Why Public Schools? They Are Fundamental to Democracy
Why Public Schools? They Are Fundamental to Democracy
Our democracy needs, or actually demands, informed citizens. Consequently, our nation’s founders strongly supported the creation of public schools. Thomas Jefferson said:
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
It is critically important for children themselves but also our country. Education enables its citizens to develop their full potential, which enables our democracy to flourish. It is about both helping individuals learn and grow and creating a successful and prosperous society.
Again, as Jefferson explains:
The object is to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country, for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind, which, in proportion to our population, shall be double or treble of what it is in most countries.
Our nation has become a leading voice for democracy in the world and one of the world’s wealthiest nations in large part to public education. The vast majority of people in the United States, including doctors, scientists, business leaders, and religious leaders, owe their teachers and public schools a great deal of gratitude for all that they have become.
And yet, from time to time, we must relitigate the very existence of public education. Just this week, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for the 2022 Ohio soon-to-be-open Senate seat, Josh Mandel, called for the abolition of public schools.
Mandel is proposing something more akin to a theocracy than a democracy, and he is effectively rejecting much of our nation’s history and state constitutions that have established a right to public schools, including the Ohio Constitution as modified in 1851.
The general assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools, throughout the State; but, no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state.
Meanwhile, others have urged the privatization of public schools. But as Benjamin R. Barber wrote in 2004:
. . .there is something deeply disturbing, even perverse, about current political rhetoric that has seized on privatizing (de-publicizing) America’s schools. For to take the public out of education is to take the common out of the commonwealth. It is to undermine the function of schooling as what Alexis de Tocqueville sagely called the arduous “apprenticeship of liberty.” It is to forget that liberty must be learned, that while we are, to be sure, “born free” we are also born as private individuals whose God-given rights are abstractions until realized through engaged and competent citizenship.
Stated simply: born free in theory, but free in reality only when we become citizens. We are not born citizens but acquire the rights and responsibilities that comprise citizenship only through Tocqueville’s long and arduous apprenticeship for which public education is the chief instrument.
Barber adds:
Education not only speaks to the public, it is the means by which a public is forged.
Still others argue that education is all about the parents.
But Secretary Pompeo, it is NOT all. Schooling is not and should not be completely centered around parents.
First, there is a long-established societal or governmental role to education. In the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:
Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.
Education is also about children themselves.
Consequently, students should have a voice in their own education where they can learn and grow with their peers. Students need support from parents and government but sometimes need protection from parents or government.
Children’s needs from education, independent of parents and government, should be respected. As Rob Reich explains:
Children are not mere extensions of the parent; children are not their parents’ property. . . . Children have an interest, separate from what their parents or the state may wish, in becoming independent adults and becoming minimally autonomous. In certain circumstances, these interests may place them in conflict with their parents or the state.
Although there is no doubt as to the importance of parental engagement in schools, parents must serve as a partner to rather than authoritarians over teachers, schools, students, and society, including taxpayers, in public education. The partnerships that parents, educators, students, and communities engage in demand some basic level of civility and forbearance.
In President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, he said:
So let us begin anew — remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems that divide us.
Again, parental engagement is important and increased communication and input are positive, but it must not be controlling or tyrannical. For example, the yelling, screaming, threatening, harassment, and censorship of educators, as if they are extreme adversaries, does not serve our children, our schools, or our democracy well.
People are also harassing children.
Teaching character and behavior has always been one of the goals of public education. Embarrassing behavior by adults is not that. In fact, adults would not tolerate such behavior from children.
And yet, while the parent engagement is crucial, the “Parental Rights” movement is having negative consequences when it threatens the education, health, safety, and well-being of children and violates the best interests of children.
Schools cannot operate under a model of “parental rights” whereby individual parents decide what their own children are taught in school.
The Washington Post editorial board correctly argues:
No question that parents should have a say in the education of their children, but individual parents can’t dictate that schools teach what they want.
Allowing one parent — or a group of parents — to bully, threaten and intimidate school officials into their way of thinking is not what our democracy is about. And it is not what learning should be about.
For example, imagine an elementary school of 450 students where 15 parents oppose the teaching of evolution, 19 parents believe the earth is flat, 28 are Holocaust deniers, 22 oppose white children learning about slavery, 7 believe in racial segregation, 21 believe in the concept of a school without walls, 49 demand the use of corporal punishment, 18 want to ban Harry Potter books from the school library, 26 want to ban any books that mention the Trail of Tears, 62 believe that parents should be allowed to overrule a physician’s decision that a child with a concussion should refrain from participating in sports, 87 oppose keeping their kids out of school when they have the flu, 9 believe that a child with cancer might be contagious, 29 believe that kids who are vaccinated should be the ones who quarantine, 72 support “tracking” in all subject areas, 32 believe students should not be taught how to spell the word “isolation” and “quarantine” because they are too “scary of words,” 104 don’t like the school neighborhood boundaries, 38 don’t like the bus routes, 71 parents want a vegan-only lunchroom, 4 demand same-sex classrooms, 5 oppose textbooks and want their children only reading from the Bible, and it can go on and on. The vast majority of parents do not agree with any of these things, and yet, parental rights extremists would insist schools must accommodate their views, even if they are completely false, undermine the purpose of education, threaten the safety of children, or promote discrimination.
How can a school operate if every parent can decide every aspect of the education of their child, as some are demanding? It cannot.
Frankly, many parents, step-parents, grandparents, and even the government itself are caregivers for children, and they often disagree (even in the same household). This would lead to chaos and anarchy, which is detrimental to everybody’s children.
There is a whole body of research, much of which is based on studies of schools in Texas, that shows that these factors — school autonomy, managerial networking, and stability — are associated with higher academic performance. . . . Teachers who feel terrified in the classroom cannot serve our students well. They cannot challenge the students to think critically about the world they live in. In the end, therefore, it is students who will bear the brunt of these policies.
This is critically important. For schools to be successful, the Texas Equity Center’s report Money Does Matters! adds:
Research confirms that effective teachers, small classes, pre-kindergarten, interventions, rigorous curriculum, and adequate instructional materials and technology do, indeed, improve student learning and adult success.
There is also the matter of science.
These are the types of things that educators should be allowed to focus on for all students, rather than some of the madness that we are seeing at school board meetings across the country.
In many ways, our schools and the education of our children are being targeted and threatened along with our democracy. As Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, write:
In framing our public schools as extremist organizations that undermine the prerogatives of families, conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. That may rally the base and tilt a few elections in their favor. But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of “rights” only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.
This is a fundamental challenge to our democracy. Barber explains:
The lesson seems obvious: We cannot do without public schools. A nation of fractious individuals schooled in avoidance ceases to be a nation. A democracy of consumers focused on their private interests ceases to be a democracy. A community of multicultural fragments celebrating only difference ceases to be a community. A republic of privately schooled narcissists blind to what they share ceases to have res public and hence is no longer a republic.
Public education is redundant: To be civilized is to understand the nature of commonality, to be learned is to grasp the rights and responsibilities of liberty, to be educated is comprehend the meaning of citizenship. If liberal education is education in the arts of liberty, then there can be no liberal education without public education.
Barber concludes:
Finally, the future of liberal education is the same thing as the future of public education, which is, in turn, the same thing as the future of democracy. America as a commercial society of individual consumers may survive the destruction of public schooling. America as a democratic republic cannot.
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