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PARTISAN REVIEW
mean to enroll a freshman in your university who doesn't know when or
why the Civil War was fought; who has never written a paper of more than
a couple of pages; whose math ends at algebra,
if
there; whose acquaintance
with literature is likely to include Maya Angelou and,
if
we're lucky,
Hemingway rather than Dickens, Faulkner, or Milton; who cannot distin–
guish Dred Scott from
F.
Scott Fitzgerald; and who could not accurately
locate more than six countries
if
handed a blank map of the world?
Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it means that the college cur–
riculum is forced-like it or not-to become more like what the high
school curriculum should have been. College becomes the place to get a
secondary education just as, for many young people, high school was the
place for a primary education. Is it any wonder that a lot of employers,
needing to hire people with a bona fide tertiary education, are now look–
ing for post-graduate degrees as evidence of what we might call "higher"
education? That lack of fundamental skills and knowledge on the part of
entering students is issue number one.
Issue number two: the young people entering our colleges are unac–
customed, by virtue of their K-12 education, to demanding intellectual
standards-but are used to being told that they're doing great. Middle
school classrooms around the country drip with self-esteem, something
called "emotional intelligence," and other forms of affective learning that
turn into grade inflation when they get to college. Try giving those col–
lege students a C or a D--sometimes even a B-and see what reaction you
get. They have been told they're nearly perfect in the elementary/secondary
system, even though they were getting by with slovenly academic work.
That same study of math and science that showed American twelfth–
graders to be near the cellar in actual knowledge also asked the classic
question, "How do you think you're doing in math and science?" Our
twelfth-graders were tied for first place in self-regard. This is not an acci–
dent, but is induced by the elementary/secondary system. It means that the
colleges get freshmen who don't know much, but think they're great.
Third, they're not used to working hard. They got through school
without rewriting papers, without doing long division by hand (they had
calculators), without wrestling with difficult texts, without burning the
midnight oil at the library. Lots of them had jobs, they had boyfriends, they
were on teams, they went to parties. They may have been busy as can be,
but many of them minored in academics while in high school. They're
used to coasting, yet getting by.
Fourth, school has not nurtured their character, their virtues, their val–
ues, or their moral fiber. Lots of K-12 schooling is still value-neutral in a
self-concious way, and lots of teachers are very wary of, as they would say,
"imposing their values" on their students. The curriculum also encourages
