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In a recent and powerful editorial, columnist George Will quotes from the provocative 1983 report on public education, A Nation At Risk: “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” We are now 25 years after this National Commission’s report. How are we doing?
In one very real sense, the US has bought a lie: That education is the answer to all social problems. It is not! Public education cannot compensate for the disintegration of the family and its horrifying effect on children. Will writes: “No [educational] reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9% of all children and 69.9% of black children today born out of wedlock, which means among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.” Throwing money at schools will not solve that problem. In 1966 a controversial report was published that proved rather conclusively that “the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial denominator of problems of race and class—fractured families—would have to be faced.” But the US government and the entire educational establishment have ignored that truth.
Will writes: “In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Educational Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA’s behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in educational schools gave us ‘open’ classrooms, teachers as ‘facilitators of learning’ rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of ‘multiculturalism,’ and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.”
The educational crisis in the US is a crisis in reasoning. For some reason, we believe that spending great amounts of money will produce better test scores and better citizens. What the US is ignoring is that education of children is the intersection of three of God’s choicest institutions—the family, the church and the state. We have bought the lie that the state can do it better, ignoring the family, which is now thoroughly dysfunctional, and the faith community. The ones who are suffering the most are of course the children! Our need is not necessarily for more money for education; it is for teachers who have deep-seated faith and who see children the way God sees them; and a state that sees the importance of the family and faith as necessary ingredients in raising children. Until and unless everyone has that perspective, our educational system is doomed to ultimate failure.
See Will’s essay in the Washington Post (24 April 2008).
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