When the spirit of the age is to strive for self-gratification, rather than what is excellent, it is no surprise then that the education of our children takes on a similar impulse. From the Kairos Journal vault is an important reflection on this predicament:
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When a Missouri, fifth-grade teacher mentioned the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a student asked, “Was she hurt?” When the average American high school student is asked what made Andrew Carnegie famous or what Pilgrim’s Progress is about, there is only puzzlement. There seems to be real slippage from the day when McGuffey’s Readers introduced elementary school kids to Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare. And these McGuffey students were not the elites; from 1836 to 1920, 122 million Readers were in circulation, second only to the Bible.
In those days, school years were capped by “spring exhibitions,” with popular spelling competitions involving such words as “‘argillaceous’ (of the nature of clay) . . . and ‘acephalous’ (without a head).” In Kansas, to finish the eighth grade, students had to pass a test, spelling words such as “elucidation” and “animosity.” Today, the teachers are more open to “inventive spelling,” more concerned that a student “writes with confidence” than that he spells correctly.
Alarm hit the boiling point in 1983, when the Reagan administration released an assessment of American public education, A Nation at Risk: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The grim findings were soon seconded by What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch, The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and To Reclaim a Legacy by William Bennett.
The educational establishment dismissed the critics, comparing them to Chicken Little, who, when hit by a falling acorn, ran around, yelling, “The sky is falling.” By their account, the minor problems could not be blamed on teachers and administrators but upon the schools’ social context, a lack of funding, and misleading national standardized tests. Their answer was a greater leveling of income that will give the students a more optimistic viewpoint on life, protecting teachers from “religious bigots,” peer-tutoring, erasure of “meritocratic individualism,” and above all, rejection of the “traditional view . . . that schools are mechanisms for pumping bits of knowledge from the past into passive students.” So much for such bits of knowledge as that the expression “Vanity Fair” came from Pilgrim’s Progress, that a comma separates independent clauses, and that the sum of a triangle’s angles is 180˚.
Those who say the educational crisis is “manufactured” receive highest honors from the teachers’ union, the National Educational Association (NEA). But many Americans are dissatisfied with the teachers’ giving themselves A’s. They complain that the language of curriculum has moved from “rigor” and “homework” to “diversity” and “self-esteem”; that the grade D has been replaced by the grade “emerging”; that the multiple-intelligences movement has placed bodily-kinesthetic intelligence on a par with logical-mathematic intelligence in the schools; that national tests such as the SAT have been “recentered” to accommodate and normalize slipping scores; that automatic F’s for grievous grammatical errors are now unthinkable affronts to students’ sensitivities and creativity.
Humorist Garrison Keillor spins yarns about a fictional town called Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average, but the American education establishment does not get the joke. Neither do they find the expression “mass excellence” odd. They seem to have replaced the Bible’s command to concentrate on true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent things (Philippians 4:8) with obsession over that which is self-gratifying, self-accommodating, self-justifying, and self-expressing, no matter how lame the self in question might be. Old McGuffey would have never stood for this—and neither should contemporary America.
