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WHY THE SCHOOLS FAIL: RECLAIMING THE MORAL DIMENSION IN EDUCATION
By Wffliarn A. Donohue
THE PROBLEM There is by now abundant evidence that the schools are
in trouble. In the 1980s one report after anot her has been issued
detailing the poor condition of the public schools. From the much
celebrated report "A Nation At Risk," we learned that American
students ranked last among 21 industrial nations on seven of
nineteen academic tests. Some 13 percent of a n 17-year olds, and
better than 40 percent of minority youth, are functionally
illiterate. Illiteracy in mathematics and science is particularly
bad, and when the subject switches to history and literature, the
results don't get any better. Knowledge of el ementary geography is
so bad that James Vining, director of the National Council for
Geographic Education, has said "We have a situation where Johnny
not only doesn't know how to read or add, he doesn't even know
where he is."i
That's not all of it. T'he d ecline in academic performance has
been accompanied by a decline in manners and morals, as the
incidence of teenage pregnancy and violence in the schools makes
clear. Reports of teachers, as well as students, who have been
beaten, robbed, and Taped - whil e not a daily occurrence - are
nonetheless more prevalent now than at any time in our history,
making some schools no more safe than the streets on which they are
situated. Drugs are commonplace, in rich as well as poor
neighborhoods, and the data on alcoh ol abuse are not encouraging.
To top it off, the number of incompetent teachers, as judged by the
easiest of tests, is shocking, and the quality of college graduates
going into the education profession is a disgrace.
Reversing the Tide. The recommendations of the many reports issued
on the schools have centered on matters of curricula and teacher
effectiveness. The National Commission on Excellence in Education
said that "the rising tide of mediocrity" that threatens American
education can be reversed by d o ing such things as tightening
standards, developing a core curriculum of academic courses for all
students, assigning more homework, and raising teacher salaries.
The Twentieth Century Fund Task Force focused on the establishment
of a Master Teacher progr am, one which would financially reward
excellence in teaching; it also recommended that mastery of English
be given priority, arguing that federal funds for bilingual
programs be used only for teaching English to non-English speaking
students.
I Quoted by Solveig Egger:4 "Emphasis on Social Studies Leaves
Students Ignorant of History and Geography,"Human Events, June
21,1986, p. 12.
William A. Donohue is Professor of Sociology at La Roche
College, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He spoke on June 23,1988, during
his appointment as a Bradley Resident Scholar at The Heritage
Foundation.
ISSN 0272-1155. 01988 by The Heritage Foundation.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, under the
leadership of Ernest Boyer, has turned out three reports, one on
secondary education, one on higher education, and one on the status
of urban schools. High schools, Boyer said, need to clarify their
goals, pay more attention to English, develop a core of academic
courses, lighten teacher loads, and reward teacher ex c ellence. He
urged colleges and universities to rethink the emphasis on
careerism. and restructure curricula toward a more defined liberal
arts orientation. These ideas found support from such authorities
as the National Institute of Education and the Asso ciation of
American Colleges.
The problem with the urban schools, Boyer contended, was that they
were largely untouched by the reform movement of the early 1980s.
He urged greater accountability and, reflecting the influence of an
earlier report by John Go odlad, called for building smaller
schools, capping enrollment around 500 students; the anonymity of
large schools has clearly had a negative effect on academic
achievement and discipline.
A report issued by education specialist Theodore Sizer stressed
basic skills, teacher autonomy, and greater teacher accountability
for the performance of their students. Once high school students
have proved to be literate in English and math, Sizer concl u ded,
they should no longer be required to stay in school. Philosopher
Mortimer Adler's Paideia Group called for extensive reform, with
all students assigned to a single track, allowing of no electives
(save choice of foreign language); courses should be s elected from
the traditional liberal arts areas. Adler's contribution is perhaps
the most tightly woven proposal of all the reports on the schools.
THE ROLE OF CHARACTER IN SCHOOL PERFORMANCE
The common assumption that undergirds these recommendations is
that the key to better education is more student exposure to
quality educational opportunities. It assumes that test scores, as
well as other measures of educational success, win increase once a
core group of traditional academic courses is offered by hi ghly
trained and motivated teachers. The focus, then, is on improving
teachers and curricula. This is what may be called the cognitive
approach to better schools, emphasizing as it does the faculties of
the mind.
The fundamental problem with the cognitive approach to better
schools is that it undervalues the independent role of the student
in determining academic excellence. To be specific, the reports on
the schools give due consideration to inadequate teachers,
salaries, curricula, facilities, textbooks, and the like, but
sorely neglect to mention the inadequacy of the student. All of the
reports cast the student in a passive light, denying to him any
active role in determining educational outcomes. He is seen as a
dependent variable, a subject that is ac ted upon, but never acts
on his own. This perspective sees the student as a person who
spends his time responding to stimuli; there is nothing dynamic
about him.
The point is that good teachers and good courses can only have a
marginal effect in improving the schools, and that is because the
cognitive approach is bent on doing something to the student and
not something about him. The reports on the schools are right to
conclude that today's students are underprepared, but what they
fail to mention is that
2
the source of underpreparation is flawed character development,
i.e., it is the lack of certain personal attributes that best
explains why students are underprepared academically.
Stressing Character Development. Better curricula and better
teachers d o not, by themselves, make for better students.
Curricula and teachers are to education what game plans and coaches
are to sports: they constitute program development, properties
which are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for success.
For success to be achieved, something must be done to insure that
the individuals who are subjected to quality programs are
themselves able and willing to benefit from these opportunities.
And that means that character development must be stressed as much
as program development: If the requisite personal traits that make
for success are lacking, all the techniques and instructors in the
world will not make a young person a good student or a good
athlete.
The kinds of personal traits that are necessary for success in s
chool are the same ones necessary for success in any endeavor, be
it on the playing field or in the office: hard work, determination,
sustained effort, practice, and so on. Yet as obvious as this
should be, many educators still undervalue the role which c h
aracter development plays in determining academic achievement. That
is why they concentrate their time on program development,
concocting new teaching techniques and the like. It is as if the
recipient of their innovations, namely the student, will someho w
take to whatever it is he is offered. But as we should have learned
by now, if students don't possess the kinds of character qualities
that allow for progress, it is not likely that being exposed to
even the most effective pedagogical resources will make much of a
difference.
There are some educators, like Secretary of Education William
Bennett, who clearly understand the relationship -between character
development and academic achievement. Bennett has consistently
emphasized the importance of "the three C's," namely content,
character and choice [of schools]. It needs to be said that good
personal skills are not only critical to learning, they are
important to the maintenance of discipline in the classroom as
well. Indeed the problems of the schools in g eneral - poor
academic performance, teenage pregnancy, violence, and drugs - are
ultimately a reflection of flawed character development. It is to
this aspect of education that attention must be given if progress
is to be achieved.
High Standards. The real ly good schools, and there are many of
them, play close attention to character development. A good school
can be defined, in part, as a place where the values of
self-discipline and hard work are consistently nurtured by both
teachers and administrators. S tudying is not possible without
sustained effort, and that is not a quality that most of us just
happen to possess. It needs to be demanded of us regularly, and
induced through daily routines. Experience shows that holding
students to high standards is pe rhaps the best way to inculcate
desirable character traits. The evidence is pretty clear on this
matter, as a look at the best schools in the country supports. Not
surprisingly, the same traits appear in Japanese schools, arguably
the best in the world.
We have known since the 1960s that money, teacher credentials,
quality of learning facilities, and student-teacher ratio are not
the key variables explaining academic achievement. That was one of
the major findings of the Coleman Report (formally known as "
Equality of Educational Opportunity"), a comprehensive study of the
schools conducted
3
by a team of researchers, led by University of Chicago
sociologist James S. Coleman. The evidence collected since that
time is supportive of Coleman. For example, between 1960 and 1980,
the amount of money spent per student each year more than doubled
in constant dollars. The average class size shrank considerably,
and the percentage of teachers with master's degrees rose from
one-quarter to one-half. Yet SAT scores dropped by 85 points during
those years.
Money vs. Results. Further support for the Coleman Report's
findings can be ascertained from educational data collected by the
states. New Hampshire typically has the highest average SAT scores
of any state, yet ranks in the bottom half in expenditures per
pupil. In terms of graduation rates, a state lik e South Dakota,
which ranks eighth on this measure, is forty-second in expenditures
per pupil and dead last in average teacher salary. On the other
hand, the District of Columbia has the worst graduation rate in the
country, but is near the top of the char t on both expenditures per
pupil (second only to Alaska) and teacher salaries (fourth
overall). Money, then, is not the great elixir.
The Coleman Report's basic conclusion was that the quality of
the family that a child was raised in proved to be a major d
eterminant of educational success. In other words, it was the
resources that a child took with him to school, and not what he
acquired in the classroom, that seemed to matter most. Other
researchers later to came to similar conclusions, including those
wh o, like Christopher Jencks, were not ideologically disposed to
accepting such findings.
Primacy of the Family. And what individual traits seemed to
matter most? Coleman found that the strongest single determinant of
academic achievement was self-responsibi lity. Those students who
took responsibility for their performance, while 2 more burdened
than those who did not, were also more autonomous and more
successful. Obviously, those schools that actively sought to
develop self-responsibility had a better trac k record than those
that did not. But as good as a particular school might be, nothing
could quite substitute for the primacy of the family.
Twenty years after the Coleman Report was issued, the Department
of Education released a study entitled "at Works: Research About
Teaching and Leaming. It underscored Coleman's emphasis on the
family, maintaining even further that it was not the income level
of the family that mattered most, it was what parents actually did
to help their children academically that was of unsurpassed
significance. Schools did matter, the report said, and those that
did the most effective job were the ones that had a safe and
orderly environment, stressed daily homework, had high expectations
of students, and held them to rigorous standa rds of
accountability.3
In 1987 the Department of Education issued a sequel to its What
Works report, this time focusing on the needs of disadvantaged
students. Its recommendations included such things as building
character and instilling the values of har d work, self-discipline,
and
2 James S. Coleman, "Equal Schools or Equal Students?" 7he Public
Interest, Summer 1966, p. 75. 3 Mat Worky: Research About Teaching
and Leaming, U.S. Department of Education, 1986.
4
self-responsibility. Building character and teaching values, the
report stressed, is every teacher's business, not just those
assigned to teach specialized courses. By doing such things as
giving students responsibilities and insisting on daily homework,
teachers help to develop in students suc h habits as persistence
and self-control, thus enabling them to do better in school and
ultimately in life. Accountability is critical, for when students
are trained to assess the future consequences of their behavior,
such problems as teenage pregnancy, d rugs, and dropping out of
school are minimized. 4
Parochial School Demands. Many of the same conclusions are evident
when comparisons are made between private and public schools. As
sociologists like Andrew Greeley and others have long maintained,
the rela tive success of Catholic schools, especially when compared
to their public school counterparts in ghetto neighborhoods, is
largely a function of the demands that parochial schools place on
their students. A 1981 study published by the National Center for E
ducation Statistics confirmed Greeley's research. On the basis of
data from tests given to nearly 60,000 high school students in over
1,000 schools, the report, conducted by James S. Coleman, Thomas
Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore, found that the reason why the average
public school did not do as good a job as the average private
school (many of them Catholic) was due to the lack of an orderly
environment, relatively easy demands placed on students, and
absence of school spirit.
With regard to Catholic schools i n particular, Coleman found that
students did better than their public school peers in math,
vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Catholic schools also
insisted on more discipline, and dispensed it in a fairer manner
than was true of public schools. The overall level of problems, as
reported either by students or principals, was much less in the
Catholic schools. This clearly accounts for the dramatic increase
of non-Catholic enrollment in Catholic schools in recent years,
especially in ghetto areas. In fact in many of the Catholic schools
in ghetto neighborhoods the majority of the students are now
non-Catholic. Parents are investing in better education and
stricter discipline.5
Surviving on Bingo. There is no mystery as to why Catholic school
students d o better: a) more is demanded of them and b) the overall
climate of discipline is conducive to learning. Indeed as anyone
who has ever attended Catholic school will confirm, as compared to
the average public school, teachers typically have less credential
s , classes are larger, facilities are inferior, and the amount of
money spent per pupil is small. With regard to finances, in fact,
if it weren't for candle and cookie sales, bingo, and the like,
many would simply not survive at all. As Coleman found, good
schools, whether they be public or private, have in common what
good Catholic schools have: "Schools which impose strong academic
demands, schools which make demands on attendance and on behavior
of students while
4 Schools That Work Educating Disadvantage d Childw; U.S.
Department of Education, 1987. See especially recommendation 3,
"Building Character," p. 23. 5 See Hilary Stout, "More
Non-Catholics Using Catholic Schools," 7he New York 7-unes,
November 28, 1987, p. 25.
5
they are in school are, according to these results, schools
which bring about higher achievement. ,6
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the study done by Coleman
and his associates was the analysis of the data by Amitai Etzioni,
a distinguished sociolog ist at George Washington University.
Etzioni secured access to the computer tapes of the Coleman study
and, after careful analysis, concluded that self-discipline was the
variable that most prominently figured in accounting for academic
success. It was th e internal attitudes and motivations of
students, Etzioni said, that best explained school performance.
That is why he recommended that more homework be given to students:
it nurtured self-discipline. Just as important, Etzioni said, was
prompt and detaile d feedback on homework assignments; teachers, as
well as students, need to be held accountable. 7
Hard Work Variable. What all this boils down to is what Barbara
Lerner aptly calls "the hard work variable." To be exact, Lerner
says that an analysis of the research literature consistently
reveals that four factors are central to good school performance:
amount of homework; amount of class time spent directly on relevant
school work; frequency of class attendance; and textbook demand
levels. 8
None of these factors, it should be noted, costs a great deal of
money to implement. It is commitment, not money, that spells the
difference.
Further proof that "the hard work variable" is the key to
academic achievement can be found by studying the tremendous
success of Japanese education. Merry White, in her splendid book
The Japanese Educational Challenge. A Commitment to Chil&-en,
details the role which hard work and character development play in
accounting for the unparalleled success of Japanese education.
Mother s are dedicated to instilling the value of self-discipline
in their children and do not hesitate to place strong demands on
them. Mothers typically work at home, attending to their children's
needs, offering "quality time" all day long, and not just for ha lf
an hour after supper. Moreover, the culture supports the kinds of
constraints that allow for success and reinforces self-discipline
through a variety of social techniques.
The Japanese schools are goal-oriented. In the lower grades,
White reports, child ren learn to bear hardships and to behave
unselfishly. Once in the middle grades, they learn to persist to
the end with patience and to live a life of moderation. Learning to
be steadfast and to live an orderly life is emphasized in the upper
grades. This is part of the moral education program that all
Japanese children experience. Hardship, White informs, is not
6 James S. Coleman, "Private Schools, Public Schools, and the
Public Interest," 7he Public Interest, Summer 1981, p. 25. 7 Edward
B. Fiske, "Etz ioni Wants to Shift Focus to the Students," 7he New
York 7"Imes, November 1, 1983, p. C1. 8 Barbara Lerner, "American
Education: How Are We Doing?" 77te Public Interest, Fall 1982, p.
72.
6
only acceptable to Japanese culture, its virtues are extolled:
"Hardship builds character, which is not innate, and anyone, the
Japanese believe, can acquire the habit and virtue of
self-discipline. 929
THE ROLE OF THE NEW FREEDOM
It should be obvious by now that self-discipline and "the bard work
variable" are strongly related to academic achievement. It should
be equally obvious why American schools are in trouble: our culture
nourishes habits and values which are directly contra dictory to
the very qualities that make for success. Quite simply, American
culture embraces a concept of liberty without limits, a
go-for-broke, no holds barred conception of freedom that disables
individuals as well as institutions.
This new freedom appe al to self-indulgence works to undermine the
social basis of academic excellence in many ways. It is just not
possible to import the value of sustained effort in a culture
hell-bent on immediate gratification and the abandonment of
constraint. By fixing o ur eyes exclusively on the merits of
unburdening the individual, we find it culturally impossible to
comprehend the Japanese celebration of hardship. We pay a heavy
social price for our idea of freedom, one that short-changes us in
many ways.
It was the ed ucation elite, not parents, principals, or teachers,
who adopted the ethos of the new freedom and turned the schools
upside down. What makes the story so tragic is that the radical
reforms which took place in the 1960s were so unnecessary. In the
two deca d es that followed World War 11, SAT scores and other
measures of academic achievement improved steadily. Elementary
codes of conduct were regularly followed and problems of drugs and
violence were mild compared to the near out of control situation
that exi s ts in many schools today. Then, about midway through the
decade, a series of untested assumptions and unrealistic theories
were put into practice, devastating the progress that had been made
and turning the clock backwards on an entire generation of stude
nts.
Progressive Education, Regressive Results. The score is in on this
one: progressive education, as interpreted since the 1960s, has
yielded regressive results. Traditional education, with its
emphasis on daily homework, structured learning, and discipl ine in
the classroom,, has delivered far more progress than progressive
education ever hoped to achieve. As if further proof is needed,
consider the results of an AM survey conducted in 1977 for the U.S.
Office of Education. A total of 9,200 third graders were divided
into two groups: one was taught the traditional way, with highly
structured lessons and lots of homework, and the other was
subjected to the progressive ideal of "informal and innovative"
techniques, representative of the "open classroom" ide al. Tested
after three years, the traditional approach won hands down, and at
a lower cost than its progressive rival.
9 Merry White, 7he Japanese Educational Challenge. A Commionent
to Children (New York: The Free Press, 1987), pp. 17 and 30.
7
It is re sults like this that have prompted educators like
Theodore Black to sound the alarm on the liabilities of progressive
education. Black, an eleven-year veteran of the New York State
Board of Regents, the last as its Chancellor, has seen first-hand
the diff e rent outcomes that the two opposing strategies yield.
For him, the results of the Abt survey only prove what should be
common knowledge among educators, but sadly is not: competition,
self-restraint, and accomplishment produce better educated students
tha n egalitarianism, self-expression, and test-bashing.
"Modernism," he says, has typically led to a deterioration in
quality wherever it has succeeded in supplanting traditional
education. 10
Attacking Authority. What has happened, as Joseph Adelson has
said , is that both civility and competence declined once authority
was attacked. "The loss of authority is felt most strongly," he
says, "at the secondary-school level, and its effects are seen most
clearly in the area of discipline." But the effects, he adds , go
even deeper than this: "The weakened authority of teachers and
principals also led to a weakening of academic demands."11 And we
have seen what happens when "the hard work principle" is not in
force.
It was the radical reformers of the 1960s who junke d "the hard
work principle" and led the attack on authority. Those who brought
the new freedom to the schools were the proud intellectual
descendants of John Dewey. The highly structured approach that the
traditional education model espouses was declared - without
supporting evidence - to be unfit. Following Dewey, the new freedom
advocates sought to usher in a neo-progressive agenda, one
featuring "open education" and undirected learning. But in fairness
to Dewey, the education gurus of the 1960s went far beyond anything
he counseled. They took his ideas to extremes and thereby corrupted
any value they might have had.
Revolutionary Politics. Dewey fairly criticized the often taut
and anti-individualistic approach of traditional education. By
concentrating so heavily on structure, the methodology of
traditional education helped to stifle individual creativity and
bore many students, especially the brighter ones. Dewey sought to
open things up a bit and move away from the mechanical skills
approach so common l y employed. Throughout his work, he maintained
a serious, realistic stance, quite unlike the utopian visionaries
of the 1960s. Dewey was content to be a reformer, while his new
freedom heirs wanted nothing less than revolutionary politics,
played out in t he theater of the nation's classrooms.
Perhaps the most important difference between Dewey and the
radical reformers of the 1960s was the way in which they defined
freedom. For Dewey, "freedom from restriction... is to be prized
only as a means to a freedo m which is power: power to frame
purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences
which will result from acting upon them; power to select and order
means to carry chosen ends into operation." As to the proper
meaning of freedom, Dewey s aid "The only freedom that is of
enduring importance is freedom of intelligence, that is to say,
freedom of observation and of judgment exercised
10 Theodore M. Black, Straight TaIkAboutAmefican Education (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). 11 Joseph Adelson, "How the
Schools Were Ruined," Commentary, July 1983, p. 46.
8
in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while." And the
purpos@ of education was clear: "The ideal aim of education is
creation of power of seff-control."i
Nihilistic Approach. Not only were none of these ideals shared by
new freedom educators, they explicitly rejected such thoughts and
actively worked against them in practice. For them, freedom from
external constraint was not a means to an end, it was an e nd in
itself.
The new freedom approach to education was essentially nihilistic,
and that is why very few of the self-styled radical reformers had
much interest in promoting a conception of freedom that served
inherently good purposes. And it was self-expre ssion, not
self-control, that they valued.
One of the most tenaciously held beliefs of the radical reformers
was, and still is for many new freedom educators, the conviction
that the schools are oppressive institutions. Charles Silberman,
one the most res pected new freedom students of education, helped
set the tone of the discussion by maintaining that most Americans
were ignorant as to the despotic quality of the public schools. He
lampooned them for failing to appreciate "what grim, joyless places
most A merican schools are, how oppressive and petty are the rules
by which they are governed." What was it that he found so
offensive? The answer: the practice of insisting on peace and quiet
in the classroom. Silberman berated teachers for being "obsessed"
wit h peace and quiet, charging that such concerns were
"unnatural."
Charles Reich came to the same conclusion as Silberman, arguing
that the sheer existence of classroom rules proved that teacher
authority was "in the purest sense lawless." He said students w ere
no more free than prisoners in a penitentiary, and maintained that
"An examination or test is a form of violence."14
Unthinkable Comparison. Jonathan Kozol, the well-known social
critic and former teacher, opined that all students were subjected
to a certain "intellectual and custodial Hell within the public
schools." Kozol called for change, sponsoring the Free School
movement, but was quick to warn that reform should not be limited
to white rich kids from rural areas, likening such a prospect as
bei ng "a great deal too much like a sandbox for the children of
the SS Guards at Auschwitz.',15 It is this kind of hysteria that
makes any comparison with Dewey unthinkable.
The ideas of the new freedom - that anything that constrains is
necessarily bad - per meated the writings of the radical reformers.
Their vision of reality was so affected by new freedom
consciousness that had the average person actually read what they
said, the most logical conclusion would have been that these people
are delirious. For e xample, most people believe in compulsory
education, on the grounds that if a child is deprived of
12 John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan,
1938), pp. 69,74, and 75. 13 Charles Silberman, Cyisis in the
Classroom (New York: Random Hous e, 1970), pp. 10 and 90. 14
Charles Reich, 7he Greening ofAmerica (New York: Random House,
1970), pp. 136-137. 15 Jonathan Kozol, Free Schools (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972), pp. 11 and 118.
9
schooling by neglectful parents, he will forever b e disabled.
But educator John Holt concluded that this was the same as saying
"if you don't go to school, we are going to put you in jail - a
real jail with bars on it." Yes, he thought the analogy was just
that close.
Most people understand that in the c ourse of going to school, a
selection process of sorts takes place, as young men and women find
a match between their abilities and aspirations. For Holt, this
quite natural process is nothing more than "meat stamping." What
about the perfectly normal pra c tice of teaching students values,
including the value of patriotism? Holt objects, screaming
"indoctrination."16 In other words, such perennial functions of the
schools as socialization, selection and allocation of human
resources, and social control, are all seen as being hostile to
freedom and destructive to the mission of education.
So what should we do? According to Free School enthusiast Allen
Graubard, we need to develop a "libertarian pedagogy," one that
will contribute to the larger process of buil ding 911a truly
humane and liberating social order."17 And where should we look for
inspiration? To the work of English educator A.S. Neill. Neill's
Summerhill school was widely touted by new freedom thinkers of the
1960s and 1970s as a place where freedo m without repression
reigned. Neill hated authority of any kind, and that is why he
insisted on participatory democracy in his school, holding, for
example, that if students wanted to use profanity, they had a
perfect right to do so. Reflecting the sentime ntalism of the
times, Neill believed that love was all that children needed to set
them free.
Quixotic Picture. One of the working assumptions of these
writers is the belief that everyone quite naturally wants to learn,
and were it not for the methods of t raditional education, everyone
would. Psychologist Carl Rogers, for instance, spoke for many when
he confessed "I become very irritated with the notion that students
must be 'motivated.' The young human being is intrinsically
motivated to a high degree."' 1 8 Ergo, there is no good reason why
a student should ever be bored or dislike school. If such a
situation does arise, it is proof not of any defect in the student,
but in the teacher or the school. Tlie whole notion of
self-directed Iearning assumes this to be true, holding as it does
to a quixotic picture of the human condition.
Some of the most specific suggestions to overhaul the schools
came from Herbert Kohl. Kohl developed a guide for teachers,
instructing them on the merits of the "open classroom." His how-to
approach includes such advice as doing away with the practice of
assigning seats to students, allowing school kids to hang their
coats wherever they choose to, abolishing the requirement that
students sho u ld raise their hand before asking a question, ending
the tradition of lining up before entering or exiting the building,
and doing away with prohibitions against talking in class, chewing
gum, and wearing sloppy clothes. As far as instruction was concerne
d, Kohl said that students should be taught such things as
1 6 John Holt, Freedom and Beyond (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972),
pp. 243,247, and 251. 17 Allen Graubard, Free the Children (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. xi and 10. 18 Carl Rogers, Freedom
to Leam (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company,
1969), p. 131.
10
64conventional" spelling, but that "Once they know about 4he rules
of uniform spelling, they should be free to accept or modify them
as they please."I
Subverting Traditiona l Education. Neil Postman and Charles
Weingartner implored teachers to openly subvert the tenets of
traditional education, and even offered ways in which this goal
might be achieved. Included in their recipe for action were such
nuggets of advice as: teac h ing without textbooks; having students
learn from teachers not trained in the field they are teaching in;
fining teachers 25 cents if they used more than three declarative
sentences per class; limiting teachers to asking only those
questions they know the y cannot answer; making every class an
elective; requiring all graffiti accumulated in school toilets to
be reproduced on large paper and hung in the school halls; and
banning the use of such words as teach, syllabus, I.Q., makeup,
test, disadvantaged, gif ted, accelerated, course, grade, score,
human nature, and dumb.2u
It might be objected that such absurd notions as these would never
be taken seriously by educators. Wrong. The praise heaped on these
savants came from the most respected, mainstream institu tions and
critics in the country. From the experts at Ivy League cofleges to
the education specialists at the New York Times, heaps of praise
were generously extended to writers like Kohl and Postman. No, most
schools did not implement some of the sillier proposals that were
made, but collectively the new freedom educators had the effect of
discrediting the value of traditional education and substituting in
its place some ersatz version of their own offerings.
Contempt for American Society. All of the refo rm efforts, be they
caRed "free school," dcopen classroom," "alternative education," or
the "deschooling movement," had in common certain presuppositions
governing the worth and value of American society. "None of these
movements," writes Diane Ravitch, " w as isolated from the others;
they shared certain assumptions about the failure of the existing
public schools, the corruptness of American society, and the need
to adopt radical changes in school and society."21 Ravitch is
exactly correct: it is impossibl e to understand the mentality of
those who wrecked the schools without referencing the profound
contempt they had for American society. It was alienation from
society, coupled with utopian visions of a new social order, that
energized their thoughts and fu eled the movement.
If there was one flaw that both Dewey and the new freedom educators
of the 1960s and 1970s had in common it was their unwarranted
assumption that most students came equipped with a minimum level of
self-discipline. Dewey's oversight was somewhat more
understandable, given the many social and cultural inducements to
self-discipline that existed in the first half of the century; it
was more natural that he would take self-discipline for granted.
But the radical reformers in the second half of the century should
have known better: a "libertarian pedagogy," if it can work at all,
must have as a base a society wherein
19 Herbert Kohl, Ae Open Classroom (New York: Vintage Books,
1969), pp. 22-30, 111, and 112. 20 Neil Postman and Charles Weing
artner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Dell
Publishing Company, 1969), pp. 137-140. 21 Diane Ravitch, 7he
Troubled Ousade (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), p. 238.
1 1
self-discipline is carefully nurtured. The 1960s was not such a
time, as should have been evident to everyone.
The curriculum reformers not only took self-discipline for
granted, they did much to undermine its development. But it was the
other wing of new freedom educators - the ones dedicated to
students' rights - that ma de discipline of any kind almost
impossible to achieve. Much, though certainly not all, of the
breakdown in discipline in the schools is an outgrowth of moving
the rights movement into the classroom.
STUDENTS' RIGHTS
Beginning in the 1960s, proponents of children's rights made the
seemingly innocuous case that students are human beings like
everyone else, and are therefore entitled to the entire panoply of
rights extended under the Constitution. Rights advocates worke d
hard to remove what they saw as the second-class status of
students, and found cause for celebration in 71"nker v. Des Moines.
It was in that 1969 decision that the Supreme Court proclaimed that
students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedo m of
speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Though the high
court has more recently taken a less expansive interpretation of
the Constitution as it applies to students, it cannot easily undo
the social effects of decisions like Tinker, Gault, Winsh ip, and
Goss, cases which in one way or another extended due process rights
to students.
Depriving Students of Freedom of Speech. Ile fundamental problem
with extending rights to students is that it inevitably becomes a
zero-sum operation, since every gain in students' rights must
result in a proportionate loss of rights to principals and
teachers. Ile net social effect of this redistribution of rights is
a decline in both teacher authority and principal autonomy. This
outcome is not lost on students, as m a ny begin to sense that
teachers have limited rule, meaning, naturally, that the cost for
misbehavior diminishes with every new round of court-awarded
rights. But if it can be said that this is a zero-sum exercise in
rights distribution, it surely is a net overall loss to the goals
of education, as both students and teachers lose. And no one loses
more than students.
No student can learn without a modicum of order in the classroom,
and for this to be achieved, teachers must have the authority to
maintain it . It is not easy to see how this can be done when the
right to punish a student for misbehavior has been called into
question, subjected to scrutiny by the court, and ultimately made
into a rebuttable presumption. The greatest irony of all is that in
the name of rights, students have a hard time learning anything,
including learning how to read and write at a minimal level,
thereby depriving them of taking full advantage of their First
Amendment right to freedom of speech.
A California study demonstrates t he changing nature of discipline
problems in the schools. In the 1940s, the most common complaints
centered on such things as talking, chewing gum, running in the
hallways, getting out of place in line, and not putting paper in
the wastebaskets. In the 19 80s, the most common complaints
centered on such things as
12
drug abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault.22 The
difference: in the 1940s, students came to school more well behaved
than they do today, the authority of teachers was more wid ely
respected, and principals had more control over disciplinary
procedures. The new freedom changed all that, relaxing constraints
on young people and stripping authority and autonomy from teachers
and principals.
Gerald Grant, a sociologist who has cond ucted his own field
studies in this area, maintains that "the new adversarial and
legalistic character of urban public schools" would be the most
noticeable change "to an observer who had not visited a public
school since the mid-1960s.11 The bottom line h e says is "a shift
of profound dimensions" as "adult authority is increasingly defined
by what will stand up in court."23 Again, students are not unaware
that the tide has shifted their way, and that is why the most
reckless among them exploit their "righ ts" to the hilt.
By teaching students they have rights but not responsibilities, new
freedom lawyers, judges, and educators have literally perfected a
blueprint for flawed character development. To give one instance,
beginning in 1980, students in the Bost on public schools received
a twenty-five page pamphlet called "I'lie Book." In it they learned
all about their rights, called from such sources as the ACLU, but
practicallMothing about their responsibilities (there were eleven
lines of type devoted to thi s side). Now young people being young
people, what lesson in morality are they likely to draw from'The
Book"? Have they been given an incentive to conform to the rules of
classroom decorum, or have they been presented with a case for
challenging those rule s that strike them as disagreeable?
MORALEDUCATION
The problem of discipline in the schools is not wholly the
result of the rights without responsibilities craze. It is due to
something much larger: it is due to the new freedom's fixation on
moral neutra lity as the governing ethos in society. It reflects,
at bottom, a crisis of confidence, an uneasiness with the defense
of the dominant norms and values of American society. The problem
is many new freedom educators have psychologically divorced
themselves from American society, thus making it impossible to
endorse programs designed to defend the moral worth of the social
order. The consequences of this alienation are still with us, and
show no signs of abating.
It would be wrong to suggest that most of tod ay's teachers and
administrators are alienated from society, or that they are not
committed to its defense. But it is nonetheless true that most of
them are still reluctant to accept their duty as moral educators,
influenced as they have been, by new free dom thinkers. Yet from
the ancient Greeks down to recent times, it has been a staple of
the schools to provide moral education.
22 Reported in "Getting Tough," 7-1me, February 1, 1988. 23 Quoted
by Bruce Hafen, "Developing Student Expression Through
Institutional Authority: Public Schools As Mediating institutions,"
Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3,1987, pp. 685-686. 24 Gera
ld Grant, "Children's Rights and Adult Confusions," 7he Public
Interest, Fall 1982, p. 91.
13
The notion that a young person should not be trained for
citizenship - to accept his obligations to the community - is an
outgrowth of 1960s excess, an idea so bizarre as to be outside the
historical parameters of discourse on education. The purpose of the
schools has always been, first and foremost, instruction in
morality. A school which turned out academically prepared, but
morally underdeveloped, students, w ould historically have been
judged a failure. Until the advent of the new freedom, that is.
Teachers Supporting Parents. Whether or not virtue can be taught is
still debatable, but what is not debatable is that most people
think it should be. Traditionally it has been true that most
parents want the schools to teach virtue, with the expectation that
what is being taught in the classroom is consistent with what is
being taught at home. No one contends that the schools can be an
adequate substitute for the a u thority of the family, but few will
deny that teachers can play a supporting role to that of parents.
At the center of the controversy is not whether teachers can assist
in teaching virtue, it is the proposition that they should refrain
from doing so alto gether.
"To suggest that a society lacks the right to teach children the
basic morality on which its very existence depends," notes
philosoger Andrew Oldenquist, "is tantamount to suggesting that it
has no right to exist." How true. Oldenquist reminds us t hat there
is nothing exceptional about a people teaching its morality and
culture to its young. Indeed quite the contrary: it is the
exception to the rule - in defiance of all the anthropological
literature - to find a society determined to deprive its me mbers
of its heritage and mores. Yet this is what new freedom educators
have sought to do. They do not want to allow the schools to act as
cultural depositories of American norms and values.
The standard new freedom response to the question of teaching val
ues in the schools is that not everyone agrees on what values
should be taught, therefore all that should be done is to allow
teachers to facilitate students in the clarification of their
values. But to insist on a standard of unanimity is to obscure the
i ssue. There is a consensus, a general agreement, on what values
should be taught, and that is all that is needed. How many people,
for example, would protest that it is wrong to teach students the
values of hard work, self-discipline, honesty, fidelity, a nd so
on? Not many, as even those who dissent must admit.
Asserting Without ProoE Those who insist on the "value neutral"
approach hold a deep-seated hostility to traditional authority.
They assert, without offering any proof, that traditional religious
an d cultural norms and values have proved to be unsatisfactory in
modern societies. Of course the same people who commonly make such
pronouncements think it a good thing that it is illegal for
teachers to lead their students in prayer. So what do they offer ?
A "value neutral" approach which seeks to help students clarify
their values.
Should teachers begin a class in values clarification by informing
their students that the Judaeo-Christian tradition, of which they
are a part, holds to a core set of moral va lues, or should
teachers just allow the boys and girls to state whatever values
come to mind, and then help them to clarify those values? The
latter is the prescribed course of action. What
25 Andrew Oldenquist, "'Indoctrination' and Societal Suicide,"
77ie Public Interest, Spring 1981, p. 86.
1 4
if students ask for help by asking their teachers what values
they hold? According to the Sidney Simon school of values, the
teacher should say nothing, unless such questions come at the end
of the exercise. A t that point, "Flie teacher should present
himself as a person with values (and often with values confusion)
of his own.',26 He can then share his values, confusion and all,
with his students, making sure, however, to state that his values
are no better t han anyone else's.
It would be interesting to see how these students, indoctrinated
as they have been with the doctrine of moral neutrality, would
respond to the same teacher who, in a history class, were to say
that slavery is evil. To begin with, would a teacher who taught the
Simon method be likely to make such a "value judgment" in the first
place? If so, what moral authority could he summon if a student
challenged him? Having just told the students in a values
clarification class that all values are m orally equal, how could
he now start by making exceptions? More important, why should
anyone bother to listen?
The new freedom emphasis on individual rights is also evident in
the value neutral approach. Lawrence Kohlberg, in particular, was
quite fond of insisting that moral claims could be impartially
resolved by considering individual rights. Like Simon, Kohlberg
came to the question of values formation and maturation from a
decidedly asocial position. The traditional figures of authority -
parents, tea c hers, priests, and policemen - carried no special
weight with Kohlberg. What Kohlberg tried to do was to assess the
merit of moral claims wholly outside the real world context of
social roles and status groupings. Whatever the philosophical value
of such a method, it is sociologically suspect, thereby renting it
of useful purposes.
Teaching Moral Neutrality. To get an appreciation for how the
values clarification approach plays itself out in real life,
consider its application in sex education classes. Ever since
values clarification became the predominant orientation in sex
educati o n, there has been no shortage of textbooks and teachers'
guides aimed at teaching moral neutrality. As Jacqueline Kasun's
analysis of the literature shows, 27 one of the most popularly used
books explicitly states that "we must finish the contemporary sex
revolution... our society must strive to sanction and support
various forms of intimacy between members of the same sex." Another
widely used text advises first-grade teachers to lead their
students on a mixed-group "bathroom tour," the purpose of which i s
to acquaint boys and girls with the proper names for male and
female genital parts.
Other exercises favored by the values clarification approach to
sex education include dividing the class into boy-girl pairs so
that they can work on "physiology definiti on sheets." In this
session, high school students are instructed to define such terms
as "foreplay," iserection," "ejaculation," and so on. Included in
the curriculum is the recommendation that teachers should encourage
students to discuss whether they ar e satisfied with the size
of
2 6 Sidney Simon, Leland Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, Values
Clariflcation:A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and
Students (New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1972), p. 26. 27
Jacqueline Kasun, "Our Erogenous Zones ," Crisis, March 1988, pp.
30-34. An earlier edition of this article, entitled "Turning
Children into Sex Experts," appeared in 77te Public Interest,
Spring 1979, pp. 3-14.
15
their sex organs. To what end it is not clear, since those who feel
cheated are apparently left without solace, counsel, or hope.
Perhaps the most offensive aspect to using the model of values
clarification in sex education classes is that it purports to be
value free. Nothing could be further from the truth. By instructing
studen ts to make up their own minds regarding the moral worth of
pre-marital sex, abortion, adultery, sodomy, etc., teachers are
imposing a value judgment on them, leading students to the
conclusion that it is perfectly acceptable to ignore the tenets of
establ ished religions, community standards, and social norms. Such
a value preference has defined behavioral consequences, as young
people resolve to follow their own dictates, guided more by passion
than by wisdom.
Going Against Americans'Values. The American p eople have made it
clear that they do not want sex education shorn of moral values.
Indeed seven in ten want abstinence to be stressed. Yet
organizations like Planned Parenthood continue to support relaxed
sexual mores and openly reject traditional moral s tandards. 28 And
some sex education experts have now gone beyond the values
clarification strategy by implicitly sanctioning promiscuity. For
example, in the Health Curriculum Guide for Pennsylvania, prepared
by the state's Department of Education, the fo llowing is one of
the questions which students are asked: "Is sexual abstinence
beneficial to a person's health, strenFth, wisdom or character?"
The right answer, as the students quickly learn, is 99no. P22
When students are told by their teachers, in defi ance of community
norms, that they should make up their own minds regarding the
merits of abstinence or, worse still, are told that abstinence is
not a good thing, why is it surprising that young people are more
sexually active than ever before? Isn't it j ust plain common sense
that what has stopped adolescents from being sexually active
throughout the ages is fear? Fear of shame and stigma, of poverty
and disgrace, of ostracism and abandonment - isn't this what
adolescents have always dreaded? It only mak e s sense that once
cultural prohibitions on sexual expression have been lifted,
adolescents will do what comes natural to them - engage in sex.
Indeed to think that an increase in dead fetuses and bastards
wouldn't result from this kind of "moral education " would be truly
astonishing.
Healthy Fear. Fear, of course, is anathema to the new freedom. Fear
constrains, and the new freedom will have none of it. Yet as child
psychologist Bruno Bettleheim has long argued, desirable moral
development is not possible without a healthy dose of fear. Those
who doubt this to be true need to explain the relatively low rates
of teenage pregnancy in the 1950s. It certainly wasn't due to sex
education, for there was very little of it back then. In fact most
adolescents were quite ignorant about the subject of sex in the
1950s, making absurd the popular notion that the way to stem the
rise in unwanted pregnancies is to have
28 See the article distributed by Planned Parenthood and written
by Marie Patten, "Self Concept and Self Esteem: Factors in
Adolescent Prepancy,"Adolescence, Winter 1981, pp. 765-778. See
especially p. 776. 29 The author is indebted to Jo Ann Gasper of
the U.S. Department of Education for bringing this to his
attention. See "Pennsylvania Health Curriculum Gu ide: Family
Health," Pennsylvania Department of Education, 1984, p. 34,
question #89. This is not an isolated question, as the guide makes
clear.
1 6
more sex education. As the record shows, when young people knew
the least about sex, they engaged the least in it.
It is well known that when teenagers learned about sex "in the
street," instead of the classroom, they were less likely to become
sexually active. And for good reason: learning about sex covertly
made it clear to everyone that sex outside of mar riage was wrong.
Once legitimate authority figures like teachers invited "open" and
"honest" discussions about sex, the stigma was removed, making it
difficult, if not impossible, to brand adolescent sex as
illegitimate. Add to this the Dr. Ruth phenomeno n of counseling
teenagers to have "good sex," and the result is predictable.
Telling teenagers to have "good sex" is analogous to telling fat
people to have "good food"; it only makes it easier for them to
indulge their appetites.
Turning Around. Despite t he popularity of the new freedom
approach to morality, there are some signs that things may be
turning around. There has been unexpected help from organizations
like People for the American Way, which has drawn attention to the
near absence of any mention of religion in the nation's textbooks.
The research of New York University psychologist Dr. Paul Vitz has
documented this neglect, making it intellectually indefensible for
publishers to continue to deprecate the positive role which
religion has played in American history. The National Education
Association has stated its misgivings over the value neutral
approach to moral education, as has New York governor Mario Cuomo.
And leading the way in this area has been California schools
superintendent Bill Honig , one of the nation's most tireless
campaigners for reform.
But for genuine reform to take place, there needs to a consensus
on the kind of moral vision that we want to import, and that goes
well beyond deciding which values are good for character formation.
There also needs to be an understanding that schools whi c h turn
out academically literate, but morally illiterate, students are a
disservice to the mission of education. That may sound like a tall
order, but in reality all it calls for is a restatement of the
founding principles of education. And the will to im plement
them.
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