#458: Why Can’t We Make America Idealistic Again?—Part 2

The 2016 election has forced me to reflect on the many ideals that both our major parties—and my own generation--have abandoned. Last time I reflected on Transportation. This time: Education.

My generation, children of the ‘60s, invented the “generation gap” by committing ourselves to fundamental change. We expected that when our turn came, we would change the world.  And we knew “the whole world is watching.” And now our time HAS come, and the whole world IS watching. What do they see?

 Now, so many years later, it seems to me that our generation has lost the capacity for idealism. 

Far from fulfilling our mission to change the world, we have betrayed our mission by failing to even sustain the ideals of our past.  On issue after issue, our baby boomer leadership (in national office since 1992) has discredited new initiatives as “too idealistic”--meaning impossible to achieve--while allowing other nations to pass America by. We now risk leaving our country less idealistic than we found it!

Ironically, this does not mean that idealism is dead. In many fields, our allies in Europe and Asia and Canada and elsewhere have been inspired by our pioneering efforts. As I watch other nations embrace American innovations and build better futures on them, I ask myself over and over, “Why can’t we?”

This post is the second in a series that surveys such issues.  In each case, I reflect on our past embrace of idealistic change. I observe how we have fallen behind our allies as we have quit on that ideal while they have taken our place and sustained such idealism. In each case I ask “Why can’t we?”

This time I look at education.

Perhaps my idealism derives from where I live, since Massachusetts has in many ways been a land of idealism since its founding.

Boston Latin School Then....

 My three children are graduates of the Boston Latin School, the first public school in America, founded in 1635.  It was designed for Boston’s elite, and funded mainly by donations, but was followed in 1644 in Dedham Massachusetts by the first public school supported completely by taxes.  In 1820, Boston English School became the first public high school in America, offering a publicly funded 12^th grade education to all.  And an 1827, a Massachusetts law required that all grades of public school be open to all students free of charge in every town and city in the Commonwealth.  This means that, for nearly 300 years, publicly funded universal education has been the law in Massachusetts.

This ideal soon spread across America, which became the first country in the world to establish universal public education for its people.  And for most of our history as a nation, we have led the world in literacy and the educational attainments of our population.

By the period immediately following World War II, the majority of Americans were achieving a high school education in schools that were free of tuition.  In addition, many others had access to professional training programs (such as the apprentice program in which my father trained during a 39 year career at General Electric).

Of course, over the last 50 years, a high school diploma has been losing its career value, as increasing numbers of Americans have gone to college. 

In most high schools across America, the majority of graduates are now going on to some college study.  Soon the majority of the working age population will have received a college education. College is now the rule, not the exception as it was for my father’s generation.

By now, for many careers, a high school diploma is no longer competitive in the workplace.  This means that, for most Americans, a K-12 education cannot provide the career benefits that it used to.  Yet the United States has not extended publicly funded, tuition-free education beyond high school. 

This means that our world-pioneering ideal of public education, providing free schooling for all, has been frozen in place since 1821!

The result is that the United States is no longer the leader in providing public education for its people.  Instead, our allies are bypassing us by establishing free (or heavily subsidized) higher education.  For more than a generation, this has been happening in Canada, France, Germany, and throughout much of Europe.  The result is that most young people in those countries can acquire a college education without acquiring any debt.

American students, by contrast, face the daunting prospect of assuming levels of debt comparable to the mortgage on a house.  I remember my shock when, as my oldest child entered college, the chief financial officer of her school predicted the day when entering freshmen would sign a 50-year loan to pay for their education!  The very image of an 18-year-old committing to debt that would last past retirement age boggled my mind. To this day, my European friends are horrified to hear of U.S. college costs.

So we should not be surprised, as our allies pass us, that more and more American students are leaving the U.S. to study abroad.  In 2012, 46,500 Americans were enrolled in degree programs in 14 countries. (NOTE: These are NOT “semester abroad” students who return to their U.S. schools; these students are receiving foreign diplomas). 68% of these were in the United Kingdom and Canada, with France and Germany close behind.

Germany has become especially popular because university study there, even for international students, is tuition-free.

Jeffrey Peck, the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, City University of New York, described the “ideal-gap” between Germany and the U.S.:

"College education in the US is seen as a privilege and expected to cost money and in Germany it is seen as an extension of a free high school education where one expects it to be provided,"

The Germans are not simply altruistic in this regard. The hope is to attract skilled foreign students who will stay in Germany. Sebastian Fohrbeck, of the German Academic Exchange, reports that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.

Other US allies are nearly as generous.  Public universities in France, including the Sorbonne, cost approximately $250 per year of study.  Belgian universities cost $960.  Finnish universities cost $1500.  Italian universities cost of $1000, Spanish universities cost $1500.  And Norway, like Germany, is totally free.

Back home, the average cost of public universities for out-of-state students is $23,800 per year.  The average cost of private universities is $31,231 per year. The old idea of "working your way through college" has become a bad joke.

The results of such astronomical fees should not surprise us. Americans have accumulated $1.2 trillion nationwide in college-related debt.  300,000 Waiters and waitresses in  the United States are working to pay off such debt.  30% of such Americans are indebted despite having dropped out of school.  Altogether, 40 million Americans--more than the population of 200 countries--are burdened by college debts.

We’re now looking at an entire generation of Americans who are forced to choose between 3 unhappy options.  First: they may go without college and suffer the competitive disadvantage for the rest of their careers.  Second: they may get a college degree and carry lifelong debt for up to 50 years.  Third: they may go to a foreign country for less costly or even free study--and many of them will remain there, draining away the brainpower of our country.

Do not be surprised if the numbers who choose option #3 keep growing—many after dropping out of an American university due to its cost. (Ironically, the colleges rich enough to guarantee students they will have no debt are largely reserved for the highest-achieving high school students. In other words, we are back to Boston Latin’s model of school for the privileged elite).

.......and now: Boston Latin School today

 So while we were once first in education, first in publicly funded schools, first in educational attainment, first in literacy--now our allies have bypassed us, and we face the challenge of catching up.

Yet in our political life, in our public policy, the idea of “free college” is regarded as an impossible ideal--something it is unrealistic to expect or even campaign for.  We seem to be a people no longer willing to fund what the public needs.  We seem to be a people no longer capable of maintaining our own ideals.

And so, as I observed with transportation, so with education: I look around the world, I observe what our allies have been doing to pursue the very ideals that we originally inspired in them.  In so many countries where education was once a privilege reserved to a tiny elite of the population, our American experiment in public education inspired them to see education as a human right (as the Catholic Church teaches) and to invest in the spread of free education for all. And they have kept that ideal alive as times changed.

So as I observe what they have accomplished, and compare that with our failure to keep our own educational ideals alive, and hear so many fellow Americans proclaim that such a goal is romantic, naive, and unrealistic, I feel compelled to point to our allies’ real-life experience, their success at making the ideal a reality, and I ask the sad question that keeps coming to my mind: “Why Can’t We?”

NEXT time: Employment

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#457: Why Can’t We Make America Idealistic Again?

The 2016 election has forced me to reflect on the many ideals that both our major parties—and my own generation--have abandoned.

Since the end of the Republican and Democratic conventions I have suffered a case of “blog-block” (not unlike writer’s block).

Oh, I’ve posted my share of Facebook comments, but these have been consistently negative critiques of specific points or events.  The depressing spectacle of this election has stymied me.  I feel acutely discouraged by our country’s sad condition but I have struggled to formulate a comprehensive account of those feelings.

Until now.

The low quality of the candidates, the uncivil and uncivilized tenor of their campaigns, and the dysfunction of our electoral system have all bothered me.  But my discouragement was about something deeper.

Two things, really. 

For one thing, this electoral season has clearly failed my personal expectations.  As an American, I expect the opportunity to vote for someone representing my civic concerns and values.  And as a Catholic, I expect to support someone who supports the social vision I get from my faith.  The 2016 campaign is defying me on both counts.

I admit, those expectations are perennial--and they have been perennially frustrated in nearly every presidential election since I reached voting age more than 40 years ago.  But the 2016 campaign has been even more discouraging than previous campaigns.  Not only is it failing my personal expectations, it has also failed the promise of my generation.

In 1992 Bill Clinton became the first baby boomer elected president.  Since then, boomers have been the dominant cohort in presidential elections: Clinton again in ‘96, George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, Bush again in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008, Obama again Mitt Romney in 2012, and now Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. By 2020, boomers will have occupied the White House for 28 years.

Like me, they all grew up as part of the largest generation in U.S. history--and one of the most idealistic.  Anyone going to high school and college in the 1960s lived through a ferment ranging from Rock and Roll and hippies to moon landings, from civil rights to Vietnam, from feminism to ecology—all amid assassinations and protests and a clash of ideals. 

Amid such chaos, we invented the “generation gap” by committing ourselves to fundamental change. We expected that when our turn came, we would change the world.  And we knew “the whole world is watching.” And now our time HAS come, and the whole world IS watching. What do they see?

Personally I always found a lot of my peers’ idealism naïve and romantic, and I tended to think our real “revolution” was more cultural (or even spiritual) than political. I knew the status quo’s hold on our way of life was powerful, so I did not really expect America to abandon all of its institutions and traditions.  I did not expect our future to break with our past.  But I did expect my generation to reject the nation’s worst traits (for example, its racism, its materialism, its intolerance to non-conformity) while embracing and expanding its key ideals.

Instead, now I am reminded of philosopher Frantz Fanon saying “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” It feels like our generation DID discover its distinct mission early on, but has not fulfilled it. Now, so many years later, it seems to me that our generation has lost the capacity for idealism. 

Far from fulfilling our mission to change the world, we have betrayed our mission by failing to even sustain the ideals of our past.  On issue after issue, our leadership has discredited new initiatives as “too idealistic”--meaning impossible to achieve--while allowing other nations to pass America by. We now risk leaving our country less idealistic than we found it!

Ironically, this does not mean that idealism is dead. In many fields, our allies in Europe and Asia and Canada and elsewhere have been inspired by our pioneering efforts. As I watch other nations embrace American innovations and build better futures on them, I ask myself over and over, “Why can’t we?”

I am thinking of things that shape the way we live and also our presence in the world.  They shape our economy our daily lives, our culture, and our international relations.  I’m thinking of education, of transportation, of health care, of labor relations, of our military, of inequality, of employment and immigration and peace and poverty.

This post is the first in a series that surveys such issues.  In each case, I reflect on our past embrace of idealistic change. I observe how we have fallen behind our allies as we have quit on that ideal while they have taken our place and sustained such idealism. In each case I ask “Why can’t we?”

Let me begin with transportation.

Just look at our past.  Except for Native Americans and some recent immigrants from Central and South America, who arrived on foot, everyone else got here by sea or by air.  The first European settlers called their destination “the New World” precisely because crossing oceans was without precedent, and required a vision and courage and a willingness to risk that presumed high ideals.  Some, like the Pilgrims, came seeking their own kind of religious liberty.  Others, like the Puritans, arrived simply seeking a better life in a new place.  Ocean travel made that possible, and led to the cluster of major ports along the eastern seaboard that we now call Megalopolis.

200 years later, the Erie Canal opened this new world to expansion away from the sea, and gave birth to an inland nation stretching west as far as the plains and its great rivers.  40 years after that, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad stretched that nation across 3000 miles from sea to sea. 

And 50 years later, America succeeded where France had failed, completing the Panama Canal that linked those two seas and made global shipping possible on an unprecedented scale.  40 years after that, a Republican president inaugurated the construction of the Interstate Highway System, enabling Americans to cross the country for both personal and commercial reasons with unprecedented speed and ease.

The American love affair with the automobile soon spread to other nations, who constructed their own super highway systems.  The same was true for international jet travel, dating from about 1960.

But at that point, American leadership in transportation ended.  As oil prices and pollution and congested roads marked the beginning of the end of automobiles’ dominance, nations in both Europe and Asia began to develop new technologies and build new infrastructure.  They constructed thousands of miles of brand new rail lines to accommodate futuristic trains that could cruise above 200 miles per hour.  The rail systems they built enabled travelers to reach distant destinations in half the time of driving, while using less energy.  Once again, train travel became the first option for hundreds of millions of travelers in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Japan, China, Taiwan, etc.

But not in the United States.  We still rely on a system of rails constructed as much as 100 years ago, running trains at laughably low speeds compared to either their past performance (when the rail lines were new) or to the speeds typical among our Allies. 

The failure to keep up with our Allies leaves Americans chronically dependent on automobile travel even for the most impractical of trips.  Currently it is impossible to get from Boston to New York in less than 4 hours of actual travel time—no matter if by car, bus, train or plane.  If we had the high speed rail our allies already possess, the trip would take 2 hours or even less.  The same problem applies to trips between all major American cities. Boston to DC is the same distance as Paris to Marseille; both trips take 7 ½ hours by car. In France the trip by train is 3 hours. We can’t we?

Moreover, our outmoded dependence on cars for intra-city and inter-city travel prevents us from reducing our carbon emissions and leaves us stuck in place as the worlds #1 contributor to climate change, which Pope Francis declares to be the world’s #1 challenge. Our economy, our health, our daily lives, our leisure, and even our connection to each other are all damaged by our failure to retain our leadership in transportation.

When I visit other countries and travel their rails, I am amazed at the vision and idealism they displayed by investing in such technological marvels in order to make them practical everyday realities.  They made their vision real. I feel ashamed that my country is no longer capable of such vision or such idealism.  So when I return home and find myself riding the antiquated systems we still cling to, I cannot help but wish that we could learn from and imitate our allies and once again learn how to make visions real.  And I cannot help but wonder “Why can’t we?”

NEXT time: Education

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#452: Must America Be the Modern Sparta?

As the editorial pages and the blogosphere filled up with appreciations for the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who died last week in New York, my sadness was not for him but for our country. 

Berrigan, who was 94, had a full life devoted to the cause of peace, often choosing radical, even illegal actions in the name of gospel values.  But by 2016, more than 50 years after he began his crusade, America doesn’t seem to have made much progress toward peace. We peaceniks used to say, amid the struggle over Vietnam, “The enemy is not the enemy.  The real enemy is War.” And we still have not conquered war. 

In fact, a blog post that popped up on my Facebook page last week observed that the United States has been at war for 93% of its history.  That means 21 scattered years of peace in our entire national life! Find the details at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm  .

I remember how shocked I was to read, during my college days, that 1968 was the first year of the 20^th century that no British soldier died in combat.  I should not have been shocked, of course: I should have known that permanent warfare is the price of empire.  And sure enough, Britain went to war in Northern Ireland the very next year. 

By the age of 30 I was less naive.  In 1977 I told a fellow peacenik that I planned to look for work in Canada, just in case of war.  I’d done some rough math, and figured that, based on our past history, we could expect the next war by the time my one-year-old child reached draft age.  I was close enough: the first Gulf War came 14 years later. 

Still, that 93% is even bleaker, and it stuns me (even though three of the 21 peaceful years came just as my first child was born).  Think of what that figure of 93% means:

It means that no U.S. generation has lived ever lived their lives in peace. 

It means that every single U.S. president has been a wartime present

It means that no U.S. child has grown up in peace.

It means that no U.S. parent has raised their children free of war. 

Of course, even the tamest of our schoolbooks revealed how bloody U.S. history has been.  Our nation was born in the blood of Revolution in the 18 century, became an indissoluble union in the bloodbath of the Civil War in the 19^th century, and we spent most of the 20^th century fighting wars overseas.  And those modern wars have inflated our military’s scope beyond all our rivals and allies put together.  We remain the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war, and the only major nation to claim the right of a first nuclear strike.

The US military has expanded dramatically even in the last 15 years. We now maintain up to 800 military bases in 70 countries. We have up to 150,000 military personnel present in 153 foreign countries.  It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, but today we can say that the sun never sets on the U.S. military.  Viewed strictly for our war making capability, we are the world’s only global empire.

Why so much war?  Since World War II, it is largely because our leaders have convinced enough of us that our “National Security” can be jeopardized by the puniest forces, by the vaguest, most remote threats.  So we went to war in Vietnam supposedly to prevent the “dominoes” from falling across Southeast Asia.  We fed weapons to the Taliban supposedly to thwart Soviet control of Afghanistan. We backed the Contras to unseat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  We invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airfield.  We occupied Panama to unseat Noriega.  We attacked Saddam Hussein and bombed Iraq, invaded Haiti, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq again to remove Saddam, waged war in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and now Syria.All those in the last 40 years, at the cost of millions of lives and countless refugees. 
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy.  It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.   
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam.  50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad.  And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion.  As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”

It seems we Americans are prepared to accept war on the flimsiest of excuses.  And the government has made this as easy as possible by (1) Eliminating the draft to short-circuit popular protest and (2) Paying for war on credit.  We don’t feel war touching our families or our wallets, because the cost of war falls on the poor who serve and on the future generations who will inherit our debt.

Moreover, our people seem to actually believe that such “threats” jeopardize our “freedom,” and we willingly sacrifice many of our liberties to protect "it."

This theme is, of course, as old as the nation itself:  “Live free or die”; “I regret that I have but one life to give…”; “Better dead than Red”; “The Domino theory” ; “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Perhaps we need to face facts and ask ourselves (if only to honor the spirit of Dan Berrigan): “Are we Americans by nature a war-like people?”

As a school kid, I love ancient history, and was particularly fascinated by the typical textbook contrast between Athens and Sparta.  Athens, we learned, was the seat of Greece's noble culture: sculpture, theater and poetry, history, philosophy, learning.  Sparta, by contrast, was portrayed as a kind of barracks-state, its men constantly preparing for or waging war.  We gathered, from the stories, that these wars were fought for honor, for revenge, for security, for wealth--but anyhow war was Sparta's defining trait.

This stereotype about the two cities lives on.  After all, who ever heard of a football team called “The Fighting Athenians"? 

As I grew older, and I began commuting to high school in Boston, I learned of a traditional nickname for the city of Boston: “The Athens of America.” Actually, Samuel Adams proposed nearly the opposite in a 1764 letter. "Boston,” he wrote, “might become a Christian Sparta."

But in 1819, William Tudor (a leading literary figure and co-founder of America’s first railroad) wrote a letter describing the town as "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that illustrious model."

The phrase “Athens of America” stuck. And even if the nickname does not accurately describe Boston itself (and certainly it predates Boston’s becoming America’s pro sports capital!), it does describe why Bostonians are proud of their town. We like to think that our contribution to the richness of American culture (in the arts, education, politics, science, etc.) over nearly 400 years is all out of proportion to our size and power.

Why this digression?  Because, dear reader, as a native Bostonian I not only embrace this (admittedly romantic) image of my city, but I also hold the fervent desire that it be a model for my country.

Alas, it seems to be a hopeless longing.  Many people around the globe (not only the French!) may admire American movies, our jazz, our jeans, our energy and vitality and creativity.  But despite all that, our image for most others in the world is defined by our real presence in the world—a presence that has brought (and still brings) our troops to every continent and, tragically, has left behind the victims of Washington bullets.

Must I accept that we are Sparta? 

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016