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Que Bueno?
“Whether or not it is advisable to completely shut the door on native-language instruction is a decision that has to be made at the point of instruction,” Education Secretary Rod Paige said on a recent trip to Denver, where he was stopping to promote President George Bush’s educational reform agenda. Colorado voters will likely be asked to vote this November on a proposal that would amend the state constitution to require public schools to put non-English speaking students in one-year immersion courses rather than the bilingual education programs favored by the education establishment. Paige’s opposition to the amendment probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Bush administration’s general “Que Bueno” stance. But few expected the Bush administration to take sides against the pro-English reformers in such a dramatic and public way. The Denver Post’s reporting depicted the Colorado debate as pitting those who favor local control over the issue of bilingual education against the supporters of the amendment who “would remove that choice from local schools and districts.” I noted earlier that this Hobson’s choice between bilingualism and centralization could be avoided by reforming our immigration policies. Why on earth would anyone prefer to consolidate control of education when a far more reasonable alternative is at hand? The fight in Colorado is just one example of mass immigration reshaping our country. Terrorist immigrants beget the burgeoning national security state. Illegal workers lead to a push for national identity cards. Increasing numbers of non-English speakers create a demand a government sanctioned “official language.” The loss of a common culture or heritage has many calling for state-sponsored “Americanization” programs. Any of these innovations would replace settled communal and traditional practices of the American people with bureaucratic managerial mechanisms. Yet for the most part, these are somehow considered “conservative” measures. What dissent exists on the right typically denies that there are any serious problems arising from mass immigration because ours is a “nation of ideas.” When I close my eyes I can imagine this phrase as the epitaph on our country’s tombstone, set back beyond the cemetery on the part of the hill reserved for suicides. In my more charitable moods, however, I’m tempted to observe that this willful blindness is a nearly understandable reaction against the proposed government kulturkampf, which ought to be anathema in a free country. The left at least recognizes that mass immigration entails the dissolution of our traditions, reorganization of our economic, educational and political institutions, and an abandonment of our inherited ways of life. After decades of mass immigration, it was inevitable that something like multiculturalism and political correctness would take hold. As immigration renders reliance on the tacit consent to traditional rules of conduct impossible, new and explicit rules governing the way we live will put in place. Multiculturalism and political correctness are simply another technique of managing a population where traditional community has dissolved. It is hard work to see beyond the distortions of managerial techniques of the right and left. Secretary Paige may pose as a defender of localism but he is nothing of the sort. It’s a strange sort of localism that requires the head of a department of a federal agency to intervene in a debate over a state constitutional amendment. And Paige is hardly a consistent supporter of local school districts against statewide mandates. His program for education would require the states to force local school districts to meet a host of statewide standards. So why does Secretary Paige insist on defending local prerogatives when it comes to bilingualism? Take a closer look at Paige’s statewide standards. It goes without saying that these statewide standards will not be set by the elected officials of Colorado, much less by voters in state referendum. The standards will be set by educational professionals. And this is why there is no contradiction between supporting statewide standards and opposing the proposed amendment to Colorado’s constitution. Both positions share the principle (identified by Jim Kalb in a comment on my earlier post) of the autonomy of the public education profession. Both positions seek to avoid democratic or parental authority over educational choices, leaving education under the control of government teachers and administrators. Paige wants decisions about language education to be “made at the point of instruction”—which is to say not by parents or even elected school board members. Localism is just a rhetorical connivance in service of this principle. I’m not so innocent that I’m surprised to discover the head of the Department of Education taking sides with the education establishment. The people of Colorado may build the schools, pay the teachers, and have nominal parental authority over their children, but they certainly are not going to be permitted to actually run things. And, truth be told, they probably do not want to and would most likely fail if they tried. An important aspect of what James Burnham termed “the managerial revolution” has been the arrangement of civil society in ways that require the mastery of managerial skills and the ability to perform certain types of routines within an organization. Who else but the bureaucrats can run a modern state bureaucracy, a corporation or a school system? Every bureaucrat must daydream a version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Only in this fantasy, it is the bureaucrats who go on strike. Every CEO and CFO, assistant undersecretary, union vice-president and university vice-provost leave their desks for a few months vacation on a Cuban beach, where they can watch the rest of us struggle to recall how our civilization might ever have got along without their ministrations. That would teach the ornery citizens, stockholders and parents. The managerial revolution is not about to launch a general strike. The rewards of power, prestige and wealth are too great. What’s more, there is always the danger that a people left to their own devices might seize upon a way to gain control of their communities and country. They might notice, for instance, that the crisis of bilingualism in California or Colorado is really a crisis of immigration. Someone might see that the dilemma that John O’Sullivan used to refer to as “the National Question” will not be solved by entrusting one set of administrators or another with more authority. Perhaps someone would ask whether or not it is advisable to permit millions of foreigners to live among us if this makes us choose between consolidating control of our schools or giving up English as our common tongue.
I guess the experts aren’t the only ones who have daydreams.
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