The Ideology of Education: The Commonwealth, the Market, and America's Schools

5. Education and Civic Culture

ccording to any number of commonwealth-oriented scholars and analysts, the primary purpose of public education is to “indoctrinate the coming generation with the basic outlooks and values of the political order” (Key 1961, p. 316). In this perspective schools are repositories and replicators of value systems that manifest themselves in norms and behavioral dispositions (Arnstine 1995). Their job is not to respond to their external task environments but to shape that external environment by storing and passing on the norms and values that constitute political or civic culture. This notion is deeply embedded within the commonwealth ideology, shaping its conception of education and its primary objectives, preferences on who should control education, and how that control should be administratively structured. These beliefs support the claim that education has an important role in supporting a democratic polity, a claim with a long history in the United States. A number of revolutionary-era politicians argued a system of schools under centralized government control would be critical to sustaining and expanding the success of the American experiment in democracy. The best known proponent of this argument was Thomas Jefferson, who tried—with very mixed success—to establish a centralized system of public education in Virginia.1 Although Jefferson and other revolutionary-era notables such as John Adams were unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade their fellow citizens to support a mass system of public education, their argument that public schooling could make a critical contribution to the civic health of the nation never lost currency. A half-century after Jefferson introduced a bill calling for a statewide system of public schools into the Virginia House of Delegates, Horace Mann and others like him managed to transform the original idea of a mass system of public education into bricks and mortar reality on a state by state basis. Because of his successful efforts to proselytize the virtues of public education, Mann, a 101 5 Education and Civic Culture A Massachusetts lawyer and politician, is remembered as the father of public schooling. At the center of his proselytizing efforts was the argument that nothing less than the survival of the republic depended on the creation of centralized systems of public education. Schools would support democracy by teaching the values of tolerance and public spiritedness , and by promoting a willingness to participate in social and political life. While Mann also promoted the economic value of education, his main arguments favored those “rooted in moral principles or civic virtues” (see Vinovskis 1995, 92–103). So the primary reasons mass systems of public education exist in the United States, and the reason governments run them, is because education is seen as an effective means of instilling civic values into the citizenry . Such republican sentiments are often explicitly articulated in the state constitutions that legally mandate the existence of public education (Rebell 1998). From at least Jefferson’s time, the importance of education to the nation’s civic health was considered so critical that commonwealth advocates argued that schools should be under the direct control of the state and free of sectarian agendas.2 Although Jefferson’s attempts to establish public grade schools were largely unsuccessful, educational historians argue they are particularly notable because of their general insistence that they be free from church interference, and served to deliberately shift the “prestige and resources of the state from the church to the school as the most appropriate agency for carrying on . . . extramural education” (Cremin 1980, 442). The previous chapter suggested that institutional structure is capable of shifting the mission priorities of education away from the communal ends of the democratic process and towards more sectarian value systems. Market-based education systems create this potential by allowing the indoctrination of narrow value agendas favored by small, homogenous groups of citizens (what Madison would call factions) to become primary school objectives. Such possibilities raise obvious problems for the civic role of education traditionally used to justify its existence . Looking at the variation in the educational objectives pursued by teachers, however, provides only a preliminary glimpse into the potential cultural impact of structural reforms in education. The larger issue is how more market-like systems shape the civic attitudes and behavioral predispositions of students, the “coming generation” who will ultimately determine how the nation’s political culture evolves. While commonwealth supporters from both consensus and conflict theory vantage points argue that schools play an important role in determining civic attitudes and behavior, this argument is also adopted by market advocates as...