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PARTISAN REVIEW
throw cheap thrills at them to get their attention. We turn them into couch
potatoes who never quite test their own powers. We treat them like con–
sumers of value, and then the business world is amazed when they show up
for work without the capacity to be producers of value. I am not for cen–
soring the media. But I am for CEOs speaking out publicly as critics of
their own and each others' commercials, marketing campaigns, and sponsor–
ships when these demean public discourse or undermine parents. Freedom
of speech means that individuals cannot be silenced by a conformist major–
ity. But it also means, as John Stuart Mill insisted, that a majority is free to
try to make individuals feel ashamed of tactless, salacious, or just plain dumb
things. I am tired of hearing how parents have the responsibility to "turn
off the set." Parents should not have to hover over the electronic gateways
of their homes twenty-four hours a day to keep out junk.
5. Make work in education. No matter how quickly we turn to men–
toring our young people, there will be millions of people of our own
generation who will never really be employable in the new economy.
Their basic skills are not up to the environment of a knowledge economy.
The revolution in standards for basic skills has come when they are too old
for it. We can either insist that their bleak prospects are their own fault,
and cast them into a scramble for survival, as people of the Third World
do, or we can endeavor to employ them on public works projects which
add to the environment of mentoring and cultivation we are trying to cre–
ate for our children: building new parks, new schools, new transport, new
fiber networks. The downside of such spending is obvious. But the upside
is too: not only a more attractive place to live and a reduced rate of crime,
but improved chances for families to stay together. The Harvard sociolo–
gist William Julius Wilson has observed that men with jobs are nine times
more likely to stay in their families than are men who are unemployed. Do
we really want to continue to absorb the consequences of abandoned fam–
ilies as a "cost of doing business"?
C.Vann Woodward: I
feel obliged to protest a phrase used by our distin–
guished last speaker. It would take an essay that I haven't written or thought
through. The phrase is "practical knowledge." I mean, the identification of
knowledge and learning as utilitarian. This gives the conveying and absorbing
of knowledge a commercial aspect or purpose. I can understand the wishes of
those who want to do that. We've had our institutions oflearning throughout
history put into the hands of various
kinds
of institutions, such as religious
ones, whose purpose is to instill doctrines in faith . More recently we've had
political organizations to instill political purposes. I strongly prefer the idea of
learning, of education, as defined by our second speaker, as an enrichment of
the mind without political, commercial, or economic, or religious purposes.
