A Tradition of Local Control
To understand the reason for this vast backlash against the
public schools, a bit of historical perspective is required.
The earliest public schools in the United States were
community-based and parent-controlled. Parents and fellow
citizens within a community would establish a school and
hire a schoolmaster. The community would establish the
curriculum, and the schoolmaster was expected to maintain
discipline within the school as well as to guide the education
of the students.
This pattern prevailed even when the nation grew and
village schools gave way to the vast suburban expansion
of modern America. The public schools were public in the
sense that they were community schools maintained for and
by the citizens of a community. Local control was axiomatic,
and parents had a direct influence in the curriculum and
policies of the schools.
That model of the public school, though rightly cherished
in the American memory, is no more. First came the educa-
tional authorities who pushed for a “progressive” under-
standing of the schools and their function. Figures such as
John Dewey argued in the early years of the last century that
the public schools should form a common liberal culture
as their main purpose. Without hiding their agenda, these
educators argued that the public schools should separate
children from the religious “prejudices” of their parents
and redefine Americanism as what Dewey called a secular
“common faith.”
Still, the full impact of the progressivist agenda took
decades to emerge. For the most part, the public schools in
rural and suburban America remained community schools.
Local school boards, elected by the community, set policy
and controlled the schools. The schools continued to teach
the basic disciplines and to maintain order and discipline
in the classrooms. That condition did not last, however, and
the last half of the twentieth century saw the public schools
radically transformed in the vast majority of communities.
Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court secularized the
schools in a way that separated the schools from their
communities and families. The courts also turned the
schools into arenas of endless litigation. The evil of racial
segregation was rightly ended. But as a result, court-ordered
busing programs eliminated any sense of a community
school for many families.
38
The Fruit of Revolution
But the most radical transformation of the public schools
was political and ideological in origin. Control of the schools,
enforced through both funding and mandates, migrated
to the national government where an army of educational
bureaucrats replaced local school boards as the real arbiters
of educational policy. Labor unions for teachers, rather than
parents, now exert vast influence over the schools.
The ideological revolution has been even more damag-
ing than the political change. Those who set educational
policy are now overwhelmingly committed to a radi-
cally naturalistic and evolutionistic worldview that sees the
schools as engines of social revolution. The classrooms are
being transformed rapidly into laboratories for ideological
experimentation and indoctrination. The great engines for
Americanization are now forces for the radicalization of
everything from human sexuality to postmodern under-
standings of truth and the meaning of texts. Compulsory
sex education, the creation of “comprehensive health clinics,”
revisionist understandings of American history, Darwinian
understandings of science and humanity, and a host of other
ideological developments now shape the norm in the public
school experience. If these developments have not come to
your local school, they almost surely will soon.
Added to these worries is the general breakdown of disci-
pline within the schools and the fact that the public schools
are now seen as social service centers. Many schools are
asked to do social work as much as education, and the very
idea of what such an education should be is up for debate.
Standards have fallen, discipline has evaporated, armed
guards roam many hallways, and teachers feel increasingly
unable to teach or to maintain order.