416
PARTISAN REVIEW
moment - or set up standards for what should be taught, for improving
teaching, and so on. It's assumed, in France, that if you go to school
there are certain things you're supposed to learn. Now, I'm not con–
vinced that the national ethos can be changed so easily by committees. I
also want to emphasize a point that Heather made, and that is that what
goes on in the universities under the cloak of multiculturalism is a general
movement against learning about the past, learning American history and
literature. Also, there is the general idea that there are no absolutes; that
there is nothing you can learn because it's all relative. Of course we
know that there are no absolutes, but not everything's relative either.
Al Shanker:
I think that there's nothing wrong with being a little pes–
simistic. Yes, I agree that the more legitimacy this kind of multicultural–
ism is given on college campuses the more legitimacy it will gain in sec–
ondary schools. But back in the 19205 a lot of doctors who had gone to
school and specialized in different fields went to state legislatures to argue
that only those who had specialized in a certain area could practice in it.
Other practitioners went to the legislatures and said they had the right to
practice in all areas of medicine after they had their M.D.s. Because
general practitioners were in the majority, specialists began creating their
own boards - an internal system of identifying specialists. I suppose when
they first did that in the 1930s, few people knew what a board-certified
specialist was. But over a period of time, they educated their own people
and the general public. Things were turned around. I think that by 1994
or 1995 we can create the institutional seeds and in a couple of decades
can have very substantial impact.
William Phillips:
You've been saying and Edith has been saying
something I want
to
question. You're assuming that the quality of
teaching has deteriorated. I'm not convinced. When I went to school, I
think students learned more and were interested in learning and assumed
they were supposed to learn. That was the purpose of going to school.
There wasn't some other purpose. I don't think the teachers were any
better. At the school I went to, the best teacher in the English Depart–
ment was Miss Falk, who taught in the honors program. I went
to
her
one day and said that I had a problem, that I would go
to
the library
and see hundreds of books. How could I tell which were the good
books? How would I know what to take out and what to read? She
said to me, "It's very simple. All you have to do is take a book off the
shelf, open it and read the first page. It will tell you whether it's a good
book or not." Now that was an absolutely idiotic answer. I needn't
belabor the point. If I could tell, I didn't need her advice.
