Made In America - Bill Bryson [226]
Almost everyone cites television as a primary or secondary factor. Without question, American children watch a lot of TV. The average child aged two or older spends four hours a day, about a quarter of his or her waking time, plugged to the box. By the time they are eighteen, American children have been exposed to no fewer than 350,000 commercials.10
Alarmed by such figures, Congress in 1990 introduced the Children’s Television Act, mandating that stations show programmes with some educational value. The result, alas, was not better programming but more creative programme descriptions. One station described GI Joe as ‘a pedagogical tool’ that ‘promoted social consciousness’ and familiarized children with ‘the dangers of mass destruction’. Another described Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers as a valuable demonstration of ‘the rewards of team effort’. The Flintstones, meanwhile, was found to promote initiative and family values. A few stations did provide some more demonstrably educational programmes, but a survey found that the great bulk of these were shown before 7 a.m. ‘After that,’ as The Economist noted drily, ‘the stations got down to the scholarly stuff.’11
While there is no doubt something in all of these considerations, it should also be noted that it is easy to give a distorted impression of educational performance. Consider the matter of the American sixth formers who did so poorly on maths tests. What almost all commentators failed to note is that secondary education in America is, for better or worse, very different from that of most other countries. To begin with, the American system does not encourage – or often even permit – sixth-form students to specialize in a core discipline like science, maths or languages. Moreover, American high schools are open to all young people, not just those who have demonstrated academic proficiency. That England and Wales came third or fourth in all the maths tests is, it may be argued, less a testament to the far-sightedness of the British education system than to the rigorousness with which the less apt are excluded. Yet it was against high-flyers such as these that the American students were in virtually every case being compared.
The fact is that by most measures the American educational system is not at all bad. Almost 90 per cent of Americans finish high school and a quarter earn a college degree – proportions that put most other nations to shame. For minorities especially, improvements in recent years have been significant. Between 1970 and 1990 the proportion of black students who graduated from high school increased from 68 per cent to 78 per cent.12 America is educating more of its young, to a higher level, than almost any other nation in the world.
There is of course huge scope for improvement. Any nation where twenty million people can’t read the back of a cornflakes box, or where almost half of all adults believe that human beings were created sometime in the past ten thousand years,13 clearly has its educational workload cut out for it. But the conclusion that American education is on a steep downward slope is, at the very least, unproven.
II
Early in 1993 Maryland discovered that it had a problem when someone noticed that the state motto – Fatti maschii, parole femine (’Manly deeds, womanly words’) – was not only odd and fatuous, but also patently sexist. The difficulty was that it was embossed on a lot of expensive state stationery, and engraved on buildings and monuments, and anyway it had been around for a long time. After much debate, the state’s legislators hit on an interesting compromise. Rather than change the motto, they decided to change the translation. Now when Marylanders see Fatti maschii, parole femine, they are to think, ‘Strong deeds, gentle words.’14 Everyone went to bed happy.
Would that all issues of sensitivity in language were so easily resolved. In fact, apart from the