The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them

Abstract

s I sit here writing about anti-intellectualism in American education, a debate is raging in my state, Virginia, over a proposal to raise standards of learning by mandating standards for each grade. The factual that is specified in the Virginia draft is far more explicit than in any currently existing state guidelines. But prospects for approval in any but watered-down form are dim. According to the Washington Post (March 29, 1995), the draft guidelines provoked scathing criticism from teachers' groups, superintendents, parent organizations, education professors, and legislators, both Republican and Democrat. Some say the goals are unrealistically ambitious for the lower grades, [and] promote over critical thinking. (Now, at a later date, as I revise this text, I can report that a watered-down compromise was reached.) That American professors of education are more hostile to the teaching of factual than education professors elsewhere in the world offers another point of entry into the American educational Thoughtworld. But, as the report from the Washington Post indicates, it is not just education profes sors who express hostility to rote memorization. That attitude also rallies Republicans and Democrats, parents and legislators, and, as I infer from the tenor of the Post article, newspaper reporters as well. There is widespread antiknowledge sentiment in American thought that Richard Hofstadter has labeled anti-intellectualism. 1 It is a convenient term, but I wonder whether Hofstadter's definition of it[107] does adequate justice to its attractions for a wide spectrum of Americans. Hofstadter defines anti-intellectualism as contempt for knowledge for its own sake. This definition perhaps misses something essential, namely, that the most often scorned by Americans tends to be academic connected with scientific lore and past traditions—the kind taught in lecture halls and recorded mostly in books. Disinterested curiosity is not in itself scorned by Americans— only disinterested curiosity about the contents of lec tures and books. Of course, Hofstadter is right that interested, as distinct from disinterested, practicality is a persistent American trait. We are fondest of that has utility for economic and moral improvement, a preference I happen to share. Befitting our early image of ourselves as giving mankind a new, Edenic start in history, Americans have valued that comes directly from experience more than that comes from books. Critical about one's own direct experience is to be preferred to rote memorization of the writings of others. Huck Finn is an archetypal American antibook fig ure. He is going to get his education by critically thinking about what he discovers on the river and in the Territory. Nature and experience will be his teachers. Huck's attitudes are not very different from those of Walt Whitman: