THE RIGHT BOOKS

Since the late 1940s so-called educational science has been working with uncharacteristic success to replace political economy as the dismalest of the dismal sciences: a development acknowledged formally two years ago by the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the reverberations of which continue to be felt as the country persists in what David Gardner, the head of the commission, described as the greatest educational-reform effort in a quarter-century. Within a year after the report’s release, legislatures in 35 states had raised high-school requirements within their jurisdiction, while 13 other states were making feints in the same direction; twenty states raised college-admission (college emission?) standards and, again, 15 more gave signs of following suit. As of this writing, however, sound and fury have signified little, for reasons set forth in a new volume called Education on Trial: Strategies for the Future (ICS Press, Institute for Contemporary Studies, Suite 750, 785 Market Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103; $29.95)—edited by William J. Johnston and with a foreword by Terrel H. Bell, former U.S. Secretary of Education—which suggests both the enormous complexity of the problem and the (probably incurable) dunderheadedness of the American education establishment.

As John Lukacs has argued with grim conclusiveness in Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, inflation of every kind is an apparently systemic—and endemic—disease of democratic societies. Nowhere, perhaps, is the truth of this observation more outrageously displayed than in the American educational system as it limps toward the twenty-first century. To an original commitment to the goal of a public education for every citizen of sane mind, and then some, has been added the dedication to an idea of education as the missing link between the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and Nirvana; a combination that, over the past four decades or so, has been producing spectacularly depressing results. In one essay (“Standards: By What Criteria?”) Francis Keppel urges the development of a consensus on the subject not only of what standards the reform movement should be attempting to reimpose but of what ought to be demanded of schools in the first place: i.e., of the role education should play in a modern mass democracy. Or as Glenn Dumke, summing up, puts it:

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Since the late 1940s so-called educational science has been working with uncharacteristic success to replace political economy as the dismalest of the dismal sciences: a development acknowledged formally two years ago by the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the reverberations of which continue to be felt as the country persists in what David Gardner, the head of the commission, described as the greatest educational-reform effort in a quarter-century. Within a year after the report’s release, legislatures in 35 states had raised high-school requirements within their jurisdiction, while 13 other states were making feints in the same direction; twenty states raised college-admission (college emission?) standards and, again, 15 more gave signs of following suit. As of this writing, however, sound and fury have signified little, for reasons set forth in a new volume called Education on Trial: Strategies for the Future (ICS Press, Institute for Contemporary Studies, Suite 750, 785 Market Street, San Francisco, Calif. 94103; $29.95)—edited by William J. Johnston and with a foreword by Terrel H. Bell, former U.S. Secretary of Education—which suggests both the enormous complexity of the problem and the (probably incurable) dunderheadedness of the American education establishment.

As John Lukacs has argued with grim conclusiveness in Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, inflation of every kind is an apparently systemic—and endemic—disease of democratic societies. Nowhere, perhaps, is the truth of this observation more outrageously displayed than in the American educational system as it limps toward the twenty-first century. To an original commitment to the goal of a public education for every citizen of sane mind, and then some, has been added the dedication to an idea of education as the missing link between the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and Nirvana; a combination that, over the past four decades or so, has been producing spectacularly depressing results. In one essay (“Standards: By What Criteria?”) Francis Keppel urges the development of a consensus on the subject not only of what standards the reform movement should be attempting to reimpose but of what ought to be demanded of schools in the first place: i.e., of the role education should play in a modern mass democracy. Or as Glenn Dumke, summing up, puts it: