Guest Post: Livingston on Lasch-Quinn's Letter-Writing Series

[Note: Please see the four prior installments (here, here, here, and here) of Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn's "Inarticulate by Choice" series for background. - TL]

By James Livingston

I am gratefully bewildered by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn’s essays on letter-writing.  That is a polite way of saying I don’t know what she’s talking about.  Or rather, I don’t (yet) see the problem she wants us to address.  My bewilderment derives, to begin with, from her conflation of the inner life and letter-writing, on the one hand, and the implicit elegy that derives from that conflation, on the other.  But it’s more complicated than that.  The inner life as such here derives its dignity from its correlation with resistance to oppression from external forces—in our time, the encroachments of the Internet, in another time, the intrusions of necessary labor.  That’s a cool rhetorical move, or it’s the kind of political sleight of hand that congratulates us for retreating from the world as it is.

The prayers, work songs, and aspirations of slaves and other subaltern peoples are surely instances of inner lives lived outwardly, but they’re not letters.  Why, then, equate letter-writing and the inner life of the subaltern?  I can think of only two answers.  First, us letter-writers are under siege—our subjectivity is at risk.  Where once slaves and workers had to salvage some sense of self from an intellectual space apart from what they were forced to do every day, us later, more literate types have to carve out an analogous space from where we can claim cognitive autonomy.  Second, us letter-writers need this autonomy because our purchase on the political imagination of our time is virtually nil—and so we must wait for posterity to validate out claims.  The private space created by this republic of letters harbors a public, political future. 

But are we “unthinkingly” rushing to “embrace whatever computer salespeople want us to”?   And even if we were, does that mean the art of composing a letter has been eclipsed?  Didn’t Walter J. Ong and his disciples (McLuhan et al.) teach us that new modes of communication change the cognitive status and the political import of inherited modes, but never obliterate them?  Is letter-writing necessarily demeaned by its alternatives?  Or is it actually enriched by the challenge of these alternatives—as Lasch-Quinn’s beautifully crafted epistles would suggest?

I guess I represent those “echoes of the usual, exhausted post-post modern” critique, the “alleged” 2.0 version.  But then I read this question from Lasch-Quinn, and I have to ask, didn’t Jacques Derrida, the poster boy for the post-modern sensibility, spend his adult life addressing it?  Didn’t Michel Foucault as well?  Come to think of it, didn’t John Dewey? 

“What if practices like letter-writing are not just signs and reminders that the inner life is real, but are preconditions of it, the very materials and means from which the inner life is forged in the first place.  Or, barring that, what if they tend to produce interiority, of a particular kind, nature, or quality . . . ?”

Yes, most emphatically, What if subjectivity (character, selfhood, etc.) is the result of practices, not their presupposition?  Then our questions become, not What is it we have lost, but How has this so-called inner life been produced, When, and Where?  Our question is then no longer epistemological, it’s historical.  Instead of how do we know what we know, it’s what have we said we’ve known, and why did we believe it?  What social, cultural forms determined the different contents of our interiority?

Letter-writing surely produces a kind, nature, or quality of interiority. But in the grand scheme of things historical, it’s not yet something we need to mourn. So far, I’d say, it’s nothing to write home about. Unless I see from the return address that Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn has sent the letter.

Popular Analytic Philosophy?

Gavagai?

Jim Holt begins the latest post to the New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, with the following questions:  "Is philosophy literature? Do people read philosophy for pleasure?"  His immediate answer is, I think, more or less correct, "Of course it is, and of course they do." What makes Holt's post (and the edited version of it that appeared in yesterday's print edition of the Times) more controversial and potentially interesting is his second set of questions: "Does anybody read analytic philosophy for pleasure? Is this kind of philosophy literature?"

But the rest of Holt's post confines itself to the second of these two questions, taking a definition from Evelyn Waugh of literature as "the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance,” which Waugh further defined as involving "lucidity, elegance, and individuality."  Holt makes a perfectly fair case that at least some analytic philosophy is lucid, elegant, and individual, and thus (at least according to Waugh), literature.  Fair enough.

But does anyone, other than analytic philosophers, in fact read analytic philosophy for pleasure?  Holt's utter silence on this question is telling.



A few months ago, I blogged about the myth of the accessibility of academic history.  I don't think most academic history commands -- or need command -- a sizable non-academic audience.  To the extent that we expect or demand that it should, we do our field a disservice. Nevertheless, if the accessibility of academic history is a myth, it is a valuable one.  As I wrote then, "the notion that one should write as if one were addressing a literate, general audience helps historians counteract the tendency of academic discourses to get ever more abstruse and hermetic."

But if the popular market for academic history is frequently exaggerated, the popular market for analytic philosophy is entirely imaginary...which may account for the fact that Holt doesn't even attempt to answer his question about its existence.

Indeed, the reach of analytic philosophy within the academic world beyond the philosophy department is slight.  To take an example close to home: the failure of U.S. intellectual historians to grapple sufficiently with analytic philosophy, both as an object of historical study and as a potential font of theoretical insight, has been a fairly frequent topic of discussion at the U.S. Intellectual History Conference and on this blog.

It is telling that Holt follows his first set of questions (about philosophy in general) with a paragraph about actual, human behavior:

People savor the aphorisms of Nietzsche, the essays of Schopenhauer, the philosophical novels of Sartre. They read the dialogues of Plato (and they would doubtless read the dialogues of Aristotle too, had Western civilization not been so careless as to mislay them). Some even claim to enjoy the more daunting treatises in the philosophical canon. “When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest,” Bertie Wooster swankily announces in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels.

But Holt gives analytic philosophy only a rather theoretical defense of its literary virtues.  It's hard not to see Jim Holt as simply changing the subject from the question of whether an audience exists for analytic philosophy to whether, at some abstract level, an audience ought to exist.

When it comes to literary qualities, Willard Quine is not Plato or Friedrich Nietzsche, but I don't think Holt has to prove that he is.  Those who've read, say, Word and Object, know that Quine could certainly turn a phrase and could write very clearly about complicated and potentially abstruse issues.  I have no problem whatsoever seeing Word and Object as a literary work (in Waugh's sense).

Yet, it is also true that very, very few people read Word and Object (which is one of the great classics of analytic epistemology, for what it's worth) outside philosophy classes.  And Quine is hardly even a household name.

Compare and contrast Quine to John Dewey.  Nobody, I think, has ever tried to make a case for Dewey as a prose stylist. Indeed, his turgid writing famously prompted Oliver Wendell Holmes to declare that Dewey wrote "as God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”  And yet Dewey was a household name, with enormous intellectual purchase beyond philosophy and beyond the academy.  Indeed, plenty of philosophers who've enjoyed enormous influence and popularity have been difficult or even poor writers. Hegel and Heidegger are two examples that spring to mind.

Yes, people savor the literary qualities of well-written philosophy. But people read philosophy because they think they are going to learn something about "big questions": how the world is, how we understand the world, how to live a good life, how to identify (or bring about) a good society, and so forth.  I think people beyond philosophy departments remain interested in these questions. But, for decades, they generally haven't much been interested in the kind of answers that Anglo-American philosophy departments have given to them.  Why they haven't is an interesting question. But I suspect the problem has little to do with whether or not Saul Kripke, David Lewis, or John Searle are good prose stylists.

Judge W. Brevard Hand, Intellectual Historian

United States federal judge W. Brevard Hand (1924-2008) was one of the more important conservative intellectuals of the culture wars. And yet his significance is rarely recognized. His opinion in the infamous “Alabama Textbook Case” (1987)—published as American Education on Trial: Is Secular Humanism a Religion?, with an introduction by Richard John Neuhaus—is the work of a creative and far-reaching conservative intellectual. In fact, it reads like an intellectual history of secular humanism.

In Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers briefly discusses the obstreperous Hand in the context of his discussion of constitutional originalism, part of his “wrinkles in time” chapter. Hand, as Rodgers writes, “set out to show that history proved the Supreme Court wrong” on its rulings on religion in school. As such, he made arguments from his Alabama bench in the early 1980s that served as an important precursor to the originalist movement, particularly in his disagreement with incorporation, a process by which portions of the Bill of Rights were applied at the state level. Among other revolutionary legal transformations, the precedent set by incorporation led to the 1962 Engel v. Vitale landmark decision that ruled school prayer violated the First Amendment. In contrast, based on a properly originalist understanding of the Constitution, Hand declared that states were not bound by the First Amendment and, as such, that Alabamans were free to establish religious practices of their choosing.

Hand’s early originalism proved influential, especially to Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, who made it the cornerstone of how the Reagan administration would deal with religious freedom issues. The Reagan administration openly pushed for prayer in public schools following this logic. Hand’s interpretation also influenced future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, among others. But Hand’s creative conservative jurisprudence did not end there. For in the 1983 case where he made his name as an originalist—Wallace v. Jaffree—Hand anticipated that the Supreme Court would reject his logic regarding incorporation. Thus, he helped the defendants in that case, those associated with the Alabama law that set aside one minute in the school day for school prayer or the equivalent in quiet contemplation, construct an alternative legal rationale for their actions. If it was determined that the Alabama law violated the First Amendment “establishment clause,” via incorporation, then Hand and the defendants-cum-plaintiffs sought to make their case by going through the “no establishment” provision. In other words, Hand sought to use the incorporation precedent against itself by making the case that “secular humanism” was a religion, and furthermore, that it was the established religion of the public schools, and thus, that it violated the religious freedom of Christians. This is an example of how conservative Christians often made use of multicultural “rights” language to advance their causes during the culture wars.

The “Alabama Textbook Case” (Smith v. Board of School Commissioners) (1987), then, was an attempt by Judge Hand and the plaintiffs, comprised of several hundred Alabama citizens, including teachers, to prove that secular humanism was the operant religion of the public schools by way of a close reading of textbooks. As Hand wrote: “What this case is about, is the allegedly improper promotion of certain religious beliefs, thus violating the constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion, applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.” The Neuhaus introduction nicely sets the stage for the nearly-100-page opinion that followed. Neuhaus argued that what Hand’s interlocutions proved was that “the law with respect to religion and public education is in a terrible jumble,” which is hardly controversial no matter your dog in this fight. In his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, David Sehat makes a similar point from a very different perspective. He contends that the liberal mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court that overturned the moral establishment based its decisions on bad history, which encouraged dissent. “By underselling the liberalizing rationale for their decisions,” Sehat explains, “the Court created a damaging uncertainty as to its purpose in taking on these cases.” Furthermore: “In not acknowledging past religious power and not explaining that that power had led to an unfair exclusion or coercion of individuals, the Court left obscure the reason that it felt compelled to act in the first place, which in turn allowed conservatives to press their claims without acknowledging their desire for a return to coercion.”

Neuhaus also analyzes the work and influence of John Dewey in ways that I do in my book, Education and the Cold War, though, as with Sehat, I come from a very different vantage point from Neuhaus. In seeking to concur with Hand that secular humanism was indeed a religion, Neuhaus pointed to the influence of John Dewey, who was open and honest about his secular humanist position. “The main defendant, be it understood, is the venerable John Dewey.” More: “Dewey lives on, so to speak, in the establishment philosophy of government education today.” And more still: “If fish could write a report on their environment, probably the last thing they would notice is the water. Dewey is the philosophical water within which government education swims.” And yet again, more: “Dewey was both wiser and more candid than much of today’s public educational establishment. He made no bones about the fact that education required religion and, in his view, the religion required is the religion of humanism. I say he is wiser because, with educators from Aristotle through Secretary of Education William Bennett, he knew that education has most essentially to do with paideia, with the transmission and nurturing of truths by which a community would live. A new religion was needed, he believed, and he called it the religion of humanism.” This gets at the point I was trying to make in my previous posts on secular humanism and the teaching of evolution: teachers should not hide behind professionalism and pretend their pedagogies don’t challenge fundamentalist Christianity, or even, ideally, capitalism.

This then leads me to the intellectual history of secular humanism provided by Hand in his opinion, which was, in essence, an attempt to refute the notion that education should operate in a bias-free vacuum of professionalism—put on display in the trial by John Tyson, Vice-President of the Alabama State Board of Education, as paraphrased by Hand: “values are not something that he thinks should be taught in the schools, but should be taught at home and in the churches. ‘What you go to the public schools for is to be educated to learn how to read and write.’” Instead of this, Hand interpreted the thought of several key people who gave testimony. One such person was Glennelle Halpin, a professor of educational psychology at Auburn who gave a lengthy testimony summarizing the major philosophies that informed educational theory, from behaviorism to humanist psychology. She was a proponent of values clarification, a pedagogical method that conservatives pointed to as representative of the hyper-relativism that informed public school curriculum, though Halpin said it was often misunderstood. Hand summed up her thought process on this: “Dr. Halpin says that the school does not have the right to teach a value system that is different from the parent, but the content of the curriculum in the school is not necessarily based on a survey of the value systems of the parents, so when the teacher does instruct she may well match or mismatch, deliberately, the information about values that has been presented to that child.”

As counter to Halpin’s insider view, Hand relied upon the testimony of famed conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, whose traditionalism informed his many writings on education. Based on Kirk’s analysis, Hand presented a brief but compelling overview of secular humanism’s etymology. The term emerged in the twentieth century, used by humanists in the Dewey vein to separate themselves from new humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. For Kirk, as for Babbitt and More, this was the distinction between humanism and “humanitarianism,” the latter being a sickly form of relativism. On whether secular humanism is a religion, Kirk argued that it indeed was, based on the fact that it had a set of documents which formed a creed—the Humanist Manifestos—and because it tended to make immanent “symbols of transcendence.” As Christians claimed “that one enters upon immortality through perfection in grace in death,” secular humanists made immanent “the perfection of society here in this world.” “The equivalent of death to the secularists is passing through a form of revolution to a new order of a perfect kind. The role model for this secularist thinking, Dr. Kirk says, is the Marxist theory: revolution and then eternal changelessness here on earth, a condition of perfect equality.”

My musings here only briefly touch upon the intellectual history of secular humanism synthesized by Judge Hand in the “Alabama Textbook Case.” My argument is neither that this is necessarily good intellectual history, nor that Hand made compelling legal or political arguments (all of which, luckily, were shot down by higher courts). Rather, I find it fascinating that Hand’s opinion reads more like intellectual history. And I maintain that the conservative critique of secular humanism points to some of the weaknesses inherent to the professional cloak worn by contemporary progressive educators and proponents of multiculturalism.

What Good is Education to Society? The Thin Line Between Justice and Order

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.

There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement. Although movement activists herald their ideas as fresh and bold, they don’t offer much new (aside from the enthusiasm with which they embrace market solutions to intransigent problems). For instance, like progressive educators since John Dewey, current educational reformers almost always sell their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, like the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, current trendy reform mechanisms always end up serving the ends of order: whereas the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization,” current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests and by college-entrance rates. In short, educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo.

Educational thinkers have long debated the role of education in society from one side or the other of the thin line between justice and order. In a compelling review of John Marsh’s Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry expresses the pessimistic, but frankly realistic view that schools are nothing more than engines of social reproduction. He pithily writes:

The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants. Schools train students in what business professor Stefano Harney says every diploma really proves: “that the student can follow arbitrary authority, endure boredom, and compete against others.”

Such dour analysis has deep roots in Marxism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Culture is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” We might as well substitute “culture” with “education.” Thinking about education as merely reproducing the capitalist order has been common amongst neo-Marxists since conditioned by Louis Althusser’s famous 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” (Much of my analysis of Althusser and his acolytes is drawn from the conclusion of my book, Education and the Cold War.) For Althusser, a state apparatus such as a public school system hailed, or, in Althusserian language, “interpellated” subjects to their predetermined tasks. Subjects in the educational apparatus were “always-already” called into being. There was no hope that people could rise above the ideological structure of a school. Justice was, at best, a façade, covering over the actual work being done by the schools: reproducing the dominant ideology and, as such, the status quo social order.

The leading neo-Marxist theorists of educational reproduction in the United States after the 1960s were Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Their book Schooling in Capitalist America was the most important empirical contribution to the genre. The Bowles and Gintis critique was rooted in their disillusionment with liberal reform in the United States, specifically with the failed assurance of social mobility—the promised by-product of public education. One of the basic thematic premises of Bowles and Gintis was that “the meritocratic orientation of the educational system promotes not its egalitarian function, but rather its integrative role.”

And yet, there have been a host of thinkers with leftist and Marxist orientations who have emphasized the liberating possibilities of education. Paulo Freire, author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has been canonized by colleges of education, is the most important signpost of such thinking. According to Freire, the great humanistic task of the oppressed was to liberate both themselves and their oppressors from dehumanization. But, paradoxically, humanization affirms itself in the face of dehumanization—this is the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Henry Giroux, the most widely read North American of the Freire school of thought, took this one step further: he argued that educators should join the oppressed in the vanguard of liberation. Education could be a force for revolution.

Such thinking continues. From a political position similar to Malcolm Harris, yet with diametrically different premises about the possibilities of education, Julia Pointer Putnam argues in her recent Monthly Review essay—“Another Education is Happening”—that education can be put to work for a more just society if it deemphasizes individualistic, meritocratic achievement and instead accentuates the goals of community-building (reprising some of the arguments made by the community-control activists of the late 1960s). In building on the work of legendary Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, Pointer Putnam advocates:

a type of learning known as Place-Based Education (or Community-Based Education), where the local community and environment serve as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. This approach diminishes the boundaries that have been built up between schools and the community. Place-Based Education emphasizes the ability of young people to learn by addressing the real-life problems around them.

If such pedagogical thinking sounds familiar, that’s because it is, at least, to those who have read John Dewey or any number of those schooled in Deweyan pedagogy. In fact, Pointer Putnam is explicit about grounding her theory of education in Deweyan thought. She even quotes Dewey to that effect: “The teaching-learning environments that would bring greatest growth are places where children and adults grow together, where the schools are not separate from the community.”

Dewey believed that education was the key to remolding society along more just lines. (Much of this section on Dewey is taken from Chapter 1 of my book Education and the Cold War.) Dewey’s theory of education was socially democratic. He believed education could and should remold society to be cooperative and just, even if at the expense of efficiency and order. In this regard, although he influenced progressive educators from both the order and justice sides of the movement, Dewey was firmly on the side of justice. Dewey’s theory of education was also one of agency rooted in the belief that, since human history was contingent, human subjectivity could irrevocably alter the course of the future. He conceptualized education as a motive force in overcoming the tyrannical impositions of the past. In short, Dewey was antipathetic to education as conformity. For Dewey, the relationship between individual agency and the surrounding environment was one of mutual adjustment, not a matter of one-sided accommodation of the individual to a static environment. “The environment must be plastic to the ends of the agent,” argued Dewey, because the “transformation of existing circumstances is moral duty rather than mere reproduction of them.”

In this, many have since criticized Dewey as too typically progressive or liberal in his naïve faith in reform—especially in his faith in the ameliorative potential of education. (Most of this form of criticism has come from Marxists, or from populists like Christopher Lasch. Of course, Dewey took it from all sides. The great counter-progressive historian Richard Hofstadter contended Dewey’s progressive educational theories were anti-intellectual for emphasizing practical concerns—in fact, Hofstadter dedicated a whole chapter to this critique in his celebrated Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And no one American thinker has ever had more abuse heaped upon him by conservatives than Dewey—Democracy and Education ranks fifth on a recent Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” not as harmful as The Communist Manifesto, but more so than Das Kapital!) But despite his relatively optimistic theory of education, Dewey was always sensitive to the misappropriation of his ideas. He was against education for social order. In fact, he reserved some of his most venomous intellectual barbs for those progressive educators who sacrificed justice at the altar of order and efficiency.

In 1914 Dewey wrote an article in the very first issue of The New Republic that was brutal in its assessment of fellow progressive educator David Snedden’s version of vocational education, which Dewey described as a practice that fashioned schools as “preliminary factories supported at public expense.” In Dewey’s eyes, vocational education had become a method for subsidizing capital at the expense of labor. Dewey’s article sparked an instructive exchange with Snedden, who was taken aback by Dewey’s attack, explaining that he had grown accustomed to such haranguing by educational “reactionaries,” but did not expect it from a fellow progressive. Snedden argued that his vocational education system would benefit everybody—management and workers alike. Everyone would reap the benefits of increased levels of production that would result from an educational system that trained students to succeed in their predetermined vocational niches. In response to Snedden’s reply, Dewey explained that their divergence was “not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” For Dewey, vocational education had become “an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.”

And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo.

Of course, as an educator, some degree of optimism is warranted. Since most of you, gentle readers, are educators, what say you?

What Good is Education to Society? The Thin Line Between Justice and Order

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the so-called education reform movement lately. Many of the movement’s highest-profile success stories have been (or should have been) discredited by recent cheating scandals. Although the cheating in Atlanta seems to have been the most systematic—the “Atlanta miracle” was built on the same house of cards as the “Texas miracle”—even movement darling Michelle Rhee hasn’t escaped the brouhaha unscathed. At least one of the D.C. schools Rhee touted as exemplary gained blue-ribbon accolades thanks to impossibly lofty wrong-to-right erasure rates. Unsurprisingly, high-stakes testing, where student scores are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations—upon which rewards and punishments are issued—have led to a culture of cheating and corruption. We should expect much more of the same, since this is the model touted by Obama and his Secretary of Education, former Chicago Public Schools CEO (yes, CEO) Arne Duncan, in the form of the “Race to the Top” policy that allocates big money to those states most aggressive in implementing measures celebrated by educational reformers.

There’s much work to be done by educational historians on the so-called educational reform movement. Although movement activists herald their ideas as fresh and bold, they don’t offer much new (aside from the enthusiasm with which they embrace market solutions to intransigent problems). For instance, like progressive educators since John Dewey, current educational reformers almost always sell their wares as instruments of justice. And yet, like the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century, current trendy reform mechanisms always end up serving the ends of order: whereas the progressive education movement’s most longstanding success story was its pedagogical program for “Americanization,” current reform success is calculated by how well students score on standardized tests and by college-entrance rates. In short, educational progress as measured by how well students stack up against conventional standards will always and inevitably reinforce the status quo.

Educational thinkers have long debated the role of education in society from one side or the other of the thin line between justice and order. In a compelling review of John Marsh’s Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry expresses the pessimistic, but frankly realistic view that schools are nothing more than engines of social reproduction. He pithily writes:

The hope is that every student has a teacher or two over a decade and a half that really makes them question and think, but either way, we silently acknowledge that they’ll spend the majority of their young vigor-filled lives quivering at the arbitrary mercy of petty kooks and jowly tyrants. Schools train students in what business professor Stefano Harney says every diploma really proves: “that the student can follow arbitrary authority, endure boredom, and compete against others.”

Such dour analysis has deep roots in Marxism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Culture is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.” We might as well substitute “culture” with “education.” Thinking about education as merely reproducing the capitalist order has been common amongst neo-Marxists since conditioned by Louis Althusser’s famous 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” (Much of my analysis of Althusser and his acolytes is drawn from the conclusion of my book, Education and the Cold War.) For Althusser, a state apparatus such as a public school system hailed, or, in Althusserian language, “interpellated” subjects to their predetermined tasks. Subjects in the educational apparatus were “always-already” called into being. There was no hope that people could rise above the ideological structure of a school. Justice was, at best, a façade, covering over the actual work being done by the schools: reproducing the dominant ideology and, as such, the status quo social order.

The leading neo-Marxist theorists of educational reproduction in the United States after the 1960s were Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Their book Schooling in Capitalist America was the most important empirical contribution to the genre. The Bowles and Gintis critique was rooted in their disillusionment with liberal reform in the United States, specifically with the failed assurance of social mobility—the promised by-product of public education. One of the basic thematic premises of Bowles and Gintis was that “the meritocratic orientation of the educational system promotes not its egalitarian function, but rather its integrative role.”

And yet, there have been a host of thinkers with leftist and Marxist orientations who have emphasized the liberating possibilities of education. Paulo Freire, author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has been canonized by colleges of education, is the most important signpost of such thinking. According to Freire, the great humanistic task of the oppressed was to liberate both themselves and their oppressors from dehumanization. But, paradoxically, humanization affirms itself in the face of dehumanization—this is the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Henry Giroux, the most widely read North American of the Freire school of thought, took this one step further: he argued that educators should join the oppressed in the vanguard of liberation. Education could be a force for revolution.

Such thinking continues. From a political position similar to Malcolm Harris, yet with diametrically different premises about the possibilities of education, Julia Pointer Putnam argues in her recent Monthly Review essay—“Another Education is Happening”—that education can be put to work for a more just society if it deemphasizes individualistic, meritocratic achievement and instead accentuates the goals of community-building (reprising some of the arguments made by the community-control activists of the late 1960s). In building on the work of legendary Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs, Pointer Putnam advocates:

a type of learning known as Place-Based Education (or Community-Based Education), where the local community and environment serve as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, and other subjects across the curriculum. This approach diminishes the boundaries that have been built up between schools and the community. Place-Based Education emphasizes the ability of young people to learn by addressing the real-life problems around them.

If such pedagogical thinking sounds familiar, that’s because it is, at least, to those who have read John Dewey or any number of those schooled in Deweyan pedagogy. In fact, Pointer Putnam is explicit about grounding her theory of education in Deweyan thought. She even quotes Dewey to that effect: “The teaching-learning environments that would bring greatest growth are places where children and adults grow together, where the schools are not separate from the community.”

Dewey believed that education was the key to remolding society along more just lines. (Much of this section on Dewey is taken from Chapter 1 of my book Education and the Cold War.) Dewey’s theory of education was socially democratic. He believed education could and should remold society to be cooperative and just, even if at the expense of efficiency and order. In this regard, although he influenced progressive educators from both the order and justice sides of the movement, Dewey was firmly on the side of justice. Dewey’s theory of education was also one of agency rooted in the belief that, since human history was contingent, human subjectivity could irrevocably alter the course of the future. He conceptualized education as a motive force in overcoming the tyrannical impositions of the past. In short, Dewey was antipathetic to education as conformity. For Dewey, the relationship between individual agency and the surrounding environment was one of mutual adjustment, not a matter of one-sided accommodation of the individual to a static environment. “The environment must be plastic to the ends of the agent,” argued Dewey, because the “transformation of existing circumstances is moral duty rather than mere reproduction of them.”

In this, many have since criticized Dewey as too typically progressive or liberal in his naïve faith in reform—especially in his faith in the ameliorative potential of education. (Most of this form of criticism has come from Marxists, or from populists like Christopher Lasch. Of course, Dewey took it from all sides. The great counter-progressive historian Richard Hofstadter contended Dewey’s progressive educational theories were anti-intellectual for emphasizing practical concerns—in fact, Hofstadter dedicated a whole chapter to this critique in his celebrated Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And no one American thinker has ever had more abuse heaped upon him by conservatives than Dewey—Democracy and Education ranks fifth on a recent Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries,” not as harmful as The Communist Manifesto, but more so than Das Kapital!) But despite his relatively optimistic theory of education, Dewey was always sensitive to the misappropriation of his ideas. He was against education for social order. In fact, he reserved some of his most venomous intellectual barbs for those progressive educators who sacrificed justice at the altar of order and efficiency.

In 1914 Dewey wrote an article in the very first issue of The New Republic that was brutal in its assessment of fellow progressive educator David Snedden’s version of vocational education, which Dewey described as a practice that fashioned schools as “preliminary factories supported at public expense.” In Dewey’s eyes, vocational education had become a method for subsidizing capital at the expense of labor. Dewey’s article sparked an instructive exchange with Snedden, who was taken aback by Dewey’s attack, explaining that he had grown accustomed to such haranguing by educational “reactionaries,” but did not expect it from a fellow progressive. Snedden argued that his vocational education system would benefit everybody—management and workers alike. Everyone would reap the benefits of increased levels of production that would result from an educational system that trained students to succeed in their predetermined vocational niches. In response to Snedden’s reply, Dewey explained that their divergence was “not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that.” For Dewey, vocational education had become “an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.”

And yet, despite Dewey’s explicit hesitations, nearly a century later, the history of American education suggests that order almost always wins out over justice, no matter authorial intentions—and no matter that Deweyans persist in sprouting up across the educational landscape. We might need to come to terms with the fact that education—or more precisely, schooling—is meant to serve the ends of the status quo, i.e., brutal inequality. And thus, if the educational reformers have been successful at anything, it’s in ensuring a more efficient machine for reproducing the status quo.

Of course, as an educator, some degree of optimism is warranted. Since most of you, gentle readers, are educators, what say you?

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Is Secular Humanism a Religion?

Most historians who study the modern Christian Right discuss, to some extent, how religious conservatives replaced the communist Great Satan with another bogeyman, “Secular Humanism,” a phrase common to the religious right lexicon from the 1970s on. For example, Daniel K. Williams, in his new book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, dedicates a sub-section of his chapter on the “Culture Wars in the Carter Years” to “Concerns about ‘Secular Humanism’ in Education.” Williams notes that religious conservatives did not focus on humanism when it first organized in 1941 under the auspices of John Dewey’s American Humanist Association (although, as I show in my book, they certainly focused their ire on Dewey’s educational philosophy). Williams continues: “Yet when social conservatives became concerned about changes in school curricula in the late 1960s, they decided that objectionable programs such as sex education and values clarification classes might be an attempt by the National Education Association and, in the words of conservative Catholic journalist John Steinbacher, John Dewey’s ‘coterie of sycophantic followers’ to ‘make good little Humanists out of the kids’."

But despite such cursory attention to the problem of secular humanism, historians rarely take religious conservative thought about secular humanism very seriously. In other words, what we need is an intellectual history of the Christian Right’s critique of secular humanism. We need this because such a critique has formed the intellectual basis and legal strategy of the Christian Right’s struggles over public education since the 1970s. We need this because doing justice to the Christian Right’s argument allows us to better understand the movement. And we need this because, as I will seek to make clear in my conclusion, the Christian Right's critique of secular humanism obliquely reveals a major blind spot of contemporary progressive education.

Influenced by the 1970s writings of Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye, the Christian Right argued that the public schools were in violation of the First Amendment because the schools established an official religion: secular humanism. Yep, that’s right, they contended secular humanism, though atheistic, evinced all the traits of a religion and thus the public schools, awash in secular humanism, violated the religious freedom of Christians. Secularists considered this ironic, to say the least, given that the so-called Lemon test put the concepts “secular” and “religious” in direct opposition to one another in that for a statute to be deemed constitutional it must have a secular purpose and its principal effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

Nevertheless, the argument that secular humanism was a religion, and that its dominion over the public school curriculum was a violation of the First Amendment, guided conservative legal attempts to remove evolution from biology classrooms or, at least, have it taught alongside some form of creationism (including, recently, intelligent design). Occasionally, the Christian Right found sympathetic judges on this matter, such as Brevard Hand, a federal judge in Alabama who ruled against state schools in a 1987 decision, writing that the secular humanist “omission” of religion “does affect a person’s ability to develop religious beliefs and exercise that religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.” But Hand’s logic was overruled and, generally speaking, the courts have yet to grant legitimacy to this argument. For example, in another 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law requiring teachers of evolution to give equal time to creationism was unconstitutional because its sole purpose was to “advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.” Obviously, to make this argument the Court did not conceptualize evolution, which the Christian Right considers integral to secular humanism, as religious doctrine.

But, just because the courts have yet to take the Christian Right seriously when it claims secular humanism is a religion does not mean intellectual historians should do likewise. LaHaye, now famous for authoring the best-selling premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, wrote a three-part “Battle” series in the late 1970s and early 1980s that gave his readers a framework for understanding secular humanism. LaHaye dedicated the third book in the series, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children (1983) (which arrived quickly on the heels of The Battle for the Mind and The Battle for the Family), to those parents concerned about the decline of the public schools, especially “the growing army within that group who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools, has brought on this decline.” LaHaye coined the awkward phrase “humanist educrats,” a reference to “the elite heads of many teachers colleges, administrators, and many superintendents and principals who are determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds, of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” Like so many before and since, he blamed the apparently all-powerful John Dewey. “Dewey made the teaching of humanism exclusive by getting traditional religion and its values expelled from the public schools.” The expulsion of Christianity from the schools, and its replacement by secular humanism, was, for LaHaye, “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.”

LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism, “the official doctrine of public education,” displayed all of them:

1. A well-defined Bible or “Scriptures”
2. A stated doctrine or dogma
3. An object of worship
4. A priesthood
5. Missionaries
6. Seminaries
7. Temples
8. An established life-style
9. A support base
10. Its roots are grounded in ancient religions
11. Recognition by the Supreme Court as a religion
12. Vigorous opposition to theistic religion
13. A world view
14. Open acknowledgement of its position

Now, I don’t buy the argument that “secular humanism” qualifies as a religion by those standards, or any other set. But, the Christian Right had valid reasons to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their moral vision. The Supreme Court enshrined secularism (if not secular humanism) in the schools with a series of landmark cases, most famously the Engel v. Vitale decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional in 1962. (Stay tuned for an upcoming roundtable at this blog on David Sehat's new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, a discussion which will no doubt deal with some of these issues.) Curriculum trends were just as distressing. Though progressive educators since Dewey had desired that schools teach skepticism of established institutions, including organized religion, few teachers actively challenged local norms, especially religious orthodoxies. But this changed in the 1960s. In English classes, teachers increasingly assigned works by minority and women authors that complicated traditional canons. In social studies, students were challenged to clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by their parents. In science, teachers slowly overcame the century-long taboo against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussions of sex came to replace moral exhortations.

A popular anthropology curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome Bruner in the early 1970s—MACOS, or, “Man: A Course of Study”—exemplified this liberalization of the curriculum. During a MACOS unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand, yet not judge, cultural difference. Such relativism became the norm. The single, authoritative account of American history increasingly gave way to an approach that accentuated multiple perspectives. This was highlighted by a 1991 New York state report, “One Nation, Many Peoples,” that deemphasized assimilation by affirming “a right to cultural diversity” that the authors argued must be reflected in the curriculum. In short, God and Country gave way to something else, call it “secular humanism” if you like, although “multiculturalism” works better.

This is not to say that such liberalization or secularization or multiculturalization took hold everywhere or at all times. In some parts of the country, for example, the traditional patriotic historical narrative has never given way to social “history from the bottom” or a curriculum that deemphasizes American exceptionalism. Not all Americans get acquainted with evolution in school. Some biology teachers in Kansas no doubt still adhere to the 1999 state board of education decision to remove evolution as one of the five unifying themes in the science classroom. Perhaps more importantly, at least since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, neoconservative educators like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, and (until her recent intellectual u-turn) Diane Ravitch, have sought to implement standardization in order to reverse progressive educational trends in place since the 1960s. But, such facts notwithstanding, generally speaking, the way our children learn is much different than it used to be, much more liberal or progressive or multicultural or even secular humanist.

This then leads me to my conclusion: The conservative critique of secular humanist schools should make clear that, like all curriculums, the contemporary school curriculum, despite its implied cultural relativism, proves to be more tolerant of some cultural positions than others. This is normal and good. I think education should be intolerant of some positions. In my perfect world, I would have schools inculcate socialistic values and be prejudiced against values inimical to them.

I contend that the progressive educational establishment is dishonest about their project. A 1987 report put out by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, entitled “Religion in the Curriculum,” found that “references to religion have all but been excised from the public school curriculum.” Progressive educators should come out and say, forcefully, that religion is not welcome in the public schools because it contradicts the values children need to learn to become tolerant citizens in a multicultural society. If they don’t believe this to be their project, and most probably don’t, then there needs to be serious reflection about why religion is hardly taught in the schools, given how important it continues to be in our political culture. Religion is progressive education’s blind spot. Why isn’t it taught about? Is it too controversial? Should something so important be so taboo?

Is Secular Humanism a Religion?

Most historians who study the modern Christian Right discuss, to some extent, how religious conservatives replaced the communist Great Satan with another bogeyman, “Secular Humanism,” a phrase common to the religious right lexicon from the 1970s on. For example, Daniel K. Williams, in his new book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right, dedicates a sub-section of his chapter on the “Culture Wars in the Carter Years” to “Concerns about ‘Secular Humanism’ in Education.” Williams notes that religious conservatives did not focus on humanism when it first organized in 1941 under the auspices of John Dewey’s American Humanist Association (although, as I show in my book, they certainly focused their ire on Dewey’s educational philosophy). Williams continues: “Yet when social conservatives became concerned about changes in school curricula in the late 1960s, they decided that objectionable programs such as sex education and values clarification classes might be an attempt by the National Education Association and, in the words of conservative Catholic journalist John Steinbacher, John Dewey’s ‘coterie of sycophantic followers’ to ‘make good little Humanists out of the kids’."

But despite such cursory attention to the problem of secular humanism, historians rarely take religious conservative thought about secular humanism very seriously. In other words, what we need is an intellectual history of the Christian Right’s critique of secular humanism. We need this because such a critique has formed the intellectual basis and legal strategy of the Christian Right’s struggles over public education since the 1970s. We need this because doing justice to the Christian Right’s argument allows us to better understand the movement. And we need this because, as I will seek to make clear in my conclusion, the Christian Right's critique of secular humanism obliquely reveals a major blind spot of contemporary progressive education.

Influenced by the 1970s writings of Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye, the Christian Right argued that the public schools were in violation of the First Amendment because the schools established an official religion: secular humanism. Yep, that’s right, they contended secular humanism, though atheistic, evinced all the traits of a religion and thus the public schools, awash in secular humanism, violated the religious freedom of Christians. Secularists considered this ironic, to say the least, given that the so-called Lemon test put the concepts “secular” and “religious” in direct opposition to one another in that for a statute to be deemed constitutional it must have a secular purpose and its principal effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.

Nevertheless, the argument that secular humanism was a religion, and that its dominion over the public school curriculum was a violation of the First Amendment, guided conservative legal attempts to remove evolution from biology classrooms or, at least, have it taught alongside some form of creationism (including, recently, intelligent design). Occasionally, the Christian Right found sympathetic judges on this matter, such as Brevard Hand, a federal judge in Alabama who ruled against state schools in a 1987 decision, writing that the secular humanist “omission” of religion “does affect a person’s ability to develop religious beliefs and exercise that religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution.” But Hand’s logic was overruled and, generally speaking, the courts have yet to grant legitimacy to this argument. For example, in another 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court found that a Louisiana law requiring teachers of evolution to give equal time to creationism was unconstitutional because its sole purpose was to “advance the religious viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind.” Obviously, to make this argument the Court did not conceptualize evolution, which the Christian Right considers integral to secular humanism, as religious doctrine.

But, just because the courts have yet to take the Christian Right seriously when it claims secular humanism is a religion does not mean intellectual historians should do likewise. LaHaye, now famous for authoring the best-selling premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, wrote a three-part “Battle” series in the late 1970s and early 1980s that gave his readers a framework for understanding secular humanism. LaHaye dedicated the third book in the series, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children (1983) (which arrived quickly on the heels of The Battle for the Mind and The Battle for the Family), to those parents concerned about the decline of the public schools, especially “the growing army within that group who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools, has brought on this decline.” LaHaye coined the awkward phrase “humanist educrats,” a reference to “the elite heads of many teachers colleges, administrators, and many superintendents and principals who are determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds, of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” Like so many before and since, he blamed the apparently all-powerful John Dewey. “Dewey made the teaching of humanism exclusive by getting traditional religion and its values expelled from the public schools.” The expulsion of Christianity from the schools, and its replacement by secular humanism, was, for LaHaye, “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.”

LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism, “the official doctrine of public education,” displayed all of them:

1. A well-defined Bible or “Scriptures”
2. A stated doctrine or dogma
3. An object of worship
4. A priesthood
5. Missionaries
6. Seminaries
7. Temples
8. An established life-style
9. A support base
10. Its roots are grounded in ancient religions
11. Recognition by the Supreme Court as a religion
12. Vigorous opposition to theistic religion
13. A world view
14. Open acknowledgement of its position

Now, I don’t buy the argument that “secular humanism” qualifies as a religion by those standards, or any other set. But, the Christian Right had valid reasons to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their moral vision. The Supreme Court enshrined secularism (if not secular humanism) in the schools with a series of landmark cases, most famously the Engel v. Vitale decision that declared school prayer unconstitutional in 1962. (Stay tuned for an upcoming roundtable at this blog on David Sehat's new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, a discussion which will no doubt deal with some of these issues.) Curriculum trends were just as distressing. Though progressive educators since Dewey had desired that schools teach skepticism of established institutions, including organized religion, few teachers actively challenged local norms, especially religious orthodoxies. But this changed in the 1960s. In English classes, teachers increasingly assigned works by minority and women authors that complicated traditional canons. In social studies, students were challenged to clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by their parents. In science, teachers slowly overcame the century-long taboo against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussions of sex came to replace moral exhortations.

A popular anthropology curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome Bruner in the early 1970s—MACOS, or, “Man: A Course of Study”—exemplified this liberalization of the curriculum. During a MACOS unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand, yet not judge, cultural difference. Such relativism became the norm. The single, authoritative account of American history increasingly gave way to an approach that accentuated multiple perspectives. This was highlighted by a 1991 New York state report, “One Nation, Many Peoples,” that deemphasized assimilation by affirming “a right to cultural diversity” that the authors argued must be reflected in the curriculum. In short, God and Country gave way to something else, call it “secular humanism” if you like, although “multiculturalism” works better.

This is not to say that such liberalization or secularization or multiculturalization took hold everywhere or at all times. In some parts of the country, for example, the traditional patriotic historical narrative has never given way to social “history from the bottom” or a curriculum that deemphasizes American exceptionalism. Not all Americans get acquainted with evolution in school. Some biology teachers in Kansas no doubt still adhere to the 1999 state board of education decision to remove evolution as one of the five unifying themes in the science classroom. Perhaps more importantly, at least since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report, neoconservative educators like William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, and (until her recent intellectual u-turn) Diane Ravitch, have sought to implement standardization in order to reverse progressive educational trends in place since the 1960s. But, such facts notwithstanding, generally speaking, the way our children learn is much different than it used to be, much more liberal or progressive or multicultural or even secular humanist.

This then leads me to my conclusion: The conservative critique of secular humanist schools should make clear that, like all curriculums, the contemporary school curriculum, despite its implied cultural relativism, proves to be more tolerant of some cultural positions than others. This is normal and good. I think education should be intolerant of some positions. In my perfect world, I would have schools inculcate socialistic values and be prejudiced against values inimical to them.

I contend that the progressive educational establishment is dishonest about their project. A 1987 report put out by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, entitled “Religion in the Curriculum,” found that “references to religion have all but been excised from the public school curriculum.” Progressive educators should come out and say, forcefully, that religion is not welcome in the public schools because it contradicts the values children need to learn to become tolerant citizens in a multicultural society. If they don’t believe this to be their project, and most probably don’t, then there needs to be serious reflection about why religion is hardly taught in the schools, given how important it continues to be in our political culture. Religion is progressive education’s blind spot. Why isn’t it taught about? Is it too controversial? Should something so important be so taboo?