There Goes the Neighborhood: Rural School Consolidation at the Grass Roots in Early Twentieth-Century Iowa

Preface and Acknowledgments

preface and acknowledgments According to popular accounts, the Americanpublicschool system is in crisis. Schools fail to involve parents effectively in the education of their children. Schools fail to impart the job skills necessary to restore U.S. competitiveness in the global economy. And schools would fail to meet national standards of student achievement—if agreement on these standards could be reached. The focus of most of these criticisms is on performance . Although local control of education appears to remain a core American value, criticism of the public schools seldom entails analysis of schools as local democratic institutions and as important sources of community and individual identity. Indeed, when debates over American public education have touched upon issues of democracy and community at all, they have been preoccupied with identifying the appropriate articulation between various publics and professional educators in determining educational policy—or more colloquially, ‘‘Who should control what?’’ Such has not always been the case. Alexis de Tocqueville, certainly one of the earliest critical observers of American democracy, pointed to the high level of centralization of social power in a single government and complete lack of administrative centralization in the United States in the early 1830s. He defined centralization of government as the concentration of authority to enact general laws common to all parts of the nation under a single directing power, and administrative centralization as the concentration of authority over matters of special concern to only certain localities or parts of the nation in that directing power.1 Tocqueville also stressed that while individualism had been important in the founding of the Republic, he feared that it could become its undoing unless effective local political institutions (he used the term ‘‘provincial’’ instead ix of ‘‘local’’) could be maintained and strengthened. Without effective local institutions to ensure administrative decentralization, he feared that democracy could evolve into a form of soft fascism.2 His solution was to merge state and civil society by linking individuals to a larger political and moral community by way of family, friends, local communities, religion, and other forms of political association.3 For Tocqueville, local community and democracy were mutually, and necessarily, dependent upon one another. Community without democracy was fascism; democracy without community was unbridled greed and anarchy. The founders also understood the importance of community and democracy in the tensions between the individual, civil society, and the state in the American system. In Thomas Jefferson’s view, a predominantly agrarian society of small property owners with families working their own land would ensure individual liberty, check the rise of social inequality, foster local cooperation, and limit the encroachment of the state into the private realm. Private life and public life would be inseparable—a system not dissimilar from that described by Tocqueville. However, ‘‘Jefferson’s friend and constitutional antagonist, James Madison, looked out on the same political landscape and came to very different conclusions about what must be done to guarantee the survival of the body politic.’’4 He too saw the rise of inequality but, unlike Jefferson, saw it as a permanent feature of an essentially competitive human nature about which little could or should be done except to protect individuals from one another by preventing any one group from dominating the others. As a means of achieving this, Madison was much less sanguine about the prospects of democratic rule; instead he saw such protection being provided only by a strong central government. Alexander Hamilton’s views paralleled those of Madison, but were more utilitarian and corporatist. In his view, people would be happy only when their economic interests were maximized, but they could not do this by themselves ; a strong probusiness government was necessary. The implication was ‘‘that prosperity would solve the problem of liberty.’’5 This was precisely what Tocqueville feared. Prosperity would allow ‘‘each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends,’’ leaving the central government as the only apparent power capable of protecting them from anarchy.6 The price paid would be the severing of ties between the public and the private and the failure of the democratic experiment. Lost also would be the promise of democracy—the willingness of a society to consider alternative political and economic systems. Lawrence Goodwyn has argued that in this broader sense democracy died x Preface and Acknowledgments in America with the failure of the Populist revolt in...