Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam: Public Education, State Centralization, and Teacher Unionism in France and the United States

7. Marianne and Uncle Sam Revisited

 T he preceding chapters constitute, among other things, an effort to respond to the lacuna identified by Peter Lindert at the very beginning of this book: Comparative institutional histories of public education are few and far between. Today, with their extensive collective bargaining contracts and unity density the envy of unions in the private sector, teachers’ unions are an important part of the decision-making and administrative structures of public education in the democracies of North America and Europe, as well as one of the last bastions of organized labor. The history of teachers’ unions is embedded in broader histories of the expansion of schooling, particularly primary schooling for the masses, along with the struggles of organized labor more generally and the ideological divisions that split societies during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examining the history of unionization struggles in education means looking at both the crucial role that organized teachers have come to play in the politics of public education and at changes in the state apparatus. Public school teachers live and work at the periphery that separates state from society and mediates relations between them. The legitimation of their political associations constitutes a shift in the structure of state authority. If the argument advanced in this book is correct, then the very effort that states made to secure central control over primary schooling at the end of the nineteenth century triggered the contentious activism and subsequent political struggles that yielded teachers’ unions. Just as surely as public school teachers are a part of the state apparatus, so too are their unions anchored in the state. The study of teacher unionism, then, is germane to scholarship on the state, as well as social movements and labor organizing. Marianne and Uncle Sam Revisited 7 160 Conclusion Before I return to centralization and selective engagement, the two causal processes of chief importance in this book, the events of 1968 require some elaboration. No book dealing with teachers’ collective claim making could neglect a few words on the tumults of that year, particularly a book that that treats centralization as a key causal process. French and American Education in 1968 It took decades for the centralization struggles detailed in this book to nurture popular discontent intense enough to generate widespread protest during the 1960s. To be sure, the social and political upheavals of 1968 in these countries had myriad causes. The frustration of (and with) organized labor, widespread disillusion with prevailing political forces, animosity toward war in Vietnam (particularly in the United States), fragmentation and polarization in the civil rights community, and intergenerational angst fail to exhaust the causes of the social turmoil that, in 1968, spilled over into the streets. And the fact that the mobilization of youth was so important is not solely an outcome of the nature of the school systems where teens and young adults spent so much of their lives. The perception that the school system was overcentralized and inflexible had become widespread by 1968 among urban city dwellers in the United States and just about everywhere in France. France By 1968, the French public education system had become the albatross of the central government. Over half a million students crowded the French universities as the children born in the immediate postwar years entered the higher education system; the number was 180,600 only ten years earlier.1 For the first time in French history, the children of craftsmen, clerks, shopkeepers, and even farmers attended the universities, alongside the children of businessmen and professionals. But the schools were slow to meet the needs and demands of a more diverse student population. Furthermore, the Education Ministry routinely underfunded the universities, and most of them lacked proper classroom equipment. The professoriat, meanwhile, had not grown nearly as fast as the number of junior professors and assistants: 7,596 teaching assistants for 1,194 university professors in the sciences, and 2,740 for 1,168 in the humanities and social sciences.2 These discrepancies intensified generational and hierarchical differences. The older generation dominated the highest teaching posts in the academy and held privileged decision-making positions within it. The pedagogical tradition of impersonal professor-pupil relations and the authoritarian mind-set of many professors exacerbated university students’ dissatisfaction with their education and the overall scholastic environment, which appeared unhelpful in navigating their transition into the adult world of work Marianne and Uncle Sam Revisited 161 and ­ citizenship...