Get-Smart-Quick Schemes No Substitute for Reform

As we enter the year 2000, and schooling has moved to the front row of citizens’ concerns, what suggestions do we hear for creating an education millennium? Pupils should address teachers respectfully as “ma’am” and “sir.” Schools should be wired to the Internet. Schoolchildren should wear uniforms. School districts should raise money by giving a soft-drink manufacturer exclusive rights to tout and sell its sodas on campus. Students should fill in the proper circles on their standardized tests with No. 2 pencils, and if they don’t, they should repeat the grade. Social promotion is out, nonsocial nonpromotion is in.

If all this fails, ex-junk-bond salesman Michael R. Milken is in the wings with his Knowledge Universe companies offering opportunities ranging from preschools for toddlers to courses for corporate entrepreneurs. Where would money come from to finance for-profit schooling? Let vouchers and the market work their wonders.

But is there something missing in our thinking about public education? In its origins, the public school was rooted in a millennial faith that seems forgotten amid today’s many get-smart-quick schemes.

The founding fathers of our public-school system took long perspectives both backward and forward. Thomas Jefferson, who developed the rationale for America’s public schools, declared in his first inaugural address that this nation was “the world’s best hope.” Jefferson believed the American republic was a hazardous experiment that could succeed only if citizens were properly educated. Public-school districts were the best seedbed of democracy, where adults would learn to be good republicans by practicing self-rule at the local level. Their children, in turn, would read histories teaching them how to preserve their rights and liberties.

Jefferson insisted in 1811 that the outcome of this experiment would shape the millennium to come: “The eyes of the virtuous all over the earth are turned with anxiety on us as the only depositories of the sacred fire of liberty, and . . . our falling into anarchy would decide forever the destinies of mankind and seal the political heresy that man is incapable of self-government.” He never lost this sense that liberties were precarious and unchecked authority could turn leaders into wolves preying on the people.

The generation of activists who crusaded for public schooling in the mid-19th century--reformers like Horace Mann--also saw their task in long perspective. Many common-school crusaders believed that the second coming had already occurred, not as an apocalyptic Armageddon but as a gradual establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Schools, said Mann, were “the way that God has chosen for the reformation of the world.” In this crusade to transform the republic into God’s country, Mann asserted that the United States was already so favored because of its values that it was a thousand years ahead of Europe. Only universal schooling, he said, could preserve and augment that advantage by creating a virtuous society, individual by individual. But Mann and his cohort of reformers had a lively sense of the evils of poverty and corruption that afflicted the republic. Like Jefferson, these common-school activists argued that the fate of the nation depended on the character of citizens. The school was to be the cornerstone of democracy.

At the turn of the 20th century, a third philosopher of democracy said education was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” He called the teacher the “usherer in of the true kingdom of God.” This prophet was John Dewey, whose faith in progress through education was shaken but not destroyed by the inhumanity that marked the first half of the 20th century. Dewey maintained that the American republic was still an uncertain experiment and democracy endangered by economic exploitation. When efficiency experts tried to industrialize humanity, Dewey worked to humanize industry. Democracy, to him, was not the patriotic litany proclaimed by the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution, but wise, collective decision-making and participatory classroom practice.

Now, at the turn of the 21st century, people talk about many ways to improve education but rarely about the fundamental ideas that link schooling to our political past and future. Some reformers place their faith in technology. Some create promotional exams that only half the students can pass and then hope this reveals a salutary toughness. Some yearn for an imagined golden age of ecstatic obedience in classrooms. Some insist that vouchers and markets will eventually generate fine schools for all.

What is missing? The kind of awareness of how public education fits into the larger scheme of things that marks our best political philosophies of education. Jefferson, Mann and Dewey shared a sense that the United States had a special origin and destiny. This was the essence of their millennialism, and it produced a special kind of trusteeship on their part that looked both backward and forward.

Their hopes for the future did not lead them to romanticize the past or relax their efforts in the present. It did, however, give resonance and direction to their campaigns for civic education, precisely the qualities missing in most educational discourse as 2000 arrives. *