Lasch—Educating the Whole Child

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[128] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.

...

[132] Beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, the immigration of politically backward elements, as they were commonly regarded, sharpened the fear...that the United States would regress to a hated old-world pattern of class conflict, hereditary poverty, and political despotism. ... From this time on, the problem of acculturating the immigrant population never wandered far from the center of the American educational enterprise. ...[hence] the American school, in contrast to the European, placed heavy emphasis on the nonacademic side of the curriculum. The democratic aim of bringing the fruits of modern culture to the masses gave way in practice to a concern with education as a form of social control. ...

[133] The differences between American and European systems of public education [however] should not be exaggerated. ... Both systems from the beginning thus combined democratic and undemocratic features; as the political objectives of public education gave way to a growing preoccupation with industrial objectives, the undemocratic features became more and more pronounced.
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[134] Manpower training bore the same relation to "industrial discipline" in Veblen's sense that political indoctrination—"training for citizenship," as it now came to be called—bore to political "initiation." Both innovations represented debased versions of democratic practice, attractive to those who resented what they regarded as the school's overemphasis on "culture." Both reforms belonged to a broader movement to make the school more "efficient." [e.g. especially] In response to a public outcry about the high rate of academic failure in the schools, an outcry that swelled to a chorus around 1910...

[135] Protests against genteel culture, overemphasis on academic subjects, "gentleman's education," and the "cultured ease in the classroom, of drawing room quiet and refinement," frequently coincided with an insistence that higher education and "culture" should not in any case be "desired by the mob."

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[135] Under favorable conditions, the school's emphasis on "Americanism" and its promotion of universal norms had a liberating effect, helping individuals to make a fruitful break with parochial ethnic traditions. Recent criticism of the school [which]...partakes of the prevailing sentimentality about ethnicity...deplores the disintegration of folk culture and pays no attention to the degree to which disintegration was often the price paid for intellectual emancipation. When Randolph Bourne...extolled cultural pluralism, he had in mind as a model not the intact immigrant cultures of the ghettos but the culture of the twice-uprooted immigrant intellectuals he met at Columbia.

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[136] As educators convinced themselves, with the help of intelligence tests, that most of the students could never master an academic curriculum, they found it necessary to devise other ways of keeping them busy. The introduction of courses in homemaking, health, citizenship, and other nonacademic subjects, together with the proliferation of athletic programs and extracurricular activities, reflected the dogma that schools had to educate the "whole child"; but it also reflected the practical need to fill up the students' time and to keep them reasonably contented. ...

Educational reformers brought the family's work into the school in the hope of making the school an instrument not merely of education but of socialization as well. Dimly recognizing that
[137]
in many areas—precisely those that lie outside the formal curriculum—experience teaches more than books, educators then proceeded to do away with books; to import experience into the academic setting, to re-create the modes of learning formerly associated with the family, to encourage students to "learn by doing." Having imposed a deadening academic curriculum on every phase of the child's experience, they demanded, too late, that education be brought into contact with "life."

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[142] Conflicts over educational policy in the fifties had made it clear that the country faced a choice between basic education for all and a complicated educational bureaucracy that functioned as an agency of manpower selection. The same issue, often clouded by overheated rhetoric, underlay the more bitter struggles of the sixties and seventies. For black people, especially for upwardly
[143]
mobile blacks in whom the passion for education burns as brightly as it ever did in descendants of the Puritans or in Jewish immigrants, desegregation represented the promise of equal education in the basic subjects indispensible to economic survival even in an otherwise illiterate modern society: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Black parents, it would seem, clung to what seems today an old-fashioned—from the point of view of educational "innovators," a hopelessly reactionary—conception of education. According to this supposedly traditional view, the school functions best when it transmits the basic skills on which literate societies depend, upholds high standards of academic excellence, and sees to it that students make these standards their own. The struggle for desegregated schooling implied an attack not only on racial discrimination but on the proposition, long embedded in the practice of the schools, that academic standards are inherently elitist and that universal education therefore requires the dilution of standards—the downward adjustment of standards to class origins and social expectations. The demand for desegregation entailed more than a renewed committment to equal opportunity; it also entailed a repudiation of cultural separatism and a belief that access to common cultural traditions remained the precondition of advancement for dispossessed groups.

Thouroughly middle-class in its ideological derivation, the movement for equal education nevertheless embodied demands that could not be met without a radical overhaul of the entire educational system—and of much else besides. It flew in the face of long-established educational practice. It contained implications unpalatable not merely to entrenched educational bureaucrats but to progressives, who believed that education had to be tailored to the "needs" of the young, that overemphasis on academic subjects inhibited "creativity," and that too much stress on academic competition encouraged individualism at the expense of cooperation. The attempt to revive basic education, on the part of blacks and other minorities, cut across the grain of educational experimentation...

[145] In the long run, it does not matter to the victims whether bad teaching justifies itself on the reactionary grounds [of racism]...or whether, on the other hand, pseudoradicals condemn academic standards as part of the apparatus of white cultural control... The whole problem of American education comes down to this: in American society, almost everyone identifies intellectual excellence with elitism. This attitude not only guarantees the monopolization of educational advantages by the few; it lowers the quality of elite education itself and threatens to bring about a reign of universal ignorance.

It's awfully tough to track down the real reasons why almost everyone feels a certain way, but this does seem to be true, and so one can't help but wonder if it itself cannot be traced to some lower-order, isolable phenomena. Organic resentment at individual achievement seems a strong candidate! That kind of resentment is very much a product of individualism per se; one of individualism's unintended consequences, perhaps. So, while I'm hardly ready to dispense with individualism or with democracy, there is even so, I think, a very curious case study waiting to be made as to whether this antielite resentment, if that's what it is, is inflamed by equal opportunity (as opposed to a true caste system or something) even as a certain justice is better served thereby.

Failing all of that (and I guess let's hope so?), perhaps our abiding antielitism is just a longstanding cultural trait/tendency that needs to be gently but firmly countervailed by sensitive "elites" such as Lasch. Good luck impressing the above points upon your local pseudoradicals.

[148] the student movement [which sought, in the 1960s, an "accounting" of the university for itself] embodied a militant anti-intellectualism of its own, which corrupted and eventually absorbed it. Demand for the abolition of grades, although defended on grounds of high pedagogical principle, turned out in practice...to reflect a desire for less work and a wish to avoid judgment on its quality. The demand for more "relevant" courses often boiled down to a desire for an intellectually un-
[149]
demanding curriculum, in which students could win academic credits for political activism, self-expression, [etc.]...

In other words,

The liberal principle that everyone is the best judge of his own interests makes it impossible to ask what people need, as opposed to what they say they want.

(The True and Only Heaven, p. 209)

All the same with radicals, evidently, as with liberals.

Even when seriously advanced in opposition to sterile academic pedantry, the slogan of relevance embodied an underlying antagonism to education itself—an inability to take an interest in anything beyond immediate experience. Its popularity testified to the growing belief that education should be painless, free of tension and conflict. Those who interpreted "relevance" as a concerted academic assault on racism and imperialism, moreover, merely inverted the expansionism of university administrators. When they proposed to enlist the university on the side of social reform, they echoed the service ideal that justified the imperial expansion of the multiversity in the first place. Instead of trying to hold the university to a more modest set of objectives, radical critics of higher education accepted the premise that education could solve every sort of social problem.