PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATION : Exalting Tribalism Over Athens : Shunning traditional values, an elite school’s curriculum leaves students in the dark about the European American world.
My three children have spent nearly 20 years among them at one of the best-known elementary schools in the country, yet none of them has ever heard of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln--at least not in school. To be fair, that may be rectified two years from now, when my eldest will study American government and ancient Greece after she has finished intensive area studies in China and Japan, Latin America and Africa. She will never study post-Athenian Europe.
This reflects a profound shift of expectations that calls to mind Sen. Bob Dole’s recent remarks about the American educational Establishment. Dole--virtually none of whose other ideas I share--said that a “liberal academic elite” is pressing its agenda to “glorify other cultures” by making “war on traditional American values.” It’s difficult for me to admit, but he may be right.
The school that my children attend is precisely what Dole excoriates as the liberal elite. In fact, that’s why they go there. It is one of the mainstays of progressive education, the lab portion of an institution that through its college disseminates its pedagogical gospel to the four corners of the educational universe. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton visited the place, for good reason.
In all other respects than social studies, this school’s techniques are nothing short of brilliant. From the age of 6, the students were engaged in reading discussion groups that would be the envy of a PEN conference, and by 8 they were developing mathematical formulas that I could not have grasped in 10th grade. Unfortunately, when it comes to social studies, the school has abandoned its own standards and panders to the simplest knee-jerk PC from pre-K on. Its program, otherwise cogently conceived and executed by an inspirational faculty, suddenly turns alternately timid or brazen.
This became evident when my middle child received her schedule for the forthcoming term. She has been sentenced to an entire year in the Arctic, mostly on the Inuits, formerly known as Eskimos. The basis for this study is a series of anthropological films that present what the administrators like to call a “rich” curriculum. Unaware of the irony of using a word that usually refers to Western capital formation, they are wrong. It’s an impoverished curriculum, because the simple, objective truth is that the Inuits are an impoverished culture. If the school really sought the abundant source materials that define academic wealth, it might consider looking into, say, Renaissance Italy or Elizabethan England. Though I applaud the wish to bring previously neglected portions and peoples of the globe to children’s awareness, when it comes to the First World, the institution is Europhobic.
Years ago, I was friendly with a group of Eskimo (their preferred term) writers who gathered regularly at a Manhattan restaurant. They detested their native environment so much that they fled it to come to New York, where, happier in the glow of Times Square neon than the aurora borealis, they read chroniclers of the metropolis from James Baldwin to Isaac Bashevis Singer. I can only imagine what they would think to see the world they disdained elevated by schools that fail to recognize that one of the aims of education may be to define a hierarchy of values. This reflects a desperate fear of exercising a judgment that says yes, it is better to use medicine than roots, better to compose a symphony than bang on a tree trunk.
Perhaps worse than the anti-European bias implicit in these curricular decisions is an anti-intellectual bias, for the thread connecting the cultures that the school emphasizes is often that they are primitive. Besides the Inuits, the school looks toward Native Americans and the Masai people of Central Africa. With the exception of a semester on New Amsterdam, my daughter has never studied a society that has produced a novel or scientific method or liberal education. This reveals an exaltation of tribalism that is at odds with one of the most basic constructs of education itself, the idea of progress.
Still, these are young children. There is a distinct pedagogical wisdom to commencing social studies with a culture that is at the equivalent stage of development as the children themselves, but as they grow, so ought the terrain of their inquiry. Sadly, it doesn’t. Inevitably this plays into the faddish multiculturalism of modern social studies. In this school’s passionate desire for inclusiveness, it has encouraged an exclusivity that willfully omits anything vaguely First World. How ironic that those whom Dole castigates as “intellectual elites who seem embarrassed by America” are using their very power to subtly foster the same kind of ostrich mentality that the senator seems to advocate.
If the atypical (or, more likely, theoretical) Inuit child is cosseted with a patronizing overvaluing of his or her heritage, typical children of European ancestry are deprived of any sense of the extent to which their origins have shaped their world. This is an inaccurate pretense that disacknowledges the present and warps the past. Nothing in Inuit life has anything to do with the children’s own surroundings. This transforms the classroom from a scene of vibrant engagement into an artificial and barren tundra and will lead to the assumption that learning is an abstract endeavor that bears no relationship to life.
Ultimately, it’s not what my children learn that matters, but that they learn how to learn, so perhaps the field of their inquiry is irrelevant. Nonetheless, forgoing the opportunity to engage them with the best their world has to offer is a waste. There is no doubt that these children will be readers and problem solvers, because their term with the Inuits will indeed help them to learn about anything they choose in later years. But when these kids get out of school and look at the world they inhabit, they may be in for a surprise.
