I agree with lobbyists for federal school aid that education is one of
the great problems of our day. I am afraid, however, that their views
and mine regarding the nature of the problem are many miles apart. They
tend to see the problem in _quantitative_ terms--not enough schools,
not enough teachers, not enough equipment. I think it has to do with
_quality_: How good are the schools we have? Their solution is to
spend more money. Mine is to raise standards. Their recourse is to
the federal government. Mine is to the local public school board, the
private school, the individual citizen--as far away from the federal
government as one can possibly go. And I suspect that if we knew which
of these two views on education will eventually prevail, we would know
also whether Western civilization is due to survive, or will pass away.
To put this somewhat differently, I believe that our ability to cope
with the great crises that lie ahead will be enhanced in direct ratio
as we recapture the lost art of learning, and will diminish in direct
ratio as we give responsibility for training our children’s minds to
the federal bureaucracy.
But let us put these differences aside for the moment and note four
reasons why federal aid to education is objectionable even if we grant
that the problem is primarily quantitative.
The first is that federal intervention in education is
unconstitutional. It is the fashion these days to say that
responsibility for education “traditionally” rests with the local
community--as a prelude to proposing an exception to the tradition in
the form of federal aid. This “tradition,” let us remember, is also
the _law_. It is sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States,
for education is one of the powers reserved to the States by the Tenth
Amendment. Therefore, any federal aid program, however desirable it
might appear, must be regarded as illegal until such time as the
Constitution is amended.
The second objection is that the alleged need for federal funds has
never been convincingly demonstrated. It all depends, of course, on
how the question is put. If you ask, Does State X need additional
educational facilities? the answer may be yes. But if you ask, Does
State X require additional facilities that are beyond the reach of
its own financial means? the answer is invariably no. The White House
Conference on Education in 1955 was, most of us will remember, an
elaborate effort to demonstrate popular support for federal aid. As
expected, the “consensus” of the conference was that more federal aid
was needed. However, the conferees reached another conclusion that was
hardly noticed by the press. “No state represented,” the Conference
report stated, “has a demonstrated financial incapacity to build the
schools they will need during the next five years.” What is lacking,
the report went on, _is not money, but a “political determination
powerful enough to overcome all the obstacles”_.
Through the succeeding five years, congressional committees have
listened to hundreds of hours of testimony in favor of federal aid, but
they have never heard that 1955 finding successfully contradicted. What
the White House conferees were saying in 1955, and what proponents of
federal aid to education have been saying ever since, is that because
a few States have not seen fit to take care of their school needs,
it is incumbent upon the federal government to take up the slack. My
view is that if State X possesses the wealth to educate its children
adequately, but has failed to utilize its wealth for that purpose, it
is up to the people of State X to take remedial action through their
local and state governments. The federal government has neither the
right nor the duty to intervene.
Let us, moreover, keep the problem in proper perspective. The national
school system is _not_ in distress. Shortly before the Senate debate
this year on increased federal aid, I asked Mr. Arthur Flemming the
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, how many of the Nation’s
school districts were in actual trouble--how many, that is, had reached
their bonded limit. His answer was approximately 230. Now there are
roughly 42,000 school districts in America. Thus, proponents of federal
aid are talking about a problem that affects only one-half of one
per cent of our school districts! I cannot believe that the state
governments responsible for those areas are incapable of making up
whatever deficiencies exist. It so happens that the same deficiency
figure--one-half of one per cent--applies to my own state of Arizona.
And Arizona proudly turned down federal funds under the 1958 National
Defense Education Act on the grounds that Arizonans, themselves, were
quite capable of closing the gap.
This may be the place, while we are speaking of need, to lay to rest
the notion that the American people have been niggardly in support of
their schools. Since the end of World War II, Americans have built
550,000 classrooms at a cost of approximately $19 billion--almost
all of which was raised at the local level. This new construction
provided space for over 15 million pupils during a period when the
school population increased by only 10 million pupils. It is evident,
therefore, that increased school expenditures have more than kept pace
with increased school needs.
Here are some of the figures. In the school year 1949-50 there were
25 million students enrolled in various education institutions in
the United States. In the year 1959-60 there were 34.7 million--an
increase of 38%. During the same period revenues for school use,
raised largely at the local level, increased from 5.4 billion to 12.1
billion--an increase of 124%. When school expenditures increase three
and a half times as fast as the school population, I do not think that
the adequacy of America’s “traditional” approach to education is open
to serious question.
The third objection to federal aid is that it promotes the idea that
federal school money is “free” money, and thus gives the people a
distorted picture of the cost of education. I was distressed to find
that five out of six high school and junior college students recently
interviewed in Phoenix said they favored federal aid because it would
mean more money for local schools and ease the financial burden on
Arizona taxpayers.
The truth, of course, is that the federal government has no funds
except those it extracts from the taxpayers who reside in the various
States. The money that the federal government pays to State X for
education has been taken from the citizens of State X in federal taxes
and comes back to them, minus the Washington brokerage fee. The less
wealthy States, to be sure, receive slightly more than they give, just
as the more wealthy States receive somewhat less. But the differences
are negligible. For the most part, federal aid simply substitutes the
tax-collecting facilities of the federal government for those of local
governments. This fact cannot be stressed often enough; for stripped
of the idea that federal money is free money, federal aid to education
is exposed as an act of naked compulsion--a decision by the federal
government to force the people of the States to spend more money than
they choose to spend for this purpose voluntarily.
The fourth objection is that federal aid _to_ education inevitably
means federal control _of_ education. For many years, advocates of
federal aid denied that aid implies control, but in the light of
the National Defense Education Act of 1958 they cannot very well
maintain their position. Federal aid under the act is conditioned
upon compliance by the States and local educational institutions with
various standards and specifications laid down by the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare. _There are no less than twelve direct
controls of this kind in the act._ Moreover, the acknowledged purpose
of the act is to persuade local educational institutions to put greater
emphasis on the physical sciences and other subjects directly related
to national defense. I do not question the desirability of encouraging
increased proficiency in the physical sciences, but when the federal
government does the encouraging through the withholding and granting of
funds, I do not see how it can be denied that the federal government
is helping to determine the _content_ of education; and influencing
content is the last, not the first, stage of control.
Nobody should be surprised that aid has led to controls. It could, and
_should not_ be otherwise. Congress cannot be expected to appropriate
the people’s money and make no provision for how it will be spent.
Congress would be shirking its responsibilities to the taxpayer if
it distributed his money willy-nilly, without regard to its use.
Should Congress permit the use of federal funds to subsidize Communist
schools and thus promote the cause of our enemies? Of course not. But
a prohibition of such use is clearly an exercise of federal control.
Congress will always feel impelled to establish conditions under which
people’s money is to be spent, and while some controls may be wise
we are not guaranteed against unwise controls any more than we are
guaranteed against unwise Congressmen. The mistake is not the controls
but appropriating the money that requires controls.
So much for the evils and dangers of federal aid. Note that I have
not denied that many of our children are being inadequately educated,
or that the problem is nation-wide. I have only denied that it is the
kind of problem that requires a solution at the national level. To
the extent the problem is quantitative--to the extent we have too few
classrooms and pay some of our teachers too little money--the shortages
can be taken care of by the localities concerned. But more: to the
extent the problem is qualitative--which in my opinion it mainly is--it
is manifestly one that lends itself to correction at the local level.
There is no place where deficiencies in the _content_ of an educational
system can be better understood than locally where a community has the
opportunity to view and judge the product of its own school system.
In the main, the trouble with American education is that we have put
into practice the educational philosophy expounded by John Dewey and
his disciples. In varying degrees we have adopted what has been called
“progressive education.”
Subscribing to the egalitarian notion that every child must have the
same education, we have neglected to provide an educational system
which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students
and which will thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the
future.
In our desire to make sure that our children learn to “adjust” to their
environment, we have given them insufficient opportunity to acquire the
knowledge that will enable them to _master_ their environment.
In our attempt to make education “fun,” we have neglected the academic
disciplines that develop sound minds and are conducive to sound
characters.
Responding to the Deweyite attack on methods of teaching, we have
encouraged the teaching profession to be more concerned with _how_ a
subject is taught than with _what_ is taught. Most important of all:
in our anxiety to “improve” the world and insure “progress” we have
permitted our schools to become laboratories for social and economic
change according to the predilections of the professional educators. We
have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit
the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to
so train the minds of the new generation as to make them capable of
absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own
day.
The fundamental explanation of this distortion of values is that we
have forgotten that purpose of education. Or better: we have forgotten
for _whom_ education is intended. The function of our schools is not
to educate, or elevate, _society_; but rather to educate _individuals_
and to equip them with the knowledge that will enable them to take
care of society’s needs. We have forgotten that a society progresses
only to the extent that it produces leaders that are capable of
guiding and inspiring progress. And we cannot develop such leaders
unless our standards of education are geared to excellence instead
of mediocrity. We must give full rein to individual talents, and we
must encourage our schools to enforce the academic disciplines--to put
preponderant emphasis on English, mathematics, history, literature,
foreign languages and the natural sciences. We should look upon our
schools--not as a place to train the “whole character” of the child--a
responsibility that properly belongs to his family and church--but to
train his _mind_.
Our country’s past progress has been the result, not of the mass mind
applying average intelligence to the problems of the day, but of
the brilliance and dedication of wise individuals who applied their
wisdom to advance the freedom and the material well-being of all of our
people. And so if we would improve education in America--and advance
the fortunes of freedom--we will not rush to the federal treasury with
requests for money. We will focus attention on our local community, and
make sure that our schools, private and public, are performing the job
the Nation has the right to expect of them.