Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  America is on a downward spiral toward scientific and technological illiteracy not because Americans have lost their aptitude for science but because the kind of discipline it requires has gone out of style. We are raising a new generation, both in inner-city slums and in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, that might be characterized as the “MTV generation.” The appalling ignorance of so many members of this generation is due not to their being less intelligent but because their intelligence is not used. They inhabit a world of hard-rock rhythms pounded at earsplitting volume, MTV images that flash across the screen in barely the time it takes the eye to follow, and sensual stimuli that appear in rapid succession. There is no room for ideas beyond the most banal. There is even less room for the information on which any sensible ideas have to be based. The once-ubiquitous bumper-sticker slogan has given way to the T-shirt slogan, but the content level has not improved.

  To arrest this decline, we must move in six areas. We must reform the profession of teaching. At Whittier College in the 1930s, my classmates who were going into teaching almost universally complained about the boring, useless courses in education theory they were required to take. Teachers today share that frustration. School systems should place less emphasis on education theory and more on a teacher’s knowledge of his substantive discipline. Teachers are taught how to teach but not enough about the subjects they are teaching—and a teacher who does not know his subject can neither teach it effectively nor convey enthusiasm for learning it.

  We must raise the standards in schools. Students will deliver only as much as we demand of them. The erosion of standards—typified by policies of grade inflation and automatic advancement—has undermined the schools. Students will develop intellectual strength only by pedaling uphill. Unfortunately, in many school systems they can coast right through, with only students who seek admission into elite universities feeling any necessity to apply themselves fully.

  We should focus more actively on motivation. Children are born with a vivid, innate curiosity—every child asks “Why?” until his parents’ ears grow numb—but along the way too many fail to connect that curiosity to the wonders of science, the challenges of math, the insights of history, or the rich rewards of language. Instead of being turned on by the process of learning, they are turned off by it. The only classroom learning they absorb is what they are force-fed, and the force-feeding only turns them off further. Both inside the classroom and outside it, we need to do far more to catch their imaginations and to lead them—especially in those early formative years when attitudes are being so crucially and often permanently shaped—to want to learn. This means exciting them not just about the process of learning but about what there is to learn. They have to be wakened to the inherent fascination of history, science, and the other disciplines. Once they want to learn, they will learn.

  We must break the monopoly of the education establishment over public schools and introduce competitive market forces into the system to improve its performance. I support public schools. I attended them until I entered college, and Mrs. Nixon was a teacher in an excellent public high school. But today the difference between the performance of public and private schools in America is shocking. Public high school seniors who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test scored significantly lower than the private school seniors who did so. Many public schools are top-heavy, spending excessively on bloated administrative bureaucracies concerned more about maintaining their monopoly on public funds than about improving their performance. As The Economist reported, “New York’s public-sector schools employ ten times as many administrators per pupil as private schools do.” Private schools ultimately must satisfy their customers—parents and students—by providing effective educational services. In this competitive environment, they must continuously strive to upgrade their programs or risk going out of business.

  To improve the public schools, we should subject them to the same competitive pressures that have made our private schools the envy of the world. The money each state spends on education should be pooled and then disbursed to parents of students in equal individual vouchers that can be spent at any school, public or private. This so-called “choice” program has already transformed some school systems. Since 1973, in New York City’s East Harlem district, it has boosted the graduation rate from under 50 percent to over 90 percent. When parents are given the power to choose, they become more involved in their schools and their children’s education. When students bear responsibility for their own future, they apply themselves more and develop greater self-discipline. Choice will create market pressures that will break the stranglehold of the education bureaucracy on the system and will force the public schools to reorganize and measure up to the competition of private schools. If we do not move decisively, the battle for education reform will be lost in the school boardroom before it ever gets to the classroom.

  We must dispel the patronizing and destructive myth that all young people need to go to college and develop alternate career tracks based more on modern-day apprenticeship than on classroom learning. Today, too many students unsuited to college and uninterested in it waste four years that could have been better spent gaining practical workplace experience. To accommodate the aptitudes of the unsuited, many colleges have loosened their standards. This exacerbates “degree inflation,” which forces stronger students to spend more years “credentialing” themselves with graduate diplomas. Meanwhile, weaker students find that the first task an employer gives them is to enroll in a training program that will actually provide them with basic skills. Enabling all students to attend college might sound appealing in the abstract, especially to intellectuals, but for many young people hands-on training in workplace skills would be more appealing, more useful, and more appropriate. And we should recognize that a good carpenter is a lot more useful to society than a bad lawyer.

  We must demand more of our universities. In recent decades, a silent conspiracy has developed between professors uninterested in teaching and students too lazy to study. Faculty, particularly at our best universities, often put first priority on their own research. Tenure and advancement are awarded on the basis of how many papers and books they publish rather than on what teachers do for their students. To reduce the burden of teaching, professors relax standards, often giving exams that demand little mastery of the material. Students, to a great extent, happily play along. The result is the paradox of declining competence of graduates amidst widespread grade inflation comparable to the currency inflation of Germany’s Weimar Republic.

  Members of the educational establishment reflexively insist that whatever the problem, the answer is more money. But the United States already outspends all other major industrial democracies on education per student, even while their schools outperform ours. The answer is not more spending but better-targeted spending. Countless studies have linked student achievement not to higher budgets but to such essentials as student motivation, active family involvement, and well-organized and disciplined schools. America does not need to make a greater financial investment in its educational system but rather to demand a greater return on its current investment. The 180-day school year is a ridiculous carryover from the time when children were needed to harvest crops in the summer months. Germany has a 195-day school year. Japan has a 225-day school year. Lengthening the school year will give our students more opportunity to learn and make more efficient use of our school facilities.

  The decline of our human capital is matched by a potential decline in our industrial capital. The debate over whether the federal deficit matters misses the point. A deficit level of over 5 percent of GNP will not bring the apocalypse. But it does represent an important economic choice. Because the deficit is financed through the pool of private savings and foreign investment, we are siphoning off funds into short-term consumption that could have gone toward long-term capital investment. While sustainable, the deficit acts like water eroding the foundation of a strong economy.

  We s
hould address the deficit through spending cuts, not tax increases. The deficit exists not because the American people are undertaxed but because the U.S. government overspends. In fiscal year 1988, the federal budget topped $1 trillion for the first time in history. By fiscal year 1992, it reached $1.45 trillion, increasing 45 percent while the economy barely grew 10 percent. Taxes now claim a larger proportion of the GNP than at any time since World War II. To rein in spending, we must disabuse ourselves of the myth that much of federal spending is “uncontrollable.” Apart from interest payments on the national debt, all spending derives from laws that Congress enacted and that Congress can change. To argue that we cannot tamper with the spending formulas for entitlement programs is to abandon any hope for bringing federal accounts into balance.

  Savings and investment are central to our ability to finance industrial expansion and productivity growth. Capital gains taxes are taxes on savings. Payroll taxes are taxes on production. The sensible way to structure a tax system, if our goal is to increase prosperity for all, is to place the bulk of levies on consumption and to reduce the impediments to savings and production. This is essentially the way the value-added tax now used throughout much of the industrialized world operates. As we gear up to take on the global economic challenge, we should consider overhauling our tax system in this direction.

  Now that socialism has so visibly failed abroad, we should not let the United States become the last surviving bastion of that discredited creed. In Eastern Europe, once-prosperous nations that were destroyed economically by their Communist captors are now struggling to make their way back to freedom and the prosperity that goes with it. We should help them, but we should also heed the lessons of their tragic experience. We must rededicate ourselves to the competitive, free-market values that have enabled us to become the world’s only superpower. If we do so, we can maintain that power and continue to play a major positive role in the world.

  • • •

  Is the United States worthy to play a leadership role in the world? In a word, yes—and the world needs our example.

  Western civilization is not just a condition but also a process. It is a process of striving toward the heights of freedom, creativity, and fulfillment. Through the centuries there has been one tragic setback after another on the way toward those heights. Some of the most highly developed nations have waged wars of conquest and committed some of the most grisly barbarities in the history of man. Those reversals provide dramatic proof that civilization itself is not a sufficient guarantor of freedom. We have to use the gifts that civilization offers and enforce the rules on which it rests.

  One role of a great power is to enforce those rules on the world stage. Another is to set an example at home of what nations and people can achieve if they live by them. Unless the rules are enforced, the example will lose its luster and may itself become a casualty. And unless we set the example, we will throw away all that we have struggled to make possible for our own people and those of all nations. As Theodore Roosevelt observed fourteen years before he became President, “It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”

  America preeminently represents three values: freedom, opportunity, and respect for the individual human being. These values transcend borders. They rise from the human spirit, and they speak directly to that spirit. They are inextricably linked with the virtues of individual responsibility, competitiveness, self-reliance, and compassion grounded in an understanding of human nature. America’s dedication to these values and its practice of these virtues are what, through the years, has given such power and reach to the American idea. They are the source of our strength and cohesion at home. They also give powerful moral sanction to our voice in the councils of nations abroad.

  American progress, based on these values, has been spectacular. We are the richest nation in the world. The very poor in the United States would be rich in three-quarters of the world today. We are the strongest military power in the world. We have the world’s best universities. Americans have won more Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other people have. We have the best medical care in the world, with those abroad who can afford it coming here for treatment rather than using their own countries’ nationalized health care programs. We have the most advanced programs for protecting the environment. We have less racial prejudice and more opportunity for all in our society than virtually any other multiethnic nation. That is why the traffic is all one way. Those who want to leave America and live in another country number in the hundreds. Those who want to leave their home countries and live in America number in the millions.

  It is vital to the democratic future of the world that the one nation preeminently associated in the minds of others with the democratic ideal should, in the course of this next generation, be an example visibly worth emulating. We have to show democracy not only working, but working well—not just to persuade others that the democratic way is the way to go, but also to demonstrate how a democracy can be made to work effectively. Even those who most hunger for democracy are still trying to figure out how best to achieve it. Ours must be an open laboratory that shows how the experiments can work.

  In Democracy in America, Tocqueville stated that the principles on which the U.S. Constitution rests—“those principles of order, of the balance of powers, of true liberty, of deep and sincere respect for right”—were indispensable. As Europe moved into the democratic age, he urged, “Let us look to America.” At the same time, however, he foresaw dangers inherent in democratic society. The universal obsession with materialism, the ruthless economic competition, the lack of enduring social bonds, and the shallowness of religious and philosophical thought, in his analysis, gave rise to the danger of a “new despotism.” He feared that because of the lack of economic security in democratic society, individuals would eventually seek that security from the state—which, in turn, would render society dependent on a paternalistic government.

  Today, we are witnessing the rise of that new despotism under the cover of “entitlements.” We hear claims that by virtue of living in the United States, a person is “entitled” not only to subsistence amounts of food, clothing, and health care, but to more and more of the amenities of life as well. It is not just the poor who seek these entitlements. Farmers who demand a guaranteed price for their crops, steelmakers who demand tariffs to protect their market share, retirees who demand Social Security payments far exceeding their contributions into the system, students who claim a right to subsidized loans, and dozens of other special interests all seek a guaranteed place at the federal trough. Today, if entitlements continue to proliferate, we risk the demise of the virtues of self-reliance and individual responsibility and the triumph of the new despotism about which Tocqueville warned.

  It is healthy for all Americans to strive for the amenities of life, but dangerously destructive to foster the notion that they are entitled to them. People are entitled to an opportunity to earn the good things in life. They are not entitled to receive them from the earnings of others. It is up to them to ensure that what they bring to the market equals in value what they want to get out of it. Entitlement is one of the most ruinous concepts in the philosophical lexicon of the modern American liberal. It saps incentive, builds resentment, and leads eventually to a corrosive sense of alienation and failure among those who are lured by its siren song into thinking that the nation owes them the good life without effort on their part.

  There is an enormous difference between a right and an entitlement. We have largely lost sight of that difference in the rush toward a “risk-free” economy in which the government insures us against failure and an egalitarian society in which each is rewarded regardless of his contribution. A right permits us to work our way up, while an entitlement is something society owes us whether we earn it or not. Rights help a society and an economy grow, while entitlements slow its growth and erode its character.

  The old hereditary nobilities were, in essen
ce, built on the principle of entitlement. A person was born to privilege, and by virtue of birth alone was entitled to keep those privileges. It is essentially this concept of birthright entitlements that is corroding American society. Liberal egalitarians are trying to impose it on the United States, except they have applied it from the bottom up rather than from the top down. To the extent that they succeed, they reinforce society’s other special pleaders in their quest for equality not of opportunity but of results.

  • • •

  America has other daunting problems at home, and because of them we are far less than we could be and should be. We must seize the moment of freedom’s triumph abroad to make America not just a rich society but a good society.

  —The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that we have the highest per capita health care costs in the world and yet 38 million of our people are unable to get adequate medical care because they cannot afford it.

  —The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that America—with one-twentieth of the world’s people—spends almost as much on illegal drugs as the rest of the world combined.

  —The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that we have the highest crime rate in the world and that during the Persian Gulf War almost twenty times as many Americans were murdered in the United States as were killed on the battlefield.

  —The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that a permanent underclass has developed that is rapidly making our great cities unsafe and unlivable.

  To address these problems, we need not new ideas but a renewal of faith in those that brought us to where we are. From the beginning, this has been a country in which people from every corner of the earth could reach their full potential because it was built on the rock of individual liberty, equality before the law, and opportunity for all.