- Chapter 7 -
     - Restore Literacy and Classical Education -

As we enter the 1992 presidential primaries, the
problems in America's schools have become so evident
that all those in the running, even self-named
``Education President'' George Bush, have been forced
to concede the magnitude of the crisis. But only one
candidate--Lyndon LaRouche--has identified the economic
and cultural factors that have ruined our schools, and
outlined the program required to restore them. LaRouche
has presented the case that the increasing illiteracy
of our population is due to the post-industrial
economic policies imposed on the United States over the
past 25 years, and the promotion of the rock-drug-sex
counterculture among our youth by the very same
neo-Malthusian policymakers responsible for the
post-industrial debacle. 

           - How Our Schools Were Ruined -
   In an open letter to the United Federation of
Teachers in July of 1985, LaRouche described how the
bankers' budget-cutting and union-busting policies have
destroyed our schools, beginning in New York City:
``The collapse in ... public education dates from
developments in New York City during the 1968-1975
period of the Ford Foundation's provocation of the 1968
New York Teachers' strike, through the establishment of
`Big Mac' during the 1975 municipal debt crisis.
Although parallel developments in educational policy
were pervasive throughout the nation, it was the
breaking of the back of the high standards once set by
the New York City Board of Education, which set the
precedent for erosion of education in the nation at
large.'' 
      No longer can talented students with limited
financial resources count on the public schools for
education, LaRouche wrote. ``The ghetto-neighborhoods
in which pupils might presumably conduct their
homework, were turned into something resembling
bombed-out cities in postwar Germany.... The reaching
of what had been once considered civil-rights goals in
educational opportunity, intersected an accelerating
plunge into `post-industrial society'; the employment
orientations, early associated with first-class public
education, were made increasingly meaningless in
practice, especially so in the traditionally
industrialized urban centers.... 
   ``During the past 20 years, the average quality of
teachers in public schools has fallen catastrophically.
The quality of instruction given has, on the average,
fallen way below the potentials of the average of
current teachers,'' LaRouche added. ``In large degree,
this reflects the worsening of the pervasiveness of
drug-usage and drug-culture-related conditions in the
schools and in the classrooms. In the largest part,
this deterioration has been the intent of powerful
lobbies which have shaped national educational
policy.'' 
   How far has America's public education system
collapsed? Consider the so-called political correctness
movement which has spread through America's schools and
college campuses. Scientific rigor and competence have
been thrown out the window--in favor of the political
fads of the post-industrial society. It is no longer
necessary for the teachers, let alone the students, to
be familiar with Shakespeare and Poe; history textbooks
are being rewritten to castigate such ``western
imperialists'' as Christopher Columbus and the Founding
Fathers. Even worse is what is being inserted
{into} the schoolbooks. Courses on alternative
life styles--lesbianism, witchcraft, etc.--have become
standard fare. Institutions which adhere to a God-given
standard of morality in human behavior, such as the
churches and the family, are branded as authoritarian. 

            - Preconditions for Recovery -
   There are two preconditions for rebuilding
America's public education system. The first is {a
winning war on drugs}. As President, LaRouche will
launch such a war. Instead of targeting only the
lowest-level street dealers, he will work with Congress
to enact new banking transparency laws, which enable
law enforcement to identify and confiscate the hundreds
of billions of dollars of illicit profits laundered
through the banks, and to jail the bankers responsible.
Along with this campaign to strangle the dope traffic
by cutting off its funds, LaRouche will institute a new
foreign policy regarding the foreign producers of the
drugs that are destroying our children: The United
States will reject the International Monetary Fund
austerity ``conditionalities'' which force developing
sector nations to grow dope as a cash crop, and replace
this genocidal policy with programs to develop modern,
capital-intensive agriculture in these countries. 
   The second precondition is an {emergency
program for national economic recovery.} In
testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on
February 5, 1992, LaRouche explained his program to
create 6 million jobs during his first adminstration.
These new jobs, 3 million in the public sector building
needed economic infrastructure, and 3 million in the
private sector supporting these enterprises, will
greatly expand the nation's tax base, and generate
needed resources at the local, state, and federal level
for returning to excellence in education. This means
that our cities and counties will once again have the
funds to hire the best teachers, bring class sizes down
to no more than 16 to 20 students, equip new science
laboratories, purchase new textbooks, and more. In
these improved circumstances, teachers will once again
be provided with the means to teach: proper training,
adequate preparation time (between 1 and 2 hours for
each hour of classroom teaching), and the means to
follow and evaluate the progress of individual
students. Computer-scored ``multiple choice'' learning
and testing--which almost always means that little or
no real teaching is going on--will be ended. 
   Just as the Apollo Moon project gave the last
boost to education, a series of Great Projects
initiated and funded by the federal government will
have a profound positive effect on our schools. As we
undertake the tasks of curing AIDS, colonizing the
Moon, and engineering fusion power, our national
laboratories and other government projects will become
training centers for upgrading science at every level
in the schools. 

              - A Classical Curriculum -
   While it is largely up to state and local
government to finance and operate our schools, the
federal government must play a leading role, by setting
national goals, delineating the role of the public
schools in meeting these goals, and establishing a
standard for excellence in performance by the education
system. 
   LaRouche has outlined three goals for our nation:
1) eradicating poverty across the globe; 2)
establishing a durable peace among nations; and 3)
colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the Solar System
beyond. To produce the citizens of the 21st
century--who can meet these goals, as young Americans
of the 1960s met the goal of landing a man on the
Moon--our schools must return to what LaRouche calls
the classical curriculum. This curriculum, which
trained the geniuses of Renaissance Europe and the
outstanding leaders among our Founding Fathers,
contains the following elements: 
   1) Classical language, literature, poetry, and
history, in English and foreign languages as well. This
would include Shakespeare, as well as English
translations of portions of Cervantes, Lessing, and
Schiller, and others, and an appreciation of our
Judeo-Christian Western European culture, as
transmitted through the Indo-European family of
literate forms of spoken and written language. LaRouche
emphasizes the importance of history for students: ``We
learn from past history how the conditions of nations
and our civilization as a whole were bettered or
worsened by the shaping of policies in one way or the
other,'' he wrote in 1981. From history, ``we learn ...
a sense of our individual selves as more or less
influential individual persons in a long historical
process.'' 
   2) Plastic arts, in tradition of Leonardo,
Du@aurer, Raphael, and Rembrandt, to name a few of the
great Renaissance artists. Most education ``experts''
today either dismiss the arts as impractical and
irrelevant, or else make the category a dumping ground
for what would, by any sane criteria, be considered
garbage. LaRouche, however, has a very defined sense of
how art and science unify in a classical unified
curriculum. ``Classical art is essential,'' he has
written. ``Simple drawing, introducing Albertian
perspective at an early age, should lay the basis for
the plastic arts ... At a later age, the advances in
perspective contributed by Leonardo da Vinci should be
introduced.'' LaRouche outlines a complete curriculum
to teach children not only about architecture,
sculpture, and drawing, but beauty and harmonics as
well. 
   3) Physical science in tradition of the University
of Go@auttingen. Taking the German university of
Go@auttingen as his model, LaRouche has outlined a
detailed program of study from basic geometry (the
tenth through thirteenth books of Euclid) to advanced
physics (Reimann, Cantor, and Gauss.) Even more
important than the specific areas of study is the
method that he has stressed. ``By living through the
experience of those past discoveries ... the student
learns to recognize, much better than he or she could
otherwise, what kinds of activity within his or her own
mental experience corresponds with the power to
generate and assimilate new knowledge of the way in
which the physical universe is organized.'' 
   4) Classical music. Similar to art, music in most
school systems has been relegated to either the
superfluous or the ridiculous. In the classical
curriculum, however, music is a fundamental element.
``Music should be presented as classical poetry sung
according to principles of well-tempered polyphony,''
LaRouche writes. ``The basis for this is best
established on the primary school level, by development
of children's choruses based upon a) the bel canto
method of singing and b) strict adherence to a
well-tempered scale set at middle C=256.'' Performance
on orchestral instruments and work in classical musical
composition, should continue throughout secondary
schooling. 


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com