Are educational freedom and social integration enemies?

AutorCharles Glenn
Páginas87-106

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The concern of the State to exercise control over all forms of popular schooling is, in most countries, a relatively recent phenomenon. Although pre-figured by Plato in The Republic and The Laws, and then by Rousseau in The Social Contract and other writings, and by his Jacobin admirers in abortive legislation, it did not become effective in even a preliminary way in most Western nations until the middle decades of the 19th century. When, at last, governments in various Western nations developed the administrative mechanisms and the political will to extend their authority over popular schooling (they were much less eager to do so over the schooling of the children of the elite), they came into inevitable conflict with the arrangements for schooling already in place, mostly under the sponsorship of churches and often enjoying the strong loyalty of parents. The popular resistance to any form of State monopoly of schooling was commonly perceived, by the political class, as a refusal of the social and cultural integration thought essential to national strength and social cohesion.

Social integration through State schooling

The primary basis for the concern to extend governmental authority over schooling, as expressed by Plato and by Rousseau and by countless 19th century policy-makers, was the need for social integration, for the ‘enlightenment’ of the common people to what we would now call ‘civic virtue’, the habits of mind and behavior (including subordination to the laws and to the ‘natural leaders’ of society - themselves, of course) thought necessary to ‘order and progress’.

To take a somewhat parallel case, when the State first became concerned with public health, it was to prevent epidemics with their socially and economically devastating effects, not to promote the health of individuals. Simi-

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larly in education, the State’s concern was not to promote individual opportunity through schooling (though that was certainly one result of the extension of the network of schools) but as a sort of social prophylaxis, to minister to the overall health of society through development of attitudes and loyalties among the common people that were considered essential to the unity and thus the strength of the nation. It was in this spirit that, in the Republican Spain of 1931, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña insisted that prohibiting Catholic clergy from teaching the nation’s youth was a matter of "public mental health."

As historian Eugen Weber put it, the goal of popular schooling and parallel measures was to turn "peasants into Frenchmen", through imposing a common language in place of dialects and regional (or indeed ‘foreign’) languages and a common sense of and loyalty to the nation in place of local, clan, and religious identities. This required, as part of the same process, eliminating or greatly reducing the influence of rivals to the State.

It is significant that the fore-runner and in many respects the model looked to by other countries for this State enterprise of schooling was 18th century Prussia, which was made up of scattered territories acquired by war or by marriage and which had no natural basis for unity. Some of the Prussian territories spoke Polish and most German-speakers were not under Prussian rule; there was no common religion, since in some Prussian territories the established church was Lutheran, in others Catholic, in others Reformed; and the territories had no shared history to serve as a basis for loyalty to the Hohenzollern ruling house. Popular schooling, under the supervision of local clergy who were themselves employees of the State, was intended primarily to create that loyalty. It was not to ‘educate citizens’ but to ‘educate subjects’.

It is ironical that those members of the Liberal elites in Western nations who promoted State control of schooling during the 19th and 20th centuries frequently did so in the name of ‘educational freedom’, understood by them as setting the minds of children free from religious ‘superstition’ and the dominance of the clergy. Requiring the children of stubbornly religious -and, thus, by definition benighted- parents to attend secular State schools would, in Rousseau’s famous phrase, "force them to be free".

While the Liberal suspicion about faith-based schooling extended to that under Protestant and Jewish (and, recently, Muslim) sponsorship, it was above all Catholic schooling which was accused of subjugating the minds of children to irrational indoctrination which would prevent them from ever reaching the stature of free citizens. Only by suppressing educational freedom, the freedom to establish and to choose non-State schools, could ‘real’ educational freedom be achieved, education free from the blighting influence of religion. In the Spain of the Second Republic, the national newspaper El Socialista explained that, "Se entiende por libertad religiosa la facultad que el hombre tiene de vivir sin estar sometido a las prácticas ni a enseñanzas religiosas" (in Molero Pintado, 71). Not the freedom to express religious convictions through the choices made about the education of children.

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The American experience

In the United States, the great waves of European immigration which began in the 1840s gave tremendous impetus to the role of the State in overseeing popular schooling. Note that I do not say ‘to the extension of popular schooling’, since that was already advancing rapidly with the spread of population to the West by local initiatives; every little community carved out of the forest or the plains built a church and a schoolhouse within the first years, with no need for interference by the State. Almost always these schools had a religious character reflecting that of the local community -usually a generic Protestantism which kept silent about the matters of faith and practice over which Protestants differed. In other cases (especially in the cities that were growing rapidly) the immigrant community started a Catholic school, especially if an order of teaching sisters was willing and able to staff it. In cities on the frontier like Chicago and St. Louis, for the first several decades the Catholic schools took the lead over public systems in providing education.

It was anxiety about the hundreds of thousands of Catholic immigrants arriving each year, at first mostly from Ireland and Germany, and then toward the end of the 19th century from Southern and Eastern Europe, that led to demands for a religiously-neutral ‘common school’ which would, it was claimed, mold the children of these newcomers into ‘real Americans’. Otherwise, it was feared, immigrants would introduce into the bloodstream of the New World the pathogens of Old World religious obscurantism and subservience to aristocracy -or, conversely, atheism and anarchy. But this is a story that I told in one of my books more than twenty years ago, and which I was honored to see published recently in Spain (Glenn 1988; Glenn 2006).

Along with an admirable impulse to educate the children of immigrants in the attitudes as well as the skills thought necessary to their successful participation in American life, there was a deplorable lack of respect for the expressed desire of many immigrant parents that their children receive an education consistent with their religious convictions. Although almost all schools in the American colonies and the young nation had possessed a distinct religious character reflecting the preferences of parents, this became unacceptable to many in positions of authority when those preferences were for Catholic schooling.

Given the extreme dispersal of authority over schooling and other aspects of civic life in 19th century America, there were no systematic attempts to suppress Catholic and other forms of schooling that dissented religiously from the prevailing -though increasingly thin- generic Protestantism of the public schools until after the First World War. At that time, in a reaction against the millions of immigrants who had arrived in the preceding decades, several states adopted laws forbidding the use of languages other than English for instruction, and a popular referendum in Oregon imposed a legal require-

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ment that children attend public schools. These state laws were, however, invalidated by the United States Supreme Court as conflicting with the Constitution. "The child is not the mere creature of the State," the Court famous-

The battles over whether to continue to tolerate alternatives to public schooling were waged more bitterly in a number of European countries where the ascendant Liberals (in power because of the limitation of voting to men of property) sought to develop a State monopoly over the formation of the popular mind. Dutch politics were defined for seventy years in large measure by the ‘school struggle’ of Protestants and Catholics united against Liberals in their demand for their own schools, while similar struggles occurred in Belgium (won by the Catholics) and in France (won by the anti-Catholic Radicals). Bismarck’s Kulturkampf Catholic schooling by the State. The example of Spain was also in large measure about the control of

The battles over control of schooling which occurred elsewhere had their echoes in Spain in the last decades of the 19th century. For the leaders of the democratic revolution of 1868, it was society itself rather than the State which had primary responsibility for education, and educational freedom sido el monopolio de la enseñanza". Thus encargarse de trabajos que los individuos pueden desempeñar con más extensión y eficacia. La supresión de la enseñanza pública es, por consiguente, el ideal a que debemos aproximarnos, haciendo posible su realización en un porvenir no lejano...Cuando la...

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