“I Did Not Invent This Faith”: The Purpose of American Education

“I have been accused more than once and from opposed quarters of an undue, a utopian, faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence. At all events, I did not invent this faith. I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit.” - John Dewey, 1939

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“...[O]nly through education could congregants acquire ‘the true sense and meaning’ of the Bible and thereby save themselves from the ‘false glosses of saint seeming deceivers.’ Such a mission was too important to be left to chance or to the option of individual parents. Instead it required action by public authority to make schooling happen.

At the same time that the official rationale for communities to provide education in colonial America was proclaimed to be the pursuit of a religious ideal, another more pragmatic reason quietly emerged that pushed individuals to see education on their own. In order to engage in commerce, people needed to be reasonably good at reading, writing, and arithmetic. Without these skills, storekeepers and merchants and tradesmen and clerks would be unable to make contracts, correspond with customers, or keep accounts. From this angle, schooling was a practical necessity for anyone who hoped to make a living by means of commercial activity in a country where, from the beginning, trade was a central fact of life.”[4]

“[B]efore there was an American system of education — before there was even an American nation — schooling in America was an important and growing part of ordinary life, and it educated a larger share of the populace than did schooling in the rest of the world. The two factors that propelled this growth of schooling, however, were quite different in character. From the view of religion, schooling was the pursuit of a high ideal, a way to keep the faith and promote piety. Religion gave schooling a public rationale that was explicit, openly expounded by preachers, political leaders, journalists, and parents. From the view of commerce, schooling was the pursuit of a mundane interest, a way to make a living in an increasingly trade-oriented economy. This rationale for schooling was well understood but only rarely made explicit...And the two factors differed not only in the goal they set for schooling but also in the agents who would carry out this goal. Whereas the religious view stimulated top-down efforts by government and the church to promote and provide education for the populace, the commercial view stimulated bottom-up efforts by individual consumers to pursue education for their own ends.”[5]

“The history of American education is in many ways an expression of this ongoing tension between schooling as the pursuit of gradually evolving cultural ideals and schooling as the pursuit of increasingly compelling economic practicalities. The first of these rationales has propelled most educational reform movements, which have demanded that schools adapt themselves to new ideals and help society realize these ideals— whether this ideal be religious faith, civic virtue, economic efficiency, racial equality, or individual liberty. These ideals have formed the core of the rhetoric of the major school reform movements. The second rationale is what has propelled individuals to demand educational opportunity and to avail themselves of it when it is made available. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, however, this second form of pressure for educational change flew under the radar for the most part;this is evidenced by the fact that it is largely missing from the language of reform documents and educational politics...[T]he history of school reform in this country has been an odd mix of turbulent reform rhetoric, which has only modestly affected the underlying structure of schooling, and a slow and silent evolutionary process, which has exerted substantial change in this structure over a sufficiently long period of time that this change is barely visible.”[7]

“A few pages later, Mann summed up his argument with the famous statement, ‘It may be an easy thing to make a Republic; but it is a very laborious thing to make Republicans; and woe to the republic that rests upon no better foundations than ignorance, selfishness, and passion.’ In his view, then, the common school system was given the centrally important political task of making citizens for a republic. And toward this end, its greatest contribution was its commonness, drawing together all members of society into a single institution and providing them with the shared educational experience and civic grounding that they needed in order to function as members of a functional republican community. For the common school movement, all other goals were subordinate to this one.”[9]

“According to the authors, schools exist to help individuals adapt to the needs of society; as society becomes more complex, schools must transform themselves accordingly; and in this way they will help citizens develop the socially necessary qualities of ‘intelligence and efficiency.’

This focus on social efficiency, however, did not deter the authors from drawing on political rhetoric to support their position. In a 12,000-word report, they used the terms ‘‘democracy’’ or ‘‘democratic’’ no fewer than forty times. But what did they mean by democratic education? At one point in boldfaced type they state that ‘‘education in a democracy, both within and without the school, should develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever nobler ends.’ So, whereas Mann’s reports used political arguments to support a primarily political purpose for schooling (preparing citizens with civic virtue), the commission’s report used political arguments about the requirements of democracy to support a vision of schooling that was primarily economic (preparing efficient workers). In addition, the report preserved the concern of common school proponents about school as a public good, but only by redefining the public good in economic terms. Yes, education serves the interests of society as a whole, said these progressives; but it does so not by producing civic virtue but by producing what we would later come to call human capital.”[11]

“The argument in this decision was at heart political, asserting that education is a constitutional right of every citizen that must be granted to everyone on equal terms. But note that the political vision in Brown is quite different from the political vision put forward by Mann. For the common school movement, schools were critically important in the effort to build a republic; their purpose was political. But for the desegregation movement, schools were critically important as a mechanism of social opportunity. Their purpose was to promote social mobility. Politics was just the means by which one could demand access to this attractive educational commodity.In this sense, then, Brown depicted education as a private good, whose benefits go to the degree holder and not to society as a whole.The Court’s argument was not that granting African Americans access to equal education would enhance society, both black and white; instead, it argued that African Americans were suffering from segregation and would benefit from desegregation. Quality education was an important form of property that they had been denied, and the remedy was to give them access to it. In this decision, republican equality for citizens had turned into equal opportunity for consumers.”[12]

“...[The report] asserted a vision of education as an intensely public good: All Americans benefit from its successes, and all are threatened by its failures...[It] represented education as a particular type of public good, which benefited American society by giving it the human capital it needed in order to be economically competitive with other nations...”[13]

“In educational reform rhetoric, we have moved all the way from a political rationale for education to a market rationale, and from seeing education as a public good to seeing it as a private good.

Instead of extolling the benefits of having a common school system promote a single virtuous republican community, reformers were extolling the benefits of having an atomized school system serve the differential needs of a vast array of disparate consumer subcultures.”[15]

“The start of the twenty-first century saw an interesting shift in the rhetoric of the standards movement and the choice movement, as both incorporated the language of equal opportunity from the civil rights movement. In their original form, both movements ran into significant limitations in their ability to draw support, and both turned to a very effective political argument from the civil rights movement to add passion and breadth to their mode of appeal.

...In January 2002, President George W. Bush signed into law a wide-reaching piece of standards legislation passed with broad bipartisan support. The title of this law explains the rhetorical shift involved in gaining approval for it: the No Child Left Behind Act...What we find here is a marriage of the standards movement and the civil rights movement. From the former comes the focus on rigorous academic subjects, core curriculum for all students, and testing and accountability; from the latter comes the urgent call to reduce social inequality by increasing educational opportunity...”[16]

“...in trying to understand the factors affecting the public character of American public schools, the consumer effect on the school system is quite different in both form and function from the reformer effect...reformers are intentionally trying to change the school system and improve society through their reform efforts. In contrast, consumers are simply pursuing their own interests through the medium of education...they are just trying to get ahead or at least not fall behind. But, in combination, their individual decisions about pursuing education do exert a significant impact on the school system. These choices shift enrollments from some programs to others and from one level of the system to another. They pressure political leaders to shift public resources into the educational system and to move resources within the system to the locations that are in greatest demand...When consumers use education to address their own social problems, the social consequences are no less substantial for being unintended.

...The core of the problem is Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. We want schools to express our highest ideals as a society and our greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually enabling us to achieve these goals, since we really do not want to acknowledge that these two aims are at odds with each other...As a result, the system continues to lure us to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools while continually frustrating our ability to meet these goals. It locks us in a spiral of educational expansion and credential inflation that has come to deplete our resources and exhaust our vitality. And we cannot find a simple cure for this syndrome because we will not accept any remedy that would mean giving up one of our aims for education in favor of another. We want it both ways." [17]