TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020590/0205640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.4 KB | 136 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 78

Education: Doing Bad and Feeling Good


By Charles Krauthammer


    A standardized math test was given to 13-year-olds in six
countries last year. Koreans did the best. Americans did the
worst, coming in behind Spain, Britain, Ireland and Canada. Now
the bad news. Besides being shown triangles and equations, the
kids were shown the statement "I am good at mathematics."
Koreans came last in this category. Only 23% answered yes.
Americans were No. 1, with an impressive 68% in agreement.

    American students may not know their math, but they have
evidently absorbed the lessons of the newly fashionable
self-esteem curriculum wherein kids are taught to feel good
about themselves. Of course, it is not just educators who are
convinced that feeling good is the key to success. The Governor
of Maryland recently announced the formation of a task force
on self-esteem, "a 23-member panel created on the theory,"
explains the Baltimore Sun, "that drug abuse, teen pregnancy,
failure in school and most other social ills can be reduced
by making people feel good about themselves." Judging by the
international math test, such task forces may be superfluous.
Kids already feel exceedingly good about doing bad.

    Happily, some educators are starting to feel bad about doing
bad. Early voice to the feel-bad movement was given by the 1983
Nation at Risk study, which found the nation's schools
deteriorating toward crisis. And Bush's "education summit" did
promise national standards in math and science. The commitment
remains vague but does recognize that results objectively
measured, not feelings, should be the focus of educational
reform.

    Now the really bad news. While the trend toward standards
and testing goes on at the national level, quite the opposite
is going on in the field, where the fixation on feeling is
leading to the Balkanization of American education.

    The battle cry is "inclusion" in the teaching curriculum for
every politically situated minority. In California, for
example, it is required by law that textbooks not just exclude
"adverse reflection" of any group but include "equal portrayal"
of women, minorities and the handicapped. In texts on "history
or current events, or achievements in art, science or any other
field, the contributions of women and men should be represented
in approximately equal numbers."

    Says a respected female historian: "I'm beginning to think
that in the future it will become impossible to write a history
textbook and satisfy these kinds of demands. After all, how do
you write a history of the Bill of Rights giving equal time to
the contribution of women?"

    In New York State, a report from the Task Force on
Minorities (A Curriculum of Inclusion) has launched a fierce
attack on "Eurocentrism" in the schools. It begins, "African
Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Rican/Latinos and Native
Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and
educational oppression that has characterized the culture and
institutions of the United States and the European-American
world for centuries." Result: "Terribly damaging" to the
"psyche" of minority youth. Recommendation: Prepare all
curricular materials "on the basis of multicultured
contributions to the development of all aspects of our
society."

    This is ideology masquerading as education and aspiring to
psychotherapy. It demands outright lying. Not all groups in
America have contributed "to the development of all aspects of
our society." There is little to be said, for example, about
the Asian-American contribution to basketball, about the
Jewish-American contribution to the Pequot War or about the
contribution of women to the Bill of Rights. Some connection
could, of course, be found -- manufactured -- if one pushed it.
But pushing it would be entirely in the service of ideology,
not truth. American history has not been smoothly and
proportionately multicultural from the beginning. Honesty
requires saying so.

    But honesty is not the object of the inclusion movement.
Psychic healing is. The fixation on inclusionary curricula is
based on the widespread assumption that the pathologies
afflicting many minorities, from teen pregnancy to drug abuse
to high dropout rates, come from a lack of self-esteem. Which,
in turn, comes from their absorbing (as the New York task force
puts it) "negative characterizations" of themselves in school
books.

    This argument is wrong on its face. This is the era of Cosby
and affirmative action. If today's high dropout rates, drug
abuse and teen pregnancy stem from negative characterizations
of minorities, then 40 years ago -- the era of Amos 'n' Andy
and parks with NO DOGS OR NEGROES signs -- self-esteem should
have been lower and social pathology worse. Of course, the
opposite is true. In 40 years negative characterizations have
decreased and social pathologies have increased.

    The real tragedy of this obsessive preoccupation with
Eurocentrism is that it is a trap and a diversion. Of all the
reasons for the difficulties encountered by the minority kids
in and out of school, curricular Eurocentrism ranks, if at all,
at the bottom. That New York State, in the midst of an
education crisis, should be devoting its attention to cleansing
the grade school curriculum of Eurocentrism is a waste, a
willful turning away from real problems.

    The attack on Eurocentrism did not start in the New York
public schools. It started at the elite universities. Last year
Stanford University changed its course on Western civilization
into a curriculum of inclusion by imposing a kind of ethnic and
gender quota system for Great Books.

    Stanford can afford such educational indulgences. Its
graduates will get jobs even if their education is mildly
distorted by this inclusionary passion. Not so inner-city
third-graders, whose margin of error in life is tragically
smaller. And for whom any dilution or diversion of education
to satisfy the demands of ideology can be devastating.

    The pursuit of good feeling in education is a dead end. The
way to true self-esteem is through real achievement and real
learning. Politically Balkanized curricula will only ensure
that our schools continue to do bad, for which feeling good,
no matter how relentlessly taught, is no antidote.