American education - 13 May 1994

Well as the Psalms or was it the Song of Solomon said the time of the singing of birds has come and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land, it's that time here too, but it's also the time of the marching of graduates and the new voices of parents raised as much in protest as in pride, end of the school and college year is what I'm talking about.

And two weeks or more from now and several thousand leafy campuses, the long familiar scene will be replayed of troops of graduates in caps and gowns for the first, and maybe the only time in their lives, padding along self-consciously up to the college president or a local worthy or if they're lucky a well-known novelist or athlete or senator and turning round and even more self-consciously padding away clutching a scroll, which attests usually in rather glowing language to their excelling gifts as scholars.

This scene is not restricted to universities and colleges; every high school in the country except perhaps in the crack capitals of the slummiest cities has a similar ceremony with paper gowns and cardboard mortar boards. It was in most places and in earlier times and in many places maybe still is a joyous festival, a family warmth and jokiness and nobody making a big deal over the fact that young Fred over there and young Sally Jones here are lamentably bad students and have graduated like many of their pals by the generosity of the class teacher, more often by the teachers' sharp awareness that if anyone in the class was denied a graduation certificate, all hell would breakout from the parents.

There was always a good deal of what, well we in another country with a state religion could safely call Christian charity, let's say here a good deal of indulgence in this annual ceremony, a national demonstration of forgiveness and geniality in the sense old Fowler meant when he said about split infinitives, if in doubt, prefer geniality to grammar, but this year has seen after gathering years of complaint, anxiety, frustration an outburst across the country of protest against the whole public school system and its failures. In general, against the prevailing low standards of scholarship and in some places against new methods that have taken the place of the old, the three 'R's for example.

First though, the low standing of American schoolchildren when matched with the children of other countries. I hasten to say that other does not necessarily mean other wWestern so called civilised or developed countries. In some tests internationally applied in geography and science for instance two or three of the countries of Western Europe, France and Britain in particular didn't do much better. But time and again, we read the results of tests given to American children and also to the children of Eastern Europe and the results are what makes some parents frustrated and depressed.

Most recently, American students were found to lag well behind in mathematics and science, students from Hungary, Slovenia and Korea, and to make the pill more bitter still, the gratuitous information was added that today the general proficiency of Americans in their own scholastic aptitude tests is way below what it was 25 years ago. I think the first blow to American complacency about its public school system came, oh seven, eight maybe 10 years ago when throughout California white children born here were tested against the children of new Asian immigrants, usually Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese, I'm talking about the children who came here to California when they were say four or five without a word of English. Ten years later, they were tested against American-born whites of the same age. Result in most subjects, but especially in science and maths the Americans got a passing mark, the Asians were comparative whiz kids.

So of the many local movements to do something to improve the education of the young, the most recent and widespread remedy beginning I'd say in the late '80s with fundamentalist questions was to take the children out of school and teach them at home. There are of course many obstacles to hurdle, many unsuspected traps not the least of which is making your child into an oddity or when he or she gets to college a social misfit, but where the parents are able and conscientious, the results are rewarding. In the state of Washington in four years, 3,600 home-taught children came out in the top third of a nationwide test in the neighbouring state of Oregon nearly 70% home-taught did noticeably better than the public school pupils.

Now for some more original forms of protests against the contemporary scene not provoked by the thought of poor teaching and low academic results. There's a school in the Midwest a public school, i.e. not private, that last autumn put out a very remarkable command mandated as we love to say, it said that from a certain Monday on all the pupils must wear the same uniform, did you ever hear of such a thing a school uniform in a free country. After two terms of it, the great majority of both parents and children loved it. Of course it had, maybe still has a novelty value, but the parents were immensely relieved not to have to pass on this idea, and that freak, every morning and the children on the whole were happy to put a stop to the never ending contests in exhibitionism.

But this is America, the country remember with a Bill of Rights written, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. That's enough for some parents. Freedom of the press has meant a right to strip to the buff, it has meant painting obscenities, to express your freedom, right of assembly, in some states it's meant right not to assemble a seat belt, right of assembly surely in any clothes you want, where is this a frothing parent frothed? Hitler's Germany? Other more subdued parents are taking the matter up and are quite prepared to take it to the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court to prove as one parent put it, to prove that such an order does not pass constitutional muster.

In New York State, there's another school which has aroused the ire of suffering parents, a school that does not teach muppets elementary arithmetic, but as a father complains teaches concepts. The whole vocabulary of the teaching is so far above the noggins of these bewildered children that one irate father challenged the teacher to ask his daughter if she knew what was two plus two. The general philosophical jargon that the school worked in was so far above such crudities, but the teacher did put it to the child "what are two and two?" The child didn't have the foggiest notion what she was talking about.

A more famous you might almost say mainstream progressive school if that's not a contradiction is Dalton School in New York City where I like to think my children got a pretty good enlightened education. Well about 10 years ago, the school lent an ear to a rich lady who wanted to start a special programme for learning disabled students. She herself didn't discover till she was in her mid-50s that she was dyslexic, she had normal vision but couldn't interpret written or printed language. So the school took on 14 specialists looking for learning disabilities and curing them. The programme was a success, suspiciously successful by which I mean the more the specialists looked for learning disabilities, the more they found them. Over a period of three years of testing it came out that of 215 five-year-olds, 77 of them, had trouble or were – a favourite label – "at risk"– at risk of what of being helpless before a book to read, helpless in other ways? It turned out that quite a bunch of these 77, I don't know how many were really at risk of being treated by the specialists for disabilities they did not have. In a nutshell, the tests grew too precise and finicky and unscientific enough to haul in whole drafts of children about to be stamped disabled.

Now this school has very many wealthy certainly comfortably off parents who at the first word of a troubled child are going to rush off and pay any money to some doctor who threatens to be helpful. Now understand there was nothing remotely sinister or crooked about those disability specialists, their intentions were honour bright, they had many successes they just suffered from – what was it Talleyrand called the fatal flaw? – too much zeal. Finally, when so many parents were being told that their child had potential visual motor problems or worse sequencing ability deficits, imagine the headmaster reviewed the whole business and said, "ooh enough", or rather he said, things got out of hand.

By now apparently quite a lot of the disabled are found to be not disabled. It all reminds me of an enthusiastic psychiatrist I knew oh 40, 50 years ago, an expert in schizophrenia, he was an honourable man he had a sharp mind and a gleaming eye and came to alarm us all by deciding that an amazing number of children we knew were schizophrenic. He's long gone and all but one of the children, a schizophrenic, I believe are middle-aged and doing fine and after 40 yeadrrs observation anyway have yet to disclose marked symptoms of anything other than chronic cheerfulness.

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