Meritocracy and Supremacy in American Schooling
A lite, multi-part look at the nature of America's public schooling traditions...
“The education system is broken."
This phrase has been part of just about every political competition in America since its founding. Ask yourself, can you recall a politician ever running on how outstanding the public schools in her/his community are? I have yet to hear a candidate for Governor standing for office with claims like "Our K-12 public school systems are the envy of the world. And the unions. They're SOOOO good. And, of course, who can forget the out-of-this-world leaders and culturally informed educators? We're doing great!"
No, public education is a football that's been kicked around the dirt field since Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams said (in unison) "I know! There are WAY too many immigrants coming to our shores, and we wouldn't want to mix our kind with theirs so—let's have a more formal, unified system of schooling that we control!"
Ok. I know. I'm being a bit inflammatory. But indulge me, dear reader…
The Roots of Education in America
For the better part of its existence, public and private education in America has had five purposes:
Preserve the predominantly Anglo-Protestant (Christian) culture in response to the arrival of immigrants of non-European racial heritage at the start of the 18th Century.
Shape the curriculum to establish the nation's workforce and the economic needs of the wealthy.
Develop scientific prowess in the name of national security.
Balance social inequities.
Develop the nation's human capital resources to maintain international competitiveness.
Most of Thomas Jefferson's specific public schooling recommendations came in the form of proposals for education in his home state of Virginia1. Based nearly entirely on Socratic wisdom, Jefferson pressed that people have to deliberate publicly and use reason in order to engage in a healthy democracy. Since the competing ideas for guiding democracy would be circulated by a free press, the citizenry must be able to read.2
Jefferson wanted the national government to provide kids with three years of schooling. He expected that schools would provide learning in reading, writing, mathematics as well as the basics of Greek, Roman, English, and American history. He even thought that slaves should partake in schooling, but only if limited to training for industrial work (for cryin’ out loud!). In his proposals for education in Virginia, he claimed that the schooling for slaves would prepare them for productive participation in society once they were granted freedom. But, he wasn't confident that slaves could be "made the intellectual equals of white men”.3 In fact, he thought that racial heritage would provide a meaningful and useful way to differentiate among people.4
It wasn't until the 1830s that the ethos of public education became more about the common people. In fact, Common Schools, the first publicly funded education system established by Horace Mann, were just that—the great social equalizers, creators of wealth for all that would be undreamed of. Mind you, they weren't schools for the poor, the native survivors of genocide, or slaves. They were free public schools for the sons and daughters of landowners, farmers, businessmen, professionals, etc. So, "common" is used quite loosely in Mr. Mann's head.
Public Education Policy LEADS to Jim Crow Laws?
Before the Civil War, much of the southern states passed laws forbidding the education of slaves. Even AFTER the war, the SCOTUS decision in the Plessy v. Ferguson case (you know, of Separate, but equal educational facilities fame?) is what BROUGHT ON Jim Crow laws that created schools for white folk5 and schools for blacks.
With the Industrial Age being simultaneously ushered in, immigrants from all over the world flooded our cities in the late 1800s. So the local American politicians and church leaders pressed educators to AMERICANIZE the kids of new immigrants. You see, by then, the Europeans immigrating to America were now coming from eastern and southern Europe, which made them…more foreign than the previous waves of immigrants that came from their preferred northern European lands.
And so, with the trusted leadership of Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants who considered themselves the anointed trustees of American culture, schools were to not only teach citizenship and patriotism, they required to inculcate the habits, values, and language of…. "real Americans" (by which they meant themselves).
Now, as strange as it may seem to some of us, most immigrants LOVED the idea of being Americanized. It was a romantic time of new opportunities. Plus, they were eager to show their families back home that they were fitting in and doing well in the states. They associated the success America was benefitting from (and projecting out to the world) as a product of the major ethnic group’s innate ability (a stereotype, sadly). So, they figured, you wanna be rich like white folks? Do and think like whatever they want you to do and think. Be like them.
At least, that's where the immigrants were during those days.6
The Anglo Protestants—not so much. See, they thought that their values were the strength and heart of the nation and that if they weren't careful, that heart would be contaminated and compromised by the infusion of alien customs and languages.7
It’s this fearful, insidious mentality that leads to the first of the Language Wars.
Oppression by Proxy of Language Instruction
The national education conversation in the 1890s had to do with how to educate newcomers, how to eliminate their home cultures as well as how to teach them the new one. Since language is considered the heart of cultures, up into the 20th Century, the dominant ethnic group of the nation, seeing that more and more folks were speaking German and Mandarin and French ran campaigns to make clear to the immigrant groups that English was the language of the land. In fact, up until 1906, bilingual education in German and French was commonplace. But when the Slavs and the Jews and the Italians started flowing in, Congress passed a law requiring those wanting to be naturalized to speak English.
Going into World War I, things got even worse! Now, the Germans were our enemy, so English-only instruction laws were passed to stop schools from teaching German. German textbooks were burned, mobs formed and threatened communities, etc.
World War II and the Red Scare dug us even deeper into our pretty well-developed xenophobic character. Now, any language other than English was considered suspicious—un-American. Just like with McCarthyism, the idea was that uniformity (in this case, of the linguistic kind) would root out alien conspiracies and stem the emerging radical labor movements8. And it was during this period, 1919-1920, that an ideological link was established between speaking "good English" and being a “good American”.
Now, you tell me the same thing isn't happening right now in the states. Many Americans, including many whose families were themselves immigrants not a century ago (the Irish, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, Pollacks, Armenians, etc) but now perceive the newest waves of Latinx immigrants from our southern border lands as threatening American culture.
Whose American culture do they mean?
It hit me when I was a teacher in the classroom back in the early aughts. I was a public school teacher for about six years, working in Los Angeles. At first, I taught Social Studies and Journalism but quickly pivoted to English Language Development and multilingual/culturally-relevant education. In the late 90s, a software developer named Ron Unz spun up the English for the Children coalition that pushed through Proposition 227 here in California. Basically, its effect was to lessen bilingual education and increase English-only instruction.
This superior, anti-human impulse that has been emanating through our history didn’t die out with Brown v. Board of Education or the Civil Rights Movement. It just lingered and slowly, quietly, built momentum, staying alive in “Sun Down Towns” (like my own Glendale, CA) and in the churches across America’s Bible Belt, the Rust Belt, the Plains, the South; not unlike what happened after the Civil War. Where do you think all them southern traitors, racists, bigots, misogynists, etc. in the Confederacy went after we won? They didn’t go nowhere. In fact, as we can plainly see in our modern American story, looks like the impulse is trying to make a comeback!
Before the 20th Century, American schools weren't AS much about the local or national economy. People got jobs by apprenticeships. They mostly got five years of schooling and would then latch onto someone to learn a particular craft or trade. But by the 1920s, the manufacturing boom had pushed the moguls of industry into politics, and as such, public schools took on the role normally saved for masters and their apprentices—they were now to prepare students with the know-how to work in the modern workplace. You know, job skills and the dispositions for…..factory work (e.g., punctuality, obedience, proper deportment, sustained routine efforts).
NOTE: in my current opinion, this moment in American history is what began the demise of public schooling in the USA—the loss of the principles of liberal education to those of technical and economic growth.
High school principals and teachers were having trouble with the immigration surges as well. This newer wave was characterized as being even needier than previous immigration surges to the USA. So, when the interests of business, international politics, and the economy were dubbed to be the purpose of public schooling, educators jumped at the chance of killing two birds with one stone.
“Here’s the plan:
The curriculum we’re teaching is WAY too difficult for these new immigrants9.
The nation needs factory workers.
We’ll differentiate curriculum with tracks focused on academic work for some and industrial preparation for others.
IT’S PERFECT!”
I'm not bashing occupational or vocational education (now widely referred to as Career and Technical Education—CTE). I understand how it can uplift the poor by providing craft education which can lead to economic sustenance for their families, which, in turn, can provide social mobility. But as a progressive, I believe schools should help create a new socio-economic order: one that would reduce income inequities and free the nation from the threat of economic collapse as opposed to preparing even more of its youth to contribute to a system established by the rich and dominant for the rich and dominant.
So, folks, not unlike my own persuasion, began adding Social Studies courses to the curricula…with explicit attacks on Capitalism.
Why you may ask?
Because progressives 'round the mid 20th Century were hoping that such topics would prepare students to tackle the social and economic problems of the time. That's why labor groups got involved with public education; they could see that the owners were going to stay owners unless more people educated themselves about how economies and industries actually work (to make the rich, richer). That's why pseudo-political reform candidate clowns take on public education so easily as their go-to crash-test-dummy for crappy ideas10 floated by by the interests of businessmen, the Christian American church, and an unmistakable stench of Civil War losers and Nazi losers instead of scholars, sages, experts, teachers: not even parents, really.
But not our conservative brethren. They saw such moves as blatant attacks on free-market mentality and the indoctrination of students with socialists ideas.
NOTE: what's happening now in 2021 with white supremacist Trump supporters yacking up garbage about "Critical Race Theory" at school board fiascos ain't nothin' new. Right-wing, conservative supremacists, have been doing this EXACT thing for over 70 years now. It's just most of us don't have that kind of memory (or knowledge), so we think it's all "too complicated." No. It's not complicated. It's what White supremacists do.
But all that is just how the American schooling challenges are related to our economy. What about how public education relates to national security? Our social problems? International competitiveness? I'll discuss how in responding to these questions, the public school systems across the USA have been co-opted to maintain the dominant social order of the Anglo-Saxon, Christian, English-speaking people in part two.
But first, I want to turn to the main culprit, as I see it. The reason we can't reform education and, instead, must rebuild the institution from the ground up—Ideology, Culture, and Meritocracy.
Ideologies are like Operating Systems on computing devices. They are so powerful that it appears that nothing could exist outside of them. The argument for your consideration, dear reader, has to do with just how powerful ideologies are. Our public schooling policies and practices didn't arise from a national, student-centered dialogue. Our educational traditions didn't form by chance. They were shaped entirely by collections of ideas that the dominant ethnicities consider appropriate, a matter of common sense, and the "American Way." So, if you have subscribed to the American ideology (a.k.a. American culture), seeing the world differently is…nearly impossible.
Unless you have access to and can use another operating system.
It's the powerful that wield ideologies. It's so invisible that it appears to us as a neutral, balanced state of being. It serves the powerful groups of society that use it to make their dominance seem legitimate and that preserve social cohesion in the face of clear inequalities. But for them to work, both the controllers and the controlled have to think that the distribution of power, as well as the benefits that result from said power, is legitimate and inevitable.
How is it done?
It's a mix-and-match job, y'all!!
As a nation, we've constructed a mix of ideologies that support AND undermine the need for equitable schooling. And when you take them all together, you start to see how we think we are committed to democracy and the thriving of our children, but in fact, we (and I’m talking about me here as well as the public school systems of the country) created social structures and practices that create and perpetuate the inequities that are so blatantly obvious today.
PART TWO, in the works…
Excellent examples in James Gilreath's Thomas Jefferson and the education of a Citizen (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999, distributed by University Press of New England).
Same reason the Electoral College was established, because folks weren’t ABLE to read…
As quoted in Carter Godwin Woodson’s The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United Sates from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War. 1919
I learned some of these assertions from reviewing an text entitled Thomas Jefferson’s Views of Public Education by John C. Henderson (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons) The Knickerbocker Press 1890
Generally referring to people of primarily European, South Asian, West Asian, and/or North African genetic heritage.
And perhaps still. 29% of people of Latinx descent voted for the former POTUS in 2016. In 2020, 32% of them voted for the former POTUS. The people he referred to has rapists and murders, in 2016 voted in GREATER numbers for him in the following election…
See Paula Fass’s Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)
Another prong of the dominator’s national oppression campaign….
The nerve! Why? Because they didn’t read English??!!
I’m looking at you, Vouchers. I’m looking at YOU, charter schools! (Ok. Not ALL charter schools…). Oh…and I’m looking at YOU, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.