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Which they do. What is nussmg in this outcome is the eccentric
teacher who inspires and thrills, the student who stumbles on the myster–
ies of chamber music, of the moral universe of the nineteenth-century
novel, the workings of the human body, or the intricacies of mathematics.
There are no Miss Jean Brodies here. The good-natured teachers and
good-hearted administrators at the suburban middle and high schools of
the world Hersch depicts could never seduce with learning. No subtleties,
no suspicion that there is more to life than polite church-going, senior
proms, and varsity games, none of the burning ambition once to be found
in immigrant families. There is nothing out there to compete with the
images and values of the media culture, no effort to see the world on a
wider screen than that framed by the television set.
Is this a necessary condition of democracy? Only when equality has
been defined in terms of outcome rather than of opportunity. Today's
schools interpret their mission as one of social engineering. Transmission
of the culture, an understanding of the development of our democratic
institutions and the traditions that have grown up around them over time,
has lost out to the immediate politics of race, gender, and ethnicity.
Egalitarianism trumps excellence, which will always be a condition
that pertains to only a few among the many who need to be educated. The
government bureaucrats, teachers' unions, and education school faculties
that rule the world of schooling have all but outlawed ability grouping
(they call it "tracking") as undemocratic. For reasons that serve their own
ends better than they do those of the children in the classroom, they have
put in place policies that militate against the encouragement of high acad–
emic achievement. The ed schools promote theories and techniques of
teaching reading and math that bypass the drill-and-practice methods
needed to master them; they encourage group learning in which the
teacher is demoted to a "facilitator"; and they disdain the stories of those
whose achievements are the stuff of our history. They make pious state–
ments about replacing the traditional curriculum with "critical thinking
skills," but what facts, what knowledge do the youngsters in communities
like the one Hersch writes about have to practice their thinking skills on?
As long as one asks of schools only that they provide the "comfortable"
and "caring" environment Hersch wants to make up for the deficiencies of
parents who are themselves adrift in a society that offers little in the way
of moral or intellectual anchor, there will be a growing void at the center
of American society. For a sobering view of what kinds of things may
come to fill that void one need only read her account of the seduction of
suburban teenagers by the culture of rap, their infatuation with the cloth–
ing and the vocabulary of the "gangsta-rappin' boyz-from-the-hood," of
the inner-city "hip-hop" street culture with its glorification of violence.
