Schooling has never been agnostic. The egalitarian notion that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste” has always been slightly twisted to mean “as long as that mind thinks like my mind”. As a generalization, we purposed each generation to create enough educated and productive citizens to support our continuing commonwealth. So much for intentions.
Within the past decade, the conceptual walls of restraint that have kept schooling and America’s best interests in touch with each other are failing. The edges of our restraints are crumbling as they are cleaved by narrow-minded self-aggrandizers. As a result, our enduring concept of an “American Way of Life” is shrinking into regional pockets of “my way of life”. We no longer have a critical mass of self-balancing integrity, but loud spoken factions wanting public education to espouse their selective self-interests. When the edges of our social contract fail, and they are, we will fall down.
What we know about us.
In truth, the education of children always has been self-interested.
For several millennia, royals learned to read, write, and count and the masses mumbled. Property and wealth were guarded by laws interpreted only by men who could read and write it. Illiterate people were easier to rule. This social construct for education migrated to America.
The first school in the English colonies, the Boston Latin School of 1635, taught a narrow curriculum to a small number and group of children for specific community purposes. To fill in the blanks, Boston’s town elders wanted their sons only to have a classical education like their father’s education so that sons could take their rightful place in the elite political, social, and economic life of New England. Latin, Greek, the Puritan Bible, and the arithmetic of commerce. White, Puritan, propertied boys only, please.
Up and down the English colonies, this was how early efforts in public education began. New England merchants, middle colony merchants and landowners, and southern planters each assured an education for the propagation of their regional ways of life.
A change began in our post-Revolutionary expansion into western lands. Early 1800s immigration brought peoples who aspired for economic and social mobility contrasted with the protective, conservatism of our colonial forefathers. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 said “…Article 3. Religion, morality, knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, school and the means for education shall forever be encouraged” and ideas of a more universal education to support an expanding nation crept into public ed, slowly but not for everyone. This was the 1800s. Enslaved people were purposefully kept illiterate. American Indian children were consigned to boarding schools to educate native culture out of their future. Gradually, white girls were enrolled in school. Public education though still white, discarded its denominational and propertied requirements.
Eastern cities used compulsory school attendance laws to manage millions of immigrant children. Truancy laws were lax when children were an essential and necessary low-cost labor force for mill work. Truancy enforcement became stronger when the need for literate, voting adults was required. An eighth-grade education was the American educational capstone through the 1930s. The need for a high school education was confirmed only after America entered WW2 and too many draftees lacked the basic, secondary education our military required. Sound cynical? It was.
For the most part, 19th and 20th century America shaped our public ed into this: an assured child daycare system that freed adults for work, an elementary-level education that prepared adolescent children for adult employment, a literate population able to read newspapers and magazines for their daily news, and an inculcated understanding of white, mainstream history and non-parochial values.
Still sound cynical? It was. It still is. Politics shapes educational practices constantly.
Public education served special interests beyond literacy. No matter the need, public ed has been our conduit for government taking significant, universal actions to stem perceived national emergencies. When President Truman signed the National School Lunch Program, he not only fed school children, he provided a federal subsidy to our nation’s post-war farmers that continues today. We eradicated polio in the 50s by lining up every boy and girl in school for a shot of Salk and a sugar cube of Sabin vaccines. Children were a captive public health clientele. The President’s Physical Fitness Awards became the standard in school PE to assure a constant readiness of fit, young men for military service. A letter and lapel pin from Ike kept me doing pushups for years. When the Russians launched Sputnik, we strengthened high school math and science curricula and enrollment in German language resurged because German was the language of physicists. Public ed was a launching pad for the space race. Schooling has been an agent for economic stabilization, public health, national defense, and international competition, forever.
In 2002 No Child Left Behind was a knee-jerk response to the downward trending of domestic NAEP and international PISA test scores. Politicians feared that the assessed education of American children was failing to keep up with the scores achieved by children in China. If this continued, the United States would lose its status as the leading international economy. Nationally mandated curricular standards and testing swamped schooling for the next decade. We studied Finland’s educational delivery as a model for besting China. Huh? With NCLB we let an implied perception that our nation’s international economic status was sliding beat up students and teachers and schools for a decade.
A lesson in a senior economics class should ask this question: What single expenditure balances a state’s annual budget? Answer: Money for public schools. Every governor runs as a “Friend of Education” making loud criticisms regarding the state’s past educational report card with promises for future improvements. Once elected, each governor, regardless of promises, uses the state’s annual allocation to public education to balance the state’s annual budget. When revenues are low, the Gov cuts education spending. Governors ease the impact of inflation on other state agencies by regulating school funding. The failure to increase education spending always is blamed on the opposition party.
“According to The Century Foundation, we are underfunding our K-12 public schools by nearly $150 billion annual, robbing more than 30 million school children of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom”. Except, fully funding public education would require spending that partisan governors are unwilling to commit.
These are facts; you can look them up.
Critical junctures today
The liberal-minded desegregation of public schools in the 1950s and 60s is losing ground to a re-segregation of local schools. New, conservative state statutes espousing parent rights allow charter schools to evolve into select-enrollment enclaves receiving public funding. Parent choice is no longer just a choice of available schooling but a right to create schooling for parent purposes. Segregated charter schools not only reject children of color but also children with educational disabilities. Courts reason that assigning state funding to the children being schooled rather than to school districts justifies a re-segregating of public schools.
States where the governor, legislature, and state Supreme Court are held by one political party are using partisan power to change public schooling. Statutes are being written to shape curriculum, subjects, and teaching strategies to further partisan thinking. Books are banned, curriculum is prohibited, and school leaders who oppose such can be charged with felonies.
https://www.eqfl.org/board-of-education-passes-anti-LGBTQ-rules
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/1600-books-banned-2021-22-school-year-report-finds-rcna4836
Why Is This Thus?
Perhaps Sir Isaac Newton explains the reversal of integration in public education policy with his third law – for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. To wit, slavery led to the abolition of slavery and freed slaves led to Jim Crow laws and that led to the desegregation of schools. Now, an equal and opposite action reverses integration into a legal resegregation of schools. However, to accept this explanation is to justify doing wrong and labeling it as right. Is equal opportunity under the 14th amendment just a majority party definition? Today, yes.
There are other forces at work.
Arlie Russell Hochschild (Strangers In Their Own Land) examined the sociology of Louisiana and neighboring communities in Mississippi and Texas. Specifically, she examined the effects of partisan politics on a population already plagued with a congruence of economic, cultural, and political pressures. Highly dependent upon a regional oil employment and affiliated industries that made their communities into historic company towns, these working families are not only dependent on industry pay checks but also forced to live in chemically toxic communities. Politically afraid, they oppose all governmental entitlements that help people of color with food stamps, jobs, and job training. They see the world as win-loss and believe liberal government is taking from them to give advantage to others. They support conservatives who are cheerleaders for their local fears.
But reductive policies and practices are not found only in deep southern states. More than half our 50 state legislatures have entertained bills to restrict curriculum, subjects, and books. More than half have considered legislation that would restrict student opportunities based upon gender identification.
School boards in all states are being approached by parents demanding specific books be removed from school library circulation. Populist censorship is determining what children can read in school.
What Are We To Do?
The Newtonian pendular swing of partisan-written educational policies will not serve the long-term future of our children. Special interested voices make the endgames of all their machinations defined by the widest arc of their collective policy statements, and these increasingly speak for fewer and fewer of our population. Each iteration becomes more and more radical or reactionary and less and less unifying.
I am guided by the sign-off words of a late-night radio host I heard in the 1970s. “When you know what is right, try to do it” and I flavor his words with Margaret Mead’s commandment “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think”. Throughout time, when adults attempted to shape the world their children would inherit by placing bias and prejudice in their upbringing, disaster has been sprung upon the world.
An older slogan comes to mind. Nancy Reagan asked children and young adults to “just say no” when confronted with illegal drugs in the 1980s and 90s. We need to tell our governmental representatives they are to “just say no” to any legislation intended to ban books, restrict curriculum, or restrict educational participation for special interested reasons. Our children need to be educated to think and not to regurgitate selective and biased thinking.