It is only recently, and only by hindsight, that we have been able to appreciate the enormous stresses imposed upon the schools in the immediate postwar era. The most visible of these was demographic in origin. There was an extraordinary increase in the number of youngsters to be educated, requiring a vast expansion of the public schools, and ultimately of the colleges and universities. That expansion was carried out remarkably well, or so it seems to me; there were strains, inevitably, but these were compensated for by a sort of euphoria about doing so much so energetically in so short a period of time—not merely the building of physical plant, but the recruitment and training of a large body of teachers and administrators. It was a euphoria that extended to the idea of education itself. Education came to be seen as a sort of universal solvent for the problems of the polity. The utopian tendencies in the American mind were to some large degree invested in the schools, in the notion of perfectibility through learning. As we shall see, there was to be a great fall, indeed one we are still witnessing; but I think it is fair to say that through most of the 1950’s the authority of the schools rested upon a sense of inner confidence—they believed in themselves because we believed in them, and we believed in them because they were the repository of so many of our fondest hopes, for ourselves, for our children, for the nation.

There were other outcomes of the demographic pressure, which we are just now beginning to understand and—ruefully—appreciate. One of these was the effect of generation size—that is, not merely the numbers involved in a generation, but its size relative to the total population. A baby-boom generation is a crowded one; economic and other opportunities are fewer, and more fiercely competed for. In the fullness of time, we see in that generation an increase in social pathology, and more specifically increases in the rate of suicide, homicide, delinquency, illegitimacy, alcoholism, and the like. That at least is the breathtakingly bold theory proposed recently by a number of economists and demographers, most forcefully by Richard Easterlin.¹ Whether or not the hypothesis is true—and we shall soon know, since it is a hypothesis that tests itself, and predicts that we should soon be seeing declines in these indices—the fact is that beginning in the 1960’s the schools found themselves confronting, rather suddenly, new and unexpected problems in discipline, in student motivation, and in collective morale. Perhaps one ought to stress how quickly it took place. As it happens, my three children, born five years apart, went to the same high school. The oldest tells me that he knew no one who used drugs; the second, two years younger, says that drugs were being used, but only by deviant youngsters, the emotionally troubled, and the socially outcast; the third, in school three years later, says that the occasional use of drugs was commonplace and that regular and heavy use was to be found among a substantial minority of his fellow students.

The size of the postwar generation had yet another effect which was not immediately evident. School systems enlarged, accelerating a long-standing tendency toward the consolidation of school districts. The figures are quite astonishing. In 1932 there were around 127,000 school districts in this country; now there are about 16,000.² There were many things at work in producing that attrition—the Conant Report on the high schools, published in 1959, placed a particular emphasis on the educational advantages of consolidation. The outcome was a substantial increase in system size, and with it, inevitably, a shift to bureaucratic modes of organization. That shift in turn brought with it a series of changes in the nature and practice of authority in the schools. The change was from traditional modes of authority—that is, direct and personal—to legal and contractual modes, in which the emphasis is placed upon conformity to rules and legal codes.³

The distinction between traditional and legalistic modes of authority is far from a new idea—in fact, it is a central concept in the writings of the pioneers of contemporary sociology, especially Max Weber. But the trend toward legalistic modes of authority, though discernible since at least the 19th century, was relatively slow in coming to the schools. When it did come, it could not have arrived at a less propitious time, at least so far as discipline was concerned. Just at the moment when social pathology was beginning its ominous rise, educators began to find themselves being buried in paper, and what was worse, constrained in the performance of disciplinary authority by increasingly complex regulations involving the rights of students, these in turn following upon court decisions which produced a widespread anxiety about litigation.

I remember quite vividly a sort of watershed event in my own experience of the schools, as a parent. This took place a little more than ten years ago. I attended what was advertised as an urgent meeting of the PTO at the junior high school my son attended. Arriving there, I learned that the meeting had been called to discuss some disturbing incidents taking place near the school; some of the older, roughneck children were bullying and extorting money from some of the younger children on the way to and from school. There had been many complaints from parents to the principal, but the answers had not been satisfactory. So the PTO had decided to make the issue public. A youngish assistant principal had been sent to calm the multitudes, and I have rarely seen anyone quite so unhappy—he stammered, he mumbled, he hemmed and hawed, he shifted from foot to foot, and his message to us was that they would do their best, but that probably not much could be done.

It was a long and rancorous meeting. The assistant principal, though defensive and embarrassed, provided us with a resumé of the legal education he had himself been receiving, at the hands of the police and of the school’s attorney. That course of instruction told him not what he could do, but all the many thing he could not do. The audience listened, incredulous, then angry and disgusted. At one point one parent shouted something to the effect that this would not have happened in the old days, and brought forth the name of a revered principal of the recent past, who had exercised a benign form of curbside justice. But those days were gone forever.

I do not want to sentimentalize the good old days, nor do I want to focus exclusively upon problems of discipline, important as they are—it is the leading complaint parents bring against the public schools. Yet we see in this example how forces and ideologies both extrinsic and alien to the schools and to education—in this case, the courts and the adversarial spirit—have begun to penetrate the practice of education in America, not only with regard to discipline, but in other realms of educational policy as well.

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Perhaps the most important source of the school’s diminished authority is the growth—I am tempted to say the cancerous growth—of judicial and bureaucratic intervention, generally at the federal level. The initial occasion was desegregation and racial equity in education; somewhat later, questions of sexual equality were addressed. Yet one now senses that these issues were used merely as pretexts, that a sort of iron law of federal expansiveness had come into play, which at this moment shows few signs of recession. It is an extremely troubling development, since neither the courts—given their adversarial style—nor the bureaucracies—given their tendency toward Byzantine inefficiency—are the appropriate forum for the discussion or the making of educational decisions.

Let me illustrate by an example close to home—and I mean that literally, since the case I have in mind took place in my own home town, Ann Arbor, and in fact in my own home neighborhood. I refer to the black English litigation. The case began when a group of radical activists, largely white, sued the school system on behalf of a group of black families. It was their claim that the poor academic progress of the children was due to the fact that their native language, so to speak, is black English, while instruction takes place in standard English, a language these children do not fully comprehend. As a solution, the teachers were to be trained to understand black English, and to respect its linguistic autonomy.

To anyone on the scene, the doctrine being proposed was not far from frivolous. Some of the children in question are from poor families. In at least some cases, family life is unstable and demoralized. School attendance is irregular, among other reasons because the families move so often (I am told, for example, that about half of the plaintiff families have already left the district). Given these circumstances, it is hard to imagine how language can be singled out as the prime reason for poor achievement. Nor is there any reason to believe that these youngsters do in fact speak black English exclusively, or cannot understand standard English. They watch television daily, they talk easily with white classmates; all those with direct and extensive experience with these youngsters report that black English is a variant dialect that can be turned on and off depending on circumstances, in much the same way that many middle-class Southern children learn to speak both standard English and “country,” and switch back and forth between the two depending on whom they are addressing.

Hence, there was no reason to believe that black English functioned as a foreign language, or that it acted as an impediment to learning. Nevertheless, a federal judge decided to hear the case, much to everyone’s surprise; and much to everyone’s astonishment he agreed with expert testimony that black English was linguistically a distinctive language, and hence a probable factor in the poor school performance of these youngsters. The remedy ordered was that the teachers be compelled to attend a series of lectures wherein they would be instructed on the linguistic merits and integrity of black English. That remedy has now been tested, and the results are precisely what our common sense would lead us to expect: it has not made the slightest difference in the achievement of the children. In short, the nullity of the outcome follows directly from the silliness of the suit, the foolishness of the judicial holding, and the fatuity of the remedy.⁴

What should trouble us most about this case is the ease with which a judge has intruded himself into the heart of the educator’s domain, into what is to be taught, how it is to be taught, and how teachers are to be trained to teach it. What qualifies the judge to do so? What qualifies him to pronounce on the linguistics of English dialects? What qualifies him to pronounce on the causes of scholastic achievement, and the means needed to enhance it? The answer is—nothing at all; yet the judiciary now takes it upon itself—here as elsewhere—to settle the most recondite technical and scientific questions. What began as judicial activism in the cause of equality has by some demonic inner logic become a kind of judicial narcissism, wherein the competence of the mediating institutions of American life is systematically diminished by judicial vanity. Here is Martin Shapiro, a distinguished student of the law, now at Berkeley, on this matter:

Our newspapers tell us of judges who forbid the transfer of Air Force squadrons from one base to another, delay multi-million dollar construction projects, intervene in complex negotiations between public employers and their employees, oversee the operation of railroads, and decide the location of schools. In the course of these litigations we have seen judges blithely intervening in precisely the kinds of massive and complex technical matters about which they would have automatically disclaimed competence twenty years ago. Judges now joyously try their hands at everything from the engineering of atomic reactors to the validation of IQ tests. They run school districts, do regional land use, redesign welfare programs, and calculate energy needs. They make policy decisions with massive financial and political consequences for every level of government. They destroy and redirect the building of educational, electoral, tax, and public-utility systems that are the products of thousands of hours of legislative negotiation and hundreds of complex statutes. Today there seems to be no public policy issue, no matter how massive, complex, or technical, that some judge somewhere has not felt fully capable of deciding aided only by the standard processes of litigation.⁵

Shapiro goes on to write that one defense of this process is that the judge is in a position to decide among the rival technical experts of the two parties, and thus free of the domination that technicians exercise over laymen, who generally see only one side of the issue. Shapiro says that although that may be true in theory, “in reality the judge often cannot understand the technical testimony on either side, has no mode of independently evaluating the accuracy of either, and is reduced to an act of faith in one side’s technicians or the other’s. The judicial weighing of technical testimony often comes down to a law clerk, fresh out of law school with no technical background, juggling footnotes to support whatever guess the judge is making.”

Nor is the judiciary alone in its zeal to administer the schools. Congress has done more than its share, in a series of ill-advised acts of legislation, as has the executive through the bureaucracies. In short, all three branches of government, and furthermore, separate or overlapping or competing units within these branches, take it as their privilege to intervene in education. They do so with almost no regard to the financial costs involved. And once they have done so, their decisions, however erroneous or short-sighted these turn out to be in practice, prove nearly impossible to modify or rescind. The fruits of judicial and bureaucratic intervention are painfully evident to those of us in the university: a professor in Georgia jailed for three months in a tenure dispute; or a federal functionary blithely sitting in on university classes to monitor potential bias; or the extraordinary and thus far unchecked growth of a bureaucracy both within and without the universities determined to compose racial and sexual quotas, to rectify an unproved and unlikely pattern of discrimination.

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Thus the authority of education—at all levels—is weaker today, far weaker, than at any other moment in memory. The schools do not fully govern themselves; they do not freely choose their own goals; they are not guided by their own values. Above all, they cannot bring themselves to resist these false or meretricious or merely foolish ideas imposed on them by others. Here I come to the point I want to stress, that our inability to resist those ideas stems in part from our inability to develop or sustain a coherent idea of ourselves, and of our own essential values.

In its relation to the federal courts and to the bureaucracies, the schools have had to confront institutions which, like Isaiah Berlin’s famous hedgehog, know but a single thing, that thing being a distended and distorted idea of equality, distended in that it puts equality above all other values, and distorted because it has transformed the original idea, of moral equality, the idea of Jefferson and Lincoln, to the idea of numerical equality, that all groups must be represented equally in all statuses.⁶ A corollary idea is the notion that variations in achievement are due only to error or malevolence, which in practice amounts to a charge either of negligence or willed malice in the schools. In their defense of their single idea, the courts and bureaucracies behave not like the ordinary hedgehog, but like a fierce and demented one, which knocks down anything that gets in its way—in short, a hedgehog with the ambitions of a fox. Whether the schools could in fact educate the courts on their narrow idea of equality is unclear—that idea has the fatal attraction of a vulgar belief understood to be advanced. Yet one can say with some confidence that they will be unable to do so until they are ready to plead publicly the traditionalist values they hold privately.

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For more than any other institution in American society, the schools have become an arena for the struggle between the values of traditionalism and of modernity. Among the values of traditionalism are: merit, accomplishment, competition, and success; self-restraint, self-discipline, and the postponement of gratification; the stability of the family; and a belief in certain moral universals. The modernist ethos scorns the pursuit of success; is egalitarian and redistributionist in emphasis; tolerates or encourages sensual gratification; values self-expression as against self-restraint; accepts alternative or deviant forms of the family; and emphasizes ethical relativism.

I think we do well here to distinguish between the universities and the schools, the former having been simultaneously the seedbed, staging area, and ultimate haven of the modernist temper. Not entirely, of course, since important segments of the university—I have in mind the sciences and some of the professional schools—have been largely immune to the modernist spirit, especially so with respect to the values of merit and success. On the whole, however, the intellectual debacle of the universities, which began in the 1960’s and continues to this day—a debacle the symptoms of which were and are grade inflation and various curricular travesties—was the inevitable result of a tacit submission to modernist ideology. I want to quote a marvelous pair of sentences from Lionel Trilling, who wrote that “ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air. The life in ideology, from which none of us can wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of habit and semi-habit in which to ideas we attach strong passions but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of their consequences.” Breathing that haunted air, the haunted air of modernism, meant that we no longer remembered what we believed in, or why. I recall my first recognition of this, in the late 1960’s, when our faculty faced a student demand for a new bachelor’s degree, the major reason being the desire of some students to escape the requirement for a modest degree of proficiency in a foreign language. Heart-rending stories were told of students possessing the highest degree of sensitivity and moral conscience, yet failing the French examination for the third time, and thereupon cast out into the darkness. What struck me most was the apparent inability of our faculty, collectively, to frame a cogent response, to argue the case for language. And listening to that debate, or rather that non-debate, I felt I was gazing into the void. For if one could not answer the question, why language, one could not, if pressed, answer the questions: why mathematics, why science, why literature, why history, why anything else?

The situation in the schools—I mean here secondary education in particular—was, and is, far different, more complex, sadder. In their fall from public favor, the universities got their just deserts, in choosing to live that “strange and submerged life of habit and semi-habit” in which passionate ideas are taken to be without consequence. But the American public schools rarely generate values; they more often merely absorb and reflect them. As John Dewey once told us, the educator is uniquely sensitive to what he takes to be the needs of his constituents. He accommodates; he serves; he aims to please. He is the least arrogant, the least petulant, the least willful of all professionals; and sad to say, the most lacking in self-esteem. In a morally unified and harmonious era, the schools can serve the public intention readily. In an era marked by a multiplicity of aims, or by competing aims, the schools tend to become ambivalent, or confused, or inhibited—often all three at once.

In the postwar period, the schools were to do everything at once. They were to help us beat the Russians into space; they were then to liberate poor and minority youngsters from the heritage of slavery and oppression; they were shortly thereafter to help middle-class children free themselves from their bourgeois constraints; and then someone noticed that the SAT scores had plummeted, and so they were to fix that too. It was never quite clear how these separate aims were to be achieved simultaneously, although it was commonly believed that it might be done through some revolution in method or technology. As I have written elsewhere: “The story of education in this period is a story of experiments—an abundance, a cornucopia of reforms and breakthroughs, each introduced breathlessly, each kept afloat by publicity, and each sinking out of sight, soon to be replaced by more publicity, and more disappointment—The New Math. Head Start. Computer instruction. Programmed learning. Closed-circuit TV. Community control. Contract teaching. Open classrooms. Sensitivity training.”⁷

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It is now fairly clear that the schools took on too much, and by doing so without sufficient caution or demurral, they were implicitly promising more than they could fulfill. Furthermore, what the schools had accepted for their agenda was not necessarily responsive to the interests and values of the ordinary families they were serving. It has been an abiding strength of American education—and a source of its weakness as well—that it remains close to the needs of that essential constituency. But as the postwar era wore on, the schools found themselves trying to serve not only local interests, but also the larger goals of public policy. In addition, the schools were being persuaded by our governing elites—the universities, the foundations, and the mass media—to accept the claims of the modernist spirit. In pressing these claims upon the schools—as always, in the name of progress—these elites were in fact helping to separate school from family. It is quite clear what the ordinary citizen wants from public education—one can discover this in casual conversation, even in a relentlessly progressive community like my own, or by examining, as I have recently done, the evidence on parental opinion about the schools. He wants there to be more discipline, both in personal conduct and in maintaining academic standards.⁸ He wants there to be a greater emphasis on moral education, on teaching children about right and wrong. In short, the demands of the American family upon the schools reflect the spirit of traditionalism—children are to be literate, ambitious, well-behaved, and morally virtuous.

I would not want to say that the schools took the side of modernity. As is their wont, they tried to do both things at once, that is to retain the loyalty of the bourgeois family, and yet offer the impression—to themselves and to others—of being with it, contemporary, alert, and alive to the new values of the putative future. It has not quite worked, not really. If you are going to hold children to high standards of achievement, you cannot at the same time, secretly, feel that ambition is a crass or ignoble motive. If you are going to teach children to be virtuous—that is, to be brave and loyal and honest—you must yourself possess a strong sense of what is right and wrong, and you cannot in one silent part of your mind feel that there are no moral absolutes, that virtue and vice are meaningless since they are understood differently among the Kwakiutl. The compromises attempted were never quite satisfactory. Thus, if you cannot bring yourself to teach values, thinking that to be old-fashioned, or absolutistic, or authoritarian, you can instead teach values clarification, wherein the parental wish for instruction in ethics is met by engaging the child in a pseudo-Socratic dialogue, ethically neutral in appearance. Yet some parents have come to feel—and I think correctly—that the very mode in which the questions are framed is a way of introducing, surreptitiously, the agenda of modernist ethics. That same uneasiness is to be found in other areas. With respect to sex education one often feels that there is considerable deception or self-deception at work, that the bland and ingenuous intentions of instruction—to reduce illegitimate pregnancies and venereal disease, etc.—are little more than a means of introducing the panoply of modernist views of sexuality—one which tolerates sexual experimentation, glamorizes homosexuality, and so on. In the long run, these efforts at compromise further diminish the authority of the schools, in that they diminish our sense of their probity—we come to feel either that they do not know what they are doing, or that they are trying to put something over on us.

In either case, the parent is further alienated from the school. That the assault on traditional education was a struggle about values did not escape the attention of the ordinary citizen, who quickly came to believe that his children’s schools were becoming trendy in curriculum, gimmicky in methods, lax about standards, and confused about purposes. He came to feel that the schools were abandoning his interests, were devoted to ideals he found alien, and were doing a poor job of teaching besides. Accordingly, he began to withdraw both emotional and financial support from the schools. That cooling of interest, that readiness to look elsewhere, is one of the most striking changes in the American attitude toward the public schools. Twenty years ago there were few families with children to educate who would have considered anything but the public schools, for to do otherwise, or even to ponder it seriously, seemed to suggest a rejection of the democratic spirit, a rejection of a tacit social contract. That is not the case today. Most parents, of course, do choose public education, but the choice is not reflexive; one sees little of that profound allegiance to the idea of public schooling that marked an earlier generation.

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What role has the family itself played in the current crisis of the schools? One cannot deny that the family is not what it used to be, that it has come under severe pressure, that it has lost at least some of its self-confidence and thus its sense of authority, especially in relation to the adolescent young. The most palpable evidence we have are the statistics on social pathology among adolescents I alluded to earlier. Edward Wynne has taken the lead in assembling this evidence and making it more widely known: the homicide rate for white males ages fifteen to nineteen has more than doubled in a fifteen-year perriod, as has the suicide rate, as has the rate of illegitimacy for young white females, as have reported cases of gonorrhea. It is likely that much of this is associated with the decline in family stability, with increases in the divorce rate and the number and percentage of single-parent households. Interestingly enough, American parents, when surveyed about the lack of discipline which so troubles them, are quite ready to point their finger not only at the schools, but also at the failure of some families to raise their children properly.

Nevertheless. . . . What is true of some families is not true of all, and indeed may not be true of most. To an extraordinary degree, the American citizen remains attached to the family, both as an idea and as an emotional reality. I have yet to see an opinion survey which does not report a secure and happy family life as the central value in most people’s lives. Nor ought we to believe, despite the lugubrious statistics just cited, that American adolescence as a whole has become a disaster area. We now have a series of studies on the adolescent self-image, collected over a period of years, by the eminent psychiatrist Daniel Offer and his colleagues.⁹ These important findings tell us two things—first, that there has indeed been some loss of morale, that the American adolescents studied in the 1970’s are less self-confident, less self-controlled, less trusting of others than an equivalent group studied in the 1960’s. Yet that erosion is on the whole modest; and after a painstaking examination of the evidence, the authors conclude that the degree of pathology, alienation, and rebelliousness in the American adolescent population need not alarm us, that on the whole these studies confirm what each and every empirical research ever done has also shown, that the vast majority of teenage youngsters are competent, purposeful, at ease with themselves, and closely bonded to their families and their values.

Given the prevailing mood of social commentary on the young, on the family, on the common culture of this country, this appraisal may strike the reader as complacent to the point of eccentricity. So be it. But we must bear in mind that there are economic and class interests at stake, that to portray the American family as feeble and failing is to make a case for a further expansion of the bureaucracies, in the name of helping those who cannot help themselves. That was the hidden message of that recent fiasco, the White House Conference on the Family, of the Carnegie Commission Report on Children, and of almost all other official efforts to instruct us on the imminent collapse of the family. I have tried to suggest that the school’s authority has been needlessly enfeebled by the ministering angels of the state. The family has so far resisted that benevolence, to its credit, and to the advantage of us all.

¹ Birth and Fortune (Basic Books, 1980).

² These figures are taken from Paul Bohannan, writing in Science, December 1980, pp. 17-18.

³ The same point was made by Gerald Grant in his address to the conference, “Crisis of Authority in the High School” (the proceedings of the conference will be published by the Center in the near future). Also see a penetrating discussion by N. P. Emler and R. Hogan, “Developing Attitudes Toward Law and Justice: An Integrative Review,” in Brehm and Gibbons (eds.), Developmental Social Psychology (Oxford University Press, 1981).

⁴ This may seem harsh, but on the contrary, my brief account does not capture the full bizarreness of this case or the strange character of its judicial reasoning. For an excellent summary and analysis, see Nathan Glazer's “Black English and Reluctant Judges” in Public Interest, Winter 1981, pp. 40-54.

⁵ “Judicial Activism,” in S. M. Lipset (ed.), The Third Century (Hoover Institution Press, 1979), p. 125.

⁶ I have borrowed here from the important book by Terry Eastland and William J. Bennett, Counting by Race (Basic Books, 1979).

⁷ “Battered Pillars of the American System: Education,” Fortune, April 1975, p. 143.

⁸ For a trenchant analysis of how modernist assumptions about the nature of achievement have damaged the competence of the schools, see T. Tomlinson, “The Troubled Years: An Interpretive Analysis of Public Schooling Since 1950,” Phi Delta Kappan, January 1981, pp. 373-376.

⁹ D. Offer, E. Ostrow, and K. Howard, Adolescence; A Psychological Self-Portrait (Basic Books, in press).