When Cohen the Columnist was rented from the Gods to write for Banker & Tradesman, he was welcomed as a Renaissance Man. He was a man who could write book reviews, edit the sports section, find cheerful things to report about commercial real estate, and explain, in rhyming verse, why total cost falls as output expands, unless the average cost curve moves toward the marginal cost.
In truth, a vast news operation doesn’t need too many Cohens. At an organization of sufficient size and sophistication, specialists abound – well-versed in certain things, not necessarily so great in others. Successful organizations come together as one, big happy family, except for Human Resources and Internal Audit, which are hopeless.
The Designated Hitters for the Red Sox don’t have to be the best defensive shortstops in the league; the actuary sitting at his desk doesn’t feel obligated to crank out snappy advertising copy for the insurance company. Nations blessed with considerable resources and large populations need not fret about whether every child lusts for the next calculus challenge; a few poets who can’t even balance their checkbooks are just fine. As the great MIT economist Paul Samuelson once wrote, better for slow people to fish, lean people to hunt, and smart people to make the medicine.
We seem to have drifted from the uncomplicated notion of “division of labor,” when we analyze and opine about student test scores. Any school district, school, or individual student that deviates from the Cohen ideal as a Renaissance Man is seen as a problem bordering on a crisis teetering on the edge of the Rise and Fall of the West.
The “No Child Left Behind” mantra was a good piece of political rhetoric that helped fuel the process of evaluating school and teacher performance, but we took the cute phrase a bit too seriously. Some children can purposely or inadvertently be “left behind” in some academic areas, if their schools are remarkable in other areas – or if the children themselves find the Theory of Relativity more compelling than whether the whale in Moby Dick was symbolic of something else.
While two-thirds of America’s fourth-graders aren’t “proficient” in science, according to the national assessment of such things, is that a critical blow to our “competitiveness,” or can we get by with a third of our next generation moving to Boston and Cambridge to cure cancer?
To Each His Own
Massachusetts, in fact, tied for first among fourth graders and tied for second among eighth graders – fueled by the wealth, sophistication and genetic ties to in-state snobby colleges and universities. Should it be national policy that the Arkansas-Mississippis of this world match Massachusetts when it comes to kids who can slice a frog or master a formula?
Our instinct is to view “public” education as a great leveler; what you may or may not be interested in, is irrelevant to the task of creating a population of artists who can do multiplication tables.
But, of course, that leads to the inevitable “failure” to achieve an impossible goal – and a goal probably unnecessary to the health and success of the nation. Every academic area plays the game: The science teachers insist that we must beef up the science curriculum, while, as a study argued earlier this year, most states offer up unsatisfactory standards for teaching history.
At the college and university level, where America is generally perceived to be the best in the world, the institutions feel free to market themselves as occupational therapy factories, or dreamy poetry barns, depending on the school persona and the student body. It’s been many, many years since we shrugged and gave up on the idea that every school must produce well-rounded giants of intellect, or, as John Stuart Mill put it, “capable and cultivated human beings,” not “skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers.”
Can a K-12 student in the United States be deemed successful if he or she offers up a range of skills, from terrific to terrible, poet or physicist? Can the nation thrive with a population mix skilled in math and music – but not necessarily both in the same person?
Of course, the answer is “yes.” But, we have trouble articulating how imperfect these creatures may be and still pass muster.
