Essay Introduction

In "Education for 1984," Arthur E. Bestor, Jr. critiques the trend in American public schools toward "life-adjustment education" at the expense of disciplined intellectual training. Drawing a parallel to the enslaved minds in George Orwell's 1984, Bestor argues that the destruction of scholarly disciplines—history, science, mathematics, and language—leaves citizens defenseless against complex modern problems. He attacks the "educational bureaucracy" for promoting trivialities like "social skills" and "hobbies" over fundamental knowledge, warning that this anti-intellectualism threatens the survival of civilization. Bestor concludes that the primary responsibility of education is to produce disciplined minds capable of independent, accurate thinking.

Education for 1984

by Arthur E. Bestor, Jr.

NO belief is more firmly held in the United States than belief in education. But belief is not enough. We must understand education as well as believe in it. The thing that counts, after all, is not the number of schoolrooms we have, but what goes on in them.

Our civilization requires of every man and woman a variety of complex skills which rest upon the power to read, write, and calculate, and upon sound knowledge of science, history, economics, and other fundamental disciplines. Intellectual training is essential for the survival of our civilization, because civilization itself has been built by intellectual effort.

Consider how the disciplines of science and learning came into being. The world is first known to us—and was to mankind—as a great tangle of confused perceptions. Before man can deal with it at all, he must differentiate one experience from another; and he must discover relationships among them: similarity and diversity, cause and effect, and the like. Gradually he discovers that one kind of relationship can best be investigated in one way (by controlled experiment, it may be), and another in another way (by the critical study of written records or of fossil remains, perhaps). Thus the separate disciplines were born, not out of arbitrary invention, but out of evolving experience. Trial and error, prolonged over centuries, has resulted in the perfecting of these tools of investigation. The methods can be systematized and taught; hence the intellectual power that mankind has accumulated throughout its entire history can be passed on to successive generations. Thereby each generation is enabled to master the new environment and the new conditions of life that surround it.

Enslaving Men's Minds

In that terrifying novel by George Orwell, 1984, the Party of Big Brother developed the ultimate in ruthless dictatorship precisely because it devised the means of enslaving men's minds. It began by undermining the discipline of history, setting all men adrift in a world where past experience became meaningless. It continued by undermining the discipline of language, debasing speech until it could no longer be the vehicle of independent thought. And the crowning triumph of its torture chambers was the undermining of the disciplines of logic and mathematics, by which it finally brought its victims not only to assert but actually to believe that two plus two equals five.

As yet, fortunately, it is only through fantasy that we can see what the destruction of the scholarly and scientific disciplines would mean to mankind. From history, we can learn what their existence has meant. The sheer power of disciplined thought is revealed in practically all the great intellectual and technological advances which the human race has made. The ability of the man of disciplined mind to direct this power effectively upon problems for which he was not specifically trained is proved by examples without number. This ability to solve new problems by using the accumulated intellectual power of the race is mankind's most precious possession. To transmit this power of disciplined thinking is the primary and inescapable responsibility of education.

A Concept Repudiated

The concept of education that I have just stated is not guiding the American public schools today. An alarming number of professional educators—school superintendents, professors of education, and members of the state educational bureaucracies—have repudiated it in favor of something which is apt to be called "life-adjustment education." As an example, let us examine a study sponsored by the superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, looking toward the reorganization of the public-school curriculum in that state. Its starting point is a document entitled Problems of High School Youth, prepared by a professor of education. Questionnaires based upon it have been widely circulated, and the answers are supposed to "be helpful in 'engineering' an improved, broadly based consensus regarding what the local high school should be doing for its students."

The first thing that strikes one on reading the list of problems is the grotesque disproportion among the different matters presented. Trivia are elaborated beyond all reason, and substantial matters are lumped together in a very small number of separate items, thus reducing them to relative insignificance in the whole. Among the 55 points are these: "the problem of improving one's personal appearance," "the problem of selecting a 'family dentist' and acquiring the habit of visiting him systematically," "the problem of developing one or more 'making things,' 'making it go,' or 'tinkering' hobbies," and "the problem of developing and maintaining wholesome boy-girl relationships." Not a whit more weight or emphasis is placed upon the following, each of which constitutes but a single point among the 55: "the problem of acquiring the ability to distinguish right from wrong and to guide one's actions accordingly," "the problem of acquiring the ability to study and help solve economic, social, and political problems," and "the problem of making one's self a well-informed and sensitive 'citizen of the world.'"

No Place For Disciplines

Needless to say, the scholarly and scientific disciplines have no place among these "real-life problems." Arithmetic has sometimes been considered of importance; but, although "athletic games," "camping," "collecting art objects, etc." and "doing parlor stunts" are mentioned by name, each in a separate item of the list of 55, not one of the branches of mathematics is even hinted at. The word "science" occurs nowhere in the list, nor any term synonymous with it or descriptive of its various branches. That history and foreign languages are absent, even by remotest implication, goes without saying.

If these basic things are left out, how can we possibly rely on the educators' vague promise that they will deal effectively with "the problem of acquiring the ability to study and help solve economic, social, and political problems"? The question for the educator is not whether the school should do anything in the matter, but how. The traditional curriculum offered a clear-cut answer: through careful and systematic study of history, political science, philosophy, economics, sociology, and other relevant disciplines. The aim was to cultivate sound judgment based upon critical thinking and thorough knowledge. To the new pedagogical medicine man, however, all this is sheer pedantry, just as bacteriology is so much learned nonsense to the happy faith healer.

Short Cut To Wisdom

Political, economic, and social problems that have taxed the intelligence of the best-educated men from antiquity to the present are to be solved, so the educator blithely assures us, through a "common learnings course" in the high school, wherein "materials from science, literature, history, mathematics, industrial education, homemaking, business education, art, music, and all other areas of the curriculum would be included."

We must not detain him to ask for proof that his short cut to wisdom will actually produce it. After all, he has 54 other problems to wrestle with; and he must hasten on to the next—"the problem of acquiring the ability to select and enjoy good motion pictures," perhaps, or "the problem of acquiring the social skills of dancing, playing party games, doing parlor stunts, etc."

If men and women prefer the latter things to intellectual training, the educator will argue, should they not have them? The question is really irrelevant; for the questionnaires do not provide, and cannot provide, one iota of evidence that the public is making any such choice. The most damning part of the whole study is that the questionnaires used are patently dishonest. They purport to ask parents, citizens, teachers, and pupils what they "think is the job of the secondary school." But the persons questioned are not permitted to give the slightest indication that they believe the job of the secondary school is to give intellectual training.

In the entire battery of questionnaires, there is not a single blank that one can check in order to express the view that the schools should offer sound training in mathematics, in natural science, in grammar and composition, in foreign languages, or in history. The citizen may respond in the negative to every question implying the substitution of frivolous aims, but he cannot indicate in any manner whatever the kind of positive program he would favor. The questionnaires are so rigged that the results are predetermined from the beginning. However overwhelming the public sentiment in favor of disciplined intellectual training may be, the professor of education who constructed the questionnaires has taken care that this sentiment shall not appear anywhere in the answers.

An "Engineered" Consensus

The Follow-Up Study is not an attempt to ascertain public opinion; it is a cynical effort to manipulate public opinion. It is obviously designed to manufacture the appearance of public support for curricular changes that professional educators have determined upon in advance.

This purpose comes out stark and clear in the official statements explaining the questionnaires: "Given the American tradition of the local lay-control of public education, it is both necessary and desirable that a community (patron, pupils, teachers) consensus be engineered in understanding support of the necessary changes before they are made." I find difficulty in following some of the involved syntax of this sentence, but I have no difficulty whatever in grasping the significance of a "consensus" that is to be "engineered." We approach here the real meaning of what these educators euphemistically describe as "democracy in education." It is the democracy of the "engineered" consensus.

The lighthearted prospectus of these curriculum engineers contains this exhortation: "There are many ways of getting under way in a program of curriculum revision. The important thing is that we need to pry ourselves loose from the present situation. Maybe one lever will do the prying loose; perhaps, it may require several. . . . Pick your lever(s) and let's get started." The metaphor is apt. The kind of lever that one uses for prying things loose is sold in hardware stores as a wrecking-bar.

Prying The Schools Loose

Pry loose from what? The answer is implicit in the entire program. The secondary school curriculum must be pried loose from the established disciplines of science and scholarship. The public school must be pried loose from its relationship to institutions of higher learning. College entrance requirements are a thorn in the side of this public school directorate, for they give some support, feeble though it may be, to intellectual training in the secondary schools. To deal with this menace to "real-life" education, it is recommended "that the colleges adopt admission policies which do not specify the courses the students are to take in high school." College entrance requirements in the basic intellectual disciplines of "English, foreign language, mathematics, science, and social studies" are "particularly limiting for smaller schools." These, alas, cannot afford to offer both the fundamental courses that scientists, scholars, and citizens believe in, and also the gilded fripperies after which the new pedagogues hanker. College entrance requirements must go, so that the schools may be free to eliminate intellectual training.

The Three R's Outmoded

Uncontrolled discretion will at last be vested in up-to-date school administrators like the author of the following remarks, which were addressed to the National Association of Secondary-School Principals and published in its official proceedings:

"Through the years we've built a sort of halo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We've said they were for everybody . . . rich and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally endowed, ones who liked them and those who failed to go for them. Teacher has said that these were something 'everyone should learn.' The principal has remarked, 'All educated people know how to write, spell, and read.' When some child declared a dislike for a sacred subject, he was warned that, if he failed to master it, he would grow up to be a so-and-so.

"The Three R's for All Children, and All Children for the Three R's! That was it.

"We've made some progress in getting rid of that slogan. But every now and then some mother with a Phi Beta Kappa award or some employer who has hired a girl who can't spell stirs up a fuss about the schools . . . and ground is lost. . . .

"When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and spell . . . that many of them either cannot or will not master these chores . . . then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum.

"Between this day and that a lot of selling must take place. But it's coming. We shall some day accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that each girl shall spell well than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie. . . .

"When adults finally realize that fact, everyone will be happier . . . and schools will be nicer places in which to live. . . .

"If and when we are able to convince a few folks that mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic is not the one road leading to happy, successful living, the next step is to cut down the amount of time and attention devoted to these areas in general junior high-school courses. . . .

"One junior high in the East has, after long and careful study, accepted the fact that some twenty per cent of their students will not be up to standard in reading . . . and they are doing other things for these boys and girls. That's straight thinking. Contrast that with the junior high which says, 'Every student must know the multiplication tables before graduation.'

"Such a requirement attaches more importance to those tables than I'm willing to accord them."

These professional educators are fond of talking about the complexity of modern problems. They speak oracularly of "education for the atomic age." And this is how they propose to train citizens to cope with the vast technical questions that are posed by science, by an intricate industrial system, and by international anarchy. After nine full years of formal schooling, a student need not be expected to read his native language or to know the multiplication table. And in college, according to another proposal, he is doing well if he can "read long numbers and ... round them off."

The Source Of These Ideas

Where did these preposterous ideas come from? Who originated them, and who is propagating them? They are obviously not the ideas of scientists, scholars, and professional men. The evidence that the public supports them is manufactured evidence. Under compulsion from their administrative superiors, a few public-school teachers have given approval; but a number of able and courageous classroom teachers are expressing the sense of outrage that vast numbers of their intimidated colleagues undoubtedly feel. None of these groups can be held responsible for the anti-intellectualism that is wrecking our schools.

Given the size and complexity of the American public-school system, the existence of a vast educational bureaucracy is unavoidable. Into it have rushed the "experts" from state departments of education and colleges of education, the curriculum doctors, the integrators, the indoctrinators—the specialists in know-how rather than in knowledge. Out of their overflowing minds, they have offered to furnish ready-made a philosophy to guide the entire educational system.

They are glad to point out to the teachers—whom they treat as dullards—the relationships that exist among the great fields of knowledge. They are happy to draw the really vital generalizations from the data which grubbers in laboratories and libraries have so obligingly collected. All that teachers need do is teach what they are told to teach. All that scientists and scholars need do is supply little facts to fill up the blanks in the great schemata which the educators have devised. "We have decided to teach a unit on industrialism," they say to the scholars. "Will you as a historian assist us by telling us who invented the power loom? And will you as a scientist show us how to connect up a buzzer?"

The Education Of An Educator

Consider for a moment the training and qualifications of the men who have seized this stranglehold upon American intellectual life. Ordinarily, the professional educator does not hold an advanced degree in any one of the established scholarly disciplines, but merely in the teaching of them, or in the supervising and administering of school systems. His training in the various parts of his omnibus field has been kept to a bare minimum, in order that he may take full advantage of the rich variety of courses offered by the training schools of education: "Supervision in Home Economics Education," "Public School Business Management," "Elementary School Core Programs."

Throughout his entire career, such a professional educator can have only the most fleeting glimpse of the great world of science and learning. At worst, he may have no contact with it at all. His first 12 years of schooling may be in a system run by these educators. His undergraduate work may be done in a normal school or teachers' college, dominated again by these educators. If he is fortunate enough to receive his undergraduate training in a college of liberal arts, teacher certification requirements may reach out to thwart him, diverting his effort to pedagogical trivialities at the very moment when he is ready to buckle down to serious advanced work in one of the disciplines. His graduate work is directed by professors of education, most of it in courses labeled "Education." His professional life is apt to be lived in close association with this educational bureaucracy and in an environment that is almost completely isolated from the realms of scientific and scholarly research and higher learning.

An Educational Iron Curtain

Across the educational world today stretches the iron curtain that these professional educators have fashioned. Behind it, in virtual slave-labor camps, are classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the hither side lies the free world of science and learning, menaced, but not yet conquered. This division is the great reality that every citizen must recognize and understand. Such a subversion of American intellectual life is possible because the first 12 years of formal schooling (from the elementary grades through the high school) are likely to have fallen under the policy-making control of those who have no real place in—who do not respect, and whose learning is not respected by—the world of science, of scholarship, and of the learned professions.

There are notable exceptions, of course, but professors of education as a group have sold their position in the learned world for a partnership in the public-school directorate. They serve their partners faithfully, laboring assiduously to enhance the power of the educational bureaucracy and to free it from the last vestige of responsibility to the world of science and learning. In return, the public-school directorate renders valuable assistance to departments and colleges of education in building up their empires within the universities. Teacher certification requirements, fixed by the state's educational bureaucracy, insure a steady flow of students through the courses given by professors of education. Experienced teachers who return to the university for advanced work are all but compelled by their administrative superiors to take that work, not in the subjects they are teaching, but in endless courses in pedagogy. A ludicrous inflation of departments of education results from this ingenious protective tariff.

If the workings of this great public-school directorate are called in question at any point, an "educational survey" can be initiated, and the educators then cheerfully investigate each other, like a treasurer auditing his own books.

Objective Of Education

The disciplined mind is what education at every level should strive to produce. And the years from six to eighteen are the years in which young men and women must learn to think clearly and accurately if they are to learn to think at all. Command of written English, foreign languages, and mathematics—to say nothing of the abstract processes of analyzing, generalizing, and criticizing—cannot be acquired in a year or two when a student or a citizen suddenly finds himself in desperate need of them. The seed must be planted at the beginning and cultivated continuously if the crop is to be ready when it is required. And these intellectual abilities are required, not merely as a prerequisite for advanced study, but also and especially for intelligent participation in the private and public affairs of a world where decisions must be made on the basis of informed and accurate thinking about science, about economics, about history and politics.

The real evidence for the value of liberal education lies where educational testers and questionnaire-makers refuse to seek it, in history and in the biographies of men who have met the valid criteria of greatness. These support overwhelmingly the claim of liberal education that it can equip a man with fundamental powers of decision and action, applicable not only to boy-girl relationships, to tinkering hobbies, or to choosing the family dentist, but also to all the great and varied concerns of human life—not least, those which are unforeseen.

About the Author

Arthur E. Bestor, Jr. is a lecturer and presently professor of history at the University of Illinois. "Education for 1984," a condensation of his "Aimlessness in Education," first appeared in The Scientific Monthly, August, 1952. This condensation was published by the Foundation in 1953.

Attribution

Bestor, Arthur E., Jr. "Education for 1984." In Essays on Liberty, Vol. 2, 380-394. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1954.