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calls "romantic naturalism" -a product of Dewey, as everybody has said,
and Rousseau, and of the rest of the Teachers College faculty. This is still
the reigning educational ideology. We won't spend time today on that
"thoughtworld," as Hirsch terms it, and I'm not going to bother docu–
menting its lack of scientific moorings, which are carefully set forth in his
wonderful book,
The Schools We Need and
Why
l#
Don't Have Them.
Its
immediate relevance is that young people are coming out of school think–
ing that they need to learn what they feel like learning, that their teachers
are escorts or facilitators, not instructors, that knowledge is pretty much
whatever they'd like it to be, and that their feelings and sentiments are as
valid as anything that might be termed successive approximations of objec–
tive truth, if indeed there is any such thing as truth.
So, what are the implications of all this for higher education? In a sin–
gle sentence, our universities have to build a house on top of a cracked and
incomplete foundation. How much re-pouring of that foundation does the
university then undertake? At what expense? Whose expense? Instead of
what? Does the remedial work count for credit? If so, does it subtract from
the expected amount of so-called college-level work? Or does it add to
the total, thus taking more time and demanding additional resources?
Or does the college give up? Or simply try to do something altogeth–
er different, not repairing the foundation but, let's say, pouring a slab and
proceeding to build something different on top?
I have my own view of all this, my own form of romantic utopianism.
It
partakes a litde of what Igor said. I think that the colleges should lever–
age the K-12 system, and initiate the kinds of changes that both systems
(and the larger society) would benefit from. The universities should stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with the business leaders of this country and say,
with a single voice: "Starting X number of years into the future, none of
us will admit into our institutions or hire in our workplaces anyone who
does not possess the following skills and knowledge, to be tested in the fol–
lowing way." (X years in the future because fair warning is needed before
you impose such a regimen.) Nothing would have such a catalytic effect on
secondary schools and ultimately on primary schools as such a pronounce–
ment by our universities, especially if they were joined by our employers.
This isn't apt to happen, for the reasons that have been given.
Employers would cite legal reasons, civil rights reasons, business reasons.
Interest groups and editorialists would talk about violations of equal
opportuni ty. The federal government is certainly too cowardly to take
Robert Samuelson's excellent and oft-repeated suggestion and make edu–
cational attainment a precondition for student financial aid. As for the
colleges, well, I hate to say it, but they need the students worse than they
need the standards. So the higher education system is likely to persist with
