As the Russian economy strains under the weight of economic sanctions, U.S. public schools struggle against collapse from the strain of two years of Covid restrictions and the weaknesses it exposed.
“Public education is too important to be left to politicians and ideologues,” writes George Packer in The Atlantic, echoing Clemenceau. More than earnings potential and protecting the little dears from ideas parents find threatening are at stake. I’ve written plenty about conservative attempts to eradicate public schooling, a foundational function of the republic since before ratification of the Constitution. President George W. Bush wanted to turn over Social Security funds to Wall Street. Avaricious investors see hundreds of billions in annual education spending mandated by states and they see dollar signs. If only they could eliminate the public from public schools. Covid has been an unlikely ally in capitalists’ drive to turn every human interaction into a transaction. They should care more about the polity that sustains their enterprises, but they don’t.
Packer asks a question more basic than who profits:
What is school for? This is the kind of foundational question that arises when a crisis shakes the public’s faith in an essential institution. “The original thinkers about public education were concerned almost to a point of paranoia about creating self-governing citizens,” Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth-grade teacher in the South Bronx and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “Horace Mann went to his grave having never once uttered the phrase college- and career-ready. We’ve become more accustomed to thinking about the private ends of education. We’ve completely lost the habit of thinking about education as citizen-making.”
School can’t just be an economic sorting system. One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved. Public education is meant not to mirror the unexamined values of a particular family or community, but to expose children to ways that other people, some of them long dead, think. In an authoritarian or rigidly meritocratic system, schools select the elites who grow up to make the decisions. A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.
“Is it quaint, or utopian, to talk about teaching our children to be capable of governing themselves?” Packer asks. “Possibly, but I doubt it’s ever been more necessary.”
What’s being taught in many homes is radical freedom. Not freedom for anything, just freedom. More is better. And damn the erosion of the polity’s ability to govern itself. To the point of eradicating democracy and dissolution of the republic. Americans are so infatuated with their freedoms that they have neglected what it takes to maintain it, just as they have neglected their roads and bridges.
Packer offers suggestions for how we might reclaim education for citizen-making.
A central goal for history, social-studies, and civics instruction should be to give students something more solid than spoon-fed maxims—to help them engage with the past on its own terms, not use it as a weapon in the latest front of the culture wars. In “The Propaganda of History,” the last chapter of his great study of Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
Children need to be taught how to think. That is something many parents (as well as demagogues) find even more threatening than them learning what to think.
The goal isn’t just to teach students the origins of the Civil War, but to give them the ability to read closely, think critically, evaluate sources, corroborate accounts, and back up their claims with evidence from original documents. This kind of instruction, which requires teachers to distinguish between exposure and indoctrination, isn’t easy; it asks them to be more sophisticated professionals than their shabby conditions and pay (median salary: $62,000, less than accountants and transit police) suggest we are willing to support. “We have a desperate shortage of teachers,” David Steiner of Johns Hopkins said, just as we’re making teaching more difficult by “politicizing education.” It’s easy and satisfying for adults to instruct children that America is an exceptional experiment in freedom, or a benighted system of oppressions. It’s harder, but infinitely more useful, to free them to think about history for themselves.
The obstacle we face is a culture that values profit over personhood. That culture sees no value in literature or history, subjects we once valued for their person-making rather than profit-making potential. America may not last through another generation of students defined by test and credit scores, Packer believes.
“American democracy can’t afford another generation of adults who don’t know how to talk and listen and think.”
That is so obvious it should not be controversial, but it is.
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