Did our schools give rise to Donald Trump?
Through more than a half-century, American schools have been blamed for almost every major national problem, from the Russians’ success in beating us into space with Sputnik in 1957 to the nation’s perceived failure to match the apparent economic successes of the Germans and the Japanese in the 1980s.
If the schools didn’t shape up, according to Adm. Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the atomic submarine, the Russians would win the Cold War; if they didn’t shape up, according to an influential national report called “A Nation at Risk,” issued in 1983, the Germans and the Japanese would beat our economic brains out. “We have, in effect,” the report ominously warned, “been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”
Neither of these ChickenLittle warnings had much merit. We didn’t lose the Cold War. The Germans and Japanese didn’t beat our economic brains out.
But maybe the biggest educational shortcoming of the past 50 years has gotten almost no attention, and that’s the failure to adequately teach government, civics and history. Nearly four in 10 American adults, according to the latest polls, still support the presidency of a self-confessed sexual abuser, a chronic liar, an abettor of every form of bigotry, public corruption and violence. Millions still support politicians who work hard to deny the voting franchise to ethnic minorities and other opponents in their own communities. They watch with equanimity as the nation’s prestige and influence abroad, not long ago as great an element of our security as our military, are systematically undercut by the very people sworn to uphold them. They watch quietly as the courts, even the Supreme Court, are politicized.
How much do those millions of Americans know about our history, about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, about economics, about the great traditions of tolerance and justice that for more than two centuries made this nation a model for the world? Do they understand that it was America that created the great global institutions that have kept the nukes in their silos for nearly 75 years? Did they learn anything about the Marshall Plan that brought Western Europe back from the devastation of World War II and kept communism from sweeping through it?
Do they know that they’re all descendants of immigrants, the great majority of whom came before immigration documents were even required?
Do they know that in the past six years the increases in the number of the undocumented immigrants in this country weren’t driven by people sneaking across the Mexican border, but by those who came with visas that have since expired?
What did they learn in school? What did the schools not teach? Are we surprised when people deny the science of climate change and global warming when, according to Gallup, some 38 percent of us still reject Darwinian evolution?
No, not all of that can be blamed on the schools. The great industrial unions — the autoworkers, the steel workers, the mine workers, the garment workers, the communications workers — now badly reduced in their membership, once were also great teachers of democracy and great introductions to our democratic institutions.
Our media, the newspapers, the TV networks, most of them, once fostered and catered to national and local communities. They sought to appeal to the common elements in their viewers and their readers, sometimes at the cost of mind-numbing blandness. Some still do, but with ever smaller resources. The internet and so-called social media (really the anti-social media) — few of them with editors or fact checkers — foster and play to separatist subgroups of true believers. As such, they undercut whatever communitarian civic sense the schools still instill.
But the schools and the people who control and run them, both at the local and the state level, bear a good share of the responsibility. A century ago, though the schools were often segregated by race and class, as many still are, we celebrated them as engines of democracy, citizenship and civic virtue. In the years since, some state and local school boards suppressed the classroom reading of books that might challenge local prejudices or offend some group, even classics like “Huckleberry Finn” because it had the “Nword” in it.
More broadly, the “reforms” of the past decades emphasized reading and math, testing and the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects — fitting students for the economy, not for the arts, the humanities, and not for community and citizenship. We’re now paying the price.