The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education

Introduction

Introduction T he seductions of redemption are the substance of human transformation . Children become adolescents and then young adults, and with new eyes they confront the world of illusion presented to them as reality by teachers and parents. These moments can be bracing, liberating, terrifying, confusing. Often they signal a change of perspective that creates a hunger for something “real” where unreality once prevailed. Colleges and schools are the proving grounds of illusion. There, new realities displace old as young minds seek the promise that the world’s revealed profanities and injustices can be replaced by the salvational promises of ideology and belief. Redemption is a risky wager, especially in a secular context. Framed by theology, redemption is bolstered by faith in the divine. But in secular humanist education, redemption’s promise of an actualized self and a perfectible society is at constant risk of being measured against the evidence . American society, in both its secular and religious dimensions, was founded on the idea that redemption is available to true believers. But the carriers of that idea in the Puritan colonies also believed that only an elect few had access to salvation. Contemporary academies provide a context for seeking that covenant anew. They proclaim openness to all, but membership in their ranks requires allegiance to secularly evangelistic education’s assumption that it can heal a broken world, even as it duplicates that world’s fractures. When that evangelism is calibrated, even unknowingly, to fix the world by ignoring the world’s innate inequities and systemic flaws, the project of secular redemption championed by these academies becomes an exercise in collective illusion making instead of illusion breaking. In the United States, illusions cultivated in the academy are crucial to the creation and sustenance of American domestic and foreign policy. For the academic trajectory is a necessary process through which young men and women who aspire to occupational significance, wealth, and power rise to the upper levels of business, government, and the liberal professions, those positions where policy is enacted. Secular redemption through occupational success at all levels is, moreover, associated with qualitative social change and progress. Personal salvation through 2 / Introduction­ education is integrated with hope for the solution of the enduring problems of poverty, disease, and war. This institutionalization of academically nurtured redemption in the service of progress obfuscates how education often serves the status quo while it engenders the illusion of change. A deeper understanding of the interplay between what academies profess and what they actually teach is the goal of this study. This book is about the education of the young for life in American society. It explores how youth from different social classes encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in schools that prepare them for the world. It describes the class-specific education of three residential communities against the historical backdrop of the end of World War II to the present. Here, ethnographic portraits of a small liberal arts college, an even smaller high school for boys, and a U.S. Job Corps center illustrate larger issues of class, bureaucracy, and religion in American society. These ethnographic case studies aim to deepen an understanding of the relationship between education and society in the United States. They explore how youth are prepared to negotiate the occupational and extraoccupational realities they face as adults, and to what extent they encounter these realities in the educational communities where they reside. The book also describes how schools contribute to the formation of that bureaucratic character which sustains the occupational basis for and mass acceptance of American domestic and foreign policy. We analyze the academic preparation of middle- and upper-class youth for leadership, management, and technical positions in the corporate world, government, the military, and the liberal professions. We also describe the educational training for the middle and lower levels of bureaucracy where policy is coordinated, honed, and applied. Finally, we describe the academic basis for the acceptance of domestic and foreign policies by the middle and lower classes. In analyzing how schools in their socialization of youth serve dominant political-economic institutions, we confirm Karl Marx’s assumption that education, as an instrument of social control, supports the concentration of wealth and power in the upper classes while coordinating the middle and lower classes in the service of that concentration. But in our analyses of the broader implications of three academies, we also grapple with those secular humanistic values that students, teachers, and administrators internalize in their attempts to...