Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (15 page)

The performance of the local school has declined over the years, and the administration has turned over repeatedly, but the Harrisons have tried to stay involved. They’ve made sure Jason, who has an interest in computers and electronics, is a member of the computer club and enrolled in computer science courses, and they’ve tried to supplement his education by buying computer programming books. They regularly meet with Thomas’s teachers to see if there is a way they can help improve his scores. The Harrisons don’t feel they know the current principal very well, and it’s hard to find time to talk to the teachers. But they try, and still they wonder if this is the best they can do for their boys.

Without the income they once had, they can’t afford the local Catholic high school at $11,500 per year for each child. They would qualify for some aid, but even with that it’s a stretch. The Harrisons worry about the quality of the education their kids are getting but also about some of the things they are exposed to in the school. It’s not only the problems other kids bring from home, but the politically correct values that permeate the school. Let’s put it this way, the boys aren’t learning the history and citizenship lessons that James and Susan were taught when they were in school. Now they keep hearing about something called the Common Core standards,
which seem to be pushed by the same people who made the public schools so mediocre in the first place. They can’t help being suspicious.

With Jason in the middle of his junior year, the Harrisons’ anxiety has grown over what will come next for him. Neither James nor Susan went on to college. But they know that the path to financial security for their kids now runs through some form of higher education. Fortunately, Jason is doing well enough academically to go to a four-year college, but paying for it is another matter. They read about the enormous costs of college and the heavy debt burdens many carry for years after finishing and wonder whether it is even the best choice. Would he be better off working and going to community college or even to a vocational program that would cost less and lead to more-immediate job opportunities?

The Harrisons know there is much less room for error than when they were growing up. Back then you followed a simple formula—stay in school, work reasonably hard, graduate, go to work. Today that’s just a start.

Which raises an even deeper question: What is education all about? The Harrisons wonder if their kids are mastering the basic skills they need to get and hold a job—reading, writing, and math. But they also worry if they’re developing the values that will make them good men. Making a good living is an extremely important goal and a darn good reason to go to school, but James and Susan know that simply having more
stuff won’t make their sons happy. Shouldn’t the boys’ education help them to be good citizens, good neighbors, good husbands and fathers, and simply
good men
? It’s hard to see how four years on a typical American college campus will do that.

There are a few colleges, nevertheless, that do get it right, and I’m happy to say that one of them is Grove City College, in my home state of Pennsylvania. When I had the opportunity to deliver the commencement address there in 1998, I considered the purpose of higher education:
¹

            
A few years ago, a survey was taken of Japanese and American mothers. They were asked the question: “What do you want your children to be when they grow up?” The Japanese mothers said that they wanted their children to be successful. The overwhelming majority of American mothers said they didn’t care what their children were as long as they were happy. I don’t believe they really meant that they only wanted their children to be “happy”—at least I hope they didn’t believe that. I can’t imagine any of you mothers dropping off your child here as a freshman and, before leaving, looking them in the eye and saying: “Now go and be the happiest student at Grove City College.” If any mothers did that, I am quite certain that they are not here today to witness
their child’s graduation! Do we really want the focus of children’s lives, our lives, to be the pursuit of pleasure, of happiness? I grew up in an Italian-American household, and I can tell you my Italian father did not care if I was happy. What my mom and dad always said was: “Now Rick, you be good.” I knew what good meant. It meant that there was a moral code that was based on universal truth. I’m afraid that, as a culture, we don’t believe this anymore.

                
What has happened to the moms and dads who want their children to be good? I believe they are casualties of the cultural war in this country. We live now in a country that believes we should be non-judgmental to the point that we won’t even fight for the souls of our own children. In my day, parents who fought for the souls of their children were called strict parents; now they are called right-wing radicals. Behavior that was once an affront to the basic moral code, a code grounded in truth, is now publicly accepted. Those who want to curb such behavior, or question such behavior, are dismissed as intolerant.

                
We live in a pleasure-driven culture. We are constantly told to do what feels right, to follow our hearts. The tenets of the popular culture are reinforced over and over again. We have gotten away from the painful, difficult decisions of discerning
what is right, and then acting on them. That is not to say that people don’t believe in right and wrong. If you took a survey and asked individuals: “Do you believe there is right and wrong,” very few people would say, “No, I don’t believe there is a right and a wrong.” Of course they would say there is a right and a wrong. The problem is they make the truth relative, and they behave as if there is no absolute right and wrong. They don’t act out their stated beliefs; they don’t live them out in their own lives and, more important, they don’t live them out with respect to other people’s lives, including their own children. What are the consequences of a culture without truth? Without a shared belief system that is held and enforced, a culture disintegrates into moral chaos.

And who gets hurt the most when we lose truth? The poor. Why so many gated communities? To protect the rich from the moral chaos they have bequeathed to the rest of society. Wealthy middle-aged liberals talk a good game about “doing whatever feels good,” and they surely followed their professors’ advice and gave it a try when they were in college. But the reason their own lives aren’t a train wreck is that, for the most part, they practice the Main Street values they profess to despise. The institution of marriage hasn’t collapsed for them as it has for the poor, who took their lie about sex without
consequences as gospel. Likewise, despite what you might read about the lives of the rich and famous in the supermarket tabloids, the top 20 percent of income earners have relatively low levels of divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and drug and alcohol use. The typical sixty-year-old upper-middle-class liberal did the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll thing when he was young, but today his own life looks more like
Leave It to Beaver
than
Modern Family
.

If our education system is going to give children the tools to be good, then there will have to be major changes. But it would be foolish to expect the system to fix itself. The good news is that we don’t have to wait for politicians and stubborn teachers’ unions. We can start the reform ourselves—family by family.

The first step is to recognize that expecting the federal or even state governments to run our local schools is a bad idea. The system of compulsory public education in America is a relic of the industrialization that swept the country at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time people were leaving the farm to work in factories and on assembly lines to mass-produce Model Ts, they left the locally run one-room schoolhouse for education factories that mass-produced citizens in conformity to state rules. The assembly line and Model T were wonderful innovations in their time, but Ford
only survived by transforming their assembly line and products to reflect both consumer demand and competitive challenges. Imagine a Ford showroom today with one model in one color that gets twelve miles per gallon and is equipped with an AM radio and an eight-track tape player. So why are we still mass-producing students in the educational factories we call schools?

The latest educational “reform”—the Common Core State Standards, which are sweeping the country—is just a revised version of mass-produced education. The Common Core is an attempt to impose on the entire country a single vision of “what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.”
²
And who determines “what students are expected to learn”? The same bureaucrats and ideologues who have already debased public education. Parents who believe their children should be taught to love the good, the true, and the beautiful should be very skeptical of the promises of Common Core.

Government is the problem here. Bureaucracies don’t care about the customer; they are focused on making and following rules. Success is determined by whether the process was strictly followed, not by the result. Don’t you think it’s time we bring our schools into the twenty-first century and liberate educators from the antiquated rules that treat our children like a Model T?

Karen and I have seven children, and we can tell you that each one has different interests, different needs, and different
ways of learning. They are all bright and curious and full of potential. But if they all went through the same public school, you’d see wildly different results. Committed parents know better than any bureaucrat what is best for their children. Now we’re doing well enough to send them to good Catholic schools. Early in our marriage, however, that was not an option, so we dedicated the time necessary to teach them at home. Karen bore most of the burden, and it certainly was not easy, but the reward came when we saw our kids flourishing under the individual attention and personalized curricula. I know homeschooling is not for everyone; starting out, we didn’t think it would be for us. But today there is a thriving homeschool community, with parents cooperating in neighborhoods or linked into internet homeschool programs. For many, homeschooling can be an excellent, low-cost option for educating your kids.

Public schools are “free”—paid for by your tax dollars—but the results they deliver can vary widely. One in four American children drops out of school before graduating.
³
Obviously that dropout rate is not spread evenly across all American communities. In towns like Murray’s Belmont—think Palo Alto, Brookline, or Bethesda—it’s not one in four; it’s more like one in forty. But in working-class Fishtown—communities like Saginaw, East St. Louis, and the Bronx—the rate is much higher. The odds are stacked against these kids. Most of them come from poor families with one parent
in the home. The pop culture they imbibe promotes all the wrong things—and the local community feels more like a war zone than a neighborhood.

When I was a senator, I met with a small group of seniors who were the only college-bound students at William Penn High School, a large inner-city school in North Philadelphia. They had just been told by an Ivy League college recruiter that given their race, income, and academic record, almost any college would take them for free. I asked these students, “What is the biggest challenge you face to realize your dreams?” Silence, heads down. Then a young man in the back haltingly raised his hand—“Getting to school alive every day,” he said. There was not even any nervous laughter, just continued silence. When I asked if everyone agreed, all of their heads nodded. Upon further questioning they explained the threat was not street criminals but their envious classmates at William Penn.

The Fishtown kids fail in disproportionate numbers. But we have to ask, aren’t we the ones failing them? The answer is not to pour billions more into the federal Department of Education. The answer is a revolution in education that begins in the home.