Controversial Essays

by Thomas Sowell

  In a sense, this is not failure, but success at a different agenda. It took progressive education generations to achieve complete hegemony in our schools and teachers' colleges. Diane Ravitch's Left Behind traces how it happened and the assumptions and goals behind it. After you read this book, the strange things that go on in our schools today may not seem inexplicable any more.

  What this book demonstrates is that the decline of American education was no accident, but the by-product of a mindset and an agenda with a long pedigree.

  “FORCED TO VOLUNTEER”

  The term “liberal” originally referred politically to those who wanted to liberate people—mainly from the oppressive power of government. That is what it still means in various European countries or in Australia and New Zealand. It is the American meaning that is unusual: People who want to increase the power of government, in order to accomplish various social goals.

  Typical of what liberalism has come to mean in the United States today is a proposal by California Governor Gray Davis that the state's colleges and universities make “community service” a graduation requirement. His plan immediately won the unconditional support of the state's largest newspaper, the liberal Los Angeles Times. There was no sense of irony in its editorial claiming beneficial effects for “students who are forced to volunteer.”

  Forced to volunteer. That is the Orwellian notion to which contemporary liberalism has sunk.

  “What could be wrong,” the L.A. Times asks, “with teaching students, as the governor puts it, that ‘a service ethic…[has] lasting value in California?’” A community service requirement “could reap a valuable return in a new generation of civically minded citizens.”

  Here we get to the heart of the so-called community service idea. Its central purpose is to create a certain set of attitudes in the students. It is compulsory submission to state-sponsored propaganda for the liberals' vision of the world. That is what students must be “forced to volunteer” for.

  What is wrong with the idea of a free people, using their own time as they see fit, for those things that matter most to them, instead of being pawns in a propaganda program more in keeping with what happens in totalitarian societies? What is wrong with each individual defining for himself or herself what being civic minded means, instead of having the government define it and impose it?

  In a country where more than 90 million people already volunteer for civic projects of their own choosing, why must students be drafted to become “volunteers” for environmentalism or other causes dear to the heart of the Los Angeles Times or Governor Davis? The casual arrogance of those who define for other people what is a “community service” is breathtaking.

  Environmentalism can—and does—reach extremes where it is a disservice to the community. Programs which subsidize the homeless lifestyle can turn able-bodied men into idle nuisances on streets across America. We need not try to force liberals to believe this. But they have no right to use the educational system to force young people to submit to propaganda for their version.

  The totalitarian mind-set behind the liberal vision shows through in innumerable ways. There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.

  Students who openly disagree with the left-wing vision that they are being taught in class can find themselves facing lower grades and insults from the professor in front of their classmates and friends. Offend the hyper-sensitivities of any of the sacred cow groups on campus—even inadvertently—and stronger punishments, ranging up to suspension or expulsion, can follow.

  On the other hand, if minorities, homosexuals or radical feminists want to shout down speakers they don't like or engage in vandalism or other mob actions to promote their agendas, that's OK.

  Campus ideological conformity extends to faculty hiring and even the inviting of outside speakers to give talks on campus. There are scholars of international distinction who would never be offered a faculty appointment in most Ivy League colleges and universities today because they do not march in step ideologically. You can find a four-leaf clover faster than you can find a Republican in most sociology departments or English departments.

  If the liberals are teaching any civics lesson with all this, it is that power is what matters—including the power to force people to keep their thoughts to themselves, if those thoughts do not conform to the liberal vision.

  Community “volunteer” work is only the latest in a series of uses of schools and colleges to propagandize political correctness, instead of teaching individuals to think for themselves. If liberals do not understand that this is the antithesis of liberation, that makes it all the more urgent for the rest of us to recognize that fact and that danger.

  DRUGGING CHILDREN

  The motto used to be: “Boys will be boys.” Today, the motto seems to be: “Boys will be medicated.”

  Of nearly 20 million prescriptions written last year for drugs to treat “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,” most were for children and most of those children were boys. This is part of a growing tendency to treat boyhood as a pathological condition that requires a new three R's—repression, reeducation and Ritalin.

  Some schools have gone to such extremes as banning recess, since boys tend to be boisterous at recess. Competitive sports are likewise banned or made non-competitive, sometimes by banning winning and losing. An aptly titled book, The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, catalogs the amazing array of things that schools do to keep boys from being boys.

  Some of this is being pushed by propaganda from radical feminists who want boys to be like girls. Their dogmas declare that the behavior usually seen in boys is a result of society's indoctrinating them with a male role stereotype. The answer? “We need to raise boys like we raise girls,” according to Gloria Steinem. Gloria Allred is more specific, “we need to socialize boys at an earlier age, perhaps to be playing with dolls.” Some schools have followed such advice, even to the point of encouraging boys to wear dresses.

  Despite the radical feminist dogma that sex differences are created by society, and that maleness in particular needs to be changed by society, a growing body of scientific evidence shows that boys and girls differ from day one, beginning in the womb, before society has had anything to do with them. The radical feminist response to such evidence? They say such research should be banned! Even without such bans, their mindless dogmas prevail over scientific evidence and pervade the education establishment.

  Meanwhile, there are drug companies making well over a hundred million dollars a year each by selling drugs for “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” Knowing a good thing, they are now not only advertising these drugs to doctors and school officials, but are also trying to gain more widespread acceptance from parents by running ads aimed at mothers through such outlets as the Ladies' Home Journal and 30-second TV commercials.

  Yet how does “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” differ from just being bored and restless with the mindless stuff being served up in school? The question is not simply how does it differ in principle, when diagnosed by high-level specialists, but how does it differ in practice when the term is applied by lower-level people in the local schools?

  A large body of research shows that high-IQ students are often bored and alienated from school. These include Einstein and India's self-taught mathematical genius Ramanujan. Fortunately, there was no Ritalin around when they were children, to drug them into passivity—and perhaps into mediocrity.

  No doubt life is easier for teachers when everyone sits around quietly, not making any waves. But schools do not exist to make teaching easy. Moreover, some of the brightest youngsters have some of the strongest reactions to what they see and hear.

  According to a study of gifted children by Professor Ellen Winner of Boston College: “These children have been reported to show unusually intense reactions to noise, pain, and frustration.” Bi
ographies of some famous people show the same pattern.

  Einstein, for example, had tantrums until he was seven years old. In one outburst, he threw a stool at his tutor, who fled and was never seen again. According to a biography of the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, he became fixated on his family's piano as a toddler and, whenever he was asked to leave the room where it was kept, he screamed and wept. When his father bought him a violin to play, he reacted by smashing it.

  Too many parents have gone along when schools have wanted their children drugged. When some parents have objected, they have been threatened with charges of child neglect for not letting drugs be used to control their youngster's behavior.

  Belatedly, in response to many revelations of the widespread use of Ritalin and other drugs in schools, some states have begun to pass laws restricting what school personnel and social workers can push parents to do. A new law in Connecticut will limit such medical advice to doctors. It's about time. That common sense restriction should be nationwide. Schools have too many busybodies posing as “experts.”

  GOODBYE TO SARA AND BENJAMIN?

  Recently a couple of dear friends visited us, bringing with them their six-year-old twins, Sara and Benjamin. These are some of the loveliest children you could meet—not just in appearance, but in their behavior. They are the kinds of kids you can see in Norman Rockwell paintings, but less and less in the real world.

  Now Sara and Benjamin are going off to public school and it is painful to imagine what they might be like a year from now. Most people are unaware how much time and effort the public schools—and some private schools—are putting into undermining the values and understanding that children were taught by their parents and re-orienting them toward the avant-garde vision of the world that is fashionable in the educational establishment.

  Today's educators believe it is their job to introduce children like Sara and Benjamin to sex when and in whatever manner they see fit, regardless of what the children's parents might think. Raw movies of both heterosexuals and homosexuals in action are shown in elementary schools.

  Weaning children away from their parents' influence in general is a high priority in many schools. Children sit in what is called a “magic circle” and talk about all sorts of personal things, with the rule being that they are not to repeat any of these things to anyone outside this magic circle. Sometimes they are explicitly told not to repeat what is said to their parents.

  Some handbooks for teachers warn against letting parents know the specifics of what is being done and provide strategies for side-stepping parental questions and concerns. Glowing generalities and high-sounding names like “gifted and talented” programs conceal what are nothing more than brainwashing operations to convert the children from their parents' values to the values preferred by educational gurus.

  Right and wrong are among the earliest targets of these programs. “There is no ‘right’ way or ‘right’ age to have life experiences,” one widely used textbook says. Another textbook tells children that they may listen to their parents “if you are interested in their ideas.” But, if there is a difference of opinion, parent and child alike should see the other's point of view “as different, not wrong.”

  Sara and Benjamin are only six years old and are going into the first grade. Will any of this apply to them? Yes. There is a textbook designed for children ranging from pre-school to the third grade, which tells children about their rights and about asserting those rights to parents. Whenever “things happen you don't like,” you have “the right to be angry without being afraid of being punished” it says.

  In other words, don't take any guff off mommy and daddy. Who are they? As another textbook says, parents are just “ordinary people with faults and weaknesses and insecurities and problems just like everyone else.” In many of the textbooks, movies and other material used in schools, parents are depicted as old-fashioned people who are out of touch and full of hang-ups.

  What these smug underminers of parents fail to understand is that the relationship of a child to his or her parents is the most extraordinary relationship anyone is likely to have with another human being. No one else is likely to sacrifice so much for another person's wellbeing. If the avant-garde ideas taught to children in schools blow up in their faces, it is the parents who will be left to pick up the pieces, not the glib gurus.

  Most of the classroom teachers who carry out such educational fashions and fetishes have no idea where they originated or what their underlying purpose is. In reality, many of the techniques and strategies used to break down the child's values, personality and modesty are straight out of totalitarian brainwashing practices from the days of Stalin and Mao.

  That is the origin, for example, of the personal journals that children are required to keep in schools all across the United States. These journals are not educational. Gross mistakes in spelling, grammar and usage are ignored, not corrected. These journals are gateways to the psyche and the first step in manipulating little minds.

  As our friends departed and went off to enroll their children in the public schools, I could not help wondering if I had seen Sara and Benjamin for the last time. Would they still be the same sweet children after they have been used as guinea pigs by those who claim to be trying to educate them?

  SUCCESS CONCEALING FAILURE

  Among the many clever and misleading defenses of our failing educational system is the assertion that our universities are among the highest rated in the world and Americans consistently win a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. Both these claims are accurate—and irrelevant.

  While Americans won the lion's share of Nobel Prizes in 1999, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States. If people born and raised elsewhere choose to come here and use their talents, fine. But do not claim their achievements as some vindication of the American educational system.

  On the contrary, the painful question must be faced: Why were a quarter of a billion native-born Americans unable to win a single Nobel Prize in 1999, when a relative handful of naturalized Americans won so many? This is not a vindication but an indictment of our educational system.

  The top-rated American universities owe much to the generosity of American donors and the largess of the American government, which enable them to attract top scholars from around the world. It is research, rather than teaching, which determines world rankings, and our well-financed Ph.D.-granting universities are unquestionably among the best at research.

  However, when you look at who gets degrees in what, again the picture is very disturbing as regards the track record of the schools and colleges that prepare students to enter these top-rated institutions.

  Less than half the Ph.D.s in engineering and mathematics awarded by American universities are received by Americans. Even more revealing, there is a systematic relationship between the difficulty of the subject and the percentage of American doctorates which go to Americans.

  In a mushy and undemanding field like education, more than four out of five of the doctorates go to Americans. It is when you start getting into the physical sciences that the proportion drops to barely half and when you get into engineering and math that Americans become a minority among American university Ph.D.s.

  Foreign graduate students predominate so heavily in difficult subjects that a common complaint across the country is that undergraduate math courses are being taught by people whose English is hard to understand, quite aside from the difficulty of learning the subject itself.

  Yes, our top universities are the cream of the crop. They are so good that people educated in American schools and colleges cannot hold their own with foreign students who go there.

  The period during which American public schools have had declining test scores has coincided with the period during which Americans were increasingly displaced by foreigners in the graduate programs of our top universities.

  In every field surveyed by the Council of Graduate Schools, the proportion of graduate
degrees in the United States going to Americans has declined over a period of two decades, with the worst declines being in the more demanding subjects.

  A closer look at those Americans who do still hold their own in difficult fields is also revealing. Nearly 22 percent of all Ph.D.s in engineering received by Americans are received by Asian Americans. Here is the group that is most out of step with the prevailing easy-going education, with its emphasis on “self-esteem” and other mushy fads. Again, this is not a vindication but an indictment of what is being done in our public schools.

  Ironically, people who go ballistic when minorities are “under-represented,” relative to their percentage of the population, whether among college degree recipients or in various professions, remain strangely silent when the whole American population is under-represented among those receiving postgraduate degrees in science, math and engineering in their own country.

  Such under-representation might be understandable if the United States were some Third World country just entering the world of modern science and technology. It is staggering in a country whose people led the world in such things in the recent past. Clearly something has gone very wrong in our educational system.

  Our current world leadership in science and technology, like our leadership in Nobel Prizes, owes much to people who never went through the dumbed-down education in American schools and colleges. Many come from countries which spend far less per pupil than we do but get far better results for their money.

  THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

  Recently I got together with a guy who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem, around 145th St. and St. Nicholas Avenue. As we talked about the old days, the world that we discussed seemed like something from another planet, compared to today.