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Gallagher's first book, Enemies of Eros: How the Sexual Revolution is Killing Family, Marriage and Sex, was published by Bonus Books in 1989. Judge Robert Bork called it "lucid, witty, profound, devastating," and George Gilder pronounced it "the best book ever written on men, women and marriage."

Currently an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, Gallagher has worked as an article editor of National Review, senior editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, and as a senior fellow at the Center for Social Thought.

MAGGIE GALLAGHER

PROCESS OR PROGRESS?

What is education for?

This is the question Howard Gardner raises in a fascinating exchange in the latest issue of Policy Review. Gardner is the single most influential progressive education guru, whose Big Idea is to rename all human abilities "intelligences." Some kids are good athletes; let's call that "kinesthetic intelligence." Some kids can draw; that's "artistic intelligence," etc.

"Too little (of recent discussion) has focused on why we educate students at all," chides Gardner, and I believe he is entirely right. But Gardner's answer is wholly unsatisfying: The goal of education is not the transmission of knowledge but the transmission of a set of certain skills or habits of thought that allow you to process knowledge, which he calls disciplined (or disciplinary) thinking.

"All students," he writes, "should have a reasonable sense of what it is like to think scientifically, mathematically, historically and artistically."

Doing so may require mastering a body of knowledge, but the goal is not the knowledge, but the process. So a few months ago, according to Policy Review, Gardner wrote in The New York Times: "I don't care that much if one can name the planets," because "one can always request that information from a Palm Pilot."

Besides, by the time kids grow up, maybe they'll have discovered a 10th planet, right? Gardner's focus on process is one response to the anxiety of progress: Knowledge (especially scientific knowledge) becomes outdated, often quickly. Under these circumstances, it is easy for educators to lose faith in the idea that the transmission of knowledge is an important cultural function. After all, the Palm Pilot knows more than they do.

But I've always felt there was something wrong with this theory, ever since my dad started spouting the same line back in the '70s. (Progressive ideas are actually quite old.) Take French. Would you tell students: Don't worry about rote memorization of nouns; you can always look up a word? How would such a student ever learn to speak fluently? This is just as true in other disciplines. If you have to stop to count on your fingers to multiply, you are going to have trouble manipulating higher mathematical problems.

Actually, the vast increase in access to information makes the editorial function more, not less important. To have good judgment in sorting through the vast wealth of available data requires knowing more, not less.

Ever since we tied public schools to graduate education departments, educators have increasingly confused the mission of grad schools and grade schools. Children's schools teach skills, of course, that kids need to survive in adult society. But even more important, they teach kids what adult society considers important to know. Education breaks through the natural bias of children to the present and to peers and offers them a longer time horizon, a vision of their place in a story that began before they were born and will continue long after they are in the grave.

The purpose of education is to enculturate children --offer them the vision, ideals, stories and values that they will not get from peers or popular culture, that extend their imaginative self both back into the past and (therefore) into future. When you expect kids to know that there are nine planets, you are telling them not only a fact about the material universe, but a fact about the social universe: The long, hard efforts of scientists over the past 400 years to accumulate knowledge matter.

When you teach kids that American history is the story of the evils committed against minority groups, that too matters. They quickly lose interest in mastering the details -- which, progressive educators tell them, after all, don't matter anyway.

(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at GallagherIAV@Yahoo.com.)

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