Lewis Lapham: Playing with Fire (Re: Education in America)

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.—Plutarch

To bring up the subject of education in nearly any sector of the American conversation—after dinner or before breakfast, in print and en blog, via public television or private smartphone—is to invite an argument or endure a sermon. No subject strikes closer to the bone of the democratic idea, and whether standing at the bar or seated on the lawn, all present come armed with two invincible opinions:

1. America’s best, last, and only hope for the future rests with the promise of education.

2. The promise isn’t being kept.

No respondent is ever at a loss for a telling anecdote or an illuminating statistic—forty million functional illiterates in the country unable to read a road sign or a restaurant menu, one fifth of the adults polled unaware that the earth revolves around the sun, 28 percent of the nation’s college seniors believing that the American Revolution was won at the Battle of Gettysburg, the Oklahoma high school girl who thought that the Holocaust was a Jewish religious holiday. Witnesses for the prosecution have been bringing evidence of the crimes against the dream of reason for as long as I can remember, certainly since the National Commission on Excellence in Education noticed, in 1983, that the country’s classrooms were flooded with “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The waters apparently continue to rise, and it now seems that every six months another committee of alarmed businessmen issues a report complaining of the system’s failure to deliver “high-quality product to the infrastructure.” The managers of America’s money worry about foreign competition in the global markets, say that unless the kids settle down to their lessons, the United States could lose it all—the ball game and the farm, the Nobel Prizes as well as the aircraft carriers, the hedge funds, the Pizza Huts and the roof-garden real estate in Palm and Pebble Beach. Corroborating testimony appears at least once a week in the dispatches from inner-city school districts as well as in the communiqués from the seats of higher learning. In Houston and Detroit administrators of the No Child Left Behind program mention the scarcity of textbooks and the need for armed guards on the playground; professors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment at Duke and Stanford remark on the loss of respect for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and a lack of acquaintance with Voltaire, sure signs of cultural backsliding into the mists of Mordor.

Like everybody else in the country old enough to have flunked a math quiz, I can wish that test scores grew on trees; but schools serve the political and economic order in which they operate, and whether they deserve a passing or a failing grade begs the prior question asking what it is they’re supposed to teach. The answers change with time and circumstance. The curriculum proposed by Plato forbade the reading of poetry apt to “give a distorted image of the nature of the gods and heroes”; Castiglione offered instruction in “a certain nonchalance” likely to win the favor of a Medici prince or a Borgia duke; John Milton believed “the end of learning” to be the knowledge and love of God. When Yale College in 1701 set itself up as a vessel of the true Puritan faith in the Connecticut wilderness, it undertook to supply the colony’s churches with an orthodox ministry, and to bestow upon its graduates the warrants of Christian character and spiritual worth. Thomas Jefferson in 1819 established the University of Virginia to develop “the reasoning faculties of our youth,” to improve in its nature what “was vicious and perverse” and by so doing to advance “the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation.”

The mission statement accorded with the American regard for the intellect as a means of building a better mousetrap—the power of the imagination not to be trusted unless securely fixed to a scientific project or a financial speculation, if in its artistic expression it remains purely decorative: something that can be framed in gold leaf or played on a banjo. John Adams associated the arts with monarchy and superstition and hoped that they wouldn’t be encouraged in the new republic. Benjamin Franklin took a similar line. “To America,” he said, “one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is more important than a masterpiece of Raphael.”

By the end of the nineteenth century the nation’s power and prosperity was emerging from its oil refineries and its steel mills, and the direction of America’s educational affairs passed from the hands of clergymen into those of the pedagogues in charge of the newly minted university bankrolled by the newly ordained ministers of industry and finance, among them John D. Rockefeller, James B. Duke, Ezra Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Addressing a meeting of the New York City High School Teachers Association in 1909, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, set forth the requirements of America’s newborn industrial civilization. “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,” he said, “and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.” John Dewey in 1916 defined democracy as “primarily a mode of associated living,” and the schoolmasters of his generation cut the cloth of their teaching to the “needs and opportunities” of the prospective members of the national economic team, prepared to understand that what was great about America was the greatness of its gross domestic product, not the greatness of its love of liberty.