What Does It Mean to Educate Citizens?

11-20-2019

It is interesting to consider what Hannah Arendt thought about education, given her understanding of what her own education had been like. A forewarning is in order. I come from an amateur point of view when it comes to the subject of Arendt and Arendt’s writings. Nonetheless, I share Arendt’s skepticism of the confusion created by using the personal narrative as a basis on which to discuss politics and, therefore, education. I think that is one of the primary dangers in the current debate about education: the ease with which we put I as the beginning point of general claims regarding the collective experience and institutions that constitute education as they seem to be and ought to be. Most individuals form ideas about education from an internal conversation with themselves about their own experience that is never subject to critical scrutiny. So it is as if we were to understand medicine primarily from a crucial yet mostly ill-informed and frequently self-serving account of having been a patient.

My own view is that the memory of the private experience does not locate what really took place in the past and it should not frame the norms of a public good, which is what education surely is. Personal experience — subjectively narrated — cannot be a basis by which we can judge what we are actually doing in education policy. In education, we must learn to subordinate our private memories and points of view (our sense of triumphs, slights, deficiencies, and virtues in our experience) in order to forge a conversation, using a shared language, with others. Our interlocutors, when we are in school as children and young adults, are going to be different from ourselves in many respects. We need to learn how to be empathetic without having to recognize a personal experience in others, without having to find a link between our personal encounter and the legitimacy of what is claimed by others or even argued as valid for the population as a whole. Education, at its best, and therefore its practitioners — educators — attempts, through schools, to create a basis for a larger political public conversation about the shared space we inhabit; a conversation about our common world — beyond family — whether understood as society, the nation, or smaller and often informal communities of work, regulation, and leisure.

The challenge and the substance of education are defined by one question: How ought we to we live, side by side, not as lone individuals but as citizens? But how do we, through education, help individuals answer that question? Answering this is hard, particularly in the United States, where many seem to view citizenship as an unfortunate necessity. The rampant distrust of government and the public sector is overwhelming. We answer the question in purely economic terms, linking education to work and productivity. Nonetheless, citizenship is more than economic; it is a political fact of life that can’t be eliminated. And it may be the indispensable foundation of justice, freedom, and civility.

To return to the seeming inevitability of the personal as the basis of how we think about education. Hannah Arendt’s view of education in America was based on an imagined comparison with her own biography. Her generation of European émigrés came to the United States and developed a love affair, if not with America then with the political ideal of America, since it was a nation in which citizenship could be acquired by anyone and was defined by loyalty to a form of government and the rule of law, not blood or soil.

Among those things that distinctly American émigrés liked most was the fact that the American public school system was not, by any reasonable comparison to Germany, fundamentally authoritarian. From early kindergarten, a child (so the American progressives who held sway in the 1930s and 1940s believed) should be able to express him- or herself. Learning was achieved not by rote or spoon-feeding a set standardized materials, but by active trial and error — by doing.

This approach, tragically, has been under attack for decades. That kind of learning does not happen as much anymore in public systems, having given way to teaching as drilling for high-stakes standardized testing. But in the progressive era, teachers learned to teach what was called a highly individualized “child-centered curriculum.” The child, who knew nothing and could do nothing, was nevertheless entitled to express him- or herself under this pedagogy; it was believed that only though active exploration would questions be inspired, ignorance discovered, the need to know cultivated, and ideas, methods, and information remembered. For all the European refugees’ snobbery about America as a land of Unkultur, the more thoughtful among them recognized the value of American pedagogy, if for no other reason than its merit as an instrument of political education.

During the height of the progressive movement in American education, the notion of teaching how to “get along” with one another became an important output of education, equal to learning information or skills. A good education was neither purely cognitive nor subject matter–based. It was actually measured by how well one learned to live as a citizen. The nation, by its very self-definition, was pluralistic and diverse; citizens — in the best sense of Rousseau — were not born. They had to be made. Education made children into citizens.

Clearly, Arendt encountered America in the 1940s, at a time where there was considerable hypocrisy about demographic diversity, particularly on the matter of race. Since the mid 1960s, the qualities and categories that people once killed each other about as differences (apart from skin color) have become less significant. The ethnic, religious, and national differences of the late 19th century and mid 20th century among whites that inflamed hatred and prejudice (e.g. being Italian, Irish, Jewish, Catholic) seem pale to us now. But in the 1940s these prejudices could not be so easily dismissed. Consider two 1947 Hollywood films, Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire, both about anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, in the midst of segregation and institutionalized racism in the 1950s, and in large measure because of it, white America appeared quite diverse and tolerant, from a European point of view. The country seemed bent on tolerance and intent on harmonizing the melting pot of immigrant white-skinned citizens through schooling. Once the prospect of racial integration and notion of breaking down the barriers of color dominated politics in the late 1960s, center-stage differences between and among whites began to fade and become benign by contrast. A much more threatening challenge to American conceits about tolerance and equal citizenship emerged. Although the public schools were placed on the front lines in the effort to end segregation and racism, they were never given the proper resources or political support to complete the task successfully.

From the émigré perspective, the attractive substantive consequence of the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian character of American education was the premium placed on independence of thought, particularly as a child grew older. When it came to the university system, which was shocking to a European in terms of its one unique creation (unknown in Europe) — undergraduate education and the liberal arts college — the American university system otherwise seemed immensely flexible and open to new ideas. There was not a fixed hierarchy with one professor running each “faculty.” Young scholars did not have to wait for their elders to retire or die. The university was able to create new fields, and new positions. Not only was there less hierarchy and formality, but even less deference to authority than in the U.S. public school system. A graduate student who walked into a senior professor’s lab and challenged his findings successfully would not be deluded to imagine being rewarded later with a job — quite the contrary. The dissenter, rebel, and entrepreneur were prized more than in Europe.

In terms of graduate education and academic career advancement, American university practice still stands in contrast to the European. Furthermore, the idea of a “private” university, and the absence of regional and national ministries of education governing universities were astonishing; even public universities in the United States were structured to maintain a striking independence.
In those years, the most important defining factor in the American system was the idea of a single, unitary public school system in which everybody enrolled. All citizens went to the same sort of schools through to the end of secondary school. Private schools were an elite phenomenon and relatively insignificant. The European system, from which Arendt came, was intentionally segregated, into distinct groups, beginning at age eleven. The state, using examinations, cut the school population into varying categories, each of which maintained a different track. Most citizens never completed school beyond elementary school. Some went on to vocational schooling. A very small percentage of the population went either to a humanistic academic high school or a science-based high school and received a secondary school diploma, a Matura or Abitur, a document that permitted them to enroll in university.

What these émigrés discovered was a reality that resembled John Dewey’s principles. They saw from the outside, as it were, a vital connection between how we educate our students and structure our schools, and our capacity to maintain a functioning pluralist democracy. For Dewey, the basis of the proper pedagogy was not primarily political; the shape of teaching and learning derived from an epistemological conceit. But for the émigré, the contrast between the school systems from which they came and the school system in the country to which they arrived was closely connected to the political character and consequences of American education. American education appeared to fit the idea that the nation and democracy were not tied to homogeneity, and that diverse constituencies could obtain equal legal status. Citizenship via a nominally nondiscriminatory and standard process accessible irrespective of birth, religion, or ethnicit — or even language — was unheard of in Europe, but it was possible in America. So the unitary public school that kept all children together until college and used the school to build citizens of character, devoted to democratic values and rarely segregated from one another by career path or vocation, was viewed by the émigré generation as a marvel.

The émigrés observed an inherent relationship between the school system, its pedagogy, and the possibility of democracy. That was the good news. The bad news was that the academic standards by which the American common school system operated seemed horrifically low. The price paid, they concluded, for the democratic culture of the American school system was its low level of shared culture. The thinly veiled (at best) snobbery of this émigré generation, when its members came to teach American college students, simply exploded without much self-control. Freshman (what all first-year students used to be called) could not read or write properly, and possessed little understanding of literature, art, philosophy, or history.

Outside of the realm of science and engineering, the Americans — students and professors alike (consider, for example, the depictions in Nabokov’s 1957 Pnin) — seemed provincial and disoriented; they seemed to get little right, displayed astonishing cultural ignorance, and merited condescension. The more forgiving émigrés were bemused, especially those in the humanities and the social sciences, and embraced general education during the undergraduate years — thereby redeeming the promise of the liberal arts — to set things right.

Just for a bit of context, let us recall that this Arendt conference takes place at an institution that hired Hannah Arendt’s husband in 1951 expressly for the purpose of correcting the American gap in general “cultural” education among undergraduates. Heinrich Blücher, an autodidact who had never completed formal schooling, was hired by Bard president James Case to initiate something called the Common Course, which Bard now maintains as the First Year Seminar, a “great” ideas and “great” books two-semester sequence designed to reverse the failings of the student-centered tradition of progressive secondary education in public schools that privileged self-direction and subjective expression over rigorous learning.

The émigrés saw American undergraduates as uncommonly confident; students expressed themselves willingly and very well. But they were bereft of cultural references. What they had to say did not engage the grand historical intellectual tradition. They were hampered by ignorance, monolingual provincialism and, from the point of view of the émigrés, were materialistic and tone-deaf to vulgarity. And so there was a perceived need to introduce them to the noble traditions of learning that seemed to have held little place in the curriculum of the American public school. For the émigrés, the absence of knowledge or cultural understanding was the result of a distorted progressive emphasis on a misleading separation of content from method.

Since the 1930s, when a majority of Americans began to stay in school through high school, a fear that schools fail to provide sufficient basic knowledge has surfaced every few decades. The result has been a series of “back-to-basics” curricular movements. In the 1950s, the pride of place in progressive pedagogy assigned to method — ways of learning — was challenged fundamentally. The focus in public policy shifted to content, particularly in science. Educational reformers sought to define what all people ought to know, and when, during the process of schooling, the proper subject matter should be taught and learned. However admirable the connection between schooling and democracy was, the fatal flaw in American education was that people were encouraged to think for themselves, but they knew nothing. So what could they think about? They were taught how to express themselves, even though there seemed to be insufficient substance; this sustained a curious American innocence, a reductive pragmatic outlook, and a lack of skepticism.

The perception of these deficiencies notwithstanding, after the Second World War German intellectuals in the West believed that the reform of the German educational system and university system was a priority, crucial to forging and sustaining a democracy. Despite their grave reservations about academic standards, the link between education and democracy that had become persuasive to the émigré generation between 1933 and 1945 was transferred back into the immediate postwar debate on how Germany might break with its past.

The mid-century perspective on American education shared by Arendt and her contemporaries is not directly relevant to the situation we now face 50 and 60 years later. Until 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, no one took seriously the prospect of dismantling the public school system. Now we do. One of the consequences of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was the creation of a charter school movement in the South as a means to evade integration. The popularization and legitimization of the idea that the American public school system ought to be differentiated largely through modes of privatization gathered momentum from the revulsion at the worst of the late 1960s and the counterculture of the ’70s.

We therefore are living in the throes of an antigovernment movement that is 60 years old and that started with an attack, fueled by a fear of racial integration, on the notion that all children should attend a unitary public school system. Race and class interests, and the growth of suburbia as a refuge from an integrated inner city school system, came to a head in the late 1960s. The 1968 teachers’ strike in New York City was a watershed in the decline of confidence in the historic role of public schooling as a key to fostering citizenship.

The initial motivations for the movement challenging the monopoly of public schools were ultimately ones of prejudice: white parents did not want their children to attend schools that were attended by blacks. This logic was then sanitized by appeals to religious liberty insofar as parents fleeing integration attached themselves to religious movements. Evangelicals and “born-again” Jews did not want their children to go to schools that idealized acculturation and assimilation into a secular society, and whose character had “godlessness” at its core. The constituencies that wanted to circumvent integration allied themselves with those who resisted the separation of church and state.

The end result of these twin forces has been the elevation of privatization as legitimate and the abandonment of the ideal of the common public school. Despite the troubled and defective promulgation of the idea of a “Common Core” for public schools on the part of the federal government, privatization and diversification have become the dominant objectives of school reform in this country, endorsed albeit indirectly (and somewhat ironically) by the first African American and perhaps best educated president of the United States.

This is a bizarre turn of events. The nice way of looking at this development is to concede, “Well, privatization is a way in which we can actually confront the failings of the public schools.” I agree that American schools are not what they might be. But they never were. The reconciliation of excellence and equity was never achieved in the United States and certainly not after 1945, when the rates of high school completion climbed to 75 percent. From the point of view of a pre-World War II European standard of university-preparatory secondary higher education (although for a small elite), American schools never competed in terms of academic standards.

But such academic standards had not been their primary purpose. Their purpose was basic literacy (essential for the economy) and the creation of a common national identity out of diverse groups. As the groups within America got more diverse, a significant sector within the electorate got uncomfortable with this ideal of socialization. In retrospect, one might legitimately ask whether the American public school system had been successful in creating a democratic culture. I’m not so sure. However, many immigrant groups — Irish, Italian, and Jewish — in the major cities have testified in the affirmative for the generations that went to school before 1960.

At the same time, it is clear that the standards of the American schools have not fallen, if one considers that only since the end of the Second World War did more than 50 percent of 18-year-olds finish high school. Before that, only a minority earned a high school diploma. So the project of attempting to educate 70 percent, 80 percent, perhaps 100 percent of all Americans in a single system was never really tried until the 1960s. And when that was about to be actually tried, the public system came under attack, thereby proving that if one wished to make public schools really democratic and excellent, it was going to be very hard indeed.

One of the uncomfortable truths in a democratic society is that equality of citizenship does not run parallel with actual equality: the ability to do any number of things — jump high, run fast, sing, approximate, visualize, remember, read, and learn. At the same time, a person who cannot learn as well as another person should not be disadvantaged, either as a citizen or as a participant in democracy. That political and participatory equality is at the core of the nation. Nevertheless, it is hard to reconcile real differences in education with the equal power of one person, one vote. How does one reconcile academic inequalities with political equality? In that conundrum rests the contemporary discomfort, if not criticism, of the American school system and the ideal of the common public school.

My view is that the common public school remains an essential element in American democracy. Our schools fail not because they cannot change the distribution of population measurable by any scale of capacity to learn. They fail because the range of that scale — the standards by which the inevitable distribution of educational outcomes is measured — is too low. That is to say, we fail the least advantaged pupils; we ask too little as a minimum standard. And we also fail those with the most talent; we also ask too little of them. We fail everyone, since the definition of the average sits, so to speak, on too low a standard of achievement.

But the corrosively low construct of the sufficient average that results from this seems inherent in any attempt to create a democratic educational system. No large, heterogeneous, industrial nation with a diverse population has ever attempted the American ideal of a unitary democratic school system for all. Privatization is now popular because many are saying that we ought not attempt to create such a universal democratic system, and that it is a poorly conceived and implausible ideal. Not only that, since government is widely believed to be notoriously terrible when it comes to providing public goods, it may be better to deliver education through the private sector in a manner similar to market competition in commerce.

I happen to think that the privatization of American education and the abandonment of public education is a blow at the very idea of democracy. It favors the rich. And the fact that there is so little opposition to it, particularly among the privileged, is frightening to me. Not surprisingly, the favorite charity of the “1 per cent” against whom Occupy Wall Street tried to protest is the funding of alternatives to ordinary public schools. That’s the idea that every hedge fund owner loves: the privatization of the American school.

It has therefore become fashionable to attack teachers in the public system. They organized against maltreatment and low pay. But now union-bashing is popular. And the unions, in turn, have not distinguished themselves as advocates of educational excellence. But have we ever addressed the question, as a matter of public policy, of who in fact our teachers are? Who now goes into teaching? Who has actually tried to do something to change the quality of those who take on teaching in public schools as a career? Have we as a nation ever sought to recruit, train and retain gifted teachers properly?

Looking ahead, the challenge that we face in education policy is twofold. First, we must ask ourselves: Do we still believe that American democracy requires a single unitary school system (with proper alternatives within that system, not outside of it) that is in the hand of the public instruments of government and not in the hands of private entities? For all the hand-wringing about public control of education, is it not true that fundamental government regulation, properly structured, can have good results? Even in the State of New York, distinguished private institutions of higher learning — Bard, for example — are regulated by the state. Private universities are actually part of a “state” university system under the New York State Board of Regents. This means that our accreditation process — just like for all New York public and private schools — is shared and overlapping. The dangers of government regulation exist, but so too do the benefits. Refining, protecting, and strengthening that shared public political umbrella for our schools represent the first challenge.

Our second challenge is that we are confronting the undeniable failures of education, both for the poor and the privileged, at a time when the nation cannot forge a constructive conversation about public goods in general. We are caught in a moment when a distorted version of the virtues of individualism is rampant and in which a banal conceit of the primacy of the personal, despite the shocking uniformity in the content of what is regarded as personal and intimate, reigns.

This is where I share Hannah Arendt’s distrust of private languages and the tendency to rely on one’s personal narrative as the basis for talking about politics, and education, in particular, understood as a political good. The personal narrative — if it is to assume any real distinctive substance — is always contingent on something beyond it. What I have to learn, as a child in school, is not only to formulate my personal narrative but also to set it aside; children need to listen, to observe others, and thereby to distinguish their personal narrative from those of others as each individual constructs a role as a citizen.

The two imperatives — personal growth and citizenship — don’t necessarily overlap. I need to learn things that allow me to function in a democratic context. I need to learn to consciously set aside personal self-interest and contemplate the public good. Raw self-interest and the public interest must be — constructively — at odds, which is evident in the fundamental obligation of taxation. Taxation properly ought to affect each of us unequally, as a legitimate function of economic inequality.

What a common public school ought to teach therefore is the capacity for disagreement, contest, and compromise. This is most relevant with regard to that basic and fundamental democratic process: free elections. For example, can I find a basis to talk about an election’s issues with someone whose personal narrative is radically different from mine, someone with a different ethnicity, religion, customs, resources, and mores? In principle we can agree yes, of course!

But my ability to have such a conversation with a person with differing circumstances and beliefs — one that even might lead to my changing my views — must be shaped by certain commonalities that we ought to share. After all, we partake of the same water system, we breathe the same air, and we drive down the same highway. We share in that we are obliged to pay our mortgage or our rent. We require the same electricity. We access the same Internet, albeit maybe on different sites. We have the same sort of appetite, though our foods may be different. We share our beds with different types of humanity, but the same sort of people are spying on us all and tracking all our cell phones.

Ultimately, as these few examples illustrate, the personal narrative bleeds into common circumstances. A shared language that derives from a shared educational experience prior to adulthood might facilitate that essential public conversation.
Could education help me find out what I need to know in order to make a conversation with individuals different from myself — equal citizens who share those spaces? If I think that public goods are irrelevant, that we can do without government, then I automatically subscribe to a kind of illusion of individualism difficult to criticize since since it rejects the point of having a discussion or debate — the creation of the public space of a shared participatory politics.

The fact that the president and Congress are not in a productive political conversation not only has to do with issues of politics, ideology or, most painfully for us, race. Certainly, we can wonder whether the president would have been much better off if he were white; the failure to converse, contest, and compromise among professional politicians in Washington might have been less severe. If he had been an African American woman, matters may have been easier since far too many white men, even to this day, will not tolerate the blunt fact of a brilliant, competent, and successful African American male. The ugliness of this reality is incredible, but what is most incredible is the fact that even two white politicians can’t sit on the same platform and talk about ideas in a way that allows for give-and-take and some real flexibility. They can be socially friendly and go to the opera together as part of a private personal narrative (consider Justices Ginsburg and Scalia). But what good does that do us? None whatsoever. So the private friendship among the court justices has no consequence in the way we negotiate the compromises and exchanges that are essential in the public sphere.

The project of public education is a fundamental aspect of the notion of public goods in America. The restoration of public education seems a precondition for making the public sphere operate properly. Education must be about something more than the personal happiness and benefit, economically defined; it has to map out the idea that there is more to the public good than the notion that through some free-market style calculus of aggregate self-interests the greatest good for the greatest number will emerge. In other words, public education is about educating the future citizen to consider a common ground in politics that can and will secure a more rewarding notion of personal security and tranquility.

But in the context of today’s absence of any confidence in the public sphere, then what is a school-trained citizen to do? Merely succeed in the marketplace? Work for Google? What actually define the public sphere today are not politics, government, and Congress, but Google, Facebook, and Amazon. When I was young, conspiracy theorists pointed to the presence of socialists and communists who were said to undermine our system of values. Fear seemed reasonable in the Cold War and under the threat of nuclear war. The line between fear and paranoia was thin indeed. Fear was plausible.

But the people that frighten me today are not terrorists and ideologues interested in overthrowing the government; they are not even those who work for the U.S. government within the NSA or CIA. Rather, the sources of my suspicion are the very large corporate giants that control our access to information, regulate our private lives by providing social networks (a deceptive platform for intimacy), and can monitor every move we make in life, and preserve a record of every message and e-mail, thereby rendering impossible secret keeping and forgetting, two essential human experiences.

Therefore our task is to forge the connection in contemporary life between education and a politically viable public sphere and the realm of public goods. Ultimately, I think we need first to reverse the extent to which in journalism, scholarship, and fiction we have privileged the personal voice. We overuse the word I. By locating beliefs in biography and framing ideas as subjective, we remove ideas from scrutiny and protect beliefs, rendering irrelevant the need for education and the capacity of citizens to argue, to criticize, to listen, and to learn. Dissent has become today an act of personal offense.

In this regard, the ongoing information technological revolution has had many unusual consequences. Technology is not itself an independent causal variable in history, one of history’s shaping forces, as Jacob Burckhardt termed them. Technologies flourish as a consequence of particular historical contexts of value. The excessive privilege accorded the idea of a personal narrative — that is, the foregrounding of the subjective “my point of view” — preceded the success of social networks such as Facebook.

The success of modern Internet technology comes out of an intellectual crisis within the 20th century about notions of objectivity and truth. From the Methodenstreit in German historiography and sociology — during the careers of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Erich von Kahler and Heinrich Rickert — to the era of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the positivistic claims of the social sciences and the notion of objectivity and truth were eviscerated. The popular consequence was something that angry neoconservatives in the 1980s (Allan Bloom among them) feared and railed against: a moral and cultural relativism in which there was no consensus about truth. Neoconservatives fought the idea that in matters of culture there was no valid canon and the notion that everyone is therefore entitled to his or her own judgment regarding matters of quality. Indeed, for their part, the extreme critics of the idea of “truth” at the end of the 20th century seemed untroubled by the idea that there are very few things that one can come to some agreement about. The truth, at best, is provisional and in most things truly subjective. But then, why then seek to debate or come to an agreement in politics?

The irony is that the early neoconservatives, the followers of Leo Strauss, believed that challenging an epistemological and moral relativism would restore a shared faith in the truth. But all the neoconservative critique has done is further the agenda of the skeptics they took on as opponents. Contemporary conservatism erodes the need for debate in a democracy, and the contest of ideas, by shutting off debate altogether. The defenders of notions of objectivity and the validity of truth have retreated into an enclave and rendered themselves immune from rigorous scrutiny. This defines the character of the Tea Party Republicans. The consequence of 1980s neoconservatism has not been consensus or a renewed sense of a common ground, but insularity, accelerated by technology, often at the expense of claims that legitimately can survive scrutiny and assume the mantle of truth, such as evolution and climate change.

Internet technology allows people to segregate into insular communities of belief, without any need to test their beliefs against criticism. We can come to believe things to be true that are not, supported by a community of like-minded individuals through modern technology. Technology aggregates prejudices and dresses falsehood (e.g. the connection of vaccines to autism) with a veneer of respectability by generating a virtual community that shares the same distorted views. Technology has become the ultimate relativizing instrument, for it makes all claims look alike.

So, how does one come to question something, understand something, relearn something, and revise one’s views anymore? Where is the motivation for public debate and discourse?

Say there are five different think tanks that put out five different reports on the same subject. Each of the five asserts a different argument and conclusion supported by statistics. How does one evaluate which ones are credible and which are not? As if this were not already difficult enough, the intrusion of technology makes the task more ideological, collective, and not simply personal. Supported by my like-minded blogs and websites, I can go forward avoiding any desire to negotiate two different reports, (let’s say one from the Heritage Foundation and the other from Brookings). With modern technology, there’s no need for engaged, reasoned dissent; the segregation of sites and the segregation of like-minded communications make sure that there is no direct overlap on a level playing field. Our new technological public space, our virtual utopia, now eliminates the need to have a conversation, in real time, with real people who may disagree, those whom we might interrogate in front of our ideological allies and opponents.

The wonders of technology have also forced Americans to come to grips with the obvious common-sense fact that schooling and education are not, and never have been, the same thing. The amount of time that a pupil spends in school is ultimately trivial. We educate and learn mostly outside of classrooms, in part through child rearing. That child rearing involves more than parents. In the middle classes, experts from psychiatrists to counselors come into play; they have taken the place, notably in suburbia, of extended family and close-knit neighborhoods.

By placing too great a burden on schools as the sole source of education, and by shedding our own responsibility as parents, family, and neighbors for the education of children and young adults day in and day out, we distort what can be reasonably expected of institutions. We ask too much. Schools have never been the exclusive source of education. They are but of a very minor influence. In a 24-hour day, and in a seven-day week, the source of education has come from a multiplicity of sources, including the public arena; with technology, that multiplicity has grown but without an easy dynamic and context of self-criticism and dialogue. Schools are best at transmitting knowledge and fostering dialogue regarding well-defined subject areas; they are not set up to act as surrogates for parents and communities.

But even within the narrow confines of academic learning, rightfully the province of schools, there are downsides to contemporary technology. Consider the Wikipedia phenomenon. In the “good old days” (which never existed), if one wrote a paper on Martin Luther King Jr. and cited an encyclopedia article, one got a C because the teacher knew that one had not done much work. Today, at least in our personal lives, Wikipedia, the Internet, Google, and the algorithms by which knowledge is searched for and located on the Web have given people access to what appears to be sufficient information, and therefore the illusion that what they find online is all they need to know. This illusion has wiped out any need for expertise beyond the level of Wikipedia, and little clue as to how to go further.
My favorite Wikipedia article is on St. Augustine. A lot of committed individuals with competing viewpoints are adherents of this particular entry. Wikipedia’s St. Augustine is full of Catholics who have conflicting views. Embedded in the entry are classicists, who have various axes to grind. And then there are Protestants, mostly Lutherans, who read him in their own way. The composite result is confusing. It is very hard to figure out what Augustine thinks. And then one finds fanatics and proponents who seem to think their views on the matter have not been properly heard by anyone except on the Internet. But there is no transparency about competing these claims and no sustained debate.

Just like many a Wikipedia entry, St. Augustine’s page changes. People are constantly erasing and adding new content. This is all admirable. But in the end, the entry is incomprehensible, and exceedingly long. This is only one example of how the Internet has compromised the standards of research expertise and scholarly debate. It has leveled it. The original idea of the Web was that it would democratize expertise. Its unanticipated consequence is that it deflects from curiosity and research and has made the real expert irrelevant. It has also wiped away the need for, and substance of, scholarly controversy. Wikipedia appears sufficient.

This is potentially dangerous. If you go to the doctor and the doctor says you have X, Y, or Z allergy, you can spend several days reading on the Internet about that allergy. But what you understand from what you read could be frightening because unless you have a remarkably good education in science, you can get easily misled. So the mass of data, with its allure of easy access, creates a semblance of sufficient understanding. This has made the conversation about negotiating different points of view harder, not easier. It has also given a kind of intellectual respectability to purely personal prejudices. I can now gather material, data, even apparent colleagues, and presumed experts to defend a point of view that may be, in the end, indefensible.

So, the question is, where does that bring us with regard to education. To close, I would say that as a practitioner of education, I still hold to the idea that the most difficult and yet most vital thing to do is to construct and sustain a language of public conversation. And that language of public conversation will inevitably be different from our several private languages. We cannot expect it to be the same. The conversation has to take place in real space and time. School is one source of that essential opportunity.

One of the depressing aspects of American politics today is the extent to which our candidates think it is enough to be a personality and to recount their experience and rely on a private language in order to get elected. Even the president got elected not on ideas but on his personal story. Other candidates, such as Mr. [Eliot] Spitzer and Mr. [Anthony] Weiner, did the same; they failed at the ballot box because their personal stories were so terrible, so obnoxious. We are more interested in the personalities of our politicians, as if they were our private neighbors or friends, than we are in what they think. Today’s politicians cannot speak a comprehensible language of ideas in public conversation, about the public goods, the matters at stake in politics.

In order to confront this lack of public discourse in a democracy and leadership with ideas — ideas bolstered by claims and evidence subject to open scrutiny — public education needs to work. It needs to create a community of diverse citizens who, retaining their diversity, are able to occupy a public space in which they can negotiate and discuss matters of shared concern, from foreign affairs to domestic policy, using a shared language. The Internet does not offer such a platform, nor does the virtual space or Facebook or any other social media.

I therefore happen to think that we need forcibly and forcefully to redouble the defense of a single system of public education to which our citizens have free access to schools. We therefore need to resist the privatization of schooling. That does not mean that every school should look alike. Our Bard High School Early Colleges, from which students are attending this conference, are very different from other schools. But they are public schools. They are not charter schools. There is no reason that there cannot be differentiation within a public school system. Since we will continue to be (I hope) an immigrant nation, as an immigrant nation we will have to champion a public school system if we are to reconcile increasing differences, inequalities of wealth, and class distinctions into a functioning, dynamic democracy.

I share the émigré generation’s quite romantic optimism for the potential of a democratic school system, one marked by excellence and equity. I think such a system is worth fighting for. There are lots of reasons to be optimistic. There is evidence that we can improve schools. A welcome first step would be to instill in the best of our current college students and future generations of college students the value of public school teaching as a dignified, honorable lifelong career. That’s the first thing I hope we do to improve the American school system.

The Austrian writer (and Nobel Laureate) Elias Canetti observed that the cruelest hoax we cling to is the claim that language actually communicates. That belief is made worse by the assumption of a coherent single language community within a nation, the claim that we all speak the “same” language. There is something witty in Canetti’s blunt observation. Yet I actually think that it is possible to create a shared language of conversation in politics about the public space that we share as citizens. That goal is the objective of education and one of the reasons why the relative precision of science is crucial to the curriculum.

The methods and findings of science tell us that many of the public things that we face, whether they be related to health, the environment, or other topics, are matters where understanding something, however limited, about the world is indeed possible and subject to agreement, rejection, discovery and constant scrutiny. We can agree as to what mutation is and what, for example, genetic engineering is all about. And what is provisionally true (as science progresses) is mostly not what Hollywood tells you about mutation and genetic engineering.

Learning how science works provides a template for what might pass for certainty. It helps clarify what biotechnology really promises or what computers may really be able to do. Citizens need to know how degrees of certainty and doubt are established. They need to locate and understand the varied distinctions between fiction and fact. The rigor of thinking and argument, the rules of evidence, and the recognition of rhetoric and ignorance are part of the education we must provide children and young adults if we are going to retain our freedoms. And the sooner we get down to business doing so through public education, the better off we will be as citizens, and the more we will be able to develop a protected space for our private languages and intimate lives.