Good riddance to 2 bad pieces of 'social engineering'

Two deaths of major consequence in America’s apparently endless toying with social engineering” just quietly occurred. The burials should leave us with some hope for our country.

The first idea to die was bilingual education in New York’s much-vaunted nonmelting pot. The New York Board of Education released a study concluding that its costly and much-heralded array of bilingual education programs during the past 15 years had failed.

To add insult to injury for all those well-meaning education establishmentarians, it seems that recent immigrant students did better in school not through bilingual education but through taking most of their classes in English.

The second idea to die was California’s equally vaunted Self-Esteem Task Force,” a commission that has devoted itself for seven years to vanquishing low self-esteem not through teaching students something but through making them feel good” about themselves.

The task force closed down, and Doonesbury gave it a memorable send-off by featuring a self-esteem summer camp” that gave big trophies for just showing up.

I am not a wrathful person, but I do hope, dear God, that you keep both of those programs in purgatory for a good long while. I would not wish them on hell, and they only will mess up heaven as they did Earth.

Meanwhile, I wonder how this country ever got into those programs _ and how we are going to survive with an education establishment that could dream up such wasteful inanities.

Think for just a moment about the whole confused bilingual education industry, which has been costing the nation $ 10 billion a year. The idea came out of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, and in practice it soon meant that students from other cultures were spending six, eight, even 10 years learning in their native languages instead of being immersed in English.

It was thought that students would learn English better in the long run by studying subjects in their native languages (you may have to read that several times).

As a lover of linguistics who speaks five languages and as an explorer of other cultures, I can say unhesitatingly that you learn another language by sitting down and patiently learning its structure and grammar, then by being forced to listen to it and finally by speaking it. It is a great joy.

The whole self-esteem movement,” which started as so many goofy things do in California but then spread throughout the nation, is nearly as removed from any genuine reading of human nature as is bilingual education. It believes that young people will develop self-confidence by being told endlessly that they are good and worthy. No one has to do or perform or prove anything:

They just need to be.”

That, not unexpectedly, has led to the next step, which is the dumbing down of our school curricula so that no students can feel bad about themselves, even while the country itself is sinking.

But genuine self-esteem comes from early rational parental discipline, which gives children a sense of protective and moral love, from schooling in the traditional arts and sciences and from having to prove oneself in a society that knows what is important and nurtures it.

It seems to me that America is only now beginning to realize what our busy-busy social engineers in the education establishment, academia and much of government have wrought.

The common wisdom is that our world began to change with the upheavals of the 1960s. Actually, the changes, most of them enshrined in new-left law, began after World War II. It was then, for instance, that leftist social engineers began transforming civic education in the schools, a change that led directly to the politicization and state of anarchy of our schools today.

Even if God takes my advice and keeps those programs somewhere where they can do no more harm, we are not at all out of the fearsome social-engineering woods. Look at this month’s new standards” on teaching American history. Developed by 35 national education organizations, they destroy any heroism or meaning in American history.

And so the social engineers’ inability to learn from their mistakes turns out to be the equivalent of those poor students who labored for eight years in Spanish, Creole and Bengali in order to learn English.

Georgie Anne Geyer’s column is distributed by the Universal Press Syndicate.



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