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The Parlous State of Education
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11902 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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8 / 1987 |
1,487 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The most serious problem facing the United States is that of education. The economy is creating more jobs and a higher percentage of the population is employed than ever before in the history of the United States. And these tend to be not low-paying jobs at McDonald's but on the whole among the more highly paid, myths to the contrary notwithstanding.
At the same time, a higher percentage of the population than ever before is becoming unfit to hold jobs in an increasingly sophisticated economy. It is less welfare dependency than occupational unfitness that produces this result. And this unfit portion of the population tends to be concentrated among black and hispanic minorities.
A United States in which there is a permanent underclass will be a United States in which our institutional values are threatened. Unlike Europe, where status played a major role, the glory of the American dream has always been the ability of the most humble to rise to the top. Even if the Horatio Alger novels misrepresented the ease of the process, there have always been enough cases of poor immigrants rising to the top to validate the theme.
For the first time in our history, groups concentrated in particular areas are being cut off from the quintessential American dream, except for an occasional basketball player or drug merchant. It does not matter where blame lies. The important consideration is that something must be done to validate the American dream.
The great power of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech was that it expressed a hope for inclusion in the system. The great danger to American democracy and our traditional values lies in the fact that hope is dying for significant minorities in the system. To rephrase Abraham Lincoln's apothegm, we cannot long remain a nation half independent and half dependent. However much my rewording loses the literary power of the original, the substance is every bit as true. And taking it seriously is every bit as urgent.
Part of the solution to this problem must lie in the schools. But simply pouring more money into the present failed systems will accomplish little. And, although going back to the basics has merit, it will not prove adequate to the task we face.
I remember once reading the letters John Quincy Adams wrote at the age of eleven and marveling. I could not today write with such epistolary skill. He came from a better educated family than mine and he went to much better schools. In those days, teachers in the kinds of grammar and preparatory schools to which Adams went were far more skilled and intelligent than many of the teachers in our better universities today. We did not have mass education in his day and teaching was one of the better outlets for talent.
The democratization of education in the United States served us well even though it involved both leveling down and leveling up. It permitted those from humble backgrounds to have a chance at the better life. I came from the poorest branch of my family and was the first from any branch to attend college. In the absence of mass democratic education, my own career would not have been possible.
We paid a price for this advance,
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