A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education: A Former Schoolbook Editor Parses the Politics of Educational Publishing

Written by Owen Edwards

Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I’d be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas.

Not so.

I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, “The books are done and we still don’t have an author! I must sign someone today!”

Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. “Who writes these things?” people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, “No one.” It’s symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business.

Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge. In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run “adoption” system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.

Welcome to the Machine

The first product I helped create was a basal language arts program. The word basal refers to a comprehensive package that includes students’ textbooks for a sequence of grades, plus associated teachers’ manuals and endless workbooks, tests, answer keys, transparencies, and other “ancillaries.” My company had dominated this market for years, but the brass felt that our flagship program was dated. They wanted something new, built from scratch.

Sounds like a mandate for innovation, right? It wasn’t. We got all the language arts textbooks in use and went through them carefully, jotting down every topic, subtopic, skill, and subskill we could find at each grade level. We compiled these into a master list, eliminated the redundancies, and came up with the core content of our new textbook. Or, as I like to call it, the “chum.” But wait. If every publisher was going through this same process (and they were), how was ours to stand out? Time to stir in a philosophy.

By philosophy, I mean a pedagogical idea. These conceptual enthusiasms surge through the education universe in waves. Textbook editors try to see the next one coming and shape their program to embody it.

The new ideas are born at universities and wash down to publishers through research papers and conferences. Textbook editors swarm to events like the five-day International Reading Association conference to pick up the buzz. They all run around wondering, What’s the coming thing? Is it critical thinking? Metacognition? Constructivism? Project-based learning?

At those same conferences, senior editors look for up-and-coming academics and influential educational consultants to sign as “authors” of the textbooks that the worker bees are already putting together back at the shop.

Content Lite

Once a philosophy has been fixed on and added, we shape the pulp to fit key curriculum guidelines. Every state has a prescribed compendium of what kids should learn — tedious lists of bulleted objectives consisting mostly of sentences like this:

“The student shall be provided content necessary to formulate, discuss, critique, and review hypotheses, theories, laws, and principles and their strengths and weaknesses.”

If you should meet a textbook editor and he or she seems eccentric (odd hair, facial tics, et cetera), it’s because this is a person who has spent hundreds of hours scrutinizing countless pages filled with such action items, trying to determine if the textbook can arguably be said to support each objective.

Of course, no one looks at all the state frameworks. Arizona’s guidelines? Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn. Rhode Island’s? Pardon me while I die laughing. Some states are definitely more important than others. More on this later.

Eventually, at each grade level, the editors distill their notes into detailed outlines, a task roughly comparable to what sixth-century jurists in Byzantium must have faced when they carved Justinian’s Code out of the jungle of Roman law. Finally, they divide the outline into theoretically manageable parts and assign these to writers to flesh into sentences.

What comes back isn’t even close to being the book. The first project I worked on was at this stage when I arrived. My assignment was to reduce a stack of pages 17 inches high, supplied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch stack that would sound as if it had all come from one source. The original text was just ore. A few of the original words survived, I suppose, but no whole sentences.

To avoid the unwelcome appearance of originality at this stage, editors send their writers voluminous guidelines. I am one of these writers, and this summer I wrote a ten-page story for a reading program. The guideline for the assignment, delivered to me in a three-ring binder, was 300 pages long.

Bon Appétit

With so much at stake, how did we get into this turgid mess? In the 1980s and ’90s, a feeding frenzy broke out among publishing houses as they all fought to swallow their competitors. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Houghton Mifflin bought D.C. Heath and Co. McGraw-Hill bought Macmillan. Silver Burdett bought Ginn — or was it Ginn that bought Silver? It doesn’t matter, because soon enough both were devoured by Prentice Hall, which in turn was gobbled up by Simon & Schuster.

Then, in the late ’90s, even bigger corporations began circling. Almost all the familiar textbook brands of yore vanished or ended up in the bellies of just four big sharks: Pearson, a British company; Vivendi Universal, a French firm; Reed Elsevier, a British-Dutch concern; and McGraw-Hill, the lone American-owned textbook conglomerate.

This concentration of money and power caused dramatic changes. In 1974, there were twenty-two major basal reading programs; now there are five or six. As the number of basals (in all subject areas) shrank, so did editorial staffs. Many downsized editors floated off and started “development houses,” private firms that contract with educational publishers to deliver chunks of programs. They hire freelance managers to manage freelance editors to manage teams of freelance writers to produce text that skeleton crews of development-house executives sent on to publishing-house executives, who then pass it on to various committees for massaging.

A few years ago, I got an assignment from a development house to write a lesson on a particular reading skill. The freelance editor sent me the corresponding lessons from our client’s three major competitors. “Here’s what the other companies are doing,” she told me. “Cover everything they do, only better.” I had to laugh: I had written (for other development houses) all three of the lessons I was competing with.

The Cruelest Month

In textbook publishing, April is the cruelest month. That’s when certain states announce which textbooks they’re adopting. When it comes to setting the agenda for textbook publishing, only the twenty-two states that have a formal adoption process count. The other twenty-eight are irrelevant — even though they include populous giants like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — because they allow all publishers to come in and market programs directly to local school districts.

Adoption states, by contrast, buy new textbooks on a regular cycle, usually every six years, and they allow only certain programs to be sold in their state. They draw up the list at the beginning of each cycle, and woe to publishers that fail to make that list, because for the next seventy-two months they will have zero sales in that state.

Among the adoption states, Texas, California, and Florida have unrivaled clout. Yes, size does matter. Together, these three have roughly 13 million students in K-12 public schools. The next eighteen adoption states put together have about 12.7 million. Though the Big Three have different total numbers of students, they each spend about the same amount of money on textbooks. For the current school year, they budgeted more than $900 million for instructional materials, more than a quarter of all the money that will be spent on textbooks in the nation.

Obviously, publishers create products specifically for the adoptions in those three key states. They then sell the same product to everybody else, because basals are very expensive to produce — a K-8 reading program can cost as much as $60 million. Publishers hope to recoup the costs of a big program from the sudden gush of money in a big adoption state, then turn a profit on the subsequent trickle from the “open territories.” Those that fail to make the list in Texas, California, or Florida are stuck recouping costs for the next six years. Strapped for money to spend on projects for the next adoption period, they’re likely to fail again. As the cycle grows vicious, they turn into lunch meat.

Don’t Mess with Texas

The big three adoption states are not equal, however. In that elite trio, Texas rules. California has more students (more than 6 million versus just over 4 million in Texas), but Texas spends just as much money (approximately $42 billion) on its public schools. More important, Texas allocates a dedicated chunk of funds specifically for textbooks. That money can’t be used for anything else, and all of it must be spent in the adoption year. Furthermore, Texas has particular power when it comes to high school textbooks, since California adopts statewide only for textbooks from kindergarten though eighth grade, while the Lone Star State’s adoption process applies to textbooks from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

If you’re creating a new textbook, therefore, you start by scrutinizing Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). This document is drawn up by a group of curriculum experts, teachers, and political insiders appointed by the fifteen members of the Texas Board of Education, currently five Democrats and ten Republicans, about half of whom have a background in education. TEKS describes what Texas wants and what the entire nation will therefore get.

Texas is truly the tail that wags the dog. There is, however, a tail that wags this mighty tail. Every adoption state allows private citizens to review textbooks and raise objections. Publishers must respond to these objections at open hearings.

In the late ’60s, a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state’s adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught–phonics, sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values–and considered themselves in a battle against a “politically correct degradation of academics.” Expert organizers, the Gablers possessed a flair for constructing arguments out of the language of official curriculum guidelines. The Longview, Texas-based nonprofit corporation they founded forty-three years ago, Educational Research Analysts, continues to review textbooks and lobby against liberal content in textbooks.

The Gablers no longer appear in person at adoption hearings, but through workshops, books, and how-to manuals, they trained a whole generation of conservative Christian activists to carry on their work.

Citizens also pressure textbook companies at California adoption hearings. These objections come mostly from such liberal organizations as Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, or from individual citizens who look at proposed textbooks when they are on display before adoption in thirty centers around the state. Concern in California is normally of the politically correct sort — objections, for example, to such perceived gaffes as using the word Indian instead of “Native American.” To make the list in California, books must be scrupulously stereotype free: No textbook can show African Americans playing sports, Asians using computers, or women taking care of children. Anyone who stays in textbook publishing long enough develops radar for what will and won’t get past the blanding process of both the conservative and liberal watchdogs.

Responding to citizens’ objections in adoption hearings is a delicate art. Publishers learn never to confront the assumptions behind an objection. That just causes deeper criticism. For example, a health textbook I worked on had a picture of a girl on a windy beach. One concerned citizen believed he could detect the outlines of the girl’s underwear through her dress. Our response: She’s at the beach, so that’s her bathing suit. It worked.

A social studies textbook was attacked because a full-page photograph showed a large family gathered around a dinner table. The objection? They looked like Arabs. Did we rise up indignantly at this un-American display of bias? We did not. Instead, we said that the family was Armenian. It worked.

Of course, publishers prefer to face no objections at all. That’s why going through a major adoption, especially a Texas adoption, is like earning a professional certificate in textbook editing. Survivors just know things.

What do they know?

Mainly, they know how to censor themselves. Once, I remember, an editorial group was discussing literary selections to include in a reading anthology. We were about to agree on one selection when someone mentioned that the author of this piece had drawn a protest at a Texas adoption because he had allegedly belonged to an organization called One World Council, rumored to be a “Communist front.”

At that moment, someone pointed out another story that fit our criteria. Without further conversation, we chose that one and moved on. Only in retrospect did I realize we had censored the first story based on rumors of allegations. Our unspoken thinking seemed to be, If even the most unlikely taint existed, the Gablers would find it, so why take a chance?

Self-censorship like this goes unreported because we the censors hardly notice ourselves doing it. In that room, none of us said no to any story. We just converged around a different story. The dangerous author, incidentally, was celebrated best-selling science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Turn the Page

There’s no quick, simple fix for the blanding of American textbooks, but several steps are key to reform:

Mix and Match

Revamp our funding mechanisms to let teachers assemble their own curricula from numerous individual sources instead of forcing them to rely on single comprehensive packages from national textbook factories. We can’t have a different curriculum in every classroom, of course, but surely there’s a way to achieve coherence without stultification.

Basals as Backup

Reduce basals to reference books — slim core texts that set forth as clearly as a dictionary the essential skills and information to be learned at each grade level in each subject. In content areas like history and science, the core texts would be like mini-encyclopedias, fact-checked by experts in the field and then reviewed by master teachers for scope and sequence.

Dull? No, because these cores would not be the actual instructional material students would use. They would be analogous to operating systems in the world of software. If there are only a few of these and they’re pretty similar, it’s OK. Local districts and classroom teachers would receive funds enabling them to assemble their own constellations of lessons and supporting materials around the core texts, purchased not from a few behemoths but from hundreds of smaller publishing houses such as those that currently supply the supplementary-textbook industry.

High Tech Textbooks

Just as software developers create applications for particular operating systems, textbook developers should develop materials that plug into the core texts. Small companies and even individuals who see a niche could produce a module to fill it. None would need $60 million to break even.

Imagine, for example, a world-history core: One publisher might produce a series of historical novellas by a writer and a historian working together to go with various places and periods in history. Another might create a map of the world, using software that animates at the click of a mouse to show political boundaries swelling, shrinking, and shifting over hundreds of years. Another might produce a board game that dramatizes the connections between trade and cultural diffusion. Hundreds of publishers could compete to produce lessons that fulfill some aspect of the core text, the point of reference.

Innovate the Industry

The intellect, dedication, and inventiveness of textbook editors, abundant throughout the industry but often stifled and underappreciated, would be unleashed with — I predict — extraordinary results for teachers and students.

Bundling selections from this forest of material to create curriculum packages might itself emerge as a job description in educational publishing.

The possibilities are endless. And shouldn’t endless possibility be the point?

Tamim Ansary writes and lectures about Afghanistan, Islamic history, democracy, schooling and learning, fiction and the writing process, and other issues and directs the San Francisco Writers Workshop.

What Are They Thinking?

A new book surveying foreign textbooks sheds light on how others see American history.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History | The New Press | $27 | 400 pages

Who could have guessed that a book about textbooks would turn out to be a page-turner? And yet that’s exactly what authors Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward have produced with History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History. Lindaman and Ward, academics from Harvard University and Vincennes University in Indiana respectively, take many of the major historical events that occupy center stage in standard U.S. history textbooks and show how texts from other countries involved recount the same episodes. One nation’s glorious war for independence may be a pesky and pernicious insurrection to another people. A national leader may be oppressive or divinely guided, depending on one’s perspective (or on whose Gore was axed). And though it’s often said that history is written by the winners, losers and bit players write history, too.

In the introduction, the authors state the problem they seek to address:

“Certain societies that could have more easily ignored the United States fifty years ago find themselves today dealing with U.S. corporations, fashion, food, entertainment, and U.S. foreign policy on a daily basis. And this is hardly a one-way street. However, there is one distinct advantage that these other countries have over the United States in this relationship: They are constantly exposed to the U.S., receiving a daily dose of information on the U.S. and Americans, studying English at school, and in some cases continuing their studies in this country. Americans, in sharp contrast, seem to know relatively little about other countries and cultures. This isolationist tendency is nowhere more apparent than within our own educational system.”

Few are more aware of this isolationism than middle school and high school teachers, particularly those who teach history using standard texts that — not surprisingly — view the signal events of American history with a kind of national solipsism. Students in the States can therefore be forgiven if they think the entire world views these events in the same way.

To correct this tunnel vision (or, sometimes, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel vision), Lindaman and Ward present a kind of Rashomon world, offering hundreds of accounts from foreign history textbooks. For example, the authors look at the Spanish-American War through the schoolbooks of Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. A reader at least vaguely familiar with the U.S. high school textbook version — the conflict sparked by the sinking of the American battleship Maine, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, imperial Spain defeated, the oppressed Cubans and Filipinos liberated and grateful — will be surprised to see how each country regards the war a century later.

The Spanish textbook quoted, which might be expected to see Spain as an aggrieved party, in fact mostly dwells on the internal dissension and clumsy colonial governance that led to the war and defeat even though the U.S. “hardly had a professional army.” Significantly, the explosion that sank the Maine and precipitated America’s declaration of war is handled with equanimity: “In February of 1898 the North American cruiser Maine, anchored in the harbor of Havana, exploded. The cause of the explosion was never clearly explained and the North American authorities attributed it to Spanish sabotage.”

Perhaps the most surprising version of the Spanish-American War appears in textbooks from the Philippines, generally thought of in this country as a U.S. ally. The island nation’s standard history textbook presents a dark picture of American motives: “The Filipinos, who expected the Americans to champion their freedom, instead were betrayed and reluctantly fell into the hands of American imperialists.” On the sinking of the Maine, the book is angrily adamant: “Although the Maine had been blown up by American spies in order to provoke the war, the public was not informed of the truth.”

To better understand the world, we owe it to ourselves, and our students, to know that these varied national “truths” are out there. Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward have compiled the textbook equivalent of the Gnostic Gospels, a book that every history teacher should be reading. — Owen Edwards

Do Homeschoolers Get “Snow Days”?

Thanks to one of our Angelicum families for sending us these pictures.  As with so many things in life, homeschoolers have the best of both worlds!

 

“Spending Time” by Hunter Gill

This was a documentary I threw together recently advocating spending more time reading. Enjoy!

Editor’s note: We have enjoyed seeing Hunter’s talent in these videos. If you have not seen his other videos, please check out the video link at the top of our website. Hunter also has his own You Tube channel: http://www.youtube.com/thebookknight

A READING PLAN FOR CHILDREN: Your Children Can Read the Great Books

Here is a great read for your weekend!  A 12-page read, but worth it! 
Click to read the PDF file:

http://www.thegreatideas.org/90Fw/TGIO536.pdf

Great Books Essay: Who Was the Better Man? by student M.C., First Year Ancient Greeks

Who Was the Better Man?                                                                            

The Iliad and the Odyssey are epic poems that were composed around 800-725 B. C. and it is traditionally maintained that they were written by down by Homer, the blind poet.  The Iliad is about Achilles and how his anger affected the Trojan War.  The Odyssey is about Odysseus and his journey home to Ithaca.  Achilles was a great warrior, fearless in battle.  Odysseus was a cunning strategist who eventually won the war for the Achaeans.  It is often wondered who was the better man?  Upon analysis, Odysseus is, undoubtedly, the better man.

To begin with, Odysseus has a great love of his family and his kingdom, and he has an honest pride in them.  The Odyssey is about his journey to get back to his home, and all that he has to suffer and undergo to do so.  He encounters many temptations along the way, including the offer of Calypso, the sea goddess, to make him her immortal husband.  But in his love and fidelity for Penelope, his wife, he declines her proposal.  Odysseus passes through the halls of Hades in order to seek out Teiresias and learn how to find his way back home; besides numerous other ordeals he has to endure.  Through all this the principles of constancy and fidelity are realized in him.

Besides being faithful and constant, Odysseus is also a very clever man and a great strategist.  Because of Odysseus the Achaeans won the Trojan War, for he thought up the Trojan horse.  After the war, in all his travels, his cleverness and resourcefulness always won him through many a difficult situation.  For example, in the Cyclop’s cave, without Odysseus’ foresight and clever escape plan, Odysseus and his men would all have been eaten  by Polyphemus or have starved to death with no way out of the cave.  Whereas Achilles would probably have killed Polyphemus without thinking of how to get out of the cave after he was dead. Thus, Odysseus is clever and prudent as well as faithful and constant.  

Achilles, the son of the goddess Thetis, is the king of Myrmidons.  He is the greatest warrior on the Achaean’s side, but he has one fatal fault: pride.  The Iliad starts out with the pride of Achilles.  He was angered and felt dishonored when Agamemnon takes his trophy, Briseis, from him.  Achilles withdraws himself and his men from the war.   He knows that this will probably lose the war for the Achaeans and that many men will have died in vain in a foreign land. But Achilles does not care.  Achilles has no constancy or fidelity to his fellow soldiers or to his general, Agamemnon.  He is preparing to leave and return to Pthia, when he learns that Hector has killed his best friend, Patroclus, who donned Achilles’ armor in an attempt to inspire and aide the Achaeans.  Without blaming himself in any way for Patroclus’ death, Achilles rejoins the Achaean army and challenges Hector to combat.  He wins the victory and kills Hector.  He dishonors Hector’s body which in turn enrages the gods.  To pacify the gods he returns the body to the Trojans, but only after King Priam came begging for it.  Achilles’ pride is very dangerous and destructive.   Homer chose to use Achilles as an example of who not to be like. Achilles nearly lost the war for the Achaeans and his pride did not allow him to feel any guilt for the death of Patroclus, which was very much Achilles’ fault and not Hector’s; and only the intervention of the gods and the desperate pleas of King Priam would induce Achilles to return the body of Hector for a proper burial. Thus Achilles is a very good example of who not to be like.

Odysseus and Achilles are also very different in their different levels of self-control.  Achilles lets his passions rule him, so he often loses control of himself.  His pride keeps him from thinking of others and how his lack of self-control could affect them in a negative way.  Countless examples of this are in the Iliad, like when he withdraws from the war in a fit of anger although he knows that this will cause very dire consequences for the Achaeans. He even goes so far as to pray to Zeus for the victory of the Trojans over the Achaeans.  Because Achilles’ mother is the goddess Thetis, Zeus decides to grant Achilles’ prayers.                                                                                                                                                                   Odysseus, however, has control over his passions and lets his reason guide him. He does not give in to temptations, like when the beautiful Calypso offered to make him her immortal husband.  He knows that, as tempting as it sounds, he has a duty to his home and his family, and that immortality would not make him happy if he was without the woman he loved and away from the land that he loved the best. Thus Homer teaches us not to let our passions control us, like Achilles, but rather let reason rule, like Odysseus.          

In conclusion, Achilles represents all that impedes the advancement of civilization, such as pride, infidelity, and no self-control over one’s passions.  Since pride is the root of all evils, this story is essential to the foundation of a good civilization. Odysseus, however, is a great model of who to be like. Odysseus is faithful, constant, prudent, and possessing of foresight. He is an example of the superiority of intelligence to brute force, which is another essential idea to civilization. Therefore, in every way Odysseus is the better man.

“I challenge every adult to step up and join the conversation”

Secretary Arne Duncan
United States Secretary of Education
LBJ Education Building, Room 7W311
400 Maryland Avenue, SW
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Secretary Duncan:

I reside in Chicago and I am a well known moral philosopher in the field education and I am the protégé of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler.

U.S. Attorney General Holder: “We want to listen to educators, parents, and experts in the field, and find out the best ideas for addressing this urgent problem. We’re not interested in just scratching the surface or focusing on generalities, and as we delve into this problem we’re not going to protect any sacred cows. We’re here to learn firsthand what’s happening on our streets so we can devise effective solutions.”

As long as you treat violence, drug/alcohol addiction, vicious behavior, etceteras as the problem, instead as a symptom of a moral problem, you are not really addressing the crisis.

Whenever there is something bad or wrong in our communities, cities, states, it is because we (citizens & parents) let it get that way.

Most Americans have lost their moral compass and we are in lock-step with the cultural trajectory of ancient Rome.

When the word education is used today, vocation is meant. Only a true liberal education can save us and that is not even a guarantee.

Our schools are not turning out young people prepared for the high office and the duties of citizenship in a democratic republic. Our political institutions cannot thrive, they may not even survive, if we do not produce a greater number of thinking citizens, from whom some statesmen of the type we had in the eighteenth century might eventually emerge. We are, indeed, a nation at risk, and nothing but radical reform of our schools can save us from impending disaster. Whatever the price we must pay in money and effort to do this, the price we will pay for not doing it will be much greater.
Cordially,

Max Weismann,

President and co-founder with Mortimer Adler, Center for the Study of The Great Ideas and Chairman, The Great Books Academy (3,000+ students)

 

Cc: Eric Holder

       Mayor Richard M. Daley

 —————————————————-
Justice and freedom; discussion and criticism;
intelligence and character–these are the indispensable
ingredients of the democratic state.
We can be rich and powerful without them.
But not for long.         –Robert M. Hutchins
—————————————————-
Center for the Study of The Great Ideas
Founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann

E-mail: TGIdeas@speedsite.com
Home Page: http://www.thegreatideas.org/
A not-for-profit 501(c)3 educational organization
Donations are tax deductible as the law allows

“Great” Website for Listening to the Great Books Online

A special thanks to the director of the Great Books Academy, Mr. Max Weisman, for sending us this link!  Listen to Genius !

Address to Catholic Educators by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

 

Members of the Angelicum Great Books Program meeting His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

April 17, 2008, The Catholic University of America

 Your Eminences,
Dear Brother Bishops,
Distinguished Professors, Teachers and Educators, 

His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI April 17, 2008, The Catholic University of America Your Eminences, Dear Brother Bishops, Distinguished Professors, Teachers and Educators, “How beautiful are the footsteps of those who bring good news” (Rom 10:15-17). With these words of Isaiah quoted by Saint Paul, I warmly greet each of you—bearers of wisdom—and through you the staff, students, and families of the many and varied institutions of learning that you represent. It is my great pleasure to meet you and to share with you some thoughts regarding the nature and identity of Catholic education today. I especially wish to thank Father David O’Connell, President and Rector of the Catholic University of America. Your kind words of welcome are much appreciated. Please extend my heartfelt gratitude to the entire community—faculty, staff, and students—of this University.

Education is integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News. First and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth (cf. Spe Salvi, 4). This relationship elicits a desire to grow in the knowledge and understanding of Christ and his teaching. In this way those who meet him are drawn by the very power of the Gospel to lead a new life characterized by all that is beautiful, good, and true; a life of Christian witness nurtured and strengthened within the community of our Lord’s disciples, the Church.

The dynamic between personal encounter, knowledge, and Christian witness is integral to the diakonia of truth which the Church exercises in the midst of humanity. God’s revelation offers every generation the opportunity to discover the ultimate truth about its own life and the goal of history. This task is never easy; it involves the entire Christian community and motivates each generation of Christian educators to ensure that the power of God’s truth permeates every dimension of the institutions they serve. In this way, Christ’s Good News is set to work, guiding both teacher and student towards the objective truth which, in transcending the particular and the subjective, points to the universal and absolute that enables us to proclaim with confidence the hope which does not disappoint (cf. Rom 5:5). Set against personal struggles, moral confusion, and fragmentation of knowledge, the noble goals of scholarship and education, founded on the unity of truth and in service of the person and the community, become an especially powerful instrument of hope.

Dear friends, the history of this nation includes many examples of the Church’s commitment in this regard. The Catholic community here has in fact made education one of its highest priorities. This undertaking has not come without great sacrifice. Towering figures, like Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton and other founders and foundresses, with great tenacity and foresight, laid the foundations of what is today a remarkable network of parochial schools contributing to the spiritual well-being of the Church and the nation. Some, like Saint Katharine Drexel, devoted their lives to educating those whom others had neglected—in her case, African Americans and Native Americans. Countless dedicated Religious Sisters, Brothers, and Priests together with selfless parents have, through Catholic schools, helped generations of immigrants to rise from poverty and take their place in mainstream society.

This sacrifice continues today. It is an outstanding apostolate of hope, seeking to address the material, intellectual, and spiritual needs of over three million children and students. It also provides a highly commendable opportunity for the entire Catholic community to contribute generously to the financial needs of our institutions. Their long-term sustainability must be assured. Indeed, everything possible must be done, in cooperation with the wider community, to ensure that they are accessible to people of all social and economic strata. No child should be denied his or her right to an education in faith, which in turn nurtures the soul of a nation.

Some today question the Church’s involvement in education, wondering whether her resources might be better placed elsewhere. Certainly in a nation such as this, the State provides ample opportunities for education and attracts committed and generous men and women to this honorable profession. It is timely, then, to reflect on what is particular to our Catholic institutions. How do they contribute to the good of society through the Church’s primary mission of evangelization?

All the Church’s activities stem from her awareness that she is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God himself: in his goodness and wisdom, God chose to reveal himself and to make known the hidden purpose of his will (cf. Eph 1:9; Dei Verbum, 2). God’s desire to make himself known, and the innate desire of all human beings to know the truth, provide the context for human inquiry into the meaning of life. This unique encounter is sustained within our Christian community: the one who seeks the truth becomes the one who lives by faith (cf. Fides et Ratio, 31). It can be described as a move from “I” to “we,” leading the individual to be numbered among God’s people.

This same dynamic of communal identity—to whom do I belong?—vivifies the ethos of our Catholic institutions. A university or school’s Catholic identity is not simply a question of the number of Catholic students. It is a question of conviction—do we really believe that only in the mystery of the Word made flesh does the mystery of man truly become clear (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22)? Are we ready to commit our entire self—intellect and will, mind and heart—to God? Do we accept the truth Christ reveals? Is the faith tangible in our universities and schools? Is it given fervent expression liturgically, sacramentally, through prayer, acts of charity, a concern for justice, and respect for God’s creation? Only in this way do we really bear witness to the meaning of who we are and what we uphold.

From this perspective one can recognize that the contemporary “crisis of truth” is rooted in a “crisis of faith”. Only through faith can we freely give our assent to God’s testimony and acknowledge him as the transcendent guarantor of the truth he reveals. Again, we see why fostering personal intimacy with Jesus Christ and communal witness to his loving truth is indispensable in Catholic institutions of learning. Yet we all know, and observe with concern, the difficulty or reluctance many people have today in entrusting themselves to God. It is a complex phenomenon and one which I ponder continually. While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in—a participation in Being itself.

Hence authentic freedom can never be attained by turning away from God. Such a choice would ultimately disregard the very truth we need in order to understand ourselves. A particular responsibility therefore for each of you, and your colleagues, is to evoke among the young the desire for the act of faith, encouraging them to commit themselves to the ecclesial life that follows from this belief. It is here that freedom reaches the certainty of truth. In choosing to live by that truth, we embrace the fullness of the life of faith which is given to us in the Church.

Clearly, then, Catholic identity is not dependent upon statistics. Neither can it be equated simply with orthodoxy of course content. It demands and inspires much more: namely that each and every aspect of your learning communities reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith. Only in faith can truth become incarnate and reason truly human, capable of directing the will along the path of freedom (cf. Spe Salvi, 23). In this way our institutions make a vital contribution to the mission of the Church and truly serve society. They become places in which God’s active presence in human affairs is recognized and in which every young person discovers the joy of entering into Christ’s “being for others” (cf. ibid., 28).

The Church’s primary mission of evangelization, in which educational institutions play a crucial role, is consonant with a nation’s fundamental aspiration to develop a society truly worthy of the human person’s dignity. At times, however, the value of the Church’s contribution to the public forum is questioned. It is important therefore to recall that the truths of faith and of reason never contradict one another (cf. First Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith Dei Filius, IV: DS 3017; St. Augustine, Contra Academicos, III, 20, 43). The Church’s mission, in fact, involves her in humanity’s struggle to arrive at truth. In articulating revealed truth she serves all members of society by purifying reason, ensuring that it remains open to the consideration of ultimate truths. Drawing upon divine wisdom, she sheds light on the foundation of human morality and ethics, and reminds all groups in society that it is not praxis that creates truth but truth that should serve as the basis of praxis. Far from undermining the tolerance of legitimate diversity, such a contribution illuminates the very truth which makes consensus attainable, and helps to keep public debate rational, honest, and accountable. Similarly the Church never tires of upholding the essential moral categories of right and wrong, without which hope could only wither, giving way to cold pragmatic calculations of utility which render the person little more than a pawn on some ideological chess-board.

With regard to the educational forum, the diakonia of truth takes on a heightened significance in societies where secularist ideology drives a wedge between truth and faith. This division has led to a tendency to equate truth with knowledge and to adopt a positivistic mentality which, in rejecting metaphysics, denies the foundations of faith and rejects the need for a moral vision. Truth means more than knowledge: knowing the truth leads us to discover the good. Truth speaks to the individual in his or her entirety, inviting us to respond with our whole being. This optimistic vision is found in our Christian faith because such faith has been granted the vision of the Logos, God’s creative Reason, which in the Incarnation, is revealed as Goodness itself. Far from being just a communication of factual data—“informative”—the loving truth of the Gospel is creative and life-changing—“performative” (cf. Spe Salvi, 2). With confidence, Christian educators can liberate the young from the limits of positivism and awaken receptivity to the truth, to God and his goodness. In this way you will also help to form their conscience which, enriched by faith, opens a sure path to inner peace and to respect for others.

It comes as no surprise, then, that not just our own ecclesial communities but society in general has high expectations of Catholic educators. This places upon you a responsibility and offers an opportunity. More and more people—parents in particular—recognize the need for excellence in the human formation of their children. As Mater et Magistra, the Church shares their concern. When nothing beyond the individual is recognized as definitive, the ultimate criterion of judgment becomes the self and the satisfaction of the individual’s immediate wishes. The objectivity and perspective, which can only come through a recognition of the essential transcendent dimension of the human person, can be lost. Within such a relativistic horizon the goals of education are inevitably curtailed. Slowly, a lowering of standards occurs. We observe today a timidity in the face of the category of the good and an aimless pursuit of novelty parading as the realization of freedom. We witness an assumption that every experience is of equal worth and a reluctance to admit imperfection and mistakes. And particularly disturbing, is the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of “risk,” bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love.

How might Christian educators respond? These harmful developments point to the particular urgency of what we might call “intellectual charity.” This aspect of charity calls the educator to recognize that the profound responsibility to lead the young to truth is nothing less than an act of love. Indeed, the dignity of education lies in fostering the true perfection and happiness of those to be educated. In practice “intellectual charity” upholds the essential unity of knowledge against the fragmentation which ensues when reason is detached from the pursuit of truth. It guides the young towards the deep satisfaction of exercising freedom in relation to truth, and it strives to articulate the relationship between faith and all aspects of family and civic life. Once their passion for the fullness and unity of truth has been awakened, young people will surely relish the discovery that the question of what they can know opens up the vast adventure of what they ought to do. Here they will experience “in what” and “in whom” it is possible to hope, and be inspired to contribute to society in a way that engenders hope in others.

Dear friends, I wish to conclude by focusing our attention specifically on the paramount importance of your own professionalism and witness within our Catholic universities and schools. First, let me thank you for your dedication and generosity. I know from my own days as a professor, and I have heard from your Bishops and officials of the Congregation for Catholic Education, that the reputation of Catholic institutes of learning in this country is largely due to yourselves and your predecessors. Your selfless contributions—from outstanding research to the dedication of those working in inner-city schools—serve both your country and the Church. For this I express my profound gratitude.

In regard to faculty members at Catholic colleges and universities, I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.

Teachers and administrators, whether in universities or schools, have the duty and privilege to ensure that students receive instruction in Catholic doctrine and practice. This requires that public witness to the way of Christ, as found in the Gospel and upheld by the Church’s Magisterium, shapes all aspects of an institution’s life, both inside and outside the classroom.

Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual. I wish also to express a particular word of encouragement to both lay and Religious teachers of catechesis who strive to ensure that young people become daily more appreciative of the gift of faith. Religious education is a challenging apostolate, yet there are many signs of a desire among young people to learn about the faith and practice it with vigor. If this awakening is to grow, teachers require a clear and precise understanding of the specific nature and role of Catholic education. They must also be ready to lead the commitment made by the entire school community to assist our young people, and their families, to experience the harmony between faith, life, and culture. Here I wish to make a special appeal to Religious Brothers, Sisters, and Priests: do not abandon the school apostolate; indeed, renew your commitment to schools especially those in poorer areas. In places where there are many hollow promises which lure young people away from the path of truth and genuine freedom, the consecrated person’s witness to the evangelical counsels is an irreplaceable gift. I encourage the Religious present to bring renewed enthusiasm to the promotion of vocations.

Know that your witness to the ideal of consecration and mission among the young is a source of great inspiration in faith for them and their families. To all of you I say: bear witness to hope. Nourish your witness with prayer. Account for the hope that characterizes your lives (cf. 1 Pet 3:15) by living the truth which you propose to your students. Help them to know and love the One you have encountered, whose truth and goodness you have experienced with joy. With Saint Augustine, let us say: “we who speak and you who listen acknowledge ourselves as fellow disciples of a single teacher” (Sermons, 23:2). With these sentiments of communion, I gladly impart to you, your colleagues and students, and to your families, my Apostolic Blessing.

What Do Sky-High College Tuitions Really Buy These Days? by John Zmirak

Editor’s note: Our thanks to John Zmirak for this article.  And a special thanks to one of our students, T. C.,  for sending us these beautiful pictures she took while in Florida.

In times of economic slowdown, prices usually fall. Is your home worth as much as it was two years ago? As much as the mortgage you have on it? (For your sake, I hope so.) In major cities rents are falling, and shoppers are skipping organic groceries in favor of mongo-sized discount produce from Price Club. There’s just one sector of the economy that’s bizarrely insulated from reality: Academia.

Tuition, room and board at Sarah Lawrence College just hit $53,166 per year. That’s like buying a C-Class Mercedes every year … except you never get the car. Other colleges are comparable, with even state school tuition rising to levels some parents find impossible. Why hasn’t reality had its revenge?

There are good reasons why we try to preserve college life from the logic of the market. There’s no clear bottom-line benefit to teaching Shakespeare plays, but we still want professors doing it. Universities in the West were invented by monks in the Middle Ages, and at their best they still serve as a cloistered refuge from the grim necessities of life — offering students not just a degree that’s valued in the marketplace, but a chance to broaden their interests and deepen their souls, to gain a solid grounding in the fundamentals that made our civilization, and explore all life’s possibilities before settling down to a life of working to earn their bread.

Yeah, that’s the theory. But what if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers — who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?

That is exactly what happened in academia over the past 30 years, according to Emory University professor Mark Bauerlain, who explores the open, ugly secret that most professors are paid based not on the quality (or even quantity) of their teaching, but rather on the volume of scholarly articles and books they can produce.

Bauerlain’s American Enterprise Institute paper, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own,” reveals the following: Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.

At the same time, the degree of interaction between teachers and students has declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial course work, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”

Indeed, prestigious professors frequently have little interaction with students at all, lecturing to hundreds at a time, consigning discussions and grading to graduate students. Meanwhile, the research these professors are turning out is increasingly obscure and often politicized. If they’re dealing with well-studied writers, they must pursue ever more oddball interpretations of the works in order to produce something original. Here’s Bauerlain again, explaining why: In the year 2007, literary scholars and critics published 85 studies of the life and writings of William Faulkner. Nearly all of them appeared in U.S. publications, and the total included 11 books and eight dissertations. The previous year saw 78 entries on Faulkner, and the one before that 80 of them.

In fact, from 1980 to 2006, Faulkner attracted fully 3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews and editions. During the same years, Charles Dickens garnered 3,437 studies, while Emily Dickinson tallied 1,776. Towering at the top was William Shakespeare with 21,674 separate pieces of scholarship and criticism.

Professors daunted by the task of hunting for treasure in such burned-over fields will often simply switch gears and write about popular culture. At least the movie ‘‘Bruno” doesn’t have 47,000 scholarly articles written about it. Yet.

I’m not throwing stones at the hardworking scholars who wade through decades of previous research to try saying something new about canonical authors. I’ve been there and I’ve done it. It’s real work, but it doesn’t add much to teaching, especially at the most basic levels, such as composition courses.

Those classes, which few professors really want to teach, are among the most crucial many students will ever take, determining how fluently they can write in their own first language.

Meanwhile, survey classes — the next most important category of courses — which cover literary history and introduce students for the first time to the greatest works in our language, also have trouble finding teachers because they don’t “tie into one’s research” and are largely useless for gaining tenure.

Ivy League grads can emerge without having ever read Hamlet or the Declaration of Independence, or they’ve learned these texts through some trendy lens, such as Queer Theory.

That’s why it’s essential, when making the ever more costly choices required in education, to carefully scope out each college. Call the admissions office and inquire about the student/teacher ratio and the percentage of classes taught by graduate students.

Is there a core curriculum of solid classes in Western culture, American history and great works of literature? Ask a professor how highly teaching (versus research) is valued in tenure decisions. After all, the teaching is what you’re paying for. Leave the tab for all that research to those 300 people who actually buy the books.

Nails Provide Link to Strong Generation by Larry Dablemont

Editor’s note: As we enter another season and the leaves begin to fall, let us take a moment to reflect on this thoughtful, timely article by Larry Dablemont. (Pictures taken in Colorado by one of our Great Books students.)

Larry Dablemont: Nails Provide Link to Strong Generation
Sunday 4 June 2006 – Globe columnist

I mentioned that I have a hard time throwing anything away. Much of my basement is filled with old things, like an electric typewriter, old tools, old cameras, old magazines, old clothes, old fishing and hunting gear, and a coffee can filled with old rusty nails. I cannot throw it all into some landfill, perhaps because my memory goes back to the 1950s when I was a boy.

I was born at the end of an era when items of daily life were treasured, taken care of, adapted, modified and reused. My grandfathers told of times when men lived with so little, and struggled so much, and I somehow could always feel the days they spoke of, perhaps because they were so close. Many of us here in the Ozarks descend from such poverty. My grandparents on both sides were poor. They raised families in a place and time where they had almost nothing. Their children wore hand-me down ragged clothes, went without shoes, and scraped up meals from what they could catch or kill, grow or raise.

You worked hard when you were just a child, and grew strong from it. Nothing was easy, little things were treasured. That was only years ago, so close to today’s generation we can still hear their voices and see the products of their lives, modest as they were. My grandpa would be astonished to know that little artifacts he owned, worth so little in his time, would bring so much money today, his handmade paddles, the old brass fishing reel, his knife and razor. His old tools, uniquely his own, made so by little adaptations he made to them, are things of history. He lived by reusing and recycling. Grandpa built a small cabin for his family to live in by using nails he pulled and restraightened from an old fallen-down house and barn.

Today, the modest belongings of our ancestors are treasures sought out in antique stores by a generation which throws away everything else. We have become an extravagant, wasteful, unappreciative generation of people. The things we use in our daily lives are made to be thrown away, or devalued quickly. Six years ago my computer cost so much I had to eat baloney sandwiches for months just to pay for it. Today it is worth nothing.

In 1999, a pickup I bought lost $5,000 in value after one week of use. In 20 years, my grandpa didn’t make that much. But I was one of the generation of which parents so often said, “My kids are going to have better. I want them to have what I could not have!” Our generation was spoiled and pampered, brought into the push-button age, and taught to treasure so little. We have misplaced values. When I became a young man, I shaved with throw-away razors, and watched modern day landfills being made as I still had a strong memory of my grandmother searching through an old city dump looking for canning jars which she might use for her garden produce, and maybe taking home an old dress she came across while doing it.

I watched jet planes soar overhead, and hunted squirrels along an old wooded lane where my dad and uncle had rode to town in a wagon and team of horses. My children cannot comprehend the awe of this. For perhaps a thousand years, and more, one generation lived in the exact footsteps of the one before and the one before and the one before. For an endless procession of time, you dressed and ate and lived and learned as your grandfathers before you. Progress was so slow it came like the growing of the grass.

Today, the change is so rapid, so phenomenal, it can’t be comprehended. We go at the speed of sound. All wild creatures are exactly what their ancestors were one thousand years ago, but a man today is nothing like his predecessors. He is a different creature entirely. In his rapid ascent, modern man sees himself, as becoming close to the God which created him, in terms of intelligence and importance.

But the earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes and tornadoes which show how small and insignificant we are surely lie at the feet of He who made the mountains and the oceans. Great natural tragedies expose our weakness, which we fail to recognize. Man can make computers, but he cannot make the air, the water and the land.

Every computer in the world, every machine in the world, every refrigerator and light and auto in the world could stop working and never work again. It comes down to knowing that men can make a gold watch, but men cannot make gold.

We are wasteful of the resources we have been given, but we seem willing to sacrifice those resources and the earth itself merely to sustain what we have created. Because I cannot see the future, I don’t know what is coming, but I have an idea of what is ahead because I can see the past so clearly.

 

Should man indeed destroy himself, he will not do it by cutting off his own head, he will do it by cutting off the broad, strong limb he sits on, the lifeline of water, air, soil, timber, oil and minerals which this smarter, greater, generation must have to survive. Our ancestors had little, but they never lived on a weak limb.

The limb we live on is long and weak, and it gets longer and weaker. Our descendants will create great computers, but they will not be able to restraighten nails and grow their own food, and today’s landfills have no jars which can be used for canning. I guess someone like me is a little goofy for not being able to throw away his old boots. No joke, I have a can filled with rusty bent nails and a whole shelf full of canning jars. I know that there are people who live very well in crowded city suburbs who laugh at people like me, and wonder why I have been so content to do without so much of what they have.

But out here on this little wooded ridge, I can survive and do just fine if tomorrow I have to live with no electricity, no gasoline, and no money. I like that independence. It links me to my grandpa, and to a stronger, abler generation of people than the world will ever know again.