Jefferson's Children: Education and The Promise of American Culture

by Leon Botstein, Fearn Cutler (Designer)

The president of Bard College and musical director of the American Symphony Orchestra offers a learned antidote to conservative pessimism about America's future, showing how parents and teachers can offer the nation's youth a vision of progress.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

232 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 1997

Reviews

[Nathaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays on the subject of education in American society by Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and, later, founder of the Bard High School Early College movement. The essays aren't really linked together directly, but are all on similar themes of cultural analysis, the reform of the American high school, the purpose of college, and what parents can do to encourage lifelong learning in their children.

Let me begin by saying that this is an intellectually stunning and multifaceted achievement on many levels, particularly on the subjects that Botstein knows best: college and raising intellectually gifted children. Much of his cultural and especially generational criticism is also spot-on, especially the assertion that my generation had a much rougher time in school than we should have because of the Baby Boomers' neurotic pessimism about the future (and blaming us for being consumers of "youth" culture created by adults) setting such a bad example for us. It's also completely ineffective, because Botstein is an erudite European intellectual who didn't grow up in America and really doesn't understand the social elements of working and middle-class American culture.

To begin Botstein is not economical with his prose. His writing shows great intellectual skill, but he takes so long to make his points that he's very difficult to quote, and that makes his ideas basically irrelevant as far as America is concerned. Next, like most intellectuals, Botstein apparently has difficulty comprehending that cost of education and cost of living are very real factors that determine the quality of education one receives and what one can do with it after getting the diploma itself. This makes many of his reform solutions unfeasible in practice (see below).

However, the most problematic aspect of this book is that everyone who summarizes its content, from Wikipedia to the author himself, only focuses on the high school reform aspect. This is unfortunate, because the high school reform aspect is easily the weakest part of the book. Botstein never attended an American high school, and therefore seems unaware of how deeply rooted in American work and life culture the institution of high school is, especially in the working class....or maybe, given that he's only seen fit to open branches of Bard High School Early College in large cities with a conveniently high level of racial diversity, he knows that all too well and doesn't care. But as it is, the high school diploma is the minimum credential in the workplace to be even seriously looked at, and giving kids the burden of explaining that an AA really is a high school diploma....really! to an HR person who is the product of the very same broken and regressive system that Botstein decries is an unfortunate reality of his ideology that I as a graduate of Bard College at Simon's Rock can bear quite a bit of personal testament to.

My final criticism is similarly personal, because Simon's Rock, the original early college experiment, has been administered ex officio by Botstein since 1979 and for all of his advocacy for early college he does not mention it once. Moreover, his criticisms of traditional college pedagogy apply to my Simon's Rock experience in spades, from the serious (bad advising) to the pedantic (an over-reliance on Foucault in social science curricula). I still got enough of an education at Simon's Rock that I have been able to arrive, 11 years later, at most of the conclusions about American education that Botstein wrote about a few years before I went there, most of which apply to Simon's Rock in spades but clearly do not apply to Botstein's other enterprises. Therefore, I can't help but be a teensy bit angry that Botstein couldn't be bothered to apply this knowledge to Simon's Rock, which in my experience seems to be largely because he didn't come up with the idea of early college before they did but wants to pretend it was all him. Considering that Bard High School Early College has since poached several Simon's Rock faculty and lets its students attend Simon's Rock, one of the most expensive colleges in the country, for free, it really seems that Botstein would rather undermine Simon's Rock than sustain it. So much for early college, unless it's something that Botstein himself came up with first.

For a book written in 1997, this is still a surprisingly relevant work - in some ways more relevant than ever. The high school stuff is problematic and, for me, especially frustrating, but this book is otherwise so packed with good ideas that it will likely take me multiple read-throughs to see them all. The sort of citizens that Botstein seeks to create are never going to be created in large numbers in a country run by passively anti-intellectual business majors. Nevertheless, any intellectually curious person who is truly interested in an erudite structural critique of American education should read this book. It's just a shame that the best parts of the work have not been promoted by anyone, even the author himself.

[Dr. Thalheimer]

A thoughtfully written book that combines biography and history to tell a lesser known story.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I read this over a decade ago, bits of it stick with me. Botstein argues, persuasively, for truncating high school and encouraging interested kids to pursue their intellectual/artistic passions by sixteen or so. Of course, this hasn't really caught on, so perhaps he's not as persuasive as I remember.

[Jsmith1000 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended by a colleague...

[Byron Despres-Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks for assigning us this book, Ken Sager. We'll miss you.

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Says American High Schools should be abolished. Yes!