When Did Americans Give Up Learning Together?
“It’s time to shift the debate from what the system thinks is best for kids to what moms and dads want, expect and deserve.” — Betsy DeVos
When did Americans give up on the idea that our young citizens not only can, but should, learn together and from each other? Very recently! Of course, no one watching the Secretary of Education confirmation hearings this week would draw such a conclusion. Neither Betsy DeVos nor her opponents have much to say much about the history of public education in our country. Moreover, both major political parties continue to focus exclusively on the school of the future rather than drawing valuable lessons from the past (which even our new president admits was once “great.”)
As Senators do modest battle with a billionaire heir, debating the schools of tomorrow, the immense lessons two hundred years of American public education go unheeded. Observers of the confirmation hearing would never guess that, only a generation ago, access to a shared educational experience was enshrined as essential to democracy as free speech, religious liberty, and the right to bear arms. Now we appear to have ditched this ideal altogether, in less than a generation no less. Yes, it happened that quickly.
This ideal — the democratic value of shared educational experiences — has never been particularly conservative or liberal (even as partisans maintained different reasons for promoting this ideal). But like other well-positioned educational reformers of the 21st century, DeVos uses ominous anti-government language (“the system”) to imply schools couldn’t possibly serve any noble purpose. But this “system” is democracy itself. And it inherently values what “moms and dads,” those who think expansively about what they want for their children’s generation, “want, expect, and deserve.”
Progressively, from 1779 to 1974, in our smallest towns and our fastest growing cities alike, leaders increasingly accepted, if not encouraged, an ever wider inclusion of young people into the same schools, and viewed this ongoing project as good for children and foundational to democratic progress. Imperfect? Clearly. But the kind of economic, religious, gender, racial, and ability diversity American schools included by the mid-20th century remains an unparalleled democratic achievement.
Even where this ideal was too long doubted — most notably in the racially divided, post-Brown, Southern schools I attended — the very struggle for equality itself was built on a broadly-held, legally-justified assumption that who you learn with is fundamental to democratic fairness. One of my first school memories was watching a friend’s mom pound angrily on the side of my bus because black students from another neighborhood were boarding. I spent my elementary years in the first truly integrated Southern schools, two decades after the Court struck down Plessy, because courageous activists countered that selfish impulse. They understood that American public education was never intended to simply serve the isolated interests of a small, demanding group of parents hyper-focused on their child’s education at the expense of something much more enduring for us all.
I owe who I am today to these activists. “Forced busing,” put me in a desk daily next to kids from families so immensely different than mine. And I’m disgusted at how easily my country has given up on this ideal given what it can continue to achieve.
Betsy DeVos didn’t initiate this cowardly loss of faith in shared learning. But she does intend to complete the reversal of a foundational American ideal. DeVos epitomizes the lack of vision in today’s education cynics, despite their ability to vastly outspend any organized opposition. Personally, I’m astounding when journalists use “conservative” to describe someone who who seek to repeal, but not replace, a two hundred year-old institution. Much like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Sam Walton heirs, DeVos’s party affiliation is less relevant to her ideology than the assumptions wealth appears to impose on education policy. Neither she nor her children have known the inside of a public school classroom. And like her new boss ,who equates “inner-cities” only with despair, DeVos can’t imagine the beauty of a community school where differences coexist, imperfection is celebrated, competition isn’t fetishized, and where parents know their children are more than cogs in someone else’s market-driven machinery.
