John Snider
English
MSU-Northern
Benjamin Barber, a professor of political science at Rutgers, gives us yet another book on the ills of American higher education along with his cure for the disease. He argues that democracy must be for everyone and that the chief aim of education must be to prepare us for the demands of liberty. He begins his book by reminding us of the wisdom of Jefferson: "Jefferson knew something about the aristocratic distrust of popular sovereignty. If you deem ordinary people insufficiently discrete to govern, he advised, don't take away their power, educate their discretion" (6). The theme of Barber's book is that democracy demands an educated populace and that mass public education need not cater to the lowest common denominator, but should appeal to the best in people by raising us up to a level necessary to performing the duties of citizenship. Barber argues that public education is a public resource which we ignore at our peril. His remedy for our failure to teach democracy is to require community service of students. He lists in his book nine governing principles for teaching liberty. Among these ideas is the notion that to study democracy is to practice it; that democracy has responsibilities as well as rights; that students should not be selfish, abusive, or discriminatory, and so on. The trouble with such a list, of course, is that it is so general as to be meaningless.
Barber has written a book which every member of the Chamber of Commerce in the country could read without looking under the bed for communists. His book reads like a commencement address with all its soporific platitudes. We should be free, says Barber, but responsible; we should study the tradition yet be innovative; we should be in the ivory tower but in the community as well; we should study the canon but revise the canon as well--and so on.
More irritating than Barber's safe dullness is his chauvinistic flag-waving, which is horrifying even for a professor of political science. Barber begins his book with the following astounding statement: "Around the world the cry 'Democracy!' has shattered tyranny's silence and caused the most stubborn of dictators to lose their confidence in the politics of fear. Walls are coming down and iron curtains are being drawn for the last time. The Statue of Liberty is an icon for young men and women who have never known freedom in lands that have never been democratic" (3). People come to the U.S. because we are a rich country, not because we are a free country. Our own record of human rights abuses and support for third world dictators is well known, even to those of us who have not studied political science. Here is a review of recent U.S. history which does not appear in Barber's book. The U.S. invades Vietnam, prevents free elections and slaughters two million people. The U.S. supports the fascist dictators Pinochet of Chile, Marcos of the Philippines, Stroessner of Paraguay, and the Shah of Iran, to name a few. Our CIA subverts progressive and democratic movements around the globe. The study or prevention of these outrages appears nowhere in Barber's nine suggestions for community service. Barber chirps about the virtues of community action, but he does not talk about promoting human rights, social justice, providing jobs or health care, or seriously studying the tax system which allows rich Americans to evade their civic responsibility. No, the good professor Barber seems content to arrange the chairs in a circle and occasionally take his class down to the ghetto where they will get "experiential learning." Barber does, of course, make the usual required condemnations of slavery and other capitalist abuses, but he does so in such an indirect manner that even an educated member of the Ku Klux Klan would have to read the book twice to realize that he had been criticized.
Most revealing of all is the complete absence of any discussion of economics. Reading the book one keeps hoping Barber will mention the fact that the U.S. is a country of vast wealth which could easily solve a myriad of problems simply by imposing a fair tax on the rich in order to fund schools, hospitals, parks, jobs, public safety, and day care centers. The best recent book on the role of money in education is Jonathan Kozol's study Savage Inequalities. Kozol, whom Barber never mentions, makes the obvious case that the children of the rich get a better education because they receive about 12,000 dollars per student per year while the poor get about 4,000 dollars per student per year. If you don't think money counts, then ask yourself why the rich do not send their children to the public inner-city schools, which are cheaper to operate. Money does make a difference, but Barber does not talk about money. Barber's book cashes in on the recent debate in America about education, but he adds nothing to our understanding.