Creating citizens

David Labaree suggests that Americans have neglected the ideals upon which the public school system was founded in pursuit of private educational gains. As part of his argument for this, he points to the growing school choice movement, which lets individuals choose the type of school they want their child to attend. He concludes that a system built on choice and competition may bring about improvements in the private marketplace, but it does not succeed at the “political project of creating citizens.” But what does it mean to make a citizen?

There is no doubt that the foundations of our public education system today are firmly rooted in the common school movement of the 19^th century. The impetus for that movement was multi-faceted, but certainly focused on inculcating citizens. According to Labaree, “The key characteristic of the new common school was not its curriculum or pedagogy but its commonality.” In other words, citizens are created by forcing them to conform to the norm.

In his response to Labaree, “Common schools create the public good,” Johann Neem discusses the adoption of common schools. He writes, “Americans supported public schools because they were involved with them.” He goes on to say that “by working together as neighbors, Americans learned that they had common interests.”

But both Labaree and Neem gloss over the diversity of the thousands of individual communities that came together to create “common schools.” Like-minded individuals, often those sharing the same faith, congregated together; they formed schools out of their shared interests. Writing about the common school movement in 1963, Bernard Mehl noted, “the local community, on their own terms, hire teachers and select textbooks to flavor the school with the particular religious leanings of the local group. As long as a community was united more or less in religious persuasion, it had nothing to fear from the common school because, in fact, it controlled the school’s curriculum.”

I’m afraid that both Labaree and Neem are nostalgic for a time that never existed.

I am not the only person to make this argument. In his book, Private Schools Public Power: A Case for Pluralism, E. Vance Randall explains this more clearly. He writes, “That the common school movement appealed to many should not be mistaken as a consensus on American education. It involved a bitter contest over whose private values and ideologies would be elevated to the status of public beliefs.” In Charles Glenn’s “The Myth of the Common School,” he argues “it was such exertion by groups that did not share the beliefs, values, and loyalties that the common school was intended to inculcate . . . that made the history of popular education in the nineteenth century so frequently stormy.”

And yet, throughout all of this tumult, and in the midst of all of this diversity, American schools (of vastly different stripes) turned out generation after generation of citizens who slowly but surely helped to form our more perfect union.

This is why I don’t fear a system with more choice, more competition, and more pluralism. Majority groups in this country should not co-opt the common school to impose their views on the minority. Parents should not have to check their values at the door to receive the benefit of a free public education. It cannot be true that a system which forces conformity is a system that will be conducive to diversity of thought, pluralism, and the essential qualities of a free and open society.

Labaree and Neem seem to think that citizens are made by forcing individuals to submit their desires to the will to the state. Luckily for us, Americans have never had to do that. We shouldn’t start now.

This is an invited response to “Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good” by David Labaree.