Education for All the Children of All the People

One, now no more serious threat on the horizon than a cloud the size of a man`s hand, is the decision of the Oakland, Calif., school board to "recognize black English as a primary language."

Are we really ready to give status to "She be at home"-an expression no Afro-American of any intelligence uses or condones?

Two, already serious and increasingly threatening, is the success of the "Christian" Coalition in electing their representatives not just to local school boards, but to the state boards.

Are we really ready to allow the teaching of creationism as science?

Underlying these school problems which should concern all citizens, without regard to political party or religion or race, is the question of the wisdom of the currently popular battle-cry that we should "return power to the people themselves."

This is historically the battle-cry of individuals and groups, both of the right and the left, who wish to impose their views even in violation of democratic principles and of all traditional wisdom.

Religious Demagogues

This battle-cry reminds all of us who have long memories of Lenin as well as Hitler. It reminds us all of religious demagogues from Savonarola in Renaissance Italy to the current potential ayatollahs from Teheran to Kabul to Jerusalem and to Dallas.

One of the wisest of our Founding Fathers, James Madison, observed in that sonorous 18th century phraseology, that, given the "propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities," the decentralization of power was the wrong prescription-especially when passions were running high and local interests were in sharp competition.

Madison was speaking against allowing the individual state governments to exercise sovereign powers. And we are thinking about allowing a jillion independent school boards, often dominated by ignorant, passion-driven partisans, to determine what is taught in our public schools in language and science.

Experience seems to indicate that before popular ideas are implemented by state agencies, these ideas should be filtered through a layer or two of elected representative bodies. To put the case mildly, reason, even with these protections, does not always prevail.

Where these protections are not present, in the field of law, for example, we see an arbitrary, unconsidered, murderous "people`s justice" as in the Russia of Lenin and Stalin, as in Hitler`s Germany, and in Castro`s Cuba.

Not to teach "all of the children of all of the people"-that beautiful phrase hallowed in the history of American public education-the only language which will allow success in business and social life is, unquestionably, criminally foolish.

Similarly, not to teach all of the children of all the people the best we know in the sciences is to equip them most inadequately for coping with a world of exploding populations, increasing scarcities of resources, and the powers which the sciences will continue to put in human hands.