What would you think of a cooking instructor who taught his students how to cook (how to measure ingredients, turn on the stove, run an electric beater, etc.) but neglected to tell his students how to get the right ingredients and what the cooked dish should taste like? Maybe that’s one problem with American education today.
The chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, has just published an intriguing pamphlet called “American Memory.” It’s the summary of a study of the state of humanities and arts education in our nation’s public schools.
Mrs. Cheney accentuated the conclusions of this study with a pithy quotation from Samuel Clemens’ “Life on the Mississippi.” “My boy, you’ve got to know the shape of the river perfectly. It’s all there is to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone.”
In reviewing this important study, Mrs. Cheney grew weary of hearing educators repeat the line that the purpose of education is to teach students HOW to think (without troubling them to learn anything worth thinking about). She concluded that this is the equivalent of teaching them how to steer the steamboat without giving them any notion of the shape of the river. On a dark night, you just can’t stay in the channel if you don’t know the river.
From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, the national average of the verbal SAT scores declined by some 50 points. This is the same period when the substantive content of education diminished rapidly.
Moving from generalities to specifics, the Cheney report cites McGuffey’s Fifth Reader, widely used in public schools at the start of this century. It included stirring speeches, heroic stories, and selections from Longfellow, Hawthorne, Alcott, Dickens, and Shakespeare.
Whereas at least half the content of those old readers was made up of enduring literature, less than ten percent of the content in currently-used readers can be called classic. Instead of presenting the best specimens of style, as McGuffey promised, current readers are straitjacketed into readability formulas that dictate sentence length, word length, and the number of new words that can be introduced.
For laughs, Mrs. Cheney shows how Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare has been rewritten to conform to a readability formula. “Rabbit said, ‘I can run. I can run fast. You can’t run fast.’ Turtle said, ‘Look Rabbit. See the park. You and I will run. We’ll run to the park.’ Rabbit said, ‘I want to stop. I’ll stop here. I can run, but Turtle can’t. I can get to the park fast.’ Turtle said, ‘I can’t run fast. But I will not stop. Rabbit can’t see me. I’ll get to the park.'”
But it isn’t a laughing matter; it’s tragic. The study concluded that, “For the most part, textbooks used in U.S. schools are poor in content, and what content they do contain is not presented in a way to make anyone care to remember it.”
Mrs. Cheney concludes that humanities teachers should be “transmitters of culture,” but that is a very difficult goal because they are besieged by educational theorists, administrators, and bureaucrats, all determined to steer the daily classroom activities in another direction, usually toward behavioral objectives.
The report is particularly critical of the teaching of social studies. Originally, this subject was planned to include history and geography with some broadening additions. Today, social studies has become a mish-mash that includes courses as varied as driver education and values clarification, while history and geography are lost in the shuffle.
Surveys show that more than two-thirds of high school seniors cannot identify in which half-century the Civil War was fought, and they can’t identify the Reformation or the Magna Carta. They don’t know that Rome fell, why it fell, and what is important about that event.
The study makes some specific recommendations. More time should be devoted to the study of history and literature; textbooks should contain more recognizably good literature; teachers should be more knowledgeable about the subjects they teach; and teachers should be subject to fewer requirements to take tiresome education courses.
Those are good objectives but not as important as changing the fundamental direction and purpose of education. The continuation of the U.S. institutions of liberty and self-government requires that modern Americans have a shared culture and a common memory of past heroes and achievers.
That memory is basic to our self-esteem, our national identity, and our vision of the future.
