Education: Where We Stand - The conservative end of education

Education policies are not enough. What we say we want them for matters too, and matters more. Con servatives have not been saying enough about the content of education.

To see what I mean, listen first to the opposition. On a radio ad in Massachusetts, the National Education Association makes a pitch for reducing class size. You hear a noisy hubbub when the class has 24 kids; but when the number falls to 15, there's nothing but quiet- productive quiet, you are led to suppose. The ad ends: "If you want to improve education, ask a teacher."

So, the woes of our education have nothing to do with the teachers! On the contrary, teachers will tell us what we must do. What we need is smaller classes, which, it is not said, will require more teachers. Quite a few more-60 percent more, if the example given is generalized with the aid of some elementary algebra. The result will be more quiet, or better discipline, in classrooms.

The teachers' union asks us to believe that it wants order in classrooms, that fewer children in them will do the trick, and that this is all we need, or the first thing we need, to improve education. It's easy to guess that the unstated means to more decorum-more teachers-is really the end that the NEA has in view.

Yet to do the union credit, one also suspects that it has a more serious end in mind. It wants not only more jobs for its members, but also a certain kind of education for our children, the kind its members, or its activists, believe in. The end they desire is an equalized citizenry averse to risk, competition, and conflict, in which each person is simultaneously wrapped up in himself and compassionate to others.

Conservatives need to oppose this degeneration of our democracy. We need to get beyond the banality of the self-comforting self and the superficiality of a compassion that always ends in a government program. We need to expose the deliberate leveling of our people by the liberals who are in charge of our education. The best way to do that is to be explicit about the conservative end of education.

At present, conservatives advocate school policies such as more discipline, learning by rote, going back to the basics, teaching right and wrong, and making teachers accountable. They promote changes such as vouchers and charter schools designed to liberate our schools from unions and liberal bureaucrats. These are reforms worth fighting for, but it is tempting to invest too much in them by treating them as ends in themselves.

Conservatives should keep their eyes on the end beyond: the content of our education. We get a glimpse of this end in the general concern over falling standards in education. Though many deplore the obvious relaxation that comes with easy grading, only conservatives raise it as an issue. Here above all we witness the amazing decline in our time of liberalism as a philosophy of education. When I was younger, my father (a professor) and my teachers were liberals, but they knew, unlike liberals today, that true education is exacting. They took it for granted that a good teacher is above all a demanding one. Even today, the teachers we remember are not the easygoing, ever-smiling, all- tolerating ones, but the taskmasters and the hard graders.

What is so special about high standards? High standards make you excel, and to excel you have to look up to something above yourself as you are now. You have to aspire to something. The gravest fault of our education today is that its content gives us nothing to aspire to. Conservatives need to say that the end of our education is to make democratic citizens with minds-or why not say souls?-that can love, admire, respect something or someone above themselves. This end has to be spoken or asserted because it is not beside us, tangible, ready-to- hand. It is above us, and invisible.

From this elevated outlook we can look down on the impoverishment of today's education, based as it is on self-esteem. Our liberals' notion of self- esteem derives from a distinction between self and other- abstract terms for me and you. The distinction is then overcome by mutual recognition when the self sees itself in the other-or you and I decide we are not so different as we first believed. Abstractness is as close as liberals get to profundity, but the effect is merely to level people out to their common denominator. I recall that when I was in high school, the worst thing you could be called is "stuck up." The liberal notion of self-esteem is nothing but that juvenile attitude dressed up as philosophy. It says that you can be known as a nice guy if you drop your pretensions-the pretensions that arise from aspirations, from the determination to look up.

The conservative end of education is certainly to make democratic citizens, not aristocrats. Democratic citizens are loyal to democracy and capable of maintaining or advancing it. The content of our education should include both loyalty and capability, because both are necessary and neither element guarantees the other. We want a great people that is sustained by great individuals. The word "great" comes easily to Americans; it is our common aspiration to be a great people. But there is little of greatness in the content of our education now.