Party of 1

Friday’s New York Times op-ed page includes a broadside from Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. As the title of this, her most recent book, suggests, much of Ms. Jacoby’s work has been devoted to countering the influence of the benighted “unwashed masses” in this country. Friday’s column appears to have been provoked largely by the recent revision of standards for the teaching of history by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). Jacoby: “Chosen in partisan elections, the board members — most lacking any expertise in the academic subjects upon which they are passing judgment — had already watered down the teaching of evolution in science classes when they turned their attention to American and world history. Thus was Jefferson cut from a list of those whose writings inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions, and replaced by Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. This is certainly the first time I’ve ever heard the ‘Summa Theologica’ described as a spur to any revolution.”

Susan Jacoby

The “reforms” proposed by the Texas board do indeed sound grotesque; apparently, some of the board members would replace Thomas Jefferson with Jefferson Davis in Texas textbooks. (Will this be adopted as a high-school history text in Texas?) Jacoby cites this as an example of “why local control of schools is often an enemy of high-quality public education. The real question is whether anything, in the current polarized political climate, can be done about educational disparities that are inseparable from our fragmented system of public schooling.”

“No Frenchman could conceive” of such a situation, Jacoby insists.  Indeed, she concedes that her ambitions for the American educational system are inhibited by “the current polarized political climate.” It’s not just that, but the historical and constitutional traditions that separate France and America, that prevent elementary and secondary education from being centralized. If a centralized system is what Jacoby wants, it’s hard to see how it could be brought about, short of imposition from above by decree — and it’s far from clear what the source of authority would be for such a thing.  If the President or Congress attempted it, surely the Supreme Court would overturn it, in the absence of a constitutional amendment to permit it.

All this is not to say that the Texas board has made a wise move. Board members may find that they have thrown a monkey wrench into efforts to secure economic development and outside investment for the state. It’s tantamount to hanging out a sign proclaiming that no one but a certain type of conservative sectarian is welcome in the place. Such a thing prompted Republican primary voters in Kansas to kick out some of the more extreme members of their education board in 2006. A similar reaction may have occurred in the Lone Star State, where some of the more notorious conservatives were defeated in primaries earlier this month. Nevertheless, the defeated members had several months remaining in their terms, and so they were able to push through their curricular “reforms.”

Some people think that the entire controversy has been overblown (see this commentary, for example), and that there is plenty of blame to go around to partisans on both sides of such disputes. For my money, these disputes demonstrate that American “progressivism” has become far more of a top-down than a bottom-up movement — and that may be a good reason to refrain from embracing it wholeheartedly. For instance, if someone were to invoke the authority of Susan Jacoby before a local school board, it might come out eventually that she is the author of works such as this one — which might be sufficient to provoke a crowd bearing torches and pitchforks in the “polarized political climate” that Jacoby herself duly notes.

It used to be thought that grassroots, bottom-up, local democracy was a good thing — and local school boards are one of the venues in which it predominates.  It’s a problematical form of democracy, since it involves collective decision-making that impinges upon child-rearing — which might be thought to be a private matter.  I might be so bold as to conjecture that a thinker like Hannah Arendt would be reluctant to see education become further centralized, since that might involve treating a country of 300 million people as though it were a single household.

Such a thing is bound to bring about devolutionary, if not wholly reactionary, pressures, contributing to a “polarized political climate” such as the current one, in which large numbers of low-to-moderate-income voters cast ballots for right-of center parties. For reasons such as that, I fear that American progressives and secularists may find that many of the measures they wish to carry out may turn out to be self-frustrating. The country simply is not as secular as they wish it to be. The devout perceived pressure from above to make them secular, and they have become exceptionally well-organized in order to prevent such a thing.

If this situation is indeed contributing to the miseducation of schoolchildren, it may be difficult to do anything about it. One approach that comes to mind would be to engage the devout and try to bring them around — but that will be a daunting task, since they have cordoned themselves off into a conservative Christian subculture. Denizens of the subculture have invoked American constitutional traditions in an attempt at self-defense, while Jacoby insists that “what made sense for a sparsely settled continent at the dawn of the Republic is ill suited to the needs of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy.”

If she is right about that, then we find ourselves placed squarely upon the horns of a dilemma. We have a form of government that is supposed to be appropriate for the kind of beings we are — which, when it was invented, clearly was supposed to operate on a small scale. But, to enjoy the fruits “of a 21st-century nation competing in a global economy,” we have to operate the nation as though it were a single household, and perhaps do away with long-standing components of local government and grassroots democracy. It happens that, under such an arrangement, families constantly find themselves susceptible to penetration by distant centralized forces, be they multinational private corporations or government bureaucracies.

A strictly philosophical observation might be that the way we live these days is problematical….

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine brings a rather grotesque story by Russell Shorto about the struggle over standards for the teaching of history being fought out before the Texas State Board of Education. Informed readers who recall prior battles over the teaching of biology will not have much trouble surmising what the controversy is about without my going into excruciating detail here. The author allows as that “the Christian activists have a certain amount of history on their side…. There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms.”

This sort of controversy is not going to go away in the foreseeable future, even though there is no way to resolve it in a manner that will come close to pleasing all of the parties to the dispute. In my view, it is not the sort of matter that can be ignored or treated with “benign neglect,” given that so many of the people caught up in it on the conservative side are individuals of low, or at least moderate, income.

In my view, our dysfunctional polity would be in much healthier shape if the religious-versus-secular element were removed from it — and that cannot be done  by attempting to settle all controversies in favor of secular views, since the country is so overwhelmingly devout at the grassroots. American history should not be taught  as though the country and all its inhabitants have always been secularists. Furthermore, it h,as always been my view that, in a large federation, it is best to observe what Roman Catholic thought calls the “principle of subsidiarity,” and permit localized decision-making as much as possible. That would mean, for instance, that localities should be permitted to decide for themselves whether or not to implement “abstinence-based” sex education.

A country such as this has to consist more than just 300 million individuals and a national government. There have to be the intermediary institutions of so-called “civil society.” And, since people do not come into existence in a vaccum, they have to be raised and educated by parents who will carry with them particularist cultural baggage — and, in our country, much of that baggage will be religious. If we refuse to acknowledge this, it is going to make the governance of the country complicated in the extreme, unless we are going to attempt a “root and branch” elimination of religious institutions, after the fashion of the Jacobins. Such a thing is just what religious conservatives are afraid of — bizarre as that fear might strike those of a more secular bent.

Solutions will not be easy, since, over the course of the last generation, as evangelical Christianity has become more partisan, it has more and more come to take on the characteristics of the cult. In the strip-mall nondenominational churches what we are liable to find being preached is a witch’s brew of  “dispensationalism,” “premillennialism,” “end-times” doctrine of the sort found in the “Left Behind” novels, “Christian Zionism” or “Christian Identity,” and some version of “creationism” or “intelligent design,” in some combination or another.

If Christians of this sort seek to become politically dominant, they will find that the rest of the country will not stand for it. Still, their numbers are large enough that they can constitute a nearly implacable faction. More than likely, a religious-versus-secular split is going to hang over this polity For some time to come.  We won’t be able to come to even a tentative resolution until there is a change of heart on the part of both the secular and the devout….

According to Department of Education research, many states have been lowering academic standards — especially with regard to minimum test scores needed to achieve “proficiency” — in order not to run afoul of the No Child Left Behind Act. John Hechinger reports for the Wall Street Journal.

The release of this research may be discomfiting to some traditional supporters of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration….

Under pressure from the Obama administration, the local teachers’ union in New Haven, Connecticut has reached an agreement with the school system that is being touted by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  “Under pressure from the Education Department, the country’s two powerful teachers unions, [the American Federation of Teachers] and the larger National Education Association, are already budging in ways that were previously unthinkable,” reports Neil King Jr. in the Wall Street Journal.

President Obama was only in New Orleans briefly, but he made a point of visiting the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology. The Christian Science Monitor editorial board thinks he was trying to make a point — and is supportive.

Daniel de Vise of the Washington Post has visited Virginia Military Institute, twelve years after it was forced to admit female cadets.

The London Economist brings news that the teenage pregnancy rate in the United States, after having been in decline since 1991, has been on the uptick since 2005.

In light of such trends, skepticism continues with regard to so-called “abstinence-only” sex-education programs. The Economist article focuses on practices in Texas. “Across the state teenagers were warned that premarital sex could lead to divorce, suicide, poverty and a disappointed God. One district staged a skit about a young couple on their honeymoon. The husband presented his bride with a beautiful wrapped present that he had been saving for years. Her gift for him was in tatters.”

“This approach does not seem to be working,” the publication argues. Obviously, cosmopolitan centers are bringing pressure to bear against conservative attitudes. “In a nice illustration of Texan conservatism, girls under 18 have to get parental consent for prescription contraceptives, even if they already have a child.” The London weekly does make this concession: “Abstinence-only education makes a convenient scapegoat.” It reports that numerous school districts already have moved to a more “comprehensive” approach.

It looks as though pressure is building in the direction of the imposition of a “comprehensive” sex-ed regime, to be imposed from the top down. I suppose my thinking here is going to be regarded as untimely, but I harbor serious reservations about it.

On the About page of this site I have posted some passages from the writings of  Hannah Arendt, including the reservations expressed about ““a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping” — what I would call “household management” on the scale of 300 million people. Someone wields a study purporting to show that “comprehensive” sex education will reduce the teenage-pregnancy rate — no matter that any such study is susceptible to having its assumptions, procedures and results challenged. Subsequently, policies are imposed on a nationwide, continental scale — regarding matters about which, throughout human history, attitudes and practices have differed from one family, school or community to the next.

I wish people could get it through their heads that this is the kind of matter  that different people will want to handle differently — depending largely in this case  on whether they harbor secular or religiously devout attitudes. In this area, to impose a policy from the top down can only have a politically corrosive effect. Maybe it would reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy at the margins. But it will  do collateral damage at the same time, feeding the mega-church, talk-radio, “birther,” “tea-party” subculture.

It is a reflection of the way we live, of course. We have organized economic production on a nationwide basis, and so regulation has to be conducted on that basis — and it follows that families and households are susceptible to a myriad of outside forces, emanating from private-sector corporations as well as    government bureaucracies. If there has to be a nationwide policy of comprehensive sex education, I hope some attention will be paid to the question of how to bring it off without sending a mixed message, so that parents will not feel undermined. Should parents be held up to ridicule if they wish to teach their children not to “do it”? Isn’t it to be expected that, in any case, careful instruction in birth control and “safe sex” often will be superseded, since sexual activity usually takes place in the moment?

Pressure against “comprehensive” sex education generally comes from conservative Christians. Their concerns deserve a hearing in my view. At the same time, they should think carefully about exactly what demands they wish to press, keeping in mind the warning — “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.” If their preferred policies prevail, they should be prepared for political criticism if it is perceived that the policies are not panning out especially well.

Andrew O’Hehir, a writer for Salon.com, and his wife are homeschooling their son and daughter. O’Hehir has written about their experiences for the site.

“Both Leslie and I went to public school and had the usual assortment of excellent, mediocre and bad teachers. We’re not zealots with some animus against public education. We’re glad it exists and relatively happy to pay taxes to sustain it. As I said earlier, though, we feel dubious about the ideology that seems dominant in public education these days, and especially about the idea that sending kids to school virtually all day for 10 months a year, beginning at age 3 or 4, is the healthiest mode of delivering it.”

“Looking at the bigger picture, being a home schooling freak isn’t what it used to be. We aren’t Bible-thumping Christians or off-the-grid hippies, and we definitely don’t feel isolated. You certainly encounter both of those groups in the home-school universe, a fascinating realm in which social dissidents from the left and right margins of society struggle to communicate and coexist. But home schooling has become a broad and diverse phenomenon found at all socioeconomic levels and in all regions of the country, and it can’t be summarized with easy demographic labels.”

“A rough but reasonable guess might be that one-quarter to one-third of home-schoolers — say, 450,000 school-age kids — come from more or less secular backgrounds, and that proportion is probably growing. Just as important, not every home-schooler who happens to be religious is home schooling solely or primarily for religious reasons. There’s a vibrant African-American home schooling scene, for instance, and while a lot of the folks involved are Christians, many say their top concern is the destructive culture they see in public school.”

O’Hehir cites Department of Education figures that show there to be 1.5 million homeschooled students, comprising 3% of the school-age population, as of 2007. That figure represents considerable growth in the course of a generation — supposedly there were only 15,000 homeschooled children in 1970. Within public education, the phenomenon sometimes is regarded as a threat, but I would conjecture that we may be near the upper limit of the growth curve for the homeschooled population, given the commitment involved.

An individual of my acquaintance ran across a newspaper article about a homeschooler who would not permit his children to read anything but the Bible. He drew the apodictic conclusion that the government ought to prohibit homeschooling….

The past week brought quite a bit of news with regard to educational reform. Teachers’ unions are not happy with the proposals coming from the Obama administration and the Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan. “Standardized testing, school accountability, performance pay, charter schools — all are integral to President Obama’s $4.35 billion ‘Race to the Top’ grant competition to spur innovation. None is a typical Democratic crowd-pleaser,” the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a study that purports to confirm the superior performance of charter schools. “Critics of charter schools have long argued that any higher test scores were not necessarily attributable to anything the schools were doing, but to the students themselves, on the premise that only the most motivated students and families elected charters. [Prof. Caroline] Hoxby’s study sought to address that argument by comparing students who attend charters directly with similarly motivated students — those who sought to attend charters but were denied a seat through a random lottery. She concluded the charters did have a positive effect.” It’s worth noting that Prof. Hoxby is associated with the right-of-center Hoover Institution; her research findings frequently have been cited by supporters of charter schools.

The intent here is not to make a case for or against “Race to the Top” or charter schools. There might be something to be said for all such measures, but my view would be that no single one of them is a panacea. Instead, I would simply make the observation that we continue to lack consensus about what to do with schools. This week’s news provides as good a pretext as any for some general observations on the matter.

Progressives and representatives of unions that represent public-school teachers will not be happy with my views. Before going any further, it ought to be acknowledged that public school teachers, to say the least, feel harried and underappreciated. They would hold that they are being asked to carry out a difficult task with limited funds and less-than-optimal working conditions.

There is no reason not to concede as much. However, my view would be that public-school teachers, or at least those who would speak for them, have put themselves too far out on a limb. There is too great of a gap between their preferences on the one hand, and those of the parents of school-age children and the public in general on the other. As long as this situation continues, we can expect the electorate to balk at providing school funding at the level that public-school teachers and their representatives would like, and that programs that teachers find onerous, such as “Race to the Top” and No Child Left Behind, will win public acquiescence.

It’s worth noting that, when governments began providing what we have come to call “public education,” the proximate cause was that parents were beginning to go to work outside the home, in factories, rather than engaging in economic production within the household. From what I understand, government provision of education began in France, at the time that the Industrial Revolution was taking hold in that country. (For the time being I’m not going to provide an academic-style apparatus of footnotes and bibliography for these assertions.) Before that, people who received any education at all, got it in the form of something like what we would now call “homeschooling.” It’s also noteworthy that, in this earliest form of public education, the government attempted to accommodate the religious preferences of the parents — an area which, of course, remains a sore spot in the 21st-century United States.

Elementary and secondary educators would like enhanced recognition in the form of higher stature as a profession. Like everyone else, they would also like higher salaries. For better or worse, nevertheless, education — or at least public education — also has its detractors, some of whom sometimes belittle schooling as glorified babysitting. I wouldn’t say such a thing, but there is at least a grain of truth in the belittlement, in that elementary and secondary education is not quite like other professions; it represents something of a “farming out” of child-rearing. We have tried to professionalize something that would have been done more or less exclusively by parents, until relatively recently in human history. Since we don’t require professional accreditation for someone to become a parent, this means that elementary and secondary education differ in a crucial aspect from professions like law or medicine — and this difference may continue to be a hindrance to efforts to enhance the professional status of elementary and secondary educators.

The school system thus represents a sort of sharing of responsibility for child-rearing between teachers and parents. A major problem is that this is being carried out under conditions with which many parents are not happy. Some parents might go so far as to say that the schools are being run over their dead bodies, as it were.

A major component of parental unhappiness is, of course, the race issue. In some cases, school systems largely have been abandoned by relatively affluent suburban parents — who generally, although certainly not always, are white parents. A good deal of cynicism is directed at liberal politicians like Barack Obama, who enroll their children in institutions like Sidwell Friends  School — although it should be noted in fairness that he is hardly the first such politician to have done such a thing. Affluent suburban parents will always flee what they perceive to be the trappings of a ghetto environment, unless you absolutely prohibit them from so fleeing. Experience has shown that they can accept a limited degree of integration, but will flee once a “tipping point” is reached. Is this an overreaction? I don’t know whether I could tell people such thing with a straight face in each and every case. Concerns range from physical safety to the difficulties parents perceive with delivering what we would call a “college preparatory” education in an integrated environment.

All of this is not to say that we should not understand and sympathize with what integrationists were trying to accomplish. If schools are permitted to vary in racial and socioeconomic composition, the schools in the more affluent neighborhoods will be viewed as more desirable working environments. They will garner more experienced teachers, and political considerations may dictate that they will be more lavishly funded. Outside these neighborhoods, students may be shortchanged. If each school is required to have the same racial and socioeconomic composition, all students can be put on the same footing.

Therefore, we should not belittle what integration and busing plans were intended to accomplish. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of decades of “white flight,” the question has to be raised whether the integration policies were pushed to a point at which they became untenable. It has to be admitted that the matter is somewhat akin to insulating the house; seal the windows, and the draft will come in under the door sill. Similarly, some students may be shortchanged under a system of “neighborhood schools” — but extensive integration plans may only provoke “white flight.”

Just as conservative parents balk at sending their children into what they perceive to be a hostile and dangerous sociocultural environment, so do religiously devout parents desire to give their children their religious education along with their general education.  To decline to permit this,  and to mandate that education be secular, creates a situation in which government comes down on the side of treating religion as not especially important — or so this is perceived by religiously devout parents. I am afraid that this is going to be a ’sore spot” as long as the educational status quo persists. Religiously devout parents perceived pressure to make them secular — whereas government ought not to be trying to make people secular, any more than it ought to be trying to make them religious. One solution would be to permit the establishment of autonomously operated schools, representing various religious and secular traditions, and then to let parents choose from among them.

That would be tantamount to a “voucher plan” — but public-school teachers and their spokespersons traditionally have been hostile to such a thing. They think it would be tantamount to the destruction of the public schools — although it might be more accurate to say that it would break down the distinction between public and private schools. After all, a “voucher” simply means a stipend to be used for school tuition — and the cash value of the voucher would be supplied from public funds.

A few years ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision that allowed experimental voucher plans to continue to operate, albeit under extensive limitations and restrictions. Contrary to some expectations, however, voucher plans have not proven wildly popular and have not been adopted widely. Taxpayers appear apprehensive; many of them may have been scared off by  apprehensions about what sort of schools extreme religious conservatives might operate if they were allowed to participate in such a plan. Religious conservatives themselves have been apprehensive because of their fears about what strings might be attached in the form of regulations and restrictions that would come with participation in a government-sponsored and financed voucher plan. They do not want any sort of ground rules — and for such a thing to be a serious proposition, ground rules there would have to be. One such ground rule would be that participating schools could not be exclusive with regard to the students they would admit. I would also stipulate that any religious instruction would have to be optional. Furthermore, schools that do not desire to participate should not be required to; they should be allowed to continue to operate on the same footing on which private schools operate now.

A couple of decades ago, I might have tried to rattle off for you a five-point plan of some kind to put all schools on a voucher-plan footing. Such a thing would frighten public-school teachers and others, but if it does frighten you, don’t worry — because I do not anticipate that such a thing could possibly come to fruition until well after our lifetimes. There is too much of a gap between secularists and the religiously devout, and that gap will have to be closed considerably before such a change can become a realistic possibility. For instance, regarding instruction in the sciences, a wise approach would be to look at how evolutionary theory could be understood as compatible with religious teachings. Of course, there are many who do not want to do this — they insist that it be taught that the world is no more than a few thousand years old. Taxpayers cannot be expected to subsidize such a thing. It amounts to a sort of secession from the wider world. Of course, the devout do not desire to become “worldly” — but their judgment about where and how to draw the line may fairly be questioned in many cases.

I still think that there would be benefits to be realized from such an arrangement, if it could ever come about. It could provide for more of a living-and-let-live arrangement between citizens of different worldviews, and could create an environment more supportive of governmental support for education; if you think education needs to be better funded, just increase the value of the voucher. However, both the religiously devout and those of a more secular bent would have to accept that education is an area in which different people want to do things differently. Not every school would conform to the preferences of either a “religious-right” activist or a progressive teachers ‘-union representative.