How ASchools Fail Democracy (Excerpt)

"...More than 40 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that it was unsound to assume that the individual development of every child must coincide, through a kind of established harmony, with the development of a good society. The anti-set-curriculum idea and the equally unsound how-to conception of learning are two of the guiding ideas in American colleges and schools of education. Together they form an ideological double whammy against a coherent, knowledge-based curriculum in elementary schools—against, that is, the thing most needed to enhance language ability and overcome the language-comprehension gap.

Mastery of the knowledge assumed within the American speech community is not just a technical prerequisite for proficiency in the standard language. It is also a prerequisite to something equally profound in a democracy—a sense of community and solidarity within the nation. Such a sense of unity was one of the chief educational ambitions of the founders. "A popular Government," said Madison, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy." The cohesion of the nation and the willingness of citizens to temper their private and local interests with allegiance to the common good could be obtained only through commonality in the school curriculum. Such commonality was the explicit subject of an important early essay on schooling, "Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic," written in 1786 by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Our most important and influential early schoolmaster, Noah Webster, was our chief maker of both dictionaries and schoolbooks. He correctly connected the two projects, believing that a common public language plus a common school curriculum were needed to sustain a loyalty to the common good.

The tempering of factionalism through a common education is thus the emotional parallel to the technical need for shared background knowledge within a speech community. Among early schoolbook writers there was a benign conspiracy to celebrate both patriotism and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and, as one wrote, to "exhibit in a strong light the principles of political and religious freedom which our forefathers professed … and to record the numerous examples of fortitude, courage and patriotism which have rendered them illustrious."

Already by the early 19th century, as de Tocqueville noted, the American educational experiment was highly successful in creating loyal, patriotic citizens ready to participate in the public sphere. Horace Mann, a great proponent of the "common school" in the 19th century, explained how this creation of an emotional bond could overcome resentments of class and tribe: "The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society."..