Recently, I drove by the school my husband went to when he was a boy. It’s a lovely old building, a private residence now, but full of wonderful memories for Dale. He talks about his teacher Mrs. McKee reading books to his class like Where the Red Fern Grows and The Call of the Wild, and how he played on the playground during recess with the Arellano boys. The Arellano family had a different ethnic and religious background than my husband, but school was a great melting pot, even in rural Idaho. Everyone got the same education. We were all Americans.
I thought of my husband’s school experience when I read there are renewed calls for a nation-wide civics curriculum, a social studies course that might bring our fractured country together again.
The curriculum would be both accurate and inclusive. It would contain the best of our country’s history and laws, but not ignore or downplay the worst. Nationalizing curriculum is not a new idea. Horace Mann, the father of public education, first advocated for free, universal, and nonsectarian education in the 1800’s. At the time the landed and wealthy privately educated their children, but formal education was not an option for many of the newly arrived European immigrants. Mann saw a common school and curriculum as one way to meld the population and unite our country.
When I was thinking about becoming a teacher in the 1980’s a couple of parents in my farming community approached me and asked if I’d be interested in starting a school just for country kids. No, I told them, the world is a much bigger place than the fields of hay and corn in our little valley. I believed then and do now that children need exposure to new ideas and greater opportunities than what they get in their home environment.
Later, when I got a doctorate in education, school choice was coming into vogue and many parents were eager to sign on. Either they didn’t like public education because it wasn’t “quality” education, or they wanted more control over what their children learned in school. They wanted their values taught exclusively.
Soon, the public education system that Mann worked so hard to establish, came under assault.
Diane Ravitch, a noted research professor in education, warned for years that charter schools and other private institutions were undermining public education by taking away both students and funding.
The recent movement to establish a standard civics’ education is not surprising when you consider the diminishing influence of public education. Currently, anywhere from 10-20% of children in the U.S. do not attend a public school. They are largely being educated in charters, private schools, or homeschooled, each with a different focus and goal. The unintended consequence of school choice has been the erosion of a common understanding of who we are as Americans.
School choice has also set the stage for an adult population expecting to “choose their news” just as their education was chosen (and edited) for them.
Whatever their information stream on social media may be, the freedom to choose has become more important than shared understanding.
Public education has also taken a fiscal hit. When states were strapped for cash during the financial crisis of 2008, one of the first cuts was to education, this despite the constitution’s charge that state’s fund education. Consequently, here in rural Idaho we have schools open only four days a week while children living in cities like Boise or Idaho Falls attend school five days a week. The argument is that four-day-a-week schools give their kids the same amount of learning hours by extending the school day. Yet, research shows reading and math test scores are lower in rural districts.
Public education, like democracy itself, was never a perfect institution.
But, in light of our divided nation, the frustration and gridlock we’ve experienced the last few years, any idea that promotes common experience, should be encouraged. We need to be reminded of all the things that bring us together as Americans.
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