Searching for Nuance in the Charter School Debate

The point of public schooling, H.L. Mencken wrote, “is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” That’s the attack, for those of you who are trying to keep score; it came to my attention from an essay by John Taylor Gatto, a former teacher in New York City public schools, who thinks Mencken was precisely correct.

Now here’s the defense of public schools, as articulated this week by University of Pittsburgh professor Michael Brenner at the always reliable Huffington Post:

Of all the institutions that made the United States into a coherent society, none made a greater contribution than our public schools. It was they that fashioned a loyal citizenry bound by a core of civic values and a collective identity—regardless of creed, national origin, religion or political preference. It was they that molded a disparate population into a unified nation. That may not be the case in the future.

Let’s hope.

A loyal citizenry, a collective identity, human beings molded—molded, pliable objects shaped to the rigid form of the template—into a condition of national unity: try to picture a living, human child operating inside that joyless construct of nearly mechanical processes:

• 8:45-9:00 Morning meeting
• 9:00-9:45 Collective molding into condition of national unity
• 9:45-10:00 Snack

Brenner’s specific target is the growing presence of charter schools, which he turns into a corporate product: “A number of start-up companies have jumped onto the charter school bandwagon with little experience in education and with their eyes fixed on the bottom line.” All X is damned because some X is Y; all charter schools are bad because some are run by corporations.

Second, Brenner assigns charter schools to the dreaded category of wrongthink. Some mention the Bible; some even teach students to question the New Deal, dear reader, as if it were acceptable to even consider such a thought. “In short,” Brenner concludes, “the charter school way is entrenching the ideas and attitudes of a sectarian element in American society whose ascendance already has wrought enormous damage.” We are molding units to the condition of national unity, and all must think alike. Successful democratic pluralism requires the standardization of ideas and attitudes, regardless of creed, national origin, religion or political preference. E Pluribus really unum, so shut up.

None of Brenner’s description resembles reality in the least. Read this and this and then reassess his prose-form cartoon. And beware of all arguments that include no actual examples.

Charter schools—some good, some bad—give parents influence and a presence in tuition-free, publicly funded schools. They are founded democratically, in particular neighborhoods and specific communities, by petitioning among parents and teachers. They are public schools in every sense except Brenner’s: they are not rigidly standardized. And yet they are deeply objectionable, because they may not reliably mold a loyal citizenry into a condition of national unity. That argument says more about the person making it than it says about charter schools.

The battle for total compliance stretches across every element of childhood. Some parents — probably many parents — object to Common Core, a rigidly standardized national curriculum designed to encourage children to meet the same national benchmarks, rather than a series of individual state benchmarks. The correct response when parents object to the uniform pedagogical molding of their own children, of course, is to make fun of them in the most urgently snide tone you can imagine.

Above all, the politics of childhood demand total uniformity of experience, and a great striving toward a standard result. It’s a perfect marriage of the factory and the prison, and a sure guarantee of a joyful, productive childhood.