SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

seen examples of these tactics bandied about in front page headlines blatantly proclaiming
tabloid horror stories such as—”Recent SAT scores show American students lagging behind the
Japanese, the Germans, the Koreans, the Canadians, and possibly some species of elk”. The
theme of these “scare tactics” is basically that someone (the Japanese, Germans, Koreans, etc.)
is getting ahead of America in some measurable way. Curiously, that measurable way almost
always seems to pertain to business and economics rather than education. For example, after a
recent set of SAT scores were released, alarmed business leaders claimed that the low scores
carried the broad implication that schools were not even preparing students for the assembly
line much less “respectable” corporate jobs (Business adjust, 1991). Foster Smith, a senior Vice
President of the National Alliance for Business stated that, “in some cases businesses have had
to ‘dumb down’ the work—spend time and money on machines and work processes that fit an
undereducated work place”. (Business adjust, 1991, p. 7-A).
These tactics have not changed much for literally decades. In 1983, the federal government’s
National Commission on Excellence in Education issued the report known as “A Nation At
Risk.” In language designed to frighten the reader into more money for a plan-less,
meaningless public education policy, the commission warned, “if an unfriendly foreign power
had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education that exists today, we might well
have viewed it as an act of war” (Spring, 1991, p. 24). This pseudo-intellectual saber rattling is
a thinly disguised attempt to develop a plan for the sole purpose of economic and market gain
and yet pass it off as a “plan for education”. This is made clear when the same report declared
that, “if only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets,
we must rededicate ourselves to the reform of the educational system for the benefit of all”
(Spring, 1991, p.24).
All this is perhaps a political plan. Perhaps it is an economic plan. But it is not an educational
plan. When considered as an educational plan such ideas are worse than no plan at all and
bring us closer to the abyss of the uncivilized existential vacuum. Such a plan is the plan of the
“sound bite” and the “slogan.” It is the plan of meaningless platitudes designed to minimally
satisfy the taxpayer until the next bond issue, or next mill levy, or next Goals 2000 is passed. It
is a plan that totally ignores the fine arts and humanities, and one that dulls the mind and
withers the soul of education. It is the plan to build bigger, richer, and emptier basilicas.
If a person or an institution remains in a plan-less state for any length of time it degenerates
into a sense of fatalism. This is Frankl’s second step downward into an existential vacuum.
Fatalism is simply the belief that though conditions are unacceptable, there is nothing that can
be done to change them. It is the belief that our destiny is out of our hands. The symptoms of
this stage of the vacuum are the “exaggerated sigh” and the reliance on a nebulous, sinister,
and virtually omnipotent outside agent to relieve us of personal responsibility. Examples of this
abound. The teacher says (with an elongated, and heartfelt sigh of course) that he/she could do
better with more support from the parents and the local administration. The local
administration (not to belabor the point, but it must be remembered that all of the following
statements are accompanied by the ritual obligatory sigh) says that he/she could do better
without all the federal regulations and bureaucratic nonsense. The professor of education says
that he/she could do better with more higher education funding, with more support from the
Dean, with less interference from the board of regents or the state legislature, ad infinitum. At
every level the litany continues. We sigh and admit we are impotent because of “them”
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