Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of The Dumbest Generation (a reference to my generation, of course, not his), reviews in the November issue of Commentary a book by Robert Weissberg titled Bad Students, Not Bad Schools. Going by Bauerlein's summary, Weissberg believes that all education initiatives are doomed because they fail to acknowledge that the students?and not the teachers, the facilities, the work, the curricula?are the problem. Bauerlein writes:
Year after year, as Weissberg shows in tiresome but accurate listings, a new initiative rolls out?laptops for every eighth-grader, bills to equalize school funding, after-school day care for single mothers, etc.?founded like the previous year's on the progressivist assumption that a better environment will invigorate the lagging ones, close the racial gap, prepare every student for college, and so on. But bright students with good work ethic excel whether they study with shiny laptops or grimy textbooks (Weissberg's example is the Vietnamese boat people). And students who hate reading and have derelict parents won't much respond to a culturally sensitive curriculum, a redefinition of ?achievement? to include ?emotional intelligence,? a school-choice plan, or a brand-new auditorium.
There is much truth here. It is certainly?true that the education-policy world largely eschews requiring from students themselves any responsibility for the ?reform? of their own educations. Yet, we go too far when Vietnamese boat people are our example of pupils with ?good work ethic.? And there is plenty of reason to believe that not a few talented, smart young people are in fact bored out of their minds at school, squirming or snoozing through dull lessons taught by duller people. And there is plenty of reason to believe that structural changes such as, say, allowing 17-year-olds more instructional choices than America's one-track high schools now do would produce happier, more-engaged pupils who are likelier to both learn something at their schools and eventually graduate from them. Weissberg's solution?to get rid of all the rabble-rousers and focus effort only on the goody-goody students who can smilingly bear hours and hours of classroom claptrap?is not viable. It is stupid.*
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
* Some object: ??Stupid' is mean and meaningless! It says nothing about the argument in question.? Not true. No matter how frequently earnest, dispassionate, reasonable souls throw their tantrums and wish that the word would just go away, it won't. It does have a meaning, and a perfectly descriptive one at that. Look it up. Sometimes ideas are so ridiculous that we need not, ought not, will not break them down?calling them ?stupid? suffices. If one happens to write about education policy, he, especially, should keep the adjective always near, always at the ready. (Incidentally, the person most likely to object to deployment of the word ?stupid? is generally the person most likely to have the word deployed in his direction.)