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Parochial Schools Are The Answer

Not a Religious Bone in My Body

By George Neumayr

Editor's note: Author Tom Wolfe made a splash in the January 19 New York Times when he was quoted at a conference sponsored by the Children's Scholarship Fund saying, "Immediately stop all installation of computers and Internet apparatus in the public schools, and substitute chessboards." This follow-up interview appeared in Investor's Business Daily on January 21.

Neumayr: What was the essential substance of your speech? I know The New York Times did a little report about your advocacy of chessboards over computers, but what was your real message?

Wolfe: Let me give you the background. I said to these big-money guys: "Any of you who has any influence over installing computers or internet in classrooms, get on the phone right after lunch and tell them to get rid of it all and you will save America millions of dollars." As every good teacher knows, in order for children to learn, they have to use information actively. I'm talking about establishing memory here. Let's say the subject is the origins of the American Revolution, which is probably not even being taught in any public schools, that is part of the problem. Studying issues like this teaches kids to develop concepts and reach conclusions; in other words, to use their minds rationally. Now, the internet does absolutely nothing to create active learning of this sort. It tends to be used as a substitute for such activity.

Let's say some kid is surfing the Net and comes across some moving pictures of South African Diamond mines. There is software that will show you moving pictures of men working down in the mine. Do kids need to know how ripped, cut and buff diamond workers are in South Africa? The Internet is a distraction for kids.

The Internet only does two things or one thing; you can actually lump it under one: it disseminates and retrieves information rapidly. That is not what primary and secondary students need. They need to learn a rather narrowly defined body of information, such as, what is the significance of the Dred Scott decision? These are basic facts of American history that they are not getting.

When the internet is used in the schools, the active side of the brain turns off. The screen is a great pacifier. It turns on the least active part of your brain; it is counterproductive.

I think what schools have learned already and what they don't dare talk about is this: Computer learning is good for one thing -- learning how to use computers! That is it. It is has no pedagogical value whatsoever apart from that. Anything you could do with a computer pedagogically you could do with a pencil. I have seen my daughter use the word processor to prepare for a test, and she will outline (she is now in college) everything she had coming up for the test. It was fabulous, because it was active. But she could have used a pencil. What does a pencil cost today? Five cents! What does a computer cost? $1,200? It would be a huge saving, and it would actually be a help because these screens are encouraging the passive use of information. That is why I advocated chessboards.

Neumayr: You probably know about these classics programs, like at Thomas Aquinas College in Southern California, that use seminars, rather than lectures, because kids learn ideas more deeply if all of their senses are engaged.

Wolfe: I said to these corporate leaders: I'm giving you this for nothing. The main point was that there should be two things that could be done really easily. One is to create in the schools a sense of order. And the second is to create a sense of moral purpose. You could go back to Epictetus and Socrates; they all knew this.

Look, you could go around the world to every continent, every society that has reached the level of the wheel, the shoe and the toothbrush, (and) you will find a bourgeois, and this bourgeois stands for order, for peace and quiet, for courtesy, for fairness, for hard work, for education, for responsibility, for accountability, for community spirit.

In preparation for the talk, I had interviewed teachers and students; I wasn't just mouthing off. I talked to a young woman who, out of a sense of altruism, started teaching the fifth grade in the North Bronx, and she quit after a month and a half. She couldn't get the class quiet for a month and a half. She was told by the administration the following: this is not a hierarchical structure that we have here. You are not a teacher in the old sense; you are a facilitator. This is an open classroom. You are not an authoritarian. She went over to a parochial school in Spanish Harlem to observe, and here were those rigid desks that she had been warned were so inimical to learning. There was absolute order in the classroom.

This got me interested in the parochial schools, frankly, and it turns out that the parochial schools in New York teach 10% of the primary and secondary school students from the city. They teach the same populations. There is no demographic difference between the students they teach and the students the public school teaches, so you are not getting some sort of cream of the crop socially.

The dropout rate is very low. Eighty-five percent of the parochial schools' graduates go to college; 27% of public school graduates go to college. They score infinitely higher on all exams and other standardized tests. The public schools have an administrative bureaucracy with approximately 10,000 employees, and the Catholic schools with these fabulous results have 50 employees -- 10,000 to 50! Adjusted per capita, the parochial schools, with 5 percent of the numbers, they are doing the same administrative job.

I interviewed a student who is Hispanic but not Catholic. The vast majority of students in parochial schools are not Catholic. Many of them are evangelical Protestants. This boy's family is made up of lapsed Protestants. He said every year you have to take a class in religion, which obviously is the Roman Catholic religion. And he said basically, regardless of whether you believe in everything you are being taught or not, there is a moral core. You are constantly reminded that in all of this teaching is a moral expectation that you are going to conduct yourself in a certain way, and the purpose of this education is to help you do that. And this is something that used to be in all the public schools in this country.

And I said to myself, as I listened to this boy, "This is of inestimable value in creating order and creating an atmosphere that makes children willing to learn."

So I said the smartest thing that the New York Public School System could do is turn the entire enterprise over to the Roman Catholic Church. And it can be done in one day. It wouldn't cost anything. Many of these corporate people, people with a lot of money, give money to for-profit educational programs. Do yourself a favor, I told them: Forget about it. American corporations are totally amoral. They are not immoral; they are amoral. I am not a capitalist basher -- I love to make money.

If you really insist on throwing your money at primary and secondary education, I said give it to the Roman Catholic Church student-sponsored program, a program in New York where big-money people will put up money for students' tuition and will keep in touch with those students.

And I said to them, "Look, I am not a Roman Catholic. I am a lapsed Presbyterian; I have been looking for a religious bone in my body, and I can't find one. But I have eyes and I see what works, and what the Roman Catholic Church is doing in New York works."

Tom Wolfe is the author of The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.

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