Conscience of a Conservative (9 page)

The fourth objection is that federal aid
to
education inevitably means federal control
of
education. For many years, advocates of federal aid denied that aid implies control, but in the light of the National Defense Education Act of 1958 they cannot very well maintain their position. Federal aid under the act is conditioned upon compliance by the States and local educational institutions with various standards and specifications laid down by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
There are no less than twelve direct controls of this kind in the act.
Moreover, the acknowledged purpose of the act is to persuade local educational institutions to put greater emphasis on the physical sciences and other subjects directly related to national defense. I do not question the desirability of encouraging increased proficiency in the physical sciences, but when the federal government does the encouraging through the withholding and granting of funds, I do not see how it can be denied that the federal government is helping to determine the
content
of education; and influencing content is the last, not the first, stage of control.

Nobody should be surprised that aid has led to controls. It could, and
should not
be otherwise. Congress cannot be expected to appropriate the people's money and make no provision for how it will be spent. Congress would be shirking its responsibilities to the taxpayer if it distributed his money willy-nilly, without regard to its use. Should Congress permit the use of federal funds to subsidize Communist schools and thus promote the cause of our enemies? Of course not. But a prohibition of such use is clearly an exercise of federal control. Congress will always feel impelled to establish conditions under which people's money is to be spent, and while some controls may be wise we are not guaranteed against unwise controls any more than we are guaranteed against unwise Congressmen. The mistake is not the controls but appropriating the money that requires controls.

So much for the evils and dangers of federal aid. Note that I have not denied that many of our children are being inadequately educated, or that the problem is nation-wide. I have only denied that it is the kind of problem that requires a solution at the national level. To the extent the problem is quantitative—to the extent we have too few classrooms and pay some of our teachers too little money—the shortages can be taken care of by the localities concerned. But more: to the extent the problem is qualitative—which in my opinion it mainly is—it is manifestly one that lends itself to correction at the local level. There is no place where deficiencies in the
content
of an educational system can be better understood than locally where a community has the opportunity to view and judge the product of its own school system.

In the main, the trouble with American education is that we have put into practice the educational philosophy expounded by John Dewey and his disciples. In varying degrees we have adopted what has been called "progressive education."

Subscribing to the egalitarian notion that every child must have the same education, we have neglected to provide an educational system which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students and which will thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the future.

In our desire to make sure that our children learn to "adjust" to their environment, we have given them insufficient opportunity to acquire the knowledge that will enable them to
master
their environment.

In our attempt to make education "fun," we have neglected the academic disciplines that develop sound minds and are conducive to sound characters.

Responding to the Deweyite attack on methods of teaching, we have encouraged the teaching profession to be more concerned with
how
a subject is taught than with
what
is taught. Most important of all: in our anxiety to "improve" the world and insure "progress" we have permitted our schools to become laboratories for social and economic change according to the predilections of the professional educators. We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to so train the minds of the new generation as to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problem of its own day.

The fundamental explanation of this distortion of values is that we have forgotten that purpose of education. Or better: we have forgotten for
whom
education is intended. The function of our schools is not to educate, or elevate,
society;
but rather to educate
individuals
and to equip them with the knowledge that will enable them to take care of society's needs. We have forgotten that a society progresses only to the extent that it produces leaders that are capable of guiding and inspiring progress. And we cannot develop such leaders unless our standards of education are geared to excellence instead of mediocrity. We must give full rein to individual talents, and we must encourage our schools to enforce the academic disciplines—to put preponderant emphasis on English, mathematics, history, literature, foreign languages and the natural sciences. We should look upon our schools—not as a place to train the "whole character" of the child—a responsibility that properly belongs to his family and church—but to train his
mind.

Our country's past progress has been the result, not of the mass mind applying average intelligence to the problems of the day, but of the brilliance and dedication of wise individuals who applied their wisdom to advance the freedom and the material well-being of all of our people. And so if we would improve education in America—and advance the fortunes of freedom—we will not rush to the federal treasury with requests for money. We will focus attention on our local community, and make sure that our schools, private and public, are performing the job the Nation has the right to expect of them.

C H A P T E R     T E N

The Soviet Menace

A
ND STILL
the awful truth remains:

We can establish the domestic conditions for maximizing freedom, along the lines I have indicated, and yet become slaves. We can do this by losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union.

American freedom has always depended, to an extent, on what is happening beyond our shores. Even in Ben Franklin's day, Americans had to reckon with foreign threats. Our forebearers knew that "keeping a Republic" meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence. In those early days the threat to peace and independence was very real. We were a fledgling-nation and the slightest misstep—or faint hearts—would have laid us open to the ravages of predatory European powers. It was only because wise and courageous men understood that defense of freedom required risks and sacrifice, as well as their belief in it, that we survived the crisis of national infancy. As we grew stronger, and as the oceans continued to interpose a physical barrier between ourselves and European militarism, the foreign danger gradually receded. Though we always had to keep a weather eye on would-be conquerors, our independence was acknowledged and peace, unless we chose otherwise, was established. Indeed, after the Second World War, we were not only master of our own destiny; we were master of the world. With a monopoly of atomic weapons, and with a conventional military establishment superior to any in the world, America was—in relative and absolute terms—the most powerful nation the world had ever known. American freedom was as secure as at any time in our history.

Now, a decade and half later, we have come full circle and our national existence is once again threatened as it was in the early days of the Republic. Though we are still strong physically, we are in clear and imminent danger of being overwhelmed by alien forces. We are confronted by a revolutionary world movement that possesses not only the will to dominate absolutely every square mile of the globe, but increasingly the capacity to do so: a military power that rivals our own, political warfare and propaganda skills that are superior to ours, an international fifth column that operates conspiratorially in the heart of our defenses, an ideology that imbues its adherents with a sense of historical mission; and all of these resources controlled by a ruthless despotism that brooks no deviation from the revolutionary course. This threat, moreover, is growing day by day. And it has now reached the point where American leaders, both political and intellectual, are searching desperately for means of "appeasing" or "accommodating" the Soviet Union as the price of national survival. The American people are being told that, however valuable their freedom may be, it is even more important to live. A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness; so much so that many recently felt that honoring the chief despot himself was the price we had to pay to avoid nuclear destruction.

The temptation is strong to blame the deterioration of America's fortunes on the Soviet Union's acquisition of nuclear weapons. But this is self-delusion. The rot had set in, the crumbling of our position was already observable, long before the Communists detonated their first Atom Bomb. Even in the early 1950s, when America still held unquestioned nuclear superiority, it was clear that we were losing the Cold War. Time and again, in my campaign speeches of 1952, I warned my fellow Arizonans that "American Foreign Policy has brought us from a position of undisputed power, in seven short years, to the brink of possible disaster." And in the succeeding seven years, that trend, because its cause remains, has continued.

The real cause of the deterioration can be simply stated. Our enemies have understood the nature of the conflict, and we have not. They are determined to win the conflict, and we are not.

I hesitate to restate the obvious—to say again what has been said so many times before by so many others: that the Communists' aim is to conquer the world. I repeat it because it is the beginning and the end of our knowledge about the conflict between East and West. I repeat it because I fear that however often we have given lip-service to this central political fact of our time, very few of us have
believed
it. If we had, our entire approach to foreign policy over the past fourteen years would have been radically different, and the course of world events radically changed.

If an enemy power is bent on conquering you, and proposes to turn all of his resources to that end, he is at war with you; and you—unless you contemplate surrender—are at war with him. Moreover—unless you contemplate treason—your objective, like his, will be victory. Not "peace," but victory. Now, while traitors (and perhaps cowards) have at times occupied key positions in our government, it is clear that our national leadership over the past fourteen years has favored neither surrender nor treason. It is equally clear, however, that our leaders have not made
victory
the goal of American policy. And the reason that they have not done so, I am saying, is that they have never believed deeply that the Communists are in earnest.

Our avowed national objective is "peace." We have, with great sincerity, "waged" peace, while the Communists wage war. We have sought "settlements," while the Communists seek victories. We have tried to pacify the world. The Communists mean to own it. Here is why the contest has been an unequal one, and why, essentially, we are losing it.

Peace, to be sure,
is
a proper goal for American policy—as long as it is understood that peace is not all we seek. For we do not want the peace of surrender. We want a peace in which freedom and justice will prevail, and that—given the nature of Communism—is a peace in which Soviet power will no longer be in a position to threaten us and the rest of the world. A tolerable peace, in other words, must
follow
victory over Communism. We have been fourteen years trying to bury that unpleasant fact. It cannot be buried and any foreign policy that ignores it will lead to our extinction as a nation.

We do not, of course, want to achieve victory by force of arms. If possible, overt hostilities should always be avoided; especially is this so when a shooting war may cause the death of many millions of people, including our own. But we cannot, for that reason, make the avoidance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that—if we tell ourselves that it is more important to avoid shooting than to keep our freedom—we are committed to a course that has only one terminal point: surrender. We cannot, by proclamation, make war "unthinkable." For it is not unthinkable to the Communists: naturally, they would prefer to avoid war, but they are prepared to risk it, in the last analysis, to achieve their objectives. We must, in our hearts, be equally dedicated to our objectives. If war is unthinkable to us but not to them, the famous "balance of terror" is not a balance at all, but an instrument of blackmail. U.S.-Soviet power may be in balance; but if we, and not they, rule out the possibility of using that power, the Kremlin can create crisis after crisis, and force the U.S., because of our greater fear of war, to back down every time. And it cannot be long before a universal Communist Empire sits astride the globe.

The rallying cry of an appeasement organization, portrayed in a recent novel on American politics, was "I would rather crawl on my knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb." This sentiment, of course, repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and dignified in the human being. We must—as the first step toward saving American freedom—affirm the contrary view and make it the cornerstone of our foreign policy: that we would rather die than lose our freedom. There are ways which I will suggest later on—not easy ways, to be sure—in which we may save both our freedom
and
our lives; but all such suggestions are meaningless and vain unless we first understand what the objective is. We want to stay alive, of course; but more than that we want to be free. We want to have peace; but before that we want to establish the conditions that will make peace tolerable. "Like it or not," Eugene Lyons has written, "the great and inescapable task of our epoch is not to end the Cold War but to win it."