Anya Kamenetz is the education reporter for NPR. This brilliant essay appeared in the New York Times. Kamenetz explains why public schools are the essential foundation stone of our democracy.
For the majority of human history, most people didn’t go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world, who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.
Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10do so in public schools.
To an astonishing degree, one person, Horace Mann, the nation’s first state secretary of education, forged this reciprocal commitment. The Constitution doesn’t mention education. In Southern colonies, rich white children had tutors or were sent overseas to learn. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed. Those who learned did so by luck, in defiance or in secret.
But Mann came from Massachusetts, the birthplace of the “common school” in the 1600s, where schoolmasters were paid by taking up a collection from each group of households. Mann expanded on that tradition. He crossed the state on horseback to visit every schoolhouse, finding mostly neglected, drafty old wrecks. He championed schools as the crucible of democracy — his guiding principle, following Thomas Jefferson, was that citizens cannot sustain both ignorance and freedom.
An essential part of Mann’s vision was that public schools should be for everyone and that children of different class backgrounds should learn together. He pushed to draw wealthier students away from private schools, establish “normal schools” to train teachers (primarily women), have the state take over charitable schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.
He largely succeeded. By the early 20th century all states had free primary schools, underwritten by taxpayers, that students were required to attend.
And that’s more or less how America became the nation we recognize today. The United States soon boasted one of the world’s highest literacy rates among white people. It is hard to imagine how we could have established our industrial and scientific might, welcomed newcomers from all over the world, knit our democracy back together after the Civil War and become a wealthy nation with high living standards without schoolhouses.
The consensus on schooling has never been perfect. Private schools older than the nation continue to draw the elite. Public schools in many parts of the country were segregated by law until the mid-20th century, and they are racially and economically segregated to this day.
But Mann’s inclusive vision is under particular threat right now. Extended school closures during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.
School closures threw our country back into the educational atomization that characterized the pre-Mann era. Wealthy parents hired tutors for their children; others opted for private and religious schools that reopened sooner; some had no choice but to leave their children alone in the house all day or send them to work for wages while the schoolhouse doors were closed….
Meanwhile, a well-funded, decades-old movement that wants to do away with public school as we know it is in ascendance.
This movement rejects Mann’s vision that schools should be the common ground where a diverse society discovers how to live together. Instead, it believes families should educate their children however they wish, or however they can. It sees no problem with Republican schools for Republican students, Black schools for Black students, Christian schools for Christian students and so on, as long as those schools are freely chosen. Recent Supreme Court decisions open the door to both prayer in schools and public funding of religious education, breaking with Mann’s nonsectarian ideal.
If we want to renew the benefits that public schools have brought to America, we need to recommit to the vision Mann advocated. Our democracy sprouts in the nursery of public schools — where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Freedom of thought will wilt if schools foist religious doctrine of any kind onto students. And schools need to be enriched places, full of caring adults who have the support and resources they need to teach effectively.
Without public education delivered as a public good, the asylum seeker in detention, the teenager in jail, not to mention millions of children growing up in poverty, will have no realistic way to get the instruction they need to participate in democracy or support themselves. And students of privilege will stay confined in their bubbles. Americans will lose the most powerful social innovation that helps us construct a common reality and try, imperfectly, to understand one another.
Firewall 😦
Nevermind 😀
Don’t worry about the firewall. I posted almost the entire article.
The entire object of the attack on public ed is to keep the large mass of people ignorant so that they swallow Trumpian nonsense. Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis – ALL elite-educated (Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard) – and they are shoveling nonsense to the uneducated, which Trump has said he “loves”, all to maintain voter support of the poorly educated.
Yes, your last seven words could be used as the Trump campaign/political mantra: Maintain Voter Support Of The Poorly Educated
The RICH want a Plutocrats in charge, because they are the Plutocrats.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/plutocracy.asp
Kamenetz’ essay remind us that the original mission of public education was to bring different groups of people from different classes in order to promote a functioning democratic society. It is a pro-social goal that attempts to create mutual understanding, cooperation and tolerance all of which is greatly needed today. My high school in Philadelphia was one of the first of “normal” schools” that was established in 1848. Later, it became a public high school for girls.
I was watching a recent French film the other day, and one of the main characters was a public school teacher in Paris. He decides to quit because he cannot take the disruptive reforms, the micro-managing, the insults and endless bureaucracy that have infiltrated his school. Unfortunately, GERM (global ed reform) like Covid is spreading everywhere. In France it is the neoliberal beliefs of Macron whose so-called reforms are poisoning the education of the poor and working class. I also found this recent article critical of Macron’s plan. It’s brief and in English. https://fathersontv.one/news/macron-and-the-inevitable-privatization-of-the-school/
Sadly, the uneducated, knee-jerk reacting masses only see the negatives regarding Public Education instead of the advantages, as stated in this article, and seen in history. But Americans are not conditioned to think of the good of the whole society, we only care about ourselves and what’s best for our own lives & our own children. That’s a natural tendency, and we all have that in us, but unless we get back to prioritizing things like the “Common Good”, we are just headed in the same direction as the fall of previous great empires, and opening our country up to a takeover by an authoritarian figure. If we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it!
There is no way to get back to prioritizing the “Common Good” until the “Common Core” and its evil twin the standardized test is thrown into a heap of trash and burned. Add to the CC/testing, all the data collecting, SEL & creepy surveys that reduce children into nothing but stupid data points. At some point, many parents (educated and uneducated) are smart enough to know that we have to do what is best for our own children. We can only fight the system for so long. Just look at the statistics and the % of public school teachers and admin. who send their own children to private school while still teaching within the public system (especially for HS)……the “Why” is very telling.
How many people are going to say what I have been saying for 50 years. IT’S THE SYSTEM STUPID! Yet you guys ignore that and just whine. Step 1 Fight like hell to abolish the test. Step 2 Make a plan to develop a system that respects the intelligences and abilities of all children. Yes like in my book. Immediately stop wasting your time bashing charters. It has accomplished nothing
Caplee, the system can’t be reorganized when old white billionaires like Koch and DeVos are siphoning money off to pay for privately managed charters and religious schools.
The hell.it can’t. I wrote about ways to sabotage the system and get away with it. Ignore charters and religious schools because we are smarter. My website has a link to my blog with many free ideas.
If you have been saying the same thing for 50 years and no one listens, maybe you should rethink your message.
am through pussy footing around while you guys destroy yourselves. And more importantly destroy kids. For those to set in their ways to pay for new book with new ideas. take my website link to free blog. Tell me i’m wrong and explain why. You can’t. At least I offer something
As Ted Turner once said “If 90% of the people don’t poh poh you, you don’t have a great idea. i tested mine as a full public school
So in the world in of new tactics, one to five word messaging the gop has used effectively, stop trying to teach and explain and just get the message out… what have you done that’s worked? Words? Actions? Policy decisions?
The good and challenging thing about public education is it is the ONLY example of a democracy left in this country. It’s local, people vote, they care about the administrator who does well by kids and they’re outraged by administrators and others who screw up (without an “aw, gee, let it pass” of the country), they vote on taxes and changes and anyone can show up and talk into a microphone – even the haters.
The gop has co-opted that for their playbook to spread their misguided outrage in local communities and villages everywhere.
So what are us old folks missing in the new gen- (whatever letter we’re on now) world of ignore history, don’t man(or person)-splain, quick fix, existential (no past, no future)?
And offering hundreds – Hundreds – of examples of public data showing charters low achievement, fraud, mismanagement, skyrocketing scandal, closures is Not “bashing.” It is reporting facts! (Thank you NPE)
As an old folk of 80 and a solid Democrat i am not sure of the references to the failed gop. Charters choice etc will self destruct. In fact they already are.
There are no quick fix solutions as systemic change will unleash a series of dominoes in free fall. It’s so far away from a quick fix that it took me 5 books and a blog to explain it.
Letter grades are a lie. Grade levels a farce. Our system of failure pushes kids out of school while blaming the teachers. And yes, I learned by fire as I designed and implemented a fully public innovation school.
Just click on my website and read the forward of my newest book A Failed System by a fabulous teacher Dr Shawn Roscoe Scott.
The forward to my previous book was by my friend Deborah Meier. A true believer.
No longer may we do nothing.
Enjoy
Thanks for the reply with some specificity.
Of course it’s a systems issue.
But it’s become a broken system, not a need for an existing one needing leadership or rethinking.
The “system” is grounded in Checks and Balances – at the local level, too, not just state and federal.
And the corporate boys are buying up Board seats so the only “check” is when they look in a mirror.
They’ve got the executive, legislative, and as evidenced now – the judicial in their pocket or in one pocket. So if they want to ignore facts, science, evidence, majority public opinion then they can and will.
Agreed. My suggestions don’t tweak the current system but replace the broken system. I focus on local. The best the feds can do is ban the test. However we can ignore it and have kids do the same. Actually, my email is caplee68@yahoo.com. If you give me an address, I will send you a book.
I watch an hour or two of a TV series or a movie each night after I’m too tired to focus on anything else.
Currently I’m watching “1883”, on DVD. Sam Elliot is one of the main characters, playing Shea Brennan, a wagon-train master hired by immigrants to guide them and hopefully keep them alive as they cross the lawless, wild, treacherous libertarian-land from Texas to Oregon.
Last night Sam Elliot’s character got angry at the immigrants for not working together, stop stealing food from each other, and bluntly told them if they didn’t learn to work together, they were all going to die.
That’s what is behind the war against our public schools. Those public schools that teach every child are a unifying factor for the United States where children learn how to work together, to get along, to agree to disagree without violence.
Without those public schools, the country will fracture and tear itself apart.
It’s already happening thanks to Traitor Trump, his army of hate-filled, MAGA misfits, and the Koch’s manipulating ALEC political machine, the Walmart Walton family, and too many other extreme-right billionaires to mention, that have been working for decades to destroy the very foundation and fabric of this nation and turn it into a nightmare for everyone else but them since they have the wealth and power to fund private armies to protect their families from the dangerously dumber-than-dumb anarchist MAGA thugs.
Wow, doesn’t that keep you awake for hours thinking more about all of this? Whew.
I suggest “Abbott Elementary” and “Never Have I Ever”
No, I don’t loose any sleep over films like 1883. After I’m done watching, I log on to YouTube and watch music videos, like this one from last night. Can you watch this video with dry eyes to the end?
Then I crawl into bed and read from books. About a half our later, I turn off the lights.
Lloyd,
What an amazing video!
I know, and I couldn’t resist listening to it a second time, a moment ago. And my eyes did not stay dry. Did you also find your eyes getting moist as your sense of well being grew at the same time?
I took a break from finishing up the last set of my daily exercise routine, because I wanted to explain the reason behind my evening routine, why I spend about an hour before sleep starting out with music and ending with reading a book. Not just any music. It has to be the right music. When I find what works, I sometimes subscribe to that channel. Have you ever listened to Gootmusic?
https://www.youtube.com/c/gootmusic/videos
Or Kurt Hugo Schneider
https://www.youtube.com/c/KurtHugoSchneider/videos
I’ve subscribed to others so these are just two examples. When I log on and they haven’t produced anything new, I look for someone else I haven’t heard before like the YouTube music video I listened to last night.
I learned a “long” time ago when I was still teaching many years before I retired from the classroom, that we can program our minds before we sleep by what we are thinking before we turn off the lights.
So, after I turned off the “1883” DVD last night, I went searching for music to shift my thoughts and found that one and it worked. I didn’t plan to watch that one. I didn’t even know it existed. And if it wasn’t right, I would have left it soon after the music started to find one that did.
Then after the right music ends, I read a chapter in the book I’m currently reading. By the time I turned off the lights, my thoughts are long gone from the darkness and tragedy of that “1883” mini series.
That music calmed my thoughts, drove out the darkness that creeps in during the day from the news and the other crap out there that wants to ruin our days and nights.
And I slept just fine, waking up refreshed with positive thoughts flowing through my head, feeling good. Sometimes, changing my thoughts before sleep like this also programs my mind to solve a plot problem in whatever story I’m writing.
Music like that one video is like a magic wand that washes away the darkness that wants to swallow us like it has for the traitor’s supporters.
Lloyd-
Your link brought a lot of joy today. In addition to other Ravitch readers who listened to the singing and to the orchestra playing, I forwarded it. The listeners were touched by the beauty of the music. Thank you.
Your welcome. I’m glad others are enjoying the healing power of music. Not all music but some.
Both the Republicans and the New Democrats seem to think that the act of leaving vast swaths of the population behind with no public services is just because, well, Darwin, and that instead of turning to a fascist strongman, the people left behind will simply disappear. Poof! It’s a gaping hole in their theorizing, but they still can’t see it.
A magnificent essay. It reads as though it were written by Diane Ravitch. And that might well be the highest praise I can think of.
Brilliant, Ms. Kamenetz! Bravo!
John Adams knew it, Thomas Jefferson knew it, Horace Mann knew it and John Dewey wrote about it. Democracy dies without robust public education.
We have a little known woman to thank-Mercy Otis Warren – who corresponded with Jefferson to urge support for public schools. I only learned about her at the Chicago Tribune museum and wonder why we never heard about her.
Thanks for the info.
Jefferson said, in every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
Tim Burch wrote an article posted at Napa Institute, “The similarities between Catholicism and Charles Koch’s recent book.” State Catholic Conferences (one in almost every state) promote school choice. In Ky., media reported that the VP of EdChoice Kentucky is also the associate director of the Kentucky Catholic Conference.