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PARTISAN REVIEW
4.
How do we get the media to understand that their mediation
between the activists and the public itself bypasses one of the basic issues–
that is, the fact that even before this debate erupted educational content
had been at a low ebb?
5.
How can we persuade people that we are not simply defending a
conservative point of view but are thinking of the enormous repercus–
sions on the entire society when the potential work force is underedu–
cated, when eighty percent of graduate students in mathematics and the
sciences are foreigners, and when businesses cannot find secretaries who
can spell or middle managers who can function in their jobs - on the
level of their German, French, or Japanese counterparts?
6.
How do we counter the teaching of relativism and so- called
multiculturalism at the expense of tradition and cultural consensus, the
teaching of "fictional" history at the expense of historical inquiries?
7. How do we deal w ith the already existing trickle-down effect of
the low level of learning by those who now are teaching in elementary
and secondary education?
a.
Can we come up with incentives to motivate them to go back
to
school?
h.
Or can such an end be achieved, on a large scale, only after we
have helped turn the present tide?
8.
Without denying that what we teach does have implicit political
conten t, how can we take nitty-gritty politics out of the classroom,
promote open education and just plain thinking?
To get the discussion off the ground on the day of the meeting, I started
with the following remarks.
Edith Kurzweil:
Today, we want to address possible courses of action,
or suggestions, to point in directions that might help pull our universities
out of their self-destructive impulses. Therefore, I want
to
be a bit
polemical, to sharpen the outlines of the larger questions, the context in
which our universities function.
As we know, public discussions sooner or later end up blaming the
family, elementary, secondary, undergraduate or graduate education for
the problems within the university as well as for the general malaise of
