paterson.qxd
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Pekin meets every critique of the schools with the same denial mechanism: If it is offered by conservative thinkers, there’s no way it could be true. Unqualified freshmen entrants? Students who write poorly? No-brainer college courses in Oprah-watching? Loopily rewritten history? Suppression of dissenting views on campus? Conservative stuff. Don’t believe it.
This can only work if the reader’s definition of “conservative” is something like “dyed-in-the-wool liar.” Otherwise, Pekin still has the obligation, which he largely shirks, to show that conservative observations are false on their merits. He finds it easier just to claim that conservatives are the devil’s spawn. They are people of wealth and power, he tells us, whose principal concern is to exclude minorities and immigrants from opportunity. Their professed desire to improve education and uphold standards of quality is simply a blind for their true agenda–confining the benefits of education to their own group. To do this, they would set up intellectual hurdles far beyond the reach (in Pekin’s view) of minorities. Readers will note that these wealthy, educated, powerful people differ only in economic status from white-trash punks and skinheads–just a bunch of minority-hating racists. (Bill Bennett, shave your head!)
Of course Pekin insists that nothing has been dumbed down and students are being better educated than ever. But there’s an Alice in Wonderland quality to his argument. For if this is so, why does he turn around a moment later and denounce rigorous standards as something that can only interfere with credentialing the rich pageant of humanity currently marching through the system? He can’t have it both ways. Either they are getting a rigorous education (which implies rigorous standards) or the relaxed standards he favors are in place, with educational results to match.
