Education is the Weapon of the Privileged

Inside the ongoing push to create "virtuous" citizens for America's "common good"

While public school advocates have been busy fighting real and perceived charter school grift, the privatization folks have turned on the heat to fry a much bigger fish. Let’s get into it.

First, it’s helpful to bone up on the history of education in what would become the United States of America. On the record – that is to say, the European Christian record - the first school was established in St. Augustine, Florida. It was created by the Catholic Church, specifically the Franciscan order. As more people ventured into “the new world,” schoolhouses of all denominations spread throughout North America. They all had one thing in common; religion.

Of course, that’s the white-washed history we tell ourselves. In the words of Montana State University Native American Professor and author of The Schooling of Native America, Dr. Henrietta Whiteman Mann, “contrary to popular belief, education – the transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills – did not come to the North American continent on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.... We Native Americans have educated our youth through a rich and oral tradition, which was – and is today – transmitted by the elders of the tribe.” African children had an equally rich educational history. In fact, humans have been educating the next generation since the dawn of our existence. Our very survival was dependent on it.

Okay, back to the colonists. If your definition of public school is limited to “white boys only,” the first public school opened in the Spring of 1635 in Massachusetts. The Boston Latin School counts Sam Adams, John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin among its pupils. The school continues to provide classical education today as a means of creating a “responsible and engaged citizenship."

According to Dr. Wendy Paterson, Dean of the Department of Education at Buffalo State SUNY, throughout the remainder of the 1600s and 1700s, “educational opportunity varied widely depending on region, race, gender, and social class.” Given the religious underpinning of education, it’s no wonder that “Teachers themselves were expected to be models of strict moral behavior.” As the concept of public education spread, Dr. Paterson contends, local communities generally replicated the French concept of école normale. The école normale – or the Normal School - was rooted in three philosophies.

• Men have more scholarly aptitude than women as both pupils and educators,

• Teachers are born not made, and

• Would-be teachers should learn to be teachers in the same building as their future students.

Early settlers had brought their educational philosophies and traditions with them and those who came from Europe predominately believed that educating children was a family responsibility. In other words, every white male child who had the luxury of attending school was taught a classical liberal education. Families who couldn’t afford a private home education raised sons who would work as opposed to raising thinkers of great thought. Some of the more progressive wealthy families would occasionally permit their daughters to listen in on tutoring sessions, but generally, in the words of Founding Father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the only reason to educate a woman was so that she may pass “on their knowledge to their young sons.” 

As Americans moved west, women became needed in the classroom. According to the Women’s History Blog, in 1787, the Young Ladies Academy opened in Philadelphia. Women were, and remain today, Constitutionally unrecognized. That is to say, women had no official role in society, therefore, at the Young Ladies Academy they were “sponsored and supervised” and taught by male religious and political leaders. White, Christian male leaders, naturally. Almost one hundred years later, in 1852, the Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia, California, marked the first women’s college west of the Rockies.

As we move into the mid-1800s, Horace Mann and the Whig Party begin pushing for education for everyone. The “Common School” movement stems from Mann’s “belief that political stability and social harmony depended on universal education.” Mann envisioned schools that were nonsectarian and open to all children to act as the “great equalizer" and the “absolute right of every human being that comes into the world." Since it was illegal in most states to teach enslaved people to read and Native children were forced into boarding schools intent on “gentling” them, the Common School was also really only the absolute right and great equalizer for white Christian, predominately male children.

Soon Americans began pushing for free, compulsory, taxpayer-supported schools with trained teachers. More students lead to the need for more schools and more teachers. It didn’t take long for communities like the Littleton School Committee in Massachusetts to realize that “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems...very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one-third of the price." Enter the feminization of education, which began to “not only how society perceived women, but how women perceived themselves.” One could argue it also became the root of today’s artificially low professional pay structure for educators.

Meanwhile, as historian Dr. Eric Foner explained in a PBS American Experience interview, the earliest schools open to African Americans were built by the United States Army for black soldiers and formerly enslaved people who had escaped bondage. By the end of the Civil War, there was an “explosion of energy in black communities to create schools. Northern aid societies come down to help create schools. The Freedmen's Bureau puts money into creating schools. But most of the schools that spring up are actually created by blacks themselves. They pool their resources -- which are very meager at this time -- to hire a teacher, to find a building, to build a building, to use an abandoned building -- to create schools. And at these schools, everybody is going. It's not just schoolchildren. Adults, elderly people are seeking education.” The definition of true freedom, for African Americans during Reconstruction included the “ability to get an education.”

During these early days, preparing teachers to teach was haphazard. There were formal “summer seminars” teachers could attend but most communities believed that if you could get passing marks in a subject, you could teach it. When the Common School model ballooned public school enrollment from 26,000 in 1880 to 110,000 by 1920, summer seminars and teacher colleges couldn’t keep up with demand. In some cases, teacher colleges began offering non-education degrees but once universities decided to get in on the action, teacher colleges stood little chance of survival. Again, according to Dr. Paterson at Buffalo State, science and math became increasingly important skill sets after the World Wars. Finally, when the Russians launched Sputnik – back when American children were practicing how to use their desks to defend themselves against nuclear fallout – rigorous science and math solidified their permanent position in the American academic experience. Science laboratories seemed more important than Latin lessons to the future of the free world.

The Cold War had ignited a red-hot hunt for American Communists. In The Rise of the Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern, Historian Thomas Knock explains that “Being ‘too Liberal’ was already starting to have consequences on American campuses. In August of 1950, thirty-one professors in California lost their jobs for refusing to take a loyalty oath that the legislature insisted on. In the name of patriotism, lawmakers in Illinois attempted to do the same thing; they established committees to ferret out ‘subversive’ books in the public libraries and attempted to get faculty at the University of Chicago dismissed for membership in the alleged communist-front organizations. A left-wing editorial in the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma in 1949 prompted the legislature to impose a loyalty oath on state employees. Harvard provided the FBI with information on selected left-leaning faculty, while the freedom to express radical views in speech or writing was curtailed at universities in Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Washington.”

Meanwhile, at Dakota Wesleyan University, progressive President Sam Hilburn’s “integrated education” curriculum was stirring up controversy. A young history professor by the name of George McGovern voiced his belief that “Hilburn was doing what any good university professor ought to do - he encouraged critical thinking in young people.” Hilburn was fired and Professor McGovern set his path toward becoming “Mitchell’s most controversial citizen.”

“On May 17, 1954,” wrote Dr. Sonya Ramsey, “when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision that racial segregation in the public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment, it sparked national reactions ranging from elation to rage” including over one hundred members of Congress to publicly declare their intent to overturn the ruling. For the next two decades, Americans struggled with questions of equality. The American education system churned in a blend of confusion and outright defiance. Ruby Bridges was escorted into her new elementary school. There was busing, court-ordered desegregation, white flight, and rejection of black teachers in predominately white schools. There was President John F. Kennedy’s decision to federalize the National Guard in Alabama, followed by President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Richard Nixon, who once voiced support for desegregated schools, decided that he needed the Southern Democrats to push him to victory in 1972. To do that, he ushered in the “Southern Strategy” and an aggressive “Law and Order” approach to appeal to white separatists.

During the 1970s, Civil Rights activists began demanding educational rights for students with disabilities and women. There was the Vocational Rehabilitation Act and Title IX of 1972. Both were signed by President Nixon, and both mandated more equitable educational opportunities. In 1972, Boston Latin opened its doors to women. In 1973, black Civil Rights organizations joined LGBTQ Civil Rights organizations and feminists in support of disability Civil Rights organizations to stage 504 Sit-In’s, which remains the longest protest in American history. In 1974, the Supreme Court, in Lau v. Nichols, reaffirmed that “access to, or participation in, educational programs cannot be denied because of their inability to speak or understand English.” In 1975, Nixon signed The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, putting more control over their own governance, including education and healthcare, in the hands of Native Americans.

In the 1980s, without regard to hundreds of years of disparity, the conversation turned to national standards. In 1983, President Reagan’s administration released A Nation at Risk. The government report declared, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people." The report, according to its original authors, was designed to fit a pre-determined narrative. “In the early 1960s, college-going was still rare. It was mostly top students, largely well-off white males, who took standardized tests like the SAT and applied to college.” But after all the progress made in the in 1960s and 1970s, more people – “more people of color, more low-income students and other historically disadvantaged groups” – were pursuing higher education. “So, when you lumped everyone's scores together, as "A Nation At Risk" did, you saw declining average scores from the 1960s to the 1980s.” Those stats fell apart, however, when the data was broken into subgroups by “looking at men, women, whites, Hispanics, African–Americans and low-income students separately, you found that most of these groups of students were improving slightly on test-taking over that time.”

As the 1980s rolled into the 1990s, A Nation at Risk continued to ripple through the system. It was an era of increased national standards for both students and teachers. By the time President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, every state had implemented ways to gauge teacher effectiveness, minimums for grade-level promotion, and high school graduation requirements. Americans, using the slanted statistics included in A Nation at Risk, began to believe that teachers were to blame. The misconception of teacher effectiveness triggered another teacher shortage.

As the clock rolled over from the 20^th to the 21^st Century and America held its collective breath in anticipation of the end world, the attention turned to curriculum. After all, it must be either the educator or the material that was threatening America’s global position. According to Dr. Paterson, the focus on curriculum included Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and Race to the Top.  “Such packaged standards-based curriculum movements once again turned the public eye to a need to conform, achieve, and compete.” In 2009, Common Core was announced as a “nationalized curriculum based on standards of education that were designed to give all students common experiences within a carefully constructed framework that would transcend race, gender, economics, region, and aptitude.” Schools reacted by scripting classroom instruction, which resulted in the suppression of teacher autonomy “and time for language arts and mathematics began to eclipse the study of science, social studies, art, music.” The backlash was immediate.

Politicians, who continue to scapegoat public education for data that was purposefully perverted by the Reagan administration, began centering the debate on school choice. Milton Friedman, credited with being the “Father of Vouchers,” first advocated for more student mobility in the 1960s and, in Texas, the first magnet school popped up. Both were a direct response to school integration. In 1971, again in Texas, the first school within a school was established, which acted as a school-to-work training pipeline. Charter schools were first conceptualized in Minnesota but the idea didn’t catch fire until A Nation at Risk was released. Under Reagan, deregulation was all the rage so, after the flawed report was released, it seemed natural to break up what many saw as a monopoly on schools. By 1988, even the president of the American Federation of Teachers was on board with the idea of “a new kind of publicly funded, independently managed school,” which he envisioned as “educational laboratories, where teachers could try out new pedagogical approaches.” The first charter school opened in 1992 in Minnesota.

Today, students can be enrolled in any number of educational experiences. From private to public school buildings to private and public virtual classrooms. In cities across America, parents can find boarding schools, language immersion schools, Parochial schools, Religious schools as well as schools rooted in various pedagogy like Montessori, Reggio Emilia and Waldorf philosophies. There are private schools focused on the educational needs of specific disabilities and, of course, students can be educated at home by any number of methods.

Classical Liberal Education, true to its roots, has always been favored by wealthier families that have the luxury of paying tuition. The flexibility offered by homeschool and charter settings has - until 2022 - quietly expanded access to Classical Liberal Education. That all began to change in 2018 when Governor Ron DeSantis appointed former legislator and charter management company founder, Richard Corcoran as his Commissioner of Education. Corcoran began to surround himself with men like Dr. Eric Hall who was leading a controversial - and subsequently failed - independent school district in North Carolina and, who now as the Secretary of Juvenile Justice, is advocating for educational services for incarcerated youth to be overseen by the Department he leads. And Senior Chancellor, Dr. Henry Mack who has an extensive and public history of supporting Classical Liberal Education as a means of helping “students acquire the habits of mind and heart necessary to live as informed, virtuous citizens,” because in matters related to higher education, the United States “should primarily be concerned with helping to guarantee the successes associated with the American Experiment; it should educate in view of the Common Good.” All this early positioning has led to the hostile take-over of New College, the Florida Department of Education’s vocal push for publicly funded universities to move toward the Classical Liberal Exam, and the demand for ideological surveying of professors.

The new New College Board of Trustees at New College has set its sights on creating the “Hillsdale of the South.” The President was immediately fired and replaced with former Commissioner of Education, Richard Corcoran. Both Flagler College and New College have dangled salary packages in excess of $700,000 per year. Hillsdale called the move a “renewal.”

The common refrain among Classical Liberal Education advocates is that, as a result of GI’s returning from World War II with college tuition benefits, universities began to contort themselves into centers of career preparation. They aren’t wrong. Research shows that by the 1960s, as many as forty-five percent of Bachelor's degrees were earned in a specific occupation.  Today, in most universities, that number exceeds eighty percent of degrees. Universities were reacting to increased immigration, the rise of international corporations and the demands of global markets. The reaction was strong. Academics like Bill Readings, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal, were pointing to globalism and left-leaning academic elites as the certain ruin of American intellect. Readings’ book, The University in Ruins, argued that higher learning had one purpose; to perpetuate national identity. Over the last few decades, he contended, universities had endeavored too deeply into research and development and abandoned the classical, enlightened truth-seeking pursued by America’s founders.

As educational systems expanded from a luxury from the privileged to a right for all Americans, Classical Liberal Education morphed into “general education.” The rise of anti-elitist rhetoric from public figures like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan put pressure on universities to create more professional degrees. Governor Reagan who once said, “we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries, but for a little while at least, taxpayers shouldn’t be funding intellectual curiosity,” has led the way for current-day politicians to muse about “zombie studies” and to rid the taxpayer from any financial burdens associated with race and gender studies.  In a clear backlash to initiatives like academic visas for foreign nationals, Title IX for women, land-grant universities for African-American, Native, and Latino students, the GI Bill for servicemembers, and Pell grants for low-income students; the debate over Classical Liberal Education is back with a vengeance.

According to Louis Markos of Christianity Today, the rebirth of Classical Liberal Education in America began quietly in 1947 when Dorothy Sayers laid out her vision for an education “grounded in Latin, the classics, and the formation of reason and discernment” giving students “coherent scheme of mental training” suitable to arm citizens against the “massed propaganda” of the modern world. More than two-decades later, “in response to the legalization of abortion in 1973 and the troubled presidency of Jimmy Carter, many of whose policies alienated the Southern conservative Christians who helped put him into office, evangelicals slowly moved out of their bubble to engage social and political issues.” Using Sayer’s vision, Pastor Douglas Wilson, founded the Logos School in Idaho in 1981.

Today, the movement is closely associated with Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Michigan. Schools following the Hillsdale model pledge to adhere to the Hillsdale philosophy of “the sanctity of Western literary and theological traditions,” while individual “administrators promise to direct students’ ‘souls such that they become men and women who love the right things’—namely ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful.’

In 2015, Jeremy Wayne Tate seized on the opportunity to create the Classical Liberal Test (CLT) as a counter punch to the SAT and ACT, which Tate claims, “censor the entire Christian intellectual tradition.” And in 2020, Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli’s published How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, in which they argue that “Conservatives tend to see the human person as a fallen and imperfect being, prone to excess and to sin, and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation.” By 2022, states like Florida were using taxpayer dollars to fund Universities – including a small, private liberal arts college and one of Florida’s flagship public Universities  – to create institutes to “support teaching and research concerning the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of western and American civilization.”

True Classical Liberal Education, according to William Michael, Headmaster at the Classical Liberal Arts Academy, authentic classical education requires teachers with a deep expertise in the classics to “explain the subjects to students, from the ancient sources.” Sources like “Aristotle, Cicero, Porphyry, Nicomachus, Euclid, Boethius, Ptolemy, Theophrastus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on.” Students study history’s “wisest and best men” including Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, the Apostle Paul, Constantine, the Church Fathers, the medieval Scholastics. “When the Jesuits worked to revive Christian education in the 16th century it was this same system of education that they taught in their schools,” and Michael argues, it is the only “true classical education.” Everything else is just a “rip-off.”

Why great minds from other ancient societies – Inca, Persia, China, Mayan, Egypt,  and Mesopotamia to name a few – were left out of the gathering of the “wisest and best men,” one can only guess. Why the list doesn’t include great female minds like Aspasia whom Socrates claimed as his teacher or Sosipatra or Thecla or Hypatia is also left up to the imagination.

So what do we know about Classical Liberal Education’s success?

Actually, very little. As William Michael bemoaned, there is little to no uniformity in what is considered Classical Liberal Education. Individual schools often boast about student achievement, particularly as it relates to SAT scores but there is no independent, third-party research verifying the model’s impact on student achievement in either the short or long term.

After #BlackatBLS went viral and exposed persistent individual and systemic racism at Boston Latin School, David Wedge of Boston Magazine about the school's troubled past and uncertain future. “It wasn’t until 1877 that the first Black student graduated from BLS. Still, the school remained almost exclusively white until the historic 1974 busing ruling that sought to desegregate Boston schools.” Former Massachusetts education secretary, Paul Reville told Hannah Uebele of Boston Public Radio that Boston Latin student demographics is “out of whack.” At the time, African American students made up just eight percent (8%) of the overall student body “contrasted with a 30% Black enrollment in Boston's public schools.” Today, data comparing the school with the wider school district shows that Caucasian and Asian students are still significantly over-represented at the school. Native Americans and women are slightly over-represented, while African American and Latino students remain vastly under-represented.

The pandemic may change all of that. In August of 2021, “a study by the RAND Corporation found that 18 percent of African-American families were uncertain about sending their children back to public schools this fall — compared with just 6 percent of white families.” And, according to an opinion piece written by Christopher Perrin, CEO of the Classical Academic Press and Anika Prather founder of Living Water School published by the National Review “the number of African Americans choosing to homeschool grew from 3 percent to 16 percent. Many of them are choosing classical learning.”

Given our history, it is probable that historians will look back on this “renewal” as a direct fear reaction to America’s changing realities.