SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT MAN-- III What the Schools Cannot Do

This is the third of a four-part series in which TIME examines what may be the beginning of a pendulum swing away from liberalism, rationalism and scientism. In the first part of the series, TIME'S Behavior section discussed "the rediscovery of human nature" by behavioral scientists. In the second, the Religion section considered the decline of interest in secular problems and the renewed search for the sacred. This week the Education section examines recent reappraisals of some of the purposes, methods and results of schooling.

FOR generations, the schools have had a mission in the U.S. that went well beyond simple learning. Writing in 1848, Horace Mann declared that education was "the great equalizer of the conditions of men--the balance-wheel of the social machinery." Most Americans would readily agree. To Mann and those who followed him, the public school system was what made U.S. democracy possible and guaranteed its prosperity as well.

In enshrining education, Mann built upon a Western tradition rooted in the Enlightenment. John Locke believed that all minds at birth were blank slates and all children were equally and infinitely educable. To Rousseau, education made men good, and through them made society better. But for the most part in England and France those notions remained only ideals, kept from fulfillment by the twin barriers of social class and privilege. In the New World, however, they flowered into a secular religion. Ragged immigrants were supposed to be molded into Americans through their education, which provided even the poorest child with the opportunity, in theory, for a rich and happy life.

For many educators and policymakers, this exalted conception of education has paled in recent years. They have begun to question whether schools are really the instruments of equality they were thought to be --and to wonder whether there are elements in man that are beyond the reach of education. Other doubts have arisen as well. In many schools there is a tempering of the recent enthusiasm for "open education," a new version of the progressive movement of the '30s. And finally there is debate about the purpose of a college education, which had come to be looked on rather narrowly as insurance for eventual careers with at least some status as well as good pay. The underemployment--if not unemployment--of many graduates today has contributed to quiet reappraisals of the monetary value of their education.

The crisis of doubt about education as an equalizer began in the '60s after it became obvious that the schools were not performing their historic function for black and Spanish-speaking Americans. At first, most educators believed that all that was needed was a series of reforms. Thus schools were to be integrated to wipe out unequal facilities. Compensatory education programs like Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 were to help poor children do as well as middle-class children.

Billions of dollars were spent in the name of those reforms, but very little concrete evidence of success could be found. Rand Corp. researchers, for example, discovered that for every study identifying a school program that worked, another equally good study concluded that the practice was ineffective. To many observers, the discouraging results did not mean that the reforms had failed, just that more time--and better-run programs--were needed. Others concluded, however, that the fault lay in expecting so much from education. They began to doubt whether any amount of money or reform could enable schools to transform their students into equal and prosperous citizens. Some critics questioned whether that was even a proper goal for schools, arguing that poverty is better attacked directly, through such means as income redistribution.

The most impressive evidence of the schools' inability to reshape society came in 1966, when Johns Hopkins Sociologist James S. Coleman finished a massive report on the differences between schools attended by whites and those attended by minorities. Analyzing studies involving more than 600,000 children and 60,000 teachers in 4,000 schools, Coleman concluded that there were far fewer differences in physical facilities, curriculums and teachers than anyone had suspected. Moreover, he found that the most variation in the achievement of students occurred not between schools but within the same school. His conclusion: "Family-background differences account for much more variation in achievement than do school differences."

The Coleman report was virtually ignored at first. In time, however, its conclusions reached out to critics like Berkeley Education Professor James Guthrie, who attacked Coleman's evidence as unreliable "dirty data" involving the wrong kind of tests, a biased sample of schools and a too narrow definition of school "effectiveness." Nevertheless, Coleman's line of reasoning gradually gained acceptance by a number of policymakers who concluded, rightly or wrongly, that spending money on schools made less difference than was formerly believed.

Coleman's report also sparked a new study to determine how much effect schooling has on students' future income. In a book published last fall (Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America), Sociologist Christopher Jencks and seven Harvard colleagues concluded that even if all children could be made to do equally well in equally good schools, that achievement would not erase economic inequality.

The Harvard scholars argued that economic success is not primarily due to the kind of schooling a person has but "to luck or to subtle, unmeasured differences in personality and on-the-job competence." Thus if social policymakers want to end economic inequality, they must attack the problem by such means as paying income supplements to the poor, providing them with more free services, or forcing employers to lessen the enormous gap between the wages of their best-paid and worst-paid workers.

Jencks's work was assailed on all sides--for drawing mostly on Coleman's dirty data, for examining only that narrow spectrum of human abilities measured by IQ and achievement tests, for using error-prone methods of analysis. To M.I.T. Economist Lester Thurow, writing in the current Harvard Educational Review, Jencks's book is an intellectual dead end whose conclusions can be summarized as "Nothing affects anything." Nevertheless, it added mightily to the argument that "equality of opportunity" to go to good schools is far from a panacea.

Even before Jencks published his findings, there were other reasons for questioning the effectiveness of equal opportunity. Its corollary, meritocracy--a system under which people are rewarded not on the basis of birth but of hard work and ability --had long been the goal of egalitarians. But if people's abilities were mostly determined by heredity, not education or even home environment, a meritocracy would tend to permit only the genetically well-endowed to rise to the top. In that case, a meritocracy would be no fairer than an old-fashioned aristocracy.

For the past few decades, the topic of genes had been avoided by most educators because of its political implications. Then in 1969 Berkeley Psychologist Arthur Jensen published an essay arguing that genes were largely responsible for the average 15-point IQ difference found between American blacks and whites. Of the factors that determine IQ, he contended, 80% are hereditary and only 20% environmental. Jensen's thesis was seized upon not only by white-supremacists but by some schoolmen anxious to excuse their own failures.

A stormy controversy followed, which has been stirred up further by Harvard Psychologist Richard Herrnstein. He agrees that intelligence is largely inheritable, but he pointedly limits his discussion to individual IQs of people of whatever race. The difference in IQs between blacks as a group and whites as a group that Jensen attributed primarily to genes, Herrnstein believes is due to environmental disadvantages. His main point is that the inheritability of intelligence can lead to a rigid class stratification in a meritocratic society. Achieving equal opportunity in education might well lead to greater inequalities in society than we now suffer, he argues; the more easily the intelligent and able individuals can rise in society and displace dull ones--of any color --the more important will inherited differences become.

Just such a scenario was imagined in 1958 by English Sociologist Michael Young, who coined the word meritocracy. By the year 2020, Young wrote in a fable called The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033, tests were given to three-year-old children to determine what schools they would go to and how high they would rise in society. Each occupation had a requisite IQ--to be a psychologist or sociologist required a score of 160. Intermarriage of the most intelligent people assured their children top rank.

Herrnstein sees this vision as the coming shape of America. Not so Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky of the University of California at Davis. In a new book, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, Dobzhansky agrees with Herrnstein that the present trend toward making people's environments--and educations --equal will cause hereditary differences to loom larger. And IQs are indeed largely inheritable, Dobzhansky says, citing 50 independent studies in eight different countries. But even if intelligent people intermarry and have intelligent children, the IQ is a narrow concept and there are many other traits that make people successful or unsuccessful. Therefore Dobzhansky denies that a meritocracy would lead to a permanent caste system, as Herrnstein feared. "The caste system in India was the grandest genetic experiment ever performed on man," writes Dobzhansky. For more than 2,000 years the Indians tried to induce "genetic specialization" for different kinds of work, and they failed. All castes today contain highly intelligent people. An Untouchable serves as Defense Minister in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet.

To Dobzhansky, the merits of making educational opportunity more nearly equal outweigh the possible dangers. But, that does not mean sending everyone to the same kind of school. Any inherited trait, he emphasizes, can be enhanced or stunted by upbringing or training. Different people, carrying different genetic endowments, should have different environments in order for their talents to blossom. "A potential musical virtuoso is denied opportunity to develop his powers if he is prevented from entering a conservatory of music and is obliged instead to undergo the same training as, for example, future engineers."

In Herrnstein's view, too, schools should use tests to uncover children's inherited strengths and build on them, instead of acting as "a pipeline through which society tries to generate talent where there is none. Those not gifted should learn a trade."

The shape of the economy today argues in less theoretical terms for an open-minded attitude toward learning such skills as welding and carpentry instead of, or along with, philosophy and history. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that only 20% of the jobs in the 1970s will require education beyond high school. Yet the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education forecast last week that two-thirds of America's high school graduates will be continuing their schooling. Already, according to the commission, nearly 30% of male graduates of four-year colleges are in blue-collar, sales and clerical jobs. There seems likely to be even more serious underemployment of talent in the future. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare projects that over the next decade an average of 2 1/2 people will be competing for every job that actually requires a college education.

That dismal prospect has already caused many young people to opt for job skills instead of the liberal arts. Enrollments at vocational schools have boomed, and the schools' image has somewhat improved. Declares D. Reid Ross, director of the St. Louis Regional Industrial Development Corp.: "Vocational education is no longer for dummies and ding-a-lings." His organization has devised television commercials and a 13-minute film to sell the idea that "no openings exist in the job market for a degreed but unskilled person." The film lauds training in welding, carpentry and drafting as "great for people who want to get out on their own and earn enough money to be independent and happy."

The idea of a two-track system still strikes many people as reactionary, suggesting the classbound education of Europe. Even in the unlikely event that the status of different jobs could be ignored, not many schoolmen--or parents--are willing to test young children and firmly pack the less intellectual ones off to vocational school. Such a step belies the American credo that everyone should go to high school and have the opportunity to go on to higher education. To many, it adds up to an assault on equality. Still, the notion that there should be more choices in education is taking hold at all levels.

At the elementary level, the most talked about recent trends have been the free-school movement and open education. Both are loosely based on the idea, as expressed by Rousseau and developed more fully by Psychologist Jean Piaget and others, that children are innately curious and can learn at their own speed with a minimum of direction from their teachers. No one has disproved this principle, but it has turned out to be difficult to put into practice. Free schools (which often charge tuition--"free" refers to the system of teaching) are usually the creation of liberal or radical parents who want to give their children alternatives to what they consider the stultifying effects of traditional schooling.

Many are excellent schools but often fail within a year or so for lack of money or leadership. The numbers of children involved have never been large--perhaps one-tenth of 1% of the nation's students--and the movement is now leveling off.

Not so the interest in the open classroom, the flexible way of teaching that is sweeping the public schools. Usually, fixed rows of desks and fixed weekly lessons are abandoned. Children roam from one study project to another, theoretically following their native curiosity and learning at their own uneven rates. The new principles are reminiscent of John Dewey's progressive philosophy of 40 years ago. Open education, however, emphasizes new discoveries about how children learn, uses more teaching materials and gives the teacher a more difficult task--to know just when the child is ready for his next stage of development. The movement is growing so rapidly that few teachers are prepared for it--and even fewer parents. Says Roland Barth, an elementary school principal in Newton, Mass.: "Most parents view open classrooms as a risky, untried experiment with their children's lives--a gamble best not taken." In a new book, Open Education and the American School, he warns that as the new system is now being applied, children are too often taught such subjects as weaving and photography at school, and the three Rs at home by their weary parents.

AS for college, the "free university" movement, with its student-designed courses in Hermann Hesse's novels or radical politics, has fizzled out. There is a general sense that everything is back to normal on the nation's campuses --that young people have happily gone back to their books after all the malaise and general hell-raising of the late '60s. But actually the discontent has not disappeared; it has only become less strident. Although there were large increases in the numbers of women and blacks in last fall's freshman classes, the rate of college attendance among white males is the lowest in eight years. Of the nation's white 18-and 19-year-old youths, 47.3% were in college in 1969; in the fall of 1972, that percentage dropped to 39.6%.

The lessened value of a degree on the job market, as well as the end of the draft, largely accounts for this declining enrollment. But there is another factor. Emory Sociologist Abbott L. Ferriss points also to the large and growing number of "dropouts, not just from school but from society--a hang-loose generation." There are now about 200,000 young men who are not in school but are not working. "Pinning down exactly what these young people are doing is very difficult," says Ferriss. "But the current suggestions are that they won't pick up college later."

At Harvard, the number of students on leave has grown from 200 to 300 in three years. Explains the Rev. James E. Thomas, senior tutor of Harvard's Adams House: "Sometimes students feel they can't do something fairly elementary without first answering a number of grand metaphysical questions."

Joyce Maynard, 19, a "stop-out" from Yale, writes in her book Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties: "We're all in search of sages. What's really going on is our search for a prophet, for someone who can, for a change, tell us the answers." This search is partly responsible for the popularity among youth of Carlos Castaneda's books on the Yaqui sage Don Juan (TIME cover, March 5). "Don Juan probably represents the return to some appreciation of traditional wisdom," says Presbyterian Theologian Sam Keen. "With the worship-of-youth cult of the past 15 years, we lost sight of one of the aspects of education. There is now a return to the relationship of student to master, to the belief that there is something that somebody who is over 30 knows, and it may be more than what people under 30 know. There are mysteries into which the old must initiate the young, and not merely the other way round. I guess we are coming to believe in seasoning again."

IN search of such seasoning, John Alsop, 21, a nephew of the syndicated columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop, journeyed to the woods of Maine. A graduate of Groton, John dropped out of Yale after one month. He has now enrolled at Colby College in Maine, in part because it gives him a chance to spend weekends with "the best teacher I've ever had," a craggy 75-year-old Maine logger named Ambrose Wintle. From him Alsop learns the arts of sharpening axes, chopping trees and building log cabins, and absorbs a practical, earthy philosophy. Other students, too, have taken what amounts to a latter-day Socratic approach to education. They cluster around teachers like Paolo Soleri, working as laborer-apprentices in Soleri's attempt at his Cosanti Foundation in Arizona to redesign urban civilization.

William Irwin Thompson, an ex-professor of the humanities at M.I.T., suggests that parents should save the money they are wasting on "elaborate campus containers" and simply give their 18-year-olds $3,000 apiece. The teen-ager could then publish a book, join friends in starting a farm or simply put the money in the bank until he is 28, which Thompson believes is the right age for entering a university. Other educators are suggesting the abandonment of schools--and the degrees they confer. Led by John Holt (How Children Learn) and Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), they would replace compulsory schooling with learning centers that simply put people who want to learn a particular skill in touch with those who can teach it. Argues Holt: "Schools should be like a public library, movie theater or art gallery--simply there for the purposes that people want to use them for. They should have taken away from them their monopoly on the credential-izing, the legitimizing of skill and learning. They've got to get out of the business of deciding what people must learn."

The deschoolers' ideas have been tried out for two years in Evanston, Ill., by two doctoral dropouts from Northwestern, Bob Lewis and Denis Detzel, who also studied with Ivan Illich. In two years their Learning Exchange has put 6,000 students in touch with informal teachers of such subjects as German classics, Camus, African music, Hinduism and auto mechanics. Fourteen more exchanges modeled after Evanston's have since sprung up in the U.S., as well as two abroad.

Not many people would favor abandoning schools entirely.

Retaining them, however, does not mean that students cannot work while they learn. Such an idea appeals to James Coleman, who in the years since he published his controversial study has been thinking about what schools should do. He advocates not abolishing them but reducing their responsibilities, which he believes have become overwhelming and unrealistic. The family used to play a major part in the education of the young, he points out. Now, however, both father and mother are often away at work. "The home closes down during the day," notes one economist. Meanwhile, children are seldom hired even for part-time jobs, and the role of the school has been enlarged "to fill the vacuum that changes in the family and workplace created."

But the passive student role is not suitable for all kinds of learning, and many youths get restless. "Shielded from responsibility, they become irresponsible," says Coleman. Somehow businesses and other enterprises should be paid to take adolescents on, teach them skills and give them a broad contact with adults that they now never have. Meanwhile, their schooling would continue elsewhere--reduced to the teaching of straight intellectual skills. Says Coleman: "I would characterize this approach as a breaking apart of the school." It would also be a new approach to racial and class integration. When a child has a number of educational settings, he says, not all of the settings have to be integrated.

Coleman's conception is tentative, as are most other proposed replacements for America's present school system. Indeed, there are almost as many visionary notions about what education's future shape should be as there are school critics. Diversity, however, is precisely what is called for. A respect for the differences in students' backgrounds and interests must guide colleges and universities as they, too, rethink their objectives. Since it is readily apparent that their degrees no longer ensure top jobs, colleges and universities must offer students far more than credentials. They must become more concerned with enhancing their students' lives --with helping a Maynard find wisdom or an Alsop acquire seasoning. Education may not be "the great equalizer of the conditions of men," as Horace Mann hoped, but it can still serve as a "balance-wheel of society" if it offers students different routes to follow according to their individual abilities and aspirations.

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