Little Red (Chinese) Schoolhouse : TO OPEN MINDS Chinese Clues to the Dilemma of Contemporary Education <i> by Howard Gardner (Basic Books: $21.95; 326 pp.) </i>

Aproper dilemma needs two horns; and, it would appear from Howard Gardner’s provocative new book, the dilemma of contemporary education is no exception. The horns, in this case, are freedom and discipline. The question before the house is how to incorporate both into one’s educational scheme without slighting either.

Alfred North Whitehead, as Gardner points out, put the matter well, nicely articulating the ideal and at the same time implying the great stress involved in trying to maintain the two values in balance. “It should be the aim of an ideally constructed education,” declared Whitehead, “that the discipline should be the voluntary issue of free choice and that the freedom should gain an enrichment of possibility as the issue of discipline. The two principles, freedom and discipline, are not antagonists but should be so adjusted in the child’s life that they correspond to a natural sway, to and fro, of the developing personality.” The magisterial Whitehead sonorously labeled this to-and-fro-ness “the rhythmic claims of freedom and discipline.”

While Gardner readily admits to being a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, a child of Rousseau and Dewey, he fears that we in the West may be missing the beat in the rhythmic- claims department, having opted to play the single drum of freedom over and over. Anyone who has attempted to teach almost anything to almost any class in the last 15 years will recognize that he is understating the problem. I still recall the numbing disbelief I felt on a day in the mid-’70s upon realizing that in a class of 20-odd liberal-arts collegians, no one could identify Charlemagne. Hadn’t a clue. Had never heard of him, her, it. They had freedom, all right--freedom to know nothing.

In China, Gardner finds a model wholly different from the progressive one he has grown comfortable with in American schools. There, even students in the lower grades achieve astounding (by Western standards) degrees of proficiency in such skills as draftsmanship and harmony. But Gardner finds that the cost of the achievement is great, indeed. Creative play, trial-and-error, finding one’s own solution--such values are virtually unknown in the Red East.

Though Gardner rightly assumes that all this lock-step learning was not invented by the Communists and must go back essentially to more ancient models, he is amazingly incurious about a raft of cultural questions. He appears, for instance, to assume that the stupefying proficiency of Chinese children has its origins in school. Actually, had he bothered to examine the drawings of preschool children he would have found them to be even more spectacularly proficient than their Western counterparts of the same age, as anyone who has attended American nursery schools with Asian-born children can readily attest.

The best explanation I have heard of this phenomenon is chopsticks, the early mastery of which Oriental nations themselves believe encourages their extraordinary eye-hand coordination. The concentration that the manipulation of a pair of chopsticks requires of a tiny child (who must use them to eat) may well upgrade other proficiencies--such as harmonics. Whatever the explanation, how could a scientist not ask himself radical questions about causality when faced with such an unusual cultural phenomenon?

Given his lack of curiosity, we cannot expect Gardner to understand Chinese civilization from the inside out, to make himself sufficiently Chinese to figure out what is really going on. Instead, we are given a sort of travelogue of his experiences in China, skin-deep impressions of a man who can never let go of his own identity long enough to truly comprehend another’s.

Even more surprising, Gardner shows little comprehension of the Western tradition that he continually invokes. He seems to think that there is a direct line from Socrates through the Enlightenment to contemporary America; though there is much invocation of the “Greco-Roman” and modern agnostic strands in our heritage, the Judeo-Christian font is never cited.

In the end, Gardner fails to notice that the profound difference between us and the Chinese is not one of communist versus democrat or ancient versus modern but one of religious intuition. Our ideas of freedom and individual vocation spring from neither Athens nor the philosophes but from the humanly singular tradition that began with Abraham setting out from his city for the unknown. This is the inception of our tradition--the tradition of the New, the only tradition that welcomes Surprise.

But Gardner is never less than earnest and genial, and while his accounts, both of his own upbringing (in a German-Jewish immigrant household in Scranton) and of his encounters with the Chinese, lack the high drama and flash of insight expected in great stories of cultural exchange, his book abounds with discrete illuminations.

He calls for American educators to recognize not intelligence but intelligences--”multiple cognitive capacities,” many of which are not accounted for by conventional IQ tests. (He names seven such capacities: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.)

He points out that our testing children for creativity often turns up nothing more than cocktail-party inventiveness, rather than the capacity to fashion--”often over significant periods of time--products or projects that actually change the ways in which other individuals apprehend the world.” Chinese education, he notes, is basically concerned with performance, ours with understanding. He argues for the reinstitution of apprenticeships. And he calls for an admixture of Chinese discipline--in very watered-down measures--to our current progressive models.

He goes off the rails entirely, I think, when toward the end of the book, he unveils an idea he calls “individual-centered learning,” a fantasy in which the school’s sophisticated testing of its students for a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses would result in the development of completely individualized curricula--one per child. Where, I wonder, do educational theorists hang out? Surely not in any schools in the real world.

Gardner’s misperceptions of the nature of the gulf between him and his Chinese hosts are echoed here in his misperception of the extent of the gulf between a Harvard professor’s daydreams and the lives of the American poor, who tend to come from households that have nothing remotely like either the discipline of China or that of Gardner’s childhood home (nor the freedom of such a home’s expectations) and who desperately need schooling in both structure and creativity--but mediated to their situation, and at a cost society can afford.

This is the real, four-horned dilemma of contemporary education, one that we as a nation will fail to solve at our peril.