A L S O_ T O D A Y

Bad chemistry
By Lori Gottlieb
When your lab partner is an obsessive compulsive, not even the data is safe

T A B L E_ T A L K

Remember those first glorious days of dorms and registration? Offer advice to incoming college frosh in the Education area of Table Talk

___________________

Check out books by Camille Paglia at BarnesandNoble.com
___________________

R E C E N T L Y

Is history dead?
By Sean McMeekin
Cultural studies scholars are ravaging the facts to suit their bassackward theories
(01/11/99)

Advice from a J-school drop-out
By Lea Aschkenas
When it comes to breaking into print, getting a graduate degree in journalism may be an exercise in exalted futility
(01/08/98)

Bartering brains for bread
By Mark Luce
Can the institutions of higher learning escape the long arms of their corporate sponsors?
(01/06/99)

Confessions of a stair mistress
By Elizabeth B. Krieger
While other students scarf chips, sling back beers and study, a growing tribe of compulsive exercisers pursues the perfect workout
(01/04/98)

Crisis in English
By Christopher Shea
When the Modern Language Association convenes this year, highbrow literary questions will take a back seat to a thorny debate about the ongoing dearth of jobs
(12/24/98)

BROWSE THE
CAMILLE PAGLIA
ARCHIVE

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
--- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled ---

The disintegrating public schools

AS ACADEMICS ALLOW OUR STATE EDUCATION TO LANGUISH, PRIVATE PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS MAY LEAD TO MORE CULTURAL DIVIDES.

Dear Camille:

I applaud your recent column on schools and standards. My business partner recently took her 11-year-old daughter out of a "good" suburban school and put her in a private church school when she realized that the kid was learning all about ecology but not reading or arithmetic.

I personally attended schools in four parts of the U.S. in the late '50s through the '60s. New Orleans, suburban New York, Jackson, Miss., and suburban Dallas each had a different approach, but what I see happening to kids now is the combination of the worst from each system.

New Orleans teachers had an attitude of "We'll all pretend that we're working but we all know it's nonsense" that made school fun, but not very effective. New York worked on making everyone pass the standardized exams, so there wasn't much room for deviation from the curriculum but we learned a lot. Mississippi fanatically enforced Draconian discipline policies and proper attitudes (I'll never forget my second day in school, when I forgot to say "ma'am" to a teacher), but the teachers encouraged thoughtful discussion in the classes. And Dallas let the kids run amok so that school was physically dangerous and the kids openly contemptuous of the teachers, but unorthodox thought was not tolerated.

What I see now is teachers with an attitude that what they are doing is not important, drilling for the state competency exams (which are cleverly set up to look difficult to anyone who doesn't look very closely but are actually offensively simple once one understands the trick vocabulary), rigidly enforced discipline ("zero tolerance" where kids get expelled for bringing Advil or G.I. Joe guns) and adherence to orthodoxy (of course it's not the right-wing variety of Dallas in the '60s, but it's still orthodoxy and it still tries to kill the spirit of anyone who thinks by challenging the ideas he is presented).

The only saving grace I see is that this sort of stupidity inures the students to indoctrination. My brother-in-law, who is a college philosophy professor, says that he loves the PC Stalinists at his university because the students with any spark of intelligence realize that those professors are fools and don't take their bullshit seriously. He claims that they react to genuine ideas and culture the way he and I did 25 years ago when we went to the University of Texas after brain-dead high school and were exposed to the ideas of our culture. His regret is that those magnificent older generation professors (Vartian Gregorian, Sidney Monas, William Arrowsmith, Charles Hartshorne, Douglass Parker and William Goetzman come to mind as people of the mind I think of at UT who showed me that there was something to be excited about in Western culture) we had are gone and replaced by narrow-minded technocrats of liberal arts. He says that there aren't many of those really learned professors around now, and certainly none under 60.

It strikes me that the lawyers, accountants and business people I know are more widely educated than the liberal arts professors. It is common to run into lawyers, for instance, who have hobbies like Roman history or medieval music. Professors seem to be much more philistine than those in the business world.

My take on the problem is that the graduate schools turn out narrow-minded specialists who have no business being trusted with anyone's education. The public schools are run by lazy ignoramuses with agendas. Unless people take the power away from these certified specialists, it will stay that way.

Bob Davidson

Dear Mr. Davidson:

You bring to the attention of Salon readers a disturbing new trend -- the creation of Bible-based Protestant church schools as safe havens from the disintegrating public schools with their many social problems, such as rampant drug use. As a refugee from Roman Catholic "Religious Ed." (which we public-school students were sent off to once a week), I am very concerned about the long-term consequences of sectarian education, which could further fracture American society.

As usual, I must decry the irresponsibility of my own profession: Campus humanities professors, obsessed with mandarin theory and with their own showy career tracks, have completely ignored the decline of the public schools, the primary community resource for working-class and lower-middle-class families. Suburban school districts offering truly high-quality education are generally confined to major metropolitan areas. And expensive private schooling has become increasingly common for upper-middle-class families. I detest this phenomenon: A solid, secular education should be the democratic birthright of every American child. As a teacher, I fail to see why educators cannot agree on a rigorous core curriculum for American students, who have become victims of clashing political agendas.

Your brother-in-law is right on the money about the vanishing of venerable, learned professors of the old school in favor of "narrow-minded technocrats of liberal arts" -- who are blind to the destruction they have wrought in the humanities. Why should universities continue to fund the humanities, much less to expand the number of full-time teaching slots, when the highest ranking, most lavishly salaried faculty declare that there is no art but only politics, ideology and (check out this clumsy clunker) "cultural production"? Academe's main problem isn't tenured radicals but tenured mediocrities who have no feeling for art.

Your observation about the broader interests of business people is most interesting. Yes, they seem to be the primary market for those lucidly written books on history, politics and science that fill the bookstores. Professional educators who do not respect or cannot address that inquisitive general audience have painted themselves and their institutions into a corner. So much cable television programming today -- documentaries on art, architecture, archaeology, history, astronomy, zoology and botany on Discovery, Bravo, the Arts & Entertainment Network and the History and Learning channels -- is far more informative and culturally central than what has come out of the amorally cliquish, pseudo-leftist campus humanities centers in the past 25 years.

What's vitally needed is more searching attention by the major media to the terrible problems in higher education. Northeastern journalists have effectively conspired to protect the commercial value of their and their children's pricey Ivy League degrees. American academe is big business. But the cartel can't be busted by Marxism, which reduces life to bleak materiality and Darwinian economics. Educators must recover their higher motivation, a spirituality that comes from faith not in religion but in civilization, humanity's sanctuary from the cruel vortex of nature.
SALON | Jan. 13, 1999

Got a question for Camille Paglia? Send it to Camille on Campus.