Jan Resseger takes a look at the work of Colin Woodard and what it has to say about the place of the public school system in our society. Reposted with permission.
Colin Woodard is the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University and author of a new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America.
In a recent NY Times column, Woodard explores two conflicting mythic stories we Americans tell ourselves to define who we are today: “There is a battle raging across America (and soon in the halls of the Supreme Court) over what it means to be an American and what our nation should aspire to be… Nations are, as the Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson put it, ‘imagined communities’; they only exist because we collectively believe they do. Every nation is defined and shaped by the stories its members have come to accept about where it came from, what its purpose is, who belongs to it and who does not.”
Woodard describes today’s battle about our society’s identity: “One vision is civic. It says that we Americans may lack a common history, religion or ethnicity, but what we share are the ideals in the Declaration of Independence: Each human has a natural and equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To be American, in this tradition, is to create a society dedicated to making these ideals a reality.”
“The other vision—an animating force inside the Trump administration—is exclusive and ethno-nationalist. Vice President J.D. Vance laid it out explicitly in a speech this summer: a national identity based not on ideals, but on privileged heritage and bloodlines. ‘America is not just an idea … We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life’… Mr Vance identified ‘our ancestors’ as the people who came to ‘tame a wild continent.’ Americans in this construction, are those people whose ancestors participated in the conquest of Indigenous America. If your ancestors include people who were Indigenous or enslaved or who immigrated to this country after 1890—ancestors who, in all likelihood, are not British, German or French Protestants—you might not be equally American.”
In The Flag and the Cross, their excellent book defining White Christian Nationalism, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry, two sociologists of religion, define ethno-nationalism—what it is and what it is not: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it should be… America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful… But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4) However… “White Christian nationalism is not ‘Christian patriotism’; white Christian nationalism…. is rooted in white supremacist assumptions and empowered by anger and fear. This is nationalism, not patriotism… ((W)hite Christian nationalism is not just a problem among white American Christians. There are secular versions of white Christian nationalism that claim to defend ‘Western Culture’ or ‘Judeo-Christian civilization.’ And there are secular white Americans who know how to leverage white Christian nationalist language. For such Americans, the ‘Christian’ label simply signals shared tribal identity or veiled political values that would otherwise be socially unacceptable.”The Flag and the Cross, pp. 8-10)
Colin Woodard explains that today’s civic narrative of our nation’s identity was established during the 1960s: “Americans like to think of our country as one of the oldest democracies in the world. But we only truly became a liberal democracy in the 1960s, in the living memory of many Americans. It was only then that the civic national vision triumphed, a result of the mass mobilizations in the World Wars, the civil rights movements that returning Black and Native American and Latino vets helped spearhead, and the interventions of the federal government at key moments.”
In Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, his history of American attempts to limit and undermine Black Americans’ right to literacy, constitutional law professor Derek W. Black traces the development of the our nation’s civic vision back much farther, as an “action-reaction” driven process beginning with slave-led rebellions in the antebellum South and the impact of northern abolitionism. After that, “The Civil War ended formal slavery but did not remedy the conditions slavery had perpetuated for centuries. Reconstruction began as a remedy but was abandoned while far from complete. The same is true of the second reconstruction—the Civil Rights Movement. School desegregation, for instance, lasted only a decade in most places before it ended.” However, Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)
Derek Black understands today’s attack on civil rights in public schools and today’s huge school privatization movement—to establish “education freedom” via publicly funded private school tuition vouchers—as central to the reaction against the civic vision that our society has struggled to maintain since Brown: “As rhetoric, educational freedom sounds good. As a practical matter it falls well short of freedom for all. It does not even attempt to ensure that private education works for children. At best it is agnostic toward the school environments students enter. At worst it uses public funds to facilitate patterns and values that America has spent the last half century trying to tame. Of course, some private schools offer an excellent education. But those schools aren’t particularly interested in expanding to serve large numbers of new students, much less disadvantaged students who would arrive with additional needs. And while some private schools attract students for good reasons, the education freedom movement speaks most directly to families who want to leave public schools for the wrong reasons—such as rage over values like anti-discrimination, inclusiveness, free thinking and equal playing fields.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 282)
Black concludes: “(G)overnment has played… an enormous role. It has been a guarantor of educational opportunity, not a market player. Before the Civil War, the free market of education had failed to deliver opportunity to huge groups of children. Black and white, rural and urban, Northern and Southern. Private actors lacked the capacity or desire to do more. When government decided to act in the aftermath of the War, it was to lift a race of people out of slavery, not deliver fungible commodities. Government proved that only public education could expand schooling from individual institutions into a system that would eventually reach everyone, or nearly so. Only government could mandate and fund education for every student. And in that unique role, it was government that insisted that schools overcome society’s basest instincts.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 287)
When I personally think about our society’s civic vision that has sustained our universal system of public education, one memory stands out. A couple of years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, I was listening to a keynoter at a national conference as he extolled the transformation of that city’s schools—a transformation that included the “shock doctrine” state takeover of the New Orleans public schools, the mass imposition of privately operated charter schools, and the mass firing of all the teachers who had served the district pre-hurricane. While the keynoter was speaking, a woman in the audience leapt to her feet and loudly protested: “They stole our public schools and they stole our democracy all while we were out of town!”
That New Orleans mother understood in a very personal way what the late political philosopher Benjamin Barber explained theoretically in his definition of our society’s civic vision: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck. Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)