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It has become a cliche that to restore our global competitiveness, we need to reform our educational system. That will take a lot more than money. The educational bureaucracy must be curbed -- education is too important to be left to the educators. Nor can it be left to zealous amateurs more interested in "community rights" or minority cultural traditions than in effective education. We must also loosen the still strangling grasp of "progressive education." Curriculums must be purged of mindless courses. Teachers must be given more independence but also held to higher standards. Families must give early support to their children's education.
And we must stop the practice of simply taking pupils who can't or won't learn and running them through the system toward a meaningless diploma. Everybody has a right to education, but that right must be earned with effort and discipline. An alternative to the present chaos is to establish more and better trade schools and on-the-job training programs, as well as national civilian service.
Each step would involve many real or imagined sacrifices for particular groups; each one would be bitterly fought. Normally, any change remotely as drastic happens only through war or domestic catastrophe. So, is it simply utopian to hope for an American revival?
No -- thanks to three factors:
1) Among America's greatest strengths is its capacity for renewal; it has shed its skin again and again to re-emerge with new life. It rebuilt itself after the Civil War and Reconstruction; it reformed itself after the cruelties of the 19th century industrial surge and the excesses of the robber barons; it picked itself up after the Great Depression; it made tremendous strides in race relations through the civil rights movement; it achieved at least partial healing after the bitter national split over Vietnam and the counterculture's nihilism.
America assimilates radical changes that in most other countries could cause revolution. In America revolution is permanent but piecemeal.
2) The U.S. has the tremendous asset of flexibility. An American expatriate journalist recently wondered how this country can survive without a ruling $ class. Yet again and again, ruling classes have decayed and left their countries in ruin. It is to America's advantage that it has no permanent ruling class and that its elites are constantly open to new blood.
America as a whole is far more open to newcomers than any other country in the world. Immigration has always been a source of boundless fresh energy and enthusiasm, as millions discovered America anew and in a sense rebuilt it in every generation.
Obviously, immigration creates problems as well. There are conflicts among various immigrant groups. U.S. immigration policy is not emphasizing the influx of the skilled and educated, thus calling into question what has been dubbed the brain gain. Some immigrant groups, especially Hispanics, seem to resist learning English, which in some states has already created a bilingual culture. That raises a deeply worrisome prospect. Is a healthy pluralism giving way to a corrosive separatism, the ideal of tolerance to reverse racism?