Restlessness abroad - Medicare, education

National Review, Oct 28, 1996 by Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

The man on my right was Mr. Civic-Minded Citizen, and soon conversation closed in on the problem of education. In his hometown of Midland, Texas, he told me, the black population is about 5 per cent. But some years ago a federal judge ordered busing in an attempt to bring about integration by the checkerboard approach. What happened, he says, is that in grades 1, 2, and 3, Midland children do exactly as well as their peers elsewhere. ''But when they get to fourth grade, they are moved into a pool,'' from which the individual student is sent to this school or that, designed to effect what in the Sixties was called ''scatteration.'' From that point on through the rest of their primary education their academic achievements move down. Why? ''Because they are separated from the children they have been associated with, their teachers are mostly concerned with goals other than education. Anyway'' -- his hands moved up, resignedly, ''that's what happened.'' Was there no way to placate the judge with another plan that retained the neighborhood school and effected integration? ''Nothing we've come up with.''

Elsewhere, the education issue focuses strongly on ''Catholic schools.'' The term is in quotation marks because the Catholic schools under consideration are hardly seminaries designed to introduce young students to recent papal encyclicals. The schools in question -- in New York, in Washington, D.C., in Milwaukee --aren't restricted to Catholic students. One high school in New York, with which I am familiar, is preponderantly black and Hispanic, its students primarily from single-parent households. One course in religion is taught, as one might expect. It has never been asserted about the school that it is primarily a religious institution. But in order to attend it, students' families, or friends, have to come up with $3,000. The cost per student in the public schools is $9,000. In the public schools, 15 per cent or fewer of the graduates go on to college. In the Catholic schools, the figure is 85 per cent.

Mr. William Bulger, formerly the undeniable boss of the city of Boston, and president of the Massachusetts Senate for almost 18 years, fought hard against the ideological bureaucracy, whose militant right hand has been the Boston Globe. In his book, While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics, Mr. Bulger, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts, recalls the havoc brought on by the grandees of social architecture whose first (and only) mandate has been integration. But a side interest, fanatical in other quarters, has been a reading of the First Amendment that tells us that it is unconstitutional to ''use public money'' for ''religious schools.'' The teachers' unions are mobilized on the issue, and, as with busing, nothing very much happens except illiteracy, which prospers.

On another bent, a street-wise Democratic office-holder spoke about what one might expect from President Clinton in Term Two. ''Of course, he will do something about Medicare expenses. Why? Because he has to.'' Indeed. Unless by the year 2001 somebody invents a pill that abolishes every affliction from aneurysms to whooping cough, permitting Americans at an agreeable old age to wake up dead one morning, we are heading for an unbearable fiscal problem. My acquaintance reminded me that Mr. Fiscal is greatly profiting from the Depression of the Thirties. How so? Well, Americans walking into the retirement ages of 62 - 65 aren't very numerous, because back in 1931 - 34 Americans were not having many children. But as morale mounted, in mid-decade, the birth rate rose. Its effects will be felt at the end of the century.

It is sad, really, that no major political candidate is facing these issues head on. A successful Catholic school is no more offensive to general social objectives than a Catholic hospital that has crosses in patients' rooms. Under-educated black children are not benefited by under-educated white children. A slight stall in public spending on Medicare and Social Security does not make the looming crisis disappear. But our democratic system tends not to give us the major issues to confront. What if Mr. Dole had said that the Medicare program simply had to be rewired; that if the Constitution is really telling us that busing is required and religious schools are ineligible for public support, then let's revise the First Amendment, to make it mean what we lived with quite comfortably for a hundred and fifty years.

What a rush such proposals would bring to Inert America. And if this time around he failed, Mr. Dole would have the satisfaction felt by Winston Churchill, the first few times around.