http://my.execpc.com/~presswis/decon.html The Deconstruction of American Education by WILLIAM G.

DURDEN

A year ago, I was a taskforce member charged with making recommendations to improve the status of gifted and talented students in a large, East Coast, urban school system. Most of the students were African-American, many were poor, and a good 40% dropped out of school at ninth grade, never to return. Academic achievement was at the lowest in the state. Under any reasonable standard, this school system was in crisis and the public was not being served. Midway through our deliberations, the Assistant Superintendent of Schools, chair of the committee, purportedly echoing the intentions of the Superintendent of Schools, announced a plan to improve standards for all students in the community and in so doing, expected that the needs of the gifted and talented would be served. He expected this plan to be incorporated into our final recommendations.

His solution, in a school district where pervasive underachievement is regrettably the norm, dropout rates before high school are staggeringly high, and where there are, for example, whole high schools where not even one College Board Advanced Placement examination is taken, was to mandate that all students - to graduate from the school system - take Calculus. the response from the task-force members, system teachers, and administrators, as well as several members from the greater community, was incredulous. The Assistant Superintendent's reasoning was as follows: uniform high academic achievement is readily subject to bureaucratic mandate. Individual student needs, varying motivation, ability levels, and preparedness are trivial considerations.

To defend the proposition, the Assistant Superintendent stated rather cavalierly that the United States is the only highly industrialized nation in which Calculus is not demanded of its high-school graduates. At this statement, I could keep silent no longer. I suggested to the Chair that his statement, to the best of my knowledge, was simply not accurate and I would be glad to supply some evidence to the contrary so that our recommendations could at least be based on facts. The reaction was swift and to the point. My colleague said that he and the community needed no such additional information. Despite his injunction, during the next few days, I called some colleagues in several industrial nations (to include Germany) to reconfirm my position. As I anticipated, Calculus is not expected of all terminal "high school degrees" in other industrialized nations. I further requested that my international colleagues fax me school regulations so that the Assistant Superintendent could have witness to the accurate situation.

All this information was passed on to the Assistant Superintendent with a congenial note from me stating that he might want to reexamine the issue and correct his position. I received no direct response from my colleague, but I was told that his reaction at the next meeting, at which I was not present, was to reassert his claims and to accompany this by a statement that whatever the evidence to the contrary, such information did not matter -- the facts were irrelevant and superfluous. Perception over Truth I bring up this scenario from my own recent experience to highlight vividly a crisis in American education that has to date been little examined. Nowhere in current scholarly or popular literature have I seen American education, particularly pre-collegiate education, associated with postmodernism and deconstruction. The Assistant Superintendent's comments and position towards educational reform represent in part an insidious and growing ideology that, left unidentified and unchallenged, will in all its various manifestations eventually destroy American public education. From the above incident, several manifestations of this ideology, which I shall call the postmodernist deconstruction ideology, are evident -- equal achievement for all regardless of performance; de-emphasis, if not complete disregard, for individuals and individual differences; the dismissal of fact and the autonomy of the interpreter's or critic's voice (in this case, the Assistant Superintendent's) over accurate information -- in essence, the authority of perception over truth, especially the perception of the "critic."

This ideology harms public education in the United States. As Mary Catherine Bateson so accurately points out in her new book, Peripheral Visions: Learning About the Way (1994), education is not just a collection of techniques and pedagogy, it is "not just about literacy and numeracy ... it has always been contested ground, the stuff of power and identity," the stuff of ideology. Normally called postmodernism, this ideology is concisely, if not controversially, described in historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's 1994 book, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society: Postmodernism (or poststructuralism -- the terms are by now used interchangeably -- or "pomo," as it is familiarly called in academic circles and computer networks) is best known as a school of literary theory. But it is becoming increasingly prominent in such other disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology, law and theology (and in architecture, where it has a more specialized meaning). Its forefathers are Nietzsche and Heidegger, its fathers are Deirida and Foucault ... from Jacques Deirida postmodernism has borrowed the vocabulary and basic concepts of "deconstruction": the "aporia" of discourse, the indeterminacy and contrariness of language, the "fictive and duplications" nature of signs and symbols, the disassociation of words from any presumed reality. From Michael Foucault it has adopted the idea of power: the "power structure" imminent not only in language -- the words and ideas that "privilege" the "hegemonic" groups in society -- but in the very nature of knowledge, which is itself an instrument and product of power. The combined effect of these doctrines is to impugn traditional rational discourse as "logocentric," "phallocentric," "totalizing," "authoritarian." According to Himmelfarb, the effects of postmodernism and deconstruction on a variety of disciplines are as follows:

In Literature: "Postmodernism amounts to denial of the fixity of any 'text,' of the authority of the author over the interpretation, of any 'canon' that privileges great books over lesser ones." In Philosophy: "It is the denial of the fixity of language, of any correspondence between language and reality -- indeed, of any 'essential' reality and thus of any proximate truth about reality." In Law: (at least in the United States): "It is a denial of the fixity of the Constitution, of the authority of the founders of the Constitution, and of the legitimacy of law itself, which is regarded as nothing more than an instrument of power." In History: "It is a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past." Strikingly, Himmelfarb does not comment upon education.

Post modernism contains several defining moments. There is a strict relativity of value about everyone and everything. This position is dramatically underscored by a commentator on National Public Radio who described positively, in August 1994, a weekend music program committed to the proposition that "all music is equal" -- folk songs, rock, classical, heavy metal. In addition, for post-modernism, the individual and individualism are of no account. To postmodernists, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, even Hitler did not exist as historical entities in their own right. There is no individual here who exists, except as postmodernist critics have the exclusive power and authority to reconstruct them. Differentiation is unacceptable and illusionary. And finally and perhaps most significantly, facts are no longer important, are objectively irrelevant. A postmodernist literary critic, Stanley Fish, most provocatively summarizes this position when he states that the demise of objectivity "relieves me of the obligation to be right ... and demands only that I be interesting."

Postmodernism has its detrimental effects on how we conceive and judge our world and our place in it, how we assume our cultural responsibilities and direct our moral energies. This ideology exhibits for such observers as Himmelfarb an intellectual arrogance and spiritual irresponsibility that most startingly belittles even one of the great tragedies of all time, the Holocaust. For the postmodernist, says Himmelfarb, this devastating event now has been detached from individuals to whom we can level responsibility. Himmelfarb concludes that an adherence to postmodernism contains the real potential for the demoralization and dehumanization of the human condition -- "Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and reality, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide."

Admittedly, except for a small circle of scholars and intellectuals at universities and research centers, postmodernism and its effects are probably not a major topic of conversation or a prevailing concern for "the person on the street." However in one critical area, I would suggest strongly that postmodernism

has placed its mark on a system that has a direct impact on millions of Americans -- and that area is education. The influence of this ideology in educational practice is probably not identified by the vast majority of students, teachers, administrators, or parents. Many of my colleagues would at first glance probably see little connection between their educational practice and ideological postmodernism and furthermore they would be offended, if not outraged, that I would identify them collectively as postmodernists and deconstructionists.

However, I contend that much that is in vogue in American education today, perhaps unwittingly, is to a large degree part and parcel of the postmodernist ideology. When this ideology is brought to bear upon contemporary learning, a disturbing challenge to human dignity arises no less than that seen affecting law, history, or other areas of defing human activities. The influence of postmodernism is most keenly felt when attention is directed to a seeming elite in the population -- students with high academic potential or accomplishment. Excellence Vs. Equality In the field of education, two value dichotomies increasingly shape attitudes towards students' intellectual talents. We believe that intellectual excellence is somehow opposed to equality. And we believe that, in the life of the individual, intellectual accomplishment comes at the expense of practicality, emotional feeling, and even the development of character.

This anti-intellectualism affects our schools and our students. On April 13, 1993, The Washington Post summarized the findings of Harold W. Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who administered tests and questionnaires to students in Minnesota, Virginia, Canada, Taiwan, and China. According to the Post, the study concluded that Asian students felt more stress when they did badly in school, but American students felt more stress when they did well. Harold Stevenson commented, "In Asia, you are defying the norm by not doing well [in school] ... in America, you are defying the norm by doing well."

Good students may be becoming the pariahs of American education. We have arrived at a moment in our cultural history in which we are inspired by the excellence of athletes on the basketball court, but resistant to the accomplishments of our intellectually aspiring students. While we admire many kinds of achievement, intellectual achievement arouses deep ambivalence and calls forth that nasty word that has the capacity for stopping all rational dialogue, "elitism." It is precisely at this moment that postmodernist ideology appears and claims attention.

Pervasive anti-intellectualism has not always been the rule. Even within the parameters of what is seen as the North-American tradition, democratic society, individual well-being, and the life of the mind are strongly associated. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a principal architect of the American Renaissance, who famously espoused self-reliance and the individual as the foundation of meaningful life, passionately embraced scholarship. Emerson portrayed the American scholar as the ideal beneficiary of democratic freedom: "free should the scholar be ... free even to the definition of freedom ... without any hindrance that does not arise from his own constitution." For Emerson, the scholar was both Everyman and hero (here, the hero still existed) and found his perfect home in American democracy. America, Emerson believed, was poised to reinvent scholarship.

In our contemporary life, not only have we lost this enthusiasm for scholarship, we have also lost our feeling for the potential symbiosis of democracy and intellectual accomplishment. The ideal of democracy that Emerson embraced -- and by which an emerging nation distinguished itself from 18thcentury European aristocracy -- in our time is broadly applied and often misapplied. In an ever-widening spiral of purported relevance, democratic ideals impose their own constraints, bolstering a growing cult of conformity.

Thus, a mist of sameness blankets education, obscuring its real and vital goals. Many educators are moved by the vision of large numbers of students learning the same thing at the same time and with the same high degree of accomlishment. On the most necessary and important goal of equality of opportunity, these educators have superimposed a utopian fantasy of equality of achievement. They are pleased by what seems to them the decency of a homogeneous view of the intellectual achievements of youth. The effect upon the subjects of this munificence is concrete. More and more students approach schooling, and one would presume their life, with a belief in the right of equal accomplishment. From this movement grows the insidious social posture of entitlement.

In this monolithic climate, intellectual difference and individual difference are considered distasteful and denied or crudely "resolved." Our schools enact a series of seemingly unrelated strategies to combat this purported "inequality" -- especially that related to individual achievement. These strategies include the reduction of testing and standardized assessment, the devaluation, if not outright dismissal, of facts, the reduction of competition, particularly as it is associated with competitive learning at the expense of any form of ability grouping. All of these strategies collectively reduce most, if not all, options for distinction, differentiation, judgement, and individualism.

Influenced further by theories of systems management initially designed for corporations, many schools increasingly subscribe to a collectivist vision that denies the presence of the individual student, favoring

instead a bland and ultimately deceptive notion of community. For if education is socially formative for youth, then in which kind of community does the individual play ultimately no part? In what kind of community are facts denied and value unassigned, in what kind of community does technique replace content, in what kind of community is competition eliminated and equal accomplishment an entitlement, not an opportunity? In what kind of community are our youth trained in schools as artificial, homogeneous collectives with the expectation that society will also be so constructed?

Cases in Point I would contend that this school agenda, when its various pieces are viewed collectively, is in fact a manifestation of the postmodernist deconstruction ideology. All the components are present -- denial of individuality, absolute equality of both human beings and ideas with no distinction in value, dismissal of facts, and at once the commitment to truth gained by interpretation and technique. I would furthermore contend that this ideology (like all ideology) is not without strong political consequences that demand authority and power and require a public's unwavering acquiescence.

The cooperative-learning component of educational postmodernism is a case in point. Robert Slavin, a researcher at The Johns Hopkins University, and Jeannie Oakes, a professor at the University of California, both argue vociferously against ability grouping and/or tracking and accuse those who are unenlightened as running "against our democratic ideals" and "against our national ideology that all are created equal, and our desire to be one nation." This challenge to one's nationalism on the basis of educational beliefs is eerily reminiscent of the harrowing charges brought against numerous Americans during the McCarthy era.

The disturbing questioning of another's "Americaness" is clearly power politics and becomes even more troubling in a free, rationally based democracy when advocates of untracking and/or non-ability grouping call for the suspension of rational study. "The ability grouping of students for educational opportunity in a democratic society is ethically unacceptable, "Lloyd Hastings, a principal from Texas, writes in the October 1992 issue of the journal Educational Leadership. "We need not justify this with research," says Hastings, "for it is a statement of principle, not of science."

A glimpse of what kind of community might emerge is given from a May 16, 1993, New York Times article with the message, "Cooperation is in, competition is out." Thus, the impulse for equal achievement now even permeates the area where striving and differential outcomes based on ability are traditionally unquestioned and handsomely rewarded. The Times reports that if games are now to be played in America elementary schools, a school class is likely to be divided into so many tiers that no one is last chosen. Children are to be shielded from seeing that someone is better than the next.

Running is not timed; basketball hoops are adjusted in height and distance to fit each pupil's capacity. The old exercise of an individual climbing a rope in gym class and measured for the ability to indeed climb the rope is replaced by three possibilities, all of equal grade value. One can now still climb the rope or one can merely hold it or just swing it. The point here is that there is no longer an absolute standard against which to measure achievement; measurement is variable and its various points are of equal value.

The most potentially destructive move to politicize the postmodernist ideology in American education was recently announced during an interview with the Justice Department's new Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Deval Patrick, at the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's May 17, 1954, ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. As reported in USA Today (May 4, 1994), the Clinton administration is planning a legal attack on classroom tracking -- described by one expert as "the segregating tool of the 90's." Not only is any form of grouping for gifted and talented students the subject of legal challenge, but also that for the speech-impaired, the learning disabled, and the retarded. Deval Patrick says tracking will be challenged in the context of laws and rulings that outlaw school segregation because the methods used to assess students and then assign them education are often biased against blacks -- relegating them to programs where challenges and expectations are low. The solution offered is mainstreaming; even legitimate differences must be treated in a common classroom, perhaps even operationally ignored.

Now there is little doubt and much empirical evidence that those students assigned to low-ability groups -- often, and tragically, poor, minority students -- are subject to inadequate instruction, limited resources, undemanding curricula, and near-permanent assignment to a class of low expectation and performance. This situation is intolerable and must be altered. And it is true that those educational strategies often reserved for supposedly "gifted and talented' students, such as critical thinking and problem solving, should be part of instruction for all students.

That these necessary components to learning are restricted is outrageous. It is even more outrageous when one realizes that many gifted and talented programs, for example, are empirically unjustifiable. The protests of numerous parents whose children are not selected for the "gifted and talented programs" are well taken. Research generally does not find achievement benefits from enrichment programs that simply permit students to do more experiments, independent projects, field trips, and so on. These irrelevant enrichment initiatives are one of the most unjustified, elitist forms of education in that there is no compelling need to restrict such services to a small group of students.

All students can, of course, benefit from field trips and extra reports, not just the "gifted." But there is sufficient empirical evidence to demonstrate that grouping is justifiable when the content of the program represents acceleration, or in any case in which a markedly different curriculum would be inappropriate for average or low achievers in that perticular subject and where common grouping with such wide variance would create nightmares of classroom management and obstruct the continuous progress of each student in the class. The responsibility seems then not to eliminate all ability grouping just because there are tenacious problems for low-achieving students, but rather to improve immediately the instructional and learning quality for all students, especially the lowest-achieving ones, and to preserve those strategies which still prove useful to advance individual students with legitimate special needs.

The elimination of ability grouping on a legal basis would, I predict, be the most serious threat to the support and continued existence of American public education by those who value educational progress and distinction for all races. There will no longer be any place where individual distinction and advancement based on legitimate effort can be found in the public sphere. In the '70s and '80s, there was massive middle-class white flight from inner-city schools to suburban schools on the basis of inadequate and unresponsive instruction. There is probably substantial evidence to assert that part of this exodus was racially based. However, the late '80s and the early '90s witnessed additional flight by families of the rapidly emerging African-American and Latino-American middle class who sought also a quality education to match the raised expectations they had for their children.

Special programs such as Advance Placement coursework, honors classes, gifted and talented programs, and legitimately staffed classes for the learning disabled are part of the expectation in suburban schools. With the legal elimination of all such opportunities, citizens of all races who value educational advancement will have nowhere to turn but to a variety of private institutions or homeschooling.

"In Defense of Elitism" Postmodernism and its irreconcilable juxtaposition of equality versus egalitarianism -- where egalitarianism always wins -- is the prevailing, yet still vaguely understood, ideology of contemporary public schooling. As such, it is unequivocally a serious matter of U.S. domestic public policy and social theory. William A. Henry III, in a most controversial book, In Defense of Elitism (1994), describes the situation and its consequences upon our body politic: This debate underlies the theories of social issues of our era, from feminism, multi-culturalism, and the proposed ban on hate speech to affirmative action, racial quotas, the erosion of political parties, and the re-enshrinement of the most aggressive forms of "progressive" taxation. The same thinking is

embedded, less overtly, in cultural changes -- from the relentless debunking of heroes and heroism to the universal self-celebration of the masses ... Talent, achievement, practice, and learning no longer command deference. Everybody is a star.

We have foolishly embraced the unexamined notion that everyone is pretty much alike (and, worse, should be), that self-fulfillment is more important than objective achievement, that the common man is always right. The situation, Henry claims, is particularly acute in education: At times -- indeed, at almost all times when educational policy is involved -- we are silly as the people in Garrison Keillor's fictional heartland, where all children are claimed to be "above average." We have devoted our rhetoric and our resources to the concept of entitlement, the notion that citizens are not to ask what they can do for their country but rather to demand what it can do for them. The list of what people are said to be "entitled" to has exploded exponentially as we have redefined our economy, in defiance of everyday reality as a collective possession -- a myth of communal splendor rather than simultaneous individual achievements ... Egalitarians are the sort who are trying to end ability tracking in elementary and sometimes secondary education, on the theory that bright children ought to be helping slow ones rather than maximizing their own achievements and pulling ahead ... Not far below the surface, this attitude embodies a Marxian belief that the smart pupils' intelligence is not theirs alone to allocate and command but is instead a communal asset to be deployed for the whole class's good. Nothing is as seductive as the assurance of success, and the ideology of post-modernism and deconstruction in American education offers this -- no, ensures this result for all. However, every ideology must answer the basic question of what it wants the society to which it appeals to look like. Gertrude Himmelfarb looks at the postmodernistic ideology in history and sees a society that can judge the Holocaust of no more consequence than, say, a stolen pocketbook. I look at the growing effect of postmodernism and deconstruction on American education and see a huge con game -- a promise of equally high achievement for all based on arbitrary proclamation rather than that gained by honest effort. I see an insult to people of all races who wish to be rewarded for a job well done rather than acclaimed for merely existing. I see a terrifying cloud of sameness suffocating education and threatening individuality, freedom of expression and association, and creativity.

Mary Catherine Bateson in Peripheral Visions argues for differentiation in the social order for the purpose of underscoring the very existence of a community and bringing, with that differentiation, human dignity: Even in the most specialized workplaces, in operating rooms and on flight decks, there are differences in kind and degree of expertise. Any human community must find ways to include some who are highly intelligent, some who, even as adults, barely understand the rules of culture, and some who rebel or

deviate. One of the greatest mistakes made by social scientists is overstating the degree of sameness -of homogeneity -- needed for a society to function. Some degree of heterogeneity, if only of age and sex, is necessarily allowed for, and many societies go on to provide niches for visionaries and schizophrenics, the ill and the handicapped, foreigners and visitors. The "threat" of the postmodernist deconstruction ideology to American education is that it will absorb valuable talent and resources to advance a homogeneity that ultimately stops a society from functioning. Exactly four decades ago, Herbert Marcuse raised the specter of the "One-dimensional Man" in society and his vision was met with alarm by numerous Americans on college campuses across the country. Sameness, engendered by the purported political and cultural integration of advanced industrial society, was then judged an insult to human dignity. The question in 1994 is whether that same level of courage and outrage can reemerge and check the snowballing influence of the current version of "One-dimensional Man."

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William G. Durden, Ph.D., is executive director of the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. The following article was reprinted from Wisconsin Interest, Volume 5, Number 1, with the permission of The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, Inc., P.O. Box 487, Thiensville, WI 53092.