How to Educate an American

The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools

Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781599475707
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the years after A Nation at Risk, conservatives' ideas to reform America's lagging education system gained much traction. Key items like school choice and rigorous academic standards drew bipartisan support and were put into practice across the country.Today, these gains are in retreat, ceding ground to progressive nostrums that do little to boost the skills and knowledge of young people. Far from being discouraged, however, conservatives should seize the moment to refresh their vision of quality K–12 education for today's America. These essays by 20 leading conservative thinkers do just that.Students, according to this vision, should complete high school with a thorough understanding of the country's history, including gratitude for its sacrifices, respect for its achievements, and awareness of its shortcomings. They should also learn to be trustworthy stewards of a democratic republic, capable of exercising virtue and civic responsibility.Beyond helping to form their character, schools ought to ready their pupils for careers that are productive, rewarding, and dignified. Excellent technical-training opportunities will await those not headed to a traditional college. Regardless of the paths and schools that they select, all students must come to understand that they can succeed in America if they are industrious, creative, and responsible.  Anchored in tradition yet looking towards tomorrow, How to Educate an American should be read by anyone concerned with teaching future generations to preserve the country's heritage, embody its universal ethic, and pursue its founding ideals.

PART 1

History, Civics, and Citizenship

CHAPTER 1

Irradiating the Past

by Jonah Goldberg

When the past no longer illuminates the future,
the spirit walks in darkness.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

FEW STUDENTS TODAY—OR their parents—saw the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger when it premiered. Like many old Bond films, it violates some modern norms, particularly of the #MeToo variety. But in one respect, it remains very relevant. Its eponymous villain, Auric Goldfinger, loves only gold. The story climaxes at Fort Knox, the famous gold depository, though Goldfinger’s plan is not to steal the treasure there but to irradiate it, making it unusable. This will increase the value of Goldfinger’s own hoard of gold.

Naturally, because it’s a James Bond movie and Goldfinger is the villain, he fails. But his plot is akin to something happening in modern education and our culture, where the largely well-intentioned villains are mostly succeeding in irradiating the historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative. They seek to make vast swaths of the American story unusable, leaving only their narrative as acceptable currency in the marketplace of ideas. They want to make their stories the only usable past.¹

This is not new. Radical historians, primarily in the 1910s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, rewrote or revised the standard American story (necessarily, in some cases). It was a mixed effort.² But this is how things go. The intergenerational construction of an American narrative must be conversational, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s metaphor for politics. This is how we understand our past, present, and future selves.³ No historical school monopolizes our national narrative; only competition/conversation of narratives and interpretations deepens our appreciation of our national identity. But today’s efforts are not voices in this conversation; they are attempts to shut up everyone else.

These efforts both are helped by and contribute to a crisis of American ignorance. We shouldn’t expect the average American to know who Oakeshott was, though would that more did. But every American should know what the Constitution’s First Amendment says. Yet more than a third of Americans surveyed by the Annenberg Center for Public Policy in September 2017 failed to name a single First Amendment freedom. Only 26 percent could name all three branches of government; 33 percent couldn’t name any branch.⁴ Similar results appear elsewhere. Only one respondent out of more than a thousand in a Freedom Forum survey could name all five First Amendment freedoms, but 9 percent said they believed it protected the right to bear arms.⁵ Just 36 percent of Americans passed (i.e., scored above 60) a multiple-choice series of questions derived from the US citizenship test, according to a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation survey. More than two-thirds couldn’t identify the thirteen states that ratified the Constitution. Less than a quarter knew why we fought the British. More than one in ten Americans (12 percent) thought Dwight Eisenhower was a Civil War general (6 percent thought he was a Vietnam general). Only a quarter (24 percent) could name a single thing Benjamin Franklin was famous for, and more than a third believed he invented the lightbulb. At least only 2 percent of Americans said the Cold War was caused by climate change. Most striking: This survey’s results differed vastly by age. 74 percent of people sixty-five and older passed but only 19 percent of those forty-five and younger passed.⁶

This might help explain the shocking attitudes of today’s young. A generation after global communism’s collapse, and during history’s greatest poverty alleviation (thanks to spreading market-based economies),⁷ more Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine view socialism positively (51 percent) than do capitalism (45 percent).⁸ A movement of campus agitation that started a half-century ago, purportedly inspired by free speech, has culminated in a generation in which 40 percent of Americans ages eighteen to thirty-four think the government should ban “hateful” speech.⁹ And 30 percent of Millennials born in a country established as a democratic republic more than two hundred years ago no longer prioritize living in a democracy.¹⁰

Our educational institutions are failing our students in at least this respect (if not also in many others, as other essays in this volume demonstrate). But children attend school for years, and ever more attend postsecondary institutions. What are they actually learning? The distressing answer is that American students are increasingly being taught that they can learn nothing valuable from America’s past except the evil of our constitutional order and our most basic civic institutions.

Now, most teachers do not set out to do this, particularly in K–12 education. I have met too many patriotic and professional teachers who think otherwise. Indeed, they often fight against larger cultural and educational forces. But they are either unwilling or unable to overcome those forces—namely, a cultural movement that began to reject America’s past, capitalism’s propensity to create an intellectual class hostile to the moral underpinnings of the society, the changes in the way young people think, and the regnant self-loathing elite ideology.

Let us examine these in turn.

First, there is the progressive rejection of America’s past. For most of our history, America’s future-focused attitude was a boon, and an essential part of American exceptionalism; its citizens self-consciously envisioned themselves as leaving behind the feudal and aristocratic prejudices of the Old World. This attitude is a healthy part of our culture, but only when restrained by civic pride, patriotism, and local institutions. Starting in the Progressive Era, however, when America’s own tradition was just barely old enough to be thought archaic, intellectuals declared war on it, believing that scientific tools wielded by “disinterested” experts could liberate citizens in ways that the outdated system of “negative liberty” could not. The Constitution, for the progressives, was a “Newtonian” relic in need of replacement by a more “Darwinian” conception of guided evolution.¹¹

Progressive educators, who relished the idea of creating a new citizenry, embraced this. John Dewey mixed a patriotic desire for assimilation with a progressive lust for social engineering. As Thomas Sowell writes, “John Dewey saw the role of the teacher not as a transmitter of a society’s culture to the young, but as an agent of change—someone strategically placed with an opportunity to condition students to want a different kind of society.”¹² While president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson tasked educators with producing men “as unlike their fathers as possible.”¹³ From kindergarten to college, educators would reshape students as they saw fit.

The second force is capitalism’s self-destructive nature. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted capitalism’s doom in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, arguing that capitalism tends to burn through the social capital needed to sustain itself. Its relentless efficiency destroys not just bad institutions and customs, but also indispensable ones. For Schumpeter, writes economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey, “capitalism was raising up its own grave diggers—not in the proletariat, as Marx had expected, but in the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie itself.”¹⁴

Schumpeter argued that mass prosperity produced intellectuals: artists, writers, bureaucrats, and, most importantly, educators. Historically, intellectuals served throne and altar. But when society protects the market and free expression, and a mass audience can support intellectuals, little constrains their work. According to Schumpeter, these intellectuals would inevitably then argue that they as a class should rule. “For such an atmosphere to develop,” Schumpeter writes, “it is necessary that there be groups whose interest it is to work up and organize resentment, to nurse it, to voice it and to lead it.”¹⁵ Schumpeter called this group the “new class.”

He wrote this just before the G.I. Bill, but he predicted its effects. The mass affluence of the post–World War II period created a mass market for discontent that exploded in the 1960s. The baby-boom children of the “Greatest Generation,” imbued with both generational obligation and guilt, sought social transformation. Unwilling or unable to see Vietnam as their “good war,” they turned inward to remake society. Some of their work, such as the civil rights movement, was good, embodying—despite some radical excesses—the highest American ideals. Other work was less beneficial. These well-intentioned acolytes of a secular faith imbued with a desire to transform American institutions conquered large swaths of the universities, journalism, Hollywood, and government bureaucracies, and sought to change America’s story. In the Schumpeterian view, this was not only an ideological takeover but also an exertion of class interest.

This dynamic has always been a byproduct of capitalism, or the prosperity it creates. The task, therefore, isn’t to eradicate it, but to acknowledge its existence and work to maintain and replenish the social and cultural underpinnings of society—the family and other Burkean “little platoons”—that serve as a check on the ambitions of national elites by fostering a sense of rootedness and belonging and an attachment to traditional notions of civility, citizenship, and patriotism. The founders, Adam Smith, and public choice theorists alike all understood that the danger to a healthy republic lay in factions using the government to impose a singular vision from above on the diverse moral ecosystem of a continental nation.

Such homogenization was central to the progressive project. Wilson, Dewey, and other progressives sought to use the state to forge society into a singular, undifferentiated body politic. The “Newtonian” architecture of the founding, Wilson insisted, needed to be replaced with new “Darwinian” approach that placed national unity, directed by technocrats, at the center of the political project.

Progressive historians like Frederick Jackson Turner argued that history was a series of chapters that led to the present. The closing of the American frontier ended one chapter. Many progressives demanded new chapters to be opened, devoted to conquering various metaphorical frontiers, including the backward notion of distinct communities and individuals.¹⁶ But at least for many of the early progressives, the earlier chapters of America’s story were something to be proud of, even if the old, classically liberal ways had outlived their utility. The later generations of new class intellectuals were different. They took out their red pens and rewrote the early chapters, creating a new story.

This is their Goldfinger project and the late Howard Zinn is its exemplar. Zinn started his widely used textbook, A People’s History of the United States, thusly:

In that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America.¹⁷

Zinn’s story of America is the story of victims. The heroes of previous ages become villains, their ideals villainous. James Burnham (a Schumpeter devotee) identified the psychological driver of the transformation of American liberalism from a confident, fundamentally patriotic, and nationalist ideology into an enterprise of collective guilt. He wrote in his Suicide of the West:

For Western civilization in the present condition of the world, the most important practical consequence of the guilt encysted in the liberal ideology and psyche is this: that the liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.¹⁸

This guilt, left untended, festers. Liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr once warned of American liberalism’s hubristic overconfidence. Now, guilt and doubt have replaced confidence utterly.

The Zinnian project could be part of the great conversation of American history. The problem is that his perspective, though important, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Time to Re-engage
• PART 1: History, Civics, and Citizenship
• PART 2: Character, Purpose, and Striving
• PART 3: Schools, Families, and Society
• PART 4: Renewing the Conservative Education Agenda
• Conclusion: How to Educate an American
• About the Contributors
• Index