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


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American Schooling and the Cultural "Consensus"

Generation after generation, American schools have helped to mold a compliant an quiescent citizenry.

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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.

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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").

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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.

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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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