Should the State Tell Schools What to Teach?

Charles Glenn, dean ad interim of the School of Education, recently gave the keynote address at a conference in Milan on educational freedom. The address, titled The Myth of the Common School Revisited, focused on the historical development of state-operated schools and how Glenn’s views on the issue have changed since he wrote The Myth of the Common School in 1988. The conference took place at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart on March 1 and 2.

Glenn (SED’87) spoke with BU Today prior to the conference.

BU Today: What is the “myth of the common school”?
Glenn: I mean the broadly unquestioned idea that the state has a right to use its monopoly of ‘public’ instruction to seek to form the worldview of its future citizens, an idea that was crusading in the 19th century and continues even today when most public schools have abandoned any effort to promote character or citizenship.

It is an idea proposed by Rousseau in Du contrat social, and it formed the heart of the Jacobin program in education during the radical phase of the French Revolution. It was the program of the Bolsheviks in Russia, the National Socialists in Germany, and the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, it would be fair to say that a distinctive characteristic of every totalitarian — as contrasted with merely authoritarian — regime is to shape the minds and hearts of youth through a state monopoly of schooling, as well as youth organizations and other means of shaping consciousness.

How has the myth changed since you began exploring this issue two decades ago?
While I believe that The Myth of the Common School still has value as a historical narrative, my own thinking about these matters has naturally developed a good deal in the intervening years. This development has been stimulated not only by extensive further research, but perhaps more importantly by the opportunity I have had to join in, and learn from, the educational policy debates in many countries, including Italy.

In my historical account, I stated the conflict perhaps too simply as being between the state on the one side and parents and religious groups on the other. My narrative did not sufficiently take into account changes in culture. While I provided an extensive discussion of changing ideas about education, I did not show how an evolving culture created new ways of understanding human nature and thus of the goals of education. And I did not show how in recent decades the secularization of culture in Western societies has made it increasingly difficult even to talk about such matters.

The result — and I believe this is as true in Europe as in North America — is that even those schools that instruct reasonably effectively, as measured by PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] and other international testing programs, often do not educate adequately. In failing to educate, they fail both their pupils and our societies. And in failing to educate, they are characteristically less effective at instructing as well, especially children and youth who are at risk of educational failure.
 
How is the concept of educational freedom, in terms of autonomous public schools, perceived differently in the United States and in Europe?
Every western European country except Italy and Greece provides public funds for nongovernment schools (including religious ones), which are considered to provide public education. The European Union has stated that educational freedom requires this.

There are striking parallels between the Subsidiarity and Education study [presented in Milan this month], with 3,200 Italian respondents, and the study of school vouchers published in 2000 by Terry Moe [of Stanford University] based on a nationally representative sample of 4,700 American adults. Moe was investigating to what extent Americans knew about educational vouchers and how they viewed both them and the public schools. In both cases there was strong support for a mixed model of funding of nonpublic schools, with the state and parents sharing the cost. This is contrary to the policies in the European countries with the strongest commitment to educational freedom, and to the voucher programs adopted in recent years in parts of the United States: these generally forbid extra charges to parents.

Also, in both Italy and the United States there is little support for a ‘libertarian’ policy of abandoning a government role of oversight over education. Moe observes, “It is true that many Americans look favorably on competition and choice. But they do not think good outcomes will emerge automatically through the unfettered operation of the market.” In neither country is there significant support for a sort of capitalisme sauvage in education.

This means, in both cases, that reform will not come through top-down policy changes elaborated through political means. Parental choice of schools has been growing rapidly in the United States despite the bitter opposition of the educational establishment and teacher unions, not through political victories (though it has won a few victories at the local and state level), but because parents have grown accustomed to making choices for their children, and school systems have been forced into responding.

There are, however, some results of the survey that seem to me especially characteristic of Italy. One difference from the United States is that in Italy there appears to be considerable resistance to vertical subsidiarity, with a lingering desire for a strong central state on the part of many respondents, while in the United States it is only horizontal subsidiarity, the transfer of various functions from government to civil society institutions, that arouses resistance. Ironically, though, local and regional communities in Italy are probably more distinctive than is the case in America; perhaps it is for this reason that for many respondents vertical subsidiarity seems dangerous.

Are there elements of the Italian public education system that the United States should explore, and vice versa?
I’m actually staying in a Catholic school in the center of Milan, Collegio San Carlo, and was given a tour. The technology is ahead of what we have at the School of Education, and all of the pupils are taught some of the time through English. They also take Chinese and other languages. U.S. schools are way behind in language teaching.

But overall the Italian system underperforms by international standards, like the U.S. system. I’ve studied and written about more than 50 national education systems, and I’d rate both countries around the middle of the pack.

Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.