The world has changed quite a bit since I entered Dundee
Elementary in 1965–66. Socially it was a very different time. No-fault divorce
did not yet exist. Two-parent families were the norm. Abortion had not yet been
legalized. The late-modern drug culture had not yet exploded. WWII had been
over for more than 20 years and the baby boom had just ended. The suburbs were
burgeoning. Top 40 radio was in its heyday and Roger W. Morgan was playing the
hits on the Mighty 1290 KOIL. The hippie movement was still a sub-culture. The
Vietnam War was intensifying but mostly we got just a moment or two of it on
the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The civil rights movement was on the
news as Dr King and others led peaceful demonstrations calling Americans to
honor the promises enshrined in the constitution only to be met too often by
fire hoses and police dogs. The Watts Riots, which were a reaction to decades
of unjust treatment of minorities by the LAPD, convulsed Los Angeles in 1965
leaving scars that would last for decades. In those years, however, my school
and neighborhood were all white. So, naturally, I did not see any oppression
but in reality it was not far from my quiet (still remarkably well-preserved)
neighborhood near the old money neighborhood in Omaha, not far from where one
of Warren Buffett’s houses sits today. Economically, things were stable. The
median family income in the USA was about $6,900 (= approx. $53,000 in 2017)
and most people lived on a single income. Credit cards were just coming into
use. The inflation rate was higher then than now, about 4% Perhaps everyone was
miserable and repressed but it did not seem so but then what did I know? I
turned five years old in 1966.
Public school was among the dominant realities of my life until
1979. In that period the world changed quite a bit. When I began, school,
teachers were not only allowed to use corporal punishment, they were expected
to administer it as needed. I certainly gave my teachers plenty of reason to
spank me. Sitting still was not my strong suit. Schools were expected to act in
place of the parents (in loco parentis). Nearly all of my teachers were
female and they were expected, during most of my education, to respect the
authority of the parents. The emphasis in school was, until the mid-70s, on the
objective. This is what parents meant in the 80s when they complained that they
wanted teachers to focus on “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” They could
sense that something was shifting but most Americans did not know the history
of public schools and were not aware that prospective teachers were being
taught in “teachers college” and in universities that education was not “rote
memorization,” that it was about “enrichment” and “experience” more than
information. During my entire primary and secondary education whenever anyone
mentioned memorization it was inevitably accompanied with the adjective “rote”
and we were given to think that was a bad thing. No teacher explained to me not
only the utility of memorizing but also the mechanics until my logic professor
did it briefly in university, in 1981.
By the late 60s and early 70s the culture and economy were
changing and so was education. In 1968 Dr King was assassinated and riots
erupted in major cities across the USA. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los
Angeles. The Tet Offensive changed the American perception of the Vietnam War.
Anti-war protests increased as more Baby Boomers were drafted. The hippie and
drug cultures were more visible, even in middle America. Movies were becoming
more sexually graphic and violent. Abortion on demand became legal in 1973. The
Beatles were no more and disco ruled in the last days of top-40 radio. The
effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were beginning to be felt but to speed up
progress school districts began to try to integrate schools by busing children
one part of town to another. In economics, a long-running, large-scale war
combined with spending on “Great Society” social program and attempts to
stimulate prosperity through taxing, borrowing. and spending led to “The Great
Inflation” for about a decade. That meant that products cost more but the
salaries and wages could not keep up. Each dollar earned was worth less than it
had been. The economy stagnated and what then called “Women’s Lib” (second wave
feminism) saw wives going work outside the home (as they had during WWII). That
meant “latch-key” kids (of which I was one) and less parental supervision of
children. Though the divorce rate had been climbing through the 20th century,
fueled by a large-scale demographic shift from the country to the city
(urbanization) and two world wars, 1 the advent
of no-fault divorce resulted in a sharp jump in the divorce rate and the number
of single-parent families.2 By the 70s the television showed us
all in “glorious living color” what “the good life” could be. Families, like
the government, began paying for things on credit in an increasingly desperate
attempt to obtain it. Household debt skyrocketed. In the schools, The emphasis
on the subjective was beginning to become more manifest. By the mid to late
1970s, teachers were openly challenging the authority of parents, and
advocating to their students a more radical social and economic philosophy.
The video below, published recently on the web, illustrates what
is taking place in some public school classrooms. In it a Los Angeles area high school
teacher is recorded demeaning members of the U. S. Military in a
five-minute, expletive-filled rant. Warning: this high school teacher uses
vulgar language.
(To see video – link to website below)
Is this teacher an exception? Probably. We hope so but I heard
more restrained rants about the evils of America when I was in high school. As
of this writing, the district is “investigating” the matter. In a sane system,
this teacher would be looking for work as a car salesman.
What was the state of Christian America during these shifts and
during the decline of the public school experiment? In 2005, Christian Smith
and Melinda Lundquist Denton described the dominant religion of evangelical
young people as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. That is an apt description.
Traditional Christian belief and practice has not fared well in Modern,
urbanized America. Under the Second Great Awakening America could have been
called predominantly Christian, even though that theology, piety, and practice
had more in common with the sixteenth-century Anabaptists than it did with the
Protestant Reformers. By the 1920s, however, “Christian America” was falling
apart. The Roaring 20s were more socially and religiously radical than one
might think. The rise and dominance of theological liberalism shattered the
faith of many Americans such that the dominant American theology between the
1920s and 70s should be described as “moralistic deism.” As one of my
university professors said, “In the 18th century God went to the corner for a
beer and never returned.” The dominant Deism of the American founders and other
elites percolated through the culture and emerged victorious in the early 20th
century. It formed the dominant cultural assumptions of the white working and
middle classes. African-American families were probably more traditional in
their theology and piety during this same period.
The self-esteem revolution, part of a larger turn to the self,
which coincided with the advent of no-fault divorce and abortion on demand,
added the third element to what has become the dominant strain of American
evangelical religion: the therapeutic. Today, the dominant American religion is
an ad hoc mix of economic/social aspiration and self-esteem. The lines
between the liberal mainline and the evangelical suburbs have blurred to the
point of being indistinct. Mainline churches look like the evangelicals and the
evangelicals look like the mainline.
Why this brief socio-economic historical survey? Because our
public schools are not merely (ostensible) educational institutions. Since
their beginnings they have long been social laboratories where social theories
are tested. In their nature, every neighborhood school is a pool of the
beliefs, values, and practices of the families whose children attend and of the
administrators who set policy and the teachers who conduct classes. Critics
such as Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) predicted the decline of the modern
educational project long before it manifested itself in the way that we see
now.
Arguably, judging by the academic outcomes that university
professors are reporting and that graduate school professors are seeing, the
American public school system has largely given up on anything like a
traditional educational mission. The defenders of the public school system do
not point to academic accomplish but to social outcomes. Schools are succeeding
at producing “better human beings.”
The decline in educational standards is obvious. Marc Tucker notes that
high school textbooks that were once written at a 12th-grade level for high
school seniors are (as of 2015) written at a 7th-grade level. There was a
natural tension between economic aspiration, which might have driven schools to
remain more focused on educational standards, and the new self-esteem religion
and the subjective-therapeutic has won.
Were schools focused on objective tasks, e.g., learning to read
well, to write well, to think well, to compute, to learn world history, to
learn basic science and methods, traditional, confessional Christians might be
able to navigate the late-modern pool but few of the administrators, teachers,
parents, or students involved in public school are there for a traditional
educational purpose. Further, the necessary conditions for education have eroded
dramatically. Ask a public high school teacher what it is like to try to
maintain order in a classroom in 2018. If you have not been in a public school
classroom you are in for a surprise. My high school world history teacher, Miss
Wihelmina Johnson, was a stout old lady. She maintained control of hormonal
teens through force of will but no one ever really challenged her in 1978–79.
Today, even teachers in an affluent suburban schools testify to the difficulty
of crowd control. Students look at their smart phones and text one another in
class. Any attempt to remove a phone would result in a riot. One substitute
teacher, with whom I recently spoke, who worked in affluent schools, quit the
business altogether out of fear for her safety in the classroom. Under
Modernism “I” was the subject and either my intellect or my sense experience
was the measure of all things. In a late-Modern therapeutic culture, I am the
subject and my feelings are the measure of all things. The authority of
teachers has been supplanted by the authority of the self.
To illustrate the confluence of the social changes, the sexual
revolution, and the collapse of education consider the crisis of sexual
predation in our schools. Contemplate this 2015 Washington Post headline:
“More Teachers Are Having Sex With Their Students. Here’s How Schools Can Stop
Them.” I had several first-grade teachers. It was not because we were a
particularly rowdy group (although changing teachers regularly did not help
things) but because the district hired young women who became pregnant and had
to leave. It was considered poor form to have a pregnant teacher before a group
of curious 1st graders. Before the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and
early 70s, teachers were to be sexless. There were rumors in college of
professors seducing students or of college students trading sex for grades but
never once did I ever hear any rumor of any sexual entanglement between a
student and a teacher in Junior High or High School. That is not scientific
evidence, I understand, but attitudes and behaviors have shifted observably. According
to Terry Abott (in the article linked above), in 2014, “there were 781
reported cases of teachers and other school employees accused or convicted of
sexual relationships with students.” In the year that his firm had been
tracking this problem (to that point), each “week has brought news of 15 young
people, on average, who were sexually victimized by the educators entrusted
with protecting them.”
The news headlines suggest that the problem has not improved.
Google News generates far too many headlines like these: “Former Teacher
Sentenced in Student Sex Case” (Des Moines, January 2018). “Student Teacher,
47, Pleads Guilty In Soliciting Sex From 13-Year Old Student” (January, 2018).
“Ex-Teacher’s Aide Convicted Of Having Sex With Student Violates Probation”
(January, 2018). “Former Dos Palos Teacher Sentence To Probation After Accused
Of Having Sex With A Student” (January, 2018). The list could continue. These
are headlines from this month alone. We are no longer shocked to see the local
news covering such stories. Like school shootings, they have become “the new
normal.”
It is beyond doubt that most American public school teachers are
dedicated, hard-working professionals but they are so in a fundamentally flawed
system. To a significant degree, the public schools are the product of an
increasingly Narcissistic-therapeutic culture. Teachers can only teach the
students that parents send them. The theorists behind the public education
system long ago gave up on what was classically regarded as
education in favor of an affective, subjectivist model of education. To make
matters worse, the hands of those parents who would dissent are tied. Common
sense disciplinary measures (e.g., moderate spanking) are now widely and
foolishly regarded as “child abuse.” In some school districts even reasonable
reforms such as Charter Schools are opposed with as much effort as possible.
Parents work to pay property taxes to fund schools which, in turn, undermine
the virtues they seek to instill in their children. Recently, the Los Angeles Times
editorial board took the opportunity to smear alternatives such as
homeschooling as a hotbed of child abuse while ignoring the collapse of the
current system. Why would Christian parents cooperate with such a system?
Christian parents who want their children to learn to think clearly, to read and
write well, to compute, to learn something of world history, in short, to get
an education, should abandon this collapsing system with all deliberate speed.
NOTES
1. The divorce rate jumped sharply by 24% in 1946. The divorce
rate in 1965 was up 6% but only 2.8% in 1966.
2. According to the Census Bureau, the divorce rate leveled off in
the mid-70s. What has changed since the mid-90s is the age at which people get
married and the rate of marriage. From the mid-90s onward people delayed
getting married or they simply did not get married at all.