Henry Gonshak
English
University of Montana-Mont. Tech
The fact that the United States today is the most multicultural nation on earth poses vexing problems for our public education system. In the past, not only was our population much more homogeneous, but the country was run largely by a WASP elite. As a result, it wasn't hard for the Education Establishment to create the "common school," which taught students shared American values along with a core body of knowledge.
Today, in contrast, a myriad of racial, ethnic, religious and political groups (many formerly disempowered), with often conflicting world-views, all demand a say in directing perhaps our country's most important public institution. Under these conditions, can the "common school" survive?
This issue is addressed by Rosemary Salomone in Visions of Schooling: Conscience, Community, and Common Education. It's not a perfect book. While always lucid and jargon-free, Salomone's prose never transcends the pedestrian. A law professor, Salomone includes many tedious discussions of Supreme Court and lower court decisions regarding public education. On the other hand, Visions of Schooling has real virtues. Foremost is that Salomone, while conservative, is usually willing to look fairly at all sides in this polarized debate and to draw balanced, nuanced conclusions.
The opening chapters place current educational concerns in a revealing historical context. The first myth exploded is that American public education has ever been "value-neutral," just a matter of filling students' heads with objective facts. For example, the influential 19th-century educational reformer, Horace Mann, stated explicitly the moral principles public education should instill in the young: "piety, justice, and sacred regard to truth, love of country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry, frugality, chastity, moderation, and temperance, and...other virtues which are...the basis upon which a republican constitution is founded" (15). Mann concluded rhetorically, "Are not these virtues...part and parcel of Christianity?" (15).
As the passage shows, the "virtues" underlying the 19th-century "common school" were overtly Christian, though usually couched in broad, nonsectarian terms. Equally importantly, 19th-century educational reformers such as Mann firmly believed that a key function of public education was to train the next generation for the duties of democratic citizenship--a belief echoed by such seminal 20th-century educational theorists as John Dewey. In "The Supreme Court as Schoolmaster," Salomone examines Supreme Court decisions from earlier eras, which have shaped contemporary educational policy and framed the terms for most current educational debates. In general, these cases pitted the state against dissenting groups of parents, thus raising thorny questions concerning who should have the final say in public education--the government, parents or children themselves.
Perhaps the court's most ground breaking decision was in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972). In this case, a reclusive Amish community challenged a Wisconsin law requiring all children between the ages of six and seventeen to attend a public or private school. The Amish claimed this law conflicted with their religious beliefs, safeguarded by the 14th Amendment, since, while compulsory elementary education taught Amish children basic academic skills they required, high schools, in contrast, instilled values inimical to the Amish way of life, as well as removed Amish children from their community at a time when they most needed to develop Amish attitudes. The court agreed, arguing that "education for citizenship in a democratic society may mean different things to different communities depending on their level of participation in the larger democratic society" (89). In other words, because the Amish's chosen level of social participation was so minimal, their children didn't need the same degree of education for citizenship required of students in the cultural mainstream. Wisconsin v. Yoder has since been cited by almost every parent group challenging the public schools (though often unsuccessfully).
The book's most gripping chapter describes the conflict which erupted in the early 1990s between conservative Catholic parents and the local school district in the wealthy New York suburb of Bedford. The dispute was sparked by the dissenting parents' objection to a before-school activity involving the fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering. While its creators claimed that Magic taught mathematical and other kinds of logical thinking, the parents insisted that the game embodied a "codification of the beliefs [and] practices...of the new Satanists.... It's...mind control.... [The cards] come straight from hell" (145-146). To alert fellow parents to this "devil-worship" rampant on school grounds, the parents hosted a forum led by religious right authorities on Satanism and the occult brought in from outside the community. In response, a sizeable group of rival parents in the district organized a second, much larger forum pledged to stopping "the witch hunt" (158). Eventually, the dissenting parents went to court, claiming that their constitutionally protected religious rights had been violated.
As the controversy escalated, it became clear that the parents objected to a wide swath of the district's curriculum, including programs mandated for all students. Ultimately, the parents' list of complaints included the following: the teaching of meditation techniques, which allegedly instilled New Age philosophy; self-esteem programs; science experiments examining owl pellets of undigested fur and bone to learn about the animal's eating habits (allegedly fostering a cult of death); a lesson that supposedly involved making clay dolls of the Hindu god Ganesha; the DARE program, designed to dissuade students from experimenting with drugs and alcohol; a mentorship program which teamed older and younger students; films on preventing suicide and domestic violence; an "Earth Day" celebration; and a lecture by the "ghost" of Abraham Lincoln (156).
Such programs, the parents claimed, "went beyond the 'mere teaching of proper academic subjects,'" wrongly addressing not just students' intellectual needs, but also their emotional ones--an area the parents felt only they, not teachers, should address (164). Basically, the parents seemed to object to the philosophy underpinning the entire curriculum, which they labeled "secular humanism"--a morally relativistic belief-system the parents deemed antithetical to the absolute Christian values they sought to instill in their children.
While the court's decision did uphold a few of the parents complaints (e.g., against the "Earth Day" celebration, which included participants chanting to an Earth Mother goddess), the judge dismissed most of their allegations as "trifling" and concluded that "under New York State Education Law, the local school board has the power and duty to prescribe the course of study" (182).
Currently under appeal, the case will probably end up in the Supreme Court, whose decision could set an important precedent for future legal battles between parents and the public schools. Unfortunately, in seeking to draw lessons from this provocative case study, Salomone's generally admirable moderation becomes a fault as she bends over backwards to empathize with the parents' perspective to the point that she seems oblivious to the danger posed by Christian fundamentalist attacks on public education. True, Salomone acknowledges that "the public nature of the accusations had an immediate chilling effect on instruction," inspiring Bedford teachers, fearful of lawsuits, to water down their lesson plans (186). Nonetheless, Salomone oddly insists that "the dispute boils down to opinion, perspective, and preference. There simply is no universal right or wrong" (193).
In contrast, I think that while a few of the targeted programs may have been silly or even anti-Christian, in general the dispute boils down to an attempt by a small group of religious extremists to impose their minority beliefs on a public school system mandated to serve all students in the district. If schools are forced to ban routine science experiments because they allegedly foster a "cult of death," how can they possibly educate? When Salomone wonders if "the women might have mobilized a measure of community support had they not drowned out their voices in the frightening rhetoric of...religious fundamentalism," she fails to see that the parents' language of religious fundamentalism wasn't mere "rhetoric" masking more moderate, mainstream complaints, but rather the driving force behind their allegations.
The motive behind Salomone's excessive empathy becomes somewhat clearer in the chapter's last sentence when she writes that "the real devil in such struggles may be the common school itself, an outdated, one-size-fits-all approach to compulsory education" (196). In the book's final chapters, Salomone proposes public education reform based on a concept she terms "structured choice." What's wrong with current public education, Salomone claims, is that it grants the government an educational monopoly, thereby restricting students and parents to a single kind of state-sponsored education at a time when the nation's multiculturalism guarantees that no one educational system can possibly please everyone. In contrast, Salomone's "structured choice" would offer three distinct government-funded educational options: public schools in their current form; "charter schools," privately run institutions under contract with the state; and a voucher system, granting parents tuition to send their children to the private school of their choice, including religious ones. To ensure that charter- and voucher-supported private schools met state educational standards, Salomone would demand that participating institutions provide a curriculum which covered all core academic subjects, as well as civics courses which taught basic democratic values.
Would such sweeping reforms work? Salomone does address the most likely anti-choice objections to her proposals. For example, countering the common charge that vouchers would weaken democratic cohesion, Salomone cites evidence suggesting that private schools, perhaps especially religious ones (unless they endorse explicitly anti-democratic values, such as the avowedly segregationist Bob Jones University) actually may better instill democratic values than public schools since they needn't fearfully avoid values talk, and since they provide students with the kind of solid ethical foundation required for true democratic citizenship.
Still, in the final analysis, I'm not convinced. I fear that, in practice, Salomone's "structured choice" would worsen the already severe Balkanization of American society, with groups of every imaginable stripe scurrying off to their own isolated educational niches. Moreover, I can't endorse any proposal which would inevitably drain money from schools, which (especially in rural and inner-city areas) are already chronically underfunded. Finally, by turning over public education to the dictates of the free market, "choice" risks disadvantaging students whose parents aren't smart, knowledgeable and determined enough "consumers" to wisely "purchase" their childrens' educations.
Nonetheless, given the current crisis in American public education, those participating in educational debates (especially the Education Establishment) must be willing to seriously consider all reasonable blueprints for reform. Visions of Schooling certainly deserves that kind of thoughtful hearing.