The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battles Shaping America's Future. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1989 by Tom Peters

What is chipping away at American vitality, Fallows believes, is "an unnatural Confucian element" that began in the late nineteenth century when schools started to become the key to American mobility. "The quality that made for success in school-high IQ, the right study habits, good family background-became more and more closely linked with success in life," he observes. "This connection sounds obvious, commonsensical and unavoidable, but it is not any of those things, and it was not inevitable that schools should have taken on the role they now play."

Fallows writes: "Confucian societies are meant to be static. They honor the scholar, place great emphasis on credentials and academic degrees, teach children always to defer to parents and social inferiors to their superiors, and assign people very early in life to the rank that they will hold as adults. This package of values may be suitable for Japan, China and Korea [but] in America [it] is an unhealthful, alien influence."

Fallows saves his most extreme vitriol for IQ tests. He cites research indicating that the basic reason behind the tests is wrong. "Many men who'd been classified as 'subnormal' and 'morons' did fine on jobs demanding skill once they got the job," he writes.

He uses the example of the GI Bill to great effect. When it was proposed that the program apply to all veterans, the most prestigious members of the educational hierarchy were outraged: "Robert Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, warned in 1944 that when GI's came home, 'Colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles.' In the same ungenerous spirit, James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, said in 1945 that the Bill was 'distressing' because it did not 'distinguish between those who can profit most by advanced education and those who cannot.' The Bill was clearly a scheme to push people beyond what their intelligence permitted. What Conant would have preferred. . .was a program restricted to a 'carefully selected number' of the most able veterans. . . .But Conant and Hutchins could not have been more wrongabout the Gl's. When the 2.3 million veterans enrolled, they turned out to be phenomenally successful. Older, less flighty, more seriously motivated than ordinary students, the early GI Bill scholars became the most successful group of students American universities have ever seen."

The fastest-growing and most successful entrepreneurial firms have always known that background means little, Fallows contends. He quotes a 29-year-old vice president of Microsoft: "We have a lot of walk-on talent. We ask them to send us a program they've written, that they're proud of. One of our superstars here was a guy who literally walked in off the street. We talked him out of going to college and he's been here ever since."

Fallows has several national policy suggestions to deal with these stultifying cultural trends. First, shift the emphasis on public assistance from "entitlement" to "insurance." He criticizes Medicare and Social Security for "guaranteeing a subsidy to everyone, not just to the people who need the protection that an insurance system would offer."