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Imprimis, On Line -- September 1992
Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
institution known for its defense of free market
principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
For more information on free print subscriptions or
back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
ext. 2319.
------------------------------
"Public Policy and Some Personal Reminiscences"
by Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow,
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
------------------------------
Volume 21, Number 9
Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
August 1992
------------------------------
Preview: In a series of fascinating personal
observations, world-renowned economist Thomas Sowell
talks about the failure of central planners and social
engineers to improve the lot of blacks in America. He
contrasts that failure with the success of blacks who
have regarded hard work and determination rather than
entitlements and victimhood as the key to getting
ahead. He describes a bygone era in Harlem, but makes
it clear that the values that inspired this era live
on. Dr. Sowell's remarks were delivered during
Hillsdale's Shavano Institute for National Leadership
10-year anniversary gala in Colorado Springs this past
January.
------------------------------
There is a story, which I hope is apocryphal, that the
French police were chasing a criminal who fled into a
building in Paris. Their first thought was that they
would surround the building. But then they realized
that the building was so large, and had so many exits,
that they didn't have enough policemen on the scene to
do that. So they surrounded the building next door,
which was smaller and had fewer exits.
Much of the academic research in the social
sciences follows exactly this pattern of reasoning.
Often we don't have information on the variables
that matter, so we surround other variables, using
statistics that the Census Bureau, or the Congressional
Budget Office, or someone else has supplied to us. Last
year, for example, both the media and the politicians
seized upon statistics which showed that blacks
received less prenatal care, and had higher infant
mortality rates, than whites. The obvious answer was
more government spending on prenatal care. Yet the very
same study showed that Mexican Americans received even
less prenatal care than blacks and had slightly lower
infant mortality rates than whites.
Prenatal care was the building next door.
Recently, looking back over my life while writing
some autobiographical sketches, I realized that the
variables which economists and sociologists can measure
are not the variables that matter. Sometimes friends
and colleagues, at gatherings like this, introduce me
as someone who came out of Harlem and went on to the
Ivy League (and, better yet, the University of
Chicago). But this presents as unique something that
was far from unique.
It was not the norm for people in Harlem to go on
to college, but neither was it unique--not among the
kids who grew up in Harlem in the 1940s, as I did. I am
neither the best-known nor the most prosperous person
to come out of the same neighborhood during the same
era. Nor were all the others basketball players.
All of the places where I lived while growing up
in Harlem were within a ten-block radius of 145th
Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Within that same radius
lived a boyhood friend named Eddie Mapp, who is today
dean of one of the colleges in New York City. In a
building on the corner of 145th Street and St. Nicholas
lived another boy, named Leonti Thompson, who was not a
friend of mine--I can recall the teacher having to
separate us when we were fighting in class--but Leonti
grew up to become a psychiatrist, owned property in
California's Napa Valley, and is today retired and
living overseas, while I still have to work for a
living. In the same building as Leonti lived an older
boy who also did well and who made a name for himself--
Harry Belafonte.
Within the same ten-block radius, at the same
time, another fellow grew up to make money and a name--
James Baldwin. Someone else who went to college within
this same ten-block radius, though he lived elsewhere,
was a young man named Colin Powell.
Were all these simply rare individuals? Perhaps,
but it is also true that more black males passed the
difficult entrance examination for Stuyvesant High
School in 1938 than in 1983, even though the black
population of New York was much smaller in 1938. As for
the masses of students in the Harlem public schools at
that time, their test scores were lower than those of
students in affluent neighborhoods, but not
dramatically lower like today, and they were very
similar to the test scores of white students in other
working class neighborhoods, such as on the lower east
side of Manhattan. During some years, the kids in
Harlem scored higher than the kids on the lower east
side, and in other years the kids on the lower east
side might nose them out. But they were both in the
same league.
Ability grouping was very common in the Harlem
schools in those days, as it was throughout the system.
A Harlem youngster who was in the top-ability class at
his grade level received a solid education that would
allow him to go on and compete with anybody, anywhere.
It is somewhat embarrassing today when people praise me
for having gone through the Harlem schools and then on
to Harvard. I did not go through the Harlem schools of
today--and would be lucky to get into any college if I
did.
What is relevant to public policy is that none of
the educational success of the past was a result of the
kinds of policies and programs that are today being
actively promoted in Washington or in the media. That
is, we had none of the so-called "prerequisites" for
quality education.
We did not, for example, have racially integrated
student bodies. Nor did we have racial role models:
Virtually all the teachers were white. I was taught
more about a Dutchman named Peter Stuyvesant than about
Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. DuBois. There was no
"community input." It is also very doubtful that we had
"adequate funding," since there never seems to be any
in education. Those things are all like the building
next door.
Certainly we did not have small classes and there
were no teacher's aides. More importantly, there were
no security guards. I was 42 years old when I first saw
a security guard in a public school. Today, there are
national conventions of public school security guards.
No one asked us if we preferred innovative and
"exciting" teaching, rather than "rote memory." The
Bible says: "By their fruits ye shall know them." In
the educational literature of today, it is "by their
excitement ye shall know them." When they proclaim a
new program to be "exciting," people who ask, "Does it
work?" are regarded as party poopers.
Back in the Harlem of the 1940s, no one asked if
our homes were broken or bent. We did not sit around in
circles unburdening our psyches, nor would anyone have
dreamed of calling a teacher by her first name. No one
asked what my sexual preferences were--nor would I have
known what the question meant if they had.
I was very fortunate to have gone through school
in those days, rather than today--and that good fortune
has benefitted me the rest of my life. It was one of
many pieces of good fortune which I could not fully
appreciate until years later. But my good fortune did
not consist in the kinds of things being promoted
today, or the kinds of things that can be measured in
the statistics of economists or sociologists. If I had
been raised in a home with twice the money and half the
attention, there is no question that I would have been
much worse off.
Another piece of good fortune was meeting the kid
named Eddie Mapp, whom I mentioned earlier. He came
from a family with more of an educational background
than mine, and he was more sophisticated about
education and culture. He took me to a public library
for the first time, and I can still recall the great
difficulty I had understanding why we were in this
building with all these books, when I had no money to
buy books.
Part of my good fortune consisted of the family
that I grew up in--and part of the ill fortune of
today's students consists of the systematic undermining
of families, and of the traditional values that parents
try to pass on. Nowhere is this undermining of parents
and parental values more pervasive and systematic than
in the public schools. You would simply have to read
the textbooks, or see the movies shown in schools, to
understand what a betrayal is going on behind the backs
of parents and the public.
Where I have been able to find schools with the
kind of academic quality once taken for granted, they
have seldom had the "prerequisites" listed by the
education establishment. One of these schools, which I
researched some years ago, was P.S. 39 in Brooklyn, a
ghetto school where students scored at or above their
grade level, even though about a third of them were on
welfare. The building was so old that there were gas
jets in the halls, because it was built in the era of
gas lights, before electricity.
One of the unfashionable things the school
principal did was to have ability grouping within the
school. This school, like so many schools, was once an
all-white institution. As the neighborhood changed, the
composition of the students obviously changed with it.
I asked the principal: "Suppose someone else wants to
reproduce what you have done here. If they have ability
grouping, won't there be a period of transition, where
the white kids are concentrated in the top classes and
the black kids in the bottom classes? And even though
that will take care of itself over time, won't you get
a lot of flack during the transition?"
His reply was: "You just take the flack." That is
not an attitude you find among most public school
administrators.
One of the great contrasts between the schools of
the past and the schools of today is in discipline.
Here I speak from some experience, because I was one of
the mischievous kids who ran afoul of that discipline,
though not in anything like the ways kids get into
trouble today.
When my eighth-grade teacher discovered a prank in
the classroom, she said "Oh, if I ever find out who did
this, Sowell._"
On one of the many afternoons when I was kept
after school, Miss Karoff said sarcastically, "Well,
here we are again, Sowell, just the two of us."
"Good grief, Miss Karoff, " I said, "if we keep
staying in after school together all the time, people
will begin to talk."
Without even looking up from her paperwork, she
replied, "We'll just have to learn to live with the
scandal."
Today, punishing a student, much less suspending
him, can literally be a federal case. Recently, in East
Palo Alto, a ghetto not far from Stanford University,
there was a legal challenge to the suspension of a
student who kicked a teacher in the groin. The student
had legal counsel supplied by the Stanford law school,
which runs a project in East Palo Alto. Apparently
Stanford thinks that they are helping the residents of
East Palo Alto by keeping hoodlums in their schools, so
that the other children there can't learn.
Isn't it a shame that blacks don't have enough
money to be able to hire attorneys to go over into
white neighborhoods and create lawsuits to keep white
hoodlums in school, so that the people at Stanford and
similar places could understand the consequences of
what they are doing?
The great tragedy of contemporary American
education is that actual consequences mean far less
than prevailing myths. These myths and illusions cover
many areas, including the role of teachers and the
relationships between students and teachers.
My great mentor, the late George Stigler at the
University of Chicago, was not one of those who shared
these illusions. When someone mentioned to him the
legendary image of Mark Hopkins sitting on a log,
talking to a student on the other end, Stigler said:
"Sometimes you could do just as well sitting on the
student and talking to the log." The "self-esteem"
dogma, so much in vogue in education today, never
seemed to be one of Stigler's guiding principles.
Anyone who crossed swords with George Stigler, whether
in a classroom or otherwise, was unlikely to have his
self-esteem raised. As for the warm and close
relationship between student and teacher, Stigler once
said of his own mentor, Jacob Viner: "I never threw my
arms around Jacob Viner; he would have killed me if I'd
tried." And I never threw my arms around George Stigler
for exactly the same reason.
There are those who believe that evaluating the
quality of a teacher means having someone sitting in
the classroom, observing what is going on, and then
writing up a report afterward. Many would apply this
procedure all the way up to the college level. From my
own experience, I think this is both a mistaken and a
dangerous idea.
What goes on in a classroom is neither the sum
total of teaching nor even the most important part of
teaching. Certainly during my own teaching career, at
least half the work of a course consisted of preparing
the course, and all of that took place before the first
student showed up.
One of my teachers in college, Professor Arthur
Smithies, never would have passed the classroom
examination test. Smithies used to sort of drift into
the classroom, almost as if he had meant to go
somewhere else and had taken the wrong turn. He would
wander around the room, look out the window, and become
fascinated by the traffic in Harvard Square. Then,
being a polite fellow, he would realize that we were
still there, and turn to say something to us. Students
thought he was a terrible teacher. But, in fact, his
course shaped my whole career.
Professor Smithies taught the history of economic
thought, and through him I became interested in that
subject which became my professional specialization in
economics. It was through Smithies' course that I first
learned of George Stigler. After reading an article by
Stigler among the assignments in that course I resolved
that I would study under him in graduate school.
Had you observed Stigler himself in class, he was
much better than Arthur Smithies. But I am sure that
there would be other teachers whom you could not have
distinguished from George Stigler in the classroom--
except by the substance of what he said. Only if you
could understand and appreciate his substance would you
realize that here was one of the great minds of our
time.
Education professors may believe that there is
such a thing as teaching independently of what is being
taught, but that is one of the reasons our schools are
so bad. The notion that some college dean, especially
from one of those large universities with 20,000 or
30,000 students, could sit in classrooms with
professors from 30 or 40 different disciplines and
form any intelligent idea of what they were saying in
substance--such a notion boggles the mind.
I had another reminder of my good fortune a few
years ago, when my niece confessed to me that she had
harbored a number of resentments over the years. One
thing that provoked her resentment was when her father
and I would talk about the old days when I was growing
up, and all the things we did together, sane and
insane. What made her resentful was that he never did
any of those things with her. Her resentments were also
on behalf of her brother, as well as herself. Her
father, she said, "treated you better than he treated
his own son." When I thought about it, I realized that
she was probably right. The reason was simple: I
happened to come along earlier, at a time when her
parents were a couple of carefree young people with two
salaries and no children, and with lots of time, much
of it given to me.
This good fortune, like so many of the factors
that go into shaping people's lives, consisted of
things which are utterly uncontrollable by the
government, or by any other human institution. Had I
been born five years earlier or five years later, there
is no question that I would have been worse off. If you
looked at the kinds of statistical indices used by
economists and sociologists, my niece came from a
better environment than I did, but it was not an
environment that was able to offer her as much as my
environment offered me.
The whole notion that you can equalize opportunity
in the things that matter is utopian. Some years ago,
there was a study of National Merit Scholarship
finalists broken down by the size of the family they
came from, from two-child families to five-child
families. In each family size, the first-born became a
National Merit finalist more often than all the other
children put together. Here we are talking about
children born of the same parents and raised under the
same roof. Yet even though heredity and environment, as
those terms are conventionally defined, have both been
held constant, nevertheless here is a major disparity
in outcomes.
Clearly, conventional statistics do not measure
what really matters, nor are policy-makers who rely on
such statistics able to do much more than surround the
building next door.
------------------------------
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution on War, Revolution and Peace and is the
author of such well-known books as Classical Economics
Reconsidered (Princeton University Press, 1974),
Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1980), Markets
and Minorities (Basic Books, 1981), Ethnic America
(Basic Books, 1981), A Conflict of Visions (William
Morrow & Company, 1987), Compassion Versus Guilt
(William Morrow & Company, 1989), and Preferential
Policies: An International Perspective (William Morrow
& Company, 1990). Nobel economists F.A. Hayek and
Milton Friedman have called his work "brilliant";
Forbes has called him one of the greatest economists
writing today.
###
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