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Breaking Liberal Taboos on Education

by Christopher Chantrill
July 11, 2004 at 3:00 am

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IS THE WIND changing on education?  Three straws seem to suggest so.  First there was the calculated outburst from Bill Cosby.

It’s comical to read solemn liberal commentators worrying about whether it was right for Bill Cosby to wash the dirty laundry of the black community right out where whitey could see (as if anybody cares after 40 years after the civil rights acts).  Still, he did say what no white American would be allowed to say, and certainly no conservative American.  In a speech on May 17 at a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education he railed against parents that bought their kids $500 sneakers but wouldn’t cough up $200 for “Hooked on Phonics.”  And then a month or so later, he broke the taboo again at a Rainbow/PUSH conference in Chicago, in case anyone didn’t get the message the first time.  Responding to accusations over washing dirty laundry in public, he reminded his audience that their “dirty laundry was getting out of school every day at 2:30… cursing and calling each other n-----.”  “They think they’re hip," the entertainer said. "They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere."

Meanwhile in The Daily Telegraph, English teacher Francis Gilbert reminded us of what we already know, or ought to know.  A disruptive lower-class child does better when challenged.  Writing about a boy who started out as a discipline problem Gilbert observed: “He became competitive about his work when he saw that other boys - tough characters like himself - wanted to do well.”  It was not positive self-esteem that motivated this boy, but the desire to compete with his peers.

On top of that, the British government suddenly announced a five-year plan on education that would increase “choice,” allow successful schools to expand, and even allow “selection,” permitting schools to interview and select the students they admit.

Only the government didn’t call its new policy “selection.”  The abolition of “selection” in schools is a sacrament of the Labour Party church in England, indeed, so holy that it is taboo.  To mention the word “selection” in a meeting of Labour Party members of parliament would shock them just as much as any mention of sex is supposed to have shocked a Victorian matron.  Since time immemorial, the Labour Party has believed that it is wrong for schools to stream students by ability and to send college-prep students to one school and vocational students to another.

Of course, they might be right.  But notice what is missing in their appreciation of the issue.  Notice what they have assumed without even batting an eye.

Yes, you guessed it.  They have not given a thought to what a parent might want for his or her child.  They have assumed, as bien-pensant elitists, that it is their job to decide how children will be educated.  Parents?  Shmarents!

Let us conduct a thought experiment.  Imagine a system of charter schools, funded by the taxpayers, but with each school a quasi-independent entity where the principal, assisted by a board, determines the curriculum and hires the teachers.  Obviously these schools will range from quasi-military academies to arts academies to science schools to unstructured progressive idylls.  Some parents will want to send their children to the military academy, others to the progressive school.  But what happens if everyone wants to send his or her child to the military academy?  Why, then the military academy will have to select which children to admit.  Evil “selection” will rear its ugly head.

That’s the rub, isn’t it?  Only in a one-size-fits-all, liberals-know-best system can we avoid the issue of selection.  Only if every parent is forced to send children to the school selected by the government’s bureaucrats is there no selection issue.  The parent has no choice in where to send a child to school, and the school must accept all students in a specified catchment area.  So when progressives, whether Labour Party loyalists in England or liberal activists in the United States, rail against the injustice of “selection,” they are also railing against the right of parents to send their children to the school of their choice.  Which side would you rather be on?

All across America, parents are making choices about their children’s education.  They move to areas with good public schools; they learn how to manipulate the system to get their children into the program they want.  They send them, if they can afford it, to Montessori schools, to Waldorf schools, to military academies, to college prep schools.  They choose adventurous schools, rigorous schools, progressive schools, art schools, and science schools.  Or maybe they home-school them.  But woe-betide that any government school should select its students based on ability or intelligence!

But wait a minute!  Public universities select by ability!  What’s going on, senator?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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