Questions cruciales

Structural Pluralism in Education

Détails

Créé le lundi 27 novembre 2017 22:00

Charles L. Glenn, professeur à Boston University vient de publier sous ce titre un texte sur le pluralisme scolaire et le libre choix de l’école.

 

Il est auteur avec Jan de Groof, professeur au collège d’Europe à Bruges, de Finding the right balance. Feedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education. Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, sur la pratique du pluralisme scolaire dans soixante-cinq pays.

ll retrace dans cet article l’histoire du pluralisme, dans quatre pays. Les Pays-Bas, la France et l’Espagne où ce pluralisme repose largement sur la question confessionnelle et les Etats-Unis où il s’est développé en réponse aux conditions nouvelles créées par la fin de la ségrégation et les difficultés du ramassage scolaire.

Alors que traditionnellement le pluralisme est aux Etats-Unis important dans la société civile, mais peu pris en compte dans les politiques publiques, le délaissement des valeurs communes au profit de l’individualisme est source de conflits culturels et confessionnels, les écoles se voulant indépendantes des familles et des communautés.

La question du libre choix de l’école devient alors prépondérante, y compris et surtout quand l’école privée s’aligne sur l’école publique.

La soumission de l’’école catholique à la réforme du collège de 2016 est une belle illustration de la démonstration de Charles Glenn.

   Philippe Gorre

Nous publierions volontiers une traduction de ce texte par un bénévole, sous réserve de l’accord de son auteur.

[Prepared for Consultation on State and Federal Approaches to Pluralism and Accountability,

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, Washington, DC, November 2007]

 

Structural Pluralism in Education

                                                                       By Charles L. Glenn

Although we talk a lot about “school choice” in policy circles – and I’m as guilty as anyone – in fact it is nothing but a mechanism. Like most mechanisms, school choice is either good or bad depending on how it is employed by those who make the choices and how it is guided by policy-makers. Some years ago, I remember, I was asked, at an in-service day for World Bank staff, “Is school choice a good thing or a bad thing?” and had the wit to reply simply, “Yes!”

Most school choices, as they now exist and have ever existed, are employed by parents seeking to gain some advantage for their children, and altogether unguided by wise public policy. Is there any realtor who does not keep information about schools available for families choosing where to rent or buy? Eighteen decades ago Horace Mann was complaining, in his Common School Journal, about wealthy parents who preferred private academies. And when it comes to choice of schools outside of the areas where families live, ample evidence shows that it is upwardly-mobile working-class families who are most eager for such opportunities, as well they might be.

When school choices are made simply on the basis of test scores, as with the “league tables” that have played such a large role in school choice in England, or of the desirable social characteristics (including race) of the pupils already attending the school, unguided by wise public policy, we see human nature at work but we are offered no strategy for improving the education of a nation.

Or, more accurately, such a situation may (or may not) have some effect on instructional outcomes through competition, but it will do less than nothing for the deeper challenge of education, the formation of decent human beings and good citizens. This is what Mary Ann Glendon calls “a basic problem of politics – how to foster in the nation’s citizens the skills and virtues that are essential to the maintenance of our democratic regime” (Glendon 1995, 2). This, as we will see, requires rethinking the long-dominant “myth of the common school” as the unique nursery of citizens.

 

Rationales for Parental Choice

Various rationales have been advanced for policies deliberately promoting parental choice of schools, rather than simply permitting it to happen, as is the case with residential choices. One persuasive rationale is that this will lead to a better match of children with the schools best suited to meet their needs. Another is that it will permit schools to be focused and distinctive, and thus more effective. A third is that competition will reward effective schools and force ineffective schools to close.

An even stronger rationale is that parental choice of how children will be educated is a fundamental human right. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that “parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children” (article 26, 3).   According to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966),

the States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents . . . to choose for their children schools, other than those established by public authorities, which conform to such minimum educational standards as may be laid down or approved by the State and to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions (article 13,3).

Closer to home, in 1925 the Supreme Court, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (268 U.S. 510), struck down an Oregon law requiring all children to attend public schools until completion of the eighth grade, finding that this unjustly threatened the rights of private corporations (schools) to carry out their business and that it interfered with the right of parents to direct the education of their children. The Court pointed out that:

the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.  The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

Legal Scholar John Coons has made this case most eloquently:

[t]he right to form families and to determine the scope of their children's practical liberty is for most men and women the primary occasion for choice and responsibility.   One does not have to be rich or well placed to experience the family.   The opportunity over a span of fifteen or twenty years to attempt the transmission of one's deepest values to a beloved child provides a unique arena for the creative impulse.   Here is the communication of ideas in its most elemental mode. Parental expression, for all its invisibility to the media, is an activity with profound First Amendment implications (Coons 1985, 511).

Persuasive as these rationales may be, individually and taken together, however, there is little evidence in this or in other countries that they have effectively persuaded, that they have led to the adoption of public policies promoting parental choice. Such arguments have not been able to overcome the entrenched resistance of the status quo of bureaucratically-governed and monopolistic schooling, which draws upon a powerful combination of ideological convictions and material interests. We must look elsewhere for the basis for school choice where it has come to be a significant policy framework.

 

Experience Abroad

Every country in Western Europe (as well as Canada and Australia) provides public support for schools that are not operated by public authorities, in most cases schools with a religious identity. These arrangements differ greatly, but generally they represent the resolution (what the Dutch call the “pacification”) of social conflicts over schooling originating in the nineteenth century. These conflicts, in turn, derived from deep social cleavages, not on the basis of class but of religious versus secular life-commitments.

Conflicts over schooling, and resistance against a state monopoly of schooling on the basis of religious convictions, occurred notably in France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries (see Glenn 1988, Glenn 2011), resulting in each case, though sometimes after many decades, in a structural pluralism that recognized and supported alternative systems of schooling. The Dutch “school struggle” (schoolstrijd), for example, reflected resistance on the part of the common people, both conservative Protestant and Catholic, against what many of them saw as the condescension and intolerance of a Liberal elite. The situation came to a boil in 1878, when a new generation of Liberals came to power, committed to government intervention in popular schooling and explicitly hostile to confessional schools (Langedijk 1935, 140). “Religion, they insisted, especially religious education among young children, bred ignorance, superstition, and backwardness. It stunted the full development of the individual and of the nation” (Bratt 2013, 115).

The legislation reflected a growing anti-religious sentiment in some elite circles. Liberal prime minister Kappeyne van de Coppello warned that making concessions to the advocates of public subsidies for confessional schools would have the result that “the struggle for liberty would have been useless, . . . destroyed through the wrangles of factions. Dominance by priests and churchly intolerance would then be prevalent in our country” (Doorn 1989, 161). While to an earlier generation of Liberals the role of the State was to provide support for schooling but without becoming involved in the content and goals of education, for “Kappeyne it was nearly the opposite: the State, the State, and again the State; everything must derive from it, in the spirit of ‘the modern worldview,’ which must penetrate the entire state apparatus, in a principled struggle with churchly authority, which [he argued] was on its last legs.” In an important parliamentary speech in 1874, Kappeyne insisted that “the State cannot leave to chance, to arbitrariness, to the care of any association whatsoever, what belongs to it in the first place: education” (Riel 1982, 111, 225).

It was in opposition to this claim on the part of the State to shape the minds and hearts of youth, to be sovereign over the most intimate aspects of family and individual conscience, that Abraham Kuyper and his allies “focused all our fight on the school struggle. For there the sovereignty of conscience, and of the family, and of pedagogy, and of the spiritual circle were all equally threatened” (Kuyper 1998, 472).

Kuyper’s distinctive contribution was, in the name of God’s sovereignty over all aspects of life, to give his confessional political party a strong agenda of social policies going well beyond explicitly ‘religious’ concerns; “by associating Calvinism with social reform, Kuyper was able to bring broad, klein burger, sectors and even segments of the working class behind the Anti-Revolutionary movement” (Hansen 1973, 370). This was the first party program in Dutch history and, in the very year when the Liberals achieved their goal of legislation to place new burdens on confessional schooling, their opponents achieved the nation-wide organization that enabled them to reverse the Liberal program.

Kuyper and his orthodox Protestant allies defined their political program in conscious opposition to the French Revolution with its assertion of the unlimited sovereignty of the Nation-State, as famously expressed by Abbé Sieyès: “[t]he Nation exists before everything, it is the source of everything” (Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etat? 1789). Or, more officially, in Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (also 1789), “All sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority which does not explicitly emanate from it” (Greenfield 1992, 172). Kuyper insisted on an alternative understanding of the nature of sovereignty as ultimately belonging to God and attributed in only limited fashion to different spheres of the created order.

Contrary to the common stereotype about religious leaders in politics (Yancey and Williamson 2015), Kuyper and his allies did not seek to dominate the society and culture of the Netherlands, but to make room for institutional pluralism.

He struggled against uniformity, the curse of modern life; he wanted to see movement and contrasting colors in place of gray monotony. . . . Thus the ‘antithesis,’ that originally [among orthodox Protestants] meant the unrelenting struggle against devilish modernity, with Kuyper imperceptibly [changed] to a teaching about diversity and about the independent, to-be-honored power of differences. All that was not logical . . . but it was successful and contributed to giving Dutch society a very distinctive flavor. The origin of what would later be called ‘pillarization’ (verzuiling), the system through which each religious group thanks to government subsidies can create its own social world that includes everything from nursery school to sports club or professional association, lies in Kuyper’s conservative love for pluriformity (Kossman 2001, 250).

The Liberals had overreached. This threat against the schools that many of the orthodox common people had labored and sacrificed to establish aroused and created a movement that, in a decade, reversed the political fortunes of the Liberals and brought state support for confessional schools. A massive petition drive collected, in five days, 305,102 signatures from Protestants and 164,000 from Catholics asking the king to refuse to sign the new legislation. When that failed, a national organization, “The Union ‘A School With the Bible’” (the ‘Unie’) created a permanent mechanism for the mobilization of orthodox Protestants (Rijnsdorp 1979). Together the orthodox Protestant Anti-Revolutionary Party and the Catholic party gained a majority in Parliament by 1888, as a result not only of mobilization around the schools but also of a revision of the election law the previous year which greatly extended the franchise among the (male) population, thus bringing the religiously-conservative common people of the countryside and small towns into political participation for the first time. As an historian of Dutch liberalism has pointed out, the effort to smother the last flickering flame of orthodox religion only succeeded in fanning it into vigorous life (Riel 1982).

A similar account could be provided of the political and social conflicts in other countries that resulted in accommodation of diversity in the provision of schooling. Religious accommodation did not occur in the same manner in the United States (except in federally-funded schooling on Indian reservations) because of the strong pressure to assimilate Catholic and Jewish immigrants. They, and Protestant immigrants as well, created networks of faith-based schools without government support, though also without government opposition.

 

 

American Exceptionalism

One of the puzzles in comparative educational policy, however, is why the United States has lagged so far behind other Western democracies, including our neighbor Canada, in promoting educational freedom. Why is it only in the last few years that American governments at different levels have begun to provide public support for alternative education based on our religious diversity?

Surely a large part of the answer is that, in contrast with other countries, our provision of schools has been in large part through local initiatives, with the states playing only a modest role and the federal government none at all (apart from data collection and some vocational education initiatives) until recent decades. Conflict over the desire of many immigrant parents for Catholic schools was largely an urban phenomenon that did not touch a hundred thousand local school districts, and it occurred at a time when the national Republican Party, giving up on Reconstruction, found in anti-Catholicism a useful political issue (Glenn 2012).

Under these circumstances, the great majority of public schools were thoroughly acceptable to their local communities, and shared the prevailing values of those communities, including a generalized Protestantism that caused no offense.

When public policies supporting parental choice of schools emerged in the United States, then, it was not in response to religious conflict, as in Europe, but neither was it because policy-makers were persuaded by the arguments for the educational benefits of school choice sketched above. It was, rather, as a politically-acceptable way to meet race desegregation obligations without resorting to the mandatory assignments known polemically as “forced busing.” The public school vested interests were willing to accept this enhancement of the role of parents only because the alternative of social conflict became even more disruptive. This was how, as a state official and consultant nationwide, I first became involved with the promotion of school choice, not as a good thing in itself but as the least bad way to find a remedy to racial segregation. Such alternatives to mandatory assignments came, over time, to affect hundreds of thousands of urban pupils.

In the process, many of us came to see that urban schools that had been allowed to become distinctive in order to attract parents also became, in the process more educationally effective because more focused. This was never an argument we could use, however, to convince local officials to implement magnet schools or “controlled choice” assignments, or to persuade teacher unions to accept them. It was only as a way to resolve conflict that we were able to persuade 18 Massachusetts cities to adopt school choice policies among their own schools and with suburban districts. By the time that charter schools were included in comprehensive education reform legislation – itself a response to another legal crisis – there were already more than a hundred thousand students attending public schools on the basis of choice, without a repetition of the brutal conflict over “forced busing” in Boston in 1974-76. Improvement of test scores or vindication of parental rights were no part of the discussion that led to this adoption of school choice policies.

 

 

European Structural Pluralism and Its Defense

We have seen that the adoption of public support for parental choice occurred in a number of Western democracies as a way to defuse religious and cultural conflicts, though in both France and Spain in recent decades massive demonstrations opposed government attempts to limit the autonomy of private schools. François Mitterand, in the run-up to the 1981 election, called for a great unified and secular public service of national education that would include the publicly-funded Catholic schools; this reignited the old conflicts and the resulting mobilization of more than a million parents and other supporters of the autonomy of private schools led to the fall of the Socialist government (Leclerc 1985; Visse 1995).

In Spain, during the period 2006-2011 the Socialist government included in the official curriculum for elementary and secondary schools (including publicly-funded Catholic schools) a new required subject called “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights,” promoting a positive perspective on homosexuality, abortion, and other controversial topics. The content of this subject aroused alarm on that part of those who considered that the State was interjecting itself into the moral education of pupils, the responsibility of parents according to article 27 of the Spanish Constitution and a fundamental aspect of educational freedom. A fierce debate ensued about the presumed intention of the new subject to indoctrinate pupils, thus imposing upon the Spanish people a vision of the world in such aspects as the nature of humanity, the family, sexuality, or life itself. Nationwide a movement developed to protest as a matter of conscience against this subject, with demonstrations against what some considered an invasion of their freedom on the part of the public authorities. With the change of government at the end of 2011, the new Minister of Education announced that the subject would be replaced by another called “Civic and Constitutional Education,” “free from controversial questions and ideological indoctrination” (Galán & Glenn 2012).

In short, schools are seldom a source of controversy in other Western democracies . . . except when government somehow threatens the autonomy and distinctiveness of faith-based alternative schools. The subsequent electoral defeat of French and Spanish Socialist parties is commonly attributed in no small part to their perceived attempts to force such schools to comply with government-defined values. Even with extensive secularization, parents in these countries continue to demand diverse approaches to fundamental life-choices within the publicly-supported educational system, and an even-handed government oversight of different sectors of schooling, whether managed by government or by private associations. This is what we are learning to call “structural pluralism” in policy arrangements, and “sector agnosticism” on the part of government (Garnett 2017).

Pluralism, it should be noted, is not the same thing as “diversity,” which is simply the unavoidable recognition that human beings vary in many different ways, significant and insignificant. Pluralism implies the recognition of certain forms of difference as constituting the basis for association within the larger social order and deserving some form of public accommodation because of their deep significance for those identifying with such associations. Religion, ethnicity, and (related to the latter) home language are perhaps the leading factors in pluralism, and there are few nations, now or in the past, which have not wrestled with how to accommodate such pluralism while maintaining a sense of common identity and purpose. Schooling is only one of many sectors – though the most significant – in which such pluralism has been accommodated in the policies of the Netherlands and other countries. In the United States, by contrast, while such pluralism flourishes in civil society, it receives scant recognition or support in public policies.

Structural pluralism consists of legal and policy arrangements that provide space for coherent understandings of the human good to take institutional form, to flourish, to adapt to new circumstances, and to be transmitted to new generations and (in some cases) to adults who choose to associate themselves with the group. For centuries, of course, and still to a considerable extent, this occurs through civil society institutions – families, religious and other voluntary associations, cooperative arrangements around shared goals – quite apart from any government guidance or support. In recent decades, however, the extent and variety of government interventions has made it difficult for these institutions to simply carry on without government recognition or support. As Abraham Kuyper noted in 1878, when Liberals enacted legislation providing that the state would subsidize local public schools, while increasing significantly the costs of all schools, confessional would remain free, “yes, free to hurry on crutches after the [public school] train that storms along the rails of the law, drawn by the golden locomotive of the State” (Gilhuis 1975, 152; Langedijk 1935, 148-49). Just consider the many-fold increase in government support and intervention in the affairs of civil society since Kuyper wrote, and especially since the Second World War . . . !

Under these conditions, as other nations have recognized, structural pluralism cannot exist unless institutions and services that compete with those provided by government are provided with comparable public support. This has been the case in the United States, as well, with respect to hospitals, higher education, and a whole range of other functions, but not with respect to schooling. The fundamental reason for this different treatment of schooling is the persistent “myth of the common school,” the belief, contrary to all evidence, that only the public school forms loyal citizens (Glenn 2000).

 

Is the Public School Neutral?

But is it not possible that the United States has reached a point of fundamental conflict over cultural and religious issues, often focused on schooling, that calls for the sort of solution that has served other Western democracies well? Perhaps it is time that schools be withdrawn from our cultural battlefields, with the sort of “pacification” that the Dutch and other democratic peoples have achieved through wise policies.

Over the past several decades, and especially over the past few years, two developments have converged to create the conditions for the sort of religious conflict over schooling that led to structural pluralism in education policies in other nations. One is the weakening of the local character of public schools for a variety of reasons, including school district consolidation from over a hundred thousand to around fifteen thousand, and the growing intrusion of state and federal governments in what is taught in public schools. Another is the growing alienation of a significant proportion of the population, on mingled cultural and religious grounds, from the values promoted by governing elites through media and the courts (Williams 2017).

Public schools since the Second World War have continued to be a focal point of such alienation; one need only mention the school prayer and Bible reading court rulings, the controversies over sex education and other curricular impositions, and the recent flap over use of bathrooms and locker rooms by transgender individuals. The public schools have served as the transmission line through which such angry disputes have reached into every community, In contrast with other Western democracies, the American public schools have been continuously roiled by controversy, often of an especially bitter quality. This has undoubtedly contributed to the ugly national mood confirmed by so many recent studies.

In theory, of course, the possibility of conflict over values in schooling could be eliminated by making schools value-free, and something of this sort has been attempted in recent years in the United States. Sociologist Nathan Glazer quotes a public school history teacher as saying, “‘We regard American culture as very diverse, and we’re not sure what values they see as American culture.’” “So much,” Glazer adds, “for republicanism, free enterprise, patriotism, strong family values, freedom of religion, and so on.” (Glazer 1997, 3).

But of course there is no such thing as value-free schooling; in daily life and special assemblies, in unspoken assumptions, in what is rewarded and what is sanctioned, what is displayed and what is not, in how teachers talk about the students among themselves, every school has a culture that communicates itself irresistibly to students, whether they love it or hate it (Wynne & Ryan 1986). Some public schools also have a deliberately-chosen ethos, often the work of a charismatic leader over many years, that is shared by the teachers and shapes the culture of the school in all of its particulars.

The Civic Republican project dear to Horace Mann and his many allies in the United States and elsewhere in the nineteenth century sought to shape loyal citizens through schooling under supervision though not direct management by state government. At the heart of the education provided by public schools was what Robert Bellah called a “civil religion,” others “the democratic creed,” though it has gone by many other names as well. In the United States, it was tinctured with a sort of generic Protestantism in which Sin and Salvation had no place; in France, by the Kantian “Idealism” promoted by Cousin and Renouvier. Other varieties of “public school religion” prevailed in other Western nations.

Robert Bellah (1992) has pointed out that the credibility of such sets of beliefs and loyalties has eroded since the 1960s. According to Dewey biographer Robert Westbrook,

rejection of Dewey’s democratic faith has become a standard feature of the dominant strain of liberal-democratic ideology. . . . liberals have left it to conservatives to worry over the absence of a common culture grounded in a widely shared understanding of the good life and adopted a studied neutrality in ethics and art which favors a segmented market of competing “life styles” in which the good life is reduced, both morally and aesthetically, to a set of more or less arbitrary preferences (Westbrook 1991, xv).

Although we should not generalize about many thousands of public schools, it is fair to say that the prevailing orthodoxy among those who write about the goals of schooling today, those who train teachers and those who shape the “discourse” about teaching, is that schools should above all promote critical thinking, autonomy, liberation from inherited beliefs and values in a process of self-creation and authenticity. Thus, “educational theory as taught in colleges of education, championed by superintendents, and accepted by teachers, has witnessed profound shifts in the dominant understanding of the child and the telos of education. The child is no longer seen as existing within larger relationships that inspire, demand, and constrain, but rather as an autonomous entity who bears the burden of self-creation” (Berner & Hunter 2014, 202).

Today’s public school students are still exposed to many of the facts and even documents that were the staple of what has been called the Civic Republican education program, but now these are used by the progressive curriculum as opportunities to develop critical judgment, to speculate about motivation, to uncover hypocrisy. There is nothing wrong with critical judgment, of course, but the danger is that students will become cynical about the whole accumulated wisdom of their society and their culture, not to speak of their families. Sociologist James Hunter reminds us that

[w]hen moral rules and selves are abstracted from the normative traditions that give them substance and the social contexts that makes them concrete, “values” become little more than sentiments, moral judgments, expressions of individual preference. In such a framework, the defining moral action is the capacity of the individual to choose as he or she sees fit. The individual is capable of making commitments, of course, but these commitments are not binding, since one always retains the right of withdrawal. The highest normative ideal, trumping all others, is the ideal of an individual free to move among multiple attachments, and the merit of those attachments is measured by the degree to which they facilitate personal well-being. Unanchored as they are to anything concrete outside the self, the values and virtues encouraged by the leading strategies of moral education provide meager resources at best for sustaining and supporting our far-reaching moral commitments to benevolence and justice (Hunter 2000, 40).

The shallowness of such an educational goal has never been expressed better than by the late Christopher Lasch, who wrote that, in the contemporary liberal view, “How should I live?. . . becomes a matter of taste, of idiosyncratic personal preference.” But this is not adequate, Lasch insists. “The question of how one ought to live requires us to speak of impersonal virtues like fortitude, workmanship, moral courage, honesty, and respect for adversaries.” Nor can we simply adopt an open, “tolerant,” stance: “If we believe in these things, moreover, we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone, as the moral preconditions of a good life.” Indeed, if we understand what is really required by respect for other persons, we cannot simply accept whatever they are doing and believing but will have a deep concern to challenge them to rise to the highest that they are capable of. “To refer everything to a ‘plurality of ethical commitments’ means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no one’s right to make any demands on ourselves.” Democracy, Lasch insists, “requires a more invigorating ethic than tolerance. Tolerance is a fine thing, but it is only the beginning of democracy, not its destination. In our time democracy is more seriously threatened by indifference than by intolerance or superstition” (Lasch 1995, 87, 89).

Ironically enough, given the liberal elite’s scorn for American consumer culture, this emphasis on autonomy is thoroughly consistent with and encourages a lifestyle based on consumerism with no fixed goals. In what philosopher Charles Taylor has called the Age of Authenticity, the only obligation of the fulfilled human life is “bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain.” The corollary of this defining value is the obligation to respect the choices that others make; thus the only “sin which is not tolerated is intolerance” (Taylor 2007, 478, 484).

 

The Paradox of Autonomy

The most striking aspect of the emphasis, by education theorists, on autonomy and unconstrained choice is its intolerance: it is not itself represented as a choice. In the spirit of Rousseau’s Contrat Social, every child will be forced to be free, will be under a compulsion to become autonomous. Thus Meira Levinson asserts unapologetically that “[f]or the state to foster children’s development of autonomy requires coercion – i.e., it requires measures that prima facie violate the principles of freedom and choice. . . . The coercive nature of state promotion of the development of autonomy also means that children do not have the luxury of ‘opting out’ of public autonomy-advancing opportunities in the same way that adults do” Nor should this educational objective of autonomy itself be subject to public debate, since, she insists, it is a fundamental premise of the liberal state which is not open to question! (Levinson 1999, 38-9, 139).

Political scientist William Galston stresses the partisan nature of such “Comprehensive Liberalism,” and the threat that its ascendancy poses to traditional communities, since “liberalism is not equally hospitable to all ways of life or to all subcommunities. Ways of life that require self-restraint, hierarchy, or cultural integrity are likely to find themselves on the defensive, threatened with the loss of both cohesion and authority.” As a result, Galston points out, “the more one examines putatively neutral liberal principles and public discourse, the more impressed one is likely to become by their decidedly nonneutral impact on different parts of diverse societies. Liberalism is not and cannot be the universal response, equally acceptable to all, to the challenge of social diversity. It is ultimately a partisan stance” (Galston 1991, 293, 297). No wonder that religious organizations and individuals who take their beliefs seriously sometimes feel under attack in this most tolerant of societies.

The focus on giving the greatest possible scope to assertion of individual preferences in a whole range of areas – most dramatically, perhaps, in gender identity – and the identification of individual autonomy as synonymous with personal authenticity have crowded out the other concerns that animated previous generations of liberals as well as reformers like Horace Mann and his allies. “Not long ago liberals thought of themselves as advancing a governing philosophy based on strong principles and firm convictions. Today liberalism can’t appeal to strong, robust moral truths, at least not overtly, for they threaten the dictatorship of relativism and therefore compromise the goal of lifestyle liberation” (Reno 2012, 6). Not only are contemporary liberals reluctant to invoke norms and goals that were taken for granted by their predecessors, but they often support policies that undermine institutions of civil society that have traditionally nurtured such norms and striven to achieve such goals. Peter Berkowitz warns that

the operation and maintenance of liberal democracy – that form of democracy in which the will of the people is grounded in and limited by individual rights – depend upon the exercise or moral and intellectual virtues that, according to liberalism’s own tenets, fall outside its strict supervision, and that it not only does not always effectively summon but may even discourage or undermine (Berkowitz 1999, 6.).

The invitation, experienced by many children and youth in America’s public schools, to put together an identity and a code of behavior that are idiosyncratic, radically personal, cobbled together from randomly-chosen elements attractive for a variety of reasons, is likely to produce very unstable results. Galston points out that, contrary to all the warnings by comprehensive liberals about the indoctrination of children by families and religious institutions, and the insistence that public schools have an obligation to liberate them from this oppression, in fact

[t]he greatest threat to children in modern liberal societies is not that they will believe in something too deeply, but that they will believe in nothing very deeply at all. . . . Rational deliberation among ways of life is far more meaningful if (and I am tempted to say only if) the stakes are meaningful, that is, if the deliberator has strong convictions against which competing claims can be weighed. The role of parents in fostering such convictions should be welcomed, not feared (Galston 1991, 255).

David Steiner offers the same warning is slightly different terms: “It is a fine line, indeed, between teaching mutual respect and inculcating universal apathy, and a large constituency argues that the schools have crossed it” (Steiner 1994, 8).

Those who support structural pluralism in schooling do not challenge the right of teachers to seek to promote individual autonomy and self-definition at the expense of group loyalties and inherited convictions about the nature of a flourishing life, or of parents who desire such an education for their children to choose schools that claim to provide it. What they challenge is the use of that claim to prevent other schools from providing a distinctly different education and prevent parents from choosing such schools.

But if public policy is to enforce the educational prescription that every child should be educated for autonomy for his or her own sake as well as for that of society and the liberal state, then it is evident that non-public schools would have to be required to conform their goals and practices to those of public schools. “As a result,” Levinson insists, “schools should not attempt to advance or to shape themselves in accordance with fundamental or divisive conceptions of the good; rather, all schools must be structured as autonomy-promoting communities which are ‘detached’ from local and parental control.” The inevitable result would be that “there would in practice be little if anything to distinguish private schools from state schools – which is exactly the way it should be. ”Faith-based schools, in particular, would have no place in such a scheme, since religion provides a “socially divisive conception of the good” and thus “religious schools would violate the liberal educative aims of commonality, autonomy, and citizenship” (Levinson 1999, 144-5, 158).

There would thus be no room for the autonomy and distinctiveness of schools. Since only one model of human flourishing could be promoted in schools, that of individual autonomy, it would be necessary for the state to insist that every school, whether operated by local government or by private association, make that its defining mission. Amy Gutmann, in what is clearly intended as a gesture toward pluralism, proposes that a “better alternative to prohibiting private schools would be to devise a system of primary schooling that accommodates private religious schools on the condition that they, like public schools, teach the common set of democratic values” (Gutmann 1987, 117), through the discussion of every issue without appeal to religious or other authority. James Dwyer, in his polemic on the deplorable effects of religious schools, concedes that they may be permitted as an alternative, but only if they conform themselves to public schools through abandoning such “harmful practices” as “compelling religious expression and practice, teaching secular subjects from a religious perspective . . . and making children’s sense of security and self-worth depend on being ‘saved’ or meeting unreasonable, divinely ordained standards of conduct” (Dwyer 1998, 159).

Here we come upon an apparent paradox: if the goal of schooling to to nurture individual autonomy in this self-referential form, then school autonomy is not important. What the latter seeks to serve is group identities, shared values, communities that distinguish themselves by loyalty to one another, by character norms, and, in many cases, to a tradition and a set of religious beliefs which they consider of fundamental importance. As Adam Seligman reminds us, “this idea of moral autonomy . . . is contested by billions of church, mosque, temple, and synagogue goers the world over. For these religiously committed individuals, people are not morally autonomous, but, rather, live under heteronomous-enacted and revealed laws. The secular, liberal claims for moral autonomy are not then as neutral as they present themselves to be” (Seligman 2014, 14).

Comprehensive liberalism has no patience with such constraints on individual flourishing. As David Goodhart has put it recently, such “‘progressive individualism’ . . . places a high value on autonomy, mobility and novelty and a much lower value on group identity, tradition and national social contracts (faith, flag and family)” (Goodhart 2017, 5). Schools that set out to liberate their students from so-called “white privilege,” from “heteronormativity,” and from religious and other traditions, and to promote “global consciousness” in place of a nationalism considered mis-guided, are certain to offend some proportion of the families who have little choice but to entrust their children to what they consider a hostile environment. This is a formula for the sort of deep-rooted cultural conflict that other Western democracies, often after decades of political conflict, were able to pacify by adopting pluralism as the basic structure for schooling.

Of course, structural pluralism in education would leave ample room for schools seeking to promote individual autonomy for the children of families who choose that educational goal, but only as one among a variety of options. It would remove the major source of conflict plaguing American public schools, and one of the contributing causes of America’s sadly-divided public today.

Educational pluralism offers a way out of these conflicts -- over what education is for, who the child is, and what role teachers and schools should play -- since it refuses to privilege one view over another. Instead of progressive and traditionalist educators competing for ideological dominance, they can populate and influence schools that want their particular approach. Instead of pretending to be ideologically neutral, public schooling could offer parents a variety of choices that reflect their beliefs and their children’s pedagogical needs. In short, educational pluralism opens up this conversation in a way that purported neutrality and uniformity cannot.

Educational pluralism is not only more honest about the formational nature of education and the deep differences between pedagogical approaches, but the political philosophy that supports it and the institutions it generates are more democratic than our present system (Berner 2012, 41).

 

Making Structural Pluralism Work in Practice

A Belgian colleague and I published, in 2012, the third edition of our reference work on how different national education systems balance the competing demands: the right of parents to direct the education of their children through choice, the right of educators to work together to create and maintain distinctive schools reflecting their professional convictions about how best to educate, and the responsibility of society to ensure that every child is adequately instructed in the knowledge and skills required for a successful life in that particular society (Glenn & De Groof 2012).

This latest edition, in four volumes, includes chapters profiling 65 national education systems, written by nearly one hundred collaborators from the different countries. As might be expected, the specific arrangements are enormously varied, reflecting the historical, social, religious, and other differences among the countries included. In each case we asked the authors to provide clear information on the right to establish non-public schools, or any public funding support for such schools, on requirements with respect to the admission of students and the employment of teachers, and on any imposition, by the state, of teaching about values.

Two generalizations relevant to the question of how to implement structural pluralism in education are possible. One is that every one of the countries seeks, through various forms of licensure of schools and, often, external examinations, to monitor the results and to a substantial degree the content of instruction in skills and knowledge which each school provides. In some cases there is a national syllabus of required content which private as well as public schools are required to follow; in others this is not imposed upon private schools, but they tend to follow it in any case to ensure successful results on external examinations.

This should be distinguished from monitoring how the instruction is provided, something for which a number of countries employ visiting inspectors, while others are content to simply judge by results.

Instruction in skills and knowledge is, of course, an essential part of schooling, and whether it is done well or badly can have life-long consequences. It is not, however, the only mission of good schools. They also educate, shape the character, values, life goals, and loyalties of their students. Good schools do so, but many schools do not, including some that produce excellent results from instruction.

The school is, by its essential nature, a moral community within which adults accept and share responsibility for guiding children or youth toward adulthood, both by instructing them but also by educating them. In the latter mission the school is analogous to though not identical with the family.

It is over the determination of goals for education, and assessment of the adequacy of the education provided, that most conflict arises in the countries we studied, as in the excamples of France and Spain cited above. Such conflict is avoided when wise policies exist to protect the distinctive character of schools, their religious or philosophical orientation and its implications for school life. Dutch law protects the richting of a school; every school (including the seventy percent of government funded schools that are not operated by government) must meet instructional expectations or face intervention by the government inspectorate, but government may not dictate its fundamental orientation and how that is expressed in the education provided. Spanish policy protects the ideario of the school, French policy its caractère propre.

These terms are often applied only to non-public schools, with the implicit assumption that public schools are characterlessly neutral. This has led to interesting debates about whether non-public schools have an unfair quality advantage because of their ability to be focused around a clear mission (Braster 1996). Indeed, studies in several countries have suggested that this focus accounts for the superior academic outcomes of many faith-based schools (Marwijk Kooy-von Baumhauer 1984; Mortimore et al. 1988). After all, “[i]t should not be a surprise that schools encouraged to be everything for everybody have found it difficult to be exceptionally good at anything” (Hess 2010, 101).

This has concrete implications. In France, during the debate over adoption of the loi Guermeur, in 1977, some senators took exception to the provision requiring teachers to respect the distinctive character (caractère propre) of the school. This, they argued, was a violation of freedom of conscience. In an important decision rejecting this challenge, the Constitutional Court concluded that educational freedom (and thus the right to protect the distinctiveness of a school) was rooted in the freedom of association. Educational freedom (which was also an individual right) could be realized only under conditions of structural pluralism. Pluralism rested upon differences, and differences could not be maintained without the right to take them into account in appointing staff. Teachers in a non-public school could thus be required to respect its distinctive character (Monchambert 1983, 60-63; see LeGrand & Glenn 2012).

The school we have described, both instructing and educating, and thus accountable to both society in general and to families though along different dimensions of its mission, fits very well into Kuyper’s model of sphere sovereignty. In crafting educational policy on this basis, it would be important to accord special protection to the distinctive educational mission of each school, the worldview that defines how it approaches every aspect of school life.

 

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