Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

  What if they had been fair to me and my schoolmate? Where would we be today? Maybe in some halfway house—if we were lucky.

  Some people say that my philosophy is “tough.” But it is life that is tough. My ideas are a piece of cake compared to life.

  What about the other kids who went to school in Harlem in the 1940s? Their test scores were very similar to those of white kids in similar neighborhoods, sometimes a shade ahead and sometimes a shade behind, but always in the ball-park—unlike today.

  Education is just one of the areas in which the mushy notion of fairness makes those who believe in it feel good about themselves—at the expense of other people's lives.

  We are so used to hearing about policemen warning criminals about their right to remain silent that some of the younger generation may not realize that this is something that never existed during three-quarters of the history of the United States.

  Back in the 1960s, both the Attorney General of the United States and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court thought it was unfair that inexperienced and amateurish criminals would make damaging admissions that more savvy crooks and members of crime syndicates would never make. Therefore cops were required to warn everybody, so as to bring the dumbest crook up to the level of the most state-of-the-art mafioso.

  There was no thought of the cost of creating this fairness between different categories of criminals. No one asked: How many women are you prepared to see raped, how many neighborhoods terrorized, how many people killed, for the sake of this conception of fairness?

  A police chief who tried to caution a conference of judges in 1965 about the consequences of such decisions was literally laughed at—by two Supreme Court justices, among others. How many victims or their widows or orphans would have laughed is another story.

  Someone always has to pay the price of fairness, whether in money or in other ways. This straining for an abstract and impossible kind of fairness and justice is one of the most tragic quests of our time.

  DOES IT ADD UP?

  For many years now, American students have been coming in at or near the bottom in international tests of mathematics. Meanwhile, our schools have been entertaining themselves with “new math,” “fuzzy math” and everything other than old-fashioned hard-work math that other countries use.

  If you want to test your own knowledge of math, here is an example for you. If a school district spends $8,000 per pupil and pays $4,000 for a voucher for each pupil who leaves the public school system, will the total cost of educating all the students go up or down when more students begin using vouchers to transfer out of the public schools?

  Take all the time you want. I'll wait. You can even use a pocket calculator if you want to.

  If you said that the total cost of educating all the students goes down, then you are a lot smarter than those people who have fallen for the teachers' union argument that vouchers will cost the taxpayers more money. If you went even further and said that the amount of money left to spend on students remaining in the public schools would enable the spending per public school pupil to rise, you are probably in the top one or two percent.

  Unfortunately, the dumbing-down of American education has been going on so long that it may now be impossible for many people to see through such flimsy arguments that are made in defense of the status quo in the public schools. These schools' own educational failures in the past may insulate them from the changes they need to make for the future—but which an under-educated public does not realize they need to make.

  Seldom, if ever, do students who receive vouchers get more than half of what is spent per pupil in the public schools. Moreover, both voucher schools and charter schools have to provide their own classrooms, while school buildings are provided free to the public school system. So the real disparity in resources is even greater than two-to-one in favor of the public schools.

  Despite the deck's being stacked in favor of the public schools, students in voucher schools, charter schools and home schooling almost invariably do at least as well, and usually better, by whatever tests are used.

  One of the most hypocritical arguments against vouchers is that the amounts of money given to the students are insufficient to pay for an education in a private school. In reality, tuition at many parochial and other low-budget private schools will in fact be covered by half of what the public schools spend per pupil in many communities. But if those who make this argument are serious, they need only advocate larger amounts of money per voucher. But that is the last thing they will do.

  The deck is stacked in favor of the public schools in other ways. Teachers' unions and the public school establishment are already organized for political combat in a way that voucher schools or charter schools cannot be this early in their history. The unions and the public schools are thus able to lobby politicians to impose restrictions and red tape on their rivals.

  The education establishment wants the teachers in voucher schools and charter schools to be “certified” as having taken education courses, being unionized and surrounded with all the iron-clad job security that makes it an ordeal to fire even grossly incompetent teachers. Sometimes these restrictions and directives are justified in the name of “fairness,” where similar restrictions and directives already apply to the public schools. But this “fairness” argument is completely invalid and misleading.

  First, one of the main purposes of voucher schools, charter schools and home schooling is to allow alternative forms of education to escape the bureaucratic rigidities, faddish dogmas and massive red tape that have helped turn too many American public schools into educational disaster areas.

  Second, “fairness” is a concept that applies to relations between human beings, not institutions. Institutions are just means to an end. Those institutions that do not serve their purpose—for whatever reason—need to give way to institutions that do.

  This does not mean that public schools should be shut down. Rather, they should be forced to compete with alternatives, as other kinds of enterprises have to compete. Whether or not Kodak film is better than Fuji film, both are better than they would be if either had a monopoly.

  DIVERSITY VERSUS “DIVERSITY”

  Sometimes it seems as if “diversity” is going to replace “the” as the most often used word in the English language. Yet the place where this word has become a holy grail—academia—shows less tolerance for genuine diversity of viewpoints than any other American institution.

  In a book titled The College Admissions Mystique, an admissions office official at Brown University is quoted as setting ideological litmus tests for applicants. An outstanding high school record would not be enough to get admitted, because such records were seen as signs of people who had sold out to traditional ways of thinking—and who envisaged careers in establishment professions. He called such students “Reptilian.”

  What the admissions official wanted were “with it” kids, socially and politically aware—“bellwethers” who “would have a following later on.” In other words, he did not want pillars of society but politically correct pied pipers who could head ideological movements.

  In other words, diversity of viewpoints is not welcome. Diversity of physical appearance is the be-all and end-all, but diversity of thought is no more welcome than it has been under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

  Such narrowness is not confined to Brown University. Nor is it confined to admissions offices. Increasingly, ideological litmus tests are applied to the hiring of professors. Candidates for faculty positions report being asked openly ideological questions.

  One young scholar who has published very careful and important research that reached politically incorrect conclusions reports being treated with calculated discourtesy and boorishness during job interviews. It was not enough for the cultural commissars to turn him down, they had to try to humiliate him.

  This particular scholar has now been hired by a conservative think tank on the east coast. But the real harm that has bee
n done has been done to students who will never learn that there is a factual and reasoned alternative to the one-sided propaganda they will hear in their classrooms.

  Incidentally, there is a reason why most of the top-rated think tanks in the world are conservative. When a liberal think tank wants to hire a top scholar in some field, it has to compete with Ivy League universities, Berkeley, Duke, and the like. But conservative think tanks don't have that problem, because the ideological litmus tests in academia bar many conservative scholars from an academic career. Conservative think tanks have little competition when hiring people like the outstanding young man who was dissed at job interviews in places where he was, if anything, over-qualified.

  What is remarkable—and appalling—is that so many businessmen keep writing donation checks, some in the millions of dollars, for places where businessmen are demonized by academics who know nothing about business, and where the very possibility that a student applicant might become a businessman is enough reason to blackball him, despite his academic achievements.

  Recently, a college student wrote to me that a professor was shocked to see a book of mine accidentally fall out of his book bag. However, the prof was visibly relieved when the student said that it was just a book that he bought for himself. What this ideological academic had feared was that this book was assigned reading in some course. In other words, four years of steady indoctrination with the left viewpoint might be jeopardized by one little book of essays.

  Who knows? It could even lead to diversity.

  All this ideological intolerance might seem funny, but it is very serious for those who are true believers on the left and ought to be for those of us who are not. Even if the academic Talibans of the left were correct in all their beliefs about all current issues, it would still be dangerous to leave students unable to weigh and analyze alternatives for themselves, because the issues in the years ahead of them are almost certain to be different. What they were taught will become progressively less relevant and the mental skills that they have not been taught can become a crippling handicap for them—and for our society.

  CHOOSING A COLLEGE

  For many high school seniors and their parents, this is the time of year when colleges let them know if their applications have been accepted. For those who have been chosen, it is now their turn to make their own choices among the colleges that have sent acceptances.

  One of the most over-rated factors in these choices are the big names of some colleges and universities. There may be some famous professors at Ivy U., but that doesn't mean much to an undergraduate who is more likely to be taught by graduate students or by temporary “gypsy faculty” who teach introductory courses that the academic stars consider too boring to teach themselves.

  For the kind of megabucks tuition that can leave both students and parents in hock for years, this is no bargain. A far better education may be obtained at a good quality college where courses are taught by professors who are competent and available, rather than by the graduate assistants of some research grant baron, to whom undergraduates are a nuisance that he doesn't want to be bothered with.

  For minority students, there are further dangers in big-name colleges and universities that want them as warm bodies which visibly demonstrate “diversity” on campus, regardless of whether these students last long enough to graduate.

  Despite a recent book by a couple of retired Ivy League university presidents, suggesting that it is imperative that blacks go to elite colleges, whether or not their qualifications match those of the other students there, the cold fact is that it is infinitely better to graduate from Hillsdale College or Birmingham Southern than to flunk out of Berkeley or Columbia. It is also better to get an engineering degree from Cal State at San Luis Obispo than to squeak through some Ivy League school by taking soft courses in subjects that prepare you for nothing but unemployment.

  It is a monument to the dedication of many parents that they are willing to take out second mortgages on their homes, in order to pay exorbitant tuition at some prestige institutions. Seldom is it worth it.

  Some people point to the fact that students who graduate from big-name colleges earn higher incomes later on. But kids who go horseback riding undoubtedly also go on to earn higher incomes than kids who don't. Does that mean that parents should buy their child a horse, in order to ensure bigger paychecks down the road? Prestige colleges, like horseback riding, are signs of other things that are often the real reason why some people have better chances in life.

  Harvard turns out bright students because Harvard takes in bright students—and usually does not ruin them during the four years in between. But that is wholly different from saying that the reason such students do well in later life is because they went to Harvard.

  Graduates of Harvey Mudd College go on to receive Ph.D.s a far higher percentage of the time than do the graduates of Harvard. Graduates of Franklin & Marshall College have scored higher on the medical school examination than the graduates of Berkeley.

  Parents should also consider the non-academic aspects of college. Do they really want to send their daughter to a college that has co-ed showers? Many big-name colleges and universities go in for all sorts of dangerous fads like this. Parents can also see their hard-earned tuition money go down the drain when their child is suspended or expelled for a politically incorrect remark.

  College guides are often used to help decide where to apply for admissions. There are a couple of guides that should be consulted before deciding where to choose to go after being accepted.

  Two guides that tell a lot about the social atmosphere, as well as the curriculum, at colleges across the country are Choosing the Right College and the National Review College Guide. They are not always in the bookstores and may have to be special ordered. But it is worth the trouble, not simply to avoid wasting money, but also to avoid having a life distorted.

  Parents are often regarded as mere obstacles to the student's making his or her own college choices. Not only do some headstrong students feel this way, so do many high school counselors and college admissions office staffers. But it is not their money and not their child—and these know-it-alls are not the ones that will have to pick up the pieces if they steer your child into disaster.

  A PAINFUL HISTORY

  The public in general and parents in particular are shocked from time to time when tests reveal the intellectual incompetence of public school teachers, or when some of the weird fads to which school children have been subjected come to light. But neither the public nor the media seem to see anything beyond the oddities of a particular school or particular teachers.

  In reality, there are not only nationwide networks promoting everything from “whole language” to homosexuality in the schools, there is a large body of literature by education gurus—going all the way back to John Dewey in the early 20th century—urging schools away from their traditional role as conveyors of an intellectual heritage toward being “agents of change” in society.

  What that means in plain English is that educators should be shaping children to be the kinds of people they want them to be—as distinguished from the kinds of people their parents want them to be. It means that educators should not be so preoccupied with developing intellectual skills and more concerned with inducing in children the kinds of attitudes that would make them receptive to collectivist economic, social and political thinking.

  This used to be called progressive education. Its de-emphasis of academics in favor of social engineering, its de-emphasis of teaching in favor of “activities” and “projects,” and its de-emphasis of intellectual development in favor of social adjustment and ideological indoctrination are all alive and well today under new names.

  An incisive new book titled Left Behind by Diane Ravitch, a leading historian of American education, traces the history of the controversies which have raged around educational trends over the past hundred years—“a century of failed school reforms,” as Professor Ravitch's su
btitle aptly puts it.

  These reforms have failed repeatedly because what the public wants—the three R's, for example—conflicts with what the education establishment is determined to do, in its more grandiose vision of its social and political mission. Given this heady feeling about themselves and their role, it is understandable that the education establishment simply dismisses, denigrates and demonizes its critics.

  For example, as Professor Ravitch points out, a group of critics who called for rigorous academic standards in the 1930s were likened by John Dewey to religious fundamentalists and were said to be supported by “reactionaries in politics and economics.” When the University of Chicago's legendary president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, dared to criticize progressive education, the head of Columbia Teachers College said: “Dr. Hutchins stands near to Hitler.” This is the level at which too many educators continue to answer critics today.

  American leaders of the progressive education movement, including its supreme guru John Dewey, went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, when their theories were being put into practice on a mass scale there. They came back gushing with praise for Soviet education, as well as other aspects of Soviet society.

  It was only after progressive education failed to turn out competently educated people that Stalin purged its advocates—and Dewey and others then began to develop some belated skepticism about the Soviet Union in general.

  This whole story was played out once again, decades later, in China under Mao during the “cultural revolution.” Here again, these romantic theories led to gross incompetence and China was forced to return to practices that were not so romantic, but which produced results.

  Ignorant of history, undaunted by facts, and undeterred by logic, American educators have subjected generations of American children to the same practices, with the same dismal results. Our children now regularly come in at or near the bottom in international tests, especially in no-nonsense subjects like math.