The Politics of the Public School

Early to mid 20th century school.

The Foundation for Economic Education has published a piece arguing on historical evidence that the American public school system has always been a mechanism for indoctrination.

It was based, the author asserts, on the Prussian system formed in the early nineteenth century by Fichte. And he includes some killer quotes from Fichte:

“Then, in order to define more clearly the new education which I propose, I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and the clear confession of its impotence and futility.”

“[Y]ou must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.”

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished ... When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

That’s pretty shocking; but it seems to explain what is taught, and not taught, in the public schools. It is the obvious way to go if you want to subvert a democracy, and retain a de facto oligarchy despite democratic trappings. Whoever controls the education of children can hope to manufacture the social consensus for the next generation.

Early to mid 20th century factory.

This, incidentally, has always been the great advantage of mothers, and of women: that they have overwhelming influence over children in their formative years. Ensuring, in fact, that as a sex women could never have been genuinely oppressed by their society. Without overlooking this, feminism would never have been credible. We have been missing it in the case of the schools too.

Mostly, I suspect, because most of us grown-ups don’t really give a damn about children.

Public schools seem designed, despite lip service to the contrary, never to teach leadership, and never to teach how to think. They seem designed to turn out passive cogs for industry, human tools—the exact opposite of the intent of education in either Confucian or the Western classical tradition. The modern public school seems built on the model of the factory. 

Plato, Confucius, Aristotle.

Government does have a legitimate interest in the schools, to train for good citizenship and to encourage all to pull together in the civic enterprise. It is shared values that make a community. If you do not have them, no police force of any size or level of armament can substitute.

But to ensure and preserve a free and democratic country, it is also important that government not be the only authority with input. That is totalitarian. There is far too much opportunity here for those in power to indoctrinate suit their own interests. He who controls the schools controls the future.

Better, to begin with, if schools were run at the most local level possible. The tendency, however, has been relentlessly in the opposite direction, to greater provincial or state control, and greater federal control. Better still to give them to the various churches to administer, with some government input. Better still to allow any private corporation, in the broad sense of that term, to open a school, on a level basis in terms of tax funding—vouchers, say. Foolishly, instead, we have been moving systematically to remove all influences that might check or balance government.

I have some immediate sense of the result for American schools. I am teaching Chinese students a current American reading curriculum. Their parents, very sensibly, want them to get an immersion in American culture.

It seems obvious to them that an American reading curriculum would be built around the classics of American literature. This is of course what my Chinese students and their parents would want and need. But it is at least as important that this be so for American students, for several reasons.

First, selecting the classics more or less automatically means the best writing available. Second, classics are arrived at more or less by popular and scholarly consensus over time, a safely neutral party in terms of present politics. So they and the curriculum would be free from political manipulation. Third, a curriculum of classics would automatically select for the most interesting and most important themes, subjects, and issues, best calculated to most interest students, and so get them committed to the reading enterprise. Fourth, it would be the best model for students in how to write well. Fifth, it would give them the body of cultural allusions, of shared knowledge, they will need to read fluently—because authors will always assume a certain body of cultural knowledge in their audience. “I struck out” can mean nothing to someone who did not grow up watching or playing baseball. Sixth, the same cultural allusions are just what make up the very fabric of the American community—they are what binds any nation together. They are exactly the things a public school should be there to teach. They are just what any American needs to become, in turn, a contributor to the culture.

But the classics are not the readings taught. The texts are all recent, indifferently written, and with a dull sameness in detail. They seem always about some young girl (never a boy) who has just moved to a new school and feels anxious about fitting in. Usually, she is an immigrant. She manages to fit in by “sharing” something about her foreign culture. Something corny and touristy. This week a Japanese girl showed her new friend how to make Japanese macha tea, and her parents showed their parents how to make a (Japanese) garden. Last week a Korean girl showed her new prospective friend a jade bracelet, with her name on it in Korean characters. The week before a Brazilian girl “shared” her costume and dance routine for Carnival. And so on and on. Always something that seems pulled from some standard tourist guidebook. Gardens are a recurrent theme, perhaps because they suggest nature: this week, the supposed Japanese community garden; the week before last, a girl was helping an elderly neighbour make a garden. 

Samba dancers, Rio Carnival.

These stories are never written by an author of the ethnicity portrayed. Unsurprisingly; a real Korean or a real Brazilian would wince at the cartoonish otherness of it. Carnival? The immigrant Korean girl, for example, is named “Yoon.” Koreans speaking English invariably take an “English” name, and “Yoon” is not even plausible as a Korean name. It is a family name, not a personal name. It looks as though the author and his editors and the levels of bureaucrats who approved the text all made the common foreigner’s mistake of confusing this issue, since Korean family names come first. It would be like calling your daughter “Jones.” A real immigrant Korean would more likely call herself “Sophia” or “Meg.”

And, inevitably, the Brazilian girl is named “Maria.” She is generic.

It is all at the level of the old stage Irishman with his clay pipe, or the old musician in blackface.

Well-meaning, but wince-inducing.

In sum, these immigrants are not seen or realized as human. We are on a visit to the human zoo.

In the meantime, the reader learns nothing about American culture, and are given only a false and trivializing vision of some foreign one. My Chinese students spend their class hours learning falsehoods about Korean or Japanese culture, and nothing about the USA or any other English-speaking culture.

It is all at the same time drearily repetitive, unimaginative, trite, and boring. The range of issues and thoughts it deals with are tightly circumscribed. What one is supposed to think about them is usually clearly indicated. It is, in a word, crude propaganda. Any bright student is going to be alienated from reading.

“Culture” is stressed often as a concept, lesson after lesson. But it is defined wrongly. Culture, the textbook explains, is made up of “food, clothing, music, language, customs, holidays, sports, and symbols.”

Something obvious is missing from that list.

Merriam-Webster defines culture as: “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.”

But in these texts and their definition culture is reduced to only this last item, material traits. Beliefs, the essence of any culture, are not mentioned: religion, values. Neither are social forms: legal principles, family structures, political concepts, ethics. Confucianism, sharia, liberal democracy, the Mosaic law, rabbinical tradition, common law: not to be considered culture. “Culture” is reduced to a materialistic and superficial affair. It is just something we do for amusement in our spare time.

The text then asks the payoff question: “how do people from different cultures contribute to a community?” Demanding, by how it is phrased, that one not dissent from the more fundamental question. Indoctrination is only thinly masked as inquiry.

This question is awkward, given a proper understanding of culture, because almost by definition a community means a shared culture. Culture is the social forms and social norms of a social group. The students are being required to assert something self-contradictory. This becomes obvious to a Chinese student.

It is immediately obvious why the texts do this, and ignore most of culture: because if it was included, the problems with multiculturalism would be apparent. And its political agenda is to promote multiculturalism. But by this approach, real social problems are not just being papered over, with possibly dire consequences. Everyone is, in effect, stripped of their culture, and their humanity, and left without anything but transitory material self-interest, if that, to bring them together. And no meaning to their lives.

The question is, is stripping the curriculum of all values made necessary by multiculturalism, or is multiculturalism made necessary to strip society of all values? I suspect the latter. Multiculturalism here aligns with postmodernism.

It all might seem superficially reasonable on the grounds of “religious freedom” and avoiding controversy. The moment we start in on deeper issues about human life, ethics, or even good manners, we risk ruffling feathers; we might violate somebody’s beliefs, right? Some parent is going to get upset. So we just take it all out. Right?

But that is not neutral. Instead, it has us sending a clear and insistent message to the young that values are not important, that there are no values, or they ought to be ignored, that life is best without them, that only material things matter. Life is all just about stuff: clothing, food, entertainment, holidays.

No wonder rates of depression are probing the stratosphere. And no longer in radio contact with Houston.

And we have clearly gone well beyond that justification, to an actual deliberate attack on values and meaning as such. That seems to be the real engine driving multiculturalism, postmodernism, transgenderism, and things like the recent attempt in Ontario to force through a controversial sex education curriculum. Obviously, the concern there was not to avoid offending anyone’s values or beliefs. Values and beliefs are the things under attack. Even basic things like the distinction between male and female.

The likeliest reason why this is happening, sadly, is that any established values or meanings serve as an inevitable objective check on people satisfying their immediate desires. Put a group in power who have a guilty conscience, or who have not themselves been deeply instilled with the need for moral values, and their natural tendency is going to be to want to get rid of them all. Values, moral values, and cultural norms generally protect the weak against the strong, and give meaning to life to the poor and the socially vulnerable. They are checks and balances against raw power.