Good Morning Friends,

This is part four of our discussion of the education bubble. I think this reality is the origin of the seemingly intractable and interminable "debate" between the mainstream left and mainstream right. Of course, the lines of the debate used to be more sharply drawn. It used to be that the Democratic party were more supportive of public education and teacher's unions.

It used to be that the Democrats believed in directing as much public resources as possible to the public system in terms of textbooks, computers, and yes, even teacher salaries, though its hard to remember now. Now the Democrats speak of "merit" pay.

Its important to remember that when people recall with such fondness, the "good old days," they are thinking about New Deal America and all that went with it. I suppose the period went from about the end of WW II in 1945 to about 1980. Of course the New Deal started earlier than 1945, but I pick that date for our purposes, because that is about the time - as I understand it - that the apparatus of what is called the "national security state" started to come into being.

It was in 1947, I believe, that Truman signed the National Security Act which formed the CIA and the other organs of the internal security and foreign intelligence gathering apparatus. So, not only was a strategic contest waged against the Soviet Union, but also a cultural propaganda war. We had to show the world that the American Way of Life was far superior to the Soviet model.

People look back to this period before 1980 as the golden age in many respects: the golden age of media, never had there been so much freedom and diversity; the golden age of economic equality, economic polarity between the classes seemed to be the least in the industrialized world; the golden age of civil rights, more formerly excluded "minority" communities were gaining their rights at a seeming blistering pace; the golden age of first amendment protection; the golden age of culture, indeed, even that medium sometimes call the "idiot box" seemed to be far superior in substance and quality than what we have today; a golden age, even of education, perhaps - we know that when the Soviet Union launched Sputnick in 1959, this infused a new urgency, especially in science and math, and it is against this background that president Kennedy made his pronouncements about the destiny in space (we couldn't let the Soviets outdo us in space), and no one was a more dedicated "Cold Warrior" than John F. Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. attorney general at the time, Robert Kennedy; unions and collective life in general had never been stronger than in this period.

And all of this must be seen in context of the one hundred fifty years of rising real wages in exhange for rising productivity, from about 1820 to 1970, as Dr. Rick Wolff tells us. During this period it must have really seemed to most people that the "rising tide lifted all boats." And I must say, all of this raises questions, for me, about the extent to which culture itself is defensive and reactionary in character. I'll come back to this.

New Deal America was also a golden age of bipartisanship. There were liberals in the Republican party and conservatives on the Democrat side. While there are still conservatives in the Democratic party, the so-called "blue dogs," there are no liberals in the Republican party, indeed, even their moderates seem to be an endangered species, with many of them making the tortured decision to register as "Independents." As a result, the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats are liberal.

There is a seeming paradox between the sharp rise in partisanship over the past thirty years and the unifying effects, on both parties, of what is called neoliberalism or the "Washington Consensus." The argument can be made that since their differences are so narrow, now, their argument naturally increases very sharply in intensity.

Coming back to education, as far as I can tell, the Democrats and Republicans are more or less united around the need for "choice," which includes charter schools and the like, "accountability," reflected in test scores, and "merit" pay, as opposed to a guaranteed decent standard of living for teachers.

Now, the Republicans tend to be more careful about spending than their opposites, saying that education is not a problem that can be solved by "throwing money at it." If we return to the education bubble that Paul Fussell told us about, of the 1950s and 1960s, we can say that the Repubican position - as far as it goes - is quite right. The Democrats, having "thrown" money at education clearly caused a bubble, which caused hundreds of "nonselective" specialty schools to inflate themselves into universities, in order to attract federal funding; and in doing so, graduated millions of students with four-year degrees, who experienced no income advantage at all over high school graduates.

As I mentioned before, I know this must be so because I have personally seen this dynamic operate.

But from the point of view of the government, what was the alternative? With all those young men coming back from overseas after the war, something had to be done with them. They had to be occupied in some way, because as everyone knows "an idle mind is the Devil's workshop."

What about nationalization? Could and should the government have nationalized those 1728 bloated specialty schools to bring them up to standard? Should and could the government do this today?

But what would be the standard? - I'll come back to that. Let's go to another part.

wingedcentaur