EDITH KURZWEIL
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perceive this change as caused by business rather than by the inventions that
have rendered the old forms of production obsolete. Certainly, people will
have to be literate to be employable. Whether this will happen in existing
educational institutions or in alternative ones set up by corporations is up
for grabs.
In
any event, Avishai maintained that we can neither afford anti–
business attitudes nor tax cuts targeted to education; that business leaders
and schools will have to cooperate in order to produce a competitive work
force--using every means at their disposal, including television and on-line
services. During
Dewey~s
lifetime, these problems still were in the future,
but the need of education for democracy remains. Maybe more so, Avishai
concluded, when individuals unable to adjust nevertheless will have to be
taken care of.
Other panelists, rather than focusing on how to turn around the obvi–
ous slide in quality within our educational institutions, recounted what had
gone on in the past and how we might get back to it, reclaim it. Vann
Woodward elaborated on the deterioration of standards in history-which
he illustrated by citing the steep decline in numbers of majors and degrees
granted, of intellectual content-and blamed this on the substitution by
postmodernism, poststructuralism, and other fashionable imports. He did
not actually say that those who don't know their history are bound to
relive it, but by recalling that both Nazism and Communism had started
out as utopias, he certainly brought home the need of linking up with the
past, and the poverty of the "cultural studies" that have replaced the teach–
ing of history.
Steven Marcus spoke more generally of the humanities, by retracing
their role in American education and showing how and why we no longer
assume that the central, or should I say unconscious, themes and problems
of society have to be addressed.
In
recent years, these concerns were
replaced by focusing on the realities of war, race, poverty, sex, gender, and
styles of life, which ended up being played out on our campuses. Marcus
talked of the formation of "a renovated cultural populism," and the reac–
tion against it. He asked us to be flexible, to address the issues one by one,
and to remain suspicious of cultural projects with overtly political purpos–
es. Jerry Martin told us that he spends his time trying to undo such
projects. He receives support from university alumni in order to reinstitute
the teaching of history and the humanities, mosdy by means of a core cur–
riculum-which is meant to allow students to learn in college what older
generations, and students in most other Western nations, have been learn–
ing in high school: the classics, philosophy, foreign languages, and history.
In
the most erudite manner, Jon Westling demonstrated that to be
educated used to mean having the art of rhetoric at one's fingertips.
"Oratory has petrified like a log from a Carboniferous swamp," he declared
