VALUING EDUCATION, THEN AND NOW
Whenever an election is at hand, there is a lot of talk about the importance of education — but with a national high school dropout rate of 30 percent, we do not seem to be making much progress. A lot of talk may be just what it is. Our society is quite willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium for the city’s football or baseball team, while leaving many of the same city’s public schools in a dilapidated condition with tattered books — and in some cases no books at all. Our young people see through this hypocrisy and tend to emulate what they see more than what they are told.
It was not always like this, however. Our nation’s founders placed so much emphasis on education that towns in Massachusetts could actually be fined for not providing adequate public education. As early as 1642, a law was passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony making education a requirement for children.2 Compulsory education was much slower to reach the southern states,3 and education of slaves was forbidden.4 The very fact that powerful men in the South went to great lengths to prevent slaves from gaining an education makes it clear that they fully understood how empowering education can be. This fact alone should encourage anyone who is poor, weak, and/or powerless to direct all their energy toward obtaining an education.
The fact of the matter is, our founding fathers were highly educated individuals, many of whom had extensive personal libraries — and most of them had a vast knowledge of world history. They were not people of average intelligence. And as they were crafting the policies of our new nation, they designed a system that would work well only with an educated populace. This is why they emphasized the importance of a solid education.
In fact, when Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America in 1831 to decipher the secrets of our enormous economic success, he was so taken with our school system that he wrote extensively about what he saw as a unique and powerful tool to fuel a productive new nation. Unlike schools in Europe, American schools taught the children values, he noticed, and there was extensive use of the holy Bible in public schools. He wrote in Democracy in America:
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.5
He was particularly impressed by the fact that anyone finishing the second grade could read and write quite well. Even when he explored the frontiers, he was astonished to find common men engaging in intelligent conversation, reading the newspaper, and understanding the various branches of government. He also reflected:
I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors … in her fertile fields and boundless forests, in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.6
To gain a real appreciation of what children were expected to know in early America, one has only to look up an exit exam from middle school grades during the nineteenth century. I suspect that many, if not most, college graduates today would fail that test. Some sample questions:
Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.
Show the territorial growth of the US.
Name and locate the principal trade centers of the US.
Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
Describe why the Atlantic Coast is colder than the Pacific at the same latitude.
Over the ensuing decades, the American system of public education was admired throughout the world because of the quality of its products — its very citizens, well educated and ready to engage with the growth of their new nation.
THE DECLINE OF US EDUCATION
In the mid — twentieth century, however, a series of things began to happen that negatively impacted the quality of public education in the US. Public prayer was banned in school, and the educational agenda began to expand significantly beyond basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. By the early 1990s, a multinational study to determine the ability of eighth-grade equivalents in twenty-two different countries to solve complex math and science problems found that students in the United States ranked number twenty-one out of twenty-two. That the pinnacle nation in the world would have such a poor academic showing is not only embarrassing but extremely frightening.
When we instill morals and values into the educational process for young people, however, we help them realize they have an obligation to become well educated and informed citizens, and to contribute to the system as opposed to draining it of its resources. Public prayer and discussion of common principles that strengthen society’s moral fabric are essential to establishing an atmosphere of courtesy and decency. The renowned Noah Webster said, “Society requires that the education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government.”7
Today in the age of information and technology, “knowledge is power” more than ever before in the history of the world. Certainly during the Agricultural Age, the United States was able to produce so much corn, wheat, and barley that we became known as the breadbasket of the world. But we are no longer in the Agricultural Age. The Industrial Age followed, during which the United States blossomed into a giant that could produce more cars, airplanes, washing machines, and weapons than anyone thought possible — changing the course of the world for the better. But we are no longer in the Industrial Age. We now find ourselves in the Information Age, where academic accomplishment is more important than ever.
Today we produce only 60,000 to 70,000 engineers per year, 40 percent of whom are foreigners, while China produces over 400,000 engineers per year. With this kind of technological discrepancy, we will be left far behind in the not too distant future unless we begin to address our educational shortcomings with more than political rhetoric. China is not a democracy, and its emergence as a rising superpower will radically change the geopolitical landscape of the world.
Even if young people are not concerned about their role in world affairs, they should clearly be concerned about their own future economic well-being. Everyone should realize that today the average person lives to be about eighty years of age, the first twenty to twenty-five of which are used to either prepare oneself educationally — or not. For those who prepare well, about sixty years shall follow to reap the benefits; but for those who fail to prepare, there are sixty years to suffer the consequences. When you look at it that way, sacrificing a bit of fun and idleness early on can pay big dividends in the long run. Furthermore, as of 1999, a US Census Bureau report entitled “The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Synthetic Estimates of Work-Life Earnings” revealed that over an adult’s working life (ages twenty-five through sixty-four), a high school graduate can expect to earn an average of $1.2 million. A college graduate will earn $2.1 million, while someone with a master’s degree will earn $2.5 million. A person with a doctoral degree will earn $3.4 million, and those with professional degrees — such as medical, dental, or veterinary degrees — will earn $4.4 million on average. Obviously there has been some relative advance on those numbers since 1999, further underscoring the point.
EVERY OUNCE OF AMERICA’S TALENT MATTERS
Some readers may be thinking, I have worked hard and achieved a lot in my personal life, so w
hy should I worry myself about the well-being of people who are too lazy to take advantage of opportunities to succeed? However, for every one of those young people we can keep from choosing a self-destructive path, that’s one less person we have to be afraid of or protect our families from, one less person we will have to pay for in the penal system or the welfare system, and one more productive, taxpaying member of society who may discover a new energy source or the cure for cancer. Every person is endowed with God-given abilities, and we must cultivate every ounce of talent we have in order to maintain our pinnacle position in the world.
Our nation’s founding fathers certainly believed in the task of educating the populace as foundational to a nation’s health. In a letter to George Chapman on December 15, 1784, George Washington wrote, “The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.” James Madison added, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”8
These statements by some of our founding fathers emphasize how essential a solid general education is to all the constituents of American society. By remaining ignorant, we shirk our democratic duty and open ourselves to slick politicians who would usurp our rights. Some of the segments of our society who are most easily led astray are those with the poorest general education, which makes one wonder if those seeking political advantage are happy to maintain the status quo in order that the uneducated might be more easily manipulated.
The founders also believed that education is crucial to offering checks and balances to governing leaders’ power. Otherwise, the insidious loss of freedom, quite relevant to us today, will follow. For “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,”9 James Madison noted in The Federalist Papers. He also pointed out in a speech to the Virginia ratifying convention on June 16, 1788, that “there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
We can certainly see a gradual erosion of hard-won rights everywhere around us today. For instance, a recent regulation imposed by the Department of Veterans Affairs banned the words God and Jesus during funeral services at the Houston National Cemetery. This obvious violation of the Constitution is being challenged legally by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and the National Memorial Ladies, who fortunately are educated enough to know their rights and are brave enough to fight for them.
I’m sure our nation’s founders hoped and prayed that we would not stray from the freedom they fought and died to provide. Reading about their vision for a unique nation inhabited by people with unprecedented freedom is truly inspiring, and we must be careful not to allow those who like to rewrite history to silence the voices of those God-fearing visionaries who founded America. We have a very rich history of placing tremendous value on education, and there is no reason that we cannot once again become the world’s most educated nation.
We have a tremendous amount of technology available to us that can help us quickly close the achievement gap that exists between our children and those in many other advanced nations. One such technology currently being developed is a computer program that analyzes the way a student solves math problems to figure out where there are gaps in that student’s knowledge. The computer then tutors the student in his or her area of deficiency until the student is able to solve problems correctly. This is, of course, the same thing that a good teacher can do, but computers provide the ability to tutor a whole classroom simultaneously as opposed to one student at a time, allowing the teacher freedom to focus energy on students needing personal attention. We also should put a great deal of emphasis on the concept of virtual classrooms. Although the technology is only in its infancy, it will provide the ability to put the very best teachers in the world in front of millions of our children on the same day. It will allow children to virtually explore the pyramids of Egypt, or the Amazon Basin, or even the surface of the moon. This kind of education should also be available to parents and other adults who want to know what their children are learning and desire to increase their own value, because knowledge is power. Not only can we do this, but we must do this in order to remain a potent worldwide leader in this age of information.
— CHAPTER 5 —
CAPITALISM:
ITS PROS AND CONS
EVERYONE HATES SOMETHING. Some hate spiders; others hate lizards or snakes, but I hated poverty. Growing up near the Delray and River Rouge neighborhoods of inner-city Detroit, and the Roxbury section of Boston gave me an up-close and personal view of poverty. I hated being poor, and I was eager to find a way out.
Living in run-down housing joined at common walls meant we could hear our neighbors on both sides of us, so sleep came only when voices settled down, if they did at all. On some nights, especially weekends, parties extended far into the morning hours. Break-ins and burglaries were common in the neighborhood, so we fortified our home with locks, bars, alarms, and a dog, which we particularly needed when my father left Mom and us two boys when I was eight. Living in that neighborhood, we felt unprotected, vulnerable at night, and alone.
The neighborhood housing projects I walked through when I began attending school in Boston were in even worse shape than ours. Some of the houses were abandoned, some were burned, and others were literally falling down altogether. But worse than the structural decay was the angry, aggressive attitude spawned by the conditions of poverty around us. No one seemed to care about the next guy, except to shake him down for money or maybe drugs. My brother, Curtis, and I were frequently bullied, and with Dad gone, Mom had to work multiple jobs just to provide. She never failed to put food on the table, however, and believed fervently that God would keep us going. I marveled at her faith, but I also wished she didn’t have to work so hard. I wished better for her and for all of us.
I hated wearing secondhand clothing and loathed going to the store to buy groceries with food stamps. If I was at the counter and someone I knew was nearby, I would get out of line as if I had forgotten something, hoping that by the time I got back to the counter no one I knew would see me paying with food stamps. In hindsight, I see this was false pride and ignorance, since many of my peers probably used the stamps too, but hatred of poverty put enough fire in me to make me work hard to escape it.
Poverty bred the attitude in me that I was a nobody, that I was going nowhere, and that I probably would never get out. So I quit school mentally before I even started. I still walked the distance from our house to the school building; Mom made sure of that. But I was lazy. I was at the bottom of my class. And most of the kids in school loved to call me by the pet name “Dummy.”
That’s when I really began to see how my feelings about poverty could affect my attitude. I developed a violent, uncontrollable temper and my grades plummeted. When Mom found out I was failing the fifth grade and that my brother, Curtis, wasn’t doing any better, she immediately instituted a program of little or no TV. We were told to focus on our homework, read books, and do book reports for her every week. Mom wanted out of the poverty too, and she knew that if we applied ourselves, we could climb out, something she had been unable to do herself. She couldn’t read the reports we wrote, but we never knew that, and the hard work paid off.
From all I observed around me growing up and all I read, I quickly realized that, in spite of the circumstances affecting you, the person who had the most to do with what happened to you in life was you. If I wanted to escape poverty, I was going to have to work extremely hard, but this was within my grasp to accomplish. And in a place such as America, no one could stop me except myself.
I nearly had stopped myself through my belief that I would never amount to a
nything. But instead of choosing to fuel my anger further, I turned to books as a way out. As I read about explorers, entrepreneurs, industrial leaders, and inventors, I saw a common thread in their lives of the desire and ability to work hard in order to accomplish something. I was particularly inspired by the story of Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave. It was illegal for him to read, yet he taught himself and read everything in sight. Because of that commitment to continually better his life, he eventually became an advisor to two presidents.
The story of Joseph in the Bible’s Old Testament impressed me even more. Sold into slavery by his own brothers, he didn’t hold a pity party for himself. Instead he decided that if he was going to be a slave, he would be the best slave around. Because of his industriousness and dependability, he went on to become the head of the household of Potiphar, who was captain of the Egyptian guard. Even though Joseph was unjustly imprisoned for a second time because of Potiphar’s wife’s false accusation — something that might have derailed even the most determined person, pushing him toward a victim mentality — Joseph did not feel sorry for himself. Instead he put to work those same characteristics in the prison that had enabled him to achieve a high position in Potiphar’s household. He soon had a very responsible position, and showing a skill in interpreting others’ dreams, gained the attention of the pharaoh. Ultimately he became the governor of all of Egypt.
Reading about individuals such as these profoundly affected my work ethic and made me realize that I could easily change my destiny with determined personal effort. I did not have to depend on what someone else did or what someone else gave me in order to be successful. The only thing I really needed was the opportunity to work hard and display my talents. As long as there was no one there trying to stop me or confiscate the benefits of my labor, I was willing to enthusiastically pursue my goals.
America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great Page 7