The authors wrote,Perhaps the most obvious indicator of how process-driven our
schools have become is the dominant role played by the
Scholastic Aptitude Test. Looming over our educational land-
scape is an examination that, in its verbal component, carefully
avoids assessing substantive knowledge.... Whether test-
takers have studied the Civil War, learned about the Magna
Carta or read Macbeth are matters to which the SAT is stu-
diously indifferent.Whatever our schools are teaching—or at least testing—has
increasingly less to do with what we have historically consid-
ered education, and more to do with the ubiquitous bottom
line. A study by the Carnegie Foundation shows that an in-
creasing number of young people choose fields that promise to
be instantly profitable, such as business, engineering, computer
science, and health programs.
Yet Lynne Cheney, former chairman of the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities and wife of former Vice President
Dick Cheney, wrote in Newsweekthat many of the country’s
most successful people had a liberal arts background, including
President Reagan and a majority of his cabinet, 38 percent of
all CEOs, and nine of the top thirteen executives at IBM.
According to Cheney, an AT&T study showed that social
science and humanities graduates moved faster into middle
management than engineers and were “doing at least as well as
their business and engineering counterparts in reaching top
management levels.” She concludes, “Students who follow
their hearts in choosing majors will most likely end up laboring
at what they love. They’re the ones who will put in the long
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