Tom Ultican here reviews Johann Neem’s history of public schools in early America: “Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.”
Neem, a historian of American education, is an immigrant to the United States from India. He attended public schools. He met students from many different background. From his own life experience, he understood the genius of public education in fostering a democratic culture.
Ultican found Neem’s history to be especially relevant in understanding debates today.
He reviews important topics in the book and sees how they relate to today’s battles over curriculum, pedagogy, religion, and charter schools.
He writes:
My main take away from this read is that in developing universal free public education in America the foundation for democracy was forged. That foundation is under attack today. Read this book and you will deepen and reinforce your own need to protect America’s public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ultican should send a copy of his review to all of our elected representatives since many of them are failing to do their duty to provide adequate public education to the citizenry. They need a lesson in democracy.
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From what we are hearing from politicians, it feels as if very few representatives actually READ. Over and over and over they (even many who say they know better) parrot the same tone-deaf mass media message that charter schools are great, teachers are bad, testing is unquestionably needed…
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Glad to see Neem’s book get “out there.” University courses in education are rife with excellent literature that takes in all sorts of historical aspects of it. Of course, I didn’t read everything available at the time (early-90’s), but I don’t remember one that, as a basic theme, relates free public education to the building of a democratic ethos from the ground up. I remember that the relationship is mentioned here and there, but not as a major theme.
Such a book is needed precisely because, often, people remark that our founding documents don’t mention education; however, the relationship is quite clear in Jefferson’s writings, some of which are foundational to the development of Virginia politics (ironically).
More importantly, two things: First, because ours is a WRITTEN Constitutional democracy (instead of based on brute power or bloodlines) that takes the rule of law as sacrosanct, the idea that the polity (the demos of a democracy) cannot READ is anathema to its maintenance. It follows that a sufficient understanding of our own political ground, and to what is going on in the world around us that influences our political being, is essential, again, of/for/to the polity.
Demos: people. Crasis: power. Education may not be stated in our documents, but it certainly is assumed by its very meaning as a term: democracy, not to mention: re-public.
Without freepublic education, democracy doesn’t have much of a change to survive. CBK
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I am working my way through Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos.
The primacy of reading and calculating predates our Constitution, but is clearly important to “maintain” the values it sets forth.
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Hello Laura: Thanks for the resources. I think we’ve all entered a stage of permanent eye-roll. CBK
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Considering a future without free public education and the long term consequences of privatizing things that had been publically supported is truly frightening. Everyone involved in public education, whether currently teaching, retired, or “watchdog” friends of public education should seriously consider ways in which they can begin to sway local and national representatives in government to pay attention, to realize what public education means to America, and to find ways to stop this madness.
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After reading many posts and comments on this blog, which I’m very thankful exists, how come we are not calling this system that’s undermining public education and our very democracy by its right name: neoliberalism? There’s many a great article and book out there that hits the target with pinpoint understandable jargon and nomenclature with regard to anchoring the ed reformspeak buzzwords such as “choice,” “free market,” “competition,” “accountability,” and so forth:
A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey (book).
Common Core: National Standards and the Threat to Democracy, by Nicholas Tampio (book).
“Neoliberalism, Social Darwinism, and Consumerism Masquerading as School Reform,” by Christopher H. Tienken. (article–click or copy/paste link below)
Click to access Neoliberalism_Tienken_2013.pdf
“What and who are fueling the movement to privatize public education — and why you should care,” (article–click or copy/paste link below)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/05/30/what-and-who-is-fueling-the-movement-to-privatize-public-education-and-why-you-should-care/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3d540455fc6d
For years, since the full frontal assault on public education under the purview of the Obama administration, colleagues as well as parents, students and community members have asked me, a high school English teacher in NYS, “what in God’s name is going on here?” I would, more or less, dismissively respond with cynical resignation that “it’s all about money for the testing companies and publishers,” etc., knowing full well this conclusion fell short of a much starker, complex truth. Intuition told me there was something much deeper anchoring all this as part of a much bigger picture, part of a much longer history with public education as its most recent chapter. Since Cuomo’s 2015 budgetary signing off on a teacher evaluation system that punished teachers with 50% of their rating on test scores (since then, a moratorium has been enacted holding off on linking teacher efficiency to test scores), with everyone knowing full well this approach to accountability was riddled and rife with flaws, faults, and futility, I said, “Enough’s enough, WHY are politician’s on both sides of the aisle continuing to do this to public education knowing full well of the absurdity and ‘berserkery’ in the face of common sense, rational debate and empirical evidence?” The last two years of reading and researching on my own, with this blog (thankfully) guiding me in a direction when I felt I got lost, the many facts and truths that accompanied the discovery of a new way at looking at all this realigned my perceptions with, again, an accurate language with which to articulate the dynamics of what has been called by participants on this blog and elsewhere, ‘corporate education reform.’ Contemporary education reform’s historical roots can be traced back to the early 70s, even beyond that to the mid 50s with free-market enterprise’s early guru Milton Friedman and his then-advocacy for school vouchers, an entirely novel and even bizarre concept at that time. So with this bounty of historical treasure available, how come we’re still using a….I don’t know…hodgepodge or patchwork language to articulate all the dynamics at play here when it’s abundantly clear who or what is driving this?
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Yossarian: Another background text for our present “brand” of neo-liberalism comes from Ayn Rand and her so-called “political philosophy.” With that as a powerful but oh-so-wrong-headed formative resource, whats generally referred to as neo-liberal is really code for “dark ideology built in a silo of reactionary and vacuous selfishness.”
The best I can say about Rand (after reading her), is that she did have a bit more understanding of politics and the human condition than you can find in a bag of dyed hair. CBK
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CBK: ‘Tis true. Even the term ‘neoliberalism’ itself is a term that sounds as if the concepts embedded within its features are legitimate and maybe even wholesome, given what old school embedded FDR ‘liberalism’ did for society from 1935 to 1973. To collectivize the concepts of neoliberalism as simple exploitation or rapacious capitalism could risk a tone of histrionics that’ll be dismissed by the ruling media pundit class which could hamper any quality heuristic approach to dealing with the issues regarding public education.
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Yossarian: As concepts, they ARE close, and so, I think, prone to confusion. And confusion is the camel’s nose-under-the-tent for those whose aim is to destruct. Also, audiences are so wide, . . . besides the INTENDED breakdown of democratic institutions, there are also common problems of today’s communications built right into our present situation, even when the best of intentions are present.
An aside: one of the talking heads showed a speech that Reagan gave in Europe on the anniversary of D-Day. He talked about Russia, and then about the power of democratic institutions . . . the rule of law, the free press, UNIONS, etc. . . . and how they are worth preserving. Oh, well. CBK
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