The recent issue of The New Criterion has many articles on the state of lower and higher education in the United States, including pieces by Charles Murray on the consequences of the No-Child-Left-Behind business, which in turn is based on a belief that all children are educable, that we are supposed to ignore I.Q. differences and the fact that many of them are, in fact, hopeless cases for book-learning  (sometimes because of I.Q., sometimes because their backgrounds which so often, though not always, reflect the I.Q.s of their parents).

Murray misstates one thing: he appears to believe that the McGuffey's Readers, the contents of which are so horrifyingly advanced compared to the fill-in-the-blank "language arts workbooks" of today, were not used in the lower grades where there was still universal education; he's wrong, and anyone who buys the Smithsonian reprint of the full McGuffey's series can see that they include textbooks for lst, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th  grades -- in other words, the very grades that everyone, including those who left school. Murray suggests that the measurement of educational performance today would be impressive, would go sky-high, if one were to throw out or not count the test scores of those who, in the 19th century, would never have stayed beyond the elementary-school years. He's wrong; the test results today, the generally low standards -- low by comparison with many European and Asian school systems -- right down the line have affected the people about whose schooling one should care about most, that is those who are most intelligent and most able to be schooled, and who remain, as they have been for some time, the most persecuted minority in America today.

Murray also goes into the attempts to downplay or ignore the value of I.Q. tests, and the various strategies employed to pretend that I.Q. results do not matter (they do), or do not have predictive value (they have very high predictive value), and the attempt by Howard Gardner and others, to muddy the waters with this "multiple intellligences" business, the kind of thing that Gardner has been getting all kinds of grant money at the Harvard School of Education, for decades, to promote, for it fits so well into the simpering sentimentalizing idiotic spirit of the age.

There is a good piece by Victor Davis Hanson that lists many, though not all, of the things that have gone wrong with higher education. What a relief not to have him writing on the war in Iraq, where he has crazily defended what he should long ago have seen through, and because he has a loyal claque, has been partly responsible for many of those Bush loyalists, those self--described "conservatives," continuing to give their support to the idiotic policy that has squandered all kinds of resources. But on the various distempers to be found in academic life, his jaundiced view is just what the doctor ordered.

Hanson does not say, but I will here, that education or higher education in the humanities (the sciences are a different matter, but the fact that instruction is offered in the same institution, for very different subjects requiring very different things of the faculty members involved, but with the science-envy of the humanities professors helping to further distort their mission, or rather their transmission, of a certain kind of knowledge), would benefit from a lot less hectic pressure to do "scholarly research" (with a nice stay at Bellagio to "finish that book") and a lot more attention to hiring those who regard teaching as a fine art, requiriing a certain charm and allure, and a keen awareness that students today are harmed, not helped, by the too-professional study of literature, and in any case, they come without the knowledge that, fifty years ago, one could assume they possessed, and unless their incredible ignorance is recognized, and grasped, by those teachers of literature and history, unless that nearly-universal lack of a solid foundation is understood, even the little that might be done will not be done.

I scanned the issue the other day in the library, and I can't remember what else there was in it on the subject of education, and I may have forgotten something else that was very good. I don't recall an all-out dismissal of the very idea of mass education -- shades of Albert Jay Nock -- but some passages in both Hanson and Murray skirt that idea.