The following is an abridged version of 

"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.

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.

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 .. 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).

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.

This is not to say some interesting proposals have not emerged from these periodic episodes of national catharsis.

But by far the most intriguing suggestions have come from the business sector.

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?

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.

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.

American students are seldom required to memorize anything more than a few scattered dates and facts in a history textbook. Rote memory of facts is considered obscurantist by modern educators. Facts are trivial... cramming the mind with useless facts is considered medieval.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Amitai Etzioni was asked to teach ethics to a class of MBAs at the Harvard School of Business he .. was unable to use much of his material, for the simple reason that his students .. 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.

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. Jobs said that ..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.

Wm. B. Fankboner © 2003

Indio, California

wfankboner@dc.rr.com

The Full length article is found on this page, alongside several other noteworthy articles.