Two months ago I was having great difficulty reading the 18 point type in our altar missal, and Adric and Peter Threadgill were debating the merits of stepping up the type size to 20 point or maybe even 24 point.
Today, thanks to a course of injections directly into my left eye at the Johns Hopkins’ Wilmer Institute, I can read the tiny, 10-point type in my daily newspaper. My recovery, thanks be to God, was little short of a miracle.
Like many other people in their “riper years,” I suffer from macular degeneration, a condition that affects the retina, and which, if untreated, can lead to blindness.
Mine is probably hereditary. My mother was also a sufferer and she had been blind for the best part of 20 years by the time she was my age. The fact that I can still see so well illustrates the enormous strides that American doctors have made in fighting this affliction over the past couple of decades.
At risk of boring you with my recent medical history, the list of my “sufferings” over the last 11 months also includes a triple bypass and a three hour operation to remove a chunk of bone lodged between my sciatic nerve and my spine.
I was left with virtually no scars after either operation. What’s more, I was back at work (albeit part time) six weeks after the bypass. Not only that, I was the celebrant at the Healing Eucharist the day after my back surgery.
All this is illustrative of the truly remarkable progress American medicine has made in the past half century. Just a few years ago, patients who underwent similar operations faced either no prospects of a cure or long, painful, and debilitating recovery periods.
My purpose in making these observations is not to pat my doctors on the back (even though they richly deserve it), but to demonstrate how very much better our lives are today in terms of healthcare than they were when our parents were our age.
Sad to say, such progress is not discernible in our social, public, and civic lives. Actually, far from improving, the quality life in these areas is not just declining, it is in free fall.
The unfortunate truth is that life in all of these aspects was very much better in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and even the 70s, than it is today. Certainly this is not an especially original observation. Most thinking people today are uncomfortably aware of it.
Some folks are inclined to ascribe it to the television, and that so much of what we deem to be entertainment consists of displays of extreme violence, sadism, and soft (and increasingly hard) core pornography.
Others, perhaps more cerebral, claim the real culprit is air conditioning. They point out that until its advent, people spent time on their front stoops or verandas, and that this encouraged a sense of neighborliness that our air conditioned comfort discourages and even denies.
There is a considerable degree of truth in all of these observations, of course. In reality, however, they are mere symptoms, not the disease. The real culprit behind the catastrophic decline in the quality of our social, public, and civic lives is, in fact, our abysmal public education system.
The nature of the problem confronting us was neatly summed up by Professor Jonathan Jacobs in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. Professor Jacobs is president of the Institute for Criminal Justice and Ethics, and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“We’re familiar with the laments of graduates,” he wrote, “who emerge from college burdened with student loans and wondering if their studies have prepared them for jobs and careers.
“A less familiar and even more troubling problem is that their education did not prepare them for responsible civic life. A decline in education means a decline in the ability of individuals—and ultimately the nation as a whole—to address political, social, and moral matters in effective considered ways.”
“The trouble begins in high school,” says Professor Jacobs, where students face “so few challenges and demands they are badly underprepared for college.” Yet colleges serve them no better. Many emerge from their under graduate education with little ability to grasp the difference between “saying something” and “constructing an explanation and formulating an argument.”
According to Professor Jacobs, the situation is exacerbated by college instructors who “urge students to regard all theories, intellectual perspectives, and views as ideology—without acknowledging the difference between theories, beliefs, hypotheses, interpretations, and other categories of thought.”
Thanks to the politics of higher education, many graduating students have little or no experience of genuine intellectual inquiry and, indeed, have been encouraged to despise it.
“Too often learning to think is replaced by ideological scorekeeping, and the use of adjectives replaces the use of arguments,” Professor Jacobs wrote.
This explains not just the ugliness of political discourse in this country, but the unpleasantness that so often mars life in our business and communal life, even in our homes. This, in turn, promotes the fragmentation of society, discouraging meaningful conversation and encouraging people to mix only with those who share like ideas.
The inability to think constructively reduces debate—political and civil—to name calling and vituperation. And if this is the standard set by Washington, Annapolis, and lesser seats of government, small wonder it leads to such mayhem in our inner cities.
The barbarians are inside the gates! And they are our children! The only way to prevent them overrunning us completely is to take back our schools, colleges, and universities from the political ideologues who have hijacked American education. GPH✠
Newsletter