, contributing to proliferation of mediocrity.

Technological excellence is the essential for economic competitiveness and creation of jobs.  We will almost never equal or beat Asian nations on production labor costs.  We must stay ahead of the curve by inventing new technologies and new products.  But soft subjects in school leave us unprepared. 

In that regard, Yale University historian Donald Kagan, in an article he wrote for Commentary Magazine, quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok and Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, along with the late Allan Bloom.

Mr. Bok:

“Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”

Mr. Lewis:

In a recently published book on the decline of Harvard, “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” [Lewis] cites the excuse offered by one member of the faculty committee: the committee thought the best thing was to put a row of empty bottles up and see how the faculty wanted to fill them.  Lewis responds, acidly:

“The empty bottles could be filled with anything so long as the right department was offering it. . . . But there is absolutely nothing that Harvard can expect students will know after they take three science or three humanities courses freely chosen from across the entire course catalog. The proposed general-education requirement gives up entirely on the idea of shared knowledge, shared values, even shared aspirations. In the absence of any pronouncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard students to know, Harvard is declaring that one can be an educated person in the 21st century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes, or Shakespeare.”

Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987) suggests the underlying malady:

“As they see it, discourse on campus is seriously inhibited by the orthodoxies of political correctness. Affirmative action has undermined the integrity of faculty hiring. The great canonical masterpieces have been downgraded to make room for lesser works whose principal virtue seems to be that they were authored by women, African Americans, or third-world writers. The very ideals of truth and objectivity, along with conventional judgments of quality, are thought to be endangered by attacks from deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists, and other literary theorists who deny that such goals are even possible.”

In addition to degrading the hard-subject competence of minority students, black studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and Hispanic studies are antithetical to Western civilization.  Their perspective is that people are the victims of European, dead, white males.

Historically, education’s function was character formation, which involved passing along to the younger generation the traditions of Western civilization.  See The Ideals of Education vs. Tyranny:

In his “Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture” (1933), Werner Jaeger capsules the classical Greek conception of education, another standard against which we can measure present-day secular education ideas.  He wrote:

“The ancients were persuaded that education and culture are not a formal art or an abstract theory, distinct from the objective historical structure of a nation’s spiritual life.  They held them to be embodied in literature, which is the real expression of all higher culture.

Plato said of the Iliad that Homer was the teacher of the Greeks, who dramatically presented the ideals of honesty, courage, loyalty, patriotism, friendship and other qualities that educated Greeks valued as essential aspects of Greek culture.  In the “Symposium,” speaking of the Iliad, Plato has Phaedrus say, “Now Achilles was quite aware, for he had been told by his mother, that he might avoid death and return home, and live to a good old age, if he abstained from slaying Hector.  Nevertheless he gave his life to revenge his friend, and dared to die, not only in his defense, but after he was dead.”

Professor Jaeger continues: “...Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character.... men can transmit their social and intellectual nature only by exercising the qualities through which they created it – reason and conscious will.  Through the exercise of these qualities man commands a freedom of development which is impossible to other living creatures – if we disregard the theory of prehistoric mutations in species and confine ourselves to the world of experience.”

Contrast this to the liberal-progressive-socialistic practice of multi-cultural and PC education, designed expressly to degrade and erase the foundational traditions of Western civilization, particularly Judeo-Christian morality. 

The following excerpt from an essay by Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the transformation since the 1960s of our schools into seminaries of socialism.  Socialist collectivism entails inevitably the political tyranny of the statist Old World that led to our rebellion in the 1776 War of Independence.

From the Free Speech Movement to Speech Codes 

by Alan Charles Kors 
July 29, 2005

Student activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s had claimed that they wanted liberty: free speech, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and the freedom to define themselves. Some indeed did want those things, but among those who remained on campus, far too many wanted them not as ends in themselves, but merely as means to advance a partisan, political agenda. They secured those things for themselves, destroying most of the in loco parentis functions of the university (universities standing in the place of parents). The students who followed them, however, did not look up to the aging heirs of the ’60s as gurus or as moral and political leaders; indeed, those new students often made fun of the ’60s, recoiled from its styles, and sought to define themselves. For the heirs of the ’60s, those new students had to be saved from themselves and from American society, and freedom for students was the first thing to be sacrificed to that agenda. 
 


Campus zealots have changed their motto on so many of America’s campuses from “Don’t trust anyone over 30” to “Don’t trust anyone under 30.” They have given up on the notion that students are young adults; instead they have institutionalized their views in the in loco parentis role of universities and so made their own particular ideological analysis of America the official secular religion of academic life. 
  


They believe that most undergraduates are intellectual and political children who enter universities inadequately aware of the effects of an American caste system of “race, gender, and sexuality.” They also believe—a patronizing perspective that is almost unchallenged in academic life—that most so‑called minorities (each of us, in fact, is a unique moral minority of one)—students of African or of mixed racial descent, students of Hispanic descent, gays and lesbians, native peoples, students of Asian descent, and, though they are in fact a majority, women—do not adequately understand the nature and methods of their “oppression,” and, indeed, often have internalized the very values by which society oppresses them. 
 


Leninists labeled this phenomenon of judging from the perspective of your oppressor “false consciousness” (what could workers know, compared to intellectuals, about what workers authentically want?), and their murderous contempt for those with false consciousness drowned the world in blood…

The children of the ’60s, in the ’60s, had asked, “What could our elders know, being the product of America?” The children of the ’60s, now elders, put the question a bit differently at the dawn of the 21st century: “What could our children know, being the product of America?” 
  


Thus, we have moved at more and more campuses from their Free Speech Movement to their speech codes, from their own struggle against mandatory chapel to their own struggle for mandatory diversity education and sensitivity seminars, from their struggle for racial integration to their efforts for new forms of separate racial programs, from their freedom to smoke pot openly on college lawns to their war against the spirits—literal and metaphorical—of undergraduates today. American students are victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions.

With gratifying frequency in the last few years, local and state school boards are awakening to the liberal-progressive educational corrosion that undermines the ethos that made the United States into a great nation.  The Wall Street Journal, in its July 13, 2009, edition, reports one campaign to salvage the unwritten constitution of our nation.

The Culture Wars’ New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas

By STEPHANIE SIMON

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

Three other reviewers, all selected by politically moderate or liberal members of the board, recommended less-sweeping changes to the existing curriculum. But one suggested including more diverse role models, especially Latinos, in teaching materials. “We have tended to exclude or marginalize the role of Hispanic and Native American participants in the state’s history,” said Jesús F. de la Teja, chairman of the history department at Texas State University.

Social studies teachers from Texas are meeting this summer to write new standards. They can accept, reject or modify the six reviewers’ suggestions, all of which were made individually. The teachers’ recommendations are sent to the 15-member board of education, a conservative-dominated body that has authority to revise standards.

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good—and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical.... That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.

Some outside observers argue that curriculum analysts should be trained academics. “It’s important to have trained historians establishing the framework,” said David Vigilante, associate director of the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The conservative Christian reviewers, in turn, are skeptical of the professional historians’ emphasis on multiculturalism, views stated most forcefully by Mr. de la Teja but echoed by Ms. Hodges. Reaching for examples of achievement by different racial and ethnic groups is divisive, Mr. Barton said, and distorts history.

The standards that the school board eventually settles on won’t dictate day-to-day lesson plans; that is up to individual teachers. But they will offer clear guidelines for educators—and also for publishers.

Nearly every state has its own curriculum standards, and there are scores of social studies texts to choose from at most grade levels, so what happens in Texas won’t necessarily affect other states. But the Texas market is huge, so most big publishers aggressively seek approval from the board, in some cases adopting the majority’s editing suggestions nearly verbatim.

While the battle in Texas is just heating up, the tug-of-war over how to present history dates back nearly 150 years, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor of education. A single paragraph in a third-grade text might seem insignificant. But it is a powerful symbol, he said, “because schools remain the most important venue for teaching our kids who we are.”