SECOND OPINION
Greater expectations in education

By Cliff Slater

To understand how low our expectations for education have become, it is well to get a 200-year perspective on it.

At the time of the Revolution, the United States had a population of 2.5 million. Its political leaders were George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, George Mason and, in addition, the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush. What an array of intellects who could give us not only the declaration but also our Constitution and the Federalist Papers.

But hold on. Hawai'i today has a population of about half what the whole United States had back then. Simple math tells us that we should have at least half that many political leaders of such stature and learning. Am I alone in thinking that we do not?

However, in those days, the elite had high expectations of students. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his 15-year-old ward and nephew laying out his expectations for the boy's education:

"I advise you to begin a course of ancient history, reading every thing in the original and not in translations ... reading the following ... Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophontis Hellenica, Xeno-phontis Anabasis, Arrian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, Justin. This shall form the first stage of your historical reading. ... The next will be of Roman history (Livy, Sullust, Caesar, Cicero's epistles, Suetonius, Tacitus, Gibbon). From that, we will come down to modern history.

"In Greek and Latin poetry, you have read or will read at school, Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles.

"Read also Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope's and Swift's works, in order to form your style in your own language.

"In morality, read Epictetus, Xenophontis Memorabilia, Plato's Socratic dialogues, Cicero's philosophies, Antoninus, and Seneca.

"... You are now, I expect, learning French. You must push this; because the books which will be put into your hands when you advance into Mathematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, will be mostly French, these sciences being better treated by the French than the English writers. Our future connection with Spain renders that the most necessary of the modern languages, after the French."

The historical record in the English-speaking world is quite clear: We have gradually lowered our expectations for what we expect of our brightest and most diligent students while raising them for the least diligent ones. The net result has been an education that focuses on a rather homogenized egalitarian education for all. Today, our children no longer have to qualify to graduate from high school; they merely have to show up a reasonable amount of the time.

But high expectations for students who want to learn are in place at a few schools in the United States. Chicago inner-city students at the Marva Collins school read Sophocles, Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Tolstoy and Dostoevski. Unsurprisingly, their lowest scores in the 7th and 8th grades are equivalent to average high school junior levels. One remembers the high expectations of Jaime Escalante, the calculus teacher whose success with inner-city kids is legendary.

What a tragedy that our sincere concern for the least fortunate among us results in such a lessening of competence at the top.

Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are available online.