When I learned recently that the Council for Basic Education had closed its doors, I felt terribly sad. According to an article in Education Week, some attributed its demise to a "tight fund-raising environment for education groups" and suggested that CBE had expired because it was swimming in a crowded pond. When I worked in Washington in the early 1990s, there were about 150 education organizations, and by now there must be far more. So CBE must have had a hard time making its voice heard above the din, especially when so many others seemed to be purveying a similar message.
But I wasn't especially saddened by the loss of one fish in that big pond of advocacy groups. I was saddened because I knew how far CBE had strayed from its roots. It did not begin in 1956 as an organization that ran programs in collaboration with other organizations. It was not a member of the education establishment. It did not partner with the federal government. It did not have a staff of twelve.
No, it began as a lonely outpost for a small, outspoken group of articulate critics who agreed that the public schools were foolishly trying to be all things to all people; who believed that progressive educationists had saddled the schools with bad ideas; and who insisted that the mission of the schools was not socialization but intellectual development.
The Council for Basic Education was founded by bold men and women who led a revolt against mediocrity, anti-intellectualism, and mindlessness in the public schools. Several of their founding board members were famous intellectuals, like Jacques Barzun and Clifton Fadiman. One of them, Arthur Bestor, wrote a searing attack on "regressive education" titled Educational Wastelands.
That book bears re-reading. It is as timely and engaging today as it was in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and every decade since then. Like his fellow board members, Bestor criticized school curricula that was intellectually barren and had no connection to the academic disciplines. In that book, he wrote, "The West was not settled by men and women who had taken courses in 'How to be a pioneer.' . . . I for one do not believe that the American people have lost all common sense and native wit so that now they have to be taught in school to blow their noses and button their pants."
CBE's main means of advancing its point of view was by publishing the CBE Bulletin. The Bulletin, like CBE, upheld the primacy of intellectual development as the chief mission of the schools. In the organization's first year, the editor of the CBE Bulletin was Harold L. Clapp. For many years afterward, the Bulletin was written by the acerbic Mortimer B. Smith. Time magazine once described the Bulletin as "a cranky, flea-sized publication that subsists on what it bites from the hide of fuzzy-minded educators." Smith's writing was a delight to read. No foolish fad, no curricular excess, no idiotic mandate escaped his sharp and witty pen.
A few years ago, I chanced upon a bound collection of Mortimer Smith's editorials titled A Decade of Comment on Education. It covered the years from 1956 to 1966. I discovered it by accident in the shelves of the New York University Library. Anyone who wants to encounter the fresh and fearless spirit of the authentic Council for Basic Education should read that book. Like Bestor's critique of the "life adjustment movement," this collection of Smith's essays for CBE is powerful and relevant, especially his discussion of curriculum, standards, and content. Smith divided the world into what he called two classes: "the good guys on the one side and all educationists on the other."
CBE, through the Bulletin, assailed the "look-say" method of teaching reading. It was highly skeptical of groupthink pedagogical experts. It derided the educationist belief that children should be free to choose what to study and to plan their activities without adult guidance. It ridiculed the "dogma of readiness," shared by nearly all professional educators, who believed that children could not be taught until they had reached a certain stage of "readiness." It positively detested the pedagogues who believed that little could be expected from slum children and therefore little should be taught to them.
CBE, from its earliest days, had a passionate commitment to academic integrity and to the egalitarian belief that all children should have the riches of an academic education. A. Graham Down strove to retain these ideals when he led CBE from 1974 until 1994. Down's successor, Christopher Cross, was recruited to make CBE a "player" on the national scene, and this he did. But as the organization changed with the times, as it branched out, sought grants, wooed foundations, entered into partnerships, launched projects and pursued government largesse, the original voice of CBE faded until it was merely a whisper.
As we mourn its death, it seems apropos to quote Mortimer Smith: ". . . while CBE's whole reason for existence is the improvement of schools we are not always sure that some of the changes that seem to be on the way will indeed involve improvement. We are glad to see the old educational establishment, the 'interlocking directorate' of educationists, lose some of its power, but sometimes we are a bit apprehensive of the new establishment, that rather amorphous body made up roughly of some of the large philanthropic foundations, the 'new faces' in the U.S. Office of Education, the commercial producers of school materials, and those who devise 'new curricula' with governmental funds."
Smith then went on to say, "It must be obvious that the Bulletin is wary of all establishments. Perhaps there is a place in the next ten years, as there was in the past ten, for an educational publication that speaks with an independent voice and is not committed to the assumptions of any establishment, old or new."
I remember when I first discovered Arthur Bestor, Jacques Barzun, Mortimer Smith, and the other critics of their generation. I was a graduate student at Teachers College and reading their work was akin to a thirsty man (or woman, in my case) suddenly discovering an oasis in a parched desert.
I mourn the loss of that CBE. That organization probably had a part-time staff of one, maybe with a volunteer assistant. That organization had a distinctive voice. That organization did not worry overly much about whether other organizations agreed with it or wanted to be its friends. That organization did not run programs. That organization did not compete for foundation funding. That organization was devoted solely to telling what it believed to be the truth about the hindrances to genuine education.
That organization died a long time ago, and I miss it.
Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
"Council for Basic Education closes doors," by David J. Hoff, Education Week, July 14, 2004
