An Educational Perfect Storm

An Educational Perfect Storm

The 1991 “perfect storm,” made famous by the movie by that name starring George Clooney, resulted from a rare collision of three distinct weather systems that converged to create an exceptionally massive and destructive storm. We are facing the damage from an educational “perfect storm” that has resulted from the collision of a host of destructive forces converging together at the same time. The results have, in many cases, been disastrous.

Good kids have been left bereft not only of a solid foundation to flourish in contemporary American society, they have been drained of any interest in or motivation for a life of learning. They cannot read more than a few pages of serious prose, nor write literate prose, or do basic math. They do not know who Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were, nor have they ever read the Constitution of the United States. What they do know is that they should not be racist and that no one should be criticized for their moral decisions or lifestyle choices. This constitutes the sum and substance of what their education has left them with. One might have hoped students from Catholic schools would be different, but proportionally, the differences are minor. The biggest exception to the rule is kids who were home-schooled.

Several forces converged to produce the profusion of educational wreckage now washing up on the shores of America’s colleges and universities. Many attribute the problems to the school closings during COVID. There is some truth in this, but it is not the whole story. We would have weathered the school closings better if the educational system had not already been so badly impaired over the previous decades. What caused this impairment?

Several things. One was decades of educational “reforms” that used children in the classroom as experimental lab rats. Failure rates in each were treated as symptoms of resistance on the part of teachers, and educational administers, instead of listening to those working on “the front lines,” so to speak, doubled down on their ideological efforts to “reform” the laggards who insisted on using the old traditional methods that still worked.

Why were these teachers not defended by their union? Because in many cases, the major teachers’ unions were the ones pushing the latest “reforms.” Like many unions, they allowed themselves to be seduced by the allure of ideology rather than satisfying themselves with “collective bargaining” on behalf of teachers. They also worked against efforts to discipline or dismiss incompetent teachers. The resulting convergence of incompetent teachers and invasive bureaucratic control from above forcing absurd educational reforms caused many of the most gifted teachers to flee to more rewarding, better paying careers. If you’re going to be treated this way, the thinking goes, why not go into a job where you can make 20 or 30 thousand dollars more per year, especially when “being a teacher” has become an unappreciated, even derided, occupation in American society.

Teachers are not trained to deal with social ills such as depression, alcohol and drug dependency, and various other social pathologies. They are (or should be) trained to teach math, science, history, and literature. And yet the schools are where society dumps kids so they won’t be out rampaging in the streets. Instead, they are rampaging in the schools, and as a result, very few can get a real education in an institution whose purpose is education, not “social control.”

The results of the social breakdown of the family have turned up in the schools. Oddly, some parents remain frustrated that the schools and teachers cannot bring about the control of their kids that they themselves are not willing to enforce. They seem surprised that their kids have little or no interest in or respect for education when they themselves have little or none themselves. Too often, parents and students see education as nothing more than a credential, a box you check on your way to a good job and a fulfilling career. Whether that was true in the past, it is certainly not true now. A “good” education now requires the hard-earned development of some basic skills and virtues.

If the education is nothing more than a “credential,” and if that credential has increasingly become meaningless, why pursue it? The apathy of some young people can be explained by the fact that they sense the meaninglessness of what they are being asked to waste their time on. They are right to wonder why they should be kept in “teen prison” and suffer frequent bullying if they are not learning anything substantial, when they could be out working a job, getting needed skills and experience. The more mature ones might even find a mate, get married, and start to enjoy the warmth and pleasure of a conjugal relationship rather than having to sneak away to find the time and place to have the sexual encounters they shouldn’t be having which will likely leave them heartbroken and damaged.

The blasé attitude toward school shifts dramatically, however, when it comes to sports. Now this is important. In sports, it is not merely a matter of “attending.” Standards of excellence are clear and demanded. New approaches in training that fail to produce results are identified quickly and rejected. Disciplining oneself in the skill is mandatory. If you don’t want to study, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to run wind sprints, you don’t play. It used to be the case that if players didn’t study, they didn’t play. An important part of the sports was thought to be the development of character. But that is no longer the case. Which brings us to yet another force converging to bring about the storm.

The sad fact is that the most common way of being greeted with open arms by a selective college or university is not by exhibiting excellence in reading, math, or art. You do it by excelling at some popular sport. It is an educational institution, but math proficiency is optional, whereas being a good linebacker for the football team can be a paid position. The degree to which educational institutions have prostituted themselves as American society’s obsession with popular sports is nothing short of shameful.

There will be those who say: “Yes, all those other things are bad, but not my thing!” Teachers’ unions will insist they are not to blame. Educational reformers will say that their efforts are being unfairly dismissed. Sports boosters who have spent literally billions supporting university sports programs will undoubtedly dismiss my criticism of the way our country’s obsession with sports has corrupted the educational system. Fine. But I teach these kids, and I actually care about their education and their futures— not about a “system,” not about an educational ideology, not about whether we’re creating the most competitive athletes in the world — but about the young people who sit in front of me every day whose working knowledge of the world, of others, and of themselves has been systematically neglected.

So don’t write and tell me how good these other things can be: how valuable sports can be, how much better the education is now than in the 1950s, how bad things would be if we didn’t have teachers’ unions. My undergraduate education was in the sciences, and so I judge things by their results, not by how well they work on paper or in people’s ideological schemes. And too many of our students can’t read, write, think analytically, or do basic math. And they have little or no sense of the duties and obligations they have to others or to the common good.

I would be negligent, however, if I did not mention another destructive force, one internal to the educational culture I am a part of. This is the problem caused by converting the paradigm for America’s educational institutions from an English-inspired Oxbridge collegiate system, emphasizing small-group teaching, pastoral care, and residential life to the German “research university” model that emphasizes research and the “production” of “knowledge.” I suppose I must point out that I have published seven books, two with Cambridge University Press, and over forty peer-reviewed scholarly articles to get around the obvious objection: “You are only saying this because you can’t hack it.” I can, and I have. But I don’t assume everyone else in the university should be like me or that excellence should be measured only in one way.

I value great teaching, and I try to be a great teacher. I admire colleagues who are great teachers and who devote themselves to their students, whether they have published a lot or not. They inspire me. Sadly, however, they probably won’t get tenure and promotion unless they publish articles that almost no one will read. This is a silly, corrupt system, and it needs to stop. We need to rededicate ourselves to the goal colleges and universities are meant to serve — not praise for our scholarship, not prestige for the institution, not victories for our sports teams, but the education of our students,

So, let’s review. A focus on woke indoctrination rather than training in reading, writing, and arithmetic; educational reforms that devastated education in subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic; the oppressive force of teachers’ unions more interested in enforcing ideological educational reforms and bureaucratic processes than in fostering educational excellence; the cultural breakdown of society and the family; the loss of respect for education; approaching education as a check box credential rather the attainment of skills; the obsession with sports over educational attainment; and the emphasis on research and the production of knowledge products rather than on student learning. It is a perfect — perfectly bad — educational storm.

If you try to tame the storm and reform the system, I applaud your heroism, but you will face some very high waves. Teachers’ unions, sports boosters, and research universities have literally billions of dollars invested in what they do, each of them proclaiming themselves to be “supporting young people” even in the face of a failing educational system. It is always someone else’s fault. Others will insist, “It’s not so bad.” Tell that to my colleagues trying to teach college kids who can’t read past an eighth-grade level, can’t write a literate paragraph, and can’t do basic math. This would be like reading reports in the news about wounded, bleeding children being taken off a battlefield and insisting, “Oh, things aren’t all that bad. Those kids will be fine.” You can say that when you’re not the doctor operating on them.

There is no good way of escaping the storm completely. It is difficult not to run into one or another of its deleterious effects. But things aren’t hopeless. It is possible to escape at least some of them — in a school that actually teaches skills; in a sports program that actually develops character and cares about education; in a home with parents who care about education and not merely grades; as part of a social group in which reading and discussion is both commonplace and civil; or with adults who make clear the duties owed to others and who model the virtues.

I see kids who have escaped one or more of the deleterious effects of the perfect storm every semester. If the lights are on, and they really want an education, we can give them one. The goal of every dedicated teacher is to be worthy of those kids. But please understand. We can do everything in the world to try to inspire them, but it won’t happen if they just don’t care, if somehow everything else in life is more important than getting an education. But for most, the divide between the educational “haves” and “have nots” gets wider every day.

Randall Smith

J. Michael Miller Endowed Professor

Department of Theology

University of St. Thomas, Houston