History Is Catching Uprnby Richard Lessnerrn”Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.”rn—Martin H. FischerrnWhy Johnny Can’t Tell Right FromrnWrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Casernfor Character Educationrnby William KilpatrickrnNew York: Simon & Schuster;rn366 pp., $23.00rnInside American Education:rnThe Decline, the Deception,rnthe Dogmasrnby Thomas SowellrnNew York: The Free Press;rn368 pp., $24.95rnIn March 1989, four young men inrnGlen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a retardedrn17-year-old girl into a basementrnplayroom, where they proceeded to rapernher, penetrate her with a baseball batrnand a broom handle, and generally brutalizernher. These young rapists werernnot the products of modern urbanrnpathologies—poverty, broken homes,rndysfunctional families, the gang-anddrugrnunderworld; they were the sons ofrnaffluence—handsome, clean-cut preppies,rnstar athletes at their high school,rnfrom good homes in a pleasant, upscalernsuburb. Yet these fresh-faced youngrnmen, three of whom were eventuallyrnconvicted of aggravated sexual assault,rnwere apparently oblivious to the mostrnrudimentary notions of right and wrong.rnHow could this be? Because most ofrnthe institutions of American society, thernpublic schools notable among them,rnhave abandoned such inconvenient, intolerantrnnotions as objective standards ofrnright and wrong, virtue and sin.rnHere is everything that is important tornknow about the state of public educationrnin America. Every month an estimatedrn525,000 assaults, shakedowns, and robberiesrnoccur in the nation’s publicrnschools. Annually, about three millionrncrimes are committed on or near schoolrnRichard Lessner, formerly deputy editorrnof the editorial pages at the ArizonarnRepublic, has recently finished arnhistorical novel.rngrounds—16,000 per school day.rnRoughly 135,000 students carry guns tornschool daily, and one-fifth go armed withrna weapon. Twenty-one percent of allrnsecondary students do not use a bathroomrnduring the school day for fear ofrnbeing assaulted or robbed. In a surveyrntaken at the end of the 1940’s, teachersrnsaid that students talking out of turn inrnthe classroom were their greatest pedagogicalrndifficulty; by the 1990’s, talkingrnhad been replaced by physical assaults byrnstudents.rnSuch are the stygian depths to whichrnour schools have sunk in fewer than threerndecades. Despite an avalanche of coursesrnin “values clarification,” moral andrnsex education, “AIDS avoidance,” andrn”drug aversion,” the public schools havernbeen uttedy unable to stem the risingrntide of violence, teen pregnancy, andrndrug abuse. If anything, every one ofrnthese problems has grown worse and, inrnmany cases, been exacerbated by thernvery palliatives allegedly aimed at amelioratingrnthem.rnOnlv the woolly-minded elites of therneducation establishment, the apparatchikirncomfortably entrenched in thernnation’s universities and governmentrnschool bureaucracy, continue to puzzlernover the etiology of the malaise that hasrnovertaken the schools and the larger society,rn’lb the rest of us, and to ProfessorrnWilliam Kilpatrick of Boston College,rnthe cause is hardly mysterious: LittlernJohnny, like those teenage rapists, simplyrncan’t tell right from wrong.rnThe title of Professor Kilpatrick’srnnewest book consciously evokes RudolfrnFlesch’s 1955 work Why ]ohnny Can’trnRead. The parallels between what passesrntoday for “moral education” and therngovernment school establishment’s continuedrnespousal of the “look-say”rnmethod of reading over the objectivelyrnsuperior phonetics approach are as uncannyrnas they arc intentional. Bothrn”look-say” and the so-called “decisionmaking”rnapproach to “values education”rnhave been, by any standard of measurement,rnresounding failures. Yet such ideologicallyrndriven pedagogical theoriesrnpersist and proliferate.rnWhy is it that Johnny can no longerrntell right from wrong? Because in thernrevolutionary 1960’s liberal educatorsrnsuccumbed to the philosophical droolingsrnof Rousseau, Nietzsche, and otherrn”naturalists,” conflated these leavingsrnwith the affective pop-psychology of CadrnRogers and others, and replaced traditionalrn”character education”—teachingrnchildren by means of historical examplesrnand classical literature the essentialrncharacter traits of the moral person—rnSEPTEMBER 1993/29rnrnrn