Consider this quote from "Public Education in America:"
Five major areas merit careful attention:
1. Problems of state-church relationships
2. Professional negotiations and collective bargaining
3. School desegregation
4. Education of the culturally disadvantaged
5. Dropouts
This list was published in 1966.
Is progress inherently slow? Are these problems just unsolvable? Or is there something else at work?
"Unsolvable" is a bit harsh, but I think that's closest to correct, especially with dropouts. Progress is slow, but I don't think that all these things could be resolved, even given all the time in the world. Maybe all of them would go away, but if so, they'd simply be replaced with other problems. Nothing is ever perfect when human society is concerned.
Thanks for the comments, Annie. You are probably right, although I think any progress we can make on problems 4 and 5 would have the biggest positive impact on the country.
By the way, tell Reagan I said good-luck at boot camp.
This is a good demonstration of the natural fallibility of man. This is not to say that we should throw our hands and give up on things, but given the amount of money we've thrown at the problem over the last few decades, it should admonish us to be careful when relying on man-made systems to fix the problem.
(Centrally controlled man-made systems, that is)
If we have natural fallibility than we should plan that into our systems rather than pretend like we can over come it. In short, we should think like Daniel Morgan.
Morgan was a militia officer during the American Revolution. Militia didn't have the staying power of a disciplined army and were prone to running under fire. Morgan understood that was the tendency. Rather than hope that his men would hold, he simply built retreating into the plan. He would have the front line troops fire two rounds and then retreat. The enemy, thinking they had Morgan's men on the run, would pursue aggressively only to run into the next line of militia that were given the same instructions. He had three lines of retreat prone militiamen organized in this way at the Battle of Cowpens. The British suffered 100 killed and more than 200 wounded. During the battle only 12 Americans were killed and six wounded. Nathaniel Greene adopted this strategy during his famous Carolina Campaign.
This result was achieved by taking advantage of the strength of the militia while conceding (but not overcoming) its weakness.
Perhaps we need to reframe our thinking. Maybe the most important question is not, "how do we prevent dropouts?" We might do better to ask, "how can we give dropouts a chance to be successful?" If we did that we would be thinking like Daniel Morgan.
If you think about our checks and balances on the accumulation of power, not only between the 3 branches of federal government, but also between the federal government and the states, you'll realize our founders were well aware of the fallibility of man and his tendency to, once he's attained it, abuse his power.
Just picked up this quote from a good article by Joe Sobran:
"...As C.S. Lewis noted, the modern world insists that religion be a purely private affair, then shrinks the area of privacy to the vanishing point. When the state moves in, separation means forcing the church to move out. And the state keeps moving into new domains which it claims as its own.
"Which suggests another question. Why don’t liberals fret about transgressions of the Tenth Amendment as much as they worry about transgressions of the First? Is that limitation on the federal government’s powers less important, less comprehensive, less binding, less central to the very nature of this Republic?"
"While the First Amendment has become the subject of Talmudic elaborations, the Tenth Amendment has dwindled into a dead letter. The great principle of dividing and dispersing power — the very genius of the original American system — is at least as vital to freedom as the specific protections of the First Amendment; in fact it includes them, since if the federal government were confined to its enumerated powers it would have no authority to infringe freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. If we took the Tenth seriously, we wouldn’t need the First."