RUTHFULLY YOURS

When I went to City College fifty-something years ago, ALL of my friends finished school within four years, unless they were interrupted by army or medical problems.  Students who had financial or family problems went to school at night and worked during the day and they naturally took longer,  but of all the people I knew, 0 full-time day students required six or seven years to complete an undergraduate degree.

One reason that everyone went through college pro forma is that they went through the first 12 grades of their education in the same way, except for those who finished in less time because of rapid advance classes and skipping grades. A series of small things characterized our academic experiences. Students didn’t wear sneakers to school and neither students nor teachers wore jeans or any other informal clothing. School was a place where you lined up in size places to move through the hall quietly and where you raised your hand and waited to be called upon before speaking in class. You sat at your own desk and took responsibility for your own work. Cheating was a serious and punishable offense – as was gum chewing. We still memorized the multiplication table and we learned to recite whole poems by heart. Our report cards reflected our achievements at “good citizenship” as well as scholarship, and teachers graded us on such things as “works & plays well with others” and “needs more self-control. “ Most children lived in a family headed by their married, biological parents.   Homework was checked by the teacher and handed back with comments requiring correction. School represented authority to which you respectfully deferred or paid the penalty in two places. For children of immigrants in particular, school also represented a privilege for which you were meant to feel grateful and appreciative. Your expected payback was to work as hard as you could.

And then came the sixties when pedagogy capitulated to the generation it was supposed to lead. Just about everything mentioned in the previous paragraph was reversed and the consequences are still reverberating through every level of academia. Schools adopted the mantra of creativity and self-expression as opposed to rote learning, discipline and hard work. They became the primary laboratory for social engineering until eventually, political correctness supplanted reason and students were admitted to schools to balance the rainbow without regard to whether they could handle the curriculum. Everyone was pushed forward regardless of ability or accomplishment so that today, the majority of college freshmen need remediation in order to do the bare minimum of their coursework. And because it wasn’t necessary to work as hard as before, students grew lazier as schools became more complacent until we ended up with college students who require high school tutoring – in over their heads till they realize how hopeless the situation is and drop out.

And now, because we have removed the source of anxieties that used to exist for children whose work was red-penciled, criticized, revised and graded – we have ended up with children who suffer no pangs of conscience as they cheat (and freely admit to it), plagiarize from the readily available internet and lack that requisite sense of guilt and shame that acts as both internal brake on anti-social behavior and strong deterrent to poor performance.  Cheating and plagiarizing have always been a part of the educational system but the cavalier attitude that they’re no big whoop is new.  Cheating used to consist of copying from another student’s paper (usually without consent); now it has morphed into the type of industry where one student can earn thousands of dollars for faking multiple I.D.’s and taking the SAT’s for his shiftless friends.  Cheating also extends to faculty and administration altering test scores so that their schools attain the necessary performance records to stay in business.

A recent Sunday Times magazine article detailed the efforts of the headmaster at the Riverdale Country School and one at a KIPP charter school to instill the concept of character as a necessary adjunct to success in school and life. One of the techniques is posting bold messages throughout school buildings with such exhortations as Be Nice, Work Hard, There Are No Shortcuts (at KIPP) and at Riverdale a charter-education program called CARE with such underlying touchy-feely sentiments as “Be aware of other people’s feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt.”   Educators are just waking up to that old-fashioned notion that self-control is a pivotal factor in children’s ability to be productive at school. The old list of citizenship categories that disappeared from report cards decades ago has been retrieved and recast as slogans or lessons in sensitivity.  Pop psychology has replaced morality, manners and decorum as the paradigm for measuring character.

There’s an old joke about the woman who brings her husband to a psychiatrist to stop his fetish for tearing paper into tiny pieces. She informs the doctor that the patient has already been to several other doctors without success. At the end of the hour, she returns to pick her husband up and within a day realizes that he’s been cured. She calls the psychiatrist the next day to find out how he was able to do it. He responds, “I just walked him back and forth, constantly telling him, Stop Doing That! Stop It, Stop It, Stop It Right Now!”  Schools stopped exercising that kind of authority long ago as the focus on students’ individual rights trumped the need for teachers to maintain classroom order. But the molding of character is something that evolves in small building blocks from toddler-hood on – much like the development of language. If children don’t hear sufficient language for the formative years of development, they cannot compensate for that deprivation with immersion in language later on.

Similarly, if children have not been raised with consistent lessons of right and wrong, with insistence on honesty, respect for others, discipline, hard work, delayed gratification, carrots and sticks – no amount of sloganeering on school walls can fill that fundamental void. Character is formed as an accretion of observed and learned behavior and parental and societal demands. For many of today’s children, middle class home life is chaotic as parents have lost the rudder of common sense in navigating a path between an overly permissive, media-saturated landscape and schools that worry more about diversity than educational content. For other children, home life is a single female parent raising children without a father, a sure predictor of dropping out of school and future poverty.  The one truism that does apply to our current situation is that there are no shortcuts. Without the restoration of parental and school authority, without the insistence on an honest work ethic without grade inflation, without a return to the fundamental mastery of reading, writing and arithmetic there can be no change in our bankrupt educational system. And in a society with fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled labor, the main statistic that will steadily grow is that of the unemployed and worse – the permanently unemployable.