The authors would probably agree with Fareed Zakaria's conclusion in his book, The Post-American World,
that our country's central problem is our bad schools. As Professor
Golding says, “Lots of kids are being left behind,… Investing in
human capital is still a very good deal. Returns are very high.”
This
sort of talk about the condition of our schools is now widespread,
almost conventional wisdom. However, while no one doubts that we are
failing terribly our poor and minority children in our inner cities, it
is not at all apparent that the additional and improved human capital
that would result from better city schools would be instrumental in
growing our economic wealth, preventing our country's economic decline.
For it's just not true that all of our school children can, even
given the proper schooling, whatever that might be, become instrumental
in maintaining let alone growing our increasingly technological society.
But
it is true, as Katz and Goldin make clear in their book, that the
United States during the 20th. century was the world leader in bringing
12 years of free public schooling to all its young people. And it's no
less true that the world is now catching up with us and we may no
longer be in first place.
But is it true that our eventual
decline, in respect to our wealth and high standard of living, follows
from this, our undeniable neglect of some of our human capital, and the
fact that other countries are now, as we before them, bringing public
education to the masses?
I don't think so. For there is another
way of seeing what has been and is still happening. By the late 1970s
our schools were the first to reach most of the country's young people
with a free public school education through high school. It was
inevitable that others would catch up with us while following our lead.
For we had reached a point from where we had no place else to go, and
we could only wait for them to join us.
What is not generally
recognized is that when we reached this point we found ourselves up
against another kind of barrier altogether, and now, some 30 or 40
years after that time, we are just as much up against it. And
confronting the barrier we haven't been guilty of neglect, although our
continually revised strategies, our seemingly endless reforms, have had
little or no effect in lowering the barrier.
Hence the understandable but mistaken conclusions of Goldin and Katz, Fareed Zakaria, Nicholas Kristof in today's Times, and many, many others, calling our failed reform efforts neglect.
What
happened shouldn't have surprised us. We did get all the kids into the
classroom but we couldn't make them all learn. We should have known
this, or at least we should have recognized that this is what happened,
what had to happen. Is there anyone who hasn't learned that not
everyone can be made to learn anything? Algebra in the Middle School,
and other such ambitious school reforms, if nothing else, ought to have
convinced us of this.
People like Katz and Goldin call this
failure our neglect of human capital. It's not, of course. Rather we
have not recognized that a good number of our young people need
something other than a college preparation program.
How long
before we realize that a college prep program worthy of the name just
doesn't work for many, perhaps even the majority of our school
children. If there is neglect it is that we are neglecting what the
kids could do if provided with a more realistic educational
environment.
Sports and music are a big part of our lives. Not
to mention the arts and crafts, theater and film. Not to mention the
trades, where many are now needed to strengthen the infrastructure of
our cities and towns. How many sports academies, music conservatories
are there in our public school systems? How much is being done to
prepare our young people for careers in the arts and crafts, for the
trades? This is neglect with a capital N.
Again, my conclusion is
that we have not failed so much as bumped into a natural barrier to
what we were mistakingly trying to do — this natural barrier being the
normal distribution of intelligences. Superior understanding of math
and language is not the proud possession of all of us, let alone all
the kids in our public schools.
We should stop pretending that
it is. Listen to the kids in our inner cities. Find out who they are,
what they can and want to do. Work with the talents, interests and
other intelligences they all do have without exception.
