The cult of non-achievement

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 18, 2002]

In Sandra Stotsky's excellent book, Losing Our Language: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason, she describes the negative impact of creeping multiculturalism on all branches of education, beginning with children's readers that were transformed from tools that explicitly taught reading skills, to tomes filled with "the social concerns of adults, not children."

There are comparisons of the standard readers that were used by American children in years past with the constantly changing readers of contemporary times. Each new edition published today attempts to outdo the previous edition, in its determination to offer stories that create poor or weak images, not only of white Americans, but of our shared American culture.

Stotsky shows how the unrealistic approach to teaching, that has been specifically developed for poor minorities, has taken its toll on their advancement. In a section, "The Ascendance of Social Goals," she makes this observation:

In a stunning reversal of images from the 1960s to the 1990s, the low-achieving minority child has changed from someone needing access to the intellectual and civic culture of the mainstream to someone who is morally and culturally superior to the mainstream and thus justified in rejecting its intellectual and civic values.

Indeed, it is this shift in education policy that has done inestimable damage over the years. This turnabout, where mainstream standards are no longer taken as the norm to strive for, has sent a clear message to black youth, who have come to expect school curricula to be customized to suit what is deemed appropriate for their "cultural needs." Which translates -- You don't have to work hard.

Stotsky describes the attempts by textbook publishers to keep up with the competing demands of interest groups, whose members insist that children's readers "broaden the cultural content" and "foster inclusiveness." The goal of publishers may be to teach reading, but too often this goal is not reached. Stotsky writes:

Although educational publishers still want to teach children to read, the implementation of these social goals seems to have led, in varying degrees, to the construction of an instructional tool more likely to produce multicultural illiteracy than an accurate understanding of the world. And the very children in whose name these changes were initiated several decades ago may now be the most vulnerable.

Researchers and educators who push for changes in children's readers can offer only "moral and emotional arguments" for the changes they advocate, claims Stotsky, and she elaborates:

Rather than accept any professional responsibility for the worsening conditions in many inner-city schools and the failure of low-income minority students to thrive, many researchers and educators have displaced their frustration and anger onto anything associated with the American mainstream: its political and economic institutions, its values, its literature, its very language.

It is not surprising that many of them are turning to methods of assessment that consist largely of subjective judgments of performance, based on loosely defined standards that can be embodied in relatively nondemanding material. Indeed, one researcher advanced the argument in the lead article in a 1997 issue of the prestigious American Educational Research Journal that achievement-oriented measures are now undesirable because they serve the "competitive and meritocratic orientation of mainstream institutions." Schools should critically examine the "cult of achievement," the author urges, and focus on "the process of learning and on its relation to self-worth rather than on particular achievements."

With years of focus on "self-esteem," instead of on achievement, and with so much damage already done, one wonders if there is any hope for a return to the basic principles and goals of teaching. Stotsky ends her book with suggestions for actions that parents can take to, at least, mitigate some of the influences of a system now bent on doing just about everything except the job of educating:

Governors, state legislators, state boards of education, and local school boards need to hear from citizens with academic concerns. Perhaps the largest and most serious hole in the educational universe of K-12 has been the almost complete absence of organized pressure groups consisting of parents with straightforward academic concerns, and not moral grievances of any kind. Parents with academic concerns need to provide their elected officials with a clear understanding of what multiculturalism has come to mean and why. They also need to arm themselves with as much information as they can obtain about the textbooks now in use in their schools and be prepared to face name calling and attempts to discredit their motives. They should not respond in kind.

Losing Our Language: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason, by Sandra Stotsky, is available at bookstores and online from Encounter Books.

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