The question that was fluttering the pundits was “Who will
win Ohio?” I presume that the
results of “Super Tuesday” mean that we can start waving goodbye to Newt Gingrich and Rick
Santorum, though we’ll have to wait until November to say goodbye to Mitt
Romney. It’s been a real squeaker,
but the Republicans, against daunting odds, have managed to pluck defeat from
the jaws of victory. Mr. Santorum
self-destructed just before the Michigan primary when a series of merely
unusually bizarre statements encouraged the press to dig out some of his really bizarre statements of yesteryear. It turns out there is no operative policy
of Too Weird to Fail. Who knew?
One
of his Parthian shots related to a subject I actually know something about,
higher education. Mr. Santorum,
who has two postgraduate degrees, said that President Obama is a snob (indeed,
“What a snob!”) for saying that all Americans should go to college. President Obama never said that, but what
people actually say has so little to do with the spirit of this campaign that
the issue seldom arises. The
President has suggested, several
times, that Higher Education is a good thing, and some of his followers are now
talking about it as a “right”. So
the question is worth considering. Would universal higher education be good for
America? I don’t think so.
Among
the legends of bureaucratic inanity is the story of a European governmental
commission tasked, early in the twentieth century, with investigating an
alarming rise in railway accident deaths. Statistical
analysis revealed that most people killed in train accidents had been sitting
in the last car of the train. The
recommendation of the commission was simplicity itself. Just remove the last car from every train!
Agitation
for a “right” to universal higher education here is of similar inanity. What do you do if the last car in the
train of your public education system—that would be public high school, if you
grasp my allegory—what do you do if this car keeps derailing? I would respectfully suggest that what
you do not do is add another car.
Our
high schools are a mess—not all of them, of course, but far too many. The mess is not one that governmental
policy has directly created, nor one the federal government can directly
address effectively. While American
public education is a somewhat more relevant topic for discussion in a
presidential race than contraception, it’s on the same continuum. And before the educational crisis can
be addressed, it has to be convincingly identified. If secondary education is broken, we need to try to fix
secondary education, not winch the problem up to higher ground. A generic high school diploma that
cannot guarantee so much as real literacy is worthless as a professional
credential; but the diploma was not always worthless.
The
notion of universal public education financed by the public purse is based in a
forgotten contract. Citizens of
the Republic have an obligation to become active contributors to its social health
and vigor. The Republic has the
responsibility to provide its citizens with with the opportunity to gain certain fundamental skills of
citizenship. But that forgotten
contract was itself founded on something yet more forgotten: the assumption
that the young would be prepared for their state education and supported in its
pursuit within the context of a wholesome and caring household.
There
is a good deal of outrage about what has followed in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s “Citizens United” decision—to wit, torrents of fat-cat money mainly
used to finance thirty-second political attack ads on television. I share the outrage, but if we need to
be protected against our own freedom I’d first look elsewhere. I have heard no outrage, none, that
even without the Supreme Court we seem content to have an electorate that casts
its votes on the basis of an education gained in the commercial breaks of
televised athletic matches.
The
latest in our endless series of school massacres was perpetrated by a certain
T. J. Lane, aged 17, in the high school at Chardon, OH. I don’t know what courses Mr. Lane or
his victims had been pursuing. Not
long ago, however, I read the beautifully written memoirs of General William
Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman, who you
will recall really won Georgia, was
born in 1820 in Lancaster, near Columbus, when Ohio was still largely
wilderness. When he was five he
entered the school there, a school like most in the early Republic
entrepreneurially established by one educated man or woman who was often the
entire faculty.
Sherman wrote: “I continued at the Academy
in Lancaster, which was the best in the place, indeed as good as any school in
Ohio. We studied all the common
branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.” That was when he was eleven or twelve
years old. At sixteen he left to
become a cadet at the Military Academy.
“During the autumn of 1835 and the spring of 1836 I devoted myself
chiefly to mathematics and French, which were known to be the chief
requirements for admission to West Point.” How many high school students today devote themselves
“chiefly” to anything taxing and academic? The relevant question about Ohio might be who lost it?
