A L S O_ T O D A Y

God save the president?
By Jackie Stevens
An anti-impeachment gathering of New York's literary hotshots may not do much for the country, but at least it made them feel good about themselves

Comics
Keith Knight: Scoping out my mom's boyfriend

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

Out with self-esteem tutorials, in with standardized tests!

Dear Camille:

I just watched (and recorded) your speech on American education on C-SPAN. I was greatly impressed and moved by your message. One of the questions posed to you afterwards was what one thing educators could do tomorrow (and I'm paraphrasing here) to start the process of change. You talked about focusing on inner-city schools and pouring money into them. I agree with you completely. I teach history in inner-city Los Angeles, and I have witnessed the decay of our schools -- both the physical plant and the quality of education.

I would like to re-ask the question that was posed after your speech but in a more personal way. What one or two things can I, as a world history teacher, do when I return to my classroom Jan. 4 to begin to bring about the educational reform of which you speak? I'm not a political person and I don't want to deal with my principal, our school board or anyone outside the classroom. I want to know what I can do within my class to make a difference in the lives of my students? I know I'm asking the impossible, but I would greatly value your response.

Thank you,

Cheryl Read Cross

Dear Ms. Cross:

Your inspiring focus on the classroom is exactly right. The dramatic, in-person relationship of teacher to students will always be the essence of education. Principals and school boards are peripheral and ought to humbly accept their merely supportive roles.

Unfortunately, American education has become a political battlefield in the past 30 years. The public schools have been turned into experimental laboratories for utopian social engineering by arrogant upper-middle-class technocrats -- who, of course, usually send their children to private schools. Swollen bureaucracies of overpaid administrators have usurped faculty authority and drained budgets at both the primary and secondary levels.

Tedious official paperwork wastes teachers' time and energy in too many public schools, where there is petty regimentation yet weak academic standards. As I said in my lecture (given last month at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government), I favor standardized end-of-year exams like those required in my youth by the New York State Board of Regents, which ensured reasonably uniform, high-quality education in both urban and rural districts. State control is surely preferable to federal intervention, given Washington's dismal track record in these and other matters.

The economic decline of large cities since World War II, combined with urban school boards' increasing lack of resolution (originating in 1960s liberalism) to make mastery of basic skills the bottom-line criterion for promotion and graduation, has defrauded needy minority children of a solid education. The strict, orderly, immigrant-era school system that immensely benefited my own Italian family is long gone -- or rather it has passed to the affluent suburbs with the flight of the middle class. It's a national scandal that we tolerate decrepit, dangerous, underfunded urban schools -- given the billions of tax dollars that are flowing overseas in foreign aid and peace-keeping junkets.

In the elite universities, the humanities professoriate has been narcissistically diddling away its time on pseudoleftist French poststructuralism while shamefully ignoring the degeneration of U.S. public education. College campuses proudly "diversify" by accepting the academically most promising minority students -- and then simply remold them into conventional white upper-middle-class personae. Higher education, acting as a funnel into the fast-track professions, leaves untouched the sordid realities of primary schooling for working-class and lower-middle-class students whose job aspirations and life expectations may be quite different.

In practical terms, you as a world history teacher are perfectly poised to give a broad perspective on life to all students, whether they are college-bound or not. The one theme I would recommend you keep central to your lessons is that human nature never changes. The young, used to the blindingly quick rhythms and sensational immediacy of popular culture, need a profounder sense of time.

When students are made to contemplate the awesome vastness of the human record, racial distinctions and conflicts become secondary. Cruelty and war are universal except in the most isolated tribal societies where the economy as well as science and art remained relatively frozen. Migration and exploration, which can be traced over a 10,000-year period on the global map, pushed the human species forward: Christopher Columbus, in other words, was not the racist villain that agitators like to claim.

The basic pattern of human life is cyclic rise and fall. Students don't need condescending cheerleading in "self-esteem" (which recently caused a huge controversy in Brooklyn when a young, blond, well-intentioned teacher imprudently distributed excerpts from a book celebrating African-American "nappy hair"). On the contrary, students must urgently get beyond the parochialism of their upbringing to see the grand drama of history, the heady glorification and then inevitable self-destruction of even the most powerful civilizations, like ancient Egypt and imperial Rome. Here archaeology, with its stunning panoramas of ruins and its gorgeous broken artifacts, can play such a useful role in the classroom. In my experience, students love archaeology and can't get enough of it.

Teachers must avoid inflaming racial tensions further in this country. Hence students should be told not that they are the heirs of unparalleled injustice and misery but that, whatever the atrocities of the past, they are the sole creators of their and their children's futures. Only in the United States, with its innovative but still-awkward democratic government, was there ever an ideal of universal literacy. Students themselves, no matter how young, must take responsibility for a lifetime of learning, which requires curiosity, an open mind and a respect for facts, as we can best ascertain them.

Again, archaeology is a splendid medium for this, demonstrating the way large historical ideas are hypothetically constructed from tiny, ambiguous fragments of vanished societies. Archaeology gives multicultural vision and understanding without PC propaganda, which has poisoned contemporary education with bitterness and suspicion.

American educational reform depends on you and all other devoted teachers finding common ground with parents and politicians in preparing students for the global 21st century. We cannot move forward until we honestly confront and reclaim the distant past.
SALON | Dec. 16, 1998

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