There’s No Such Thing as a Value-Neutral Education

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 22, 2022

 

The public schools are meant to serve — whom?

 

Writing in the New York Times, Frank Bruni thinks he has an answer: “all of us.”

 

“The schools . . . exist for all of us,” Bruni writes, “to reflect and inculcate democratic values and ecumenical virtues that have nothing to do with any one parent’s ideology, religion or lack thereof.”

 

This is naïve and ahistorical.

 

The first public-school law in Massachusetts — the first in what would eventually be these United States — bears the wonderful name the “Old Deluder Satan Act” of 1647. Like every public-education law that ever has existed or ever will exist, it was meant to serve a particular parochial agenda. In this case, the law was intended to encourage literacy in order that young Christians might study Scripture and thereby fortify their souls against the seductions of the Catholic Church. Of course, there was no Catholic Church in Massachusetts at the time, and Boston would not see its first public Mass celebrated for another century and a half. In the same year as the education law was passed, Massachusetts banned Jesuit priests from entering the colony — on penalty of death.

 

We have been having sectarian fights about public education since the very beginning.

 

The theory and practice of modern public education owes much to Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose education system contained many features that remain familiar: specialized colleges to produce professional teachers, compulsory school and compulsory school taxes supervised at the municipal level, and a curriculum designed around the interests and the needs of the state, which are distinct from the interests and needs of students and their families. The schools were not meant to be places where young people pursued individual cultivation — they were understood as factories producing the human capital needed by the Prussian state: bureaucrats and administrators, professionals, educated workers, business leaders, etc. Religion was taught as a subject in the Prussian schools, but the creed of those schools was nationalism.

 

There is no such thing as a value-neutral education, at least not a value-neutral education worth having. Questions of values — political, ideological, national, moral, religious — will always be raised in the course of any meaningful education. And in a free society that entrusts education to the political organs — which, for some reason, we assume to be the only option — those questions of values will turn into political disputes.

 

Public education in the United States brings together two elements that always react explosively: diversity and compulsion. Frederick the Great and the New England Puritans did not have to concern themselves very much with minority interests, dissent, or intellectual heterogeneity — and, unlike our own modern practitioners of public education, they were at least honest enough to forthrightly admit that conformity was central to their educational agenda: Schools existed to conform students to the needs and interests of the regime.

 

There is no sense in pretending that what is happening here and now is a conflict between some humane and liberal set of universal democratic values and the self-centered factional demands of some particular group of ideological partisans. And there is no denying that in many cases — the overwhelming majority of them — it has been progressives who are the ideological aggressors in these disputes. That is particularly true when it comes to sexual education, something that never should have been entrusted to the public schools to begin with. When Bruni and others talk about “democratic values” or the common good, they most often are talking about their own values by another name. The fact that we are fighting over these questions is pretty good evidence that these values are not in fact universally held, or that at the very least we differ radically in our interpretation and application of them. Of course, our progressive friends believe that their values should be universally held, and, like their Puritan forebears, they are willing to go to great lengths to punish heretics.

 

Yes, the public schools are public. “You have to accept our values because of the great public benefit we are forcing you to pay for at gunpoint” is, considered without ornamentation, not a very good argument at all.

 

There is no way to avoid such disputes entirely, though there are some ways they might be mitigated. If I were designing a system of universal education from scratch, there would be no public schools at all: There would be public funding of education distributed on a per-student basis to privately operated schools of many kinds overseen by a dozen or so competing credentialing agencies. The accreditors would ensure that certain basic educational standards were satisfied, and families would be able to enroll their children in schools that reflected their priorities and values. Not all of these are hot-button Kulturkampf issues: In some cases, the issue very likely will be that we’d rather spend an hour each day instructing our students in higher mathematics or Greek than showing them how to roll a condom over a cucumber.

 

This would put the interests of students and parents at the center of education rather than treating them as nettlesome irrelevancies. The fact that it would frustrate the busybodies who want to use the schools to bully everybody else into worshiping their own household gods would be a very enjoyable bonus. But it is a very long way from what we have now in any case.

 

The real, viable alternative is some variation on the Prussian model, treating public education as a nationalist — meaning nationalizing — institution, with part of its mission being to instruct students in certain values that are deemed to be important by . . . whoever wins the inevitable political ruckus over that question. Frank Bruni is not going to get to use the public schools as an instrument of Frank Bruni’s values without a fight. I’m not going to get to use the public schools as an instrument of my values without a fight. Nobody else is going to prevail without a fight. That is the nature of democracy. If it were up to me, there would be very little democracy at work in education, but I didn’t design the stupid system we have.

 

What we have is democracy — oodles of it. The discovery of school-board activism by animated right-leaning parents reminds me of the recent fights over the filibuster, contentious Supreme Court–confirmation processes, and gerrymandering — progressives did not give a hoot about any of those things until Republicans learned how to play the game at least as well as Democrats do. Progressives were happy to have the schools engage in political indoctrination when it was their doctrines that were being taught. Progressives are happy to see the establishment of their religion, even as they pretend it is not a religion at all. The people who dreamt up all those bizarre Greek myths about virgins being ravished by sneaky gods taking the forms of animals would laugh their classical asses off if anybody had tried to explain 21st-century gender ideology to them.

 

The next time someone lectures you about the common good, try this experiment: Ask them to name four or five circumstances in which their own political positions are at odds with the public interest and explain how they would go about subordinating them to that public interest. What you will learn in practically every case is that everyone thinks the public interest is identical to his own desires and priorities, which is why discussions along those lines have gone nowhere for the past 200 years or so in any reasonably developed society with more cultural and religious diversity than Denmark.

 

If I win the political fight, then your kids are going to spend a big part of their school days reading Shakespeare, Cicero, and the Bible. (No, Sunshine, I don’t care if you are a Christian or aren’t — just as I don’t expect that everybody who loves Moby-Dick is going to pick up his harpoon and follow Ahab.) Because if we are on the hunt for genuinely universal values, then we are going to have better luck finding them in those books than in the cultivated prejudices of any graduate of your favorite teachers’ college. We would be doing our students a favor.

 

And shouldn’t we be thinking about them, at least a little?

 

Alternatively, we could keep doing what we’ve been doing and subordinate yet another generation’s intellectual development to the important work of satisfying our own political appetites and social rivalries.

 

How’s that been working out for you, America?