EDUCATION IN AMERICA

by Wm. B. Fankboner

As a veteran cold warrior, I think I may be forgiven for believing that the disintegration of communist police states in Eastern Europe has far more meaning to those of us who grew up in the shadow of the cold war, than to more recent generations. In my high school days, I can remember waking up with a sense of doom that would cling to me for much of the day; and it seemed to poison the more joyful moments. And in my college years, during the Cuban missile crisis, I can remember returning home to find a substantial excavation in progress in the backyard--my brother was digging an air raid shelter. Many of us wasted two precious years of our youth in compulsory military service. The lifers told me I would look back on my years in the armed forces as a lark, but I do not. I think only of the loss of time, the postponement of life.

So the end of the cold war in my lifetime comes as a bittersweet reprieve. Yet, I also feel a surge of optimism and elation that only a freed political prisoner can know, for we have all been prisoners of fear. It is not just that the weight of physical threat has been lifted, it is that a sense of rational equilibrium has been restored to the world; not just that our side won, but that good men triumphed over evil men. Man is a compensatory animal--maybe he should be called homo compensatoris rather than homo sapiens--so he will, in a way, miss the challenge of evil posed by communist police states, but he won't have to look any farther than his doorstep to find new challenge.

The political pundits are already discussing how to divvy up the 'peace dividend', the massive savings in defense that will result from Pax Europa. (It is estimated that elimination of the Defense Department would retire the national debt.) This is a little like spending next year's Christmas bonus or tax refund, but let's indulge ourselves--it has been a long cold war. First on my list of priorities is wildlife conservation. I could be accused of a certain insensitivity here; others would put the AIDS and the plight of the homeless and starving ahead of mere animals. But my sense of urgency springs from the finality of the problem: If we lose the Florida panther (an endangered species), we will never see it again; its loss will be permanent and irretrievable. Next on my list is the global environment, followed by a balanced budget and the drug problem. Everyone has their own list of emergencies and sacred cows, but one thing upon which we can all agree is that the earth has never been in worse shape, and the end of the cold war has not come a moment too soon.

But I have left out the most important problem of all, the one that, possibly, holds the key to all the rest--education. It is, for example, difficult to become interested in the fate of the Everglade Panther if you can't even find Florida on the map (as 9 of 10 high school graduates cannot); you won't lose any sleep about ozone depletion if you don't know what the ozone layer is (American science students rated 17 in the world in a recent study).

If you know about these things, it is difficult to ignore them. In fact, the more you know, the deeper is your sense of emergency and moral panic. It becomes obvious, then, that when we speak of education, we are not only talking about information of a strictly factual kind, but that there is a moral component to every fact: To know the Everglade panther is to value the Everglade panther; to understand its relationship to habitat is to desire its preservation. It is this moral dimension to information that makes the subject of education so forbidding. When we try to break the problem of education into its parts, to separate technical education from moral education, we find that both components lose meaning in isolation; but when we treat the subject in its organic totality it becomes overwhelming, as large as life itself.

This is not an issue for a quick political fix, so while there is a good deal of activist rhetoric in favor of improving the educational system, few if any politicians have found it a attractive platform on which to enhance their political image or to build a political constituency, and because it does not yield to short-term crisis management, or to the mechanical solutions so dear to technocrats, the problem attracts only occasional and fitful attention. You can usually tell when the national news bureaus and television networks are having a slow month--it is then that they pull the education issue off the shelf and pulverize the public conscience with the latest study on the failure of the American school system.

Making the rounds as a hot topic for panel discussions throughout the country, it becomes the occasion for Presidential photo-ops, educational summits, public hand-wringing and national catharsis; Congressmen utter grave prophesies and organize special committees. In short, education is agendized, then forgotten; in becoming the focus of crisis and alarm it actually becomes invisible, obscured in a blizzard in media hype, then silently slips into the background... until it is revived again two or three years later as a new topic during a slow news month.

This is not to say some interesting proposals have not emerged from these periodic episodes of national catharsis. Indeed, some of them are quite refreshing in their simplicity. A perennial favorite is that we should discard educational methods courses, and relax certification standards so that truly qualified teachers who have mastered a subject may enter the profession. It is an excellent idea, but it is amazing how many people think that it is new; it's a least thirty years old and, and has never been implemented, except on a piecemeal basis in some cosmopolitan areas like New York City,. (Both professional educators and union bureaucrats do not like the idea for obvious reasons.)

Another suggestion is that we separate education from the social welfare department. It has long been a criticism of our schools that they have become day-care centers instead of centers for learning. We do not require lawyers and doctors to baby-sit and discipline our children; why, then, should we ask teachers to do so? The logic of this complaint is breathtakingly obvious, but resistance to it comes from an unexpected quarter: Many teachers themselves have become so adept at the art of class control and maintaining discipline, they would find it difficult to learn and teach a subject.

But by far the most intriguing suggestions have come from the business sector. We currently spend $5,000 per student per year. In an average classroom of 30 students, this comes to $150,000 for a nine-month year. Yet teacher salaries account for only one sixth to one fifth of this figure. You do not have to be an accountant to smell a rat; and you don't have to be a social revolutionary to register anger when you see the members of the boards of education being driven in chauffeured limousines. The current overhead that makes our schools so expensive--we spend far more than the Japan or Europe--is a system of privileged, otiose, entrenched state bureaucracies. We could eliminate these traditional management structures (and a huge administrative overhead) by putting our schools on a private enterprise basis, and thereby introduce a healthy competition to the arena. Turning over the school system to the private sector would allow the business world itself more direct access to the educational function, with input into the vocational curriculum, scholarship funds and other endowments, special apprenticeship programs and job placement. Most important of all, the savings would allow the schools to just about double the current salary schedules of both teachers and administrators.

As appealing as this last plan sounds, it is not without risks. Though it is a radical and comprehensive proposal for systematic reform, and it would undoubtedly eliminate considerable waste and create more choices, it is difficult to imagine what would happen to eduction in the hands of business. How would the American business community, notoriously obsessed with short-term profits and weak in strategic planning, cope with the long-term problems of education? American corporations have a very poor record when it comes to projections beyond the fourth quarter, and typically the first department eliminated during a business downturn is research and development. What assurance do we have that their current commitment and resolve to improve education would not melt away in the next recession?

There is also something suspicious about raising salaries as a solution. It smacks of a current trend in the American corporate world to reward managerial mediocrity with huge salaries, bonuses, perks and stock options. American CEOs and other high-level corporate managers are an untouchable caste of elite and privileged technocrats who are paid 10 times as much as their Japanese and European counterparts, whose dysfunctional companies continue to perform poorly and lose market share in an increasingly competitive world market. So, while increasing teachers salaries is obviously better than spending the money on stealth bombers and nuclear carriers, if not done judiciously could result in creating a privileged class of mandarins very much like the one that dominates the American business community. Privatization of government certainly has its applications, and the corporate world obviously has a special interest in, and contribution to make to, the educational system, especially vocational curriculum, but we should beware of Croesus setting up shop in the classroom.

What all these remedies have in common is that they are macro-level institutional solutions; they boldly attack management problems, but none of them radically probe a theory of learning, which is the root of any educational reform program.

What is it, for example, that distinguishes the learning of the Japanese student from the American student? The first thing you will notice when you enter a Japanese classroom is the size of the class; they are large, even by our crowded standards. And yet, where an American school teacher will have to spend the first half hour establishing order, the Japanese get down to business of learning immediately. The teacher is not required to cope with social pathology or fulfill a community support role.

The second thing you might notice is that there are no computers or expensive audio-visual equipment. The most important piece of equipment, the best computer of all, is the human brain, and it is its development and use that receives first priority. This is crucial to understanding the success of the Japanese system: Instead of developing skills, like problem-solving or operating a computer, the Japanese concentrate on expanding raw brain power. They do this, of necessity, through mastery of their own writing system. The Japanese language consists of over 2,000 Chinese characters, and learning them is an awesome feat of memory. Just to read a newspaper requires a ninth-grade education, and most students don't learn to write their names until the third grade, yet literacy is 100%. To Western observers, such a language seems cumbersome, a curse, but it has been the making of the Japanese. Next to the strenuous discipline of mastering their native tongue, math and science are literally child's play. By the time he graduates from high school, the Japanese student has already achieved a level of mnemonic power that could be compared to that of an American medical student.

A contrast with the American system is revealing. After learning the ABCs, times tables and the months of the year, American students are seldom required to memorize anything more than a few scattered dates and facts in a history textbook. The emphasis shifts immediately to problem solving. Rote memory of facts is considered obscurantist by modern educators. Facts are trivial and can always be looked-up in large books and marshalled to prove a point. The stress has been on learning essential skills such as research techniques; cramming the mind with useless facts is considered medieval.

Thus, by their early teens Japanese students already enjoy an enormous advantage over American students. They have tapped and developed the most powerful faculty of the human mind, its almost unlimited capacity to absorb and use information. They sense what few American students ever sense, the potential (and the confidence that comes with that potential) of immediately accessible information. In an American classroom, great emphasis is placed on such things as how to use a dictionary; in the Japanese classroom, the student actually becomes the dictionary, each mind a repository of information. With such rich resources in play in immediate memory, creative solutions to problems present themselves instantly and seem effortless and intuitive; whereas the mnemonically deprived experience an impoverishment in the quality of thought, and a sense that problems are inherently difficult, if not impossible; and since solutions must be found in external reference materials, there is little sense of personal involvement, and for them the pursuit of knowledge is a remote and coldly mechanical activity.

Intimately connected with linguistic mastery is the humanizing influence of calligraphy. In America, where handwriting is a lost art, students are taught how to use typewriters and word processors, and only rarely experience the tactile immediacy of the pen or brush.

These things necessarily carry over into later professional life where American executives do not consider it necessary, or even possible, to master the minutiae of the departments and companies they run. Technical matters are delegated to subordinates, who in turn parcel them out among their subordinates and specialists. Decisions are thus based on the collective advice of an army of technical specialists. This fragmented decision-making process seldom yields useful results, but because it is spread over a network of technocrats, so is the ultimate responsibility. The result of such collective irresponsibility is that no CEO or department head ever makes a bad decision; bad decisions are only good decisions that have been improperly implemented at a lower level, and since no one is ultimately responsible, poor corporate performance is spoken of as though it were a natural event beyond human control, like the weather. A correlative neglect of detail is found at the technical level in American industry. While Japanese engineers and technicians are likely to remain with a company for a lifetime, turnover is high in American companies because it is not considered important for production and design engineers to stay with one company long enough to master the intricacies of a particular technology.

The mandate for a learning philosophy that places applied skills ahead of memory can be found in almost any current statement of American educational goals. Says a writer in a recent article in Scientific American:

In addition to conveying basic skills, primary and secondary school curriculums must emphasize critical thinking--a capacity to identify problems, raise questions and find structure in apparent disorder--rather than the mere regurgitation of facts.

This view is typical of the sterility of contemporary educational thought in America. Human understanding is, apparently, divided into memorization of facts, which is an inferior sort of activity, and something called 'critical thinking', the pinnacle of human intellectual endeavor, which includes such things as pattern recognition (a skill we commonly associate with trained pets and laboratory animals). Aside from its being a fatuous over-simplification of human thought processes, this summation of learning is absurdly reductionist in that it completely ignores the moral side of cognition.

As mentioned earlier, there is an emotional-moral component to every fact we learn. One doe not simply memorize facts, they are intuited and fused in complex mnemonic networks, and are colored by their proximity to other complexes; which is to say, they partake of the humanity on which they impinge. No one is more aware of the richness of memory than a writer of fiction, such as William Faulkner. Consider, for example, the childhood discovery by Gail Hightower of his father's Civil War coat in a trunk:

'I was eight then,' he thinks. 'It was raining.' It seems to him that he can still smell the rain, the moist grieving of the October earth, and the musty yawn as the lid of the trunk went back. Then the garment, the neat folds. He did not know what it was, because at first he was almost overpowered by the evocation of his dead mother's hands which lingered among the folds. Then it opened, tumbling slowly. To him, the child, it seemed unbelievably huge, as though made for a giant; as though merely from having been worn by one of them, the cloth itself had assumed the properties of those phantoms who loomed heroic and tremendous against a background of thunder and smoke and torn flags which now filled his waking and sleeping life.

After seeing the coat, he is filled with such turbulence he is unable to eat that night at supper. The discovery of this coat, patched with Confederate grey, and the story of his grandfather's daring raid on a Union supply depot, summon an unforgettable vision of thundering hooves of calvary with bright banners and flags, jangling accouterments and glinting swords, that is to haunt him for the remainder of his life.

Current theories of learning, which are based on a behaviorist model of human consciousness, are utterly incapable of dealing with human experience on this level, of interpreting complex emotional-moral events that take place in the medium of memory. The a priori assumptions for this model are never questioned; educators have little patience with history and regard the correctness of their model as self-evident. Argument more commonly turns upon its implementation. But in fact it can be traced back to 18th Century Newtonian science. At that time, the world was considered a book, and since Newton had proven that the world was a perfectly functioning time-piece, men contemplated this book by studying nature and landscape, with the idea that it would confer a kind of equilibrium on their lives:

Men took readily to the notion that the disordered passions of the human heart might be restored to their pristine integrity by the automatic and unconscious operation of landscape on the passive mind--especially when Newton had guaranteed the exquisite mathematical order of the external world.

It naturally followed that the minds most susceptible to the spiritual therapy of nature were those least corrupted by the conditioning of traditional society and education. This was the origin of Rousseau's concept of the 'noble savage'. Accompanying the apotheosis and glamorization of the simple agrarian man--Voltaire's Candide springs quickly to mind--came the repudiation of traditional humanistic learning and social conditioning as corrupt and unnatural artifice.

This sentimental theory of man did not, of course, stand up to Darwin's discoveries that man had evolved, "red in tooth and claw", from lower life forms whose chief occupation was eating or destroying one another, and it became difficult to find poetry in the sylvan landscapes of nature with the smokestacks of the industrial revolution as a backdrop. Natty Bumpo, Queequeg, and Huck Finn didn't stand a chance against the onrush of the industrial mechanization. But the myth of the 'noble savage' was to exercise a fatal attraction and hypnotic influence over the social theorists of succeeding generations, especially utopian socialists like Karl Marx.

While in America the success of Darwinian capitalism was a rejection of the innocence of the noble savage and an affirmation of original sin, traditional humanistic learning was never to recover its former prestige and importance as the crucial enabling principal of intellectual life; it was, instead, reduced to a complementary role and replaced by the spirit of scientific inquiry espoused by logical positivists like John Dewey and William James. This is reflected in the fact that, while the humanities are still fully represented in the curriculum of the American university, they are studied in an academic void, barren of social context, and no longer intervene upon society with any moral authority. And while CEOs claim to want well-rounded executives, a liberal arts degree is still the quickest route to obscurity and poverty in America, while an MBA is an absolute guarantee of a corporate sinecure.

Since Dewey believed every problem could be solved by the application of scientific method, there was no further need for the old fashioned study of the classics, and it was to be replaced by modern technology. The object of education should be to train students to manage the autonomous, self-correcting systems, such as a free market economy, and to maintain the institutions of a republican democracy. One the most frequent remarks heard in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal was that, while it had been in many ways a harrowing episode in American politics, it proved 'the system works'. Not that good men triumphed of evil men, not that morality had won out over immorality, but that an autonomous, self-correcting institution had uprighted and stabilized itself. It was as if this had been a technological triumph like the space program, not a product of the wisdom of the founding fathers, but victory for the social engineer and the technocrat.

When Amitai Etzioni was asked to teach ethics to a class of MBAs at the Harvard School of Business he rejoiced in the opportunity and had prepared copious notes for his lectures. To his consternation, he found that he had over-prepared and was unable to use much of his material, for the simple reason that his students had been so indoctrinated in cynical business concepts such as 'consumer sovereignty' that they had the moral development of five-year old children. In short, they had what Catholic theologians used to call 'invincible ignorance'.

One of the most troubling things for Etzioni was the behaviorist tendency to reductionism. When presented with a moral problem, the MBAs were unanimous in their belief that a person chose the good over the bad, not because it was the a nobel thing to do, but because it gave one a good feeling about oneself, or because one expected a quid pro quo, i.e. all human conduct was ultimately reducible to self-interest.

Appalling as all this is, it has more subtle and far-reaching ramifications. Take, for example, the concept of 'consumer sovereignty'. Briefly, this means that a company can market any legal product the public is willing to pay for (it has always been the secret pride of the marketing executive that he knew his customer better than the customer knew himself). An excellent example of this practice is IBM. Because of its commanding market position, for years IBM has dictated to the corporate world what kind of mainframe computers, operating systems and application software they would get and what they would pay for it, a practice that they continued into the era of the personal computer. Instead of giving their customers the product they really needed, a powerful workstation with a universal multi-user operating system (Unix), they attempted to palm off their technically obsolete PS computers and a proprietary operating system (OS/2), a strategy that would enable IBM both to perpetuate its hegemony over the personal computer world and to avoid undercutting its mainframe sales. The results were disastrous. Bolder, innovative companies, like Sun Microsystems, filled the vacuum, and appropriated a huge market share, leaving IBM in such a precarious and damaged condition that it is doubtful whether it would ever regain a foothold in the workstation market.

The obvious lesson to be learned here is that not only are marketing principals like 'consumer sovereignty' immoral, they are, even from a business point of view, shortsighted and self-liquidating. Proponents of the free market principal would say that this is a classic example of the market correcting itself. But this is cold comfort for the thousands of employees laid off by IBM, and it misses the point. Self-correcting mechanisms like federally-insured savings, anti-trust laws, manipulation of the Federal Reserve, and market adjustments, are last-resort disaster-avoidance strategies that should come into play only in extraordinary situations or in emergencies, not regularly invoked as routine tools of management. The efficient operation of a system as fragile as the free market depends on the sound administration and business acumen of morally enlightened men, not cumbersome self-correcting mechanisms misapplied by technocrats or cynically exploited by moral cretins. Clearly, the so-called autonomous market system is not autonomous at all, but carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction; and even a robust economy such as ours cannot absorb many more 'corrections' such as the S&L scandal, before it will deteriorate to the crippled condition of an Argentina or an Uruguay.

During a Public Television forum, the moderator asked Steve Jobs how America would fare economically against Europe and Japan in the decade of the 90s. Echoing a theme introduced over twenty years ago by Marshall McLuhan, Jobs said that we must forget the traditional categories of industrial production. In the new age of computerized automation and programmed production, where industrial goods and processes take on the character of information, the competition between Europe, Japan, and the United States will not be decided at the corporate level, but by their educational systems. If this is true, then our relief from the glooms of the cold war can be regarded as only a temporary respite.