Preamble

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Students don’t go to school to acquire the wisdom of Solomon. They go to school to acquire a cash value and improve their lot, to pick up the keys to the kingdom stocked with the treasures to be found in a BMW showroom or an Arizona golf resort. Their education bears comparison to the procedure for changing caterpillars into silkworms just prior to their transformation into adult moths. Silkworms can be turned to a profit; moths blow around in the wind, and add nothing to the wealth of the corporation or the power of the state.

The objective conforms to the popular notion of democracy. As Americans, we make the heroic attempt to educate all our citizens, to provide as many people as possible with as many opportunities as possible, to do for our children what we couldn’t do for ourselves. The sentiment is as generous as it is romantic. Appreciated as a monument of idealistic intent, the American school system deserves to be ranked as the eighth wonder of the world. As long ago as 1931, Albert J. Nock, a critic otherwise as sarcastic as H.L. Mencken about the grade level of America’s public discourse, was moved to a feeling of awe. He described the country’s schools as “an expression... an organization—of a truly noble, selfless and affectionate desire.”

Unhappily—cf. the conversations gathered on the lawn or assembled in the bar—the desire is seldom fulfilled. Because the schools serve a political theory as well as an economic objective, they cannot afford to make invidious comparisons between the smart kids and the dumb kids. Under the rules of egalitarian procedure, the schools must teach everything to everybody (algebra and the novels of Jane Austen as well as the manipulation of the iPhone and the condom). Even more wonderful, they must entertain the fiction that everybody can learn to write as well as Jefferson or to think as clearly as René Descartes (Leiden, page 107). Although a salve to the democratic conscience, the assumption makes a mockery of the facts. Who can imagine an NFL coach fielding his team to conform with social policy, or a major league baseball manager troubling himself with the niceties of affirmative action? College deans and high school principals don’t enjoy the same freedom of maneuver, and their obligatory disavowal of what they know to be true condemns the schools to a striving for the lowest plausible denominator.

Children learn by example as well as by precept, and they have only to surf the Internet or consider the careers of Paris Hilton and President George W. Bush to know that the making of a success in this American life doesn’t presuppose a prior knowledge of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The society doesn’t count on its statesmen or its movie stars to have read John Milton or George Eliot, and the corporations inclined to hire Harvard graduates don’t make important distinctions between those familiar with the essays of Michel de Montaigne and those who have mastered the complete works of Danielle Steele. If the kids know how to run the computers, work up the punch lines for Disney or Goldman Sachs, figure the exchange rates between the euro and the yen, what does it matter if they don’t know who won either the Revolutionary or the Civil War? It’s probably true that a very small percentage of high school students can point to Lithuania on a map; it’s also true that the State Department’s ambassadors often can’t speak the language of the country to which they buy passage with contributions to a presidential campaign. If a great many college students can’t diagram a sentence or write a decent paragraph, the same can be said of most American investment bankers and members of Congress. Should it become necessary to display the finery of learning, the congressman can hire an oil company lobbyist to write the legislation; the banker can order a bespoke set of attitudes from the tailors at the Aspen Institute or the Council on Foreign Relations.

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