One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our too-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

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* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Teacher, Educate Thyself!

There's a good post (or so it looks to me, I have no legal background) by bmaz at Emptywheel on the coming oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare." Among other things, consider the irony of the Right seeking an activist Supreme Court to overturn a law they don't like. As the post concludes, "One thing IS certain, when the dust has settled, one side will say the Supremes are beautiful minds, and the other will say they are craven activist tyrants."

There's one aside in the piece that stuck in my attention, though, and merits comment. (Also chastisement.) bmaz considers an analogy, posed by an opponent of ACA, between the individual mandate (requiring everyone to purchase health insurance) and a hypothetical federal mandate to keep everyone in school until the age of 18. What do you think of that, ya libs? asks the right-wing critic. "Anyone think the government should win?"

I'd say no, but I'm not a Supreme Court Justice. And maybe, in terms of law and precedents, they should. bmaz replies (emphasis added by moi):

Actually David, yeah I wouldn’t have a real problem with that. As a sage friend related to me this morning, there is a direct correlation between a nation’s ability to compete in a world market and the level of education provided to it’s citizens. Citizens with less, or poorer, education harm the entire nation – it’s welfare, it’s defense, its very liberties and it’s ability to defend itself against threats and enemies, foreign and domestic. I think that is exactly right; if you accept the individual mandate is constitutionally agreeable, it would be hard to see how you could disagree with an “education mandate”.

bmaz may know a lot about the law, but not about educational issues, or apparently economic competitiveness. (Notice, by the bye, how the apostrophes take over the next sentence, though that's trivial; it's just amusing.) Actually, there is no direct correlation between a nation's ability to compete in the world market and the level of education provided to its citizens. bmaz's sage friend's dictum set off alarm bells in my head, and I looked up some of the late Gerald Bracey's remarks on this subject -- it was what you might call a pet peeve of his.

In 2007 Bracey discussed a World Economic Forum report on global competitiveness which covered twelve factors in ranking nations. The WEF ranked the US #1 at that time (admittedly before the worldwide collapse of 2008), though our rankings varied widely in the twelve factors. In number 4, Health and Primary Education, we ranked 34th in the world; in number 5, Higher Education and Training, we ranked 5th. Interestingly, given what I've been hearing lately, we ranked number 1 in both Labor Market Efficiency and Innovation. Even if we don't have a federal mandate on education, it's not hurting us much.

Bracey also pointed out:

First, though, we have to take a look at the concept of competitiveness. Many people take it as a zero-sum game: If you win, I lose. Not so. The computer chip was invented in the U.S. Many other nations benefited. If some young medical student in Nigeria invents a cure for AIDS, the world, not just Nigeria, will win.

Which is a reminder that harping on competitiveness, internationally or locally, is basically a dumb idea. (I've written about that before. See also this post by Bracey.) Bracey had other useful things to say on the subject five years earlier.

But there is a broader, more objective means of looking for any relationship. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provides test scores for 41 nations, including the United States. Thirty-eight of those countries are ranked on the World Economic Forum’s CCI. It’s a simple statistical matter to correlate the test scores with the CCI.

There is little correlation. The United States is 29th in mathematics, but second in competitiveness. Korea is third in mathematics, but 27th in competitiveness. And so forth. If the two lists had matched, place for place, that would produce a perfect correlation of +1.0. But because some countries are high on competitiveness and low on test scores (and vice versa), the actual correlation is +.23. In the world of statistics, this is considered quite small.

So, direct correlation? It doesn't look like it. Sage Friend isn't so sage after all.

There are other reasons to doubt the wisdom of a federal educational mandate, apart from its legality or constitutionality. And it's not only the Right that opposes ACA's individual mandate for health insurance. As bmaz concedes,

This is about far more than Obama’s questionably cobbled together ACA law; the law is inane in how it soaks Americans to benefit craven insurance companies. Either way, sooner or later, healthcare as constructed and/or mandated by the ACA will die a painful death, but will continue to decimate American families for years, irrespective of the ruling by the Supreme Court on its nominal constitutionality. At some point, single payer, such as “Medicare For All” is inevitable.

So, while emptywheel is a very informative and intelligent blog, its writers do have their blind spots. I wish bmaz would ditch the schoolyard homophobia too.

Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything

An old friend came to Bloomington for a visit yesterday, someone I hadn't seen in many years. We had a great conversation, and got caught up on some of the books, movies, music, and ideas that mattered to us. Among others, I mentioned Gerald Bracey, the tireless critic of misinformation about American schools, and today after my friend had left I looked for Bracey's website to remind her about his work. I also wanted to point her to Bracey's articles for the Huffington Post, which I'd followed until they simply stopped appearing a year ago.

But my search also brought up Bracey's obituary: he'd died in his sleep last October 20, at the age of 69. Damn! Why had no one updated his page at the HuffPost? I eventually found a page by his successor, Susan Ohanian, who paid tribute to him and continues his critiques there -- something else for me to get caught up on. I soon found more obits and some useful links that I evidently hadn't noticed in the past year when I'd done online searches for him.

So, okay, this is year-old news. But it's news to me, and probably to other people as well who needed to know.