Inside American Education (15 page)

Part of the double standards of multiculturalism often involves a paternalistic sheltering of disadvantaged minority children from things remote from their immediate experience. As one former teacher on a Wyoming Indian reservation
put it, in asking for “textbook relevance” for his Indian students:

The concept of an ocean would be foreign to them. The children of Wind River know Ocean Lake, so named because of its considerable size, and the occasional wind-driven waves. They couldn’t fathom the idea of a real ocean.
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No such claim was made for the white children in Wyoming, or in any of the other land-locked states of the United States. More fundamentally, it did not address the question whether education is meant to open a window on a larger world or to paint the student into his own little corner.

With so many people bending over backward to be “sensitive,” with so much attention to mixing people from different groups, not only in real life (through “busing” and the like), but even in textbook pictures, what has been the net result? A San Francisco high school presented a lunchtime scene all too typical of many American schools and colleges where “multicultural diversity” is only statistical:

In the brick-lined courtyard, a group of black students gathers on benches. Outside a second-floor classroom, several Chinese girls eat chow mein and fried rice from takeout carions. Inside the dreary cafeteria, a clique of Vietnamese students sprawls across two tables—where they have spent every lunch since September. Against the back wall, two lone Russian boys pass lunch in conversation.

San Francisco schools have spent two decades and more than …100 million on integration programs. Yet outside the classroom—at the lunch counters, on the playgrounds and in the hallways—many ethnic groups still mix as well as oil and water.
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It should be noted again that California is one of the states where the very textbook pictures must conform to the multicultural ideology. Moreover, it is not at all clear that there was this much ethnic separatism in multi-ethnic schools in times past. This is not simply a California problem, however. Researchers around the country report internal self-segregation among students in schools racially “integrated” statistically. A two-year study by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh found that, on a typical day at a school being studied, only 15
out of 250 students ate lunch sitting next to someone of a different race, even though the school had equal numbers of black and white students.
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The more fundamental question—whether racism is increased or decreased in the schools by multiculturalism, and therefore whether the flow of racism is primarily from the schools to the larger society, or vice-versa—can be better addressed after discussions of multiculturalism in American colleges and universities in Part II. It is sufficient here to point out that that question is seldom even considered in the massive outpourings of words on “multicultural diversity.”

MISCELLANEOUS PSYCHO-BABBLE

“Relevance”

Everyone wants education to be relevant. It is hard even to conceive why anyone would wish it to be irrelevant. Those who proclaim the need for “relevance” in education are fighting a straw man—and evading the crucial need to define what
they
mean by “relevance,” and why that particular definition should prevail.

Beginning in the 1960s, insistence on “relevance” became widespread and the particular kind of “relevance” being sought was typically a relevance judged
in advance
by students who had not yet learned the particular things being judged, much less applied them in practice in the real world. Relevance thus became a label for the general belief that the usefulness or meaningfulness of information or training could be determined
a priori
.

“No one should ever be trying to learn something for which one sees no relevance,” according to Carl Rogers.
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The student should be asked:

“What do you want to learn? What things puzzle you? What are you curious about? What issues concern you? What problems do you wish you could solve?”
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It is easy to see how this particular concept of relevance is consonant with trends toward more student choice, whether individually in choosing among elective courses in schools and
colleges, or collectively in designing or helping to design the curriculum. Because the student has neither foreknowledge of the material to be learned nor experience in its application in the real world beyond the walls of the school, his emotional response to the material must be his guide. As Carl Rogers envisioned the process:

I am talking about LEARNING—the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his “cruiser.” I am talking about the student who says, “I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of
me
.” I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: “No, no, that’s not what I want”; “Wait! This is closer to what I’m interested in, what I need”; “Ah, here it is! Now I’m grasping and comprehending what I
need
and what I want to know!”
⁶⁴

At the heart of the “relevance” notion is the belief that current emotional responses are a reliable guide to the future usefulness or meaningfulness of education. Although this assumption is essential to the logic of the argument for “relevance,” Carl Rogers was one of the few who made that assumption explicit when he said that the man who would “do what ‘felt right’ in this immediate moment” would “find this in general to be a trustworthy guide to his behavior.”
⁶⁵
If emotions are indeed so prescient and virtually omniscient, then of course there is little reason to rely on experience—which must mean the experience of others, in the case of inexperienced students.

It is hard to imagine how a small child, first learning the alphabet, can appreciate the full implications of learning these particular 26 abstract symbols in an arbitrarily fixed order. Yet this lifelong access to the intellectual treasures of centuries depend on his mastery of these symbols. His ability to organize and retrieve innumerable kinds of information, from sources ranging from encyclopedias to computers, depends on his memorizing that purely arbitrary order. There is not the slightest reason in the world why a small child should be expected to grasp the significance of all this. Instead, he learns these symbols
and this order because his parents and teachers want him to learn it—not because he sees its “relevance.”

Experience would be virtually worthless if it were possible to know
a priori
what will and will not be needed in the future. If an economist who has done 20 years of research and analysis has no better idea how much statistical analysis a beginner should master than that beginner himself has, then one can only marvel that 20 years of experience have been such a complete waste. If a new recruit beginning basic training in the army knows just as much as a battle-scarred veteran as to what one should do to prepare for battle, then there is no justification for putting experienced officers in charge of troops and no excuse for differences in rank. In no other field of endeavor besides education would such reasoning even be taken seriously, much less be made the basis of institutional policy.

The “relevance” argument becomes especially dangerous when it is used to justify teaching different things to students from different racial or ethnic groups, on the basis of those students’ immediate emotional responses, or their uninformed sense of plausibility as to what might, for example, be “relevant to the black experience”—at a time of life when they do not have enough experience of any color to make such a determination. How can someone who sets out to study things “relevant to the black experience” know whether such statistical concepts as multicollinearity or such economic concepts as dynamic equilibrium will turn out to be among those things which provide a whole new perspective on racial issues? To say that such questions can be answered
a priori
is to assume at the outset the very competence which education is supposed to produce as an end result.

Although many who use the “relevance” argument may not see clearly how it depends crucially on the reliability of current emotions as a guide to the future value of education, the inner logic of the argument nevertheless shows through in the frequency with which people of this persuasion use the word “exciting” as a recommendation for some educational policy. Other investments—that is, current costs incurred for future benefits—are seldom assessed in terms of how “exciting” they are. Farmers do not say that planting a given crop is exciting. Their justification for choosing a particular crop, or for planting it in a certain soil at a particular time of year, is much more
apt to be in terms of the likelihood of producing a good harvest. Similarly, a financial investor seldom characterizes his choice of portflio as “exciting.” Instead, his justification for choosing the particular investments in his portfolio is likely to run in terms of his assessment of future rewards.

Education is one of the largest investments in the society, running into hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Yet this investment is often, and increasingly, assessed in terms of its current emotional appeal to students or teachers. In short, it is not treated as an investment but as current consumption. The Bible said: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Educators too often seem to be saying: “By their excitement ye shall know them.” For those less blatant, the word “relevance” is a round-about way of saying the same thing.

The idea that inexperienced young people can judge in advance what will later turn out to be relevant over the next half-century or more of their life is part of a more general and romantic social vision. This vision underlies such things as denigration of authority derived from experience or specialized training. This vision has been not only part of many radical experiments in American education, beginning during the 1960s, but was also the foundation of even more radical educational experiments in schools and colleges in China during the “great cultural revolution.” The results were very similar in these very different settings.

In China, as in the United States, ideologically defined “relevance” superseded traditionally defined skills, as academic criteria in general were subordinated to such social goals as group “representation,” while elitism in general was decried. College entrance examinations were abolished, grades were no longer unilaterally assigned by teachers but were discussed or negotiated, and off-campus activities substituted for academic work.
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Educators’ authority was so undermined that teachers were “afraid to take firm charge of their students.”
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The educational results in China were also similar to those in the United States. Nearly half the middle-school students failed the tests of basic knowledge in science and technology, and more than two-thirds failed the mathematics examination. By 1979, a group of American educators found that China’s college entrance examinations were no longer as sophisticated as they had been 20 years earlier.
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The biggest difference between China’s educational experiments and those in the United States has been that the Chinese learned from their mistakes, and abandoned such policies, while American education continues on the same course. Chinese political leaders recognized that China was falling further behind world standards in science and technology as a result of its educational debacles, and proceeded to re-introduce the teaching of traditional subjects and college entrance examinations.
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Ideologically defined “relevance” was no longer a sacred cow in China, though it remains so in the United States.

The “Whole Person”

The idea that one should teach “the whole child” goes back at least as far as John Dewey. Some today call it “child-centered education” at the elementary school level and teaching “the whole person” in high school or college. The idea of tailor-made education, varying with the social background and psychology of each student, is related to the notion of “relevance.” It is also reminiscent of an idea once popular among some ambitious economists, that they could “fine tune” the economy—until embarrassing experience taught them that they were lucky to get the right channel.

Ambitious educational goals seldom seem to evoke the question as to whether we have the capability of achieving them. Nor are these ambitions noticeably moderated by the educational system’s abysmal failure at teaching the most basic skills. That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children.

There is only one way to deal with “the whole person”—and that is superficially. Anyone who is serious about understanding just one small aspect of the whole person—the endocrine glands, for example—knows that it is the labor of a lifetime for highly trained people, working with unrelenting dedication. Merely to develop the whole person’s photographic
talents can take many years, as anyone can see by looking at the nondescript early photographs taken by the great photographer Ansel Adams. The reason for teaching mathematics, instead of teaching “the whole person,” is that one may have had some serious training in mathematics, and so at least have the possibility of being competent at it.