When Smart People Do Dumb Things
Twin Cities Business Monthly, May 1999
By Mitchell Pearlstein

I've been thinking a lot recently about how smart people often do really stupid things -- and no, I'm not referring here exclusively to Bill Clinton. What got me started, even more than the president's social life, were two, radically disparate but simultaneous events.

The first was publication of a new book by Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary magazine, called Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

The second was the emergence (finally) of a consequential debate regarding the "Profile of Learning," the unbelievably fouled-up quest to instill greater rigor and accountability in Minnesota elementary and secondary education.

As unrelated as these two matters seem, connecting them is the impossibility of considering either one without wondering how in the world their main characters and participants could ever delude themselves so.

In the case of Podhoretz's book, I hasten to note, this indictment is not directed at the author, but at many of the people he writes about: Men and women who, to one degree or another, were either blind to the evils of tyranny and the Soviet Union; dismissive of the blessings of freedom and the United States; or in the case of Ginsberg and Mailer, "men of letters" who were hell-bent to diminish their considerable talents by every licentious or otherwise childish and blustery means imaginable.

As someone who was modestly caught up himself in the passions and idiocies of the 1960s, I'm a bit more understanding than many others on the right when it comes to the leftist radicalism of that period, as well as several prior decades. But that's not to rationalize away Podhoretz's accounts of real, live fellow-travelers, such as the writer Lillian Hellman.

Granted, the natural predisposition of artistic folks is to hang out on the (moderate) left. To continue holding glitzy fund-raisers, for instance, for Clinton, while directing most of their wrath and theatrics at those who brought him to the cusp of justice. Also granted were the upheavals and disorientation of the Depression and the realpolitik fact that Stalin was America's ally in the death struggle against Hitler. The world was different back then.

But the mind still boggles at how many in the generation of writers and deeply cultured souls described by Podhoretz sidled up to the Soviet Union. What possessed them to work so hard at ignoring -- or at the very least, gainsaying -- culpability in a system so comprehensively spiteful of freedom, including artistic freedom. They were brilliant, yes. But they also were monumentally stupid.

Nothing so grave, needless to say, warrants being said about the Profile of Learning and those responsible for it. Which is another way of saying that as Marxist schemes go, the Profile owes infinitely more to Groucho and his brothers than to Karl and his comrades.

What has come to be known as the Profile of Learning actually started off, more than a decade ago, as a mainly conservative idea. The thinking went like this. Instead of focusing on inputs, such as how much money is spent on schools, success should be measured by how much children actually learn. To this end, the state of Minnesota set out to establish "high" academic standards that students needed to reach in their various subjects.

Officials likewise understood that assessments (a fancy word for "tests") were needed in order to gauge whether kids were, in fact, learning what they were supposed to learn. The tests also were needed to determine how children in one place were doing in comparison to another.

All this made perfect and sound sense. It still does. But what we have instead (or what we had before legislators began scurrying several months ago to turn a big, fat lemon into lemonade) is a system that accomplishes none of the above.

There's no time for detail here, but suffice it to say the Profile's standards and preferred pedagogy are more ethereal and confusing than high. And because of the utter subjectivity of its means of assessment, no useful comparisons can be made whatsoever. Zippo.

How in the name of bureaucracy did we get to this stage, especially after Governor Carlson said several years ago that nothing would be finalized until it was readily understood by folks in barber shops? I start from the premise that the Profile's principal architects were bright people. But I also begin with two other assumptions

The first is that it takes extra-special insight -- and not a small amount of courage -- to pull the emergency brake on a project as expensive and as long out of the gate as the Profile of Learning. On the slim possibility that there existed even one insider not yet deluded by group think, no one, obviously, was willing to draw public attention to such a huge goof.

But there's also a second reason, distinctive to education, why so many smart people -- men and women with backpacks of degrees -- wound up committing such a mistake. It can be started briefly, if harshly: Nowhere, are loopy ideas more the norm than in education, particularly in places like state departments of education, state boards of education, and the like.

To document the point, quick: What's the difference between a "learning area," a "content standard," and a "performance package" -- the principal elements of the Profile? And why would anyone, other than an otherwise smart person caught up in such insular nonsense, believe that any barbershop crew might ever grasp and warm up to them without, in effect, being kept after school for tutoring?

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.