Today’s public schools are not primarily educational facilities. They are indoctrination battlegrounds, whereby political factions fight for control of the schools’ curriculums in order to impose their own ideological agendas across school districts.
Michelle A. Purdy, an associate professor of education at Washington University in St. Louis, makes this observation plain in a revealing Washington op-ed, As the right fights the teaching of race, a new AP course expands it: The sub-title reads, A tug of war over disrupting or conserving social arrangements has long buffeted schools. After making her far Left ideological bias plain early on, she makes this astounding statement:
The nation’s public schools have long been caught in a tug of war over whether they should be used to conserve or disrupt existing social arrangements. Alternate efforts to constrict and expand academic freedom in the nation’s schools have been central to how politicians, educators and activists have tried to encourage social change or resist it.
Purdy’s ideological bias is plain. If you disagree with my agenda, you are constricting academic freedom and reactionary—resisting social change, as she puts it, as if all change is necessarily good. But we’ll leave that aside for the moment.
What Purdy is acknowledging is: Yes, American schools are political institutions. They are not primarily educational institutions. And what would you expect of a monopolistic government system funded by taxes and populated by students forced into assigned schools based on the students’ addresses? And as with any socialistic institution, conflict over control of the central planning apparatus is bound to flourish in such a setting. Ideological conflict is not a “bug.” It is a feature inherent in government schooling. What’s lost, or at least relegated to the “back burner,” in an institution of this type? Education.
The purpose of education is to teach the children how to individually think for themselves in order to prepare them for living their lives. 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand defines education this way:
The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.
This is, I believe, correct. It’s the broadest definition. If education is not fundamentally about kids learning how to use their minds objectively and independently, then what is it?
Instead, they get subjected to the political or social ideological agendas of whomever happens to be in control of the curriculum. Purdy is not wrong to say that there were serious flaws in the ideological biases of the status quo. But she is no more interested in real education than those agendas she would replace. She would merely replace agendas she disagrees with with her own, leaving out the training of students to independently evaluate and compare competing perspectives based on all available facts.
Purdy doesn’t seem to be concerned with such objectivity in learning, at least not as implied in this article. Purdy denounces the prevailing and/or past teaching of American history as “white history,” and proposes to replace it with “black history,” in the form of myriad black studies curricula. No doubt the teaching of American history has often been tainted by white racism. But replacing it by tainting history with a black racial tinge for the purpose of advancing a social justice political agenda is just as wrong. The truthworthiness of history courses is not determined by the skin color of the person interpreting/teaching it. It is determined by facts. What should be examined and adopted are history lessons that are accurate and fact-based. There could be honest, unbiased disagreements in interpretation of the facts. Where such differences emerge, children could be exposed to the disagreements, and taught how—and allowed—to objectively weigh the differences, discuss them, and come to their own conclusions—the purpose being to teach children how to articulate their case, listen to others’ views, refute them intelligently, and integrate it all objectively. The main ingredient is to teach facts. Facts, not dogma, is the starting point. That is how real education should work. Truth in history (or any other subject) is not determined by the skin color of the person discovering and/or interpreting the facts. We don’t need racially slanted history, whether white or black. We need accurate history.
Getting to a quality, genuine educational system will be all but impossible as long as that system is government controlled—which means, thoroughly, coercively politicized. Purdy labels forcing her own agenda on schools “academic freedom.” But there can be no real academic freedom in a system where any political faction can impose their school agendas on everyone by force. The monopolistic public school system is the ultimate enemy of academic freedom in American education..
Purdy speaks of academic freedom. But academic freedom is not defined by a war of factions over who gets to impose their school dogma on everyone else. Academic freedom means the individual’s right not to have to submit to any school scheme one doesn’t agree with, including being forced to pay for it. Academic freedom means to have a real marketplace of ideas— including educational ideas, where all ideas have the equal opportunity to be market tested.
Such a market can only flourish when the customers of education, the parents and students, can vote with their feet and their dollars. Under the current system, parents seeking alternatives to the traditional public schools are burdened with the need to pay for the alternative private schooling while still being stuck with thousands of dollars in education taxes that fund the public school, effectively being forced to pay double or triple the private school price.
I am for the complete separation of school and state, with the government having no role in funding or administering education. Given political realities, I favor an interim step, universal parental/guardian school choice through having education taxes follow the student rather than fund school districts directly. Whether by tax credits, education savings accounts (ESAs), or other broad-based funding methods, Such a liberation would spur a vibrant education marketplace where all education methods, curriculums, philosophies and teacher qualifications would have the opportunities to be market tested by entrepreneurs and businesspersons, afford parents myriad choices, and end the ridiculous and damaging curriculum wars.
That would be real academic freedom.
Related Reading:.
The Comprachicos by Ayn Rand
Toward a Free Market in Education: School Vouchers or Tax Credits by me for The Objective Standard
Educational Freedom, Not Just Education, ‘Has to Be the Top Priority for Candidates'
The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard
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