Another Thick Slice of Wendell Berry

This is tough stuff. It’s a thick slice of Wendell Berry, a heavy dose of the reality he writes about and I thought to include a slice of F.A. Hayek. On whole it would be a meaty sandwich, though tough and, might I say, somewhat unsavory. And for a blog, it would be quite indigestible. For now I’ll leave Hayek out of it, and simply serve my slice of Berry open-faced.

   

From his essay Conservation and Local Economy, he draws this conclusion: “”The business of America is business,” a prophet of our era too correctly said. Two corollaries are clearly implied: that the business of the American government is to serve, protect and defend business; and the business of the American people is to serve the government, which means to serve business. The costs of this state of things are incalculable. To start with, people in great numbers – because of their perception that the government serves not the country or the people but the corporate economy – do not vote…

…then two further catastrophes inevitably result. First, the people are increasingly estranged from the native wealth, health, knowledge, and pleasure of their country. And, second, the country itself is destroyed.”  

                                                                                                          

Taken to its limits, Berry sees the industrial economy as necessarily environmentally destructive, enslaving and dehumanizing. In Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community he observes:

“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and necessary community is.  For when community fails, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures.  All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life...”

He looks at the industrial economy from the vantage point of the slow displacement of the rural economy of diversified family farms and small towns serving those farms by industrial agriculture. It’s an economy that’s been displaced by well meaning national agricultural programs meant to ensure food surpluses though federal price supports. Those subsidies, over time have feed an industrial agricultural economy that has led to the slow decline of family farms and the rural small towns. All unintended.

Wendell Berry’ viewpoint is agrarian. And in terms of environmental degradation it is necessarily so.

But his economic hierarchy, founded on the economy of households and local community from which follow in descending order region, state, national, and global economies, applies to an urban industrial/post industrial setting. The lesson here is that much of our well intentioned public policy ultimately undermines the economies of households and local community and sets the stage for disaster.

Primary public education is a case in point. One of the primary functions of the household is the education of our children. In our huge urban schools districts it’s a disaster. The scale of economies is all wrong.

In January 2009 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that while the Milwaukee Public Schools’ high school graduation rate increased from 51.8% in 2000 to 68.6% in 2007, the overall student proficiency remained flat-lined with roughly 40% of 10^th graders proficient or advanced in reading and only 28% in math.

School districts measure their success by high school graduation rates and the average college admission test scores of those students taking that test. Wisconsin’s overall high school graduation rate was 89.6% in 2007. That year 70% of Wisconsin high school students eligible to take the ACT college admission test did so with and average score of 22.3, up from 22.2 in 2006.

So there you go. In Wisconsin, over 10% of high school students drop out and another 30% do not take the test for continued technical or college education. It seems 40% of the kids educated in our public schools are poorly served. Nevertheless, these ACT test numbers were proudly announced by the Wisconsin Department of Public education as a huge success, in an August 15 press release that year. This was the number second highest state average, tied with Iowa behind Minnesota.

Those happy numbers mask a more dismal truth. In 2006, the Wisconsin Technology Network pointed out that only 28% of the kids who took the college admission test that year were ready for college in all four core subject areas; English, reading, math and science. Nationwide, the Internet based Education Portal, reports that only 15% of the high school students who completed the core math courses were considered college ready.

Our “vast centralizing” education economy settles for the lowest common denominator -- mediocrity. Nationwide, fewer that 50% of fourth graders are able to read at grade level. Kids going on to college in increasing numbers need remedial instruction in math and composition. Their dismal knowledge of history, literature, math and general science is the norm and not the exception.

What we have missed is the economy of household and local community. Primary education should first be the responsibility of the household and by extension the immediate community. Outside of parents who are able to choose home schooling, or a private school, the education of our children is delegated to bureaucracies and self interests. 

In charge of our children’s primary education are “local” school districts, state departments of education, schools’ of education, unions, and a cabinet level federal Department of Education. In my area, the k12 cost per student is between $12,000 and$14,000 a year. And when none of that works we get a No Child Left Behind Act. Dismal.

The reason the oxtails are tough and tasteless is the same reason why “Johnny can’t read.” Both have been turned over to “vast centralizing” economies, that are not and can never be up to the job. 

In education, the primary problem isn’t failed Federal policy, or state policy, or education theory, though all contribute. Rather, it stems from economic violations of hierarchy and scale. The household should direct of the education its children. It is best able to identify and meet the individual needs of its children. Yet, the household has both voluntarily surrendered and been coercively stripped of this primary responsibility.

We have bought into the false promise of a centralizing economy and in the process, not only has the education of our children suffered, the very fabric of household has been weakened. The problem isn’t with schools per say. With increasing magnitude, it’s with school districts, unified school districts, huge centralized school districts, state departments of education, and finally lording over all a Federal Department of Education. Each bureaucratic layer further separates the child’s education from parental oversight and the parents’ desires for their children.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides similar bureaucratic oversight to the production and distribution of ox tails. The regulatory oversight places compliance costs that are unbearable for small meat processors to market locally produced beef and pork beyond their premises, while federal agricultural policies are steeply tilted toward confined animal feeding operations and ever cast a growing shadow of the industrial over that which should be agarain. In the process it serves us tough, second rate oxtails. And so it goes with household and community.