570
PARTISAN REVIEW
NEH dollars to the continuing education in the humanities of
schoolteachers, advantageous as that might be, will significantly al–
ter or ameliorate the chaos and debacle of our public schools is a
mystery to me. The Commission is fond of uttering hortatory bro–
mides such as "state education officials should enlist the best teachers
available to help them defend the immeasurable educational value of
the questions, methods, and fields of the humanities." Certainly
nothing that it proposes could provide the most meager key as to
how this wonderful goal could be achieved.
The Commission itself notes that the quality of students in our
colleges of education, from which future schoolteachers are drawn,
tends to be below the norm of arts and science and business school
students. They do not go on to consider the significance of this fact
and the lamentable role that our colleges of professional education
themselves have played, along with unionization and politicization,
in engendering the morass that is now our public school system from
one end of the country to the other. How this vast lump is going to
be leavened by a handful of even "the best (mediocre) teachers," who
have under the auspices of the NEH received some training in "cul–
tural pluralism," remains unexplained.
As a matter of fact, the one feasible, relatively low-cost major
change in secondary education that could be effected is not men–
tioned. In the older snowbelt states like New York, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, and Illinois, we have many state colleges which will not
be needed in the eighties as the college-age population rapidly
declines. State budget officers are now at work retrenching the
faculty and staff in these underenrolled colleges. The one hope for
American secondary education would be to transform these
redundant post-high school colleges into elite magnet residential
secondary schools on the curricular models of the French
lycees
and
the German
gymnasia .
And the faculties in these redundant state
colleges are already in place who could devise and implement a
quality high school education that is now provided by only the most
expensive private boarding schools in the Northeast.
There are two other issues in the Commission's report that de–
serve comment. In both issues, the Commission has glimpsed a
problem, but has not focused sharply on its full significance. The
Commission stresses - and the Reagan-Stockman policy on NEH
and the intended elimination of the social science programs of the
National Science Foundation make this much more acute - that the
humanities in the universities have to turn to the corporate sector for
