CFP: Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies
Special Issue on Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future
Edited by Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University) and Jeff Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)

Fundamental questions have roiled the American educational system in recent years. Critics suggest that public education is failing its students and the nation, pinning the blame on teachers' unions, curriculum, and educational bureaucracy, among other culprits. Skeptics, on the other hand, note that critiques of today's educational system are motivated by get-rich-quick privatization schemes or simply find educational reform to be the latest cause de jour. Teachers themselves often feel that their professionalism, their care for children as well as test scores, and their collective bargaining rights vis-a-vis administrators are threatened by possible reforms.

As the journal of record for the Illinois Council for the Social Studies, The Councilor will publish a special issue on the topic of educational reform. We seek academic articles and shorter reflective essays on topics related to educational reform in its current guise, but also its past iterations and possible future trajectories. Possible topics may include:

• Teachers’ firsthand experiences with new testing and accountability regimes
• Lessons from previous reform movements that might inform the current situation
• Discussion of how Illinois teachers and schools have responded to the challenges of education reform

For consideration, please submit an abstract of approximately 200 words to the editors by October 15, 2012. The editors will review all submissions and then invite authors to submit full articles to the journal in early 2013. Abstracts should be emailed to Andrew Hartman (ahartma@ilstu.edu) and Jeff Manuel (jemanue@siue.edu).

The Councilor is the peer-reviewed journal of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies. Since 1939, The Councilor has published articles that incorporate pedagogical innovation and practice into all disciplines of the social studies. The Councilor also provides a forum for scholars to publish articles that explore the ways in which they integrate research into the classroom.

The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective (Call for Papers)

Howard Hotson, Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at Oxford and President of the International Society for Intellectual History, just called my attention to the isih's 2012 conference, which will be held at Princeton University on September 4-6 and is entitled The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective.

It looks like a fascinating event and should be of interest to members of S-USIH and readers of this blog.

Paper and panel proposals are due on April 16, 2012.  The complete Call for Papers can be found at the above link and below the fold.


The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective
Princeton University
4-6 September 2012

Call for Papers

It is an inescapable fact of contemporary life that the idea of a liberal education, an education that aims primarily at the cultivation of the intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular vocation, is widely under attack all over the world. In country after country, the idea of learning for its own sake is being swept aside, as institutions of higher education are pressured to devote themselves primarily to preparing students for careers in practical areas. The global membership of the International Society for Intellectual History is in a unique position to illuminate these questions from a genuinely historical and cosmopolitan perspective.
The range of potential questions is vast:

• What role did the ideal of liberal education play in classical Western intellectual culture?
• How did the idea arise in ancient Greece? How was it modified in transmission to ancient Rome?
• Was it fundamental to higher education in the medieval and early modern periods?
• How did it mix and mingle with other, more practical conceptions of higher learning throughout history?
• How did the high theorists of university teaching and research in the nineteenth and early twentieth century develop the idea?
• Have their writings been superseded? If so, how and why?
• What lessons can be learned from the intellectual history of non-western cultures?
• What cultural values and intellectual assumptions have sustained the quest for new knowledge and its transmission to the next generation outside the Western world?
• What forces and agendas are propelling the current redefinition of university learning around the world?
• What prospect is there for reviving elements of this traditional concept in an idiom appropriate to the twenty-first century?

During the conference, a series of distinguished keynote speakers, to be announced shortly, will help determine some of the broad lineaments of the topic, which will be further explored in contributions of two main kinds submitted in response to this call for papers. The first and principal form of contributions will be brief papers relating to the theme of liberal education, scholarship, and their place in society. Papers can concentrate on any period, region, tradition or discipline, including the arts, humanities, sciences, and various forms of professional learning. As well as individual papers, we welcome proposals for panels of up to three papers and a commentator. Individual papers will be twenty minutes long, followed by ten minutes of discussion.

The second set of contributions will be posters designed to draw on the international scope of the Society. The purpose of the posters is to document the various attempts to reform higher education being pursued simultaneously in various countries. As well as brief narratives of major legislative and reform programs and opposition to them, posters should include references to resources for studying the national situation further: news broadcasts, documentaries, serious journalism, academic studies, and legislation itself. As well as displaying the posters and discussing them in a poster session, it is hoped that this material can be collected and archived on the Society’s website as a readily accessible resource.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words for each paper or poster. Proposals for panels featuring a maximum of four papers should not exceed 2500 words. All proposals – for papers, panels, and posters – should be accompanied by a brief CV or biographical statement. Individual contributors are welcome to present both a paper (or panel) and a poster at the conference. All proposals are due 16 April 2012. Decisions will be announced by 1 May. Please send proposals to James Lancaster (james.lancaster(at)postgrad.sas.ac.uk), to whom you should also address any queries.

Fundamental Tensions In U.S. History, Intellectual and Otherwise

I don't normally spend a lot time thinking about essential, or fundamental, tensions in American history. I think positing these tensions is a bit cheap---a reductionist way of sweeping a lot important details, or contingencies, under the rug. I suppose I should think more about these tensions, however, since they are useful. Many well-known historians resort to them. And many solid historians respect others who resort to these shorthands.



For a long time Hegel, for instance, was important---a force to be reckoned with---in terms of theorizing about history. In case you're forgotten (or are unfamiliar), Hegel discussed a dialectic, or a tension, around the idea of freedom in history. He saw a dialectic of transition, progress actually, in relation to our increased consciousness of freedom. Hegel forwarded the theory that the idea of freedom was coming into being by grades---that there was a teleology of the realization of human freedom in history. See his Philosophy of History for more, or read more about his thought here. I think this is a fair, shorthand way, of characterizing his thought. He saw a tension, and believed it should characterize accounts of Western history. It's whiggish, but past historians of the United States have applied it in their accounts.



But I'm not here to dwell on Hegel. My present thinking about fundamental tensions has arisen because of some side reading in Reinhold Niebuhr.* This past week I started reading Niebuhr's 1944 book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. This is a work of political philosophy, infused with Christian theology, that covers democracy, fascism, cynicism, and optimism in relation to liberal Christian and secular thought. Ray Haberski referenced this work in an earlier UISH post. Ray used Niebuhr's Children in a discussion of the 1949 film noir classic, The Third Man, to analyze fascism's success in the context of the growth of democratic liberalism.



I'm intrigued by a fundamental tension Niebuhr attributes to Western societies in Children. He argues that you can view the history of Western political philosophy, and American politics by extension, through the lenses of excessive optimism and extreme cynicism. The former is linked to political liberals (particularly the twentieth-century American variety) through their sharp focus on general welfare. These are the naive "Children of Light." The latter, the "Children of Darkness," use our inherent self-interest to manipulate politics through cynicism---playing factions off each other.



This resonated with me. But I probably would've held Niebuhr's theory in tension had I not seen an immediate application this week in the classroom. I'm teaching "The History of American Education" this term, and our first applied reading---after a two-period discussion of the nature and philosophy of history---was in William J. Reese's America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind" (Johns Hopkins Press, 2001). The book is part of a series edited by Stanley I. Kutler called "The American Moment."



Normally I don't dwell on forewords from series editors in my readings with students; even in an academic press series, these are usually puffery---an academic's attempt at salesmanship. But I decided to have them look at this one. Kutler's foreword offered at least one intriguing point relating to "fundamental tensions" in American history:



"Schooling also reflects the eternal quest for the proper balance between individualism and community---both "values," deeply ingrained in the American character, with substantial merit and appeal. Americans, Reese notes [on p. 8], vacillate between the two, yet constantly search for a useful, meaningful reconciliation of any tension between them, favoring an education system that will promote and serve both values" (p. ix).



Just to be painfully explicit, I'm connecting individualism to self interest, and general welfare to community (or the common good).



Just before the crush of the term began, as I was attempting to finish my recent manuscript chapter on Mortimer J. Adler, the great books idea, and reactions to the Sixties, I was dwelling a lot on feelings of alienation in relation to the common good. I was thinking a great deal about how our institutions (public, private, and in-between) navigate the individual-community divide, and how they get off-track and require reform---or even revolution.



In other words, my reading, research, and teaching are coming together to underscore the notion that fundamental tensions, especially this one between self-interest and the general welfare, are not just cheap, reductionist shorthands that ignore contingencies. Indeed, some dialectics and dichotomies are representative of historical realities---the historical contingencies at hand are about these tensions. These tensions feel simple, but have an explanatory power that can't be denied. Maybe Niebuhr, Kutler, and Reese are right? And maybe I need to take Hegel more seriously than I have in the past?



What "fundamental tensions"---or dichotomies or dialectics---guide your thinking about intellectual history, or American culture generally? How do you work around the problems they present? How do you reckon with their explanatory power in relation to other valid tropes? - TL



------------------------------------------



* Have you heard about the recent posthumous release of John Patrick Diggins' Why Niebuhr Now? (University of Chicago Press, 2011)? I'd be interested to hear any early scuttlebutt on the book's quality, contents, or potential for controversy. - TL

The Ironies of Education Reform

In a post from about a month ago I sought to put the so-called education reform movement in a longer historical context. I introduced the post as follows:



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 (pictured here with former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty)

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.



I've been giving more thought to the historical significance of the education reform movement since I posted this, mostly because I am writing a piece on Teach for America (TFA), where Rhee first made her mark in the world of education reform.



Rhee’s professional biography highlights the baffling place of TFA relative to the knotty history of American education reform. The last education leader as polarizing as Rhee was Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Shanker’s fractious legacy is evident in that he was both lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, as the man who blew up the world no less, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The paradoxical connections between Rhee, the leading anti-teacher’s unionist, and Shanker, the most important teacher’s unionist in American history, do not end there, however. When Shanker infamously lead the UFT out on three separate teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, in what became known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (which I blogged about here, in the context of thinking about communitarianism), Shanker was defending an educational order similar to that which TFA has attached itself to: a standardized system of accountability believed to be meritocratic. It goes without saying that these similarities are deeply ironic.



Some background history is warranted (I gave a synopsis of this at my post on communitarianism as well). In the late 1960s, black citizens in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political and financial support from the liberal elite, including from Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Power theorists such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. They sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers on the grounds that black teachers, unlike their white counterparts, would not presume black students genetically or culturally incapable of academic achievement.



Whether or not black teachers would better serve black students was less important to Shanker and the UFT than the fact that community control infringed upon a collectively bargained contract whereby teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests they took at several points along their career. This system, which Shanker and his union members believed was objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but often left black teachers behind. As part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several white teachers, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control. Prefiguring the TFA model, several of the white replacement teachers were inexperienced yet academically gifted Ivy Leaguers. This move, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker, who, thanks to union solidarity, decisively defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

As historian Jerald Podair convincingly shows, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis shattered the alliance between Jews and blacks that, for decades, had formed the bedrock of New York City’s cosmopolitanism.



But the crisis broke another bond, one mostly unnoticed despite its significance: that between teacher’s unions and educational reformers. Prior to the late 1960s, the concerns of teachers and students were rarely thought exclusive. It was understood that teachers and students held a mutual interest in acquiring more resources for schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville dismantled this affinity by revealing the cracks in the engine of American meritocracy.



Unwittingly, the TFA insurgency inserted itself into this complex history in incongruent ways. On the one hand, like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, TFA operates by a post-social Darwinist philosophy that all students are capable of academic achievement, no matter their racial and socio-economic background. And yet, on the other hand, much as Shanker and his teachers did in 1968, TFA bolsters a standardized testing regime that underpins American meritocracy—which, due to the long and tortuous history of race and class discrimination, disproportionately benefits whites at the expense of blacks and the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This discrepancy underscores the problems associated with the rationale for education reform: that it seeks to end educational inequality.

The Ironies of Education Reform

In a post from about a month ago I sought to put the so-called education reform movement in a longer historical context. I introduced the post as follows:



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 (pictured here with former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty)

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.



I've been giving more thought to the historical significance of the education reform movement since I posted this, mostly because I am writing a piece on Teach for America (TFA), where Rhee first made her mark in the world of education reform.



Rhee’s professional biography highlights the baffling place of TFA relative to the knotty history of American education reform. The last education leader as polarizing as Rhee was Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Shanker’s fractious legacy is evident in that he was both lampooned in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, as the man who blew up the world no less, and posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. The paradoxical connections between Rhee, the leading anti-teacher’s unionist, and Shanker, the most important teacher’s unionist in American history, do not end there, however. When Shanker infamously lead the UFT out on three separate teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, in what became known as the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (which I blogged about here, in the context of thinking about communitarianism), Shanker was defending an educational order similar to that which TFA has attached itself to: a standardized system of accountability believed to be meritocratic. It goes without saying that these similarities are deeply ironic.



Some background history is warranted (I gave a synopsis of this at my post on communitarianism as well). In the late 1960s, black citizens in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political and financial support from the liberal elite, including from Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Power theorists such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. They sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers on the grounds that black teachers, unlike their white counterparts, would not presume black students genetically or culturally incapable of academic achievement.



Whether or not black teachers would better serve black students was less important to Shanker and the UFT than the fact that community control infringed upon a collectively bargained contract whereby teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests they took at several points along their career. This system, which Shanker and his union members believed was objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but often left black teachers behind. As part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several white teachers, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control. Prefiguring the TFA model, several of the white replacement teachers were inexperienced yet academically gifted Ivy Leaguers. This move, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker, who, thanks to union solidarity, decisively defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

As historian Jerald Podair convincingly shows, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis shattered the alliance between Jews and blacks that, for decades, had formed the bedrock of New York City’s cosmopolitanism.



But the crisis broke another bond, one mostly unnoticed despite its significance: that between teacher’s unions and educational reformers. Prior to the late 1960s, the concerns of teachers and students were rarely thought exclusive. It was understood that teachers and students held a mutual interest in acquiring more resources for schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville dismantled this affinity by revealing the cracks in the engine of American meritocracy.



Unwittingly, the TFA insurgency inserted itself into this complex history in incongruent ways. On the one hand, like the Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, TFA operates by a post-social Darwinist philosophy that all students are capable of academic achievement, no matter their racial and socio-economic background. And yet, on the other hand, much as Shanker and his teachers did in 1968, TFA bolsters a standardized testing regime that underpins American meritocracy—which, due to the long and tortuous history of race and class discrimination, disproportionately benefits whites at the expense of blacks and the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This discrepancy underscores the problems associated with the rationale for education reform: that it seeks to end educational inequality.

Theory and The History of Education

The May 2011 issue of History of Education Quarterly (HEQ), a journal published by the History of Education Society, focuses on theory, or philosophy, in educational history. The TOC below provides a taste of the issues discussed. Tamura's full article, "Narrative History and Theory," may be of interest to upcoming USIH conference participants.

------------------------------------------------------------

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 51, Issue 2 Pages 145 - 271, May 2011

Guest Editor's Note: Theory in Educational History (pages 145–147)
Eileen H. Tamura

Introduction: Theory in Educational History (pages 148–149)
Eileen H. Tamura, Caroline Eick and Roland Sintos Coloma

Articles

Narrative History and Theory (pages 150–157)
Eileen H. Tamura

Oral Histories of Education and the Relevance of Theory: Claiming New Spaces in a Post-Revisionist Era (pages 158–183)
Caroline Eick

Who's Afraid of Foucault? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjects (pages 184–210)
Roland Sintos Coloma

Responses

Probing the Deep: Theory and History (pages 211–217)
Nancy Beadie

History, Theory, and Education (pages 218–228)
John L. Rury

The Proper Place of Theory in Educational History? (pages 229–238)
Wayne J. Urban

What's Foucault Got to Do with It? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjected (pages 239–246)
Ronald E. Butchart

“What Happens in the Historian's Head?” (pages 247–253)
Kathleen Weiler

A Matter of Class (pages 254–263)
Kathleen A. Murphey

Reflections on History, Education, and Social Theories (pages 264–271)
V. P. Franklin

Theory and The History of Education

The May 2011 issue of History of Education Quarterly (HEQ), a journal published by the History of Education Society, focuses on theory, or philosophy, in educational history. The TOC below provides a taste of the issues discussed. Tamura's full article, "Narrative History and Theory," may be of interest to upcoming USIH conference participants.

------------------------------------------------------------

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 51, Issue 2 Pages 145 - 271, May 2011

Guest Editor's Note: Theory in Educational History (pages 145–147)
Eileen H. Tamura

Introduction: Theory in Educational History (pages 148–149)
Eileen H. Tamura, Caroline Eick and Roland Sintos Coloma

Articles

Narrative History and Theory (pages 150–157)
Eileen H. Tamura

Oral Histories of Education and the Relevance of Theory: Claiming New Spaces in a Post-Revisionist Era (pages 158–183)
Caroline Eick

Who's Afraid of Foucault? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjects (pages 184–210)
Roland Sintos Coloma

Responses

Probing the Deep: Theory and History (pages 211–217)
Nancy Beadie

History, Theory, and Education (pages 218–228)
John L. Rury

The Proper Place of Theory in Educational History? (pages 229–238)
Wayne J. Urban

What's Foucault Got to Do with It? History, Theory, and Becoming Subjected (pages 239–246)
Ronald E. Butchart

“What Happens in the Historian's Head?” (pages 247–253)
Kathleen Weiler

A Matter of Class (pages 254–263)
Kathleen A. Murphey

Reflections on History, Education, and Social Theories (pages 264–271)
V. P. Franklin

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?

Neo-Liberal-Conservative America (some recent educational history)

“Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in.”

Just when I thought I could let the discussion of neoliberalism rest for now, the comment thread at Ben’s most recent post on the subject sparked my wish to seek more clarity.

Ben writes:

And it’s fascinating to compare [an essay on the origins of U.S. neoliberalism] to more recent essays like Wendy Brown's “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec., 2006), pp. 690-714; http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452506), which is equally innocent of neoliberalism (us). Instead, Brown discusses “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” (e) as somehow parallel constructs, though the first is more exclusively American:
“The problematic of this essay is well-suited to the analytics of dreamwork. This is the problematic of thinking together American neoconservatism—a fierce moral-political rationality—and neoliberalism—a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation and that does not align exclusively with any political persuasion.”
Here's the problem (or at least a problem) with all this: although neoliberalism (us) may be an instance of neoliberalism (e), they are not the same thing...and, in fact, neoliberalism (e) pretty much encompasses all “mainstream” US political positions of (at least) the last thirty years or so (it’s called the “Washington consensus” ‘cause it's a consensus, after all).
So while “neoliberalism” (us) was, indeed, constructed as a parallel contrastive term to “neoconservatism,” “neoliberalism” (e) really doesn’t work as contrastive with “neoconservatism,” despite its linguistic similarity.

I want to politely disagree with my colleague Ben on two fronts.

First, Ben’s careful spadework in separating out neoliberalism (us) from neoliberalism (e), though an interesting distinction, will, I suspect, in the longue durée mean very little. Neoliberalism (e) is now neoliberalism (g) (global). And neoliberalism (g), in the eyes of most people, is neoliberalism (e and us). In a fascinating interview about his most recent book on Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm, simply the best at historical periodization, speaks matter-of-factly about neoliberalism as our latest historical epoch (here, in the context of discussing why Marx and Marxism is relevant again):

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

Hobsbawm is obviously using the term neoliberalism in the sense of Ben’s neoliberalism (e). But he thinks neoliberalism (e) is in fact neoliberalism (us-e) and that neoliberalism (us-e) became neoliberalism (g). This seems right to me and this seems like the best use of the term in most contexts. The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts.

This leads me to my second disagreement with Ben: I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education.

Milton Friedman, one of the original neoliberal thinkers, actually wrote quite a bit about education during the 1950s (I cover this to some degree in chapter 5 of my book Education and the Cold War). He grounded his educational theory in both economic and political principles. On the one hand, as a laissez-faire economist, Friedman was an early proponent of educational privatization, believing that education would function more efficiently if subjected to the market. He believed that imposing the costs of education on parents would “equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.” In other words, relieving taxpayers of the burden of paying for the educations of other people’s children would be a non-intrusive way of regulating those inclined to multiply beyond their financial means. On the other hand, as a libertarian political theorist, Friedman lamented the “nationalization” of education that had given rise to an “education industry” disinclined to constrain its own power and reach. As a solution, he proposed a voucher system that would empower parents as educational buyers, presenting them with a range of educational options. According to Friedman, vouchers would have the doubly beneficial effect of forcing schools to be more cost effective and of breaking the “education industry” monopoly. (See: Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955].)

In short, Friedman innovated neoliberal solutions to education in the sense that neoliberalism is all about introducing market principles to solve otherwise intractable social problems that government supposedly cannot solve. However, other than business elites, the majority of Americans in the 1950s were not yet amenable to thinking of their children’s education as they might consider a commodity such as a kitchen appliance. I would argue—and here is where I disagree with Ben—that neoconservatives were crucial in popularizing such neoliberal thinking.

One of the central achievements of Irving Kristol’s Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary is in convincing so many intellectuals and policymakers that the government often makes social problems worse. In the realm of education, the Coleman Report (1966) became legendary in neoconservative policy circles for supposedly proving that educational equity was unattainable via policy measures. In other words, the Coleman Report became the holy grail of those who contended that spending more money on the education of poor children was a waste of resources. It became the touchstone for those who argued instead that educational “excellence”—in other words, high standards measures by a testing regime—was the only means of ensuring educational improvement.

I just completed reading Chester Finn’s memoir, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik. Finn is the longtime neoconservative educational policy thinker who started his career in the 1970s working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and who also worked in Reagan’s department of education under the guidance of William Bennett. He’s written widely on educational “excellence” and in support of school choice, or Friedman’s “vouchers.” In Troublemaker, Finn repeatedly refers to a “post-Coleman consciousness.” In other words, this report, which had neoliberal policy implications but was trumpeted most widely by neconservatives, forever changed the game for Finn and for the neoconservative educationists who would eventually win the national debate. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top are national policies rooted in “post-Coleman consciousness.”

One interesting note, based on Wendy Brown’s definition of neoconservatism as “a fierce moral-political rationality”: neocons like Finn are distinguishable from neoliberals like John Chubb and Terry Moe, who wrote the bible of school choice—Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990)—in that he, in addition to supporting market solutions, believed in a strong, patriotic, anti-relativist curriculum. As such, Finn joined the fierce neoconservative critique, led by Lynne Cheney, of the 1994 National History Standards. In Troublemaker, Finn lumps his critique of the history standards together with his treatment of the national English standards, created around the same time:

the quest for standards was… weakened by the credulous expectation that self-interested experts, mostly free from the discipline of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers—and sometimes free from leading university scholars in their own fields—could successfully distill from their own cherished subjects the essential skills and knowledge that kids should learn in school, and could do so while (a) avoiding political correctness, (b) sparing schools from the savage internecine disputes within the field, and (c) producing a manageable document of essential curricular guidance rather than a kitchen-sink tome with the heft of the Los Angeles phone directory… The dismaying results ranged from incoherent blather (English) to left-leaning political correctness (history)… The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to condemn the history standards, and an early draft of the English standards was so vapid that Clinton’s Education Department cut off further funding (173).

Finn’s longtime collaborator Diane Ravitch had a similar take on the National History Standards in her magnum opus Left Back (2000): “The abortive attempt to create national standards revealed… the wide gap between avant-garde thinkers in the academic world and the general public” (174). Together, Finn and Ravitch founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981 to push for neoliberal-neoconservative reforms. In 1988 they co-authored What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (not much).

As most of USIH readers are probably aware, Ravitch, unlike Finn, has recently made an intellectual U-Turn (Tim blogged about this back in May). Ravitch the neocon, it seems, is not happy with the destructive consequences of neoliberal educational policy. Ravitch has even become the biggest critic of Bill Gates the educational philanthropist. (Check out this great Ravitch interview on the topic of Gates.) I admire Ravitch’s flip-flop, since, as Joanne Barkan demonstrates in a devastating critique of educational philanthropists like Gates, neoliberalism has been just as destructive to education as it has been to the economy. Thanks neocons!

Neo-Liberal-Conservative America (some recent educational history)

“Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in.”

Just when I thought I could let the discussion of neoliberalism rest for now, the comment thread at Ben’s most recent post on the subject sparked my wish to seek more clarity.

Ben writes:

And it’s fascinating to compare [an essay on the origins of U.S. neoliberalism] to more recent essays like Wendy Brown's “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec., 2006), pp. 690-714; http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452506), which is equally innocent of neoliberalism (us). Instead, Brown discusses “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” (e) as somehow parallel constructs, though the first is more exclusively American:
“The problematic of this essay is well-suited to the analytics of dreamwork. This is the problematic of thinking together American neoconservatism—a fierce moral-political rationality—and neoliberalism—a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation and that does not align exclusively with any political persuasion.”
Here's the problem (or at least a problem) with all this: although neoliberalism (us) may be an instance of neoliberalism (e), they are not the same thing...and, in fact, neoliberalism (e) pretty much encompasses all “mainstream” US political positions of (at least) the last thirty years or so (it’s called the “Washington consensus” ‘cause it's a consensus, after all).
So while “neoliberalism” (us) was, indeed, constructed as a parallel contrastive term to “neoconservatism,” “neoliberalism” (e) really doesn’t work as contrastive with “neoconservatism,” despite its linguistic similarity.

I want to politely disagree with my colleague Ben on two fronts.

First, Ben’s careful spadework in separating out neoliberalism (us) from neoliberalism (e), though an interesting distinction, will, I suspect, in the longue durée mean very little. Neoliberalism (e) is now neoliberalism (g) (global). And neoliberalism (g), in the eyes of most people, is neoliberalism (e and us). In a fascinating interview about his most recent book on Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm, simply the best at historical periodization, speaks matter-of-factly about neoliberalism as our latest historical epoch (here, in the context of discussing why Marx and Marxism is relevant again):

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

Hobsbawm is obviously using the term neoliberalism in the sense of Ben’s neoliberalism (e). But he thinks neoliberalism (e) is in fact neoliberalism (us-e) and that neoliberalism (us-e) became neoliberalism (g). This seems right to me and this seems like the best use of the term in most contexts. The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts.

This leads me to my second disagreement with Ben: I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education.

Milton Friedman, one of the original neoliberal thinkers, actually wrote quite a bit about education during the 1950s (I cover this to some degree in chapter 5 of my book Education and the Cold War). He grounded his educational theory in both economic and political principles. On the one hand, as a laissez-faire economist, Friedman was an early proponent of educational privatization, believing that education would function more efficiently if subjected to the market. He believed that imposing the costs of education on parents would “equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.” In other words, relieving taxpayers of the burden of paying for the educations of other people’s children would be a non-intrusive way of regulating those inclined to multiply beyond their financial means. On the other hand, as a libertarian political theorist, Friedman lamented the “nationalization” of education that had given rise to an “education industry” disinclined to constrain its own power and reach. As a solution, he proposed a voucher system that would empower parents as educational buyers, presenting them with a range of educational options. According to Friedman, vouchers would have the doubly beneficial effect of forcing schools to be more cost effective and of breaking the “education industry” monopoly. (See: Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955].)

In short, Friedman innovated neoliberal solutions to education in the sense that neoliberalism is all about introducing market principles to solve otherwise intractable social problems that government supposedly cannot solve. However, other than business elites, the majority of Americans in the 1950s were not yet amenable to thinking of their children’s education as they might consider a commodity such as a kitchen appliance. I would argue—and here is where I disagree with Ben—that neoconservatives were crucial in popularizing such neoliberal thinking.

One of the central achievements of Irving Kristol’s Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary is in convincing so many intellectuals and policymakers that the government often makes social problems worse. In the realm of education, the Coleman Report (1966) became legendary in neoconservative policy circles for supposedly proving that educational equity was unattainable via policy measures. In other words, the Coleman Report became the holy grail of those who contended that spending more money on the education of poor children was a waste of resources. It became the touchstone for those who argued instead that educational “excellence”—in other words, high standards measures by a testing regime—was the only means of ensuring educational improvement.

I just completed reading Chester Finn’s memoir, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik. Finn is the longtime neoconservative educational policy thinker who started his career in the 1970s working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and who also worked in Reagan’s department of education under the guidance of William Bennett. He’s written widely on educational “excellence” and in support of school choice, or Friedman’s “vouchers.” In Troublemaker, Finn repeatedly refers to a “post-Coleman consciousness.” In other words, this report, which had neoliberal policy implications but was trumpeted most widely by neconservatives, forever changed the game for Finn and for the neoconservative educationists who would eventually win the national debate. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top are national policies rooted in “post-Coleman consciousness.”

One interesting note, based on Wendy Brown’s definition of neoconservatism as “a fierce moral-political rationality”: neocons like Finn are distinguishable from neoliberals like John Chubb and Terry Moe, who wrote the bible of school choice—Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990)—in that he, in addition to supporting market solutions, believed in a strong, patriotic, anti-relativist curriculum. As such, Finn joined the fierce neoconservative critique, led by Lynne Cheney, of the 1994 National History Standards. In Troublemaker, Finn lumps his critique of the history standards together with his treatment of the national English standards, created around the same time:

the quest for standards was… weakened by the credulous expectation that self-interested experts, mostly free from the discipline of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers—and sometimes free from leading university scholars in their own fields—could successfully distill from their own cherished subjects the essential skills and knowledge that kids should learn in school, and could do so while (a) avoiding political correctness, (b) sparing schools from the savage internecine disputes within the field, and (c) producing a manageable document of essential curricular guidance rather than a kitchen-sink tome with the heft of the Los Angeles phone directory… The dismaying results ranged from incoherent blather (English) to left-leaning political correctness (history)… The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to condemn the history standards, and an early draft of the English standards was so vapid that Clinton’s Education Department cut off further funding (173).

Finn’s longtime collaborator Diane Ravitch had a similar take on the National History Standards in her magnum opus Left Back (2000): “The abortive attempt to create national standards revealed… the wide gap between avant-garde thinkers in the academic world and the general public” (174). Together, Finn and Ravitch founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981 to push for neoliberal-neoconservative reforms. In 1988 they co-authored What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (not much).

As most of USIH readers are probably aware, Ravitch, unlike Finn, has recently made an intellectual U-Turn (Tim blogged about this back in May). Ravitch the neocon, it seems, is not happy with the destructive consequences of neoliberal educational policy. Ravitch has even become the biggest critic of Bill Gates the educational philanthropist. (Check out this great Ravitch interview on the topic of Gates.) I admire Ravitch’s flip-flop, since, as Joanne Barkan demonstrates in a devastating critique of educational philanthropists like Gates, neoliberalism has been just as destructive to education as it has been to the economy. Thanks neocons!