PEOPLE ARE STUPID, NEW POLL REVEALS

Every once in a while, however, a foundation wins the Big Problem Lotto. A tip of the hat, then, to the Kettering Foundation of Ohio, which has taken on a Big Problem of amazing proportions: Fixing Our Broken Democracy.

The solution to the problem of broken democracy — or, more accurately, the first step in a long process of give-and-take dialogue that will at least begin the process of moving us forward toward a meaningful solution — is the National Issues Convention, to be held under Kettering’s sponsorship at the University of Texas at Austin next January and broadcast live over three days by PBS (Jim Lehrer, moderator). All the major presidential candidates have been invited, and several are expected to attend, including the president himself.

The National Issues Convention is the bright idea of Dr. James Fishkin, chairman of the university’s department of government and author of the new book, The Voice of the People, which serves as an extended brief for the ” deliberative poll” that caps the Convention’s agenda.

Fishkin’s poll is actually two polls. The first surveys respondents in the conventional manner. The second asks the same questions of the same people after they have read and talked about the issues intensively for three days.

With the deliberative poll, Fishkin hopes to solve a problem that has frustrated good-government activists since the days of George Gallup: While random sample polls do accurately measure the thinking of the public, the public is stupid. People answer pollsters’ questions off the top of their heads. They vote without thinking. They decline to read the New York Times or even to watch Dan Rather. The ruinous evidence is all around us, most recently in the election of November 1994, when voters sought Easy Answers to Tough Questions. The deliberative poll neutralizes these distortions by measuring, in Fishkin’s words, “what the public would think if the public were thinking.”

How? With the aid of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, Fishkin and his sponsors will gather a nationwide random sample of Americans and poll them on three great issues of the day — the American economy, the state of the American family, and America’s role in the world.

“Every citizen in the country will have an equal random chance of being selected,” Fishkin says. The pollsters will invite all respondents to Austin for the weekend of January 18, and they’ll keep asking until 600 accept. It shouldn’t take long, for the inducements to attend are formidable: free airfare (provided by American Airlines, the convention’s Official Airline), free accommodations, a $ 300 honorarium, and the chance to meet Jim Lehrer.

The Austin 600, scientifically selected in this way, will “gather the entire country in one room” — a perfect demographic representation of their fellow citizens. Thus the entire country, in miniature, will at long last be subject to the forces to which they have so far been immune: the powers of reasonable persuasion and intelligent deliberation. They will be broken up into smaller groups, where for 36 hours they will engage in intensive dialogue. Trained facilitators, chosen by the Kettering Foundation, will be on hand to conduct educational briefings and lead discussions of the issues. Booklets prepared by experts will inform the opinions as they mature and develop; video versions will be shown for those less disposed toward the written word. Saturday night, Republican presidential candidates will appear, one by one, to dialogue with the 600. Sunday morning, President Clinton will do some dialoguing of his own.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, the “after poll” will take place — after the dialogue and sharing, after the briefings and facilitating. Fishkin and his colleagues expect a marked change in results from the “before” and “after” polls: from mere opinions to “considered judgments.” The results will be presented to the country at large, via PBS and other press outlets, so that all Americans will know what they would think if they had the time.

And from there, who knows? Fishkin himself foresees an ongoing series of deliberative polls sponsored by good-government groups at every level of civic life, a process of education that will in time come to outweigh the destructive effects of ideology and partisanship: “We’ll have a prototype of a different sort of democracy.” And not a moment too soon.

The deliberative poll has its critics, of course. Everett Carll Ladd of the Roper Center calls the science underlying the poll “absolutely atrocious. There’s no possibility of introducing meaningful controls.” The influence of group dynamics, biased materials, a possible ideological tilt among the facilitators, and a host of other unforeseen complications guarantees that any results will not be reproducible, hence scientifically suspect. According to Ladd: “There’s just no way you’ll be able to say, “This is what Americans would really think if they could deliberate about the issues.'”

Which is precisely what Fishkin does want to say: “We’ve got all this stuff to guarantee its credibility and certify it.” The facilitators, all of whom have spent at least one week training at the Kettering Foundation over the last several years, will have been drained of partisanship. “These will be nonpartisan citizens from communities around the country,” he says. “There are lots of people with lots of experience leading groups. There’s a whole industry out there.”

Indeed, the National Issues Convention represents a coincidence of interests among several industries. PBS, recently threatened with privatization, gets to stress its indispensability as a source of public affairs programming. Its new slogan — “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” — suggests that the network has decided to broadcast shows that nobody else would touch with a barge pole. Even C-SPAN. And nothing will so solidify this new reputation as its decision to offer the convention multiple hours of prime time.

More important, the convention will engage the energies of the thousands of political scientists, reporters, foundation executives, teaching assistants, League of Women Voters members, consultants, Common Cause subscribers, and other well-educated activists who have ached for years to make the vulgar carnival of democracy more rational. As it happens, they are mostly liberal Democrats, but their devotion to non- or bipartisanship is sincere and deeply held, as evidenced by their willingness to form bipartisan commissions with sensible Republicans, most of whom are certified as right-wingers for having held upper-level jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Ford administration.

At least two new commissions will be commissioned just to get the convention up and running. A Technical Review Committee will oversee the design of the poll itself. The committee will be made up of nonpartisan experts. The briefing materials will be prepared by the Public Agenda Foundation — a non-partisan group led by liberal Democrats Cyrus Vance and Daniel Yankelovich. And the materials themselves will be reviewed by one of the most comprehensive assortments of reasonable people ever assembled. Co- chaired by lobbyist Charls “No E” Walker and, of course, Newton “Vast Wasteland” Minow, the National Issues Convention Advisory Committee includes such veteran petition-signers as Lloyd Cutler, Sol Linowitz, and Jody Powell.

Bipartisanship reigns, from Howard Baker on the fire-snorting right to Barbara Jordan in the sensible center. No sector of American life goes untapped: Ellen Hume from the nonideological press, Tom Luce from the Perot campaign, Nelson Polsby from academia, Norm Ornstein from the world of think tanks, Bobby Ray Inman from Mars. And Sharon Percy Rockefeller, in whose very name post-partisanship finds its most salient expression.

As you scan this impressive roster, two questions immediately arise: 1) Where the hell is Father Hesburgh? And 2) What unites the committee members? A passion for public service, of course, and a commitment to the democratic process. But something more: a desire to tame the forces of populism so alarmingly unleashed over the last few years. The lexicon of rationality leaps from the pages of Fishkin’s book and the convention’s promotional materials. The good words are: nonpartisan, consensus, rigorous, complexity, long-term, common ground, scientific. They are locked in a death struggle with the bad words: simplistic, partisan, ideological, negative, divisive, soundbites. It is an effort of enlightened opinion to subsume and defang its counterpart among the rabble, popular opinion.

And it works! Fishkin has shown that it works. This year and last, he conducted two deliberative polls in Great Britain in association with Channel 4.

One poll dealt with the issue of crime, the other with the European Union. Random samples of citizens were scientifically selected. The respondents were brought to a single place — “the entire country in miniature, gathered in one room” — and surrounded by facilitators, TV cameras, and experts. Opinions were presented. Moderators encouraged discussions and facilitated exchanges. Dialogues proceeded in a deliberative manner and an atmosphere of mutual respect. Understanding deepened. Complexities were apprehended. And just as Fishkin had predicted, the changes in attitude from the “before” poll to the “after” poll were large.

In the matter of crime, for example, 57 percent had earlier agreed that ” sending more offenders to prison” is an effective way of preventing crime. After a weekend of proper deliberating, the percentage dropped to a reassuring 38 percent. Should courts send fewer people to prison? Before deliberation a mere 29 percent said yes. Thirty-six hours of facilitated dialogue goosed the percentage to 44 percent. The number who believed that ” stiffer sentences generally” are effective in fighting crime likewise dropped as consciousness rose. “The responses,” read the report, “show an increased sensitivity to procedural rights of defendants.” And so on.

“They ended up with a much deeper and more complex view of the issue,” says Fishkin. “They were more open to considering issues having to do with poverty and root causes.”

Depth and complexity, openness and root causes: These are the tools with which our nonpartisans will fix a broken democracy. And if we join the ACLU along the way, well, that will be just fine too. WHY JOHNNY CAN’T FAIL:AN EDUCATION DISASTERBy Charles J. SykesAmong the more scathing critics of the new edu-cational fashion, Outcome Based Education, isBritish comedienne and actress Tracey Ullman,who cited it as one of the reasons she chose to moveher family back to England. “Mabel, my seven-year-old daughter, really needed to get some old fashionedBritish schooling. Some discipline. Some intoleranceand indifference from her teachers,” she explained toan interviewer. “In California everything is s-o-o-otouchy-feely. They are into this silly outcome basededucation where it doesn’t matter if she knew how tospell her name as long as she knew who she was. And itdidn’t matter if she knew that two plus two was four aslong as she had enough self-confidence to ask how toget ‘to the conclusion of the problem.’ What a crock!She was going to end up as dumb as a mudflap. Had toget her out.” One doesn’t have to be a comedienne, or evenBritish, to dislike Outcome Based Education (OBE).Take the case of Diane Spoehr. She worked as a volun-teer at Eastside Elementary School in her communityof Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Using slogans such as ” AllStudents Can Learn” (an idea that Diane Spoehrliked), Eastside had adopted OBE–which insists thatstudents be given as much time as they need (or want) to learn the subject matter. In her daughter’s fourth-grade class, Spoehr found that every time a project or areport came due in language, math, social studies, orscience, half to two thirds of the class did not have thework done. Even so, there was no penalty or loss ofcredit for the late assignments. In OBE, she was told, no student ever fails. Everystudent must be given as much time as needed to meetthe outcome goals. That also meant that if sloppy, in- complete, or poorly done assignments were handed in,students were not graded down, because they could al-ways be redone. In practice, that meant that the onlything students had to do was keep up with the lowestCharlesJ. Sykes is the author 0fA Nation of Victims andProfscam. This article is adapted from his brthcoming book,Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America’s ChildrenFeel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write orAdd. Copyriqht c 1995 by CharlesJ. Sykes. Reprinted withpermission of St. Martin’s Press, Inc., New York, NY. achiever in the class, because outcome based class- rooms did not move on until all students met the goal. The students, not the teacher, set the pace. Spoehr found that half of the fourth graders at Eastside could not tell time or count change. But there was no sense of urgency in correcting the situation. Students were allowed to take tests over and over again until they got a passing grade. As a result, students at Eastside were three and a half months behind students in the same grade at private schools in the area. If her children’s school seemed uninterested in academic achievement, Diane Spoehr found the school remark- ably interested in her children’s attitudes and feelings. First graders, for example, were told that “getting the correct answer in math is not as important as ex- plaining how you solve the problem.” They were con- stantly writing papers with titles like “How Do You Feel About Work in (NSERT StBJCT).” Fourth-grade students spent an entire unit (four tofive weeks) studying Wisconsin’s Indians. But at theend, there was no test. The teacher explained, “Therewas too much material to test and, anyway, the mainreason for this unit is to be sure the students developthe proper attitudes toward Indians.” The new philos-ophy also was reflected in the school’s new gradingsystem. Starting with first graders, students no longerreceived As, Bs, and Cs on their report cards. Instead,they were given Cs, Ss and Ns. C stands for “consistently,” S for “sometimes,” Nfor “Not Yet.” “These grades,” Mrs. Spoehr points out, “could notbe more ambiguous. They mean nothing. Does ‘some-times’ mean twice a day, once a week, three times amonth? Is ‘not yet’ implying that this is an expectedgoal this quarter, or have we not been introduced tothis, or is the teacher frustrated beyond reason with achild’s refusal to try and ‘not yet’ doing anything? ‘Notyet’ could mean any of these things. These ‘reportcards’ did not report anything.” The lessons the chil-dren were learning, she concluded, were “procrastina- tion, the ability to do any quality [of] work withoutconsequences, lack of responsibility, and the accep-tance of mediocrity.” Cheri Yecke was the 1988 Stafford County (Vir-ginia) Teacher of the Year, and in 1991 she was a finalist for the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award sponsored by the Washington Post. After her family re-located, her daughter, Tiffany, was enrolled in schoolsthat had begun implementing OBE. A seventh grader,Tiffany had been an eager student, but shortly aftershe started at her new school, she began to beg to stayhome. “The work was far too easy,” Cheri Yecke recalls.”The prevailing attitude among many students is’Why study? They can’t fail me so who cares?’ Whatsort of work ethic is this producing in these children?No one fails, regardless of how little they do. Instead,they receive ‘incompletes,’ which can be made up atany time. The kids have the system figured out. Whenthere is a football game or show on TV the night be-fore a test, a common comment is: ‘Why study? I’lljust take the test and fail it. I can always take the retestlater.'”In 1990, Oklahoma’s state legislature, hoping to beef.up its standards, passed a bill requiring that allteachers be trained in OBE. The state’s educationalbureaucracy then developed several volumes of “learn-er outcomes,” which included no fewer than 7,000 ob-jectives. For first graders, one objective was: “The studentplans and monitors own reading progress.” First gra-ders are, of course, legendary for their planning abili-ties. The new “rigorous” outcomes also made shortwork of useless mathematical knowledge, like the mul- tiplication tables. The goals for grades six to eight de-clared: “Many of the (computational) skills to whichso much time has been devoted are obsolete skillswhich no one needs today.” No one. But the harshest critics are the students them-selves. In Minnesota’s Apple Valley School District,high school students put out an underground newspa-per opposing OBE. “It’s not teaching real life,” com-plains one student. “Granted, we are in high school.But we have to start dealing with reality. In the realworld, you’re not going to have the same situationtwice.” Another critic is high school senior MarisaMeisters, who wrote to a local newspaper: “As a senior,at Arrowhead [High School, Wis.], I have seen the re-sults of OBE firsthand. The bottom line is that it doesnot work.” The politics of Outcome Based Education are any-thing but simple. OBE programs are bitterly opposedby some conservative parent groups, but have beenwidely embraced by moderate and conservative busi- ness leaders. On the other hand, OBE (under a varietyof different names) is championed by the education es-tablishment (and is de rigueur at teachers colleges), butit is opposed by one of the nation’s largest teachersunions, the American Federation of Teachers. (Per-haps reflecting the confusion, Pennsylvania’s AFTchapter began one letter opposing the state’s OBE planby declaring: “We are not now, and never have been,right wing kooks.”) In Connecticut, opposition to OBE took educa-tionists by surprise because it came primarily not fromfundamentalists, but from the state’s affluent suburbs. In its account of the dispute, the New York Times de-scribed OBE as “a movement to improve the publicschools that has gained a rare consensus among Presi-dents, governors, business leaders and educators.” Thepaper quoted a prominent educator who declared thatOBE was a movement “led by all the relevant forces inthe country” and marveled at the temerity of parentswho would seek to thwart such an impressive displayof unanimity. Critics, of course, saw the issue very dif-ferently.
One member of the Greenwich, Connecticut,PTA complained, “It’s not a program that improveseducation; it’s a program that rounds out educationwith all sorts of social goals. And it hurts a lot of chil-dren it’s designed to help.” Part of the problem is that different people meandifferent things when they talk about Outcome BasedEducation. Adding to the confusion, some districts ap-parently have adopted OBE techniques but deny hav-ing done so when parents and/or reporters make in-quiries. School administrators who are understandablyreluctant to venture into such treacherous waters oftendownplay, deny, or evade the philosophical underpin-nings of the reforms they advocate. In some communi- ties where OBE has encountered strong opposition,educationists have adopted the strategy of simply re-naming it (as, for example, Performance Based Educa- tion)–a ruse that has done little to enhance their owncredibility or build trust among parents.Ironically, “outcomes” were first raised to promi-nence by leaders of the conservative educational re-form movement of the 1980s. Championed by ChesterE. Finn, Jr. among others, reformers argued that theobsession with inputs (dollars spent, books bought,staff hired) focused on the wrong end of the education-al pipeline. Reformers insisted that schools could bemade more effective and accountable by shifting em-phasis to outcomes (what children actually learned).Finn’s emphasis on outcomes was designed explicitlyto make schools more accountable by creating specificand verifiable educational objectives in subjects likemath, science, history, geography, and English. In retrospect, the intellectual debate over accountability was won by the conservatives. Indeed, conservatives wereso successful in advancing their case that the term” outcomes” has become a virtually irresistible salestool for academic reform. Today, for the most part, the educational philoso-phies known as Outcome Based Education have littleif anything in common with those original goals. Tothe contrary, OBE–with its hostility to competition,traditional measures of progress, and to academic dis-ciplines in general–can more accurately be describedas part of a counter-reformation, a reactionagainst those attemptsto make schools moreaccountable and effec-tive. The OBE beingsold to schools repre-sents, in effect, a se-mantic hijacking. “The conservativeeducation reform of the1980s wanted to focuson outcomes (i.e.,knowledge gained) in- stead of inputs (i.e., dol-lars spent),” notes for-mer Education Secre-tary William J. Bennett.”The aim was to ensuregreater accountability.What the education es-tablishment has done isto appropriate the termbut change the intent.” Central to this se-mantic hijacking isOBE’s shift of out-comes from cognitive knowledge to goals centering onvalues, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As an exampleof a rigorous cognitive outcome (the sort the originalreformers had in mind), Bennett cites the AdvancedPlacement Examinations, which give students creditsfor courses based on their knowledge and proficiencyin a subject area, rather than on their accumulated”seat-time” in a classroom. In contrast, OBE programs are less interested inwhether students know the origins of the Civil War orthe author of The Tempest than whether students havemet such outcomes as “establishing priorities to bal- ance multiple life roles” (a goal in Pennsylvania) or”positive self-concept” (a goal in Kentucky). Wherethe original reformers aimed at accountability, OBE makes it difficult if not impossible to measure and compare educational progress objectively. Where original reformers emphasized schools thatwork, OBE is experimental. Despite the enthusiasm ofeducationists and policymakers for OBE, researchersfrom the University of Minnesota concluded that “re- search documenting its effects is fairly rare.” At thestate level, it was diffcult to find any documentationof whether OBE worked or not, and the informationthat was available was largely subjective. ProfessorJean King of the University of Minnesota’s College ofEducation describessupport for the imple-mentation of OBE asbeing “almost like a re-ligion-that you be-lieve in this and if youbelieve in it hardenough, it will be true.”And finally, where theoriginal reformers sawan emphasis on out-comes as a way to re-turn to educational ba-sics, OBE has become,in Bennett’s words, “aTrojan Horse for socialengineering, an ele-mentary and secondaryschool version of thekind of ‘politically cor-rect’ thinking that hasinfected our collegesand universities. ” By definition, Out-come Based Educationis about outcomes. Al-most invariably, howev-er, those outcomes are nebulous and framed in the ob-scure jargon that seems endemic to OBE. One of Min-nesota’s original outcome goals called for the “integra-tion of physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness.” Kentucky’s state educational goals include such “val-ued outcomes” as ” Listening,” which officials definedas “students construct meaning from messages com-municated in a variety of ways for a variety of purposesthrough listening.” This was distinguished from “Ob-serving,” which they defined as ” students constructmeanings from messages communicated in a variety ofways for a variety of purposes through observing.” Other goals included: Interpersonal Relationships,in which “students observe, analyze, and interpret hu-man behaviors to acquire a better understanding of self, others, and human relationships”; Consumerism (“students demonstrate effective decision-making andevaluate consumer skills”); Mental and Emotional Wellness (“students demonstrate positive strategies forachieving and maintaining mental and emotionalwellness”); Positive Self-concept (” students demon-strate positive growth in self-concept through appro-priate tasks or projects”); Adaptability and Flexibility(“students demonstrate the ability to be adaptable andflexible though appropriate task or projects”); Multi-cultural and World View (“students demonstrate anunderstanding of, appreciation of, and sensitivity to amulticultural and world view”); and Ethical View(“students demonstrate the ability to make decisionsbased on ethical values”).Obvious questions remain unanswered here:Whose ethical values will be used to establish theacceptable outcomes? Will any size fit? How will theybe measured? How will schools determine whether astudent has met his or her goals for “Interpersonalskills,” or “Consistent, Responsive and Caring Behav-ior,” or “Open Mind to Alternative Perspectives?” Andwhat will they do if students fall short of these man-dated “outcomes?” In developing ” outcomes,” academic areas are notneglected but they often bear only a passing resem-blance to traditional fields of study. Geography istransformed into ” Relationship of Geography to Hu-man Activity,” in which “students recognize the geo-graphic interaction between people and their sur-roundings in order to make decisions and take actionsthat reflect responsibility for the environment.” (Notethat this does not actually include knowing somethingso mundane as what countries border the UnitedStates.) Similarly, the “aesthetic” goal, in which “stu-dents appreciate creativity and the value of the artsand the humanities,” could conceivably be achievedwithout students’ having read a classic work of litera-ture or seeing a masterpiece of art. In Milwaukee, where the average grade point aver-age of high school students hovers around a D, the dis-trict’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction de-veloped 10 ” goals and performance indicators” for stu-dents. The number one “goal and indicator” for theMilwaukee Public Schools did not deal with math,reading, or even with a readiness to work. Instead,Goal One read: “Students will project anti-racist, anti-biased attitudes through their participation in a multi- lingual, multi-ethnic, culturally diverse curriculum.”(Note: Students will project the requisite attitudes.Not study, or understand, or even learn about. Theywill project the mandated attitudes. What happens ifthey don’t?) This is not to suggest that all OBE programs have ahidden political agenda. But their authors do seem tohave a far more exp
ansive view of the role of schoolsthan more traditional educators ever envisioned. One,Albert Mammary, writes: “We believe that if studentsdon’t get love at home, they should get it in schools. Ifthey don’t get caring at home, they should get it inschools. If they don’t belong and aren’t connected athome, they should get it in schools. If they don’t getfood and clothing at home, they should also get that inschools.” This would seem to suggest that schools not onlybecome centers of social work and welfare, but alsosubstitute families. Defenders of OBE scoff at chargesthat the new curricula involve social engineering; andthey are right to the extent that many programs bearlittle resemblance to the grandiose visions set out bysomeone like William Spady, the director of the highlyinfluential High Success Program on Outcome BasedEducation. But given the vagueness of the jargon-laden “outcomes,” it is diffcult for parents to know inadvance what their children will learn, and equallyhard to measure success after the fact. Such confusionprovides ample opportunity for abuse. Even so, the re-sult is less likely to be indoctrination than a pervasivemediocrity.Criticism of OBE’s abstract academic goals is notlimited to conservatives. Albert Shanker, presi-dent of the American Federation of Teachers, hasjoined the chorus of OBE critics who question its aca-demic priorities. “OBE standards include academicoutcomes,” he notes, “but they are very few and sovague that they would be satisfied by almost any levelof achievement, from top-notch to minimal.” And thevery number of “learning outcomes” is significant, ac-cording to Shanker. He notes that the large number ofoutcomes “sounds demanding, but it’s the opposite.”This is because teachers are already spread thin andwill therefore have to pick and choose among thedozens of mandated “outcomes.” It is not hard to pre-dict what sort of choices they will make. RemarksShanker, “It’s a lot easier to schmooze with kids about’life roles’ than to make sure they can do geometry the-orems or read Macbeth.” One thing is clear, however–OBE has been arhetorical tour de force. When governors and legisla-tors embrace “outcomes,” they often imagine they aretalking about test scores of academic content, mea-surements of how much math, science, and historySEPTEMBER 25, 1995 TtE WEEKLY STANDARD / 31students had learned. The problem is, educrat archi-tects of OBE mean no such thing by “outcomes.”Spady, for instance, argues that outcomes must impact”the lives of students in the future.” He understandsthis to mean that, in the long run, “content details willhave to give way to the larger cognitive, technical, andinterpersonal competencies needed in our complex, changing world.” But when asked to define “out-comes,” Spady is at pains to disabuse anyone of theimpression that he is talking about curriculum con-tent; i.e., what kids will know.SPady envisions a three-part process of transforma- tion which culminates in what he terms “Transfor-mational OBE.” In ” Transformational OBE,” Spadyexplains, “curriculum content is no longer the ground-ing and defining element of outcomes.” Actual knowl-edge-the ability to write a coherent letter, add a col-umn of numbers, know the century in which the CivilWar took place–should not be allowed to crimp thestyle of the higher-order competencies. Spady de-scribes teaching the student of the future as a sort ofperformance art–a work in progress. Offering an example of what he has in mind, Spadytold one interviewer that students might be requiredto design a bridge in lieu of being tested on math, Eng-lish, and civics. Working in groups, the studentswould design strategies for the project. For English,they would write a report about the bridge. For math, they would calculate the measurements of the bridge.For civics, they would conduct an Environmental Im-pact Study. The end product, or “demonstration,” would meet all of Spady’s educational goals. But would it meet society’s educational goals? Itwould, of course, if our goal was to create a society ofbridge builders. But what if we want students who cannot only build bridges, but also houses and informa-tion highways; who can design jet engines and probethe mysteries of DNA? Those more complex tasks require more than thebridge demonstration–they require knowledge, thefull grasp of the disciplines of higher mathematics,physics, and the properties of matter. It is that knowl-edge that provides them the power to extend theirdemonstrations to higher and more complex levels. Spady insists that it is not important what the stu-dent knows, only what he can do. But what a studentcan do is a direct product of what he knows; it is theknowledge that provides him with the power, not theartificial demonstration. Students, for example, maydemonstrate folk dances of many lands, but do theyunderstand anything about world history? They maydress up as Indians, but do they kn’ow anything aboutthe history, culture, religion, and language of Indians?Do students who tattoo numbers on their arms reallydemonstrate meaningful knowledge of the Holocaust? Rapidly changing technology and an ever-growingknowledge base are often cited as reasons to emphasize”thinking skills” rather than knowledge, since currentknowledge shortly will be obsolete. The obsolescenceof that knowledge means that a premium needs to beplaced on intellectual adaptability. That is both a plau-sible and a persuasive argument, but it begs the ques- tion of just how best to go about ensuring adaptability. Both science and society likely will undergo dra-matic transformations in the next half century, and ed-ucators are right to stress the need to place a premiumon the ability to learn how to learn. What they forget isthat the best way of learning how to learn is by learn-ing something, such as a discipline, and by masteringits content and its protocols. It is impossible to learnhow to learn about math without learning math. Thesame is true with history: It is futile to learn to “thinkhistorically” without knowing what happened. Conservatives who championed outcomes in the1980s now insist that Outcome Based Education rep-resents a distortion of an idea that is still fundamental-ly sound. But the hijacking of the term “outcomes” bythe educationists represents more than simply a politi-cal coup, and conservatives are naive if they fail to seethis or to recognize the fundamental and perhaps fatalflaw that is inherent in the focus on outcomes. Ulti-mately, it is an act of educational hubris, whether it isundertaken by the educationists or their conservativeantagonists.When schools define what they offer to students,they are being realistic about their capacitiesand their limits. When they define “outcomes,” theyare neither realistic nor cognizant of those limits. In astunning display of hubris, the educationists claim tobe able to define and prescribe the beliefs, values, atti-tudes, and behaviors of the educated man or woman. In sharp contrast, liberal education has always rec-ognized that there are incalculable differences betweenindividuals in capacity, interest, and talent and that itis therefore necessary to approach the mystery of thehuman intellect with humility. The liberally educatedman or woman was not asked to ” project” or “demon-strate” certain behaviors–he or she was expected tomaster certain fields of knowledge and to learn how tothink. The emphasis on outcomes, however they aredrawn up, reverses the focus–and ultimately the re- sponsibilities–of education.

by Andrew Ferguson