Education on trial: strategies for the future.

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 others 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) dunder-headedness 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:

In considering educational goals, it is important to begin by understanding what schools cannot do. They cannot solve all of the problems of a troubled society. They cannot do everything well, all at once. Most importantly, they cannot succeed in their most basic purpose if they are constantly veering in response to the winds of political change. They must be able to operate with stable, firm, agreed-upon objectives.... Until reforms of education evolve from a broad consensus about what to do ... all reform initiatives will be subject to the vagaries of changing fashion.

(It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the reform movement will have to say about the new Harvey Milk School in New York City. In the interim, we must all pray that the Harvey Milk School is not part of the reform movement.)

The scope of Education on Trial is impressively wide, allowing for articles on secondary and post-secondary education, teacher education, collective bargaining and its effect upon the profession, technology in the classroom, California's dubious attempts at educational reform, the case to be made (or not to be made) for a ministry of education, and other subjects. To my mind, however, the contributors pull their punches when dealing with the primary problem confronting American education: the big grand-daddy crocodile lurking at the bottom of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, which has displayed time and again a taste for tender reformers, whom it devours in watery swales of indignant enthusiasm while obscuring the blood with murk. Recently, I looked at a book by a converted pedagogue (that is to say, a teacher who has deserted the ivied walls for a career in business) who, overcome by a burst of negative enthusiasm, issued a forthright call for the abolition of teachers' colleges everywhere in the Republic. I do not remember whether the means advocated was public recall, constitutional convention, or dynamite, but my own preference remains for the quickest and most violent solution.