Unilateral Disarmament of Educational Standards

January 14, 2004

Joanne Jacobs has a very interesting Boston Globe report on a Russian immigrant to the U.S. trying to start a charter school. The school design sounds to us like it is very rigorous and clear-headed, but the residents opposed to the school have a handy fallback position:

Xenophobia!

How quaint, it's like the Cold War all over again.

"She talked about Germany, how they teach in . . . China and Japan. I don't want my kids educated like Germans," said Tom Leveillee, 77, a retiree and World War II veteran.

You show them pesky "fur-ners" who's the boss, Tom!

But this brings up an interesting point, one which has bugged us for years. What war are Progressive Education reformers fighting? And more importantly, whose side are they on?

But first, a historical sidenote.

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As world history has shown time and time again, weaker nations have almost always been attacked by bellicose stronger ones. Occasionally the recipient was only perceived to be weaker, such as when an America full of Great Gatsbys and Lindy Hoppers was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor.

Now, don't get us wrong, there's nothing wrong with being a weaker nation, as long as there are no military dictatorships nearby.

A famous--and true--military slogan is "Peace through Superior Firepower."

When faced with a pugnacious and extremely strong enemy, if you want to avoid a bloody war, your only choice is to try to have a greater arsenal, which is exactly what the United States did during the Cold War. Years later, the war won, both nations could then (and only then) begin the process disarmament, as is happening today with our strategic nuclear weapons.

But a concerned cadre of Americans proposed a very different approach for us during the Cold War.

Their strategy was called, "Unilateral Disarmament," which proposed that America, and America alone, disarm her strategic weapons. After all, nukes are baaaaad. These American Neville Chamberlains hoped that we would have "Peace for our time" by these actions.

Unfortunately, history has also shown the results of such appeasements, as Chamberlain soon found out.

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Which brings us back to education.

The world is full of different approaches to education. America, it can be argued, used to have a pretty decent one. One just needs to read a sampling of Civil War letters (from Generals all the way down to Privates) to realize that these folks received some sort of classical training to produce such poetic prose.

But beginning in the early 20th century, public education in America was viciously attacked, not by an island nation, but by island ideas. When we say, "no man is an island," we mean that we are all interconnected, mutually supporting, and accountable to each other.

But Progressive reformers are truly islanders. Their ideas are accountable to no one. They simply sit upon a foundation of sand, gathering supporters not by their sturdiness but by their poetry, and are discredited by the cruel gaze of History at every opportunity.

Their ideas (and ideals) simply don't work.

But somehow they've been highly successful at waging a war, a war of unilateral disarmament of our educational standards. Even though they aren't expecting the Japanese, or the Germans, or the Singaporese, or even the Russians to gut their standards, they want us to gut ours.

And they've been highly successful in their battle.

So now, in the twenty-first century, we have the United States, with arguably a highly mediocre public education system, up against what Joanne drolly calls "them fancy foreign education ideas."

So again, our mantra is: Can't we go with what's been proven to work? The war is not lost.