Having made certain, that any moron can be graduated from a high school, they are now striving to make certain that every graduate will be a moron

Bestor - Restoration of Lenrning review by

Revilo Oliver:

In his new volume Bestor again suryeys modestly and dispassionately the present status of public education from the kinder-garden to the graduate school. It is a dismal and frightening story.

Although, he reminds us, there is no evidence whatsoever that anyone ever became a better teacher by subjecting himself to the tedium and hypocrisy of courses in the "science" of "education," the shamans long ago bamboozled the legislators of every state into granting them a virtual dictatorship over the elementary and secondary schools. They then proceeded, by terrorizing competent teachers and befuddling the public with their own brand of conjurer's jargon, to eliminate intellectual discipline from the teaching of the established subjects of study, thus degrading them to suit the mentality of nincompoops and the taste of louts. By this process the minds of intelligent children are, of course, debauched and crippled, and the result is that almost everywhere, as Bestor puts it, "the elementary and secondary schools are, with devastating success, killing off every budding intellectual interest." That goal attained, the professional boob-breeders are now suppressing even what was left of the usual curriculum, and are replacing all the normal subjects of instruction, from English to mathematics, with classes in "life adjustment" designed for the feeble-minded.

Having made certain, in other words, that any moron can be graduated from a high school, they are now striving to make certain that every graduate will be a moron. Some pupils, they recognize, have been denied the benefits of imbecility by birth; but strenuous application of modem techniques for twelve years should correct this deficiency. In the meantime the colleges imd themselves inundated by an ever-increasing horde of illiterates, and are desperately trying to provide the elements of a secondary education in "survey" or "remedial" courses - or are cynically consoling themselves with the reflection that anything that can stand on its hind legs long enough to receive an A.B. is worth at least two thousand bucks on the hoof (counting, of course, both what is collected as tuition and what is wheedled from alumni or legislators). The very thought of attracting another thousand head of customers suffices to make the ideals drool down the jaw of an ambitious diploma-peddler, and the land now resounds with singsong cries about "modern needs" and "wider opportunities". And finally, the corruption has inevitably spread to the graduate schools in some of which, at least, the highest academic degree, PhD, is now being sold to incompetents whom their examiners admit to be incapable of original investigation or even lucid thought, and who, often enough, cannot write a paragraph of correct, intelligible English.

The general accuracy of Professor Bestor's account of what has happened and what is happening cannot be disputed. But some readers, at least, will suspect that in one respect he has been less than fair to the self-appointed "educational experts." For, whether from courtesy or from a desire to delimit his subject, he avoids discussion of the experts' motives, and leaves it to be inferred that their activities have been largely or entirely instinctive, determined subconsciously by the blind forces of ignorance and greed.

It is a delicate and difficult question. When termites find lodgement in the beams of your house, they instinctively settle down to multiply and to exercise their mandibles; and when your piano descends suddenly to the basement, to speak of a conspiracy or even of a motive would be absurd. But the educationalists are, after all, human beings, and we are accustomed to think of human beings as acting with a rational purpose which may usually be deduced from the probable consequences of the act. When a man rolls a boulder onto a railway track, we infer that he intends to wreck a train, and we should be skeptical were he to assure us that, in the spirit of blithe experimentation which the pedagogues hold sacred, he merely wishes to ascertain whether railroads can be used as rock crushers. We cannot avoid, therefore, the question whether the educational Harpies, or at least the more intelligent among them, are not acting from rational motives and carrying out a consciously formulated plan.

To answer that question with certainty will be difficult, perhaps impossible. But once it is asked, one's mind is beset by a swarm of disturbingly suggestive recollections.

One remembers, for example, that in the palmy days in which Hitler and Roosevelt came to power, the educationalists of both countries were talking openly of using the schools to produce "a new social order". And was this not in some measure produced?

One remembers, furthermore, that the only perfect example of an educational system pragmatically operated to produce "life adjustment" is the one that now functions so successfully in Russia. And one vainly strives to discern a perceptible difference, other than in the jargon used as camouflage, between the announced objectives of the American educators and the avowed practice of their Soviet counterparts - or should we say colleagues?

The rational mind instinctively recoils from so sweeping a generalization, from so drastic a conclusion. But then one must ask onself, What other intelligible purpose can be served by systematically instilling into the adolescent mind contempt for the traditional culture of Western man? What results would a man expect to produce by inculcating the brutalizing doctrine that the intellectual, aesthetic and moral values which have always been the object of true learning are now the "snobbish relics" of a dead past, and that the true function of society is to satisfy the animal appetites of the proletarian? Would a man strive to produce boobs if he did not intend to have serfs?

These are questions which each of us must anxiously answer for himself. In fairness to the architects of the new "education," we must note that they - unanimously, I believe - protest they are not Communists, though some of them have only recently ceased to swing the censers before the shrine of St Marx, and that some have expressed mild disapproval of the thugs who succeeded Stalin. I wish we could find in these facts complete reassurance.

"Truth", said a noted educationalist to me one day with the iron dogmatism of his tribe, "must be Social Truth". "And what", I asked, "is Social Truth?" "It is", he said quite simply, "what it is expedient for a society to tell its members."