Published: May 15, 2008 12:42 pm         

There is great irony in education

Schools around the country are gearing up for the spring rite of graduation and the opening of doors for summer vacation.

Students are taking final exams, going to proms and laboring over that last essay. And let’s not forget the incessant conservative drumbeat that harps on how terrible the American public school system is, that it’s failing students and the economy by turning out a bunch of slackers who can’t compete with the rest of the world.

A recent article in the Wilson Quarterly rebukes all this nonsense by pointing out that American schools and students are among the best and the brightest in the world. The author, Jay Mathews, points to a flawed article in Fortune that said China and India are outpacing the United States in engineering graduates.

Upon closer examination of the data, it turns out that China and India, who provided their own statistics, included technicians and auto mechanics as engineers. Such positions aren’t called engineering in the United States. An engineer takes a four-year degree from a major university.

When being bombarded by right-wing claptrap, remember that conservatives need a scapegoat and education is an easy one because, as Mathews points out, 30 percent of U.S. schools are in trouble. These schools lie in rural and urban areas and are populated with low-income students. It’s not curricula, teachers and administrators to blame, it’s poverty that fuels a sense of helplessness.

There is another area where schools have to be vigilant and isn’t talked about much. The right constantly assaults education over what is taught and this leads to a dumbing down of curricula that threatens the fundamental liberal arts course work that is the bedrock of public education.

Conservatives — mostly of the Christian right variety — seek to win school board seats and form advocacy groups to attack curricula and books to denounce subjects they deem unfit for their precious children.

This has a profound effect on education. If conservatives can insert their exclusionary values — American exceptionalism, exclusion of minorities, denigration of perceived enemies, abstinence of all things sexual, pro-free market, anti-union, intelligent design — they control the type of graduates they want. This type of graduate will, of course, perpetuate policies that have failed this country in both foreign and domestic areas. Most importantly, curricula will exclude liberal values — cooperation over competition, environmentalism, questioning authority through critical discourse and advocating civil liberties — that lead to thorough understanding of issues and subjects through inclusion.

Earlier this year, Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., began questioning a textbook called “American Government” by James Wilson and John Dilulio. LaClair claimed the book “skewed views of topics from global warming to separation of church and state,” according to the Associated Press.

Matthew recognized that he and his classmates were being force-fed conservative dogma masking as a civics book. It turns out that Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and Dilulio, a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, worked in the Bush administration as director of faith-based initiatives.

Houghton Mifflin, the book’s publisher, says it, along with the College Board that oversees Advanced Placement high school courses, will review the book.

In Peabody, Mass., Beverly Dunne, a school committee member, decided that the novel “The Kite Runner,” by Kahled Hosseini is unfit to be read this summer because it includes a passage on the rape of a child, according to an article in the Salem News. Never mind that the book is about “friendship, atonement and the cruelty of war,” said Michalene Hague, head of the high school’s English Department.

“Sometimes people don’t want students to feel uncomfortable,” said Hague, who is fighting Dunne’s attempt at censorship. “Everything is nice and happy.”

This kind of indoctrination, in the former example, and censorship, in the latter, interfere and corrupt a well-rounded liberal arts education that allows students to learn about the world through unblinkered eyes. They are led through historical horrors by teachers who, in theory, illustrate bad decisions, immorality and cruelty so future generations won’t make the same mistakes. This is the hallmark of a progressive education, which is constantly under attack by “this ugly head of censorship,” as Hague put it.

The great irony here is that those who shout the loudest about inferior public education are the same ones whose small minds work the hardest to keep kids dumb.



Stephen Dick is assistant managing editor of The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.