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Defending Public Schools (Volumes 1-4)
E. Wayne Ross
Kevin D. Vinson
Sandra Mathison
2004
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Abstract
Defending Public Schools addresses the historical, current, and future context of public education in the United States. While the essays provide an overview of education and schooling issues, the overarching concern is that public schools are under attack and deserve to be defended. Since 80% of America's student-aged population attend public schools, a fair and balanced look at a school system that has educated and continues to educate a population that is diverse in every way possible, is sorely needed. It can be said that a national school system has never had to educate so many young people through secondary school with mastery of so much information. While no one rejects the necessity of school reform to meet contemporary needs, the question of how to achieve the greatest good for the greatest numbers remains for thousand of schools across the nation. Defending Public Schools is a practical, necessary addition to the work of administrators, teachers, policy makers, and parents as they negotiate the difficult path of how to best teach and educate today's children and youth.
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Defending Public Schools

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Defending Public Schools
Volume I
Education Under the Security State

EDITED BY
DAVID A. GABBARD AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

FM_i-xxxvi.pmd 3 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, xi
Defending Democracy
E. Wayne Ross
Foreword
Peter McLaren xix
Preface xxiii
Introduction: Defending Public Education from the Public xxv
David A. Gabbard

Part I The Security State and the Traditional Role of Schools 1
Chapter 1 “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”: A Brief 3
History of What Makes Schooling Compulsory
David A. Gabbard
Chapter 2 The State, the Market, & (Mis)education 15
Takis Fotopoulos

Part II Security Threats 29
Chapter 3 What Is The Matrix? What Is the Republic?: 31
Understanding “The Crisis of Democracy”
David A. Gabbard

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viii Contents

Chapter 4 Civic Literacy at Its Best: The “Democratic Distemper” 43
of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
John Marciano
Chapter 5 A Matter of Conflicting Interests?: Problematizing 55
the Traditional Role of Schools
Sandra Jackson

Part III Security Measures: Defending Public Education 73
from the Public
Chapter 6 A Nation at Risk—RELOADED: The Security State 75
and the New World Order
David A. Gabbard
Chapter 7 The Hegemony of Accountability: The 91
Corporate-Political Alliance for Control of Schools
Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross
Chapter 8 Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States: 101
How State and Federal Government Education
Policies Perpetuate Inequality
David W. Hursh and Camille Anne Martina
Chapter 9 State Theory and Urban School Reform I: 117
A Reconsideration from Detroit
Barry M. Franklin
Chapter 10 State Theory and Urban School Reform II: 131
A Reconsideration from Milwaukee
Thomas C. Pedroni
Chapter 11 Cooking the Books: Educational Apartheid with 141
No Child Left Behind
Sheila L. Macrine
Chapter 12 The Securitized Student: Meeting the Demands 157
of Neoliberalism
Kenneth J. Saltman
Chapter 13 Enforcing the Capitalist Agenda For and In Education: 175
The Security State at Work in Britain and the
United States
Dave Hill
Chapter 14 Privatization and Enforcement: The Security State 191
Transforms Higher Education
John F. Welsh

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Contents ix

Chapter 15 Schooling and the Security State 207
Julie Webber

Notes 221
Index 249
About the Editors 259
About the Contributors 261

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Defending Public Schools
Volume II
Teaching for a Democratic Society

EDITED BY
KATHLEEN R. KESSON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

FM_i-xxviii.pmd 3 9/27/2004, 8:45 AM

Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, ix
Defending Democracy
E. Wayne Ross
Introduction: Teaching for a Democratic Society xvii
Kathleen R. Kesson

Part I Teacher Education and Teacher Development 1
Chapter 1 Cultivating Democratic Curriculum Judgments: 3
Toward a Mature Profession
Kathleen R. Kesson and James G. Henderson
Chapter 2 Finding the Color of the Sky: Inquiry in 17
Teacher Preparation
Cecelia Traugh
Chapter 3 Informing the Present, Illuminating the Past: 31
Historical Knowledge and Teacher Development
Sonia E. Murrow
Chapter 4 Standards, Testing, and Teacher Quality: Common 43
Sense vs. Authority in Educational Reform
Paul Shaker

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viii Contents

Part II The Labor of Teaching 57
Chapter 5 A Dangerous, Lucid Hour: Compliance, Alienation, 59
and the Restructuring of New York City High Schools
Paula M. Salvio
Chapter 6 Pursuing Authentic Teaching in an Age 79
of Standardization
Kevin D. Vinson, Rich Gibson, and E. Wayne Ross
Chapter 7 An “Inhuman Power”: Alienated Labor in 97
Low-Performing Schools
Kathleen R. Kesson
Chapter 8 Gender and the Construction of Teaching 111
Susan Laird
Chapter 9 Another Brick in the Wall: High-Stakes Testing in 123
Teacher Education—The California Teacher
Performance Assessment
Perry M. Marker

Part III Teaching for Social Justice 135
Chapter 10 Caring-Centered Multicultural Education: 137
Addressing the Academic and Writing Needs
of English Learners
Valerie Ooka Pang and Evangelina Bustamante Jones
Chapter 11 The Role of Race in Teacher Education: Using Critical 149
Race Theory to Develop Racial Consciousness
and Competence
Tyrone C. Howard and Glenda R. Aleman
Chapter 12 Thinking Inclusively about Inclusive Education 161
Mara Sapon-Shevin
Chapter 13 Things to Come: Teachers’ Work and the Broken 173
Promises of Urban School Reform in an Age of
High-Stakes Testing
Dennis Carlson

Notes 189
Index 211
About the Editors 215
About the Contributors 217

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Defending Public Schools
Volume III
Curriculum Continuity and Change
in the 21st Century

EDITED BY
KEVIN D. VINSON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

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Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, ix
Defending Democracy
E. Wayne Ross
Defending Public Schools: Curriculum and the Challenge xvii
of Change—An Introduction
Kevin D. Vinson and E. Wayne Ross

Part I History, Context, and the Future of the Public 1
School Curriculum
Chapter 1 An Artful Curriculum/A Curriculum Full of Life 3
Rita L. Irwin
Chapter 2 Old Wine in a New Bottle: Twentieth-Century 17
Social Studies in a Twenty-First-Century World
Perry M. Marker
Chapter 3 Literacy Research and Educational Reform: 31
Sorting through the History and the Myths
Martha Rapp Ruddell
Chapter 4 The Mathematics Curriculum: Prosecution, 47
Defense, Verdict
Cynthia O. Anhalt, Robin A. Ward, and Kevin D. Vinson

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viii Contents

Chapter 5 Science in Public Schools: What Is It and 61
Who Is It For?
Bruce Johnson and Elisabeth Roberts
Chapter 6 Character Education: Coming Full Circle 77
Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs)
Chapter 7 Not the Same Old Thing: Maria Montessori—A 93
Nontraditional Approach to Public Schooling in an
Age of Traditionalism and Standardization
Elizabeth Oberle and Kevin D. Vinson

Part II Critical Issues in Curriculum 105
Chapter 8 The Military and Corporate Roots of State-Regulated 107
Knowledge
Stephen C. Fleury
Chapter 9 Extreme Takeover: Corporate Control of the 119
Curriculum, with Special Attention to the Case
of Reading
Steven L. Strauss
Chapter 10 The Body and Sexuality in Curriculum 133
Lisa W. Loutzenheiser
Chapter 11 When Race Shows Up in the Curriculum: Teacher 149
(Self-) Reflective Responsibility in Students’
Opportunities to Learn
H. Richard Milner, Leon D. Caldwell, and Ira E. Murray
Chapter 12 Critical Multicultural Social Studies in the Borderlands: 161
Resistance, Critical Pedagogy, and la lucha for
Social Justice
Marc Pruyn, Robert Haworth, and Rebecca Sánchez
Chapter 13 Schooling and Curriculum for Social Transformation: 173
Reconsidering the Status of a Contentious Idea
William B. Stanley

Notes 199
Index 223
About the Editors 235
About the Contributors 237

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Defending Public Schools
Volume IV
The Nature and Limits of
Standards-Based Reform
and Assessment

EDITED BY
SANDRA MATHISON AND E. WAYNE ROSS

Praeger Perspectives

FM_i-xxvi.pmd 3 9/27/2004, 9:07 AM

Contents

General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, ix
Defending Democracy
E. Wayne Ross
Introduction: The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform xvii
and Assessment
Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross

Part I History, Context, and the Future of Educational 1
Standards and Assessment
Chapter 1 A Short History of Educational Assessment 3
and Standards-Based Educational Reform
Sandra Mathison
Chapter 2 Standards-Based Education: Two Wrongs Don’t 15
Make a Right
W. James Popham
Chapter 3 The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement 27
Alfie Kohn
Chapter 4 International Comparisons: Worth the Cost? 35
Gerald W. Bracey

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viii Contents

Chapter 5 Assessment, Accountability, and the Impossible Dream 49
Linda Mabry
Chapter 6 Authentic Accountability: An Alternative to 57
High-Stakes Testing
Ken Jones
Chapter 7 Evaluation of Schools and Education: Bad Practice, 71
Limited Knowledge
Sandra Mathison and Marco A. Muñoz

Part II Perspectives on Standards and Assessment
Chapter 8 Teachers Working with Standards and State Testing 81
Sandra Mathison and Melissa Freeman
Chapter 9 “Parental Involvement”: In Defense of What Kind 93
of Vision for “Public” School?
Melissa Freeman
Chapter 10 Leaving No Child Left Behind: Accountability Reform 107
and Students with Disabilities
Margaret J. McLaughlin and Katherine M. Nagle
Chapter 11 The Accumulation of Disadvantage: The Consequences 121
of Testing for Poor and Minority Children
Sandra Mathison
Chapter 12 Educational Leaders and Assessment-Based Reform 137
William A. Firestone
Chapter 13 The Mismeasure and Abuse of Our Children: 149
Why School Officials Must Resist State and National
Standardized Testing Reforms
William C. Cala

Notes 167
Index 183
About the Editors 189
About the Contributors 191

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General Editor’s Introduction:
Defending Public Schools,
Defending Democracy
E. WAYNE ROSS

WHY DO PUBLIC SCHOOLS NEED TO BE DEFENDED?
Why do public schools need to be defended? This may be the first question
some readers have about this multivolume collection of essays, and it’s a good
one. Certainly, the title suggests schools are under attack, and they are. Public
schools in the United States have always carried a heavy burden as one of
the principal instruments in our efforts to create an ideal society. For example,
public schools have been given great responsibility for equalizing gender and
racial inequalities, providing the knowledge and skills that give everyone an
equal opportunity to experience the “American Dream,” producing a
workforce with skills that enable U.S. corporations to compete effectively in
the global marketplace, and preparing citizens to be effective participants in
a democratic society, just to name a few.
Critics of public schools come from across the political spectrum, but it
is important to understand the reasons behind the various criticisms of public
schools. The diverse responsibilities of public schools present a huge chal-
lenge to educators, and even when schools are performing well, it is diffi-
cult, if not impossible, for them to deliver all the expected results when their
mission necessarily entails contradictory purposes. For example:

• Should schools focus on increasing equity or increasing school performance (e.g.,
student test scores)?
• Should the school curriculum be limited to the development of students’ cognitive

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xii General Editor’s Introduction

processes, or do schools have a responsibility for supporting the development of
the whole person?
• Should public schools serve the interests of the state, or should they serve the
interests of local school communities?
• Should schools prepare a workforce to meet economic needs identified by cor-
porations, or should they prepare students to construct personally meaningful
understandings of their world and the knowledge and skills to act on their world?
• Should schools be an instrument of cultural transmission with the goal of pre-
paring students to adopt (and adapt to) the dominant culture, or should schools
function as an engine for social and cultural change, reconstructing society based
upon principles of progress aimed at amelioration of problems?

It is important not to view the contradictory goals of public education as
merely “either/or” questions as presented above. The terrain of public
schooling, as with all aspects of the human endeavor, is too complex to be
reduced to dualisms.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN A DEMOCRACY1
In his magnum opus Democracy and Education, John Dewey—widely
regarded as America’s greatest philosopher—states that all societies use edu-
cation as means of social control in which adults consciously shape the dis-
positions of children. He continues by arguing that “education” in and of
itself has no definite meaning until people define the kind of society they
want to have. In other words, there is no “objective” answer to the ques-
tion of what the purposes and goals of public schools should be.
The implication of Dewey’s position is that we—the people—must de-
cide what we want our society to be and, with that vision in mind, decide
what the purposes of public education should be. The challenge then is as-
suring that a pluralism of views on the nature and purposes of public schools
is preserved in the process of defining what they should be. This is the prob-
lem of democracy. It also explains why public schools are the object of criti-
cism from various points along the political spectrum (e.g., from liberals and
conservatives) as schools become the context in which we work out, in part,
our collective aims and desires and who we are as a people.
Our understanding of what happens (as well as what various people would
like to see happen) in U.S. public schools can be enhanced by taking a closer
look at our conceptions of democracy and how democracy functions in con-
temporary American society.
Democracy is most often understood as a system of government provid-
ing a set of rules that allow individuals wide latitude to do as they wish. The
first principle of democracy, however, is providing means for giving power
to the people, not to an individual or to a restricted class of people. “De-
mocracy,” Dewey said, is “a mode of associated living, of conjoint commu-

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General Editor’s Introduction xiii

nicated experience.”2 In this conception, democratic life involves paying at-
tention to the multiple implications of our actions on others. In fact, the
primary responsibility of democratic citizens is concern with the development
of shared interests that lead to sensitivity to the repercussions of their ac-
tions on others. Dewey further characterized democracy as a force that breaks
down the barriers that separate people and creates community.
From a Deweyan perspective, democracy is not merely a form of govern-
ment nor is it an end in itself; it is the means by which people discover, ex-
tend, and manifest human nature and human rights. For Dewey, democracy
has three roots: (a) free individual existence, (b) solidarity with others, and
(c) choice of work and other forms of participation in society. The aim of a
democratic society is the production of free human beings associated with
one another on terms of equality.
Dewey’s conception of democracy contrasts sharply with the prevailing
political economic paradigm—neoliberalism. Although the term neoliberalism
is largely unused by the public in the United States, it references something
everyone is familiar with—policies and processes that permit a relative handful
of private interests to control as much as possible of social life in order to
maximize their personal profit.3 Neoliberalism is embraced by parties across
the political spectrum, from right to left, and is characterized by social and
economic policy that is shaped in the interests of wealthy investors and large
corporations. The free market, private enterprise, consumer choice, entre-
preneurial initiative, and government deregulation are some important prin-
ciples of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is not new. It is merely the current version of the wealthy
few’s attempt to restrict the rights and powers of the many. Although de-
mocracy and capitalism are popularly understood (and often taught) as “birds
of a feather,” the conflict between protecting private wealth and creating a
democratic society is conspicuous throughout U.S. history. The framers of
the U.S. Constitution were keenly aware of the “threat” of democracy.
According to James Madison, the primary responsibility of government was
“to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Madison be-
lieved the threat to democracy was likely to increase over time as there was
an increase in “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hard-
ships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessing.”4
In crafting a system giving primacy to property over people, Madison and
the framers were guarding against the increased influence of the unpropertied
masses. The Federalists expected that the public would remain compliant and
deferential to the politically active elite—and for the most part that has been
true throughout U.S. history. Despite the Federalists’ electoral defeat, their
conception of democracy prevailed, though in a different form, as industrial
capitalism emerged. Their view was most succinctly expressed by John Jay—
president of the Continental Congress and first Chief Justice of the U.S.

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xiv General Editor’s Introduction

Supreme Court—who said that “the people who own the country ought to
govern it.” Jay’s maxim is a principle upon which the United States was
founded and is one of the roots of neoliberalism.
For over two hundred years, politicians and political theorists have argued
against a truly participatory democracy that engages the public
in controlling their own affairs; for example, founding father Alexander
Hamilton warned of the “great beast” that must be tamed. In the twentieth
century, Walter Lippman warned of the “bewildered herd” that would
trample itself without external control, and the eminent political scientist
Harold Lasswell warned elites of the “ignorance and stupidity of the masses”
and called for elites not to succumb to the “democratic dogmatisms” about
people being the best judges of their own interests.
These perspectives have nurtured a neoliberal version of democracy that
turns citizens into spectators, deters or prohibits the public from managing
its own affairs, and controls the means of information.5 This may seem an
odd conception of democracy, but it is the prevailing conception of “liberal-
democratic” thought—and it is the philosophical foundation for current
mainstream approaches to educational reform (known collectively as
“standards-based educational reform”). In spectator democracy, a specialized
class of experts identifies what our common interests are and thinks and plans
accordingly. The function of the rest of us is to be “spectators” rather than
participants in action (for example, casting votes in elections or implement-
ing educational reforms that are conceived by people who know little or
nothing about our community, our desires, or our interests).
Although the Madisonian principle that the government should provide
special protections for the rights of property owners is central to U.S.
democracy, there is also a critique of inequality (and the principles of
neoliberalism)—in a tradition of thought that includes Thomas Jefferson,
Dewey, and many others—that argues that the root of human nature is the
need for free creative work under one’s control.6 For example, Thomas
Jefferson distinguished between the aristocrats, “who fear and distrust the
people and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher
classes,” and democrats, who “identify with the people, have confidence in
them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe . . . depository
of the public interest.”7
Dewey also warned of the antidemocratic effects of the concentration of
private power in absolutist institutions, such as corporations. He was clear
that as long as there was no democratic control of the workplace and eco-
nomic systems, democracy would be limited, stunted. Dewey emphasized
that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the coun-
try through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity,
transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press,
press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” “Politics,”
Dewey said, “is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation

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General Editor’s Introduction xv

of the shadow will not change the substance.” A free and democratic society,
according to Dewey, is one where people are “masters of their own . . . fate.”8
Therefore, when it comes to determining the purposes of public schools
in a democracy, the key factor is how one conceives of what democracy is
and, as illustrated earlier, there are longstanding contradictions about the
nature of democracy in the United States. In the contemporary context,
mainstream discourse on the problems and the solutions for public schools
has been based upon the principles of neoliberalism and manifest in
standards-based educational reform, the subject of many of the contributions
to Defending Public Schools.

WHY ARE WE DEFENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS?
The editors and authors of Defending Public Schools are not interested in
defending the status quo. Each contributor is, however, very interested in
preserving public schools as a key part of the two-centuries-old experiment
that is American democracy. Public schools are in a centripetal position in
our society and, as result, they always have been and will continue to be
battlegrounds for conflicting visions of what our society should be.
We believe that public schools serve the public, “We, the people.” We
believe that schools should strengthen our democracy in the sense that our
ability to meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes that
impact our communities and our lives is enhanced, not constricted. Educa-
tional resources need to be directed toward increasing people’s awareness
of the relevant facts about their lives and increasing people’s abilities to act
upon these facts in their own true interests. Since the 1980s and even be-
fore, the purposes of public schools have been by the interests of the state
and of concentrated private/corporate power, as follows from what I de-
scribed earlier, as neoliberalism. We believe that public education ought to
serve public interests, not the interests of private power and privilege.
At a time when our democracy and many of the liberties we hold dear
are in crisis, we propose that the preservation of public schools is necessary
to reverse antidemocratic trends that have accelerated under standards-based
educational reforms, which intend to transform the nature and purposes of
public schools and our society. Each of the volumes in Defending Public
Schools takes on a different aspect of education, yet these volumes are bound
together by the underlying assumption that preserving public schools is a
necessary part of preserving democracy. The following ten points provide a
synopsis of what defending public schools means to us:

1. The statist view of schools treats teachers as mere appendages to the machin-
ery of the state and seeks to hold them accountable to serving the interests of
state power. Linked as it is to the interests of private wealth, this view defines
children’s value in life as human resources and future consumers. Education

FM_i-xxxvi.pmd 15 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

xvi General Editor’s Introduction

should foster critical citizenship skills to advance a more viable and vibrant
democratic society. Schools should be organized around preparing for demo-
cratic citizenship through engagement with real-world issues, problem solving,
and critical thinking, and through active participation in civic and political pro-
cesses. Informed citizenship in a broad-based, grassroots democracy must be
based on principles of cooperation with others, nonviolent conflict resolution,
dialogue, inquiry and rational debate, environmental activism, and the preser-
vation and expansion of human rights. These skills, capacities, and dispositions
need to be taught and practiced.
2. The current system uses “carrots and sticks” to coerce compliance with an alien-
ating system of schooling aimed at inducing conformity among teachers and
students through high-stakes testing and accountability. This system alienates
teachers from their work by stripping it of all creative endeavors and reduces it
to following scripted lesson plans. We believe that teaching is a matter of the
heart, that place where intellect meets up with emotion and spirit in constant
dialogue with the world around us. We call for the elimination of high-stakes
standardized tests and the institution of more fair, equitable, and meaningful
systems of accountability and assessment of both students and schools.
3. Current federal educational policy, embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act,
sets impossible standards for a reason. Public access to institutions of learning
helps promote the levels of critical civic activism witnessed during the 1960s
and 1970s that challenged the power of the state and the corporations that it
primarily serves. The current reform environment creates conditions in which
public schools can only fail, thus providing “statistical evidence” for an alleged
need to turn education over to private companies in the name of “freedom of
choice.” In combination with the growing corporate monopolization of the
media, these reforms are part of a longer-range plan to consolidate private
power’s control over the total information system, thus eliminating avenues for
the articulation of honest inquiry and dissent.
4. The current system of public schooling alienates students by stripping learn-
ing from its engagement with the world in all of its complexity. It reduces learn-
ing to test preparation as part of a larger rat race where students are situated
within an economic competition for dwindling numbers of jobs. We believe
that educational excellence needs to be defined in terms of teachers’ abilities
to inspire children to engage the world, for it is through such critical engage-
ment that true learning (as opposed to rote memorization) actually occurs.
Students living in the twenty-first century are going to have to deal with a host
of problems created by their predecessors: global warming and other ecological
disasters, global conflicts, human rights abuses, loss of civil liberties, and other
inequities. The curriculum needs to address what students need to know and
be able to do in the twenty-first century to tackle these problems—and it needs
to be relevant to students’ current interests and concerns.
5. Teachers matter. Teaching is a public act that bears directly on our collective
future. We must ensure the quality of the profession by providing meaningful
forms of preparation, induction, mentoring, professional development, career
advancement, and improved working conditions. High learning standards
should serve as guidelines, not curricular mandates, for teachers. Restore teacher
control, in collaboration with students and communities, over decision mak-

FM_i-xxxvi.pmd 16 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

General Editor’s Introduction xvii

ing about issues of curriculum and instruction in the classroom—no more
scripted teaching, no more mandated outcomes, no more “teacher-proof”
curricula. Local control of education is at the heart of democracy; state and
nationally mandated curriculum and assessment are a prescription for totalitari-
anism.
6. In the past two decades, the corporate sector has become increasingly involved
with education in terms of supplementing public spending in exchange for
school-based marketing (including advertising space in schools and textbooks,
junk fast-food and vending machines, and commercial-laden “free” TV). We
believe that students should not be thought of as a potential market or as con-
sumers, but as future citizens.
7. All schools should be funded equally and fully, eliminating the dependence on
private corporate funds and on property taxes, which create a two-tiered edu-
cational system by distributing educational monies inequitably. Include universal
prekindergarten and tuition-free higher education for all qualified students in
state universities.
8. Children of immigrants make up approximately 20 percent of the children in
the United States, bringing linguistic and cultural differences to many class-
rooms. Added to this are 2.4 million children who speak a language other than
English at home. Ensure that the learning needs of English language learners
are met through caring, multicultural, multilingual education.
9. Citizens in a pluralistic democracy need to value difference and interact with
people of differing abilities, orientations, ethnicities, cultures, and dispositions.
Discard outmoded notions of a hypothetical norm, and describe either all stu-
dents as different, or none of them. All classrooms should be inclusive, meet-
ing the needs of all students together, in a way that is just, caring, challeng-
ing, and meaningful.
10. All students should have opportunities to learn and excel in the fine and per-
forming arts, physical education and sports, and extracurricular clubs and ac-
tivities in order to develop the skills of interaction and responsibility necessary
for participation in a robust civil society.

In the end, whether the savage inequalities of neoliberalism—which define
current social and national relations as well as approaches to school reform—
will be overcome depends on how people organize, respond, learn, and teach
in schools. Teachers and educational leaders need to link their own inter-
ests in the improvement of teaching and learning to a broad-based move-
ment for social, political, and economic justice, and work together for the
democratic renewal of public life and public education in America.

***
I would like to acknowledge the many people who have contributed to
the creation of Defending Public Schools.
Each of my coeditors—David Gabbard, Kathleen Kesson, Sandra
Mathison and Kevin D. Vinson—are first-rate scholars, without whom this
project could never have been completed. They have spent untold hours

FM_i-xxxvi.pmd 17 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

xviii General Editor’s Introduction

conceiving of, writing for, and editing their respective volumes. I have learned
much from them as educators, researchers, and as advocates for more just
and democratic schools and society.
I would also like to acknowledge the truly remarkable contributions of
the chapter authors who have provided Defending Public Schools with cutting-
edge analysis of the most recent educational research and practice. I know
of no other work on issues of public schooling that brings together a com-
parable collection of highly respected scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
I would be terribly remiss not to acknowledge the tremendous support
and invaluable advice I have received from my editor, Marie Ellen Larcada.
Defending Public Schools was initially envisioned by Marie Ellen, and she has
been an essential part of its successful completion. Additionally, I would like
to thank Shana Grob who, as our editorial assistant, was always attentive to
the crucial details and made editing these four volumes a much more man-
ageable and enjoyable job.
Thanks also to the folks who inspire and support me on a daily basis,
comrades who are exemplary scholars, teachers, and activists: Perry Marker,
Kevin Vinson, Steve Fleury, David Hursh, Rich Gibson, Jeff Cornett, Marc
Bousquet, Heather Julien, Marc Pruyn, Valerie Pang, Larry Stedman, Ken
Teitelbaum, Ceola Ross Baber, Lisa Cary, John Welsh, Chris Carter, Curry
Malott, Richard Brosio, and Dave Hill.
Lastly, words cannot express my love for Sandra, Rachel, and Colin.

FM_i-xxxvi.pmd 18 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

— I —

The Security State and the
Traditional Role of Schools

Ch1_1-14.pmd 1 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

— 1 —

“Welcome to the Desert of the
Real”: A Brief History of What
Makes Schooling Compulsory
DAVID A. GABBARD

MORPHEUS: Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because
you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it.
You’ve felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world.
You don’t know what, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you
mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talk-
ing about?
NEO: The Matrix?
MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is?1

You may be reading this book because you, too, know something that you
feel but can’t explain. You may wonder if there isn’t some equivalent to the
Matrix at work in our world. What it is, you don’t know for certain. In this
chapter, I will explore the possibility that it has something to do with the
state and the schools it compels us to attend.
We want to believe that public schools serve us, the public, “We, the people.”
This could mean that we want to believe that schools strengthen our democ-
racy, our ability to meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes
that impact our communities and our lives. Such a model of education, as
defined by Everett Reimer, would, like a transgenerational red pill, entail the

conscious use of resources to increase people’s awareness of the relevant facts
about their lives, and to increase people’s abilities to act upon these facts in

Ch1_1-14.pmd 3 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

4 Defending Public Schools

their own true interests. Of major importance to most people are the laws
which govern them, the ideologies which influence them and the institutions,
and institutional products, which determine the impact of their laws and ide-
ologies upon them. Practical education, then, is increasing awareness for in-
dividuals and groups of their laws, ideologies and institutions, and increas-
ing their ability to shape these laws, ideologies, and institutions to their needs
and interests.2

As Reimer adds, “This definition of education need not exclude the teach-
ing of respect for existing laws, ideologies, institutions and other facts of life.
So long as what is can meet the challenge of what should be, respect and criti-
cal awareness are compatible. It is not permissible, however, to give respect
to priority over truth since this is to induce respect for falsehood.”3
Our collective suspicion that today’s institutions give “respect to priority
over truth,” inducing us into “respect for falsehood,” helps explain why The
Matrix films have generated such a following.4 No matter what we want to
believe about schools, the “splinter” remains, dividing our minds between
what we believe education should be and what education is. We want to be-
lieve that public education, as it occurs in practice, is worth defending. Short
of this, we need a vision of education that we can defend and struggle to
put into practice. With Reimer, most of us believe that society ought to be
governed democratically and that everyone in society should have an equal
voice in shaping our laws, institutions, and ideologies.
When Morpheus asks Neo if he believes in fate, Neo says that he doesn’t,
“because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.” If given a
choice in what sort of life we’d like for ourselves, most of us would likely
hold a preference for maximizing the control that we have over our own lives.
Most of us, I believe, would seek opportunities for autonomy as well as cre-
ative interactions with others and with our environment or, as Ivan Illich puts
it, “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.”5 With Neo,
we would give top priority in our lives to “the one resource that is almost
equally distributed among all people: personal energy under personal con-
trol.”6
We find this same longing in the work of Paulo Freire, whose educational
ideas stem from one central assumption: “that man’s ontological vocation
[as he calls it] is to be a Subject, and in so doing moves toward ever new
possibilities of fuller and richer life individually and collectively.”7 In Freire’s
own words, “while both humanization and dehumanization are real alter-
natives, only the first is the people’s vocation.”8
Sadly, few of us believe that we have much control over our lives or that
we really have a voice in shaping anything related to public life. Our ener-
gies today seem to be moving further and further beyond our control. Feel-
ings of impotence sink us into apathy, even cynicism, regarding our lives as
public citizens. Despite all pretenses of our society deriving its essence from

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“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 5

its “democratic” institutions, our ability to shape our laws, ideologies, and
institutions to our needs and interests drifts further away from us with each
passing generation. Increasingly, we feel that those laws, ideologies, and in-
stitutions no longer serve us, if they ever did.
What is the Matrix? Recalling Morpheus’s first response to his rhetorical
question, he explains that “The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here
even in this room. You can see it out your window or on your television.
You feel it when you go to work or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the
world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
When Neo then asks him, “What truth?” Morpheus tells him, “That you are
a slave, Neo.”
So, what is our Matrix? It too is a world that blinds, or attempts to blind,
us from seeing the truth—the truth that we too are slaves. Though we sus-
pect that our laws, ideologies, and institutions do not serve us, we shy away
from confronting the possibility that they never did, that their architects did
not design them to serve us. Though it contradicts everything we’ve ever
been taught to believe, those laws, ideologies, and institutions were created
to serve something of our creation, but not us. And those laws, ideologies,
and institutions exist to ensure that we serve it, too.

“DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS?”
Understanding “what it is” returns us to The Matrix films, where we find
potent metaphors for understanding the source of our alienation. Morpheus
explains how “at some point in the early twenty-first century, all of mankind
was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we
marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.”—artificial intelligence
(“a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines”). We
later learned from The Animatrix that human beings enslaved and abused
these machines until they rose up in rebellion against their masters. Civil war
erupted, with A.I. and the machines claiming victory, but not until humans
had launched a nuclear attack in an effort to block out the sun—the
machines’ primary energy source. Ironically, as Morpheus notes, the machines
then enslaved human beings in a manner that holds tremendous relevance
for our later considerations of the state and the traditional role of schools.
Here in our world, long before anyone dreamed of computers, human
beings gave birth to a form of A.I. that has come to dominate us, simulta-
neously decimating the diversity of human societies as well as the diversity
of biotic species. Though intrinsically violent, Jean Baudrillard suggests that
we might better describe this “global violence, as a global virulence. This
form of violence,” he contends, “is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, pro-
ceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems
and our capacities to resist.”9 We have come to know this global virulence
that spreads itself through global violence as the market. Like A.I. in

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6 Defending Public Schools

The Matrix, it has spawned its own “race of machines” that includes insti-
tutions such as the modern state apparatus and, therefore, schools.

WHAT IS THE MARKET ?
Markets have long been features of various human societies but not present
in all. Where markets did exist, they functioned as a special space outside of
the routines of daily cultural and social life. Economic life, in general, found
its motivation in the individual’s and the collective group’s need for subsis-
tence. As Karl Polanyi reported in 1944, “The outstanding discovery of re-
cent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule,
is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard
his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to
safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values
material goods only insofar as they serve this end.”10
Even in its infancy, the self-regulating market declared war against the
social. While it wrought miraculous improvements in humanity’s tools of
production, it also brought catastrophic dislocation to the lives of common
people. One of the initial and most crucial elements of this dislocation in-
volved the process of enclosure as experienced during the English Agrarian
Revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Enclosure entailed fencing
off public fields and forests known as “the commons” that had been used
for collective farming and fuel collection. Once these lands were enclosed,
those who claimed ownership of them used violence and other means to push
out the peasants whose families had inhabited them for generations. The
peasants often resisted this appropriation of their lands, but by the seven-
teenth century, “the commons” had been sufficiently depopulated and priva-
tized so that the wealthy landowners’ inalienable right to private property
became institutionalized.
The enclosure movement marked an important step in the destruction of
the traditional cultures of Europe, for it transformed the basis of village life
from what R. H. Tawney describes as “a fellowship of mutual aid and a part-
nership of service and protection” to a matter of servicing “the pecuniary
interests of a great proprietor.”11 The individual legal and property rights
of the great proprietors began taking precedent over moral claims of the
larger community.
Displacing the motivation of subsistence with the motivation of gain or
greed, the market redefines human nature as “red in tooth and claw” and
demands a separation of the economic sphere from the political sphere in
order to effect a total subordination of the entire society to the requirements
of the market. The market deems social relations themselves as impediments
to its growth. A French essay written at the end of the sixteenth century,
for example, describes “friendship as an unreasonable passion, a ‘great cause
of division and discontent,’ whereas the search for wealth is highly praised

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“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 7

as a ‘moral virtue’ and a ‘civic responsibility.’”12 “Four hundred years later,”
writes Gérald Berthoud, “the same position appears with Hayek’s Great
Society, radically opposed to any form of community. Relationships take place
between abstract men, with neither passion nor sentiment. Therefore, ‘one
should keep what the poor neighbors would surely need, and use it to meet
the anonymous demands of thousands of strangers.’”13
The same disdain for social bonds and allegiances resonates in J. L. Sadie’s
explanation of why indigenous (nonmarket) societies seem so resistant to
marketization. “The mental horizon of the people,” Sadie states,

is limited by their allegiance and loyalties, which extend no further than
the tribe. And is directed towards the smaller family unit. . . . Community-
centeredness and the absence of individualism are nowhere more strongly re-
flected than in their economic system. Land is communal property. . . . However
commendable the social security which arises from this type of socio-economic
organization, it is inimical to economic development. It obviates, or greatly di-
minishes, the necessity for continued personal exertion.14

In order to effect the “continued personal exertion” demanded by the
market, Sadie continues, traditional “custom and mores” must be broken.

What is needed is a revolution in the totality of social, cultural, and religious
institutions and habits, and thus in their psychological attitude, their philoso-
phy and way of life. What is therefore required amounts in reality to social dis-
organization. Unhappiness and discontentment in the sense of wanting more
than is obtainable at any moment is to be generated. The suffering and dislo-
cation that may be caused in the process may be objectionable, but it appears
to be the price that has to be paid for economic development; the condition
of economic progress.15

While Sadie offered his account of the steps necessary to impose the mar-
ket pattern over an indigenous African culture in 1960, Polanyi cites “an
official document of 1607, prepared for the use of the Lords of the Realm”
in England that expressed the same general attitude toward such changes:
“The poor man shall be satisfied in his end: Habitation; and the gentleman
not hindered in his desire: Improvement.”16 In other words, as Polanyi
writes, “the poor man clings to his hovel, doomed by the rich man’s desire
for a public improvement which profits him privately.”17
But the “rich men” of the seventeenth century faced the same problem
at home as the “development” expert of the twentieth century faced abroad:
how to secure “continued personal exertion” from the victims of social dis-
location? Traditional cultures had always organized themselves to obviate the
possibility of scarcity coming to dominate their social relations. In doing so,
they sought to remove envy and the fear of scarcity that might promote in-
dividualistic economic behavior (i.e., greed—the motivating force of the

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8 Defending Public Schools

market) from infecting those same relations. In order to ensure “continued
personal exertion” from isolated individuals, the market pattern declared its
war against such subsistence-oriented customs. This war entailed the intro-
duction of scarcity as the defining characteristic of the human condition and,
therefore, the universal condition of social life everywhere.18 “Hunger,”
wrote William Townsend in 1786, “will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach
decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In
general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] on to
labor. . . . [Hunger] is the most powerful motive to industry and labor, it
calls forth the most powerful exertions.”19 And from Jeremy Bentham’s utili-
tarian point of view, Polanyi reports, “the task of the government was to in-
crease want in order to make the physical sanction of hunger effective.”20

WHAT IS THE STATE?
As implied in Polanyi’s discussion of Bentham’s perspective on “the task
of the government,” the ascendancy of the market could not have happened
without the assistance of state power. Through the Commercial and Indus-
trial Revolutions and beyond, the market’s historic unfolding gave rise to a
merchant and commercial class who would gradually use their growing fi-
nancial power to leverage great influence over the feudal state. While our
contemporary champions of “the free market” invoke his name as one of their
most venerable patron saints, Adam Smith observed in 1776 that

It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this
whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest
has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so care-
fully tended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers
have been by far the principal architects.21

And even though these “principal architects,” who had so carefully attended
to their own interests in contriving this system were, in Smith’s estimation,

incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become
such . . ., by a strange absurdity [they] regard the character of the sovereign
[the state] as but an appendix to that of the merchant, as something which
ought to be made subservient to it.22

Eventually, the power of these “principal architects” of the market sys-
tem would transform the feudal state into the modern nation-states of our
current era—appendices to the market. This transformation entailed a sepa-
ration of the economic sphere from the political sphere in order to effect a
total subordination of the entire society to the market’s requirements. As
James Madison wrote in the 1787 debates over the federal Constitution,

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“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 9

“Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country
against innovation, putting in place checks and balances in order to protect
the minority of the opulent against the majority.”23 Securing those perma-
nent interests meant providing security to allow the market to function un-
impeded by any social, political, or other form of impediments. This would
require a total reformulation of state power.
In an earlier reference to The Matrix, I stated that the manner in which
the machines (A.I.) enslaved human beings held tremendous relevance for
our later considerations of the state and the traditional role of schools.
“Throughout human history,” Morpheus explains, “we have been depen-
dent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems is not without a sense of irony.”
With the sun blocked out as the result of nuclear attacks launched by humans
to deprive the machines of their primary energy source, A.I. “discovered a
new form of fusion. . . . The human body generates more bioelectricity than
a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 Btu’s of body heat.” What, then, is the
Matrix? As Morpheus states, the Matrix is “control. . . . The Matrix is a com-
puter-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to
change a human being into this.” With these words, he holds up a coppertop
battery.
Human beings in this dystopian world are no longer born; they are grown
inside glowing red pods filled with gelatinous material to regulate their body
temperature for maximal energy production. We see endless fields and towers
of these human batteries in each of the three films. Within each pod, flex-
ible steel tubes tap into the legs, arms, and torsos of each “coppertop,” ex-
tracting the body heat and bioelectricity necessary for running the machines
that support A.I. While these tubes extract energy, another tube, inserted
at the base of the coppertop’s skull, “uploads” the Matrix, the computer-
generated dream world into the individual’s brain. This “neural-interactive
simulation” programs the “coppertops” to believe that they are leading nor-
mal, everyday lives in late twentieth-century America. They have no idea that
their real bodies lie docile in their pods. A.I. and the machines need humans
to believe that they are alive and living “normal lives,” because even the il-
lusion that they are carrying out everyday activities, making decisions and
so on, causes the brain to “fire” and create bioelectricity for harvesting by
the machines.
This scenario provides an apt metaphor for understanding the reformu-
lation of state power required by the market. In a very real sense, the mar-
ket required that the state be reprogrammed. Where the power of the
sovereign had once fixated itself on the repression of those internal and ex-
ternal forces that threatened its right to rule, the market now claimed sov-
ereignty, transforming the state into an instrument, a machine for ensuring
its security, its freedom to expand and dominate life in all its forms and di-
mensions.

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10 Defending Public Schools

Like A.I. in The Matrix, the market demanded that the state secure ac-
cess to isolated and docile bodies. As Michel Foucault explains, “A body is
docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”24 This
docility, predicated on viewing the body as a mechanism itself, allows, then,
for an increase in the utility of that body. The state would go on to develop
techniques of power for exercising control over that mechanism’s move-
ments, gestures, and attitudes that would increase their utility in terms of
their efficiency. “These methods,” argues Foucault, “which made possible
the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the con-
stant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-
utility, might be called ‘disciplines.’”25 The disciplines constituted nothing
short of a machinery of power aimed at exploring the body as mechanism,
breaking it down and rearranging it, not only to advance the growth of its
skills, but also to render the body more obedient as it became more useful,
and more useful as it became more obedient. “A ‘political anatomy,’ which
was also a ‘mechanics of power,’ was being born; it defined how one may
have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do as one wishes,
but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed
and the efficiency that one determines.”26
Foucault, then, identifies the form of power that emerged alongside the
market’s transformation of the state as disciplinary power. This form of power
met the requirements of an emerging art of government defined as “the right
disposition of things, arranged so as to lead to a convenient end”27 (i.e.,
serving “permanent interests” and eliciting “continued personal exertion”).
In order to effect the “right disposition” in people, disciplinary power seeks
to increase the economic utility of each individual, increasing the forces that
the individual’s body feeds into the market as both a worker/producer and
consumer. Paradoxically, disciplinary power also seeks to reduce the body’s
forces by seeking to instill political obedience (allegiance) to the state and,
thereby, to the market that it serves. Moreover, disciplinary power seeks to
obtain

productive service from individuals in their concrete lives. And in consequence,
a real and effective incorporation of power was necessary, in the sense that power
had to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes, and modes
of everyday behavior. Hence the significance of methods like school discipline,
which succeeded in making children’s bodies the object of highly complex sys-
tems of manipulation and conditioning.28

WHAT IS SCHOOLING?
From the foregoing analysis, we can discern that the state compels us to
attend school for two primary reasons that help us comprehend the tradi-
tional role of schooling. In short, schooling conditions children for their

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“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 11

future lives as coppertops while simultaneously cultivating their obedience
to the state. It accomplishes this, in part, by disguising the disciplinary func-
tions of schools that treat children as coppertops behind a mask of benevo-
lence. In order to achieve maximum efficiency, the mechanism and the
supporting ideology of disciplinary power had to remain hidden. Therefore,
by providing modern institutions with beneficent images, pastoral power can
be said to function in manner similar to the Matrix—as a “dream world,” a
“neural-interactive simulation,” and “a world pulled over people’s eyes to
prevent them from seeing the truth.”
First, the state must prevent people from recognizing the truth that
schooling is compulsory, which means that the state claims the right to lay
hold of the bodies of children to carry out the disciplinary measures required
to maximize their utility to the market. To blur the connections between
school, state, and law, schooling was tied to the value of education and pre-
sented as a human right and an opportunity. Framed as a value and protected
as a right, schooling came to fit into the logic of the market as something
that could be acquired. In the vernacular of schooling, we have learned to
say that we want our children to get an education, or to receive an educa-
tion. Suddenly, something that had previously been treated as a process
became a thing that one could possess. Befitting the market’s logic of ac-
quisitiveness, education devolved into a commodity, and the more of it that
one consumes, as evidenced by the number of diplomas and degrees that one
possesses, the more one’s use-value within the market grows. Human be-
ings, then, could be “graded” like coppertop batteries. Some are AAAs, some
are AAs, some are Cs, and some are Ds. As they increase their charge through
the consumption of schooling, the coppertops increase their certified use-
value in the market.
The market itself played a role in this when employers began requiring
educational credentials (diplomas, degrees, and certificates—testimonials to
the degree to which a person’s use-value had been developed) as a precon-
dition of employment. The degree that the market literally became people’s
only means for satisfying their wants and needs, these formal job require-
ments made compulsory school laws somewhat obsolete. Because the mar-
ket itself began requiring participation in the ritual of schooling as a condition
of employment, the connection between the compulsory nature of school-
ing, the state, and the law became less discernable. As a consequence, school
could become viewed less in terms of being an institution that the state forced
people to attend and more in terms of an “opportunity” and, later, a “right”
that the state granted to individuals, enabling them to meet the demands
of the market.
The notion of “use-value” allowed the state to introduce the “law of scar-
city” into public policy planning that would also contribute to both its own
pastoral image and that of the market. While the “doctrine of original sin”
provided the Church with its moral imperative, one of the most fundamental

Ch1_1-14.pmd 11 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

12 Defending Public Schools

laws of the market provided the state with the imperative that it needed,
namely, the law of scarcity. The law of scarcity defines the human condition
and social conditions everywhere. Applied to the human condition, the law
of scarcity proclaims that human wants are great (if not immeasurable), while
their means for satisfying those wants are scarce. Only the market can pro-
vide those means—the means for achieving secular salvation, defined as the
satisfaction of wants. But in order to access those means through participa-
tion in the market, one must possess something of value to exchange on the
market. One must possess something akin to grace sought by those who
identified with the Church. The market’s equivalent of grace is use-value.
The “doctrine of original sin” taught people to understand that they were
born without grace and that without grace they could not acquire eternal
salvation. The “law of scarcity” teaches people to understand themselves as
having been born without use-value. Without use-value, I have nothing to
exchange on the market. Therefore, I have no means for satisfying my wants
or achieving salvation in the secular world of a market society. In my raw
state, like any resource, I possess no use-value. Like any resource, however,
I can be subjected to processes designed to make me useful. Again, the means
for developing my use-value are scarce. Fortunately, or so my conscience is
molded to believe, the benevolent state organizes a subsidy to support public
education for cultivating my use-value in order that I can find my own in-
dividual salvation in the market while contributing to the broader salvation
that the market bestows upon the society as a whole.
In addition to conditioning us to blindly accept our status as coppertops,
another major feature of the Matrix that schools assist in feeding into our
brains revolves around our utility to the market as consumers. This feature
also contributes to developing our loyalty and obedience to the state by
socializing children to identify themselves, first and foremost, in nationalistic
terms as Americans. Within this identity structure there comes a sense of
privilege—the privilege of having been born or “naturalized” into a society
that represents the very best of what any human civilization could ever pos-
sibly have to offer. At the most superficial level of analysis, the formal cur-
riculum of compulsory schooling frames what is “very best” about America
in jingoistic terms, celebrating its democratic form of government, with all
the freedoms and rights that it purports to afford its citizens.
The school’s hidden curriculum, however, frames those freedoms and
rights primarily within the context of the market, not politics. Here the uto-
pian character of market fundamentalism surfaces to define what is “very
best” about America in terms of the “rights” and “opportunities” that the
state affords individuals to pursue their own individual secular salvation.
Again, through the formation of “consumer conscience,” individuals learn
to judge their own degree of salvation according to market standards. We
learn to equate “well-being” with “well-having.” Given the total quantity
and quality of goods and services currently made available through the

Ch1_1-14.pmd 12 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM

“Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 13

market—the overall level of affluence that establishes the American market
society as the historic and universal standard against which all other nations
and societies pale in comparison—to what degree and for what duration must
I comply with and consume schooling in order to cultivate the proper
amount of use-value that will enable me to acquire a level of affluence com-
parable to that standard? Again, children must never learn to view their at-
tendance at school as a compulsory duty imposed on them by the state for
the purpose of rendering them useful to the market as producers/consumers.
They must recognize schooling in terms of the value of education and, there-
fore, as one of the first “opportunities,” “rights,” or “privileges” afforded
to them by the benevolent state.

EDUCATION: BLUE PILL OR RED PILL?
The foregoing analysis of the traditional role of schools as one of the
machines used by the state apparatus to serve the market should not dissuade
us from defending the idea of public education. Before unplugging Neo from
the Matrix to show him “how deep the rabbit hole goes,” Morpheus pre-
sents Neo with a choice. In one hand, Morpheus holds a blue pill. If Neo
chooses this pill, he will remain trapped within the illusory world of the
Matrix, condemned to spend the rest of his life as a slave to the machines.
If he chooses the red pill, as he ultimately does, he will be liberated from
this condition. He will awaken to the truth and join the resistance to liberate
all of humanity from its enslavement.
With Peter McLaren and others, I believe that a defensible idea of public
education hinges on our “viewing schools as democratic public spheres . . . ,
dedicated to forms of self- and social empowerment, where students have
the opportunity to learn the knowledge and skill necessary to live in an au-
thentic democracy.”29 Education can and should be a “red pill” to awaken
us to the realities of the world while empowering us to transform those re-
alities as we deem necessary. Only then will education come to serve the
public. Until then, it will continue to target us.

Ch1_1-14.pmd 13 9/27/2004, 9:11 AM
E. Wayne Ross
University of British Columbia, Faculty Member
Sandra Mathison
University of British Columbia, Faculty Member
Kevin D. Vinson
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