Inside American Education (41 page)

In reality, death and dying were very common themes in the old
McGuffey’s Readers
of an earlier era.
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Death was dealt with not only often, but sensitively—but not in the manner of so-called “death education” today. The difference in tone and approach may be illustrated by a
McGuffey’s Reader
story about a child whose mother, suffering from a long illness, asked her to go get her a glass of water. The daughter recalled, years later:

I went and brought her the water, but I did not do it kindly. Instead of smiling, and kissing her as I had been wont to do, I set the glass down very quickly, and left the room.
²⁷

Feeling guilty later that night, she decided to ask forgiveness in the morning—but the next morning she found her mother dead. The daughter recalled:

I bowed down by her side and sobbed in the bitterness of my heart. I then wished that I might die, and be buried with her; and, old as I now am, I would give worlds, were they mine to give, could my mother but have lived to tell me she forgave my childish ingratitude.
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This was not the gimmicky approach of today’s “death education,” with its “dim the lights” instructions to teachers,
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or its self-congratulation at discussing a subject ignorantly assumed to have been “taboo” in the past. Nor was this the creation of pompous jargon like “thanatology” for death education or “Type II (HD-II)” to convey the simple fact that two types of “horrendous deaths” were being discussed.
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Such pathetic
attempts to seem “scientific” only betray the hollowness so characteristic of “affective education” in general.

No matter how false, the claim to be responding to an unmet need, expressed in public demands, is a recurring theme in a wide variety of attitude-changing programs. Many of those promoting new curriculum packages are quite sophisticated in their backstage efforts, which often means making the demand seem to be coming from “society” at large. Planned Parenthood, for example, has instructed its followers on how to create the appearance of a demand for its programs: “Pack the board room with your supporters,” it said and “avoid a public encounter” with “the opposition.”
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However much attitude-changing programs claim to be responding to public demands, the tactics used to get them inaugurated and continued suggest a clear awareness by their proponents of a need to
avoid
public scrutiny. One symptom of this awareness is the repeated changing of curriculum titles. As a writer who has studied this phenomenon said: “Titles proliferate because once the public catches on to the nature of a program in one place, the same curriculum re-emerges somewhere else under a new title.”
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The “Quest” program warns its teachers and “facilitators” to avoid using terms which “tend to raise ‘red flags’ among the critics.” These terms include “values clarification,” “role-playing” and “self-concept”
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—terms whose concrete meanings have become too well known over the years to be useful any longer as smoke screens.

Institutional Defenses

Verbal tactics are not the only tactics used by the educational empire as it strikes back at critics. These critics include not only outsiders but also individual teachers. These latter are, however, the easiest for the educational establishment to deal with. Ultimately, the teacher who is critical or skeptical of fashionable “innovations” can be dealt with by threatening his or her career, but some can be brought into line by more subtle means. These include special rewards for teachers who first jump on the bandwagon of a new program,
³⁴
hostile responses to teachers who are reluctant or questioning,
³⁵
or a side-tracking
of teachers in favor of “facilitators” who come in from outside to conduct the psychological program sessions.
³⁶
Similar tactics have been used in England.
³⁷

The testimony of an Arizona parent before the U.S. Department of Education in Washington suggests something of the untenable position of a teacher critic: “I had one teacher express to me that she would lose her job if she showed any support at all for the parents who were questioning the program.”
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Another parent, appalled at a movie showing “masturbation in detail” in a so-called “Human Development” curriculum received help from a teacher, but in a manner indicative of the pressures the teacher was under:

A teacher called me anonymously and said she had a copy of the 13-year curriculum guide and she would leave it in her top desk drawer. I would come in when she was out, take it, and use it any way I wanted. I xeroxed 200 copies, spread it around the school, and both the program and the principal were removed from the school.
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That such cloak-and-dagger methods are necessary suggests something of the obstacles put in the way of the facts coming out.

Parents who seek through official channels to see specific materials used in a curriculum can be stalled, told to come back another day, given only part of the material, told that a committee will be convened to look into it—and these tactics can go on for months, or even years. A Department of Education hearing officer who has followed attempts of parents to see various program materials, and the educators’ tactical responses, concluded, “the primary aim was to wear them down.”
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If parents sense the futility of their individual efforts and organize, then these organized groups will be depicted as “censors” trying to stifle “freedom” in the schools. However, people who argue this way never say that
McGuffey’s Readers
were “censored” when they were replaced by other textbooks. Only after the kinds of books they want are in place is any criticism of these choices called “censorship.” However, this has often proved to be a politically very effective tactic, substituting for an argument.

School Choice

Few things arouse such all-out opposition from the educational establishment and their media allies as proposals to allow parents a choice as to the schools their children attend. Here the empire strikes back with a long litany of objections, of which these are the most common:

1. Parents would make bad choices.
   
2. Parents who make good choices would take their children out of substandard schools, leaving behind in hopelessness the children of parents with less knowledge, concern, or initiative.
   
3. Parental choice would destroy the American tradition of the common school for all, replacing it with schools segregated by race, income, religion, and other social divisions.
   
4. It would lead to an unconstitutional government subsidy of religious schools.
   
5. It would be prohibitively expensive.
   

The first objection goes to the heart of the issue, for this objection stands or falls on the assumption that parents lack the knowledge, interest, and initiative to make as good choices as those made by the educational establishment. After more than a quarter of a century of declining school performances, the claim that educators have some mysterious “expertise” which parents cannot grasp is a claim that is hard to take seriously. Most members of the educational establishment do not in fact phrase this claim in the form of an explicit comparison, but instead deplore the possibility of “schools that pander shamelessly to parents,”
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suggest that parents are unlikely to choose on the basis of “rigorous standards.”
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or claim that “poor families” are too beset with problems to be able to “cope with the added responsibility” of “evaluating different schools.”
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Although such arguments dwell on, or exaggerate, the deficiencies of parents, the alternative receives no such critical scrutiny, whether that alternative is allowing children’s schools to be chosen by the very educators who have produced disaster after disaster, or allowing the child’s school to be chosen by the accident of arbitrary school boundarv lines.

Despite paternalistic concerns expressed that disadvantaged minority children might be left behind in various parental choice schemes, due to the apathy of their parents, polls have repeatedly shown that support for parental choice has been higher among blacks than among whites.
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In Chicago alone, there are dozens of private, non-Catholic schools that are predominantly or wholly black
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—in addition to the Catholic schools located in black neighborhoods. In Berkeley, one third of all the children in Catholic schools are black, and in Oakland 62 percent of the children in Catholic schools are black.
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Clearly, there are black parents in black neighborhoods who are not only concerned about their children’s education, but who are also prepared to make financial sacrifices out of below-average income, in order to get their children a decent education. Often, most of the black children in a Catholic school are not Catholic, but are being sent there for educational reasons.

Not all parents are conscientious, of course, whether among blacks, whites, or any other group. But any policy must be compared with an alternative, not with an ideal. One of the most remarkable objections to parental choice is that not all children would benefit. This Utopia-or-nothing approach has been expressed, among other places, in a
New York Times
editorial which asks, “what’s to be done about the children left behind, whose parents are indifferent, afraid or absent?” The
Times
is especially opposed to enabling “the cream of the crop of poor children to attend non-public schools.”
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In other words poor children who are ready
right now
to go elsewhere, to get a decent education denied them in their substandard schools, are to be held hostage in those schools until such indefinite time as either (1) all the other children around them are also ready for quality education, or (2) one of the innumerable educational “reforms” that come and go finally works. It is hard to imagine a more unconscionable sacrifice of flesh-and-blood children to ideological visions. Moreover, if this is such a wonderful principle—either morally or educationally—then why do we permit the children of the affluent (such as editorial writers) to escape being used as hostages for the greater glory of social justice?

Seldom does any social advance take place simultaneously among all members of any large social group. Typically, the
most far-sighted or most venturesome members of the group try the new way, or migrate to a new place, and others follow in their wake as their success becomes apparent. To demand that low-income people alone must all be ready at once is to demand what is seldom, if ever, found among any other people in real life. As to those youngsters initially left behind in substandard schools, it is hard even to conceive how they could be worse off educationally then they are today. The only difference from today would be that now they would have before them the living examples of neighbors, friends, and relatives who are getting the benefits of better schools. Some of those initially left behind would undoubtedly follow their classmates. Moreover, the exodus from substandard schools would itself create incentives for those schools to improve, to prevent more losses of students and the inevitable losses of budget and jobs which follow.

An equally baffling argument is often used that it would be “unfair” to the public schools to leave with them the worst students, especially with the public schools operating not only under the handicap of having to accept everyone, but also under the additional handicaps of innumerable mandated rules, policies, and commitments whose rigidity and red tape interfere with the educational process. However, the very concept of “fairness” applies to relationships between
human beings
—not institutions. Institutions are merely a means to an end, that end being to serve human beings. There are no moral obligations to institutions which do not serve human purposes as well as other institutions. The most important fairness is fairness to children.

This does not mean that public schools are to be banished categorically. The whole point of allowing parental choice is to permit a widespread monitoring of school performance to replace arbitrary policies based on
a priori
beliefs. Those public schools which prove to be able to do a good enough job will undoubtedly survive the competition, just as many public schools survive and flourish in many affluent communities today, where private schools are both available and affordable to the high-income people in those communities. In other cases, where the public schools are too snarled in red tape to compete effectively, then competition provides an incentive for the educational establishment itself—the teachers’ unions, the state
education departments, etc.—to work to get rid of the red tape, in the interest of institutional survival. If the red tape nevertheless proves to be impossible to get rid of, that is all the more reason to let institutions die off when they are incapable of doing their job.

The argument that parental choice would be socially divisive is painfully ironic, in view of the deep social divisions in the public schools as they exist today. A nationwide study, headed by the widely respected scholar James S. Coleman of the University of Chicago, found that “blacks and whites are less segregated within the Catholic schools than are blacks and whites in public schools.”
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Moreover, the gap in academic performance between black and white students was less in the Catholic schools than in the public schools.
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The education establishment’s claims of social divisiveness have been carried to the extremes of claiming that parental choice could lead to schools representing ideological fringe fanatics of the left or right, religious cults, or purveyors of bizarre philosophies. Yet existing private schools, especially those sought out by parents from disadvantaged groups, have tended to be more traditional than the public schools. Indeed, it is precisely in the public schools that brainwashing with
avant-garde
ideas, and even the occult, have been increasingly introduced into the curriculum.