Diane Ravitch Speaks

I'm excited. Tonight, Diane Ravitch speaks on my campus. She is to give a talk at Braden Auditorium, which seats just under 3,500 people. Based on the fact that ISU has one of the largest colleges of education in the nation, and that Ravitch has become the nation's staunchest supporter of teachers, my bet is the event is standing-room only. Given Ravitch's career trajectory, which Tim Lacy first called attention to at this blog over two years ago, this is remarkable.

I first got to know the work of Ravitch in graduate school. I took a class on the history of education reform with Donald Collins, who has been a mentor and friend ever since. Donald assigned authors with various perspectives, including some he disagreed with, namely, Ravitch, who was known at the time to be a fairly conservative historian and education reformer, appointed assistant secretary of education by George H.W. Bush. We read Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. In this book, her magnum opus, Ravitch argued that the progressive education movement took a wrong turn somewhere shortly after Dewey. It had dumbed down the national curriculum, lowered standards, made schooling too vocational, too adherent to this or that trend. Left Behind is carefully researched, which is no surprise given that Ravitch learned the craft of history from Lawrence Cremin, and I learned a lot by reading it. But at the time I thought it was crankily nostalgic for a classic liberal curriculum that was never as liberal as its proponents claimed. I also thought it was too hard on progressive education, though I was certainly critical of some elements of that movement in my book, Education and the Cold War, though from a different vantage point.

But now Ravitch is the most prominent voice against the so-called education reform movement. This is evident in her latest book, the excellent and bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which is not only an immaculately researched brief against the education reform movement, but also Ravitch's mea culpa. She apologizes for getting caught up in the zeitgeist that reigned supreme in policy-making circles: privatization, testing, "choice," charters, etc. Ravitch's resistance to the education reform movement is also evident in her being one of the most influential "tweeters" around (@DianeRavitch). Ravitch also now regularly writes essays against the education reform movement at The New York Review of Books. Her latest, which critically reviews Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp's recent book, aligns with my thinking on Teach for America, which I make clear in my Jacobin article, "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders." Again, this is remarkable. I'm excited for tonight.

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?

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?