UNEDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY
Mark Steyn says America
is strong and rich enough to survive its politics and schools
New Hampshire AMERICA spends more per pupil on edu- cation than any other major industrial democracy. And that's not just because the weekly schoolyard massacres are doing such a great job keeping classroom sizes down. No, these figures come from the start of term: for example, US primary schools spend $5,300 per pupil, compared with an average for member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development of $3,033. So what does America get in return for this investment in the future? Well, to put it in a nutshell, American students are now statistically the dumbest in the industrial world. According to the most recent sur- veys, they're just about holding their own with Cyprus. For those Spectator readers who are American college graduates, Cyprus is a small island in the Mediter- ranean, population 745,000, principal crops grain, grapes, carobs, citrus fruits, olives.
On the other hand, America's economy is the strongest in the world, the Dow Jones index has blasted through the 9000 barrier and unemployment is, to all intents and purposes, statistically irrelevant. In my Own part of the country, where there's no industry except logging, dairy farming and a couple of hospitals, it's down to 1.8 per cent. Allowing for the statistical margin of error, this means DeeDee has quit her job at the feed store and is taking a couple of weeks off before starting at the hair salon. S0 America's getting richer. And the richer it gets, the more it can spend on education. And the more it spends on edu- cation, the dumber it gets. And the dumb- er it gets, the richer it gets. Ignorance has never been such bliss. On present projec- tions, at some point around the year 2020 American teachers will be earning a mil- lion per annum, American college students Will be unable to count their toes and the Dow will be on the moon. This rosy prog- nosis was confirmed by the Common- wealth of Massachusetts' very first basic reading-and-writing test — not for pupils, but for teachers. The legislature passed a )11 mandating 'standardised examination' for teachers in 1985, but, with the insou- ciance for which the educational establish- ment is renowned, somehow it took 13 years for the first test to be administered. Educators were asked to define what a noun is and spell words like 'imminent'. When the results came in, 59 per cent had failed. Confronted by this unnerving fig- ure, the Massachusetts Board of Educa- tion reached an immediate decision: they lowered the bar. Instead of accepting C as a passing grade, the board voted to accept D. That meant that — hey presto! — sud- denly only 44 per cent had failed. Board members said they'd voted to lower the threshold partly to prevent lawsuits from the failures for loss of self-esteem, etc.: as Shaw said, he who can, does; he who can- not, sues.
Despite the sterling example of Mas- sachusetts' teachers, President Clinton is urging us not to be complacent. He's not satisfied with the American education sys- tem. He thinks every child should be able to go to college. As things stand, only 24 per cent of Americans are university grad- uates, most of them, in my experience, being Doctors of Conflict Resolution Stud- ies and Bachelors of Queer Theory. Nonetheless, America already has, per capita, two-and-a-half times as many uni- versity graduates as France, Germany, Britain and Spain. Its college population is twice the size of its high-school population, mainly due to the fact that academic courses such as 'Towards a Feminist Alge- bra' are so rigorous that to complete a bachelor's degree now takes on average 6.29 years.
His dad's sperm was frozen.' But if, as the statistics would indicate, American stupidity is crucial to American success, then the President's strategy is sound. According to that OECD data, the longer American children are exposed to American teachers, the more birdbrained they become. Kindergarteners can just about compete with their opposite numbers in western Europe. But by middle school forget it. In a survey of 17 OECD mem- bers, Americans made less progress in mathematics between the fourth and eighth grades than any other nation. Hence the President's ingenious plan: keep America's boneheads in school for another seven years or so and there's no telling how low they'll go. Forget Cyprus, we'll be down there with Chad! (For those Spectator read- ers who are Massachusetts high-school geography teachers, Chad's a republic in north-central Africa, adult literacy rate 17 per cent.) President Clinton has said he wants to be remembered as 'the education President', but fortunately no one believes him. Otherwise, America might end up like France — with an internationally admired school system, and an unemployment rate of 12 per cent. So, while French children have their heads down at the baccalaureat, American kids have their heads down at the back o' Dunkin' Donuts.
Incredible as it seems, without French assistance the American Revolution might have failed. As the first 'American century' draws to a close, the French must some- times wonder what on earth they were thinking of. Indeed, in so far as there's any animating force behind the rush to Euro- pean union, it's not economic but cultural: the feeling that the world is entitled to an alternative to the American model. The trouble is, there isn't one. The Europeans complain about unrestrained Anglo-Saxon `jungle capitalism'. Yet EU labour regula- tions and social costs have given companies every incentive not to hire full-time employees: France is now the land of the casual, responsible all by itself for 30 per cent of the world's temp market. By con- trast, the American worker is offered signa- ture bonuses just to entice him to take a full-time job. The only recent challenger to American hegemony — the Lee Kuan Yew form of Asian capitalism — has taken a battering in recent months from which its reputation is unlikely to recover. Of course, there's always China, though that raises the perennial question: can you have a success- ful market economy without democracy?
Well, maybe. After all, look at America. In the 1996 presidential election, record sums of money were spent by candidates, parties, unions, special interest groups and dodgy Chinamen to entice voters into the polling booth; an extra five million citizens had been registered to vote, thanks partly to the 'motor voter' law which allows you to register when you go for your driver's licence; the Immigration and Naturalisa- tion Service had hustled through citizen- ship papers for thousands of aliens, many of them convicted felons; in close races in the South-west, many foreigners were brought to the polls to vote illegally. And yet, despite the funny money, the motor voters and the foreign felons, turnout on the big day was the lowest since 1924 the year that women got the vote, suddenly boosted the number of eligible electors but declined in large part to show up; if you discount that blip, the 1996 election had the lowest turnout since 1824.
For this November's congressional elec- tions, it's expected to fall lower still. According to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, participation in state primaries this year has been the lowest ever. How low can they go? The Republican base is badly disillusioned, and, whatever the opinion polls say, so are the Democrats. My neighbour Matt, who headed the Clinton/Gore campaign in my town in 1996, has given up on politics com- pletely; so has his mom, a lifetime Demo- cratic activist disgusted by her party. For the first time ever, participation in a national election could fall below 30 per cent.
But there's the real reason President Clinton's 'numbers' have held up even as his pants have collapsed: few Americans feel betrayed by him, because so few have any personal investment in him. In 1996, 48 per cent of eligible electors voted, of whom 49 per cent cast their votes for Bill Clinton. Take away 49 per cent of 48 per cent of eligible electors from the general population, and you're left with about 216 million people who didn't vote for Clinton. They didn't care enough to vote for him; so why should they care whether he has sex with interns?
American politics is like American edu- cation: more and more money is being pumped in to less and less effect. Just a month ago, the former chairman of North- west Airlines, Al Checchi, spent a record $40 million of his own money trying to win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California. That's right: he blew 40 mil- lion bucks not trying to win the election, just the nomination for the right to fight the election. Instead, he got whipped.
Forty million: that's a little under two dollars per eligible voter. In theory, Al and his lieutenants could have called up every California resident and had a half-hour phone conversation explaining Al's posi- tion on taxes, education and so on. But nobody spends $40 million in order to speak to voters. Instead, Al hired two hot- shot Washington political consultants, Robert Shrum and Mark Penn, who advised him to spend his dough on attack ads denouncing his opponents as career politicians. This makes sense from Shrum and Penn's point of view: political consul- tants collect commissions of 10 to 15 per cent from agencies with whom they place television commercials. So they have no reason whatsoever to tell Al he should get a campaign bus and ride around Bakers- field kissing babies. Unfortunately, televi- sion is, in political terms, a passive medi- um: attack ads may increase your name recognition, but only among 300-lb lard- butts who can barely get off the couch and down to the voting booths. Poor old Al. He was winning until he brought the pro- fessionals in.
It's nothing to do with ease of registra- tion: 'motor voters', it turned out, were just looking for a driver's licence after all; they don't want to vote; they're principled apathetics who have concluded that, in the hands of Shrum and Penn, American poli- tics has degenerated into a private game between remote elites. Voter participation and educational performance are two of the traditional yardsticks for measuring the health of a democracy, but the incredible amounts of money squandered in both fields testify rather to the extraordinary resilience of America and its astonishing economic success: it can afford to indulge these wastrels. In any case, a citizen is more than a voter. Since 1980, the number of Americans serving with voluntary organisations, charities and social assis- tance groups has risen from 30 per cent to more than half. That tells you more about a nation's civic health than how many peo- ple can be bothered to turn up to choose between Clinton and Dole.
Besides, when electors can make the connection between local taxes and expen- diture, democracy usually reasserts itself — even in education. Last year, the state of Vermont came up with Act 60, a crazy system of education-funding 'equalisation' which attempted, in the interests of 'fair- ness', to restrict how much each town can spend on its school. The canny citizens of little Winhall thought about it and came up with an inspired revenge: they voted four-to-one to shut down their public school and reopen it as a private academy for the town's children, thereby at a stroke wriggling free of the bureaucratic burdens of the state. If the French are wondering why the future still belongs to the crass and vulgar Americans, there's the reason: Vi!' the relative inability of the national flim- flam — the $40 million of asinine attack ads — to impose on local resourcefulness. Alas, in the EU there are no such safety- valves.
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