a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Thinking last week about healthy skepticism and old-fashioned cynicism or “simplicity of living”, I came to the topic of public education.  “Public education,” it seems  to me, should be a big revivalist tent of a concept under which public schools and universities gather along with public radio and TV broadcasting, public libraries and information centers, public theatres and museums, public communications networks, public assemblies and forums, and also public healthcare, public transportation. All kinds of public services where public servants work should be there, too. Public-spiritedness or willingness to engage in community action, public action, would be the guiding spirit –not a religious Spirit, but a political one–in this capacious tent of public education.

If we thought of  “public education” as education that goes on in public places of all sorts that are organized to bring the public –potentially all the citizens—together for the education of themselves as “the public,” maybe it would be much more obvious than it now is what that education should consist of.  Maybe it would be clear that public corporations, called public because they sell shares to all buyers on the open market, do not by that function, belong in the “public education” definitional space or really deserve thee title “public.”  And we would certainly realize that public relations has no business getting the adjective “public,” because the professional manufacture by private enterprises of a favorable public image for other private enterprises, is a kind of modern anti-education aimed at duping the public.

As everyone knows, we Americans are having a huge debate now about public education,

but this, unfortunately, is only a debate about public schools. The debate is focused around two make-believe and not at all public-spirited endeavors that are imagined to be solutions to the alleged problems of our public schools. The first of these is

standardized testing, which some people hold to be a good way to determine whether

public school students are learning anything, whether schools are succeeding or failing, and whether teachers are any good. The testing solution carries implications about what should happen to students who do not succeed on the tests, to the schools where those students tend to cluster–should they be “turned around,” or should they be closed?—and to the teachers in those schools who are deemed bad, judged so partly by the results of their students’ test scores.

The second, make-believe solution is to create  another kind of school, called a charter school. This is a private school in which a private corporation running the school and making money from it also receives some public funding. Charter schools, in other words, are privatized schools, comparable to the other privatized public services advocated by “free market” believers who want “limited government” or limited government regulation. When private enterprise is held to be good unconditionally,  charter schools are held to be are good as their expression. In business, profit, expansion, triumph over others, show who is the fittest to survive in a “survival of the fittest” competition  So charter schools will make America strong and assure that their students –their privatetly selected students—will be winners.

It is truly tragic that our current debate is being framed by the allegations now being made about why our schools are problematic and why these two delusionary solutions are right.  The debate framers are everywhere, lauded by leaders in federal and state and municipal governments –starting with  President Obama and his Department of Education in Washington.  Those brave public-spirited educators who protest the terms of the debate and the solutions find themselves beleagured and increasingly marginalized.  I will write more about the battle terms in my next post. But, since I view the battle itself as a giant distraction from –or what the psychoanalytic trade calls a “displacement” from– a deeper conflict, I want to speak about that deeper conflict first.

To my mind, what we are really having in America is a debate about whether to

remove the public schools from the big tent of “public education” and put them

over with the public corporations and public relations firms that are anti-education.

Do we want our schools to be businesses or not? That is the question.  And behind it is a conflict about what is “in the best interests of children.”

If the answer is yes, schools should be businesses, we are, indeed, headed in the right direction. We just have to get our analogy clearly worked out and more efficiently pursued. The student, we have to say more clearly, is a product. The teachers are workers assigned the task of getting the product developed, assembled, and tested for quality. (The teacher may be involved in product design, but usually there will be a design department whose workers do not do hands-on work but just the vision thing.) The administration selects the product materials, approves the design (perhaps there will be different models for different future purposes), calculates the profit desired and the process that will bring the product in at predictable cost. (Hopefully, over time, the start-up costs will disappear and the on-going cost decline,  so the profit margin will increase.) The administration also hires the workers at a stipulated salary (with some benefits), supervises the workers, provides the quality tests by which they will test the product, and holds them responsible (by testing them)  if the product fails. There will be a seniority system for the workers, to encourage them, but no wage guarantees or job security, because the business cycle is not always predictable and they may need to be downsized. Besides, they do not always turn out to be the best workers and replacements may have to be found. Or they may get uppity and make demands. The owners will hire the administration and make sure the whole operation runs as smoothly and as profitably as possible for them and their shareholders. They will also hire a public relations outfit to make sure that their operation and the products have a favorable public image. (It may be necessary to lie about the test scores or the quality control, in which case, some academic evaluators and poll-takers will have to be hired, too.)

But there is, nonetheless,  going to be a problem. What role do the parents

play?  They are not like suppliers of microchips to a computer manufacturer. They will supply the product materials, of course. But the materials are their children… Should they have any say in what happens to the material?  They may think they own the material or they may pride themselves on being progressive people who want the material to be free and spontaneous. But, either way, they are going to care about what happens to the material, perhaps to the point of wanting to administer the school administrations and  design departments and teachers. And they are going to be investors, with a vote, indirectly, on company policy, too.  Further, they will be  consumers.  In the school-as-a-business model, the consumers are other businesses where the products produced will be hired as workers. Some parents own (or at least work in) consumer businesses.

The parents are the wild card in this whole enterprise of making the schools a business. because their role is not clear –even leaving aside the fact that some will not subscribe to the whole enterprise because they are public school exponents or they are un-American social democrats.  Some students, by the time they get to be adolescents, may have something restive to say as well; and younger ones may register their dislike of being produced by “acting up” or “acting out” and needing Ritalin. But perhaps these sorts of problems could be addressed with an adjustment in the product design and production process, to get the kinks out or to discard poor materials.

Back at the end of the 19^th century, during the last Gilded Age, when America had another major debate about the public schools (then called common schools), the eventual decision to make the schools factories was clearer and these problems with  parents and poor student materials were solved –until the Great Depression upset everything. The schools, although turned into businesses, were ostensively public. Nobody called for charter schools to take over the public school system. So parents were not investors, they were only tax payers. And they were under the impression that their children, once educated, would be ready to go forth into the world of work (or, if female, into the world of domesticity and child-rearing) and into the role of being tax-payers, so that the whole public services sector would be supported—in theory, for all citizens. To the working class particularly, services were the return for not requiring their children to labor, for voting in anti-child labor laws. The state, supplying schooling, was also going to supply all kinds of essential services which would help parents stay out of poverty and live  the American Dream.

Actually there was, however, quite a lot of private money discretely in the public schools. A significant portion came from foundations set up by major corporations that had a big stake in what kind of products were produced. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, and many others bearing well known WASP family names, invested in the public schools and in teacher’s colleges in order to get the kind of teachers (and curriculum designers) needed to turn out products suited to work in their industries and in society as they envisioned it. For decades, their contributions to the schools out-ran tax money, and they bought outright places like Columbia’s  Teacher’s College.

With foundation funds, the teacher’s colleges sent their students by the boatload to Germany so that they could get Ph.Ds in Educational Psychology from the faculties where Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig and other leaders of the “Prussian Reform Movement” held sway. The Germans had perfected educational testing and tracking of incoming children, who were assigned  to one of three categories of schools. For the vast majority, there were Volkschulen turning out workers for farms and industries and the military; for a group of some ten percent, there were Realschulen training  future managers and administrators; and for a tiny fraction there were elite Akademiensschulen where future leaders  (including in education) were trained to think. Thinking, so Wundt held, is “an epiphenomenon,” not something the hoi polloi able to do; and even the able are unable without an elite training. For the elite, the old  Humanist curriculum was retained: courses in the Greco-Roman classics, languages other than German, philosophy, art history, music. Kultur. Great thinkers of the past.

Most of the German testing-and-tracking was done when students were starting off, because if you made the right initial decision you really did not have to keep checking. Very helpful to the precision of this enterprise were racism and eugenicism, which the Germans developed locally but also imported from England, where Charles Darwin’s eccentric cousin Francis Galton had produced a standard work: Hereditary Genius. America eventually produced its own theorists, too, and by the 1920’s they had tremendous influence on the kind of testing done in American schools to sort wheat from chafe.  Henry Goddard at Princeton, for example, published his Human Efficiency in 1920, a kind of manual for assembly line schooling on all tracks, even the highest.  The best American students were destined for private universities, where the old Humanist curriculum was retained for some (not usually those directly serving industry with their scientific research).  Harvard had been a hold-out for the Humanist curriculum to be the basic curriculum, but after the last presidential exponent of this view, Eliot Norton, lost major battles with the foundations over it, the Humanist curriculum became a province of specialists. Norton’s notion that education is “training of the mind for independent thought” faded.

Henry Ford took all these developments to the max. “Fordism” was a business model in which a campus or town was built for housing workers and two factories were set up: one factory turned out Model-Ts and the other, a school, turned out future workers for the Model-T factory. The Model-T factory workers were paid and housed well enough so that they could afford to buy Model-Ts, that is, the workers were also consumers. Perfect! No parents involved in turning their children over to the assembly-line-school were going to think they should design that school, and no students were going to think they might like to be something other than consumers. It was a closed circuit.  Of course,  cities with multiple industries and big populations of impoverished people were not able to able to replicate a Fordist “company town”; but the ideal was informative, and still is. The key is to make the school products into consumers as well as into the right kind of workers.  If they become interested enough in being consumers, they may not make trouble when it comes to turning their own children over to the school-as-business.  And they may not see how important to children is the bigger tent of public education –everything around their schools that may make their lives worth living and their schools worth going to.

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