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Freedom from Public Education

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Charles Dickens’s famous opening passage in A Tale of Two Cities might apply to US education policy today. For that reason, Neal P. McCluskey’s book, The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal, and Harmonious Society, is a welcome contribution because these “worst of times” have provoked school reforms that might move the country toward the “best of times.”

It is the worst of times because the pandemic and dangerous radicalism in schools have inflicted incalculable damage on American education. There is a great deal of retrospection about how schools handled the pandemic, but one thing is clear: it has been handled badly. Misguided political leaders, power-hungry teachers’ unions, and administrator-ideologues have arbitrarily closed schools, imposed useless face masks on children, and sent students into the netherworld of “online learning”—all done while students are in their most formative stages of social and academic development. It should be no surprise then, that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often dubbed the “Nation’s Report Card,” reports “massive declines” in math proficiency and significant drops in verbal skills. Such troubling metrics are not unprecedented but this time, parents seem reluctant to dutifully sign the “report card” and send it back in with their offspring.

During the Covid-19 episode, the bar was not just low—it was subterranean. According to mounting anecdotal evidence, teachers were firmly instructed that students must not receive a failing grade; even a “C” would be unjust. Consequently, students—often smarter than their betters—saw no reason to show up. In some instances, attendance should not even be expected: “children of color” may not have adequate internet connection so lectures must be recorded; and in case that strains the digital connection, the text or notes of class lectures must be supplied so that students could watch or read the teacher’s notes on their own schedule and at their own internet speed.

That worked about as well as should have been expected. At the receiving end, my university colleagues and I are startled at the lackluster disposition of many freshmen and sophomores. It’s not just a matter of academic deficiencies; curiously, it seems that the indifference schools showed toward education has been absorbed by the students.

Perhaps the worst of times may give way to the best of times because many consumers of public education have concluded, “Enough is enough!” Accordingly, 2021 was dubbed “The Year of School Choice” as almost half of the fifty states have either expanded existing programs or created new ones. Admittedly this may put a few Drag Queen Storytellers out of business, but such is the cost of progress.

At the end of the school day, it is all about educational freedom, and Neil McCluskey is well positioned to offer his insight and direction: he is the educational policy expert at the libertarian CATO Institute. In general, CATO is to be admired for its adherence to at least two principles. First is their unwavering presumption in favor of individual liberty. It is the yardstick by which all initiatives and progress should be measured. Secondly is their Kantian-like logic that demands that exceptions be justified, if indeed they can. Instead of beginning with the question, “Why shouldn’t government do this?” they consistently ask the better question, “Why should government do this?”

Perhaps McCluskey’s most important point is to state the obvious: public education no longer serves to unite; rather it divides, so much so that schools have become cultural battlegrounds with school children the collateral damage—hence, the reference to the school as “fractured.” The most valuable chapter of the book may be “The Democracy Problem” in which the author examines the tie between education and democracy. Confusing and self-serving definitions of “democracy” have been a cover for a great deal of mischief in education. The problem occurs on two levels: the process of education and the results of education.

In the former, as McCluskey notes, most states’ textbooks are chosen by small boards of education with little if any consultation with those who actually teach the texts. If these bureaucrats have classroom experience, it is quite dated and they themselves certainly don’t have to use the books they mandate in the classroom. Accordingly, in many instances, ideology and faddishness drive textbook choice. They certainly don’t have to grapple with their too-often misguided choices, infected as they may be with the latest ideological fads. If the local school and teachers have a choice, it is Hobson’s choice between three or four equally mediocre or offensive texts.

In the latter case, the author convincingly demonstrates that several different and contrasting definitions of democracy have evolved since the founding of the country, yet the word “democracy” is often invoked, without clarification, as a kind of totem to place questionable policies beyond debate. Does democracy mean “leveling”re-fashioning society so that there are no dramatic socio-economic differences amongst citizens? Or does democracy mean using the classroom to fashion socially conscious citizens, never mind in what way and to what ends that social conscience is formed? As the author aptly states, “‘Democracy Trumps Freedom.”

The Fractured Schoolhouse appears at a critical juncture, and it is hoped that it will educate and embolden state leaders to intelligently and effectively pursue educational freedom within their fifty jurisdictions.

McCluskey rightly notes that John Dewey planted seeds of destruction with his denigration of traditional learning and his grand dream of the classroom as a laboratory of social change. McCluskey might agree that Dewey’s classroom dynamic has devolved into something more grotesque. Too many schools are now endeavoring to become laboratories of human experimentation; after all, a father is the last person to know if his twelve-year-old is really a boy or a girl.

At the same time, McCluskey is a little too kind to John Dewey. He takes the progressive philosopher at his word that Dewey was sincere in advocating a “student-centered” classroom. Though that was true to varying degrees with other progressives (for example, schools founded by Italian Maria Montessori), Dewey co-opted these progressive mechanics not so much to promote the autonomy of students but to free them from traditional inertia so they might form the vanguard of future change.

Later, McCluskey does cite the notorious volume The Educational Frontier (1933) in which a collection of progressives, including Dewey, explicitly call for the schools to become the revolutionary hothouse to prepare students to reject the twin bugaboos, individualism and capitalism. This, though, Dewey had already said explicitly as early as 1916 in his magnum opus Democracy and Education. Exposing Dewey’s child-centered pretense as a covert means to remake the world is important because precisely the same strategy is employed today, evident in such popular texts as Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom or the progressive classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

McCluskey’s book endeavors to trace the imposition of public schooling from the founding of the country. This is not really necessary for his thesis, and in so doing he implies that Jefferson, Washington, and others such as Benjamin Rush, needlessly set the country on a path to public school dominance. At times, he seems not to decipher the occasionally hyperbolic rhetoric of Rush very well. Although Jefferson gets the most attention, Dr. Benjamin Rush was the most comprehensive and forward-looking of all the American Founders who thought and wrote about education for the new republic. He bravely advocated that women not only be educated in domestic skills but also in “liberty and government” since they were the most responsible for shaping succeeding generations for self-government.

Troubling as well, McCluskey at times seems to regard the Founding educational thinkers as if they were fellow travelers with Horace Mann who was active some decades later than the Founders and was in no way a member of their cohort, whether chronologically or philosophically.

Consequently, McCluskey seems not to appreciate that the early decades of the country were a much different era than our own. At that point in time, the country arguably needed public schooling to form the nation. Then, political survival depended on the acquisition of a sense of nationalism because of the gravitational pull of state power. Nationalism, in turn, depended on certain common attitudes: Jefferson explained, for example, that students should acquire the paradoxical combination of sentiment in favor of one’s nation, and the critical apparatus to know when power is abused.

Today the relationship between the states and the national government is centripetal; that is the national government pulls authority inward to D.C., away from the states. Then, however, the political physics was centrifugal, as the states flirted with anarchy by drawing power away from the federal government. The consequence was the failure and crisis of the Articles of Confederation. When it comes to public schools, then, criticizing the Founding Generation for pursuing public schooling from the perspective of the 21st century when public schools have become hegemonic may be anachronistic. McCluskey seems to go too far, for example, when he writes that “the goal of Jefferson and even Mann” was “controlling society through government coercion.”

McCluskey concludes, not surprisingly—but appropriately—with a renewed call for greater educational choice—but he does not do so simplistically. He recognizes that legislating and implementing choice is complicated and the means to achieve it vary in their effectiveness, their constitutionality, and their political viability. He suggests, for example, that as important as school vouchers are, educational tax credits may be more feasible in many instances. Despite its historical flaws, The Fractured Schoolhouse appears at a critical juncture, and it is hoped that it will educate and embolden state leaders to intelligently and effectively pursue educational freedom within their fifty jurisdictions.

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