This diary is the first substantive diary to come out of the Education UpRising – Education for Democracy group (see diary entries by teacherken here, here, here, here, and here for more). I agreed to provide some historical background, and both the outline and drafts of this and following diaries have been tossed around the group and thoroughly criticized before being posted. All remaining errors are my own. This entry focuses on the history of arguments over the purposes of schooling. Other diaries in the history of education (later this month) will focus on the history of school bureaucracy, teaching (both instruction and the occupation), and (in)equality of educational opportunity.
Key points:
- We connect education to citizenship in two ways: Education is for citizenship and education comes with citizenship. But the two ideas were originally separate: Americans started to argue that education was a right in the first part of the 19th century, after some of them had argued that the new nation needed education to help make the nation.
- Public education has acquired public and private purposes, individual and collective purposes, and there are inevitable tensions among those broader "meta-goals."
- Americans have had a variety of ideas about what schools should teach (the curriculum), and the arguments about curriculum are not reducible to a simple dichotomy or to partisan politics.
- Historically, arguments about the purposes of education have been sedimentary, layered on top of each other instead of debated clearly and prioritized.
- Since World War II, arguments about education have become increasingly nationalized as various politicians have made arguments about the need for education to help fight the Cold War, then poverty, then prejudice, and finally our economic adversaries.
- For the past 25 years, we’ve been stuck in national arguments that education should help keep us economically competitive. This nationalization of education politics is new and looks at least semi-permanent. Arguments about education reform and the "new economy" fit into the bigger postwar context of a "crusade cascade." Some of the themes are sensible (we really do need some skills for economic reasons), while others fit all too well into the practice of expecting schools to save society (government and corporations do not get off the hook for economic and social policy or for specific decisionmaking).
Education and citizenship
We connect education to citizenship in two ways: Education is for citizenship and education comes with citizenship. But the two ideas were originally separate: Americans started to argue that education was a right in the first part of the 19th century, after some of them had argued that the new nation needed education to help make the nation.
In the late stages of and after the Revolutionary War, Americans started to argue about all sorts of things regarding the new nation: what should be the political structure, how should we govern ourselves, what the role of women should be, etc. One of those topics was education: Was there a role for education in making the new nation? Plenty of people said yes. Many of you may be familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s ideas in Notes on the State of Virginia, where he proposed that Virginia have a system of free primary education for all white males, to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people (we know what he thought "the people" meant, but we’re not going to get into his weird racial politics too deeply here other than being conscious of it). The best white boy from each district school would go on to the grammar school: By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammer schools go. (So Jefferson’s notion of meritocracy didn’t assume that the population as a whole would be fit for higher education.) And the best poor boy from each grammar school would attend William and Mary College without tuition. He acknowledged a number of purposes, but one remained supreme, and I’ll preserve his 18th century style:
But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
Others in the late 18th century had their own arguments about what national purpose education should serve: Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, Samuel Harrison Smith, and Samuel Knox are among those better known to historians of education. The larger point here is that before there were systems of education or a notion of education as a right of citizenship, people made arguments that we needed education for citizenship.
The argument that education is a right that comes with citizenship evolved later, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Common school reformers argued that schooling should be tuition-free, but that wasn’t necessarily tied to education as a right (more as something that would make a better society). It took arguments about the expanded franchise (for white males only) and local workingmen’s parties to make the link between citizenship rights to vote and citizenship rights to schooling: "Give us our rights, and we shall not need your charity." (Mechanics’ Free Press, 1828, quoted in Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic (1983), p. 138) The workingmen’s parties formed in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1820s were part of what labor historian Sean Wilentz called the history of civic republicanism, with skilled workers concerned about wages and the perceived decline in their social status and respect.
By the late 19th century, domestic politics had confirmed education as tied to citizenship. In European countries, that didn’t happen in the 19th century. The United States developed with one model of social citizenship rooted in public education, and European welfare states developed with another model rooted in a wide range of public institutions.
Public and private purposes of education
Public education has acquired public and private purposes, individual and collective purposes, and there are inevitable tensions among those broader "meta-goals."
David Labaree and Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick have nicely explained the tensions among multiple purposes of education. Labaree says there are three dominant goals of education today: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. Hochschild and Scovronick also describe three goals: individual success, the collective good, and group welfare. For each analysis, one popular goal of education is the private interests of students (and their parents) in using education to get ahead economically (phrased as social mobility by Labaree and individual success by Hochschild and Scovronick). And in each case, that private economic purpose can frustrate other goals of education. For example, Labaree explains the academic treaties between teachers and students as a consequence of social mobility: students often want to do little work because they see the paper credential as more important than the education. Hochschild and Scovronick explain the results of all sorts of battles over educational equality as a struggle between the collective good of equal education and the private concerns for individual success.
Their perspectives of the dominant themes in education debate differ in other ways, and we might think of these tensions as falling along two dimensions: public and private purposes, on the one hand, and individual and collective purposes, on the other. Just to illustrate...
| Public | Private |
Individual | - Education for service (borders on the collective)
| - Education for jobs
- Education for personal fulfillment
- Education for hobbies
|
Collective | - Education for citizenship
- Education to serve the larger economy
- Education to boost the tax base
- Education to help the military
| - Education for your family
- Education for religious leadership
- Education to boost your community or culture
|
This table is simplistic and ahistoricalthere are many other ways you could work this table, and it doesn't explain how the categories or the individual purposes evolvedbut it helps us think about the debates over education. Hochschild and Scovronick frame many of the education debates over desegregation, funding, special education, bilingual education, vouchers, magnet schools, etc.as a debate about goals, and their three goals fall in three of the four cells of the table.
Curriculum debates
Americans have had a variety of ideas about what schools should teach (the curriculum), and the arguments about curriculum are not reducible to a simple dichotomy or to partisan politics.
Herbert Kliebard argued that curriculum politics in the first half of the twentieth century (before Sputnik) were dominated by four central ideas: passing on humanistic culture, educating children for the marketplace, solving social problems, and encouraging individual development. Kliebard's history is one of ideas more than a history of individuals: Today, most people would probably subscribe to more than one of these purposes, and you could design curricula around ones he didn't write aboutsocializing voters, scientists, consumers, and so forth. The important point Kliebard makes is that curriculum arguments have not been battles between two camps but among many, each of which has had its own assumptions about the purpose of education.
Jonathan Zimmerman focuses on two cases of conflict over what we teach in schools: the teaching of history and social studies and the role of religion in schools. In his book on the K-12 culture wars, Zimmerman argues that each case was unique (a conclusion that surprised him): In the teaching of history, there was a pragmatic compromise that we should regret, while in the role of religion, there was a history of deep conflict. In history, ethnic politics led textbooks and school systems to accept a lowest-common-denominator version of multiculturalism: We all get our heroes, and we talk about "contributions." That left in place the larger narrative structure that Zimmerman labels national triumphalism, without using the experiences of different groups to raise important questions about the country's history. With religion, on the other hand, Zimmerman points to a long history of conflict and irony. In the middle of the 20th century, it was often religious liberals who organized and welcomed a place for religion in the schools, as it provided a space to talk about social needs (fitting into Kliebard's argument described above). But the politics shifted, and in the aftermath of Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), social conservatives have become the defenders of religion in public schools. Even with a long line of Supreme Court cases on religion in schools and a clear understanding of the legal situation among multiple parties, acrimony persists.
The layering of educational purposes
Historically, arguments about the purposes of education have been sedimentary, layered on top of each other instead of debated clearly and prioritized.
Historians of education can identify scores of different purposes that have been laid on schooling. One could pick the religious purposes of the early colonies or the commercial purposes of the 18th century, the collective purposes of the Iroquois nations or the private purposes of apprenticeships. By the American Revolution, the purposes claimed by various parties included literacy for religious study, day care, transmitting culture, leadership preparation, and the private advancement of one’s sons (and daughters, on occasion), just to pick a few. School reformers in the early nineteenth century greatly expanded the responsibility of schools to address social ills, from alleviating poverty to eliminating vice and class tensions. In 1848, as revolution boiled over in Europe, Horace Mann argued that public education would prevent such unrest in Massachusetts:
[N]othing but Universal Education can counter-work this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor,... the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former. But if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it,... for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor, in different classes, are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor, in the same class, are essentially fraternal. (quoted in Cremin, 1957, pp. 86-87)
With the Progressive Era, public schooling acquired two new purposes: Americanization and vocationalization. Americanization meant the socialization of into cultural and political norms. The vocational-education movement created a new role for schools: to help the economy. As more teens attended schools in the first half of the twentieth century, schools acquired even more purposes, with home economics, health and sex education, driver's education, and even the worthy use of leisure time. With each argument, educational politics acquire a new layer without any clear sense that maybe schools can't do everything. In the book that's coming out in the spring, I write:
But saving society is too broad a mission for any institution, and it gives the rest of society a free pass for too many issues. An economic recession? The schools are to blame! Poverty? Education can solve it! Crime and immorality? Teach character education! A failure of adults to appreciate history? Mesopotamian civilization in the first grade! Too many traffic accidents? Driver’s education! Sometimes I wonder if schools will soon be commanded to solve the Crisis of Split-Ends with mandatory cosmetology classes. (Accountability Frankenstein, in Chapter 4)
In many ways, public school systems have accommodated this layering of purposes by adding on bits and pieces every time someone comes up with another task for education. The Shopping Mall High School (1986) argues that high schools have evolved into clusters of boutique shops without a central mission.
Postwar nationalization of education debates
Since World War II, arguments about education have become increasingly nationalized as various politicians have made arguments about the need for education to help fight the Cold War, then fight poverty and prejudice, and finally fight our economic battles.
In the postwar era, the arguments about education have seeped into national politics. Maybe Jefferson wrote about education, but the federal government didn't have much of a role in local education with the exception of the Freedmen's Bureau in Reconstruction. That changed after World War II, and since the 1940s, politicians and school critics have called for schools to address national concerns, in a process that my colleague Erwin V. Johanningmeier calls the matching of school politics to the national agenda. In the 1940s, Admiral Hyman Rickover said high schools were too lax, and after the Soviet Union put Sputnik into orbit in 1957, Congress finally heard and passed the National Defense Education Act. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson signed several landmark bills designed to use education to address poverty and discrimination: the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and the Higher Education Act of 1965. (The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also had its consequence for education, including Title VI, which forbade recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin. With the expansion of aid to local schools in 1965, that gave the federal government significant leverage in the battle over desegregation. Then there's the authorization of a report on equality of educational opportunity, but that's a separate story.)
The economic rationale for school reform
For the past 25 years, we’ve been stuck in national arguments that education should help keep us economically competitive. This nationalization of education politics is new and looks at least semi-permanent. Arguments about education reform and the "new economy" fit into the bigger postwar context of a "crusade cascade." Some of the themes are sensible (we really do need some skills for economic reasons), while others fit all too well into the practice of expecting schools to save society (government and corporations do not get off the hook for economic and social policy or for specific decisionmaking).
The most recent wave of national education reform debates started in the 1970s but really came to the fore with a 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, which claimed,
[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
In an era of stagflation and then the 1981-82 Reagan depression (yes, folksit was a classic nineteenth-century-style depression), schools took the blame for our society's economic woes. In the last quarter-century we've had report after report after report, with the same basic argument: Schools have to change or our economy is in the drink.
As an historian, I see the last quarter century of such rhetoric as the latest layer to be added to the purposes of schools, in many ways echoing the purpose underlying vocational education. The difference in the postwar era is the nationalization of education debates (which also mirrors a growing role for centralized state departments of education). But we should recognize the rhetoric for what it is, a continuation of our historical pattern, adding to the jobs of schools without prioritizing, or rather prioritizing by reverse chronological order: the latest crisis to be declared must have the highest claim on education.
Education UpRising is designed to cut through the layers and look at the priorities clearly. The name makes clear what we think education's highest purpose should be: democracy. We believe that education for democracy includes both education for citizenship and also education that comes with citizenship as a right.
The next diary will be a thumbnail history of school bureaucracy, uploaded next Saturday morning.