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fuzzy sentimentalism that has, in the post-World-War-II years, accom–
panied the teaching of togetherness and social adaptability. But there
really isn't much difference, for the teacher, between teaching correct
grammar or "correct" deportment. In both cases, the emphasis is on
what is socially acceptable. As many of the critics in this volume point
out, the effect of such teaching is to instill the notion of competition in
students, to orient them toward grades and public marks of success and,
curiously, to minimize for them the value of the very knowledge they
struggle to acquire. Students taught in this professional way frequently
discover that knowledge has nothing to do with anything that matters
to them or to their teachers and parents. The teacher, nevertheless,
teaches his subject, and the student, more or less successfully, masters it.
Education, then, is the providing of information, and a usual con–
commitant of this view is that the successful accumulation of informa–
tion depends on certain largely innate skills. Jensen's recent study of
Black
I.Q.
scores is only the most obvious and respectable attempt to
avoid the implication of the fact that academic success seems to have
a high correlation with certain social conditions in the students' back–
grounds. And these attitudes have much to do with the way in which
the word "standards" is regularly invoked by the most high-minded, as
well as by the most frightened, and the most reactionary academics in
order to avoid change. Shifting the perspective from subject matter to
student, seeing education as a way of acquiring skills useful in dealing
with the world in all its aspects, attempting to reach large numbers of
Blacks and minority students who have no reason to respect academic
authority - all this poses a deep threat to the institutionalized form of
American education. The threat to standards is a threat to an entire sys–
tem of values, most of which have, in fact, little to do with academic
mastery of materials. It is difficult for most academics to imagine that
an institution with a large Black population can be doing serious edu–
cational work.
To say that critics represented in this volume are not concerned
with standards is not to say that they are unconcerned about whether
their students acquire skills and knowledge. They see knowledge prag–
matically and have a deep respect for their students. The student, for
them, is not a little vessel to be filled brimming with information but
a potentially perceptive and sensitive human being whose life in school
is continuous with his life outside and who can learn to learn most ef–
fectively by seeing some value in knowledge, some connection between
it and his life and some human responsiveness, flexibility and respect
in the people appointed to teach
him.
The cost to teachers wh'} think
