American Schooling
and the Cultural "Consensus"
excerpted from the book
The Democratic Facade
by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis
R. Judd Brooks
Cole Publishing Company,
1991, paper
The Areas of Legitimation
p21
American Schooling and the Cultural "Consensus"
Generation after generation, American
schools have helped to mold a compliant an quiescent citizenry.
p26
The Challenge to Old Themes
In her influential book, America Revised,
Frances Fitzgerald showed that twentieth-century history textbooks
have been frequently revised so that historical "truths"
change for each generation of schoolchildren. Even so, some themes
have run like a thread through the textbooks of all periods. History
textbooks in every generation peopled American history with a
succession of white male heroes. The Founding Fathers, as they
were invariably labeled, were sanctified, along with the presidents.
As a nation, America was always described in chauvinistic tones
as the best, most democratic country on earth, whose foreign policy
ventures were innocent of economic motives. Not only were American
economic interests absent in descriptions of foreign policy, but
corporations were never mentioned at all in accounts of national
history. Capitalism was, evidently, an economic system without
specific business organizations or workers. In the 1930s, in the
midst of an economic calamity a few textbook authors mentioned
income inequality and acknowledged the existence of poverty. These
texts, however, had a short shelf life. Despite its pro-free enterprise
stance, in 1938 a leading textbook written by Harold Rugg was
subjected to a national campaign orchestrated by the National
Association of Manufacturers, after which his book and other "liberal"
texts were revised. Any discussion of inequality or poverty, however
tentative, was once again forbidden. No school board or administrator
would dare adopt such a book.
For more than one hundred years, American
history and civics texts had expressed anxieties about the immigrants.
But by the 1940s, Fitzgerald discovered, the texts began for the
first time to promote the idea of American society as a "melting
pot" of national cultures. This shift allowed more favorable
attitudes to be expressed about immigrants (made possible, no
doubt, by the strict immigration quotas that Congress had adopted
in 1921 and 1924). A few accomplishments by individual immigrants
were praised, and the cultural legacy of some immigrant groups
were cast in a positive light. Until the 1960s, however, immigrants
still were distinguished from "we Americans," and an
anti-immigrant sentiment-though less shrill than before- still
could be found in school textbooks.
Black people did not appear at all in
schoolbooks before the 1960s, except in passing references to
slavery. These passages tended to be overtly racist, as illustrated
by a discussion in a 1937 text that said that the slave "sang
at his work....If his cabin was small, there were shade trees
about it, a vegetable garden nearby and chickens in his coop."
The first mention of individual African Americans appeared in
the late 1940s when pictures of the educator Booker T. Washington
or the baseball player Jackie Robinson were inserted to illustrate
the "progress" black people had made. In the 1960s,
a few more black leaders such as George Washington Carver and
Ralphe Bunche were mentioned, but the textbook authors did not
know what to make of the civil rights movement. Because it would
be unthinkable to portray genuine cultural conflict, the civil
rights movement was described as a few protests that quickly led
white people to extend equal rights to all blacks.
Women were described, if at all, strictly
in the context of stereotyped domestic roles, the only exception
being an occasional sentence or paragraph on the suffragette movement
of the Progressive Era. Of course, the male pronoun was used to
refer to all people, a habit of language that still infects some
textbook writing. That young women were pressed into labor in
the textile mills of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
that women often fought for and secured public funding for schooling
and universities and had to fight doubly for admission to these
institutions, and that women were important labor leaders were
nuances of history not learned by schoolchildren.
Civics texts have tended to be even more
fervently patriotic than the history textbooks that Fitzgerald
reviewed. Because civics instruction always has been expressly
designed to instill patriotism in schoolchildren, the American
nation has been presented in texts as "the greatest,"
with the word freedom repeated over and over but never defined.
National chauvinism has long been a rigid prerequisite for textbook
writing, as demonstrated in a book published in the 1950s that
asserted, "No other people on earth enjoy as many rights
and privileges as Americans," and,
Countries which favor liberty are friends
of the United States. Those countries which favor communism and
other forms of dictatorship consider the United States their greatest
enemy. It is a great thing for a free people to be known as the
champions of liberty.
Of course, textbooks had always extolled
the United States as a "bastion of the free nations,' but
in the apocalyptic visions of the 1950s America became, in the
texts, "locked into a struggle with another powerful world
leader...the Soviet Union." Now absent was the optimism that
earlier textbooks had expressed about the ultimate global triumph
of democracy. With the purpose of preparing "young people"
to resist communism, the 1955 edition of The Story of Democracy
"compared" U.S. and Soviet institutions and life. The
Soviet Union was portrayed as a leviathan on the verge of overwhelming
the world-a three-color map (showing the "red" communist
nations, the "pink" endangered nations, and the "white"
free world) depicted most of the Middle East and Latin America
as "endangered" (pink).
Even the United States was described as
being subverted from within.
Students were encouraged to look for communists
among their teachers, fellow students, neighbors, and at home.
Some textbook writers suggested that the students' parents might
be spies, and thus this advice:
The FBI urges Americans to report directly
to its offices any suspicions they may have about communist activity
on the part of their fellow Americans....When Americans handle
their suspicions in this way...they are acting in line with American
traditions.
The American tradition, apparently, was
that citizens informed on one another-and why not? According to
a leading high school text of the mid-1950s, Soviet agents had
infiltrated every walk of life: "Unquestioning party members
are found everywhere. Everywhere they are willing to engage in
spying, sabotage, and the promotion of unrest on orders from Moscow."
In such an atmosphere, it goes without
saying that the "American dream" of equality for all
was described as already fully realized. Students were advised,
"Any man may rise to his best," "You may choose
any kind of work or aim for any job," or, "Of all the
modern industrial nations ours comes the closest to being a classless
society." The view that American government is a "government
of the people" served, in the textbooks, as an adequate description
of the processes of democracy:
In our nation government has been organized
to serve the people and to provide for the general welfare of
all the citizens. We will learn very shortly that all levels of
government are responsive to the wishes of the people.
What was omitted from a civics education?
There was no mention of interest groups, political elites, or
the influence of the media or money in politics, and no information
about voter turnout levels or voting behavior among different
groups, or about political socialization. These omissions are
not surprising because the textbooks were designed to convey well-defined
values and interpretations, not to encourage critical or independent
thinking. Viewed from this perspective, the purpose of textbooks
had changed remarkably little in over one hundred years.
By the mid- 1960s this fact created problems
for educators and text publishers. The civil rights movement exposed
systematic racial discrimination in the South and racial bigotry
in the North that could not possibly be explained by the old stereotypes
of a conflict-free and classless society. The protests against
the Vietnam War made it more difficult for textbooks and schoolteachers
to sell the simple-minded idea that America was always engaged
in noble causes in defense of freedom. New clothing styles, music,
and lifestyles expressed a general questioning of cultural and
political authority. The schools were not impervious to these
developments.
Textbook authors scrambled to insert discussions
of blacks in new editions which meant that almost overnight texts
were revised to recognize a few of the contributions of blacks
to American society. For the first time textbook authors also
were forced to recognize women, and, to a very slight degree,
rarely more than a paragraph, Latinos and Native Americans. The
changes were obvious, but much of the old message remained. By
the mid-1970s, texts described America as a multiracial society,
but one that was basically homogeneous, because, it was said,
all Americans, regardless of background, had the same essential
wants, desires, and opportunities.
The "recognition" accorded to
blacks, Latinos, and women took the form of mentioning important
names, such as Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Susan B.
Anthony, with little or no context provided so that the activities
and motivations of these people could be understood. Text publishers
and educators remained uncomfortable with any material that might
provoke opposition from parents or political groups. Thus any
recognition that protests and violence had often accompanied demands
for social change in the United States, or any information that
pointed to a systematic oppression of a whole group (such as blacks),
was studiously avoided. A student could read the books without
ever learning about slums, crime, or poverty. History and civics
texts of the 1980s still avoid such topics. It must be confusing
for an inner-city child or a child living in the Mississippi Delta
to look at the photos in ~ these books; they make it appear, as
noted by Fitzgerald, that "all non-white people i1 in the
United States took happy pills."
Current controversies about the schools
could leave the impression that a minor revolution occurred in
civic education during the 1960s and 1970s. The term revolution
vastly overstates the degree of change that was introduced into
school curricula, but old-style civics education was, indeed,
subjected to a strong challenge. Textbook publishers became sensitive
to ethnic, racial, and sexual stereotypes, with the result that
virtually all texts and teaching materials underwent scrutiny
to ferret out stereotypical language. Even so, most history and
civics texts continued to avoid controversial interpretations.
Caught in the dilemma of having to acknowledge new groups and
a few social "problems," but not willing to risk controversy,
textbook authors wrote watered-down and insipid prose-or found
that publishers performed the task for them. Perhaps the aversion
to controversy explains why contemporary textbooks devote so little
space to the discussion of minorities. A history text published
in 1982 reserved four pages for a discussion of the civil rights
struggle, three pages for a statement on Hispanics, and two pages
for some words on Native Americans (ironically, this section is
labeled, "Indians refuse to accept the role of 'vanishing
Americans."' Another recent history text is more efficient;
it devotes just one page inclusively to all minorities and to
women's rights (including one paragraph on blacks, one on Native
Americans, and three paragraphs on whether women can be drafted).
Despite the slight changes in the textbooks,
new perceptions about the identified purposes of social studies
exerted a strong influence on school curricula. The New Social
Studies, a label given to curricular materials drawn up by leading
educators in the late 1960s, emphasized (like the New Math also
then in vogue) "concepts," independent analysis, and
"values clarification," in place of memorized facts
and values imposed by teachers. The values approach broadly infiltrated
the social studies curriculum across the nation, in part because
it was promoted by a set of lesson plans and books funded by the
National Science Foundation. A new course of study called "MACOS"
(Man: A Course of Study) relied on "inquiry" texts and
values clarification material that asked schoolchildren to examine
their own values by reference to cultural beliefs and practices
elsewhere in the world.
A backlash quickly erupted, led by people
who were appalled that moral or cultural "relativism"
would be taught in the schools. Book burnings, attempts to ban
books and remove materials from school libraries, and demonstrations
swept the nation, increasing in intensity all through the 1970s
and accelerating in the 1980s. Summed up by the phrase "back
to the basics," the reaction was founded on the idea that
"old-time education" must be reestablished in the schools.
But what appeared to be a popular mass movement was amplified
and utilized by conservative and right-wing political elites that
pressed their own agenda.
p30
Back to the Basics
The "Back to the Basics" movement
should be understood not merely as an isolated reaction to the
New Social Studies, sex education, and other curricular material.
The schools have been subjected to waves of religious fundamentalism
and nationalistic fervor at many times in the past. In the 1920s,
for instance, fundamentalists sought to outlaw the teaching of
evolution in the public schools, and by 1935 thirty-seven states
had adopted anti-evolution statutes.
According to Burt Pines, author of Back
to the Basics, the first principle of basics schooling is a "God-centered
education." Religious issues make up a "profamily"
catechism opposing abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuality
premarital sex, pornography, and sex education in the schools.
For the New Right the schools bear a heavy responsibility for
upholding traditional roles in the family Textbooks "suffer
from an anti-God, anti-religion, anti-patriotism, anti-capitalism
and anti-homemaker slant." Particularly alarming "is
the disappearance from school books of traditional images of men,
women and families."
Civics education is the cornerstone of
the back-to-the-basics edifice. Students are to be told about
the evils of government regulation, government spending, deficit
financing, welfare programs, national health care, and wage-price
guidelines; about the sanctity of private property and profits;
and about the importance of tax incentives for business expansion.
Pines enthusiastically reviews "pro-free-enterprise"
activities in schools, universities, and colleges: "In a
testimonial to corporate America's mounting determination to do
something to support capitalism, specifically endowed or funded
chairs in free enterprise are proliferating rapidly." Through
institutes for free enterprise, high school teachers enroll in
(or are required to take) pro-business seminars and workshops
subsidized through corporate dollars, and local school districts
are benefited by the injection of "economic/free enterprise
concepts into the entire curriculum, from kindergarten through
twelfth grade." According to Pines, a junior high school
textbook financed by business contributions is used in school
districts in twenty-seven states, and business-sponsored instructional
materials are used in economics classes all over the nation.
The New Right civics education stresses
a brand of patriotism that requires allegiance to the New Right's
position on a very long list of political issues. To Pines the
overall aim is to praise "America's unique meritocratic tradition
that for generations has rewarded achievement and fostered social
mobility." History and civics instruction are supposed to
show the unstinting generosity and freedom-loving motives of American
foreign policy. In all cases, the imminent Soviet threat is destined
to occupy center stage.
At the end of her book intended to document
the horrors of "liberal" and "humanistic-inspired"
education, Phyllis Schlafly published a twenty-five-point checklist
that parents could use to evaluate whether their schools were
engaging in heretical education practices. Among the twenty-five
items listed are these three questions:
Does it blur traditional concepts of gender
identity...? Does it induce role reversals by showing women in
hard physical-labor jobs and men as househusbands?
Does it describe America as an unjust
society (unfair to economic or racial groups or to women) rather
than telling the truth that America has given more freedom and
opportunity to more people than any nation in the history of the
world?
Does it propagandize for domestic spending
programs, while attacking defense spending and economy in government?
Does it lead the child to believe that disarmament rather than
defense can prevent a future war?
By 1981, at least ten national organizations
were attempting to rid schoolbooks of material on evolution. One
such organization was the Parents' Alliance to Protect Our Children,
which circulated to its subscribers a newsletter that analyzes
school materials and recommends local action. Possibly the most
influential organization was The Eagle Forum, organized by Schlafly
on the principle that "parents have the right to expect schools"
to "use textbooks and hire teachers that do not offend the
religious and moral values of the parents" and to "use
textbooks that teach the truth about the family, monogamous marriage,
motherhood, American history and Constitution, and the private
enterprise system" (among other expectations). The targets
of these groups were humanism, ideas promoting participatory democracy,
the Equal Rights Amendment, sex education, global education, and
a limitless number of other topics. These groups exerted substantial
influence on school curricula-one example is that the average
biology text used in high schools in the early 1980s contained
only fifty lines on evolutionary theory.
Groups like Schlafly's have not been able
to gain control of many schools, but they have exerted enough
influence to intimidate teachers and school officials. One measure
of their clout was the resurgence of censorship of school materials
following the 1980 presidential election. Hundreds of school districts
excluded books from school libraries or went through protracted,
bitter fights over censorship demands. According to the American
Library Association, fifty-two books were banned in various schools
across the United States during 1986 alone. A sample of titles
included The Diary of Anne Frank ("sexually offensive passages"),
Cujo, by Stephen King ("profanity and strong sexual content"),
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker ("troubling ideas about
race relations"), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya
Angelou ("preaches bitterness and hatred against whites"),
The Living Bible, by William C. Bower ("perverted commentary
on the King James Version"), To Kill n a Mockingbird, by
Harper Lee ("undermining of race relations").
p31
The Reagan Administration's Educational Agenda
For eight years the Reagan administration
enthusiastically lent authority and guidance to the education
agenda of the New Right. The administration staffed the
Department of Education with people who
were closely involved in back-to-basics campaigns. As Secretary
of Education, William Bennett declared that the education system
s deficiencies were responsible for the public opinion polls that
revealed opposition to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. Regarding
social studies in the schools.
Surely one explanation for the fact that
democratic values no longer seem to command the assent they once
did is that for many years now the teaching of social studies
m our schools has been dominated by cultural relativism. The notion
that the attempt to draw meaningful distinctions between opposing
traditions is a judgment which all virtuous and right-minded people
must sternly
One social studies series for elementary
schools, for example, advises the teacher that the materials aims
to "decrease inclination toward egocentrism ethnocentrism
and stereotyping." But what this means, it turns out, is
more than teaching children that all cultures and traditions are
not the same. It means teaching that all cultures and traditions
are equally valid, that there are not real criteria for good and
bad, right and wrong.
Bennett's conclusion was that the schools
should teach that ours is the best system To him, teaching that
lesson was the only valid purpose of social studies.
Global education became a particular target
of the Reagan administration. In June 1984, an of official in
the Denver regional office of the Department of Education circulated
a report castigating the University of Denver for using global
education materials m teacher training courses. The materials
committed the arch sin of describing world events and issues as
often ambiguous, in contrast to the "accepted moral absolutes"
that ought to be applied. The Reagan official described the moral
absolutes as "truths that are true for anybody, anywhere,
at anytime," and noted that students need to be taught a
"healthy skepticism" about "tolerance" for
different points of view. His report castigated the "redistributionist
ethic" in global education materials that encouraged students
to think about how food and other resources could be distributed
more equitably among nations. According to the report, a "countervailing
network of organizations" was needed to produce "objective
curriculum materials" that would echo Secretary Bennett's
description of America as "the last best hope on Earth.'
The correct global education would teach children "patriotic
love of country and commitment to this nation's leadership responsibility."
The Reagan administration pressed its
agenda in school districts all across the country. Soon after
the controversy over the University of Denver's program erupted
a school district in Colorado was persuaded by a Department of
Education employee to reject a state grant that would have paid
teachers to attend a seminar on global education. Encouraged by
the Reagan administration, local right-wing groups mobilized against
global education programs because they saw in them a threat to
patriotic values. To some degree, these groups were no doubt correct;
Americans who are educated about global problems are probably
less likely to accept uncritically their nation's role in world
affairs.
p33
Still the Basics
The historic function of American schooling-to
instill a sense of patriotism and shared culture-has never been
lost. The schools still teach that America is a land of the free,
prosperous, and peaceful. It is inconceivable that any schools
would allow any systematically critical perspective about U.S.
history or democracy to dominate the curriculum, simply because
all schools are necessarily embedded in and dependent on mainstream
culture. Try to imagine, for instance, this book being assigned
in a high school classroom.
What, therefore, motivated the New Right's
assault on the schools? In part, the attack was based on a solid
foundation of widespread disenchantment with the quality of the
schools: declining national test scores in reading and mathematics,
the well-publicized illiteracy of high school graduates, and the
fear that America is losing economic vitality to other nations.
A great many Americans who do not consider themselves conservative
share these concerns. Without doubt, public education in America
is often inadequate, or worse. At a deeper level than this, however,
the Back-to-the-Basics movement is not new. The schools have always
acted as a magnet for social and cultural conflict. National ills
are invariably traced back to the schools, for that is where,
it is widely assumed, a national culture is supposed to be molded.
During times of social or cultural turmoil, people often want
the schools to impose discipline, authority, and patriotism:
Complaints about the decline of education
due to modern permissiveness go back at least to the nineteenth
century. As a national mood, it often coincides with the ends
of wars and with periods of economic downturn. Conservative, pessimistic,
nostalgic, it seems to be some kind of quest for certainty in
an uncertain world.
The New Right has influenced education
all across the nation. Publishers are careful not to include "controversial"
discussions of evolution in biology textbooks; millions of dollars
in revenues are at stake. School boards, administrators and teachers
are subjected to campaigns of harassment and expensive litigation
involving the teaching of "secular humanism" (evolution)
or civics material. As a result e obvious risks, publishers edit
their texts on the basis of market surveys; authors do not control
the editing procedure.
Dozens of conservative think tanks and
policy organizations take an interest in the education debate.
These organizations receive money from corporations and corporate
foundations (a leading Reagan supporter, Joseph Coors, was a big
contributor). The triangle forged among federal administrators,
conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, and
right-wing fundamentalist groups virtually guarantees that public
schools will continue to promote a mythical American culture and
politics (and a mythical biological curriculum as well).
The national government does not run America's
schools. But this fact does not mean that education varies significantly
from one community to another. A child attending an urban school
in California will be exposed to curriculum materials and values
almost identical to the instruction received by a child in rural
Pennsylvania. Some might say that such uniformity is the glue
that binds a culture together. It should also be pointed out that
if the cultural bond is constructed from shared myths about a
past that never existed; if ethnic, racial, cultural, and political
differences and conflicts are papered over with a veneer of consensus
and harmony, then an intolerance for differences is promoted or,
just as likely, a fatalistic cynicism emerges when students discover
that what they are being taught in schools bears no relation to
their actual lives.
It is hardly surprising that students
often find history, geography, and social ( studies to be dull
and alienating. The safest way for teachers and textbook writers
to escape censure from the right is to promote conventional patriotism
and to leave critical analysis out of the classroom. This approach
is producing citizens whose emotional buttons can be pushed by
flag-waving politicians reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or blaring
Neil Diamond's hymn, "Coming to America," but it is
not likely to produce citizens capable of understanding the world.
This worries some educational elites, who fear that such ignorance
will contribute to the overall decline of American influence in
the world economy. The National Commission on Social Studies concluded
that students who can name all the American colonies, but who
cannot understand what a colony is, are not well educated. To
remedy this situation, the commission recommends, among other
things, that teachers highlight connections between historical
subjects and present content, not as something to be memorized,
but as information that can be used to explore and confront "open
and vital questions" about the world. But what if the definition
of a colonial relationship proves to be an apt description of
U.S. relations with Latin America?
Opposition to critical history and social
science comes principally from well-funded groups like Schlafly's
Eagle Forum and Reed Irvine's oddly named "Accuracy in Academia."
AIA claims to promote the right of college and high school students
to think for themselves, but its principal activity is to encourage
students to send copies of syllabi, exams, and classroom handouts
from professors deemed ideologically unacceptable. To AIA, the
freshman year in college is analogous to an Army boot camp where
the right-thinking student learns to survive in a hostile environment.
AIA warns college freshmen that teachers who espouse support for
national liberation movements struggling against U.S.-backed governments
are "most likely Marxist or left-leaning academics"
who are about to subject "your mind...[to an] intense assault."
According to Irvine,
The goal of the classroom indoctrinator
is to transform you into an ideological radical, so you'll serve
his or her political cause. His strategy is to destroy your faith
in the political-economic system-and the values that undergird
that system-of the United States. Once you've become disillusioned
with America then you'll be introduced to an alternative system,
based on different values, which will be touted as the cure-all
for America's social evils.
One example of what AIA regards as "indoctrination"
is its objection to teaching students that racism was a motivating
factor for the internment of 110,000 American citizens of Japanese
ancestry into camps during World War II. Specifically, AIA objects
to a California State Assembly resolution declaring that the U.S.
government
wrongfully rationalized the internment
on ground of national security and military necessity....The broad
historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice,
war hysteria and a failure of political leadership....The current
textbooks used by California's public school students do not accurately
portray the internment experience as a violation of human rights.
Irvine wants textbooks to continue to
describe the "relocation" of these American citizens
(as in current texts in California) "as a precaution taken
for national security reasons."
A false sense of cultural consensus serves
political elites well. Dissent appears as unpatriotic and threatening
to those people who have come to believe in the myths taught in
the school curriculum. People who are relatively privileged will
tend to accept stereotypical description of an America that is
affluent and full of opportunity. Such a description confirms
their life experience. For others, the schoolbook stories ring
false. There is a tendency for these people to embrace cynicism,
which translates into the habit of dropping out of the political
system altogether... elites in the United States count on such
nonparticipation as essential for preserving their political hegemony.
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