Notes from Hell: the public schools need discipline and respect for learning. That's all - Back to School

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Daniel Kaufman

I fear that most of these young people believe higher education is some kind of vocational training for white-collar jobs. And this is largely our own fault; we are increasingly tending toward "practical" and "applied" areas of education, and evaluating courses and curricula in terms of whether or not they "prepare the student for the real world." But the purpose of higher education must be much deeper than that.

Still, even at a practical level, the schools are performing miserably. Being able to write and speak decent English is a necessary condition for survival in this society and although I was on campus three days a week, I never once heard English spoken in the halls or stairwells of this institution (where the students seem to be 80 to 90 per cent Hispanic). We have failed at even the most basic aspect of acculturation -- teaching our own language.

And this all comes back to K - 12 and public v. parochial education. Of my twenty students, only three received an A - or better as a final grade. All three had gone to Catholic high schools. Several others scored in the B range (and still, their writing skills were atrocious) and the rest scored C - through F. So there was really no large middle range as there would be on a proper curve. Students either excelled (and those had had a Catholic education) or did extremely poorly (and these had gone through the public system).

Still, even for the students who ultimately did poorly, forcing them to deal with real material and holding them to rigorous standards did produce a modest improvement in their work. Students who received an F for plagiarism once did not plagiarize again. The situation, while bad, is not hopeless.

However, if we continue to populate public educational institutions with the leftist faculty and administrators we have now, the situation will probably get worse. For it's not just the ideas which are essential, it's the people who must implement them.