Bell Curve

43 2 Living Together The Leveling of American Education 433But other pressures were (and are) put on the schools, and theycreated a gulf between what happened to courses in mathematics andto courses in every other academic field. Ifa school, trying to have higherstandards in math, began to require a basic calculus course for itscollege prep students, there were limits to the amount of fudging thatcould be done with the course content. Somehow a core of analytictechniques in calculus had to be part of the course. There was no wayaround it. Furthermore, there is a welleestablished standard for decidingwhether calculus has been learned: Can the student solve calculusproblems?Another feature of math skills at the high school level is that they canbe increased independent of the student's development in other intellectualskills. A student may learn to manipulate quadratic equationseven if he is given not a glimmer of how formal logic might relate to expositoryprose or to the use of evidence in civics class. It is good that mathscores have risen, but it remains true that raising math standards can beroutinized in ways that cannot be applied to the rest of the curriculum.How, for example, does one decide that the standards for an Englishliterature course have been "raised"? In the old days, it wouldn't havebeen seen as a difficult question. Standards would be raised if the studentswere required to read a larger number of the Great Rooks (no onewould have had much quarrel about what they were) or if students wererequired to write longer term papers, subject to stricter grading on argumentationand documentation. But since the late 1960s, suchstraightforward ways of looking at standards in the humanities, socialsciences, and even the physical sciences were corrupted, in the sensethat the standards of each discipline were subordinated to other considerations.Chief among these other considerations were multiculturalismin the curriculum, the need to minimize racial differences inperformance measures, and enthusiasm for fostering self-esteem independentof performance.[45' We assume that a politically compromisedcurriculum is less likely to sharpen the verbal skills of students than onethat hews to standards of intellectual rigor and quality. We make theseobservations without belittling the issues that have been at center stagein American secondary education. But if the question is why the downhillslide in verbal skills has not reversed, here is one possible explanation:The agendas that have had the most influence on curricula aregenerally antagonistic to traditional criteria of rigor and excellence.These influences come together when textbooks are selected by largeschool systems. A school board runs no risk whatsoever of angry historianspicketing their offices. They run grave risks of pickets (and of beingvoted out of office) if a textbook offends one of the many interestgroups that scrutinize possible choices. Publishers know the market andtake steps to make sure that their products will sell.There are doubtless other culprits that help explain the differencebetween the recovery in math scores and the failure to recover in verbalscores. Television, rather than the printed page, became the primarymedium for getting news and recreation at home after mid-century, andthat process was also reaching full flower in the 1960s. Telephones displacedletter writing as the medium for long-range communication.Such trends are hostile to traditional definitions of excellence in verbalskills. The simple hypothesis of this story is that these pressures existedacross the curriculum and in society at large but that math skillswere less susceptible to them. (Math skills may instead have been gettinga boost from the accessibility of computers, calculators, and otherhigh-tech gadgetry.) When parents demanded higher standards, theirschools introduced higher standards in the math curriculum that reallywere higher, and higher standards in the humanities and social sciencesthat really were not.The same dynamics provide a hypothesis for explaining why the reboundwas more complete for the nation's overall student populationthan for the SAT population. A textbook that is dumbed down is in facthelpful to the mediocre student. A recent study of six textbooks over atwelve-year period demonstrated that they had indeed been simplified,and students performed significantly better on the current, dumbeddowntexts.46 Subjects that were traditionally not included in the curriculumfor the lower end of the distribution-for example, exposure toserious literature-have now been so simplified as to be accessible to almostall.The same dumbed-down textbook can quite easily have a depressingeffect on the talented student's development. And while the textbookswere being simplified, subjects that would push the best students to theirlimits, such as the classical languages, were all but dropped. Offered thisdiluted curriculum, talented students do not necessarily take the initiativeto stretch themselves. Plenty of students with high IQs will happilychoose to write about The Hobbit instead of Pride and Prejudice for theirterm paper if that option is given to them. Few of even the most brilliantyoungsters tackle the Aeneid on their own.