Fall History & Heritage — #1 (week of September 5)

Back to State Schooling

 
The late great economist Milton Friedman often insisted on calling public schools
“government schools.” The distinction reminds us that in modern America, it is indeed
government that claims lordship over our children’s mental and moral upbringing.
Allowance is made for a variety of private initiatives, thankfully, but government certifies
and superintends them and, presumably, can shut them down at will.

There is another sense, however, in which Friedman’s terminology may not be helpful.
The better question is not whether government should play a role in our schools, but
which government and to what end? Turning things over to big cities, the fifty states,
and the United States did nearly irreparable damage to both liberty and learning.

“State schooling,” as opposed to public and private, is a product of the late 1800s and
early 1900s. The leading lights of the movement, like Columbia’s John Dewey, knew
exactly what they wanted and wrote about it candidly. Their aim, believe it or not, was
nothing less than to fashion a new kind of man, basically an individualist divorced from
religion and tradition who would lend his democratic consent to whatever the nationstate
was scheming to do next. Everyone a resource, a worker bee, for the greater
good of man and his mass economy and culture! Local communities, of course, could
still have their school boards and such, but only as administrative arms of larger, more
“enlightened” jurisdictions.

Those who think state schools have failed (probably most of us) should think again.
Given their original purpose, they’ve been wildly successful.

In the excerpt below from the most recent issue of Chronicles, classics scholar Thomas
Fleming discusses the state school phenomenon and the American educational scene:

Schools have been the factories in which we cranked out the perpetual adolescents
who hated everything their ancestors had accomplished. No one today can praise
Jefferson without piously denouncing him as a slaveholder and citing the Sally Hemings
affair as if it were an established historical fact rather than a theory perpetrated by a
known liar. *

Anyone who has gone to high school .knows’ that before the 20th century American
men spent their lives lynching Negroes, beating women, abusing children, and keeping
Jews out of country clubs. State schooling in the United States, from the very
beginning, has been a political and ideological project that had little to do with training
young minds and everything to do with liberating American children from the shackles of tradition, which can be loosely defined as anything their grandparents ever believed.

By and large, state schooling developed in the decades after the War Between the
States. Some New England schools, it is true, had state superintendents or agencies
even before the war, but for the most part public schools were still public–that is,
controlled by the people of local communities. It is only when large cities and state
agencies assume control over local schools, standardizing curricula and textbook
selection and amalgamating dozens of community schools into consolidated assembly-line systems, that it becomes proper to speak of state schooling.

Pseudo-professional educationists staged a coup in the decades before and after 1900.
They were clear in enunciating their agenda: Parents were too stupid and selfish to be
trusted to make decisions; the traditional curriculum had to be destroyed and replaced
by a curriculum designed by so-called social so-called scientists, who would create a
new democratic man.

* The reference here (“a known liar”) is probably to Pulitzer Prize winning author Joseph
Ellis, whose books on the Founding Fathers have proved a commercial success. Ellis
long maintained that he had seen action in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne, but this
was not the case. He never went to Vietnam. When exposed by an author from Texas
in Chronicles, and then by The Boston Globe, he apologized publicly.

(Fleming’s entire essay, entitled “Deforming Education,” appears on pages 10-11 of the
September 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Chronicles is
the monthly periodical of The Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois.)