NON-GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS:
EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP
Joel Wysong
Cornell University
Of all of the implications of recent liberal theorizing for educational
policy, one stands out clearly — but remains remarkably unnoticed;
government schooling in a liberal democratic state is, at its
core, a contradiction. Education, properly conceived, cannot exist
in a teleological vacuum; for their well-being, children (especially
younger children) need to develop in the nourishing and morally
coherent atmosphere of a “thick” educational community.
But in a liberal state, in order to respect plural visions of
the good, government schools can only legitimately provide a significantly
“thin” educational experience.1
In his recent work, John Rawls has insisted that we must give up a central project of modernity — basing liberalism on a comprehensive moral doctrine, on “claims to universal truth, or claims about the essential nature and identity of persons.”2 Only by deliberately “staying on the surface”3 can liberalism “avoid disputed philosophical, as well as disputed moral and religious, questions,”4 thereby undermining objections that it is just one among many competing conceptions of the good. In a pluralistic society, all we can hope for politically is an “overlapping consensus.”5 Government schools, like other political institutions, must stay on the surface, a surface far too “thin” to adequately support educational purposes.
Although this conclusion is very difficult to acknowledge in a society in which government schooling is the accepted norm,6 this paper takes it seriously and suggests that democratic education, long assumed to be virtually synonymous with government schooling, is actually more likely to occur in non-government schools.
An important charge frequently leveled against “choice” in education is that only government-controlled common schools can adequately provide the education for democratic citizenship that is deemed essential to the functioning of a democratic society. In this context, it is sometimes argued, but more often assumed, that common schools are essential to hold our melting pot society together, that without public schools divisiveness would literally tear our society apart. This view seems pervasive in America — from popular culture to the Supreme Court. But is it really true? If more, most, or even all education took place in non-government schools would our democracy be undermined and eventually doomed? What of an opposing view which claims that as government schools become larger and more bureaucratic, they themselves actually undermine the development of democratic values — which can better be learned in smaller, more autonomous, voluntary associations, including non-government schools?
Of course “choice” is not a debate with just two sides; there are a range of views from those who support government-only education to those who support private-only education. Some supporters of government schools would prefer that there be no alternative. It is interesting to note that historically many of the strongest proponents of government schools have been extremists trying to stamp out the influence of a feared enemy. For example, the law, rejected in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, requiring children to go to government schools “had been adopted after a referendum campaign organized and promoted primarily by the Ku Klux Klan and the Oregon Scottish Rite Masons as part of a strategy to ‘Americanize’ the schools.”7 One visible target of this strategy was the Catholic Church with its parochial schools. In Farrington v. Tokushige, the target was “anti-American” Japanese language schools in Hawaii; in Meyer v. Nebraska, it was teaching in the German language in the World War I era. Although most contemporary proponents of common schooling have more credible reasons as to why they feel that government-controlled instruction in “democratic” values is both right and a necessary part of “conscious social reproduction,”8 it should be sobering for them to consider some of their forebears.
The strong view on the other side of the choice debate is the view that government should not be involved in education at all. Legal scholar Stephen Arons, for example, has argued that government schooling is an unconstitutional assault on children’s First Amendment rights.9
The middle ground was perhaps first articulated by J.S. Mill in “On Liberty” where he claimed that it is appropriate for the state to require compulsory education, to pay for it for those who cannot afford to pay themselves, and possibly even to be one among many “competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.” But even Mill was highly suspicious of a “general State education” which he considered “a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another.”10
The current legal standard, the Supreme Court’s Pierce compromise, holds that non-government schools are free to exist, but may be regulated by the government and are generally not entitled to government financial support. Pierce also left the states free to require “that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught that is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.”11 This principle could be interpreted to mean that the Court accepts the idea that only literacy and some basic factual knowledge relevant to citizenship can be required. But, it does not preclude the view that what is “plainly essential” is some much stronger form of civic republicanism.
In Wieman v. Updegraff, the Supreme Court expressed a stronger view of what is required for responsible citizenship and hence the character of government schools: “To regard teachers — in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university — as the priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion.”12 This paradoxical view that the government school priests of our democracy must nevertheless be critical and open-minded, reflects the inherent tension in an institution which, by its very nature, cannot avoid promoting some view of the good — and yet, in our society, is expected to somehow be neutral regarding such views. As these two examples suggest, the views expressed by the Court regarding education for citizenship tend to be vague and hortatory, showing it to be an “apple pie” sort of issue — all the more reason to consider its assumptions more closely.
What do we mean by “public” education? I think for most people, public education, public schools, and government run and financed schools all mean the same thing: the current familiar, dominant form of education in the United States. But we may ask: Must “public” schools necessarily be government schools? Based on our own situation, where what we refer to as public schools are government schools and, in general, our use of the word public to mean not just relating to everyone in the country, but as a synonym for government, we tend to not even question whether it might be possible that public values, such as those relevant to citizenship, could be cultivated in non-government schools. We assume non-government schools are naturally sectarian (in some sense, usually, though not necessarily, religious) and consequently divisive; government schools, in contrast, because public and government are understood to be synonymous, are non-sectarian and thus non-divisive.
What I am arguing at this point is not that there is necessarily no substance to the claim that government schools are better teachers of public values than non-government schools, but simply that the way we use the words discourages us from even considering any alternative to the assumed view. Our use of the words makes it seem self-evident that public (government) schools must be better promoters of public values than non-government schools. Historically, the use of “common” school, by Horace Mann and others, is related: although it most obviously referred to a school that all children in a community attended, it also came to refer to a particular program of educational reform, “the deliberate effort to create in the entire youth of a nation common attitudes, loyalties, and values, and to do so under direction of the state.”13 In this paper, in order to emphasize my point, I refer to government run and financed schools as government or state schools; not as public schools.
Now let us consider more deeply what is meant by democratic education. Here it is interesting to note the distinction between education and instruction as these terms were used by those who promoted government schooling in the nineteenth century. Instruction “was used to refer to the teaching of skills and information necessary for economic life”; education “referred to the shaping of the character, values, and loyalties of students as future participants in political and social life.”14 Thus, instruction might include the three R’s and even learning factual matters about the structure of our governmental institutions, whereas education meant moral education. The common school reform movement in this country was little concerned with instruction (which was generally adequate for the needs of the time, at least in New England where it began), but with education: inculcating loyalty to the institutions of the new American experiment, replacing “sectarian,” traditional, Christian perspectives with an enlightened “non-sectarian” (Unitarian) one, and, in the 1840s and 1850s, assimilating “the mongrel hordes” of (especially Catholic) immigrants. “The objective of this state-controlled system of popular education…was to shape future citizens to a common pattern.”15
Thus, for the founders of government schooling, democratic education meant far more than the Jeffersonian minimum of insuring literacy and enough familiarity with our institutions to participate in them; it was primarily concerned with ideological identification with a set of moral values. One way of describing this situation is that it was an attempt to maintain the moral consensus that could be assumed by Jefferson but was increasingly threatened by the displacement of an agrarian society by an increasingly industrial one, with its immigrant factory workers.
What about today? What is it that those who promote the notion that only government schools can provide adequate, democratic education are interested in? Are they interested in merely insuring literacy and a certain minimal level of factual knowledge necessary for citizenship? Or, are they, like their counterparts in the nineteenth century, primarily concerned with what we can most accurately denote as moral education? Although there are a great variety of views and motivations, we would be naïve not to recognize the predominance of moral agendas.
A recent example of a strong proponent of democratic education through government schooling is philosopher Amy Gutmann, who in her recent book Democratic Education presents an explicitly moral position: “Cultivating character is a legitimate — indeed, an inevitable — function of education.”16 Of course, the next questions are who will do the cultivating and what range of visions of the good will be tolerated. I have already suggested, following Strike, that a consistent view of liberal neutrality severely limits the range of legitimate visions — essentially enervating government schooling — but Gutmann has not accepted the full force of this argument. To the important question of who should decide what kind of character to cultivate, she considers and rejects three answers:
Theorists of the family state rest educational authority exclusively in the hands of a centralized state in a mistaken attempt to wed knowledge of the good life with political power. Theorists of the state of families place educational authority exclusively in the hands of parents, on the unfounded assumption that they have a natural right to such authority or that they will thereby maximize the welfare of their children. Theorists of the state of individuals refuse to rest educational authority in any hands without the assurance that the choices of children will not be prejudiced in favor of some ways of life and against others — an assurance that no educator can or should be expected to provide.17Gutmann then puts forth her own vision of a democratic state that is
committed to allocating educational authority in such a way as to provide its members with an education adequate to participating in democratic politics, to choosing among (a limited range of) good lives, and to sharing in the several sub-communities, such as families, that impart identity to the lives of its citizens.18For Gutmann, a primary purpose of education is to enable citizens to participate in the collective democratic deliberations necessary for conscious social reproduction: “a society that supports conscious social reproduction must educate all educable children to be capable of participating in collectively shaping their society.”19
In her consideration of the role of non-government schools in the democratic state, Gutmann rejects a parental right of private education as a legitimate justification for non-government schools. Nevertheless, she tolerates their existence (if appropriately regulated) because she feels the alternative of forcing non-government school parents to conform (the majority of whom opt out of government schooling because they want their children to have a frankly religious education) would be even more destructive of democratic values than tolerating the existence of non-government schools. This compromise is acceptable to Gutmann partly because she admits that non-government schools’ record is not bad:
The evidence is scanty, but it suggests that private schools may on average do better than public [government] schools in bringing all their students up to a relatively high level of learning, in teaching American history and civics in an intellectually challenging manner, and even in racially integrating classrooms.20In spite of this record, Gutmann objects to non-government schooling and family choice as a standard — primarily, it seems, because she believes educational authority should be shared by parents and the state: “The risks of democratic [state] and parental tyranny over moral education are reduced (although they can never be eliminated) by providing two substantially separate domains of control over moral education.”21 Thus, her solution is a balance of power between state and parents.
It appears that Gutmann is guilty of the same error for which she faults others in another context — what she describes as requiring an unnecessary dichotomous choice or a tyranny of dualisms.22 Although she does not explicitly say that a society must choose either to be a family state or a state of families — the main thrust of her argument is that the state and families should share control of education — she ignores a significant third choice: small scale local communities, intermediate between the state and families. Although Gutmann obviously is not completely ignorant of such communities and mentions them in passing, she nevertheless seems not to consider them particularly relevant to education. She points out weaknesses of the state of families — potential (and a real history of) abuse of children by parents, a tendency to pass on prejudices, shielding children from diverse associations — but conceives of no corrective, but for families to share their authority over children with the state.
Kenneth Strike points out another significant problem with Gutmann’s overall position: an important feature of Gutmann’s “strong democracy” is that liberty is contingent upon “what is believed about the empirical conditions of achieving democratic community.”23 This contingency violates the liberal principle of neutrality and may be particularly problematic in freedom of conscience disputes leading to substantially different outcomes. I, like Strike, “would not choose a social order in which the Amish cannot live with integrity.”24
In a sense, Gutmann’s position accurately reflects the trend for intermediate associations — which, historically, have fulfilled the corrective role she delegates to the state — to be replaced by agencies of the state. According to legal scholar M.A. Glendon,
families have always shared their functions with other social institutions. What is modern is that today these institutions are apt to be distant bureaucratic entities — large school systems, social welfare agencies, and so forth — rather than neighbors, patrons, and the local school or parish.25It may be that Gutmann has considered this trend and approves of it or is simply accepting the reality that these traditional social institutions have declined in impact and we are, in fact, left with nothing but the state and individuals (loosely aggregated in families). However, since I have not found where she discusses the issue, perhaps she has not seriously considered it. Another aspect of this issue, also not considered by Gutmann, is that not only have intermediate associations been losing ground, but so have families themselves. Glendon, again:
But pervasive in all the recent developments we have surveyed is the tendency for law and social programs to break the family down into its component parts and to treat family members as separate and independent….Without any particular purpose to do so, modern legal systems in varying degrees have come close to realizing a dream of the French revolutionaries: that citizens would one day stand in direct relation to the state, without intermediaries.26The greatest threat to education, including democratic education, is this very concrete “tyranny of dualism” — centralized state and atomized individual. Truly moral education, including that recommended by Gutmann, can only take place in a community. According to Kenneth Strike,The historic significance of this development is apt to be overlooked unless we remind ourselves of how much once stood between the state and the citizen and how modern both of these concepts are….The centralized modern state and the free, self-determining individual were both made possible by the destruction or decay of the old society of groups. They were, in a sense, born together.27
“rootedness” in community is required for the achievement of various goods and for development. A central problem of schooling in liberal democratic societies is to find ways to balance the need for rootedness in community against the requirement to avoid cross cultural and transgenerational dominance.28But, for Strike, as for Gutmann, the community required for education is not the family state, the polis: “the identification of community with the state is the greatest danger to liberty.”29 If it is not to be a family state or a state of families, what shall it be? Fortunately, there is a choice other than Gutmann’s sharing of authority between state and family: education in relatively intimate communities intermediates between state and family. These can be culturally significant “thick” communities providing the kind of initiation into the particularistic modes of thought and behavior that provide the foundation for the later development of critical thinking — which is necessary to understand and appreciate democratic, as well as other, values.
As Glendon discusses, there is a significant tradition of writers concerned about the importance of intermediate associations and the perils of their loss, including Edmund Burke, Tocqueville, and Durkheim. Unlike the days when the founders of our nation saw these kinds of associations as obstacles to the integration of society into a state, in our time of centralized state power (a degree of centralized power inconceivable to the Founding Fathers), intermediate associations provide a much needed buffer between the individual and the state:
For Tocqueville, then, the simultaneous rise of the free, self-determining individual and the centralized nation-state were historical achievements which represented dangers as well as advances for human freedom. The elimination or mere decay of institutional subsystems standing between individuals and the state represented a loss of countervailing power, contributed to atrophy of the skills of governing, and imperiled a certain strength of character and independence of mind that he believed could be developed only within families and local communities.30Intermediate associations also provide a level of community where an individual can feel a sense of belonging and meaning in life that is not possible (despite Rousseau’s hopes) in a large state. And, most important for democratic education, as Glendon points out, they provide various forums in which democratic principles can be meaningfully learned and actually practiced. Glendon, quoting Tocqueville:
Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but has not got the spirit of liberty.31Glendon goes on to say:
In the vein of Burke, who believed the feeling of citizenship had to be rooted in attachment to a smaller group, Tocqueville questioned whether the practice of citizenship could survive without experience in a theater smaller than the national polity.32Glendon argues that government should not only tolerate intermediate associations, but take steps to support them because
preservation of meaningful liberty in a society may require citizens with particular sorts of virtues — such as self-restraint, cooperativeness, and generosity — that can be developed only within relatively small groups.33In the past, governments “have often eroded the conditions in which such associations flourish.”34 But now, they “should view the protection of neighborhoods, churches, families, and other voluntary associations as an important social aim.”35 Although she recognizes the difficulty of implementing such a proposal “when legal theory barely possesses the concepts or the vocabulary to deal with groups as such,”36 she feels
the risks of continuing along the path of increasing individual isolation in the immensely powerful public and non-government bureaucracies of the present day seem greater than those of trying to promote, or at least to refrain from harming, relatively frail intermediate groups.37Harking back to my comments about “public” education, I find it telling that Glendon, despite her obvious close attention to these issues, does not mention schools when she gives examples of intermediate groups. As she herself admits, “In some areas of life, the idea of primary public [government] responsibility is nearly unquestioned, as, for example, with the formal education of children.”38 Yet, I would argue that non-government schools could be the most important of mediating structures, in that formal schooling absorbs so much of children’s time.
To summarize the implications for education in a liberal democratic state, first, we must recognize that education if it is to be worthy of the name, cannot be morally neutral. Whatever we decide to teach in whatever kinds of schools, we are going to be inculcating morality of some kind — we must abandon the notion that schools can (or should) be morally neutral.
Second, learning in general is most effective in “thick” communities, and the values that are generally agreed to be democratic values — justice, tolerance, concern for others, critical thinking — are best learned and practiced in relatively small communities, not in large bureaucratic institutions. To the degree that non-government schools exhibit the qualities of coherent, relatively intimate communities, and to the degree that government schools tend toward increasing size, centralization, etc., non-government schools are better places for children to learn and to develop than government schools.
Third, although at first glance it may seem possible that government schools could be modified to exhibit these desired qualities (and indeed there are efforts afoot to decentralize, for example), there are some very significant, inherent obstacles to this ever happening sufficiently. In addition to the lack of sufficient moral consensus in our richly pluralistic society, which, as I have argued, effectively prevents liberal government schools from providing a “thick” learning community, we can include the strong tendency of bureaucratic government school power structures to perpetuate themselves, effectively blocking meaningful reform,39 and significant legal obstacles, particularly the First Amendment, to establishing such a community in a government school.
Fourth, since only non-government schools have the latitude to effectively provide “thick” learning communities and since they have, on the whole (contrary to critics’ fears) done a respectable job of providing democratic education, non-government schools should be favored over government schools. Non-government schools can be “public” schools in the sense that they can effectively transmit publicly desired values. As we have seen, there is much more to democratic education than an intent to inculcate particular values or even to develop a certain kind of character in a captive audience — the most valuable lessons are not learned by listening, but by living and participating in humane institutions “close to home.”
For a
response to this essay, see Collins.
1. Kenneth A. Strike, “The Moral Role of Schooling in a Liberal Democratic Society,” in Review of Research in Education 17 (1991): 413-83.
2. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-51.
3. Ibid., 230.
4. Ibid.
5. Interestingly, by giving up claims to a universal foundation, a more stable consensus is conceivable precisely because extant moral traditions, each claiming universality, are less threatened and are left largely free to justify their participation in the overlapping consensus in their own terms.
6. It may appear, in fact, to fly in the face of historical record — until one realizes that the extent to which the common school was successful educationally was a reflection of just how “thick” a learning experience it provided.
7. M. G. Yudof, D. L. Kirp and B. Levin, Educational Policy and the Law (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company, 1992), 13.
8. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Although some advocate prohibiting private schools, others, including Gutmann, are willing to let private schools continue to exist.
9. Stephen S. Arons, “The Separation of School and State: Pierce Reconsidered,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (1976): 76-104.
10. Quoted in Yudof, et al., Educational Policy and the Law, 17.
11. Yudof, et al., Educational Policy and the Law, 23.
12. Quoted in Yudof, et al., Educational Policy and the Law, 275.
13. Charles A. Glenn, The Myth of the Common School (Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 4.
14. Ibid., 86.
15. Ibid., 76.
16. Gutmann, Democratic Education, 41.
17. Ibid., 41-42.
18. Ibid., 42.
19. Ibid., 39.
20. Ibid., 65.
21. Ibid., 69.
22. Ibid., 36.
23. Strike, “The Moral Role of Schooling in a Liberal Democratic Society,” 451.
24. Ibid., 474.
25. M. A. Glendon, Transformation of Family Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 294.
26. Ibid., 295.
27. Ibid., 298.
28. Kenneth A. Strike, Community and Individualism: Two Views (Forthcoming in Studies in Philosophy and Education).
29. Strike, “The Moral Role of Schooling in a Liberal Democratic Society,” 474.
30. Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, 302.
31. Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, 300.
32. Glendon, Transformation of Family Law, 301.
33. Ibid., 310.
34. Ibid., 308.
35. Ibid., 309.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 311.
38. Ibid., 306.
39. For a discussion of how one experimental voucher plan was undermined by school bureaucracy, see E. G. West, “The Prospects for Education Vouchers,” in The Public School Monopoly, ed. Robert V. Everhart (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1982).