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PARTISAN REVIEW
schools of education have effectively been politicized in the name of the
values of the sixties counterculture. Teachers are trained to view the school
as a therapeutic milieu that places concerns for the physically and emotion–
ally handicapped over concern for the able and the interested, and as a social
laboratory that aims to inculcate self-esteem on the basis of group identity.
A push for egalitarianism has replaced an emphasis on individual achieve–
ment, and the intellectually adventurous student is the odd man out.
I have not been back to the bastions of political correctness that I vis–
ited in order to write
Ed School Follies
but everything I read and hear leads
me to believe that what I found there has only become more entrenched
in policy and practice.
By way of illustration I will take as my text today a publication that
owes its existence to the efforts of the next speaker, Chester Finn, who has
done as much as anyone to push the engine of reform toward the light at
the end of the tunnel.
An instructive-no pun intended-look into the mind-set of the typ–
ical professor of education was provided last year with the publication of a
report by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan group that surveyed nine hundred
education faculty members at colleges and universities throughout the
country. These teachers of teachers were typically of the opinion that
maintaining discipline and order and teaching grammar, correct spelling,
and punctuation were beneath the classroom teacher. What they hoped to
convey to the nation's prospective teachers instead was the importance of
"lifelong learning" and how to teach their students to be "active learners."
Lest you think of Socrates or other such active lifelong learners as Thomas
Edison, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, or Sigmund Freud, let me tell
you what the professors have in mind.
First of all, forget what we usually refer to as basic skills. Lovers of
learning don't need them and should never be discouraged by the threat of
being held back from the next grade. The process of learning is more
important than whether or not any specific knowledge is gained in the
process. In fact, the professors of teaching express contempt for the teach–
ing of any specific facts or, as I so often heard them referred to in my
journey through the nine circles of ed schools-"mere facts." (A phrase
which, whenever I heard it, always reminded me of an anecdote, possibly
apocryphal but illustrative nevertheless, about Alfred North Whitehead,
who was reputed to be a singularly soft touch when it came to recom–
mending his students for academic positions. The story goes that once,
when faced
with
a request for a letter of recommendation for a more than
usually hopeless candidate, he wrote, "This man is no mere scholar.")
The lifelong learner the ed school professors have in mind is going to
be more active manually than mentally, since he should start right out
