By PHK
Years ago when I lived in Moscow and the city was the capital of the Soviet Union, I considered myself lucky when I found 85 percent of the ingredients for a recipe. By 1979 Moscow standards, I was spoiled. I had access to the U.S. Embassy commissary – albeit tiny and too often stocked with outdated canned goods, the Soviet “gastronome” filled mostly with booze, cigarettes and chocolates - for diplomats and others who could afford to buy hard currency coupons to shop there, a twice weekly delivery via train from Stockmanns - the Finnish department store that carried almost everything for a price, and the private Soviet farmers markets or rynoks located in various parts of the city where I first met fresh cilantro in summer and purchased a single small cucumber for ten dollars from the Caucasus around the Christmas holidays.
The missing 15 percent, however, is often as important as all the other ingredients put together. Without baking powder or soda, for example, the best tasting cake falls flat.
Missing baking powder is what I think of as I read the news reports – national and local – about the continuing failures of American public schools. In a nutshell, we’re told that American youth – particularly girls - are learning to read better and that boys outperform girls in science and math. We’re told that Anglos and Asians are better students than Blacks, Hispanos and Native Americans. Yes, I agree. Our schools need to improve in all those areas.
But it’s what those tests don’t measure that we also need to think about now, and hard.
In my view, the missing ingredients are the social sciences: history, geography, politics, government, international affairs, economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Maybe the latter can wait until college for all but the brightest, but history, geography and government need to be emphasized in the lower schools and taught by qualified teachers as separate subjects – to everyone.
Nowhere in the latest news reports of national test results, however, do I see mention of the subjects that develop responsible citizens taught to understand the basics about their own country’s politics or the world in which they live. American students are apparently supposed to learn how to be good citizens by osmosis: the “back to the basics” proponents – I guess - just don’t think these attributes are important.
Well. Osmosis has failed. Far too many students walk into the university with no understanding of the American political process – let along where the UK is on a map. So don’t blame university professors for having to teach 9th grade American government or 5th grade geography to freshmen. They have no choice because our schools are remiss.
This is a large mistake, however, because studies of political values formation have shown that people usually develop the fundamental ones during the teen and pre-teen years. Studies I read on the post WWII German experience suggest that such values among the overall population can change over time – but slowly and in response to changing conditions. The West Germans, for instance, did not become instant democrats after World War II. It took a number of years, a dedicated leadership and a sustained allied commitment that emphasized citizenship education as well as helped raise all economic boats to convince the majority of West Germans that democracy - not authoritarianism – best served their interests.
I’m not convinced that people like Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney or Karl Rove – especially Karl Rove – would want to fill the missing educational ingredients in our high schools, however. After all, thinking Americans might stop behaving like sheep grazing on the White House lawn.
Thinking Americans would, for instance,
• Have demanded that Mr. Bush remove the visible but mysterious rectangular-appearing apparent “cheat-sheet” from under his clothing during the final Presidential debates last fall and respond to questions without help from a behind-the-scenes prompter.
• Have deserted the churches in which preachers told them how to vote – where politics and religion entwined - when in the US Constitution, church and state are separated by the important First Amendment that guarantees the practice of minority religions including their own.
• Now demand that the president explain himself and his ill-begotten policies and take his job seriously. A five week vacation filled with bike rides and barbeques just doesn’t cut it. Not when the administration’s Middle East policy is in flames, when 15 year olds receive repeated calls from military recruiters desperately trying to fill enlistment quotas, when the President had to use a slimy recess appointment to slip John Bolton, his inappropriate political nominee in as Ambassador to the UN, and when Mr. Bush couldn’t even get off his bike to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the distraught mother of a son killed in Iraq.
But thinking Americans would also demand that the Democratic leadership get its act together, find and unite behind an electable leader who sets out a different course for the US and explain it in terms everyman can understand.
So in my view, it’s past time to get the social sciences - those missing ingredients - back in our lower schools – and seriously. They are as imperative as reading, writing and arithmetic in developing our next generation of citizens. We need to get accountability back into politics – and this can only be done through the sustained pressure of an educated, concerned, questioning and active citizenry.