Our Children and Our Country.

Our Children and Our Country

WILLIAM BENNETT is a nightmare for the American education establishment. The worst of it is the way he keeps getting into the news. Wherever the controversial education secretary goes, he succeeds in putting education issues on the front page and in front of the cameras--the last thing the professionals want. Last year when Bennett came to chicago, the school board thought it was prepared for anything. It wasn't. What the secretary told the press was simple. Before his visit, he said, he had been under the impression that chicago had the second-worst school system in the nation, but after seeing it in action he'd changed his mind: it was the worst.

The most frequent complaint about Bill Bennett--heard repeatedly from liberal educators--is that he has politicized education. This collection of his speeches, Our Children and Our Country, provides plenty of ammunition for the critics. Even the title implies a connection between schooling and the national interest, and the topics include education for democracy, the future of conservatism, the importance of teaching Western civilization, the case for voluntary school prayer, and the problems with bilingual education.

These are the sorts of obvious political topics that have more than once encouraged speculation that the secretary of education was staking a larger claim in Republican Party politics. But Bennett's real concern throughout his tenur of office has not been political activism but education reform, and it is precisely his identification with the reform movement that has alarmed so many bureaucrats in his own department, to say nothing of the superintendents, union bosses, and education professors who dictate how and what our children shall be taught.

In Bennett's hands to complex and tangled concerns of school reform are straightened out into the simplicity of a three-point sermon, based on the Three C's (to balance the Three R's): Content, Character, and Choice. Schools should, in this view, give better books to children, teach the values necessary for life in a democracy, and involve parents in decisions about what their children are taught.

Most of Bennett's recommendations make such obvious good sense, it is hard to say enough good things about them. Strong principals and community support are the key to effective schools; drugs must be kicked out of all schools, including graduate schools; American children have to be taught their own history and the unique contributions made by the great men of the civilized West. Bennett states these imperatives in a simple and direct manner calculated to win applause from receptive audiences and gain space even in hostile newspapers.

But these strengths are also the principal weaknesses of the secretary's speeches. The richness of American history and our constitutional system cannot be boiled down to a few slogans about liberty and democracy; and whatever is left of the civilized remnant in American cannot fail to be at least mildly uncomfortable with Bennett's sweeping proclamations of the glories of Western civilization. Plato and Homer jostle with Mark Twain and Maurice Sendak, and we are now to place Martin Luther King Jr. alongside Jefferson and Madison in the national pantheon. Still, at their best, Bennett's speeches embody the highest aspirations of traditional American education. Even at their worst, they only reflect the harsh political realities that every Cabinet member must confront every day.

It is easy to understand why Bennett should embrace a nationalist, democratic ideology in his struggles against an anti-American, leftist education establishment. Throughout this century, experts like Ellwood Cubberley and John Dewey have worked to take control of the school sout of the hands of parents and local communities and turn it over to centralized, professional bureaucracies. In every case, this was done in the name of reform and a non-partisan consensus. At the very beginning of the public-school movement, Horace Mann decreed that Trinitarian Chrsitianity could not be taught in the schools because it was controversial, and Mann's own bloodless Unitarianism became the official religion of public education in the Northeast. By the 1960s the public-school religion had become a secularized Marxism, modified only by the demands of feminists, homosexuals, and racial minorities.

If some people are less enthusiastic than Bill Bennett over the current reform movement, as represented by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, it may be that they catch the whiff of Horace Mann and John Dewey in the effort to find an ideology of democracy and Western values that is not subject to political squabbling. Of course, for the education establishment, politics in defined as any questioning of that establishment's right to refashion the nature of man.

Local politics is an unsavory business, almost as corrupt and disagreeable as national politics. It remains, however, the peculiar genius of the American people that we prefer to resolve our local differences through local politics. Even after the New Deal and the Great Society, much of what Tocqueville said about local government and voluntarism still applies in the United States. If the reformers really want to teach democracy in the schools, they should give up their notions of a national ideology and concentrate on breaking up the monopolies of large consolidated districts and state bureaucracies. They could even try turning over control to parents and local communities--a logical deduction from Secretary Bennett's heroic lobbying on behalf of parental involvement.

Even Chicago--under a mayor who makes Harold Washington look like his namesake George--has come up with a plan for school-management councils that would restore a larger measure of neighborhood autonomy to the city's schools. Such a measure would probably have been inconceivable without the steady drumbeat for parental choice issuing from the Department of Education. This move toward real democracy, not the inspiring rhetoric of civics and Western values, will be Secretary Bennett's enduring legacy.