The conscience of a Conservative

by Barry M. Goldwater

This may be the place, while we are speaking of need, to lay to rest the notion that the American people have been niggardly in support of their schools. Since the end of World War II, Americans have built 550,000 classrooms at a cost of approximately $19 billion—almost all of which was raised at the local level. This new construction provided space for over 15 million pupils during a period when the school population increased by only 10 million pupils. It is evident, therefore, that increased school expenditures have more than kept pace with increased school needs.

Here are some of the figures. In the school year 1949-50 there were 25 million students enrolled in various education institutions in the United States. In the year 1959-60 there were 34.7 million—an increase of 38%. During the same period revenues for school use, raised largely at the local level, increased from 5.4 billion to 12.1 billion—an increase of 124%. When school expenditures increase three and a half times as fast as the school population, I do not think that the adequacy of America’s “traditional” approach to education is open to serious question.

The third objection to federal aid is that it promotes the idea that federal school money is “free” money, and thus gives the people a distorted picture of the cost of education. I was distressed to find that five out of six high school and junior college students recently interviewed in Phoenix said they favored federal aid because it would mean more money for local schools and ease the financial burden on Arizona taxpayers.

The truth, of course, is that the federal government has no funds except those it extracts from the taxpayers who reside in the various States. The money that the federal government pays to State X for education has been taken from the citizens of State X in federal taxes and comes back to them, minus the Washington brokerage fee. The less wealthy States, to be sure, receive slightly more than they give, just as the more wealthy States receive somewhat less. But the differences are negligible. For the most part, federal aid simply substitutes the tax-collecting facilities of the federal government for those of local governments. This fact cannot be stressed often enough; for stripped of the idea that federal money is free money, federal aid to education is exposed as an act of naked compulsion—a decision by the federal government to force the people of the States to spend more money than they choose to spend for this purpose voluntarily.

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.