By Philip Vassallo, Ed.D.
Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for Our Nation’s Future by Michael Barone. New York: Crown Forum, 2004. 188 pp. $12.00. Paper.
In the introductory chapter of his highly readable, remarkably eclectic book
Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for Our Nation’s Future, author Michael Barone reveals a problem with seeing the world in terms of polar opposites when he writes: “For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.”
The incompetents Barone refers to are schoolchildren who are victimized by the inadequate education available to them, and the competents are the professionals in offices, laboratories, hospitals, courtrooms, and universities whose wisdom, creativity, diligence, and entrepreneurialism contribute significantly to the American and world economies. What Barone never mentions in his book, however, are that many of the incompetents he refers to become those very competent adults later in life, and that many of the competents are not products of the American education system at all. This faulty premise serves as a theme of
Hard America, Soft America, yet serious though the flaw may be, Barone’s narrative frames an interesting perspective of recent history.
Essentially, Barone sees two Americas: a Soft America, one in which competition and accountability are lessened, and a Hard America, one which favors them. While he ultimately sees the need for a consistently Harder America, he does not exude the ruthlessness Al Dunlap or the egomania of Donald Trump, because of evenhanded observations such as
It would be a cruel country that had no Soft niches. But it would be a weak and unproductive country that did not have enough Hardness.
How Did We Go Soft?Throughout the book, Barone provides a veritable historical survey of America’s political, economic, military, and educational movements in the twentieth century. He does so creatively with allusions to literary classics, such as John Updike’s
Rabbit is Rich, Sloan Wilson's
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Charles Reich’s
The Greening of America, searching for metaphors that conform to his idea of Hardness and Softness. He equates Soft America with Progressivism, the New Deal, Social Security, welfare, racial quotas and preferences on the political side; unionization and the Big Three automakers’ planned obsolescence of their cars on the economic side; and grade inflation, social promotion on the education side. Standing in for Hard America, their polar opposites, are the financial or educational requirements on recipients of programs of the Federal Housing Administration (pay your mortgage to get a federal break) and Veterans Affairs (go to college to receive aid); the aggressive American response, led by President John F. Kennedy, to the Russian early lead in the space program; the enforcement of quality of life standards established by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the innovation or reorganization of Bill Gates’s Microsoft, Jack Welch’s General Electric, and Fred Smith’s Federal Express; and the creation and continuance of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program for public school students.
Barone maintains that Soft America, regardless its good intentions, creates contradictory and deleterious effects for the constituents it purports to help. He deduces that although Blacks lived in hard conditions, they were victims of Soft America, with limited entrepreneurial activity and little accountability. In such a scenario, victimization extends even to society’s more privileged members, who were deluged by images of the segregated South in the early 1960s, when Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor unleashed water hoses and police dogs on peaceful Black demonstrators: :
White Americans came to think worse of themselves even as they made the country—and themselves—better. If you had asked white Americans in 1961 whether blacks were treated unfairly in the United States, a very large number would have said no. If you had asked white Americans in 1969 the same question, a majority would have said yes—even though blacks at that point were treated much less unfairly than they had been eight years earlier.Hard America, Soft America asserts that Progressivism in education, with John Dewey in the vanguard, led the fight against rote memorization, traditional curricula, and teacher-centered classrooms, all of which ultimately created a Soft American school system. Add to these initiatives the phenomena of grade inflation, social promotion, the right of teacher unions to strike and to veto attempts to legitimize teacher accountability, and we have a school culture that has run amok and institutionalized mediocrity in the classroom.
How Should We Become Hard?A common practice of many innovators when seemingly every attempt at improving one’s field has failed is to look to other fields. No reform was successful in stemming the plummeting of the national average SAT scores (from a high of 478 in verbal and 502 in math in 1963 to 420 in verbal and 466 in math nearly in the late 1970s and early 1980s), which in part prompted the 1982 publication of the watershed
A Nation at Risk, which called for extreme measures to reverse America’s educational slump.
Where should we turn for exemplars of turning the tide of diminished achievement? Barone points to several examples, including imprisonment and warfare, which are more Straw Men for his argument than indicators of success. The first example concerns the decrease in violent crimes in proportion with the increase of incarcerations. In a longitudinal analysis of crime, punishment, and their connection, Barone insists that crime increased as we Softened sentencing laws and decreased since we Hardened them.
So, increase the prison population to reduce crime—is it really that simple? Then what accounts for wild increases in violent and property crimes between 1960 and 1980, which do not entirely correlate with the prison population changes, as incarceration numbers also increased during that period? In addition, what explains the incongruous aggregates: the prison-to-general-population ratio skyrocketed from 1:842 in 1960 to 1:211 in 2000, but the crime rate also skyrocketed 118.6 percent during the same period?
The second example discusses American troop casualties in various military campaigns. Barone suggests that the large numbers of American dead in the Korea War (36,574) and Vietnam War (58,209) resulted in part from a Soft stance regarding clear military objectives and a lack of political resolve, while the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War (382 dead), Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (158 dead since 2001), and the Operation Iraqi Freedom (over 1,500 dead since 2003) are prototypes for Hard action. Needless to say, when Barone wrote this book, Iraq might have seemed a rosier picture than it currently is. Yet one would have to wonder how he would compare these campaigns to those of 30 and 50 years earlier, whose scopes were vastly different. Also noteworthy for its omission are World War II casualties (405,399 dead), presumably because the causality rates for this Hard military engagement are consistent with his theory.
So What About Schools?Where do these faulty premises take the reader when transitioning to America’s K-12 schools? In one misstep, Barone never adequately addresses connection between the reality of failing children and the successes, overrated though they often are, of American adults. Indeed, he spills quite a bit of ink in rehashing spectacular adult failures, such as the losing battle of the Big Three automakers against foreign competition and the impotence of government and law enforcement against Detroit rioters in 1967. Soft or Hard, adults have failed as much as children, if not more. In another error of omission, he excludes the contribution of immigrant adults working in technical and scientific fields who used their foreign education to benefit the United States.
For two reasons, however, I found it easy to finish this book. First, Barone captures the imagination with references to fine literature, even when they are not always apt, to wit his inclusion of If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien. Second, he often occasionally offers helpful summations which acknowledge the complexity of the issues he raises:
Hardening public-sector institutions is more difficult than Hardening private-sector institutions; a corporation cannot ignore a failure to make profits, while a public-sector institution can ignore a failure to achieve results for a very long time indeed as long as revenues keep flowing in.
Thus, read
Hard America, Soft America not necessarily for insights on education policy, but for its sweep and swing.
Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.
