“Wanting It Both Ways”: The False Paradoxes in the American Education Debate

Introduction

In “‘I Did Not Invent This Faith’: The Purpose of American Education,” I said that I am more optimistic than economics and education scholar David F. Labaree when it comes to Americans' adopting and acting on realistic expectations about education. While the American expectations are no doubt ambitious, they are not based on utopian or contradictory logic. Rather, they are based on the actual American experience, which justifies a considerable degree of confidence and hope. In other words, America’s allegedly extravagant expectations are realistic, but only if everyone gets on the same page about what the goals are. That is what John Dewey meant when he wrote in 1939, that his “faith in the possibilities of intelligence and in education as a correlate of intelligence,” were not something he had invented on a whim. "I acquired it from my surroundings as far as those surroundings were animated by the democratic spirit.”

Labaree acknowledges the confusion about specifics that have accumulated since the early 20th century, but the persistent utopian lean in the educational culture suggests an underlying shared vision. Though they may struggle to articulate it, those attuned to the “democratic spirit” still sense that a coherent and realistic path to a better system of American education is out there.

The public education system we have now, Labaree argues, is a result of “the peculiarly American balance between access and advantage" that has been struck.

In earlier pieces, I have indicated my suspicion that perceived tensions between quality and quantity in American education may be symptoms of deeper contradictions, ones that are both more complex and yet more liable to reconciliation. The nature of the confusion is summed up by the frequent claim that Germany had the best educated population in the world in the late 19th century. While Germany’s universities, technical training programs, and state bureaucratic organization were considered unmatched, most of its population was consigned to a life of manual labor by age fourteen, and its world-renowned scholars and scientists made up only a tiny fraction of those with more than an elementary education. The accurate claim would be that Germany had the best-educated scholars and professors in the late 19th century. That achievement is only possible when you strike a balance very much in the favor of advantage (a degree of talent and in-depth knowledge that few people possess) rather than access.

Labaree pointedly notes that “before there was even an American nation—schooling in America was an important and growing part of ordinary life, and it educated a larger share of the populace than did schooling in the rest of the world,” and that “consumers [in other words, regular Americans] drove...American school enrollments to a level higher than anywhere else in the world, starting with the surge from primary school into grammar school in the late nineteenth century, into high school in the first half of the twentieth century, and into college in the second half,”

“The Race Was On”

Crucially, as Labaree acknowledges, the balance we discussed above was achieved not as part of a plan or even conscious collective action, but through attempts by individual actors to advance their own interests, often bypassing the grand plans of experts. In fact, many of these awkward compromises were a direct result of reform schemes that did not operate as intended.

The confused expectations of average Americans could not have been inherently built into a system that neither they nor anyone else consciously chose.

To me, the key point is captured in these remarks from Labaree:

In other words, rampant 20th-century credentialism destabilized a public school system that was not designed for a society that equated credentials with merit—certainly not “all across the occupation system.” In fact, as Labaree implicitly acknowledges in this paragraph, and explicitly states elsewhere in the piece, the 19th-century school system was not built to emphasize career training or the empowerment of striving middle-class professionals...that’s why the latter had to be “lured” into it by the high school administrators who “inadvertently set off” a competitive class-based dynamic. (Later, as John Dewey indicated, vocational training programs were added to high school curricula to lure students from working-class or rural families into the system—getting people into the system has consistently absorbed more energy than figuring out what would be done with them once they were there.)

The Complexity of the 19th-Century American Education Landscape

What was the situation in public schools prior to this outbreak of “competition for education advantage?” Bringing together students from all backgrounds, so that they would have enough familiarity and common ground to coexist as responsible citizens in adulthood. While reality necessarily fell short of this ideal, and at times fell far shorter than was necessary, American public schools existed for many years without resembling arenas for zero-sum competition among aspiring middle-class professionals. I even find Labaree’s claim that “the introduction of universal public education in the common school era made such basic skills available to everyone in the white population at public expense," thus establishing the common school “as the baseline level of formal skill for the American populace in the nineteenth century,” too strong. In my opinion, the idea that “formal skills” acquired from public schooling are a major source of personal advantage in adulthood—and/or serve to maintain class or race-based privileges, is anachronistic when applied to the 19th century.

As I wrote in “The Revealing Historical Differences Between Northern and Southern Education in America, Part I: The Northern Education Tradition”:

As this suggests, the dispositive factor when it came to accessing tax-payer funded common school education during the 19th century was probably location (urban vs. rural or frontier, northeastern vs. western or southern). Where common school systems existed in the first place, they were usually open to all, as a major factor driving the expansion of such systems was to bring less integrated and advantaged groups under “respectable” social influences. (It was often wealthy businessmen who set up public schools in the 19th century, for the stated educational and moral benefit of poor or immigrant children in crowded cities—often with an eye to preserving their own comfort and security. See ”The Misconception of Americanization in 19th and 20th-Century America,” for more on this.)

Socioeconomic status affected the likelihood one would take advantage of such options that existed in one’s location (in complicated ways, as the most well-off families or aspiring professionals/specialists tended to forgo or supplement this option, pursuing private and inherently exclusive educational options)

The final lines are especially telling: a randomly selected African-American child in the North was more likely to have limited educational options than a randomly selected American child of another race, but this is not comparable to the situation of the African-American child in the South, whose education was actually considered a crime, and who was held to have no rights or access to meaningful, autonomous social participation in adulthood. Additionally, others, like some Native Americans, may not have benefited from, or might have even been made worse off, by their "guaranteed access” to public education.

The relationship between these factors was complicated, such that they can’t be assessed independently, but the key point is that even though white children were more likely to attend public school overall, common school access was nowhere near “universal” among them, and actual attendance was extremely regional and uneven. Some scholars have estimated that it was only in the 1830s that a majority of New England children had received any formal schooling at all, whether public or private, and only in the 1840s that this became true in the Midwest and West.

"A Single Voice”

All this, combined with the fact that informal education was prevalent, indicates that common school attendance could never have functioned as a “baseline level of formal skill for the American populace in the nineteenth century.” And, as said above, common schools were not designed to establish a baseline level of formal skill for the American populace, but to create familiarity and shared understanding between members of the same political community, along with the basic tools of self-governance, such as literacy and a respect for American values and institutions. While schools increasingly aimed at appealing to the general American populace following the Civil War, prior to the 20th century, this often meant the propagation of the Yankee educational tradition and the values associated with it. In other words, it was designed to cultivate that “single voice” and “single direction” that is conspicuously absent in today’s system.

All this is abundantly clear in the remarks of “Radical Republican” George Boutwell shortly after the Civil War:

As a result, manual skill training in public schools was controversial and uncommon during the 19th century. In fact, there was little apparent reason for someone to seek basic skills through years of common school attendance rather than through an apprenticeship or other informal option.

The dominance of this credential-based culture in a system not designed for it is the cause of the consumerist dysfunction Labaree laments, and much of the confusion that has plagued 20th-century educational reform and rhetoric. By definition, an “education market,” like any other market, will consist of “competing voices” and “multiple directions.” But no one signed up to be an individual consumer in an “education market”; the current situation, as well as the justifications made on its behalf, emerged from attempts to deal with an increasingly pervasive and incoherent public school system that consistently escapes its would-be "overseers."

“Bargain-Counter Education”

This is exactly what was predicted by critics of the evolution of so-called “bargain-counter education” in the first half of the 20th century.

Are Education Reform Experts the Answer?

As some post-Progressive Era 20th-century scholars concluded after surveying the modern school system, “pedagogical questions must be studied in the context of their relations to economic and political realities,” and “a theory of instruction is a political theory in the proper sense that it derives from consensus concerning the distribution of power within the society—who shall be educated and to fulfill what roles?...The psychologist or educator who formulates pedagogical theory without regard to the political, economic, and social setting of the educational process courts triviality and merits being ignored in the community and the classroom.”

Labaree preempts questions about the role and record of educational reformers when he says that, unlike “consumers,” by which he seems to mean the general public, “reformers over the years have tended to treat education as a public good. They have seen their reform efforts as the solution of a social problem, and the benefits of this reform would be shared by everyone, whether or not they or their children were in school.”

While meritocratic competition in modern education encourages a self-interested approach, it still seems strange to say, as Larabee does, that “consumers approach education as...the personal property of the individual who acquires it.”

If the “traditional public good approach” was to serve the public good via the expert-planned production of human capital, that could easily take the form of intense “tracking” and other exclusive systems, ones with a questionable history when it comes to actually maximizing human capital and improving society as a whole. This sounds an awful lot more like serving the needs of national economic and military competition by churning out a steady supply of high-performing STEM specialists ready to take orders, as described in A Nation at Risk, than it does serving the public good in the sense Larabee describes. He says that Americans want schools to “express our highest ideals as a society and our greatest aspirations as individuals,” promote equality, inclusiveness, and learning, “fix society,” and allow for upward mobility and the pursuit of ambition (the latter sometimes in the form of perpetuating privilege).

Something has got to give, Larabee insists. Either individual aspirations or societal ideals: we have to pick one, because “these two aims are at odds with each other.”

Conclusion: How Should We Think About “Human Capital” and the “Public Good”?

I think John Dewey would say that we can, and that many sensible Americans, reformers of all stripes and “laymen” (I’m not a fan of the term “consumer” in this context) have shared his belief that balance is possible—that such give-and-take is indeed the secret to America's success, rather than a constraint on it.

When Labaree says, “we ask schools to promote equality while preserving privilege, so we perpetuate a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning,"

If we shift our perspective, drop the usual categories (progressive vs. traditional, reformer vs. consumer) and, as Americans, adopt Dewey’s approach to American education, rooted in a “democratic faith” underwritten by American experience, it may not seem like such a dilemma. If we stop the rhetorical games and try trusting the public to make a clear-eyed assessment of the options, we may actually be able to “have it both ways,” or at least make a choice and exit the spiral.

Scholars have been urging a similar approach for some time. “We have tried to avoid easy ideological generalizations, "went one 1970 lament.“They hide more than they reveal when the subject of study is a nation with a divided soul confronting a revolution in human affairs.”

Perhaps Labaree’s true complaint is with false binaries that lead us to pursue unnecessary, artificial homogeneity, and prevent us from articulating acceptable alternatives to this spiral. As John Dewey wrote in 1916’s Nationalizing Education, America is “complex and compound,” containing “a multitude of peoples speaking different tongues, inheriting diverse traditions, cherishing varying ideals of life.” As this situation distinguished American nationalism “from that of other peoples,’” at least at the time he was writing, Dewey concluded that “our unity cannot be a homogeneous thing like that of the separate states of Europe.”