SECOND OPINION
Learning what is important
By Cliff Slater
Since my April 15 column about 1940s British schooling generated interest here in Hawai'i, here's more: Our pre-1950 teachers' attitudes toward us students can best be summed up in Thomas Sowell's words: "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
Accordingly, our curriculum was based on our educators' assessment of what facts and thought processes we needed to learn in the short time they had to civilize us.
They wasted no time on current affairs. We had history, but that was only dealt with up to 20 years prior to our time in school.
This subsequently made sense to me. Virtually every important issue in recent memory was subsequently found to have been significantly burdened with false information at the time. Think of the Vietnam War, the government's forecast (inflation adjusted) of $170 a barrel for oil by 2000; think of virtually any politician's forecasts for the effects of legislation — and then consider what actually occurred:
• Medicare was forecast to cost $12 billion annually by 1990, allowing for inflation; it actually cost nearly 10 times that — $110 billion.
• Aloha Stadium cost $37 million to build (it was forecast to be less), and we were assured it would be rustproof. It cost $60 million to repair the ensuing rust, far more than it cost to build in the first place. We are now told it needs a further $40 million in repairs.
• We follow that up by building a softball stadium where the spectators cannot see home plate and to remedy it we then have to put in enough soil to raise the playing field by four feet.
I could go on about government failure — it has encyclopedic scope.
Thus, to have young students discussing highly complex current affairs when they have neither the true facts at hand nor the educational background to be able to judge the relevance of what they do know, is to divert them from studies that will be more useful to them in later life.
For example, it is important that students be able to put such issues as slavery, Hawai'i's past and the U.S. Constitution in the context of their times.
Students are not taught today that we are all descendants of slaves. Slavery existed in every culture and still exists in places like Sudan. Slavery only ended in most of the world through the efforts of Western imperialists in the 19th century. This is not taught today. To focus on slavery in the U.S. as though it were the world's only slavery is to give it meaning it does not have.
Nor do students (or even their teachers) know that public school teachers' real salaries, allowing for inflation, quadrupled during the Oligarchy (as Hawai'i's official textbooks describe the times) and have declined in the 30 years since they were unionized. Is it possible that the Oligarchy was more concerned about education and teachers than their own union?
Nor do students understand that the main protections of the U.S. Constitution were to protect the individual states and their citizens from the potential excesses of the federal government. If we had taught past students to have one-tenth the Founding Fathers' own skepticism and mistrust about government, we would have had far better governance today.
How many students know that a hundred years ago there were no income taxes, payroll taxes or sales taxes and that the minuscule federal revenues (2 percent of today's per capita taxes, allowing for inflation) were just from customs duties, and alcohol and tobacco taxes?
The massive regulatory and tax-heavy environment that now weighs us down is a development of the 20th century.
Students should know all this material instead of learning trivia. These matters are settled history, and it should be important that they know such facts and understand the underlying dynamics affecting them.
Cliff Slater is a regular columnist whose footnoted columns are at www.lava.net/cslater
