Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

In this column, I want to address an educational failure that is not receiving the kind of attention that it deserves. The failure comes to mind as a result of reading some advertisements by Sikh organizations in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The gist of the advertisements was a plea: Sikhs are not Muslims so please stop attacking and harassing Sikhs in the United States.

To be sure, it is unconscionable that anyone should be attacking or harassing Sikhs in the United States at any time. It is just as unconscionable for anyone to be attacking Muslims simply on the basis of their ethnic and/or religious similarities to terrorists. We should not be attacking Sikhs, but the reason has nothing to do with mistaken identity. Think of the reactions of some Germans to the Nazi atrocities in Hitler's reign of terror against Jews. The non-Jewish reactions were "Don't confiscate our property - we are not Jews." The property, and later the lives of thousands of non-Jewish Germans should not have been taken later because there was no defensible reason to take it.

My purpose in pointing this out is not to criticize the Sikhs. Quite the contrary, their organizations would not have paid for these advertisements if they did not believe in their effectiveness with the American people generally. The unwitting implication of their advertisement is that it is acceptable to attack our Muslim population, which it isn't. In other words, the point I wish to make is that the American people generally were not (or were not deemed to be) aware of the fundamental reason for not tolerating the indefensible attacks on the Sikhs. In my opinion, this tells us something about education in the United States. Despite all the formal education received by the American people, their understanding generally of the constitutional and moral basis of our civil liberties and our political system is minimal.

Let me cite just one other illustration of this failure on the part of our educational institutions at all levels. Ever since the 2000 elections, a substantial number of professors, pundits, and other assorted threats to the general welfare have argued that Vice-president Gore should have been declared the winner because he received more popular votes than Governor Bush. In fact, this was not the first time the person chosen by the Electoral College for president received fewer popular votes than the winning candidate. And it is interesting that despite controversies over the 2000 presidential election, no one of any political stature has since proposed to change the rules to allow or require the winner of the popular vote to be declared president. The argument that Gore should be awarded the presidency because he received more popular votes than Governor Bush was (and is) an appeal to ignorance, put forward as a means of exerting pressure on judges and legislators to declare Gore to be the president.

Those who made this appeal would not have made it unless they believed that it would be effective with a substantial part of the public. That is, the argument was made in the belief that many Americans would buy into it, that is, were ignorant of the rationale and history of the Electoral College, and the implications of changing it so that the leader in the popular vote becomes president. Like the Sikh pleas that they not be attacked because they are Sikhs, not Muslims, the argument that Gore should have been declared president assumes and/or reflects widespread failure to understand basic facts about our political system. This is the kind of educational failure that does not receive the attention it deserves.