(PDF) Education Under The Security State

Defending Public Schools Education Under the Security State - Edited by David A. Gabbard & E. Wayne Ross. FOREWORD BY PETER McLAREN : Education Under the Security State Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/owbo_W8-ARH-388 Education Under the Security State Defending Public Schools EDITED BY Davip A. GABBARD AND E. WaynE Ross TEACHERS OLLEGE GiPRESS Teachers College, Columbia University New York and London Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Education under the security state : defending public schools / edited by David A. Gabbard and E. Wayne Ross. — lst paperback ed. p. cm. Previously published in hardcover with the title Defending public schools, 2004. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8077-4900-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Education and state—United States. 2. Public schools—United States. 1956- III. Title: Defending public schools. _ . Gabbard, David. II. Ross, E. Wayne, LC89.D46 2009 379.73—dc22 2008017956 Defending Public Schools Vol. I: Education Under the Security State, edited by David Gabbard and E. Wayne Ross, was orignally published in hard cover by Praeger, www.greenwood .com/ praeger an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT. Copyright © 2004 by David Gabbard and E. Wayne Ross. This paperback edition by arrangement with Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reprinting, or on any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN: 978-0-8077-4900-5 Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper LSPA SIO SLI MORO9eOs 3) eee a) 2 J Copyright Acknowledgments Chapter 2, “The State, the Market, & (Mis)education” by Takis Fotopoulos was excerpted from “Education, Paideia and Democracy: From (Mis)education to Paideia” in Democracy and Nature 9, no. 1 (November 2003) pp.15—50, and is available online at http:// www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol2/vol2_nol_miseducation_paideia_takis.htm Chapter 6, “A Nation at Risk—RELOADED: The Security State and the New World Order,” by David A. Gabbard originally appeared as “A Nation at Risk—RELOADED: Part I” in The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 1, no. 2 (October 2003) and is available online at http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageI D=article&articleI[D=15. Chapter 7, “The Hegemony of Accountability” by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross was excerpted from “The Hegemony of Accountability in Schools and Universities,” originally published in Workplace 5, no. 1 (October 2002) and available online at http://www louisville.edu/journal/workplace/issue5p1/mathison.html. Chapter 8, “Neoliberalism and Schooling in the U.S.: How State and Federal Government Education Policies Perpetuate Inequality” by David Hursh and Camille Anne Martina originally appeared in The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 1, no. 2 (October 2003) and is available online at http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageI D=article&articleI[D=12. This book is dedicated to: The memory of Dr. Stanley C. Israel, who helped me learn to read and to love learning. Stan always modeled the power we possess to use our lives as a means to make the world a better place for others. D.A.G. and to: Dr. Phillip Schlechty, teacher, scholar, and school reformer, who taught me the importance of thinking critically about the role of schools in society. E.W.R. Contents General Editor’s Introduction: Defending Public Schools, Defending Democracy E. Wayne Ross Xi Foreword Peter McLaren Preface Introduction: Defending Public Education from the Public David A. Gabbard Part I The Security State and the Traditional Role of Schools Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Part II “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”: A Brief History of What Makes Schooling Compulsory David A. Gabbard ‘The State, the Market, & (Mis)education Takis Fotopoulos Security Threats Chapter 3. What Is The Matrix? What Is the Republic?: Understanding “The Crisis of Democracy” David A. Gabbard 29 31 Contents Vill Chapter 4 Civic Literacy at Its Best: The “Democratic Distemper” of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) John Marciano 43 Chapter 5 A Matter of Conflicting Interests?: Problematizing the Traditional Role of Schools Sandra Jackson 55 Part III Security Measures: Defending Public Education from the Public ae Chapter 6 A Nation at Risk—RELOADED: and the New World Order David A. Gabbard The Security State ihe Chapter 7 The Hegemony of Accountability: The Corporate-Political Alliance for Control of Schools Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross 91 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 Chapter 10 State Theory and Urban School Reform I: A Reconsideration from Detroit Barry M. Franklin 117 State Theory and Urban School Reform II: Ist A Reconsideration from Milwaukee Thomas C. Pedroni Chapter 11 Cooking the Books: Educational Apartheid with No Child Left Behind Sheila L. Macrine 141 Chapter 12 The Securitized Student: Meeting the Demands of Neoliberalism Kenneth J. Saltman ie: Chapter 13 Enforcing the Capitalist Agenda For and In Education: The Security State at Work in Britain and the United States Dave Hill 175 Chapter 14 Privatization and Enforcement: The Security State Transforms Higher Education John F. Welsh tot Contents Chapter 15 Schooling and the Security State Julie Webber Notes Index 249 About the Editors 259 About the Contributors 261 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 challenge to educators, and even when schools are performing well, it is difficult, if not impossible, for them to deliver all the expected results when their mission necessarily entails contradictory purposes. For example: e e 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 General Editor’s Introduction xii ¢ ¢ e 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 corporations, 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 preparing 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 DEMOCRACY! In his magnum opus Democracy and Education, John Dewey—widely regarded as America’s greatest philosopher—states that all societies use education as means of social control in which adults consciously shape the dispositions 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 question of what the purposes and goals of public schools should be. The implication of Dewey’s position is that we—the people—must decide 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 assuring 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 problem of democracy. It also explains why public schools are the object of criticism 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 contemporary American society. Democracy is most often understood as a system of government providing 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. “Democracy,” Dewey said, is “a mode of associated living, of conjoint commu- General Editor’s Introduction Xili nicated experience.”? In this conception, democratic life involves paying attention 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 actions 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 government nor is it an end in itself; it is the means by which people discover, extend, 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.? 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, entrepreneurial initiative, and government deregulation are some important principles 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 democracy 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 believed 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 hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessing.”* 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. 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.® This may seem an odd conception of democracy, but it is the prevailing conception of “liberaldemocratic” 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 implementing 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.® 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.”” 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 economic systems, democracy would be limited, stunted. Dewey emphasized that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country 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 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. Educational 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 before, the purposes of public schools have been by the interests of the state and of concentrated private/corporate power, as follows from what I described 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: l. The statist view of schools treats teachers as mere appendages to the machinery 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 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 democratic citizenship through engagement with real-world issues, problem solving, and critical thinking, and through active participation in civic and political processes. 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 preservation and expansion of human rights. These skills, capacities, and dispositions need to be taught and practiced. The current system uses “carrots and sticks” to coerce compliance with an alienating 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. 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. The current system of public schooling alienates students by stripping learning from its engagement with the world in all of its complexity. It reduces learning 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 engagement 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. 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- General Editor’s Introduction xvii ing about issues of curriculum and instruction in the classrcoom—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- 6. anism. 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 consumers, but as future citizens. 7. 8. 9. 10. All schools should be funded equally and fully, eliminating the dependence on private corporate funds and on property taxes, which create a two-tiered educational system by distributing educational monies inequitably. Include universal prekindergarten and tuition-free higher education for all qualified students in state universities. Children of immigrants make up approximately 20 percent of the children in the United States, bringing linguistic and cultural differences to many classrooms. 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. 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 ail students as different, or none of them. All classrooms should be zuclusive, meeting the needs of all students together, in a way that is just, caring, challenging, and meaningful. All students should have opportunities to learn and excel in the fine and performing arts, physical education and sports, and extracurricular clubs and activities 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 interests in the improvement of teaching and learning to a broad-based movement for social, political, and economic justice, and work together for the democratic renewal of public life and public education in America. RK 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 XVill 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 cuttingedge analysis of the most recent educational research and practice. I know of no other work on issues of public schooling that brings together a comparable 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. Foreword PETER MCLAREN The security state has emerged as the country’s new political paradigm. One of the advantages of untrammeled U.S. power is the ability it affords its ruling elite to establish the definitions of terrorism and evil, to circumscribe their ideological formations and relations, to administer the means to publicize them, and, in doing so, to normalize those definitions for propaganda purposes. In the security state, lies are now “creative omissions” or “misstatements,” while truth is whatever it needs to be to secure the strategic interests of American power. Global prosperity means tearing up the Kyoto Treaty; preventing nuclear threats by rogue nations means threatening to use nuclear weapons in “preemptive” strikes; creating global support against terrorism means blocking a UN investigation of the Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp; bringing war criminals to justice means preventing the establishment of an international criminal court. Today, the preferred choice of Bush policymakers is deceit and deception. It is no surprise that Machiavelli is a favorite among the reactionary right wing of the president’s team of advisors. But it is also important to recognize that, increasingly within the security state, nothing carries the aura of truth as much as deception; nothing is as real today as that which is fake. Naomi Klein captures this phenomenon—hardly restricted to the United States—in the following description: The blacklisting of the almanac was a fitting end for 2003, a year that waged open war on truth and facts and celebrated fakes and forgeries of all kinds. This Foreword Xx was the year when fakeness ruled: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey. An action movie star became governor and the government started making its own action movies, casting real soldiers like Jessica Lynch as fake combat heroes and dressing up embedded journalists as fake soldiers. Saddam Hussein even got a part in the big show: He played himself being captured by American troops. This is the fake of the year, if you believe the Sunday Herald in Scotland, as well as several other news agencies, which reported that he was actually captured by a Kurdish special forces unit.’ While the war in Iraq is a fake war as far as the reasons go for justifying it, its consequences are painfully real, as a guerrilla war emerges. By propelling us into an occupation of a country whose inhabitants had little if any connection to al-Qaeda, the second Bush administration has assured us that it will most certainly forge the unholiest of alliances in the years to come. Pan-Arabism—ironically, something U.S. hawks have tried to prevent for decades—could in fact be one of the unintended legacies. True, getting rid of Saddam was a welcome by-product of the invasion, but it is important to recognize that the removal of Saddam was secondary to other geopolitical ambitions of the United States. With its military bases in Iraq, the United States can now pull its forces out of the Saudi kingdom, which has long been a source of great hostility among Muslims and one of the factors that helped to galvanize al-Qaeda against the United States. The United States now controls the second largest oil reserves in the world—112.5 billion barrels of proven reserves and 220 billion barrels in all of probable and possible reserves. It is able to establish a long-term military presence in the Persian Gulf region so as to control the principal external source of oil supplies for Western Europe and China, preventing either of them from emerging as global rivals. It is able to ensure, by physical occupation of the second largest oil reserves in the world and by a formidable military presence in the Persian Gulf region that could make possible the rapid takeover of Saudi oil fields, that the price of oil will remain denominated in dollars. And the United States can put pressure on OPEC by controlling Iraq either directly or indirectly through Iraqi leaders willing to serve as American political stooges who are pliant on the question of oil pricing policy.” The policies of the Bush administration, if allowed to continue, will not serve the larger cause of education, which is to improve the living conditions of all, especially impoverished children and their families. The actions of the Bush White House have broken the basic bond of trust between government and the people. Those actions exacerbate what is already a growing trend of capital’s restructuring in the form of cutbacks in wages, benefits, and public spending, and disgracefully increasing poverty (over three million jobs were lost in the first three years of the Bush presidency). After all, money has no irrefutable logic of its own and has to be Foreword xxi pried loose for investment in new technology and labor-saving devices; even profitable plants have to be closed or moved to areas with cheaper labor and raw materials, and barriers must be lifted to the movement of capital between national borders and maximizing output by reorganizing work processes.? But the detritus of Western security states is growing more and more visible throughout the world, as the poor continue to be exterminated by war, genocide, starvation, military and police repression, slavery, and suicide. Those whose labor-power is now deemed worthless have the choice of selling their organs, working the plantations or mines, or going into prostitution. Capital offers hope but, as it fails to deliver on its promise, the search for alternatives to its social universe continues. Within the context that I have described, the question of education looms large. Education has always been part of the reproduction of the disciplining of youth for entry into the security state and the promise of lifelong learning within its strict confines, although through the years, the nature and meaning of both “security” and the “state” has changed dramatically. Education under the Security State is a volume that vividly and bravely speaks to the crisis of our age. It explores issues that most books on education virtually ignore, such as the relationship between state formations and the disciplining and shaping of the labor-power of future state workers. It examines with analytical suppleness and great political verve contemporary conflicts around educational policy, revealing how both policy and pedagogy have been impacted by the increasing militarization, privatization, and corporatization of the security state as well as shifting dynamics within media culture. What becomes clear in Education under the Security State is that the real threat to the security state is not terrorism but the struggle for democracy. For it is the self-movement and self-management of working people struggling for democracy that poses the greatest challenge to the transnational government and business entities. The endless search for markets, capital, and cheap labor casts a long shadow throughout history. We are living in perilous times. History will not.be kind to the role played by the United States, especially since the end of WWII, and especially at this time when the United States, desperate to survive the crisis of capitalism, strides the world stage like a Hollywood action hero, uncontested. Education under the Security State serves the important purpose of generating new ways of thinking about the state and its relationship to the production of and possibilities for human agency, both now and in the crucial years ahead. Humans are conditioned by structures and social relations just as they create and transform those structures and relations. Everything in human history passes through the realm of subjectivity, and it is through this dance of the dialectic that we create our future. The democracy in which we live is indeed at a crossroads, and we must fiercely question its present historical course in order to outlast despair and hold on to the vision that first brought this worthy concept into existence. — on —, _ = 1. Fy we aT, ie Sh a i Lb * a WP Aule\e Ma Ly wor Parts 1 eT Grae occills alt 000 Slnrvey a id ei 7 eel r Neabherreeragly 4 9 dean Jalon foe gale vyystupeneer Grau: hehe Ee) IP ewe a pray Sede wera syriis <5 — Pane) eee ih 6 anonta ee le i-Se.- bsnl 7” wing ot ee Tye. 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Or we think of it in terms of the role played by the state during the Cold War. This book presents an alternative understanding of the security state, arguing that the modern state is a product of the emergence of the market economy as the dominant institution in Western societies. In this understanding, the state has always functioned, primarily, to provide security for the market, protecting its domination here at home and helping to expand that domination abroad. Compulsory schooling, as an institutional process enforced by the state, has always functioned as an instrument of this domination, though there have been periods when elements of the public have sought to influence schools to serve other values. Most notably, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed various movements calling on schools to unleash their democratizing potential. People began speaking of education in terms of empowerment, helping individuals critically examine the world around them to address the injustices they might identify. Such a democratic spirit within education constitutes a threat to those who chiefly benefit from the forces of the market. Hence, steps were taken to suppress what John Marciano refers to in chapter 4 as the “democratic distemper” of the times. The public’s imagination had to be refocused away from what schools might do to enhance democracy. That imagination had to be disciplined to think of education solely in terms of what it can do for XXiv Preface people individually to increase their “use-value” in the market. And that usevalue, of course, had to be measured—measured by standardized test scores. And teachers and schools had to be made “accountable” for ensuring that no child is “left behind” in the great competition for economic and material gain. Moreover, the state has implemented a series of stealth tactics (standards, testing, and accountability) designed to eliminate any threat that public education might pose to the hegemony of corporate power. Schools can be allowed to function only if they serve that power. Hence, we should read the educational reforms since the 1970s as part of a concerted effort to defend public schools from the public. Within the corporate imagination, public schools do not serve the public; they target the public. The authors of this book are adamantly committed to rekindling the democratic imperative in public schools. We are indebted to the authors for their efforts in helping us compile this volume. We are also indebted to Marie Ellen Larcada and Shana Grob, our editors at Praeger Publishers. Their scrutiny of our work helped us improve the quality of the final product. Introduction: Defending Public Education from the Public Davip GABBARD On July 15, 1979, a beleaguered Jimmy Carter appeared before a national television audience to deliver the most important speech of his presidency. As America fell deeper into a seemingly endless period of economic decline, the public grew increasingly impatient with his administration’s inability to fix anything. Inflation and unemployment soared, while Carter’s public approval rating (25 percent) plummeted below even that of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal. During his presidential campaign, Carter told Americans that they deserved a government as great as the people whom it served. In this speech, however, he seemed to be telling them that the government deserved a people as great as the government that served them. While acknowledging the reality of the problems facing Americans—recession, inflation, unemployment, long gas lines, energy shortages—Carter contended, “The true problems of our nation are much deeper.” Government and “all the legislation in the world,” he went on, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”! Americans, Carter argued, had fallen into a “crisis of confidence.” Elements of his speech provide crucial background knowledge for our understanding of the relationship between the state and schools and how that relationship has shaped educational reform since the 1980s. For Carter, the “crisis of confidence” that he named, in what his detractors refer to as his “malaise” speech, “is a crisis that strikes at the heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt XXVvi Introduction about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”? Just as he claimed to have arrived at these conclusions after listening to the American public, he pleaded with the people for their assistance in helping him to resolve these problems. “I will continue to travel this country to hear the people of America; you can help me to develop a national agenda for the 1980s. I will listen and I will act. We will act together. These were the promises I made three years ago, and I intend to keep them.”° In keeping with this promise to enlist the support of Americans in formulating a national agenda for the 1980s, Carter issued an Executive Order on October 24, 1979, that created the President’s Commission for a Na- tional Agenda for the Eighties (PCNAE). Composed of forty-five members of diverse backgrounds and interests, the PCNAE divided itself into nine separate panels to undertake its assigned tasks of identifying the problems looming ahead for America in the approaching decade and of developing recommendations for solving those problems. None of those panels addressed, however the president’s concern for the national “crisis of confidence.” In his “Statement from the Chairman,” Columbia University President William J. McGill acknowledged that “a concern with the ‘American spirit’ has become a national preoccupation.” He’ explained, however, that “for the most part, Commissioners recognize that it is not the business of government agencies, even temporary ones, to spell out the content .. . or prescribe how to reach new measures of ‘civic virtue.’ They turn such advocacy over to private citizens and public philosophers, to independent organizations and voluntary associations.”* Moreover, the PCNAE held that rectifying the “depression of spirit” resulting from the tendency of many citizens to devote themselves entirely to the “private morale” at the expense of public or civic virtue was beyond the authority, if not the power, of government. McGill did qualify this aversion, however, with the statement that hints of the Commissioners’ concerns for the “crisis of confidence” “show up here [in the PCNAE’s report] in a few lines that have to do with the ways in which education has to be set in a positive civil context if it is to achieve larger national purposes.”° Indeed, we have chosen one of those lines as the basis for developing the organizational framework of this book. In explaining its charge, the PCNAE stated in its 1980 report that this nation faces a decade of difficult choices and priority-setting among many important and compelling goals; it has been the principal task of the Commission to draw national attention to the necessity of choice and to clarify the implications and consequences of the difficult choices before us.® In clarifying the choices regarding education, the Commission pointed out Introduction XXVil that “Continued failure by the schools to perform their traditional role adequately, together with a failure to respond to the emerging needs of the 1980s, may have disastrous consequences for this nation.”” We have organized this book around three questions stemming from this argument. 1. What did the Commission mean by the “traditional role” of schools, and what “larger national purposes” are tied to that role? 2. What forces had inhibited schools from performing that role “adequately,” threatening the security of nation with “disastrous consequences”? 3. What security measures has the state taken since 1980 to avert those consequences and restore schools to their traditional role? With regard to the first question, we cannot separate the “traditional role” of schools from the traditional role of the state. Though custom prescribes that we refer to them as public institutions, schools would not occupy their central position in our society if the state did not compel us, by law, to attend them. The state also organizes a massive public subsidy (taxes) to ensure that schools are able to function. We would be surprised, then, if the role of schools did not complement the state’s role in our society. To examine the role of the state, however, we might first inquire into the nature of our society. On this matter, Carter’s speech reminds me of many of the most elementary lessons that I learned throughout my years as a student in the state’s system of compulsory schooling. Like most Americans, I learned that the nature of our system of government defines the nature of our society and ourselves as a people. This lesson assumes, of course, that a society’s dominant institutions define its culture, its values, and the identity of its people. It also assumes that the state constitutes our society’s dominant institution. The former assumption, I believe, holds true in all societies. The latter assumption is simply erroneous, though Carter seemed to have wanted us to believe it. According to his portrayal of it, American society and the American people derived the nobility of their purpose and their values (freedom, liberty, equality, and others) from their government and their confidence in that government. Within a single generation, however, that confidence disappeared, as did the American people’s traditional sense of purpose and their traditional values. Americans went from being grounded in the civic virtue that they derived from their faith and feelings of connectedness to the democratic state to “worshipping self-indulgence and consumption” and defining their “human identity” not on the basis of what they do, but by what they own.® How could these values have gained ascendancy at the expense of civic virtue if the allegedly democratic state actually functioned as the dominant institution in the United States? Here we come to the crux of the matter. If XXxVvill Introduction 4 nation’s dominant institutions, in fact, define its culture, its values, and the identity of its people, America has never been a democratic society. Owing to the nature of our truly dominant institutions, America has always been a market society. The market functions as our dominant institution, while the state’s central role has always been to provide the security needed by the market to maintain its dominance and to enforce the social and political conditions that the market demands at home as well as abroad. As Takis Fotopoulos and I explain in chapters 1 and 2, the traditional role of compulsory schooling has always been to function as one of the social technologies or machines of the security state to ensure that the programming logic of the market—what Fotopoulos calls the “dominant social paradigm”—dominates social life. One of the two dominant tasks that traditional schooling performs in service of this function entails maintaining the population’s “confidence” that the state is not only our society’s dominant institution but that the state is also a benevolent institution. By the 1970s, significant numbers of people began questioning and challenging this benevolence, which led to the “crisis of confidence” lamented by Carter. But the problem was not, as Carter claimed, a matter of the people’s Jost faith in their “ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.” As John Marciano and Sandra Jackson explain in chapters 4 and 5, the security state viewed the problem in terms of people’s increased faith in themselves to rule and shape our democracy, and this included an increased faith in their ability to shape educational institutions to serve democratic goals and purposes. Democracy itself constituted the greatest threat to the security of the state and the market forces that its serves. Marciano, author of the critically acclaimed Civic Illiteracy and Education: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of American Youth, chronicles the history of the “democratic distemper” captured by “the most influential New Left group of the 1960s,” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As one of the founders of SDS at SUNY Buffalo, Marciano knows this history intimately. At the heart of its founding political declaration, the Port Huron Statement, SDS called for “a ‘participatory democracy’ that would allow people to make ‘the social decisions determining the quality and direction’ of their lives.” Education, epitomized in SDS’s own civic literacy projects, would play a major role in developing and maintaining the participatory democracy envisioned in the Port Huron Statement. “In its brief history in the 1960s as part of the New Left,” Marciano writes, “it played a crucial role in raising the civic literacy and political consciousness of that era, particularly on the U.S.-Vietnam War.” The heightened levels of civic literacy and political consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s inspired educational visions within other popular movements as well. As Sandra Jackson reports, however, many of those visions possessed deeply historical roots. “When African-Americans, other people of color, women and other marginalized groups organized for educational re- Introduction XXxix form in the 1960s and subsequently,” she writes, “to advocate equal educational opportunity as well as curricular reform, they were participating in a tradition whose principles were based on ‘promoting the idea that schools should take an active and positive role in shaping their society.’” Prior to the 1960s, the public school curriculum excluded the histories of marginalized groups, for including those histories would have tarnished the benevolent image of the state that schools were assigned to project. When members of those groups were presented in the curriculum, which was seldom, they were nearly always stereotyped and otherwise negatively characterized. “In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement,” as Jackson claims, African-Americans and other ethnic and cultural groups demanded an inclusive curriculum. Understanding the past and present struggles of such groups to liberate themselves from the historic patterns of disenfranchisement, discrimination, and general subordination and oppression in the United States ought to have been welcomed as a forerunner of the Soviet Union’s period of glasnost under Gorbachev. Instead, the proponents of multicultural curriculum, women’s studies, and bilingual education programs have been treated as threatening to the stability and, hence, the security of the nation. In this light, we could read Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech as a more nuanced version of an earlier report issued by the Trilateral Commission (of which Carter was a member) entitled The Crisis of Democracy. In the view of the members of this Commission, composed of more or less liberal elite elements from the three major centers of market power (the United States, Europe, and Japan), the crisis of democracy stemmed from “the fact that during the 1960s and the early ’70s substantial sectors of the population which are usually apathetic and passive became organized and began to enter the political arena and began to press for their own interests and concerns. That created a crisis because that’s not the way democracy is supposed to work” in a market society.” In a market society, as I explain in chapter 3, the people should function as consumers of the political process, not participants. Neither Carter nor his President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties encouraged higher levels of public participation in the political arena. They sought merely a restoration of the public’s confidence in the benevolence of the state—the “American spirit” or “civic virtue”—to overcome the public’s deep distrust of government. The PCNAE assigned this task to the schools and to “private citizens and public philosophers, to independent organizations and voluntary associations” who were to draw upon Walter Lippmann’s!° notion of “public philosophy” in overcoming this “spirit of depression.” The PCNAE?’s decision to promote the ideas of Lippmann merits attention, as well as concern, for anyone interested in how the architects of state power actually regard the role of the public in the democratic process. Lippmann, of course, was one of the pioneering architects of the American propaganda XXX Introduction system. He believed that the public did have a place in the affairs of democracy, but that this place was on the sidelines, not on the field of action. “The public,” Lippmann argued, “must be put in its place so that the responsible men may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.” Because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely,” the public (those “ignorant and troublesome outsiders”) should be “interested spectators of action.”!! Active participation should be restricted to the insiders—that “specialized class” of “responsible men” whose privilege as experts stems from what Henry Kissinger described as “the ability to articulate the consensus of [their] constituency.”!* In this case, the constituency happens to be those with real effective power. For the “responsible men” sitting on Carter’s PCNAE, the “crisis of confidence” or the “crisis of democracy,” as it affected schools, grew out of what they termed “a temporary confusion of purpose.” According to the PCNAE, this confusion arose from a variety of dissatisfactions with the schools leading to “the formation of special interest groups which often work at crosspurposes with each other as they advance differing notions of what the schools should do and how.”!? Restoring schools to their “traditional role” would eliminate that “confusion of purpose” through a series of security measures dedicated to defending public education from the public. The chapters comprosing Part III of this volume describe those security measures as they arrived in the form of numerous “reform” efforts eventually leading up to President George W. Bush’s reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act through what he dubbed the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Twenty years prior to that, however, Secretary of Education Terel Bell authorized the formation of the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) during the Reagan administration. As I describe in chapter 6, the NCEE must have taken McGill’s advice to draw upon the ideas of Walter Lippmann. Under the leadership of Milton Goldberg, who would later be rewarded with a position working for the National Alliance of Business (“the business voice for excellence in education”), the NCEE orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign that culminated in the release of the infamous A Nation at Risk report. In examining the language surrounding this report and the campaign to disseminate its message, I found many disturbing similarities between it and the language that we more commonly associate with the “security state”—the language surrounding the formation of U.S. Cold War propaganda. Five years after the release of A Nation at Risk, Goldberg admitted that the members of the NCEE “examined the methods that other distinguished national panels had used to generate public and governmental reactions” in order to “create a national audience for the Commission’s work.”'4 In listing the more publicly admissible lessons that they gleaned from examining those methods, Goldberg and James Harvey explained that “effective reports concentrated on essential messages, described them in clear and unmistakable prose, and Introduction XXxxi drew the public’s attention to the national consequences of continuing on with business as usual.”!° This statement bears a startling resemblance to Dean Acheson’s account of the rhetorical maneuvers that he and other “hard-liners” in and around the National Security Council deployed to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government” into believing that the Soviets were a military threat to the United States and to world security. Acheson recalls how: In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical “average American citizen” put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. . . . It seemed to us that ten minutes a day would be a high average. If this were anywhere near right, points to be understandable had to be clear. If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise (emphasis added).!6 Moreover, A Nation at Risk constituted a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the public that the poor quality of public schools threatened national (economic) security. A sense of crisis needed to be generated in order to legitimate the security measures (educational reforms) that were to follow. Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross begin by examining one of the most central of those measures—the accountability systems that arose alongside the high-stakes testing movement. As they so poignantly explain, in declaring that schools ought to be a certain way, the state and corporations cannot themselves make schools be that way. They “can only demand that others remake schools and the authority to carry out this mission is delegated, although not the authority to decide on the mission.” That mission, of course, has already been decided. It has been decided by the state and corporations. David Hursh and Camille Anne Martina (chapter 8) pick up on this theme in their discussion of how the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act extends governmental intervention into education by “steering from a distance.”?” Steering from a distance enables the state to avoid the appearance of removing education from the public sphere or intervening to assert direct control. These stealth tactics allow the state to very quietly eliminate the “temporary confusion” in the public mind concerning the role of schooling. It shifts people’s understanding of the purposes of education from the liberal to the vocational, from education’s intrinsic value to its instrumental value, and from qualitative to quantitative measures of success. Schools, Hursh and Martina contend, are decreasingly concerned with developing thoughtful informed citizens and more concerned with raising test scores and preparing economically productive employees. In chapters 9 and 10, Barry M. Franklin and Thomas C. Pedroni use case studies of urban school reform in Detroit and Milwaukee to explore the role XXXil Introduction that state theory can play in interpreting efforts at urban school reform during the last decades of the twentieth century when African-American politicians, parents, and community activists, intent on using the schools to advance both equality and the social mobility of black children, have increasingly consolidated their efforts to influence the direction of city politics and school reform. These chapters advance a theory of the state that both takes the principle of relative autonomy seriously and is consistent with more recent postmodern and critical conceptualizations of the power of the state as embodied not just in state actors and agencies, but also in discourses circulating through the larger cultural and social formation. Sheila L. Macrine returns our attention in chapter 11 to the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, exposing many of the false claims and recent scandals surrounding it. Most notably, she discusses how what was once proclaimed as the “Texas miracle” has devolved into the great “Texas scandal.” While former Houston school superintendent and current Secretary of Education Rod Paige once credited his strict accountability and standards policies for eliminating dropouts and raising test scores in Houston city schools, a number of credible whistle-blowers have recently stepped forward to report that many dropouts were never reported and that failure to report their status enabled the schools to artificially inflate their reported test scores. She also describes the scandalous process leading the National Reading Panel to recommend a narrow phonics-only approach to reading. State and local education agencies must now adopt this allegedly “scientifically proven” approach in order to qualify for federal funding to support their literacy programs. In chapter 12, Ken Saltman describes how the state’s “language of security” unites “educational policy reform with other U.S. foreign and domestic policies that foster repression and the amassing of corporate wealth and power at the expense of democracy.” Intimately tied to what he calls the “new” neoliberalism of the Bush administration, this discourse securitizes students in multiple ways, including the dual securitization of students: first, as commodities and, second, as investment opportunities. Ironically, Saltman argues, neoliberal policies have undermined the economic and social security of students by cutting crucial public support programs and replacing them with increasingly repressive security apparatuses that include zero tolerance policies, constant surveillance, and police presence. Dave Hill, in chapter 13, extends this critique of neoliberalism and its ties to the security state by exploring how the demands of the market have impacted educational policies and practices in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom. Hill’s analysis focuses on what he frames as capitalism’s twofold agenda in both countries. First, he claims that capitalism has an agenda for education—what services it wants schools to provide for the ben- efit of capitalism. Second, he examines the capitalist agenda im education. Introduction XXXili This section of Hill’s paper helps us recognize that the efforts at corporatization and privatization in U.S. schools described by Saltman extend more globally. In example after example, Hill illuminates how the security state’s agenda being played out in U.S. schools generates almost identical policies and consequences in England and Wales. John F. Welsh, in chapter 14, translates what those same themes have meant for institutions of higher education in the United States. According to Welsh, the security state is creating a new form of organization for higher education. First, the forces of privatization are shifting the costs of higher education to private sources, particularly students and philanthropy. Second, strategies and tactics of enforcement subordinate the traditional teaching, research, and service missions of the university to the needs and directives of the state and private capital. As Welsh points out, the War on Terror has greatly accelerated the pace that these patterns of enforcement have set in reshaping America’s colleges and universities. Julie Webber closes the book with a thoughtful interrogation of the very notion of the security state, plus an examination of the new role of the public school in reinforcing that security state. In Webber’s description, the security state is not a national security state, as has traditionally been held, but rather a security state that binds democratic students in allegiance (as subjects) to the shifting rhetorical concept of state forged by what James Der Derian has called the “media-infotainment network” of militarized authority structures. As she so eloquently states, “The security state is the last thread holding together democratic citizenship in the United States and elsewhere, and unless we can re-conceive of the mission of the public school, as educators, we will lose it to the security state completely.” Given the analyses of the security state offered in this book, readers may wonder how such a book could ever appear in a series committed to “Defending Public Education.” The answer is fairly simple. President George W. Bush’s signing of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 pushed us deeper into an educational Dark Ages that first cast its public shadow in 1983 with the release of the now infamous A Nation at Risk report. That shadow began to darken in the mid-1990s when high-stakes testing and accountability started sucking out what life may have ever existed within America’s schools. What drives these reforms may seem uncertain to many. My hypothesis challenges the notion that measures of high stakes and accountability have ever intended to “reform” public schools at all. Though predictions rarely appear in the social sciences, I believe that these measures, particularly as they are intensified under the No Child Left Behind Act, have been crafted to bring public education to an end. Honesty forces me to question whether public schools have ever served either the public or the value of education. In my earlier critiques, I have always insisted that the public has been the target, not the beneficiary, of XXXIV Introduction state-sponsored, compulsory schooling.'* Nevertheless, if my prediction holds up, once the No Child Left Behind Act succeeds in its destructive mission, the reincarnation of compulsory schooling will take a more virulent form. Schools will cease to function under the control of representative democracy, limited though it may be. By the time that the No Child Left Behind Act runs its course in 2013, public schools will have proved their inability to meet the imposed standards, leaving too many children “behind” in the process. Though the state will continue to organize a massive public subsidy (taxes) to support what goes on inside schools, what goes on inside schools will no longer be decided by democratic means. Furthermore, the shallow pretense of professionalism (teachers have never been significantly involved in educational policy decisions) that always surrounded the teaching field will evaporate. Teachers will formally become employees hired to follow the orders and scripted lesson plans of their managers. By 2014 or 2015, the task of managing compulsory schooling will be transferred to the hands of private corporations. In spite of my past criticisms of compulsory schooling, many of which will be rearticulated in this volume, my work with teachers tells me that there are many conscientious teachers (though their numbers are dwindling as the stultifying effects of high-stakes testing and the accountability movement drive them from the profession) who work extremely hard to help children to make honest sense of the world around them. Even the limited democratic governance structures of schooling and the limited professional respect given to teachers provided these most dedicated teachers opportunities to deliver creative and thought-provoking educational experiences that inspire young people to examine and maybe even take action to address the problems afflicting their lives, their communities, and the broader world around them. As I see it, for the past fifty years or more, the majority of Americans have been most dependent on public schools and the corporate media for the information and ideas that give shape to their understanding of the world. Such dependence holds major consequences for social life within any democratic society. For a society to be judged democratic, its members must meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes that impact public life. Effective decision making always requires free and unrestricted access to the fullest range of information, ideas, and opinions. If our schools have failed to fulfill their democratizing potential, we should not blame teachers. As state-subsidized and -managed institutions, schools will only ever be as democratic as the state that organizes them. And our state—despite all pretensions—has never been dutifully committed to the ideals of a democratic society. Nevertheless, multiple factors have contributed to conditions that have allowed many (though there are never enough) critical educators to conduct meaningful work with students. Once schools fall into corporate hands, those conditions will vanish. The ideas and information available to students will then Introduction XXXV pass through the same set of filters as the ideas and information that we receive through the corporate-owned media. Herein, of course, lies the ultimate purpose of the No Child Left Behind Act—to foreclose on the democratizing potential of public education by transferring the power to manage schools from the security state, where at least the dreaded public has some voice, directly to private corporations, where the public holds no voice. he ee Pa wil iginingsk, abreaikt t-te ier? ' port ee ne nag hem ee Eg Arye. a ce am <2. gohics” fase vio (am vy . a Di mr (AD wD Tey ee 8 > ry eae 4 bili i al) Ge” wl Oe “gl Mia ae | Cir hE (Mecey ods wal nT _ esr PS mae e at) SO ey pee: POL be “vu 4! h. oman yykete | ¥ gene ea] (ave te iia rie, tne, tend ek’ 7 “neh ; Ar i ki 8 aro be Sed nar © a Pre) ws Rs igh aoaneth nies es |De ee ‘ i - oy wrk A -* Pe » Oo a ee Cewes ‘ eer - =, a Dee = ie oh = NRG aaar Wan. etic hare? § SRK boas + ute a nae At T eee 2 i ae fi ela a | ¢ Mae? «a? 2 anh \ > eel » ee a wen 4 _ en Son id 2 Ling =: — ae © e-abi Ue 7 < ‘odeaaa “oa i Zi La ’ le deal gnagabt a o- Seley ee et AR ins iii <% fen ee ' + ‘ ty off an Wil Gow tae pibhit > > oth dhlp of, eae SS Sie ee ne e MO ot ot os GPU ayn haat Thee Teles saeco ek hp tes ee i —_= BE vVk a Cyr" mer Hie wi hs (meet a aly, re (alee! ee oa eat 1) |e) —— ely > ies < 4 7 Heke epi lac asin 7 tails A ea Be Latte i : vv; Cay ra j nd arial Rnb, My pa AVA Be. Se Sek”! c. , U0 Onan) 260! sFetinMan i Trecarte PF "a4 reals oe se Dani, RAM f mh salient a ay aa! ee liter aSye jaa pe GSS aang 2 = : es amaretto DoW Rite FSSA a ee TABLe Gre - Oe ar eae ee bry , tate ie eaeetareati _— aly ose. ) e< G priink os we 3 . ; ition 4 ae | pyis ee fae |b The Security State and the Traditional Role of Schools —_ ~ > ~~, _ >, = eve 7 = | >. : ie: sis Bre ond = a dnorind, 10 3k :a A ame *hh _ : : P | . en! 3S ; i ania i it rt - | : 1 5 T ] on ! i] a y tf f Lt ba ie ee ; ne i) 4 a RareTa te UTD i mys re 0 et 7: ih pe “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”: A Brief History of What Makes Schooling Compulsory Davip 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 talking about? NEO: The Matrix? MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what 2t is?! 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 democracy, 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 Education under the Security State 4 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 ideologies upon them. Practical education, then, is increasing awareness for individuals and groups of their laws, ideologies and institutions, and increasing their ability to shape these laws, ideologies, and institutions to their needs and interests.” As Reimer adds, “This definition of education need not exclude the teaching 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 critical awareness are compatible. It is not permissible, however, to give respect to priority over truth since this is to induce respect for falsehood.” 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.* 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 zs. We want to believe 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 creative interactions with others and with our environment or, as Ivan Illich puts it, “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.”° 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- trol2e 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.”” In Freire’s own words, “while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people’s vocation.”® 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 energies today seem to be moving further and further beyond our control. Feelings of impotence sink us into apathy, even cynicism, regarding our lives as public citizens. Despite all pretenses of our society deriving its essence from “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 institutions 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 suspect 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 zt 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, simultaneously 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, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.”? We have come to know this global virulence that spreads itself through global violence as the market. Like A.I. in 6 Education under the Security State The Matrix, it has spawned its own “race of machines” that includes institutions 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 subsistence. As Karl Polanyi reported in 1944, “The outstanding discovery of recent 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.”!° 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 involved 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 seventeenth century, “the commons” had been sufficiently depopulated and privatized 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 partnership of service and protection” to a matter of servicing “the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor.”!! 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 “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” vi as a ‘moral virtue’ and a ‘civic responsibility.’”!? “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.’”!4 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. ... Communitycenteredness and the absence of individualism are nowhere more strongly reflected 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 diminishes, the necessity for continued personal exertion.!* 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 philosophy and way of life. What is therefore required amounts in reality to social disorganization. Unhappiness and discontentment in the sense of wanting more than is obtainable at any moment is to be generated. The suffering and dislocation 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.!5 While Sadie offered his account of the steps necessary to impose the market 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.”!° 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.”!” 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 dislocation? 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 individualistic economic behavior (i.e., greed—the motivating force of the Education under the Security State 8 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 introduction of scarcity as the defining characteristic of the human condition and, therefore, the universal condition of social life everywhere.!® “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.”!? And from Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian point of view, Polanyi reports, “the task of the government was to increase want in order to make the physical sanction of hunger effective.”?° 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 Industrial Revolutions and beyond, the market’s historic unfolding gave rise to a merchant and commercial class who would gradually use their growing financial 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.?! 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.?? Eventually, the power of these “principal architects” of the market system would transform the feudal state into the modern nation-states of our current era—appendices to the market. This transformation entailed a separation 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, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” y “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.”?? Securing those permanent interests meant providing security to allow the market to function unimpeded 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 dependent 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 computer-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, flexible steel tubes tap into the legs, arms, and torsos of each “coppertop,” extracting 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 computergenerated dream world into the individual’s brain. This “neural-interactive simulation” programs the “coppertops” to believe that they are leading normal, everyday lives in late twentieth-century America. They have no idea that their real bodies lie docile in their pods. A.J. and the machines need humans to believe that they are alive and living “normal lives,” because even the illusion 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 reformulation of state power required by the market. In a very real sense, the market required that the state be reprogrammed. Where the power of the sovereign had once fixated itself on the repression of those internal and external forces that threatened its right to rule, the market now claimed sovereignty, transforming the state into an instrument, a machine for ensuring its security, its freedom to expand and dominate life in all its forms and dimensions. Education under the Security State 10 Like A.I. in The Matrix, the market demanded that the state secure access to isolated and docile bodies. As Michel Foucault explains, “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”?* 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 movements, 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 constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docilityutility, might be called ‘disciplines.’”*° 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.”° 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”?’ (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.”® 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 traditional role of schooling. In short, schooling conditions children for their “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” ll 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 benevolence. 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 presented 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 education. Suddenly, something that had previously been treated as a process became a thing that one could possess. Befitting the market’s logic of acquisitiveness, 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 beings, 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 usevalue 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 precondition of employment. The degree that the market literally became people’s only means for satisfying their wants and needs, these formal job requirements made compulsory school laws somewhat obsolete. Because the market itself began requiring participation in the ritual of schooling as a condition of employment, the connection between the compulsory nature of schooling, 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 scarcity” 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 12 Education under the Security State 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 provide those means—the means for achieving secular salvation, defined as the satisfaction of wants. But in order to access those means through participation 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 individual 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 possibly have to offer. At the most superficial level of analysis, the formal curriculum 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 utopian 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 “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 comparable to that standard? Again, children must never learn to view their attendance 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, therefore, 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 zdea of public education. Before unplugging Neo from the Matrix to show him “how deep the rabbit hole goes,” Morpheus presents 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 authentic democracy.”*? Education can and should be a “red pill” to awaken us to the realities of the world while empowering us to transform those realities as we deem necessary. Only then will education come to serve the public. Until then, it will continue to tavget us. ee, ee, aeBy i ? ry ar “a > al ie : : Cie td | a, is i j ULE. ie ,i oT ‘ =~ LPCaay s3 ni / a TH » By tind hi r eee I< eT wy iy tiie ee a) yt , ie e) 2e w nit itaerate ’ eas)heroes os tee ay usta bt an pre ph ahr ae eed ~ Hi.” shi Creat 190 VU ‘a —.: SO i ee mh a afe ae) eet eee pein fet Asay bees? stein Sys a nd A ey ee a Ss - Pi le ri a, wpe: ait be (lr sen. repay ° Wf aly ? aie OM PRY oe Pei. phe SAS gfit eeea BEN mae yt’ 2 SivBir Syteand eee sans Ms Sie Rate Lega Fh a Woh nie tthe prs xy fei dh 2D wvom © aia CM Hille er aha eRe wshie ihe al ASHES HV aide ee 7 leprae Whey 4 a ee ¥Sp wa il | ne Aa eonpeelt see hy weary, (G0 yhig ai JW yilp nie ay TY redues Sree. (nead WA ib oe he pry Ria ieee mane, a ih (Na? TK aah rah a 4 7 . , } i'd ta ie! ‘ ie Tee 6 Ties » nies Lai) O° G4 eS oh A = Hie oie Weel we . ots tate sail,is ueLabel ity os oe ese! r oer gull Jypies ‘= aw a oo kn beri iu i vt Prt, om linn I iil ee Dicial Bs,’ . beet oyéna va ed ‘<a «sales it a Gere ee: eM a p ‘i ar va r ond: ye (Se ere. | eeediv Wwhe a bat Woibieds ca Gees 3 et ay aT te na. at ih Rit reas hy ? | teint SAR te at SOA Pt ge he ee: ge OR a: Fs er The State, the Market, & (Mis )education Takis FOTOPOULOS DEMOCRACY, PAIDEIA, AND EDUCATION Culture, the Dominant Social Paradigm, and the Role of Education Education is a basic component of the formation of culture,! as well as of the socialization of the individual, that is, the process through which an individual internalizes the core values of the dominant social paradigm.” Therefore, culture in general and education in particular play a crucial role in the determination of individual and collective values. This is because as long as individuals live in a society, they are not just individuals but soczal individuals, subject to a process that socializes them and induces them to internalize the existing institutional framework and the dominant social paradigm. In this sense, people are not completely free to create their world but are conditioned by history, tradition, and culture. Still, this socialization process is broken—at almost all times, as far as a minority of the population is concerned, and in exceptional historical circumstances even with respect to the majority itself. In the latter case, a process is set in motion that usually ends with a change of the institutional structure of society and of the corresponding social paradigm. Societies, therefore, are not just “collections of individuals” but consist of social individuals, who are both free to create their world (in the sense that they can give birth to a new set of institutions and a corresponding social paradigm) and are created by the world (in the sense that Education under the Security State 16 they have to break with the dominant social paradigm in order to re-create the world). A fundamental precondition for the reproduction of every kind of society is the consistency between the dominant beliefs, ideas, and values, on the one hand, and the existing institutional framework on the other. In other words, unlike culture,? which has a broader scope and may express values and ideas that are not necessarily consistent with the dominant institutions (this has frequently been the case in arts and literature), the dominant social paradigm has to be consistent with the existing institutions for society to be reproducible. In fact, institutions are reproduced mainly through the internalization of the values consistent with them rather than through violence by the elites, which benefit from them. This has always been the case. The values, for instance, of the present system are the ones derived by its basic principles of organization: the principle of heteronomy and the principle of individualism, which are built into the institutions of the market economy and representative “democracy.” Such values involve inequity and effective oligarchy (even if the system calls itself a democracy), competition, and aggressiveness. Still, what is wrong is not the very fact of the internalization of some values but the internalization of such values that reproduce a heteronomous society and consequently heteronomous individuals. Paideza will play a crucial role in a future democratic society with respect to the internalization of its values, which would necessarily be the ones derived by its basic principles of organization: the principle of autonomy and the principle of community, which would be built into the institutions of an inclusive democracy.* Such values would include the values of equity and democracy, respect for the personality of each citizen, solidarity and mutual aid, and caring and shar- ing.® However, institutions alone are not sufficient to secure the nonemergence of informal elites. It is here that the crucial importance of education, which in a democratic society will take the form of paideia, arises. Paideia was, of course at the center of political philosophy in the past, from Plato to Rousseau. Still, this tradition, as the late Castoriadis® pointed out, died with the French Revolution. But the need to revisit paideia today in the context of the revival of democratic politics, after the collapse of socialist statism, is imperative. Education, Paideia, and Emancipatory Education Education is intrinsically linked to politics. In fact, the very meaning of education is defined by the prevailing meaning of politics. If politics is meant in its current usage, which is related to the present institutional framework of representative “democracy,” then politics takes the form of statecraft, which involves the administration of the state by an elite of professional The State, the Market, & (Mis)education 17 politicians who set the laws, supposedly representing the will of the people. This is the case of a heteronomous society in which the public space has been usurped by various elites that concentrate political and economic power in their hands. In a heteronomous society, education has a double aim. The first aim is to help in the internalization of the existing institutions and the values consistent with it (the dominant social paradigm). This is the aim of explicit school lessons like History, Introduction to Sociology, Economics, and so forth, but even more significantly—and insidiously—of schooling itself, which involves the values of obeyance and discipline (rather than selfdiscipline) and unquestioning of teaching. The second aim is to produce “efficient” citizens in the sense of citizens who have accumulated enough “technical knowledge”’ so that they could function competently in accordance with “society’s aims,” as laid down by the elites who control it. On the other hand, if politics is meant in its classical sense, that is, related to the institutional framework of a direct democracy in which people not only question laws but are also able to make their own laws, then we talk about an autonomous society.® This is a society in which the public space encompasses the entire citizen body, which in an inclusive democracy will make all effective decisions at the “macro” level, not only with respect to the political process but also with respect to the economic process, within an institutional framework of equal distribution of political and economic power among citizens. In such a society, we do not talk about education anymore but about the much broader concept of paideia. This is an allaround civic education that involves a lifelong process of character development, absorption of knowledge and skills, and—more significant—practicing a “participatory” kind of active citizenship, that is, a citizenship in which political activity is not seen as a means to an end but an end in itself. Pazdeia, therefore, has the overall aim of developing the capacity of all its members to participate in its reflective and deliberative activities, in other words, to educate citizens as citizens so that the public space could acquire a substantive content. In this sense, paideza involves the specific aims of civic schooling as well as personal training. Thus, paideia as civic schooling involves the development of citizens’ self-activity by using their very self-activity as a means of internalizing the democratic institutions and the values consistent with them. The aim, therefore, is to create responsible individuals who have internalized both the necessity of laws and the possibility of putting the laws into question, that is, individuals capable of interrogation, reflectiveness, and deliberation. This process should start from an early age through the creation of educational public spaces that will have nothing to do with present schools, at which children will be brought up to internalize and, therefore, to accept fully the democratic institutions and the values implied by the fundamental principles of organization of society: autonomy and community. Paideia as personal training involves the development of the capacity to learn rather than to teach particular things, so that individuals become Education under the Security State 18 autonomous, that is, capable of self-reflective activity and deliberation. A process of conveying knowledge is of course also involved, but this assumes more the form of involvement in actual life and the multitude of human activities related to it, as well as a guided tour to scientific, industrial, and practical knowledge rather than teaching, as it is simply a step in the process of developing the child’s capacities for learning, discovering, and inventing. Finally, we may talk about emancipatory education as the link between present education and paideia. Emancipatory education is intrinsically linked to transitional politics, or the politics that will lead us from the heteronomous politics and society of the present to the autonomous politics and society of the future. The aim of emancipatory education is to give an answer to the “riddle of politics” described by Castoriadis,? which is how to produce autonomous (that is, capable of self-reflective activity) human beings within a heteronomous society and, beyond that, in the paradoxical situation of educating human beings to accede to autonomy while—or in spite of—teaching them to absorb and internalize existing institutions. Not less than the breaking of the socialization process, which will open the way to an autonomous society, is involved here. The proposed answer to this riddle by this essay is to help the collectivity, within the context of the transitional strategy, to create the institutions that, when internalized by the individuals, will enhance their capacity for becoming autonomous. Therefore, autonomy politics (the kind of politics implied by a transitional strategy toward a democratic society!°), emancipatory education, and paideia form an inseparable whole through the internal dynamic that leads from the politics of autonomy and emancipatory education to an autonomous society and pazdeza. It is therefore clear that, as pazdeia is only feasible within the framework of a genuine democracy, an emancipatory education is inconceivable outside a democratic movement fighting for such a society. EDUCATION IN MODERNITY The Shift to Modernity The rise of the present system of education has its roots in the nationstate, which did not start to develop until the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The idea of a “nation” was unknown in antiquity and even in the Middle Ages. Although in the territorial regnum of the Middle Ages some monarchies did indeed have their national territories and made claims to sovereign power within them, these monarchies were just part of European Christendom, so there was little of a national state or, indeed, of any sort of state. In fact, it was not until the end of the Middle Ages, and specifically in the seventeenth century, that the present form of the nation-state emerged. The nation-state, even in its early absolutist form, extended its control beyond the political and into the religious (with the creation of the established The State, the Market, &® (Mis)education 19 church) and educational fields, as well as to almost all other aspects of human life. As the state bureaucracy was expanding, the need for well-educated civil servants was significant, and universities of the time came to be more and more training institutions for higher civil servants whereas, at the same time, elementary education for the middle classes developed further, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A basic distinguishing characteristic of premodern schools and universities compared to modern ones was that, whereas up to the seventeenth century the aim of education was conceived as a religious one, in the eighteenh century, the ideas of secular- ism and progress, which constituted the fundamental components of the emerging new dominant social paradigm, began to prevail. As I have attempted to show elsewhere,!! the two main institutions that distinguish premodern society from modern society are, first, the system of the market economy and, second, representative “democracy,” which are also the ultimate causes for the present concentration of economic and political power and, consequently, for the present multidimensional crisis. In this, problematic, industrial production constituted only the necessary condition for the shift to modern society. The sufficient condition was the parallel introduction— through decisive state help—of the system of the market economy that replaced the (socially controlled) local markets that existed for thousands of years before. In both cases, it was the emergence of the nation-state that played a crucial role in creating the conditions for the “nationalization” of markets (i.e., their delocalization), as well as in freeing them from effective social control— the two essential preconditions of marketization. Furthermore, it was the same development, the rise of the nation-state that developed from its early absolutist form at the end of the Middle Ages into the present “democratic” form, which led to the establishment of the political complement of the market economy: representative democracy. The shift to modernity, therefore, represented in more than one way a break with the past. The new economic and political institutions in the form of the market economy and representative democracy, as well as the parallel rise of industrialism, marked a systemic change. This change was inescapably accompanied by a corresponding change in the dominant social paradigm. In premodern societies, the dominant social paradigms were characterized by mainly religious ideas and corresponding values about hierarchies, although of course there were exceptions, like the Athenian democracy. On the other hand, the dominant social paradigm of modernity is dominated by market values and the idea of progress, growth, and rational secularism. In fact, the flourishing of science in modernity has played an important ideological role in objectively justifying the growth economy—a role that has been put under severe strain in neoliberal modernity by the credibility crisis of science. Thus, just as religion played an important part in justifying feudal hierarchy, so has science, particularly social science, played a crucial role 20 Education under the Security State in justifying the modern hierarchical society. In fact, from the moment science replaced religion as the dominant worldview, it had objectively justified the growth economy, both in its capitalist and socialist forms. However, although the fundamental institutions that characterize modernity and the main tenets of the dominant social paradigm have remained essentially unchanged since the emergence of modernity more than two centuries ago (something that renders as a myth the idea of postmodernity, into which humanity supposedly has entered in the last three decades or so), there have, nevertheless, been some significant nonsystemic changes within this period that could usefully be classified as the three main phases that modernity took since the establishment of the system of the market economy: liberal modernity (middle to the end of the nineteenth century), which after the First World War and the 1929 crash led to statist modernity (mid-1930s to mid-1970s), and finally to today’s neoliberal modernity (mid-1970s to date). The various forms of modernity have created their own dominant social paradigms that, in effect, constitute subparadigms of the main paradigm, as they all share a fundamental characteristic: the idea of the separation of society from the economy and polity as expressed by the market economy and representative democracy (with the exception of Soviet statism, in which this separation was effected through central planning and Soviet “democracy”). On top of this main characteristic, all forms of modernity share, with some variations, the themes of reason, critical thought, and economic growth. As one could expect, the nonsystemic changes involved in the various forms of modernity and the corresponding subparadigmatic changes had significant repercussions on the nature, content, and form of education, to which I now turn. Education in Liberal Modernity During the period of liberal modernity, which barely lasted half a century, between the 1830s and the 1880s, the grow-or-die dynamic of the market economy led to an increasing internationalization of it, which was accompanied by the first systematic attempt of the economic elites to establish a purely liberal internationalized market economy in the sense of free trade, a “flexible” labor market and a fixed exchange rates system (Gold Standard)— an attempt that, as I have tried to show elsewhere,!? was bound to fail given the lack of the objective conditions for its success and in particular the fact that markets were dominated by national-based capital, a fact that led to two world wars with the main aim to redivide them. The rise of the system of the market/growth economy in this period created the need to expand the number of pupils/students in all stages of education: at the primary level, because the factory system that flourished after the Industrial Revolution required an elementary level of literacy; at the sec- The State, the Market, &% (Mis)education pA| ondary level, because the factory system led to the development of various specializations that required further specialized training; and, finally, at the tertiary level, because the rapid scientific developments of the era required an expansion of the role of universities to train not just civil servants, as before, but also people who would be able to be involved in applied research on new methods of production, both as regards its physical and its administrative /organizational aspects. All these developments had significant repercussions on education, one of the most significant ones being the gradual acceptance of the view that education ought to be the responsibility of the state. Countries such as France and Germany began the establishment of public educational systems early in the nineteenth century. However, this trend was in contradiction to the dominant social (sub)paradigm of liberal modernity. This paradigm was characterized by the belief in a mechanistic model of science, objective truth, as well as some themes from economic liberalism, such as laissez-faire and mini- mization of social controls over markets for the protection of labor. This is why countries such as Great Britain and the United States, in which the dominant social paradigm has been better internalized, hesitated longer before allowing the government to intervene in educational affairs. The prevailing view among the elites of these countries was that “free schools” were to be provided only for the children of the lowest social groups, if at all, whereas general taxation (which was the only adequate way to provide education for all) was rejected. Still, when liberal modernity collapsed at the end of the nineteenth century, for the reasons mentioned above, governments across Europe and the United States “legislated to limit the workings of laissez-faire—first by inspecting factories and offering minimal standards of education and later by providing subsistence income for the old and out of work.”!? As a result, by the beginning of the twentieth century, social legislation of some sort was in place in almost every advanced market economy.'* However, it was not only the access to education that changed during the nineteenth century. The nature of education changed as well, as the new social and economic changes also called upon the schools, public and private, to broaden their aims and curricula. Schools were expected not only to promote literacy, mental discipline, and good moral character but also to help prepare children for citizenship, for jobs, and for individual development and success. In other words, schools and educational institutions in general were expected to help in the internalization of the existing institutions and the values consistent with it (i.e., the dominant social paradigm), on top of producing “efficient” citizens in the sense of citizens who have accumulated enough technical knowledge so that they could function competently in accordance with society’s aims, as laid down by the elites who control it. Similarly, the practice of dividing children into grades or classes according to their ages—a practice that began in eighteenth-century Germany—was to spread everywhere as schools grew larger. Massive Bp) Education under the Security State schooling, which was to characterize the rest of modernity up to date, was set in motion. Statist Modernity, Education, and Social Mobility Statist modernity took different forms in the East (namely the regimes of Eastern Europe, China, and other countries) and the West. Thus, in the East,!5 for the first time in modern times, a “systemic” attempt was made to reverse the marketization process and to create a completely different form of modernity from the liberal or the social democratic one—in a sense, another version of liberal modernity. This form of statism, backed by Marxist ideology, attempted to minimize the role of the market mechanism in the allocation of resources and replace it with a central planning mechanism. On the other hand, in the West,!° statism took a social-democratic form and was backed by Keynesian policies, which involved active state control of the economy and extensive interference with the self-regulating mechanism of the market to secure full employment, a better distribution of income, and economic growth. A precursor of this form of statism emerged in the interwar period, but it reached its peak in the period following the Second World War, when Keynesian policies were adopted by governing parties of all persuasions in the era of the social democratic consensus, up to the mid-1970s. This was a consensus involving both conservative and social democratic parties, which were committed to active state intervention with the aim of de- termining the overall level of economic activity, so that a number of social democratic objectives could be achieved (full employment, welfare state, educational opportunities for all, better distribution of income, etc.). However, statist modernity, in both its social democratic and Soviet versions, shared the fundamental element of liberal modernity, namely, the formal separation of society from the economy and the state. The basic difference between the liberal and statist forms of modernity concerned the means through which this separation was achieved. Thus, in liberal modernity, this was achieved through representative “democracy” and the market mechanism, whereas in statist modernity, this separation was achieved either through representative “democracy” and a modified version of the market mechanism (Western social democracy), or, alternatively, through soviet “democracy” and central planning (Soviet statism). Furthermore, both the liberal and the statist forms of modernity shared a common growth ide- ology based on the Enlightenment idea of progress—an idea that played a crucial role in the development of the two types of “growth economy”: the “capitalist” and the “socialist” growth economy.!” It is therefore obvious that although the growth economy is the offspring of the dynamic of the market economy, the two concepts still are not identical, since it is possible to have a growth economy that is not also a market economy—notably the case of “actually existing socialism.” However, the Western form of statist mo- The State, the Market, ( (Mis)education 23 dernity collapsed in the 1970s when the growing internationalization of the market economy, the inevitable result of its grow-or-die dynamic, became incompatible with statism. The Eastern form of statist modernity collapsed a decade or so later because of the growing incompatibility between, on the one hand, the requirements of an “efficient” growth economy and, on the other, the institutional arrangements (particularly centralized planning and party democracy), which had been introduced in the countries of “actually existing socialism” in accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology.!8 The dominant (sub)paradigm in the statist period still features the same characteristics of liberal modernity involving a belief in objective truth and (a less mechanistic) science, but includes also certain elements of the socialist paradigm and particularly statism, in the form of Soviet statism based on Marxism-Leninism in the East and a social democratic statism based on Keynesianism in the West. Both types of statism attempted to influence the education process, although Soviet governments, particularly in the early days after the 1917 Revolution, had much wider aims than Western social democrats, who mainly aimed at widening the access to education in order to improve social mobility. Thus, the Soviets, immediately after the revolution, introduced free and compulsory general and polytechnical education up to the age of seventeen, preschool education to assist in the emancipation of women, the opening of the universities and other higher institutions to the working class, and even a form of student-self management. On top of this, a basic aim of education was decreed to be the internalization of the new regime’s values. No wonder that, as soon as a year after the revolution, the Soviet government had ordered by decree the abolition of religious teaching in favor of atheistic education. As regards the social democrats, their main achievement was the welfare state, which represented a conscious effort to check the side effects of the market economy, as far as covering basic needs (health, education, social security) was concerned. An important characteristic of the ideology of the welfare state was that its financing (including education) was supposed to come from general taxation. Furthermore, the progressive nature of the tax system, which was generalized during this period, secured that the higher income groups will take the lion’s share of this financing, improving thereby the highly unequal pattern of income distribution that a market economy creates. However, the expansion of education opportunities was not simply necessitated by ideological reasons. Even more important was the postwar economic boom that required a vast expansion of the labor base, with women and sometimes immigrants filling the gaps. On top of this, the incessant increase in the division of labor, changes in production methods and organization, as well as revolutionary changes in information technology required a growing number of highly skilled personnel, scientists, high-level professionals, and others. As a result of these trends, the number of universities in 24 Education under the Security State many countries doubled or trebled between 1950 and 1970, whereas technical colleges, as well as part-time and evening courses, spread rapidly, promoting adult education at all levels. Still, despite the fact that massive education flourished in this period, the effects of this rapid growth of education opportunities on social mobility has been insignificant. If we take as our example Britain, in which a bold social democratic experiment was pursued in the postwar period to change social mobility through education—a policy pursued (in various degrees) by both labor and conservative governments—the results were minimal. Thus, an extensive study by three prominent British academics concluded that the postwar expansion of education opportunities brought Britain no nearer meritocracy or equality of opportunity.!? Another study, also carried out during the period of social democratic consensus, concluded that despite the “propitious” circumstances, “no significant reduction in class inequality has in fact been achieved”?°—a situation that has worsened in today’s neoliberal modernity in which, as Goldthorpe showed, the chances of manual workers’ sons not doing anything but manual work have risen. But, if the results of social democratic education policies on social mobility and social change in general have been so meager, one could easily imagine the effects of neoliberal policies to which I now turn. Neoliberal Modernity and the Privatization of Education The emergence of neoliberal internationalization was a monumental event that implied the end of the social democratic consensus that marked the early postwar period. The market economy’s grow-or-die dynamic and, in particular, the emergence and continuous expansion of transnational corporations’ (TNC) and the parallel development of the Eurodollar market, which led to the present neoliberal form of modernity, were the main developments that induced the economic elites to open and liberalize the markets. In other words, these elites mostly institutionalized (rather than created) the present form of the internationalized market economy. An important characteristic of the neoliberal form of modernity is the emergence of a new “transnational elite,”*! which draws its power (economic, political, or generally social power) by operating at the transnational level— a fact that implies that it does not express, solely or even primarily, the interests of a particular nation-state. This elite consists of the transnational economic elites (TNC executives and their local affiliates), the transnational political elites, that is, the globalizing bureaucrats and politicians who may be based either in major international organizations or in the state machines of the main market economies, and, finally, the transnational professional elites, whose members play a dominant role in the various international foundations, think tanks, research departments of major international universities, the mass media, and so on. The main aim of the transnational elite, which The State, the Market, & (Mis)education 25 today controls the internationalized market economy, is the maximization of the role of the market and the minimization of any effective social controls over it for the protection of labor or the environment, so that maximum “efficiency” (defined in narrow techno-economic terms) and profitability may be secured. Neoliberal modernity is characterized by the emergence of a new social (sub)paradigm, which tends to become dominant, the so-called “postmodern” paradigm. The main elements of the neoliberal paradigm are, first, a critique of progress (but not of growth itself), of mechanistic and deterministic science (but usually not of science itself) and of objective truth, and, second, the adoption of some neoliberal themes such as the minimization of social controls over markets, the replacement of the welfare state by safety nets, and the maximization of the role of the private sector in the economy. Regarding scientific research and education, neoliberal modernity implies the effectual privatization of them. As a result, the nonneutral character of science has become more obvious than ever before, following the “privatization” of scientific research and the scaling down of the state sector in general and state spending in particular.?” As Stephanie Pain, an associate editor of New Scientist (not exactly a radical journal) stresses, science and big business have developed ever closer links lately: “Where research was once mostly neutral, it now has an array of paymasters to please. In place of impartiality, research results are being discreetly managed and massaged, or even locked away if they don’t serve the right interests. Patronage rarely comes without strings attached.”?° Also, regarding education in general, as Castoriadis pointed out,”* for most educators it has become a bread-winning chore, and for those at the other end of education, a question of obtaining a piece of paper (a diploma) that will allow one to exercise a profession (if one finds work)—the royal road of privatization, which one may enrich by indulging in one or several personal crazes. The effects of the neoliberal privatization of education on access to education in general and social mobility in particular are predictable. Thus, regarding the former, it is not surprising that, as a result of increasing poverty and inequality in neoliberal modernity, the reading and writing skills of Britain’s young people are worse than they were before the First World War. A recent study found that 15 percent of people age fifteen to twenty-one are “functionally illiterate,” whereas in 1912, school inspectors reported that only 2 percent of young people were unable to read or write.”° Similarly, as regards the access to higher education, the UK General Household Survey of 1993 showed that, as the education editor of the London Times pointed out, “although the number of youngsters obtaining qualifications is growing rapidly, the statistics show that a child’s socio-economic background is still the most important factor in deciding who obtains the best higher education. Thus, according to these data, the son of a professional man was even 26 Education under the Security State more likely to go to university in the early 1990s than one from the same background in the early 1960s (33 percent versus 29 percent). Finally, an indication of the marginal improvement to access to education achieved by social democracy is the fact that, whereas at the end of the 1950s the percent of the sons of unskilled workers going to university was too small to register, by the early 1990s, this percentage has gone up to 4 percent!”2° Needless to say, the situation has worsened further since then. The difference between the proportion of professionals and unskilled going to university has widened ten points during the nineties, and by the end of this decade fewer than one in six children from the bottom rung are going to university compared with nearly three-quarters of the top.?7 No wonder, therefore, that social mobility in Britain has declined in neoliberal modernity. This is because while the working class has declined in size following neoliberal globalization, the middle classes have not been displaced. As a result, over the twentieth century, the trapdoor beneath the upper social groups became less and less the worry it was in the nineteenthcentury Victorian society and as sociologist Peter Saunders?® put it, the safeguards against failure enjoyed by dull middle-class children are presently strengthening. Despite, therefore, a small increase in social mobility for children from lower social strata, at the same time, as a team led by Stephen Machin of University College London has found, more children from higherclass backgrounds have remained in the same social class as their parents. This could explain the paradox that the amount of “equality of opportunity” may actually have fallen in recent years, despite the expansion of educational op- portunity.”? Another study by Abigail McKnight*° of the University of Warwick confirms this. Thus, whereas between 1977 and 1983, a full 39 percent of workers in the bottom quarter of the earnings distribution had progressed into the top half by 1983, in the period between 1991 and 1997, that had dropped to 26 percent. Similar trends are noted everywhere, given the universalization of neoliberal modernity. Predictably, the effects are even worse in the South, where education was seen by the newly liberated from their colonial-ties nations as both an instrument of national development and a means of crossing national and cultural barriers. No wonder that, worldwide, 125 million children are not attending school today (two-thirds of them girls) despite a decade of promises at UN conferences to get every child in the world into a classroom. Thus, as cash-strapped governments have cut education budgets, forcing schools to charge fees, “schools have become little more than child-minding centers.”*! CONCLUSION In conclusion, in exactly the same way as the present neoliberal form of the internationalized market economy represents a synthesis of the liberal The State, the Market, ¢ (Mis)education 27 with the statist forms of it, neoliberal education expresses a similar synthesis of the liberal and statist types of education that I described above. Thus, the present neoliberal form of the market economy may be seen as completing the cycle that started in the nineteenth century when a liberal version of it was attempted. So, after the collapse of the first attempt to introduce a selfregulating economic system at that time, a new synthesis is attempted today. The new synthesis aims to avoid the extremes of pure liberalism by combining essentially self-regulating markets with various types of safety nets and controls, which secure the privileged position primarily of the overclass and, secondarily, that of the two-thirds (or less!) of society, as well as the mere survival of the underclass, without affecting the self-regulation process in its essentials. Therefore, the security state still has a significant role to play today, not only in securing, through its monopoly of violence, the market economy framework but also in maintaining the infrastructure for the smooth functioning of the neoliberal economy. Similarly, free schooling and its financing through general taxation may be part of the safety nets being built at the moment for the underclass; however, the privileged social classes, including the vast middle classes in the North, should safely be expected to pay for the education of their children, particularly in higher education, where one government after another introduces at the moment various schemes of fees-based education financed by student loans, which, ultimately, aim at integrating the youth into the existing system at the very first stages of their adult lives. ig Shekel ab - Di pete lint Rapp ~~ sestre tage ePil eich Lge Qtule eeghiie ysl pe isek vhegiyy eee RPsp ua nt Sa Adelie: ye Ted! wetey Duh n coe ag vat a gil sa et atcha? ee Mdrtmadiey. piper Qa Ree: er “TTR eee hoa wes trill Hee oe ee — rd a ie Ta | Me ie Whipity pM > ; { eee Ria sea s weteens herein sapped, RSPeocr aNcit: a om ey fin eee Fs) ee uw ita f i lect i tt aca alaiey Alera Bio ints,Selate Thad ilar bh te bovirrtic iy eradon nmi agatea (SiR eS carr Shelual ha a > a. 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Wath). 2 ‘sii ~ ~_i| cyln tae : Rhy erie eR ale Ta vee bat "4 a Pot ta j or , oe ve nip‘ra he ! Security Threats DEE Qiery What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic?: Understanding “The Crisis of Democracy” Davip A. GABBARD When we are children, teachers and textbooks tell us that being American makes us special. They tell us that we are part of some great historical experiment known as democracy. They tell us the tale of George Washington and the cherry tree to condition us to believe that our leaders do not tell lies. They tell us Thanksgiving stories to give us the opportunity to count our blessings that we born in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We later learn about the Declaration of Independence and our collective belief that “all men are created equal.” They teach us about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that secure our rights and our freedoms. They even have us write mock letters to our representatives in government to help us understand how our political process—“of the people, for the people, and by the people”—operates. Most of what we learn about history, however, revolves around war—the wars that our government has waged to preserve our freedoms and our liberties at home and to extend or protect those same freedoms and liberties for others threatened by tyranny abroad. They also tell us that America is a land of opportunity—equal opportunity—and that our education is the key to this opportunity. So, we’d better learn all these lessons well if we want to grow up to be rich and famous like the people we read about in our history and social studies books. These are among the many things they teach us when we are children. So, why are we called “childish,” “naive,” or “idealistic” when we actually attempt to exercise those liberties and rights later in our lives? Aren’t we 29) Education under the Security State simply trying to become everything that they told us we were? Where did those ideals come from? If we persist in our efforts to exercise our liberties and freedoms to try and bring greater social, economic, and political equality into our world, especially if we try to organize ourselves in doing so, we are called “radical and, oddly, “un-American.” Even more oddly, when running their campaigns for political office, the same people who call us radical and un-American draw upon those same ideals to perfume their rhetoric to win our hearts and votes. It makes us wince when we hear them invoke those ideals and values, be- cause we don’t like being treated like children. And if we don’t like being treated like children, why do we treat children that way? We don’t want to be treated like children because it presupposes a relationship of paternalistic dependency that denies our autonomy, our capacity to arrive at our own independent understandings of the world that lies at the very heart of freedom. We feel disrespected by such treatment because we sense it flows from an underlying assumption of our ignorance, naiveté, even stupidity. But how can the state treat us as ignorant, naive, or stupid when our actions flow from the same set of ideals and values ascribed to the state by the state’s own system of compulsory schooling? We can only conclude that the state intends to cultivate our ignorance, naiveté, and stupidity when it uses schools to teach us, as children, that America values such ideals as democracy, freedom, and equality. As John Milton observed in 1642, “Those who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindnesse.”? In The Republic, famed Greek philosopher Plato provided a blueprint for the paternalistic dependency endemic to market democracies such our own. While Max Weber defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory,”* Plato defined his republic as “a human community that claims the monopoly of both truth (because of the superior wisdom and intelligence of his guardian class that justifies their right to govern) and the legitimate use of lies.” “Lay persons,” he says, “have no business lying.” Like doctors in charge of the health of the republic, however, the guardians recognize that there are times when “lies are useful... as a kind of medicine or remedy. Only the rulers of the city—and no others—may tell lies. And their lies, whether directed to enemies or citizens, will be legitimate only if their purpose is to serve the public interest.”¢ The most important of these useful lies serve the public interest by, first, endearing the population to the same love of country that our present system seeks to instill in us by fabricating illusions such as the Pledge of Allegiance and its declaration of “liberty and justice for all.” As Plato explains, What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic? 33 We spoke some time ago of useful lies. Could we contrive one now, a noble lie that might be believed by the rulers themselves, or at least by the rest of the city. ..- I shall try to persuade first the rulers, then the soldiers, and then the rest of the people that all the training and education they have received from us are actually products of their own imaginations, just the way it is with a dream. In reality, they were the whole time deep within the earth being given form and feature, and the same with their weapons and other accouterments. When the process was complete, they were all delivered up to the surface by their mother earth, whence it comes that they care for their land as if it were mother and nurse and feel bound to defend it from any attack. Likewise do they regard their fellow citizens as brothers born of the same soil. While all citizens were to feel a strong sense of maternal love of their country and brotherly love for the fellow citizens, Plato had to rationalize the disparities in wealth and power that people would experience in the real world with an extension of this first lie. We will tell them that although they are all brothers, god differentiated those qualified to rule by mixing in gold at their birth. Hence, they are most to be honored. The auxiliaries he compounded with silver, and the craftsman and farmers with iron and brass.* Gold symbolized the capacity for pure reason that enabled the guardians to determine “the good” or the “public interest” of the republic. Hence, the guardians derived their right to rule from the superiority of their intelligence. The auxiliaries did not possess the capacity for pure reason but possessed a devotion to serving the public interest. Hence, they could be trusted to enforce the decisions made by the golden class of guardians. Most people (“craftsmen and farmers”) were compounded with iron and brass—the least pure of the metals. The passions of these people undermined their capacity for pure reason as well as devotion to the common good. Like children, they could think only of themselves and their own selfish appetites. We must remember that Plato did not believe any of this to be true. He knew it was a lie, but he did regard it as a useful lie—a lie told, possibly even believed, by the guardians—to serve the “public interest” in the sense that it rationalized the guardian class’s right to rule. Jt also granted the state an ideology to ensure social stability. Regardless of the inequalities in wealth and power that one experienced in the republic, this “myth of the metals” would damper their anger by socializing them to believe that their position in the hierarchy reflected their divinely ordained predispositions (gold, silver, or bronze). When asked how to plant and perpetuate this lie in the minds of people, Plato proposed that a system of education could function as “some kind of ingenious lottery,” designed to ensure that the “inferior ones will blame their lot on bad luck and not on the rulers.”° 34 Education under the Security State From this lie flowed a further lie that the guardians must profess in the public interest. Namely, he argued, the guardians must “profess belief in a prophecy of ruin for the city ifa brass or iron man should come to rule it.”° Moreover, we can recognize in The Republic the ideological origins of the paternalistic dependency characteristic of modern market democracies. Those who govern the state—the decision makers—must conceive themselves as intellectually superior to those whom they govern. Those whom they govern, in turn, should learn to respect and never question the decisions of the state, just like children must learn to listen to their parents because of their superior knowledge and wisdom. Furthermore, those who govern must come to recognize the necessity of telling “useful lies” when the “public interest”— as they perceive it—is at stake. The same sentiments resurfaced during the English revolution in the seventeenth century, which one historian characterized as “the first great outburst of democratic thought in history.”” During this period, elements within the general population demanded a voice in shaping state policies, favoring universal education, guaranteed health care, and a broader democratization of the law. The state and its supporters viewed this voice as preaching “a seditious doctrine to the people” and aimed “to the rascal multitude... against all men of best quality in the kingdom, to draw them into associations and combinations with one another. . . against all lords, gentry, ministers, lawyers, rich and peaceable men.” As historian Clement Walker warned, “There can be no form of government without its proper mysteries”— mysteries that must be “concealed” from the common folk: “Ignorance and admiration arising from ignorance, are the parents of civil devotion and obedience.” The radical democrats had “cast all the mysteries and secrets of government .. . before the vulgar (like pearls before swine),” he continued, and had “made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule.”® The idea that people should be governed by people like themselves who know and respond to their wants has always appalled the guardians (“men of best quality”). The latter have been willing, writes Noam Chomsky, “to grant the people rights, but within reason, and on the principle that ‘when we mention the people, we do not mean the confused promiscuous body of the people.’” After the democrats had been defeated, John Locke (another of the “great thinkers of western civilization” so glorified for his contributions to “democratic thought” and the foundations of our institutions) commented that “day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids” must be told what to believe; “The greatest part cannot know and therefore they must believe.”? Although we do learn in school that “the founders” wrote our Constitution to protect the minority from the majority, schools seldom if ever refer us to the line where this idea came from. To do so would shed too much light on the reality of which minority the framers wrote the Constitution to What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic? a5 protect. In the words of James Madison, “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.”!° The interests of the opulent constitute “the permanent interests of the country,” and the state must construct measures to protect them. This describes the essence of the security state. The well-worn phrase “We, the people” was never meant to include the majority of the people. Most of the people, the “rascal multitude,” being “compounded of iron and brass” cannot know and, therefore, must believe the “useful lies” of those who govern us, “all the mysteries and secrets of government” that will keep us in our place so that we will not threaten “the permanent interests of the country”—the “minority of the opulent.” Moreover, to fulfill its role in providing security for the market and those who control it, the state has always needed its “useful lies,” its “mysteries,” its Matrix. As described by the prophetic figure of Morpheus in the popular film of the same name, the Matrix “is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”!! The truth that has thus far eluded the film’s protagonist—Neo—is that he is “a slave.” “Like everyone else,” explains Morpheus, you were born into bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.” Morpheus later describes the nature of his bondage, explaining how “at some point in the early twentyfirst 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.IJ.”—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. “Throughout human history,” Morpheus continues, “we have been dependent 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 Btus of body heat.” What, then, is the Matrix? As Morpheus states, the Matrix is “control. . . .The Matrix is a computer-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 and to facilitate waste treatment. 36 Education under the Security State We see endless fields and towers of these human batteries in each of the three films. Within each pod, flexible steel tubes tap into the legs, arms, and torsos of each “coppertop,” extracting 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 normal, 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 illusion that they are carrying out everyday activities, making decisions, causes the brain to “fire” and create bioelectricity for harvesting by the machines. In our own world, the end of the Cold War witnessed a similar “celebra- tion” and “blinding inebriation of hubris.” As the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite empire signaled the death of the only functioning alternative, the “permanent interests” of our nation “marveled at the magnificence of the market,” interpreting the death of Soviet-style socialism as “the end of history.” The market constitutes the artificial intelligence that programs the machinery of the state. Within the logic of the market, human beings only possess value insofar as they offer service to the market. This constitutes our use-value. ; We have a metaphor in our society that communicates this idea perfectly— human resources. This metaphor implicitly states that we only hold value to the institution that employs us to the extent that we are useful to that institution. A similar phrase has long held dominance in shaping educational policies—human capital. In this formulation, human beings represent commodities, valuable only to the extent that they contribute to the production of other commodities. The market defines “the permanent interests” of our nation and all of our most basic social relationships, hence, we can say that it functions as a form of artificial intelligence that programs our dominant institutions conceptualized as social machinery (e.g., the state and schools). In teaching us that being American makes us special—part of some great historical experiment known as democracy here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” where our leaders do not tell lies—the social machinery of compulsory schooling plugs us into our own Matrix. Just as the enclosure movement associated with the English Agrarian Revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cut people and cultures off from the physical space of the commons, schooling effects its own system of enclosure. Schooling cuts people and learning off from the social space of the world in which they live. Under the regime of compulsory schooling, people no longer learn or gain recognized competence from living and interacting with the world directly. They may only learn about the world while enclosed in this special space known as school. Schools, in this sense, function in a manner What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic? oy similar to the pods in the Matrix. In the Matrix, the individual coppertop’s energies are tapped and fed into the machine world from birth. In school, the coppertop’s energies are being developed for future extraction. In either case, however, the isolation of the space from “the real world” allows schools to plug the coppertops into whatever system of “useful lies” or “mysteries” the state deems necessary to ensure loyalty and obedience. Isolation from the real world fosters the paternalistic dependence necessary to wed people’s emotions to the social machinery of the state. The innocence and naiveté of children presents an advantage to the state, for it renders them susceptible to emotional manipulations, “mysteries of government,” and “useful lies.” All of this was recognized early in the history of the security state, long before compulsory school laws became widespread. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, promoted the idea of mass schooling for the purpose of converting men into “republican machines. This must be done,” Rush argued, “if we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” To create these republican machines, he contended that “our pupil [must] be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.” To teach these habits, Rush wanted the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible. The government of schools like the government of private families should be arbitrary, that it may not be severe. By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age.” In The Matrix, Morpheus explains to Neo that many of the minds plugged into the Matrix were not ready to be unplugged. “Many of them,” he says, “are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will die to protect it.” This constituted the ultimate aim of Rush’s proposed model of schooling. By denying children their will, you prolong their dependence, particularly their dependence on others for their understanding of the world in which they live. That intellectual dependence becomes all the more heinous when it plugs people into a system of “useful lies” and “mysteries of government.” Education in this form represents nothing short of a system of imposed ignorance. Thomas Jefferson recognized this in formulating his own ideas about the form of education proper to a democratic society. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a civilization,” wrote Jefferson, “it expects what it never was and never will be.”!* In his Bell for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, he promoted a model of education “ Education under the Security State 38 for helping people become “the guardians of their own liberty.” Grounded in the study ofhistory, Jefferson’s model of education would “apprise people of the past to enable them to judge the future.” It will, Jefferson asserted, Avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will quality them as the judges of the actions and designs of men, it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every government on earth is some trace of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.'* While Jefferson’s ideas would offer inspiration to many future democratic educational theorists, these elements of his educational thought scarcely impacted the actual practice of schooling in the post-Revolutionary period. Compulsory schooling was not widely spread during that time, and the Constitution granted no power to the federal government to establish schools. Perhaps the framers of the Constitution did not concern themselves with controlling the public mind because the Constitution, as originally adopted, did not give the public any voice in governing the new republic. The original Constitution only extended the franchise to those “permanent interests”—white, property-owning males. As common people struggled to expand democracy, the need to enclose the population within the equivalent of a Matrix increased. “The twentieth century,” wrote Alex Carey, was “characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power from de- mocracy.”!® Between 1880 and 1920 in the United Kingdom and the United States, the franchise was extended from around 10-15 percent of the populace to 40 or 50 percent. Graham Wallas and A. L. Lowell, leading students of democracy in Britain and the United States, warned as early as 1909 of the likely consequences of this development. Popular election, they agreed, “may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and power” to make the full use of their resources. However, should they do so, “there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for production of emotion and opinion has so advanced that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future.”!® The warnings of Wallas and Lowell would prove prophetic as the state and “permanent interests” of the market joined forces to “make full use of their resources” to contain democracy. Quoting an AT&T executive from that time, Chomsky writes that “since the early twentieth century, the public relations industry has devoted huge resources to ‘educating the American What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic? 39 people about the economic facts of life’ to ensure a favorable climate for business. Its task is to control ‘the public mind,’ which is ‘the only serious danger confronting the company.’”!” Carey, Chomsky, Edward Herman, and others have done an excellent job of documenting the history of the propaganda/public relations industry. As they report, the pioneers of propaganda demonstrated considerable openness concerning the nature of their work. Edward Bernays, one of the leading figures in this field, frankly stated that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society... . It is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously.”!* Walter Lippmann described this “intelligent minority” as the “responsible men.” Reminiscent of Plato’s description of his “guardians,” Lippmann asserted that “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.” Lippmann characterized common people as “the bewildered herd.” Any members of this “herd” that might think to press her or his demands on the state she or he characterized as “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” Citizenship, under Lippmann’s model, did not entail an active civic role for average citizens.!? It is not for the public, Lippmann observes, to “pass judgment on the intrinsic merits” of an issue or to offer analysis or solutions, but merely, on occasion, to place “its force at the disposal” of one or another group of “responsible men.” The public “does not reason, investigate, invent, persuade, bargain, or settle.” Rather, “the public acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to act executively,” once he has given the matter at hand sober and disinterested thought. It is for this reason that “the public must be put in its place.” The bewildered herd, trampling and roaring, “has its function”: to be “the interested spectators of action,” not participants. Participation is the duty of “the responsible man.”?° In another variant on these matters, Reinhold Niebuhr would later de- clare that “rationality belongs to the cool observers” who must recognize “the stupidity of the average man” and fill his mind with “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” Since the time of Plato, the mainstream of democratic theory has recognized these proper mysteries of government. Unlike totalitarian societies, where the state can always resort to outright physical coercion to control the population, the “permanent interests” of market democracies such as our own, where the decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of those who control the market, must concern themselves with what people think. Here, the public does have a voice, but the permanent interests must make sure that the public voice says the right things. Hence, thought control takes on central importance. The population must be rendered dependent, like children, on the paternalistic state for their proper understandings of the Education under the Security State 40 world in which they live. The more deeply enmeshed people become within the fabricated Matrix of “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplification,” the less threatening they become to the state. Too much independence from this Matrix might lead to the formation and articulation of other ideas, leading to a “crisis of democracy” that might threaten the security state’s ability to protect the “permanent interests.” Democracy itself constitutes a threat to those interests and must, therefore, be properly managed by the “responsible men.” CONCLUSION In The Matrix, Morpheus offers Neo a choice, a choice between a blue pill (that will leave him enclosed within the prison of the Matrix) and a red pill (that will allow him to escape that Matrix). During the same period that the propaganda/public relations industry began taking shape to deter democracy, John Dewey pioneered the way for us to make a similar choice in terms of the types of schools that we want. Dewey recognized that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business... . Power today [this is the 1920s] resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country.”*! To counter that power, Dewey advocated strongly for a system of education to expand freedom and democracy. “The ultimate aim of production,” wrote Dewey, “is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.” Education could serve these ends, he believed, by cultivating young people’s social imaginations and their sense of community. Students could learn to truly value the learning introduced to them through school if they could only comprehend the relevance of that learning to their lives outside of school. By better understanding the conditions of their social existence, they would be better prepared to play active roles in transforming those conditions. As Richard Brosio describes in his groundbreaking work on the history of schooling in our market society, none of the efforts on the part of the nation’s “permanent interests” went without challenge on the part of the “rascal multitude.” America’s history is replete with stories of resistance to market domination, but that history tells the wrong story, so it almost never receives treatment in our schools and the market-managed media. Like Dewey, Brosio recognizes that The lack of power experienced by the working class and poor is tied to the fact that most of the power in capitalist America, as well as in other capitalist systems, is rooted in the control of the means of production and accompanying State coercive force. In most instances, the fact of this power is obfuscated by the use of hegemony and specific propaganda. During some unique historical moments, protest becomes possible among the working poor. . . . American What Is the Matrix? What Is the Republic? 4} history is punctuated by such occurrences, and, in each instance, masses of the poor were .. . able, if only briefly, to overcome the shame bred by a culture that blames them for their own plight; somehow they were able to break the bonds of conformity enforced by work, by family, by community, by every strand of institutional life: somehow they were able to overcome the fears induced by police, militia, by company guards.?? Moreover, while we need to acknowledge the presence and power of the security state’s Matrix-generating machines (schools, corporate media, etc.), we must also acknowledge that our current system of thought control is not nearly as totalizing and mechanistic as the Matrix portrayed in the film series. Relatively early in their “school careers,” most children learn to distinguish between the “real world” and the “school world.” For the most part, they learn to experience the content of schooling as irrelevant to their lives. This is not to say that the “useful lies” communicated through the school’s formal curriculum have no impact on children’s consciousness. However, it is difficult to disagree with Chomsky’s observation that the general population is far more dissident today than during the 1960s, based on the scale of the domestic opposition to the invasion of Iraq even before it started. The level of dissidence and citizen activism in the 1960s triggered an alarming response from the “minority of the opulent” and “the responsible men” who provide security for their interests. From their perspective, independent political activism on the part of “the bewildered herd” constitutes “the crisis of democracy.” In their view, democratic action isa crisis. As I have written elsewhere, the major educational reform initiatives since the 1983 release of the A Nation at Risk report have been formulated as part of a larger strategy to deal with that crisis.” The current level of dissidence, for example, is probably the primary motivation behind the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. The achievement standards imposed on schools in this act, the most comprehensive federal educational initiative ever, are ridiculously high. No one who knows anything about teaching and learning would have imposed such measures. Leaving no child behind requires schools to ensure that a// students are reading at or above grade level within two or three years, and that includes the special education population. In other words, NCLB assigns teachers the task of curing mental retardation and other severe learning disabilities. Even bringing children from lower socioeconomic groups up to grade level will defy all previous expectations of schools. Policymakers have typically been so cynical about the remedial powers of schools that they have used third-grade reading scores to predict how many prison cells they will need to construct ten years ahead. Moreover, the “responsible men” drafted NCLB to ensure that public schools will fail. The demonstrated failure of public schools to leave no child behind will affect a further enclosure. While public schools do enclose children from 42 Education under the Security State “the real world” to have them become dependent on school for their learning, at least the public still has some, however limited, voice in shaping what students learn. Teachers enjoy certain levels of academic freedom that empowers them to make independent curricular decisions within their own classrooms. Once public schools fail to pass the muster of NCLB, the business of education will be handed over to businesses, private corporations. This will move educational decision making out of the public sphere. Teachers will no longer function as public servants who might have funny ideas about actually serving the public interest and not the country’s permanent interests. They will become employees of corporations and, therefore, expected to simply follow orders and the curriculum guidelines handed down by their superiors. Rather than entrusting the task of producing “republican machines” and “human resources” to the security state, the “permanent interests” will take over that task directly, further enclosing students from the social by removing schools from the political. So long as we still have a voice in shaping policies, we should defend schools from this third wave of enclosure. sete: Poa Civic Literacy at Its Best: The “Democratic Distemper” of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) JOHN MarcIANo INTRODUCTION: THE “CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY” In his report for the Trilateral Commission in 1975, Harvard Professor and Pentagon adviser Samuel P. Huntington asserted that the movements of the 1960s challenged “the authority of established political, social, and economic institutions [as the] spirit of protest [was] abroad in the land.”! The U.S. ruling class feared a “democratic distemper” that threatened those in power as well as the school and media-cultivated civic illiteracy of youth; the danger was that these youth might then become informed and activist citizens. Our leaders do not wish to revisit the “excess of democracy” that emerged in the 1960s, and history lessons on the Vietnam War era are simply one educational tool in the struggle to vaccinate the hearts and minds of youth against this “excess.” Civic illiteracy, therefore, is perfectly reasonable once we understand the purpose and nature of citizenship training in the schools: to block the critical and liberating potential of education.’ I will discuss the “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s by examining the antiwar “distemper” of the most influential New Left group of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In its brief history in the 1960s, as part of the New Left, it played a crucial role in raising the civic literacy and political consciousness of that era, particularly on the Vietnam War. As opposed to Huntington’s fear of “crisis,” I take the view of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who applauded SDS and New Left activists because they refused “to perform efficiently and ‘normally’ in and for a society which .. . 44 Education under the Security State is infested with violence and repression while demanding obedience and compliance from the victims of violence and repression.”* The discussion of SDS here addresses the fundamental issue of the 1960s and 1970s: U.S. aggression in Vietnam. Paul Shannon estimates that 1.9 million Vietnamese died and 10.5 million became refugees as a result of that war.* In addition, chemical warfare “resulted in large-scale devastation of crops [and] ecosystems, and in a variety of health problems among exposed humans.”® It is in the context of these atrocities that SDS’s “distemper” and protest must be examined.° The insights in this chapter reflect nearly forty years of activism and scholarship on issues of war and social justice. As a graduate student (1965— 1969), I was one of the founders of SDS at SUNY Buffalo and wrote my doctoral dissertation on SDS at Cornell University; insights from that work have been incorporated into this chapter. I was also a faculty adviser to SDS at SUNY Cortland during my first few years there (1969-1972). I have spent time with some of the historical figures that defined the Vietnam War era, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Benjamin Spock (I was their driver and host during their visits to Buffalo in November 1967, spending an evening with King and two days with Spock), Tom Hayden (I was his cohost during visits to Cortland in 1969 and 1972), Noam Chomsky (a reader of my manuscripts Teaching the Vietnam War and Civic Illiteracy and Education), and Howard Zinn (whom I hosted at SUNY Buffalo in 1967 and who wrote the preface to the Vietnam book). My political activism and scholarship have also included a term as chairman of the Ithaca, New York, Human Rights Commission (1991-1996), hundreds of demonstrations, meetings and rallies, two books and dozens of articles on U.S. domestic and foreign policies. SDS: ORIGINS AND EARLY HISTORY, 1960-1964 SDS traced its origins to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), founded in 1905 by older reformers Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. After World War I, ISS was reorganized as part of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) under the leadership of John Dewey, among others. After World War II, as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), it supported “a pro-American, Cold War, State Department” position.’ In 1960, SLID was reborn as SDS; its “founding” event was a May 1960 conference on “Human Rights in the North,” and it held its first convention that June with only two active chapters; by 1968, it would have more than 300 chapters and 70,000 members. During this early period, SDS activists became involved in the Civil Rights movement, supporting the courageous struggles of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). These efforts would cement the bonds between the two organi- zations.® Civic Literacy at Its Best 45 At the SDS national convention in 1962, Tom Hayden, later to become a leading anti- Vietnam war activist, writer, and legislator in California, presented its founding political declaration, the Port Huron Statement (PHS). James O’Brien writes that the statement reflected “our generation’s discov- ery of the hollowness of the American dream... and the bankruptcy of America’s Cold War policies” and urged emphasis on the “potential of the university as a radical center.”? Hayden later reflected that some of the statement sounded like a “litany slightly to the left of the Democratic Party. . . . We railed at an economy dominated by... the priorities of the militaryindustrial complex [and] condemned the perpetuation of the Cold War at the nuclear brink. . . . We identified racism as a ‘steadfast pillar in the culture and custom of this country.’”?!° The PHS called for a “participatory democracy” that would allow people to make the “social decisions determining the quality and directions” of their lives. According to writer Kirkpatrick Sale, the PHS “successfully captured and shaped the spirit of the new student mood.” Even more, it was “a summary of beliefs for much of the student generation as a whole [and] a thoroughgoing critique of the present American system in all its aspects.” Perhaps 100,000 copies of the PHS were circulated on college campuses in the 1960s, as it became the most important document of the New Left. SDS activists were the political leaders of their generation, and many were outstanding students at the best universities. Many of their parents “had some contact with the left,” and many came from middle- and upper-middle-class homes in the East; a few were “red-diaper” babies, children of former Com- munist Party members.” They were the most civically literate youth in the nation, especially on U.S. foreign policy. SDS AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1965-1969 SDS became the leading New Left group after its April 1965 March on Washington. The Vietnam War was the defining and historic moment for its members—a violent assault that resulted in at least half the people of South Vietnam being killed, maimed, or driven from their homes, in addition to the devastating loss of life and land in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Hayden believes that “Vietnam [was] the central issue, the metaphor and mirror of our times, the moral and murderous experience that would mark our identity for the future.”!? The march drew some 25,000 people, at that time the largest antiwar demonstration in Washington’s history; it would pale, however, in comparison with later protests: 400,000 in New York and San Francisco in April 1967, and 1 million in Washington and San Francisco in November 1969; the largest student demonstrations would come in May 1970: Speaking at that April 1965 protest were Senator Ernest Greuning, one of only two members of Congress to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution 46 Education under the Security State in August 1964; SNCC field worker Bob Moses; journalist I. F. Stone, whose weekly Newsletter was an invaluable antiwar resource; and SDS president Paul Potter, who urged the crowd to deepen their antiwar efforts: “If the people of this country are to end the war in Vietnam, and change the institutions [that] create it, then the people... must create a massive social move- ment.”!4 SDS members helped to organize the national teach-in movement against the war during that spring, which involved more than 100 colleges and universities. It culminated with a May National Teach-In in Washington that was broadcast to some 130 campuses. Through these teach-ins and similar educational efforts, hundreds of thousands of students and faculty became informed on the war and broader foreign policies, as SDS civic literacy labors brought critical knowledge to bear on vital national and international issues. The major antiwar action that truly brought SDS to national attention was the International Days of Protest against the War in October 1965. More than 100,000 students marched throughout the country and SDS received publicity as the “instigating” force behind the protest, even though it only planned some campus activities that focused on the Selective Service System (SSS) and its relationship to the war. The Justice Department and the FBI investigated SDS “for aiding and abetting of draft evasion,” and U.S. senators denounced “the demonstrators, war protesters, and ‘draft dodgers’ en masse.”!° SDS chapters also organized support for the November 27, 1965, March on Washington; more than 40,000 people heard speeches against the war by Coretta Scott King, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and SDS president Carl Oglesby, who delivered “a scathing yet considered attack not on the Administration in Washington but on the institution of liberalism itself.”!° Although by 1967, many in SDS questioned the political effectiveness of mass demonstrations, it still endorsed the April 15 Spring Mobilization in New York and San Francisco that drew more than 400,000 people—the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history. Leading the rally in New York was Dr. King, who drew the direct links between U.S. violence in Vietnam, racism, and economic exploitation at home, following the lead of Malcolm X, who had condemned the war before he was killed in February 1965. SDS also played an important role in the civic literacy program that developed out of that mobilization: Vietnam Summer, a community-based campaign that involved citizens in local meetings, rallies, and teach-ins. All these antiwar efforts were aided by the growth of an alternative and progressive media that exposed U.S. government lies on the war and other issues (e.g., Ramparts magazine and radical literature such as the Autobiography of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America?, and Carl Oglesby’s and Richard Schaull’s Containment and Change).‘” By the end of 1967, SDS had grown to nearly 30,000 loosely affiliated members, and antiwar efforts grew and became increasingly militant. The Civic Literacy at Its Best 47 October 1967 actions at the Pentagon and the Oakland, California, induction center were a watershed as the struggle moved “from protest to resistance.” In Oakland, SDS members and other antiwar activists attempted to stop to close the induction center as thousands battled police in the streets. Across the country, a rally at the Lincoln Memorial was followed by a march to the Pentagon, where several thousand confronted federal marshals, soldiers, and the National Guard. During 1967 and especially 1968, SDS went through a profound change: the “very language of rational persuasion and nonviolence came to be regarded with suspicion by many in SDS, as it did throughout the New Left.” While the 1962 Port Huron Statement had called for “a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools,” by 1967, this was “out of style,” and SDS leader Carl Davidson called for a “common struggle with the liberation movements of the world” by means of “the disruption, dislocation, and destruction of the military’s access to the [student power], intelligence, or resources of our universities.”18 SDS’s move to a more radical and militant antiwar stance complemented a similar process underway in the U.S military, especially among AfricanAmericans—the ultimate “democratic distemper” that undermined the war effort. This antiwar “distemper” actually began in 1945 when U.S. merchant marines condemned Washington’s support for French efforts to “subjugate the native population” of Vietnam.!? By the late 1960s, SDS had moved increasingly toward an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and socialist analysis of U.S. foreign policies, and looked abroad to revolutionary movements in Cuba, China, and Africa for inspiration. It had evolved from an early history of “moral outrage” to an explicit resistance to U.S. capitalism and imperialism. From the ISS in 1905, SDS had come full circle from socialism to revolutionary socialism. SDS AND 1968: THE WATERSHED YEAR The year 1968 was politically explosive. It began with the Tet Offensive against U.S. forces in South Vietnam in January, Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race in March, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and resulting black uprisings in more than 100 cities, Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June, and Hubert Humphrey’s nomination in August as the Democratic presidential candidate, while police battered demonstrators in Chicago. Long-time radical activist and writer Max Elbaum argues that these events “altered the country’s political landscape [and] disrupted business-as-usual. They propelled fresh waves of people, especially young people, toward involvement in protest demonstrations [and] they produced a decisive leftward shift.”?° The Tet Offensive was the turning point in the war, causing Johnson to call on his “Wise Men” elite advisers who had served in four administrations Education under the Security State 48 to review the conflict (March 1968). “They (secretly) reported . . . that the war could not be won and the domestic cost of pursuing victory was too high.” They realized that the “democratic distemper” of the antiwar and antiracist movements threatened their rule at home, the war and U.S. imperialism. Their advice “was the immediate trigger for Johnson’s dramatic ... withdrawal from the 1968 presidential race and his announcement that peace talks would begin.”?! In addition, the cities exploded in anger in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. King, who was killed just four days after Johnson’s announced withdrawal. For many in SDS and the New Left, King’s death “symbolized the depth of the system’s incorrigibility and convinced thousands that the nonviolent road he advocated was a dead end.” Opposition to war-making institutions increased on and off campuses in the late 1960s, especially during and after 1968; these included blocking and disrupting army and Dow Chemical recruiters on campuses, attempts to stop troop trains and close draft induction centers, and the bombing of federal and military facilities and ROTC buildings. The bombings of military-related campus buildings “marked the first concerted use of such tactics of violence by the student left in this generation—indeed the first use by students in the history of the country. Compared to the violence of the state, this was a mite, compared to the violence of everyday public America, a snippet—yet it was a signal that times were changing, and rapidly, too.” SDS did not endorse this upsurge in violence, and leader Carl Davidson took pains to disassociate mainstream resistance to the Vietnam War from “the ‘the Left adventurers,’ or simply, the ‘crazies.”” Despite condemnation, however, violence directed at the war effort itself grew.?° Militant antiwar actions, however, must be placed within the context and alongside massive U.S. violence in Vietnam and elsewhere. As Herbert Marcuse asserted: “Can there be any meaningful comparison, in magnitude and criminality, between the unlawful acts committed by the rebels in the ghettos, on the campuses . . . and the deeds perpetrated by the forces of order in Vietnam . . . Indonesia . . Guatemala, on the other?”24 The violence against property peaked during the 1969-1970 academic year, when there were “no fewer than 174 major bombings and attempts on campus. . . . The targets... were proprietary and symbolic: ROTC [and] government buildings.” These attacks received the greatest attention from the media and the public, but they were an extremely small aspect of antiwar protest that numbered more than 9,400 protest incidents?’ on campus, as well as thousands of civic literacy efforts, such as demonstrations, vigils, letter writing, teach- ins, rallies, mass media presentations, articles and books, petitioning congressional representatives, blocking induction centers and napalm plants, defying the draft and supporting draft and military resisters. From a very modest beginning in 1960 with two college chapters and perhaps 300 members, by the spring of 1969, SDS had become the largest Civic Literacy at Its Best 49 and leading student antiwar group and was under attack by the federal government. That April, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared that the New Left was “a firmly established subversive force dedicated to the complete destruction of our traditional democratic values and the principles of free government”; at its center was SDS. Two thousand FBI agents and twenty federal agencies were involved in “maximum surveillance, disruption, and harassment of the New Left.”?° THE DEMISE OF SDS AND BEYOND: 1969-1973 Although SDS collapsed in 1969 under the weight of external attacks and internal sectarianism, and a few members resurfaced as the sectarian Weathermen faction, individual members, and the New Left continued their antiwar efforts into the 1970s. Campus protests peaked in May 1970, although antiwar actions continued long after the official end of SDS and the drop in campus protests. As antiwar protest became more militant and radical, activists increasingly looked to the Vietnamese and “dynamic liberation movements that threatened to besiege Washington with ‘two, three, many Vietnams.’” Many activists came to believe that “a Third World—oriented version of Marxism ... was the key to building a powerful left in the U.S., within the ‘belly of the beast.’” Such a posture “seemed to many the best framework for taking the most radical themes struck by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez—the U.S. figures that most inspired rebellious youth in the sixties— and transforming them into a comprehensive revolutionary ideology.”?” These revolutionary views would blend together with less-politicized students in May 1970 when the United States invaded Cambodia, sparking the greatest campus political protests in United States history; a survey months later reported that 40 percent of college students—then about 3 million— believed that “a revolution was necessary in the U.S.” Massive numbers of students demonstrated, and on May 4, after the Ohio National Guard killed four white students at Kent State, the protests deepened; eleven days later, two black students were killed at Jackson State in Mississippi, but, by comparison, this elicited little outrage. More than 400 campuses went on strike or shut down, involving some 4 million students and 350,000 faculty members, and 30 ROTC buildings were burned or bombed. In response to the massive protests, Nixon was forced to declare that he would withdraw troops from Cambodia within thirty days.?8 The Cambodia invasion and the Kent State killings provoked more than 1 million students to demonstrate for the first time, and perhaps as many as seventy-five campuses shut down for the year, including my own SUNY, Cortland. It went without a graduation ceremony for the only time in the college’s history—now 135 years. Thousands of students also became politically involved in their college communities, “working for peace candidates, and . . ‘reconstituting’ their courses to 50 Education under the Security State address the international crisis” in what was the greatest student civic literacy effort in U.S. history.”? Kirkpatrick Sale calls the campus protests of May 1970 “one of the most explosive periods in the nation’s history and easily the most cataclysmic period in the history of higher education since the founding of the Republic.” Colleges and universities in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and South Carolina were declared in a state of emergency, and the National Guard was called out to restore order at twenty-one campuses. The May explosion “had a profound effect upon the country, condensing and climaxing as they did the entire decade of student rebellion, providing for a brief time a clear look at the significant new position” of U.S. students.*° The protests, however, were the last major campus antiwar actions of the Vietnam War era, and most students returned to campus that fall to business as usual. And the earlier demise of SDS left millions of students without “the lead or participation of a strong radical student group . . . without the sense of politics such a group might have transmitted, and .. . without a vision of how to effect real change at this unique point, most campuses turned toward the familiar path of electoral politics.” This absence was to end the possibility of a powerful and ongoing campus antiwar movement.?! Relative campus calm did not end public protests against the war, however, as an April 1971 Washington protest drew about 500,000 and featured dramatic antiwar actions by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), who threw their war medals over the Capitol fence. The VVAW, founded in 1967 with a few members, then numbered 11,000 and included “a left-wing that not only opposed U:S. intervention but called for an outright NLF victory.” A week after the April 24 march, thousands of demonstrators committed mass civil disobedience in the nation’s capital; these “Mayday” protests produced nearly 13,000 arrests (most later ruled illegal), the largest of any single day in U.S. history.” The July 1971 publication of The Pentagon Papers (TPP), the secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, which had been copied and then released to the public by Rand Corporation official and Vietnam veteran Daniel Ellsberg, proved that what SDS had claimed about the war was true; it legitimated its years of antiwar civic literacy efforts. Tom Hayden states that the release of TPP confirmed his desire “to believe that the American people would oppose the war if they knew the truth—and that was precisely why administration after administration had hidden the truth. By August, one month after the papers were released, a majority of Americans in a Harris poll said the war was “immoral,” and in a Gallup poll 61 per- cent favored complete withdrawal”*%—the same antiwar position that SDS had advocated. The documentation of TPP was stunning proof of the ne,cessity of “democratic distemper” student antiwar efforts in the face of criticism by the major media pundits, influential educators, political officials, and major union leaders. Civic Literacy at Its Best 51 CONCLUSION: CIVIC LITERACY AND “DEMOCRATIC DISTEMPER” Noam Chomsky’s conclusion on the Vietnam War and its relationship to the educational system is a powerful starting point from which to assess the SDS civic literacy efforts against that war. As American technology is running amuck in Southeast Asia, a discussion of American schools can hardly avoid noting the fact that these schools are the first training ground for the troops that will enforce the muted, unending terror of the status quo of a projected American century; for the technicians who will be developing the means for extension of American power; for the intellectuals who can be counted on, in significant measure, to provide the ideological justification for this particular form of barbarism and to decry the irresponsibility and lack of sophistication of those who will find all of this intolerable and revolting.*4 SDS’s civic literacy “distemper” moved huge numbers of students toward an antiwar position and greater understanding of the U.S. educational system. Despite these civic literacy efforts, however, fundamental change in U.S.-Vietnam policy did not ultimately come from the “reason and persuasion” of teach-ins and community forums, important though these were; it came ultimately from the Vietnamese resistance, the antiwar movement within the military, especially among African-American ground troops in South Vietnam, Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s victories in the 1968 Democratic primaries, and serious economic problems caused by mounting war costs and federal budget deficits. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin assert that, as the New Left grew larger, “it also grew more internally divided. The early 1960s vision of the movement as a ‘beloved community’ in which all those committed to social change could join together in common effort and fellowship came apart at the seams by mid-decade.”** Despite the fine civic literacy efforts against the war by SDS—all of which aroused the “democratic distemper” fears of the USS. ruling class and its intellectual apologists—during the later 1960s it was criticized, however, because too often “the standard of political effectiveness ... increasingly became the sense of gratification and commitment the tactics provided to participants combined with the amount of coverage it guaranteed on the evening television news.” The problems inherent in the increasing “politics of confrontation were not lost on some veteran leaders of the New Left, although they found themselves powerless to reverse the trending Max Elbaum, however, differs with Isserman, Kazin, and “the conventional wisdom concerning sixties radicals” that is reflected in the title of former SDS leader Todd Gitlin’s book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage—that “the decade started with idealistic, impassioned young people ae Education under the Security State putting their lives on the line . . . to fulfill the promise of America. It ended with days of rage as the sixties movements, frustrated by the Vietnam War, became irrational and self-destructive.” Elbaum believes that we must step back and revise this analysis, because through their “struggle against the war in Vietnam and racism at home,” SDS and the larger New Left helped millions of youth to attain “new levels into the extent of inequality and milita- rism in U.S. society—and their deep structural roots.”?” SDS’s antiwar militancy drastically changed politics here at home because its actions went “beyond traditional channels and demands that required more than reforming the existing social arrangement. ... The established centers of power could no longer completely control events. . . . Radicalism was no longer a fanciful notion promoted by a few voices on the fringes—it had gotten a foothold in the mainstream.”8 SDS civic literacy efforts challenged the view of influential educators in the United States who supported the dominant view of the war and patriotism, militarism, and imperialism that undermines thoughtful and active citizenship in a democracy. Such a view shaped the Vietnam War era and continues today despite the historical record of U.S. violence abroad that has resulted in the deaths of millions throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia.°? Most U.S. teachers and students are unaware of this violent record; therefore, they are unable to reflect critically on such issues and then act as empowered citizens. Educators and mass media pundits offer youth a distorted view of U.S. policies, promoting civic illiteracy and turning civic responsibility into passive conformity. Patriotic and militaristic propaganda dominates in the mass media, schools, and colleges, leaving many students unable to make reasoned moral and political judgments about official policies, such as the Vietnam War; this is also true of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the present Iraq War. SDS’s antiwar efforts in the 1960s undermined such an “education” and civic illiteracy, and Chomsky argues that this was positive because it led to a “notable improvement in the moral and political climate [and were] a factor in the ‘crisis of democracy’ . . . that so dismayed elite opinion across the spectrum, leading to extraordinary efforts to impose orthodoxy, with mixed effects. One significant change, directly attributable to the [Vietnam War and especially opposition to it was] a growing reluctance to tolerate violence, terror, and subversion.” SDS and New Left civic literacy efforts were effective, and by the late 1960s, “much of the public was opposed to the war on principled grounds, unlike elite sectors [that] kept largely to ‘pragmatic’ objections of cost (to us). This component of the ‘crisis of democracy’ was considered severe enough to merit a special designation—the ‘Vietnam syndrome,’ a disease with such symptoms as dislike for war crimes and atroci, ties.””4° History lessons about U.S. wars are educational tools in the struggle to vaccinate the hearts and minds of youth against “democratic distemper.” The Civic Literacy at Its Best 53 ruling class fears that civically literate and activist youth will join other informed and involved citizens; civic instruction in schools and the mass media, therefore, is organized to prevent such a danger. Civic illiteracy is perfectly reasonable once we understand the nature and purpose of “citizenship training” in the schools: to undermine the critical and liberating po- tential of education. A critical and open debate in our schools and media that accurately presented the radical “other side” of the Vietnam War and subsequent U.S. imperialist aggression, for example, would have to consider the perspective of the late journalist Andrew Kopkind. Writing shortly after the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Kopkind argued that “America has been in a state of war—cold, hot and lukewarm—for as long as most citizens now living can remember”; this state of war has “been used effectively to manufacture support for the nation’s rulers and to eliminate or contain dissent among the ruled.” This “warrior state is so ingrained in American institutions ...in short, so totalitarian, that the government is practically unthinkable without it.” But this war mentality is a good cure for “democratic distemper,” because it “implies command rather than participation, obedience over agreement, hierarchy instead of equality, repression not liberty, uniformity not diversity, secrecy not candor, propaganda not information.”*! What can finaily be stated about SDS’s “democratic distemper” opposition to the Vietnam War and the “warrior state” that prompted such a “crisis of democracy”? Tom Hayden concludes that SDS achieved much, as it was part of a movement that “forced our government to abandon its policies in Vietnam and the nation to reconsider the Cold War.” It and the larger New Left “fostered ...a moral view of human beings, ‘ordinary people’ in the process of history.” This required an “active citizenship [that] in turn required a society of citizens, or a democracy of participation, where individuals had a direct voice in the making of decisions about their own lives.”*? Hayden’s comments go to the heart of an activist civic literacy that created nightmares for Samuel Huntington and his ruling class benefactors. Kirkpatrick Sale concludes that although SDS “achieved none of its longrange goals, though it ended in disarray and disappointment . . . it shaped a generation, revived an American left... [and] played an important part in molding public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia and increasing public understanding of the imperialistic nature of that war.” It also produced “4 pool of people, many of them of the finest minds and talents, who have forever lost their allegiance to the myths and institutions of capitalist America and who will be among those seeking to transform this country.”** The tumultuous decade of the 1960s in which SDS arose was “notable for setting a considerable part of its youth against a system that bore them, against its traditions and values, its authorities and its way of life.”** It was a decade of “democratic distemper” that deepened the “crisis of democracy” that confronts us in the twenty-first century. : et ’ Kate ~— oa S — ) ~~ 4, = noe - ie ay “¢ Rg = 3 > al y A. See eelPanett j 1° > it . tm, ? Pt as ae ~ 1h et i a. aia > rer alpaiaes =o 2 aX ee saa 4 2 ert RA) Det 50S Ct ? Gah x ea eee tyIn om. Mle irs OMG RAE +r et eea ae ot el a ee 1 is et hee 65 epi —_ |) a = Pena ae wi o>~@ ' e mitte ; Steet od “ 73 sagt’ nate =a et <7 > 2. t. Cee: Reeeaes pti mete:«2 * Beare ma pe eae ran > _— She a Sree aidinlih = died ie a0 2 mare Ghee A Matter of Conflicting Interests?: Problematizing the Traditional Role of Schools SANDRA JACKSON In most modern societies, the education of most people is conducted by institutions run by the government. Education is therefore, in the political domain. —Charles Taylor’ INTRODUCTION In the United States, education is a political issue. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, several waves of politically driven school reform tied to “national security issues” have swept the nation. Blaming schools for such a breech in national security, politicians berated public schools for having allowed the Soviets to beat the United States into space with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Politicians used this “security threat” to create a mandate for public schools to provide rigorous academic training, especially in math and science, imperative to produce the brainpower necessary to put the country ahead of the Russians. Almost three decades later, A Nation at Rik (1983), the report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in the mid-1980s, again argued for change on the basis of national security and the need to sustain economic growth and maintain superiority in the world. It asserted that the United States was at risk of losing preeminence in the world as 2 consequence of slippage in its competitive edge in the global society because of an educational system fraught with inadequate standards that had failed to produce the quality of workers, as well as the science and technology, necessary to remain number onc. This line of criticism argued 56 Education under the Security State that the root of the problem lay with public schools—their loss of clear direction, lack of quality curricula with far too many electives, inadequate graduation requirements, as well as divergence from their traditional roles. Recommendations proposed five new basics: English, mathematics, science, social studies, and computer science. These were to serve as the antidote to restore schools to their rightful role in the production of highly skilled and technologically competent workers who would assure that the United States would restore its supremacy in the world market. Approximately twenty years later, President Bush enacted his No Child Left Behind policy, which echoed many of the arguments of the previous report and went further to propose public policy initiatives to implement thoroughgoing reform of education in the United States. Again, the presumption was that schools needed to return to their traditional roles. Yet what this means remains highly contested. The reforms that have focused on standards, high-stakes testing, and choice, spearheaded by the president and supported by conservative politicians and powerful business interests, stand in sharp contrast to the more populist agendas for change. The latter focus on addressing persistent inequalities (e.g., the gap between highly funded and underfunded schools, the gap between high-performing and underachieving schools, and the differential rates of achievement among racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students), as well as issues related to the very nature of education itself—ideals, core values, and notions about what is most worth knowing. The major fault line in these frameworks_has been a focus on individual achievement and schools that produce students who test well, and a contrasting emphasis on examining structural barriers not only for individuals but also for groups regarding the ways in which race and ethnicity, gender, language, and culture have affected education and schooling for different population groups. As a consequence, debates about education in the United States have been quite contentious and politically charged because of competing interests: the government espousing a given set of priorities to ensure worldwide hegemony; ongoing differences between liberals and conservatives—politicians as well as ordinary citizens; supporters of the Civil Rights movement advocating racial equality and equal opportunity; advocates of the women’s movement as well as feminists seeking to redress gender inequalities and sexism; and proponents among communities of color and immigrant communities, as well as educators supporting bilingual/bicultural, and multicultural education to promote cultural and linguistic diversity. In examining the historical issues of cultural and linguistic genocide, and educational segregation in the United States, Joel Spring contends, “The problem is the inherent tendency of nation-states to use their educational , Systems to create uniform culture and language usage as a way of maintain- ing social order and control.” In this regard, the “traditional” role of public education has been to socialize individuals to the norms of the dominant A Matter of Conflicting Interests? 57 culture, forge assimilation of immigrants, and engage in the production of individuals who have internalized the values of obedience, punctuality, efficiency, self-discipline, high-achievement motivation, individualism, compe- tition, and a belief in meritocracy—all of which have promised success and social mobility. Individuals of color and women, who find many of the promises of equity, freedom, and justice yet unfulfilled, have organized, demonstrated, and struggled in pursuit of these illusive ideals in the public sphere, especially in educational contexts, through social movements and legal actions. The Civil Rights movement and the women’s movement have agitated for intervention by the federal government to remedy inequalities and discrimination based on race and sex, and supporters of bilingual and bicultural education have also engaged in legal battles and organized to challenge attempts by cultural purists to make English the official language of the United States and install an English-only orthodoxy. As a consequence of this exercise of agency, changes have been made in public institutions—unsettling a status quo of entitlement based on white skin, class, and gender privilege. In reaction, according to Foner, “conservative rhetoric has depicted the federal government as an alien and menacing presence rather than an embodiment of the popular will.”? This chapter will argue that the struggle between a majority population and its dominant culture, imposed on others, and resistance from various ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, inclusive of women, is at the heart of the “crisis of democracy” and hence a crisis in education in the United States. The culture wars manifesting themselves in curricular reform regarding race and gender, and struggles over language as in the case of the English Only movement versus the movement for bilingual, bicultural, and multicultural education, among others, reflect profound differences and values in this country. In public debates, conservative rhetoric in reaction to claims related to equity, inclusiveness, and diversity often couches the problem in terms of a nation under siege from within by “special” interest groups whose demands are at odds with the interests of “the people”* Within this context, when the struggle for social justice in the broader society is characterized as a crisis, then it should be no surprise that public institutions such as schools become contested terrains, emanating from conflicts of interest and inequality in power. BACKGROUND In the United States, “[d ]emocracy is an ideal that is filled with possibilities, but also an ideal that is part of the ongoing struggle for equality, freedom and human dignity. . . that promotes the highest aspirations, dreams, and values of individual persons, not only in the U.S. but also throughout the global community.”* These deeply humanistic values stand in sharp 58 Education under the Security State juxtaposition to a market ideology that is predicated on defining human behavior as essentially unchangeable, perceiving society as an aggregate of individuals exercising individual choices, privileging self-interest as the primary motivator of choice with personal material-reward as the primary goal, and protecting and maximizing individual freedom of choice.® This framework makes group rights problematic in that they are juxtaposed against individual rights in a mutually exclusive way. The government accordingly is to look out for the interests of individuals and their individual pursuits. Within this context, based upon the notion that the market will self-correct and adjust accordingly, there are two criteria for government involvement: (1) the extent to which education enhances national sovereignty and security, and (2) the extent to which education can produce specific, tangible, and quantifiable benefits to the smooth functioning of the market economy itself.” These principles undergird reforms advocated by the government as well as conservative forces that seek to limit government involvement and resist any attempts to use education as a political instrument for extending democracy.® Educational initiatives that do not advance these interests are suspect and hence ensues a continuing debate about government’s proper role in advancing goals for education. Thus, according to Kliebard, “For one thing, what goes on in schools can hardly remain unaffected by national debates and . .. professional influences. For another, these expressions emanating from political business and professional sources are themselves indicators of how certain elements in society seek to define the world in which they live as well as what a society’s children should know.”? In the United Stated, the discursive milieu surrounding education includes issues related to race, gender, class, language, and culture, in addition to other dimensions of difference. Race, for example, is an autonomous concept, independent and yet intersecting with issues of gender and class.!° As such, based on physical appearances and characteristics related to skin color, hair texture, facial features, and other features, it cannot be reduced to or conflated with class based upon economics and status, which manifests itself in inequality of resources, social capital, and power. Gender also remains a basis for inequality, which critiqued through the lens of feminism predicates social change on an analysis of sexism, patriarchy, and gender stereotyping, as well as a critique of the traditional disciplines and their inattentiveness to women’s issues, as well as omissions and biases often shaped by biological determinism and essen- tialism.!? To the discussion about the roles of education and schooling, given differential experiences and achievement, individuals from different ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups, as well as women, often bring particularities of interest regarding education—its aims, purposes, and challenges. Regard, ing praxis, when we consider the nature of elementary and secondary education, as well as that of higher education, we must ask ourselves whose heritage and values will be included in curricula and in what manner.2 A Matter of Conflicting Interests? 59 Given the gains of the Civil Rights movement and its legal advances regarding challenges to inequality, racism, segregation and discrimination, and remedies designed to create equal access (e.g., education, housing, work, health care), as well as those of the women’s movement regarding issues related to gender and gender equity, curricular reforms as well as pedagogical practices have brought about changes that have manifested themselves in changes in terms of knowledge consumption and knowledge production. This has meant that issues of race and gender previously ignored and missing from the curriculum have been included, challenging Eurocentric content and perspectives, as a consequence of criticism and scrutiny from individuals of color as well as women. In reaction, those who champion the status quo have asserted that the inclusion of content and material by individuals of color, as well as women, is a departure from studying the best (traditionally defined as the classics most worthy of consideration produced by the West), resulting in substituting work and material of lesser quality and engaging in identity politics, which in their view undermines the quality of education, thereby indulging students in a feel-good curriculum that lacks rigor and substance. Some critics such as Sandra Stotsky, who believe that the contemporary curriculum for high schools is dangerous, argue that multiculturalism in English literature courses is the cause of illiteracy in contemporary America.!* She and others of like mind argue for a return to the basics—tried and true classics—eschewing inclusion of works by women and people of color. And what we have heard from this sector is that “We have gone astray in what we expect of our educational system. ... [T|hat it must be redirected to become an integral part of our economic system. Its job is to supply to the world of employment the human skills that are and will be necessary.”!* Those who counter these ideas espouse a very different idea about education in the United States: A vision of education that takes democracy seriously cannot but be at odds with educational reforms, which espouse the language and values of market forces and treat education as a commodity to be purchased and consumed. In stead, it will regard it as self-evident that education is a public good rather than a private utility and acknowledge that in a democracy, education has to be constantly reformed as a part of a broader process of social change aimed at empowering more and more people consciously to participate in the life of their society.}® A deeply contested notion of the good society thus involves a question of values regarding whether the ideas of democratic citizenship are rooted in equal rights, opportunities, and responsibilities for individuals, or whether such permits inequalities to be perpetuated on the basis of such things as class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, or nationality.'° Furthermore, when individual identities and collective identities coalesce, resulting Education under the Security State 60 in organizing and challenges to existing conditions, identity politics enters the picture. And when interests emanating from diverse group perspectives are articulated, then the differences that become manifest are seen as either important dynamics of a democratic process or as symptoms ofa crisis, as in the case of what has been named the “culture wars,”!” wherein Western culture and civilizations are presented as under siege from those who question and challenge their hegemonic and exclusionary practices. And when it comes to individuals and groups seeking to bring about change in terms of educational policies and practices, curriculum and pedagogy, because they are labeled as not representative of the mainstream, then they are often painted as fringe, special-interest oriented, making illegitimate demands and wanting special treatment, which if addressed would undermine fairness. As a consequence, people of color, various cultural and ethnic groups, as well as women and others have been put in the position of having to defend their right to be included, and at times when they have voiced their concerns, organized, and engaged in social activism, they have been accused of making things political, whereas the things that they criticize and challenge are normalized and taken for granted as merely the ways that things are—givens, neutral and apolitical. With these dynamics at work in the political landscape in the United States, it should be no surprise that contentions in the political sphere also permeate social institutions. Whatever understandings about democracy and democratic practices prevail, they necessarily influence the nature of education. Carr and Hartnett argue that “since the system of education in a democratic society always reflects and refracts the definition of democracy that that society accepts as legitimate and true, then educational change occurring in a democracy at any time will reveal how that democratic society has interpreted itself in the past and how it intends to interpret itself in the future.”!8 The values implicit in how a given society sees itself and how it practices a democratic ethos will also be reflected in the nature of education, the content of its curricu- lum and pedagogical practices. With an increasingly diverse population—one in which individuals of color will be in the majority—how will the United States respond to difference and negotiate the terrain of multiplicity regarding culture, race, gender, class, and language as they impact upon education? How will current debates resolve “existing patterns of political, economic and cultural life—[making decisions] which ought to be reproduced and which ought to be modified or transformed?”!® CURRENT CONDITIONS Western societies have been forced to confront the cultural contradictions that refuse to be swept under the rug. . . Multiculturalism simply is. [It] is a con- dition of the end-of-the century Western life we live in multicultural societies.2° Scholars such as Charles Taylor argue that issues of diversity are recon cilable with democratic ideals in that “connecting the democratic value of expanding the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual horizons of all individuals enriches our world by exposing us to different cultural and intellectual per- spectives and thereby increasing our possibilities for intellectual and spiritual growth, exploration, enlightenment, and enhancement of life and learning.”” Within this context, issues related to the experiences of different groups are not “special,” nor should they be presented in contradistinction to the mainstream, which is hardly monolithic. Instead, they and their interests are integral to the body politic of the nation, how we perceive our society and ourselves, and how we perceive others and interact with them. When African-Americans, other people of color, women, and other marginalized groups organized for educational reform during the 1960s and, subsequently, to advocate equal educational opportunity as well as curriculas reform, they were participating in a tradition whose principles were based on “promoting the idea that schools should take an active and positive role in shaping their society.””* In particular, the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that separate education was inherently unequal went far beyond the interests of black people and had implications for other minority groups such as Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other ethnic and cultural groups, as well as women, in challenging and proposing remedies to historic problems of discrimination and segregation.?* Hence, different cultural, ethnic, and ethnic groups, as well as women, have demanded inclusion and acknowledgment of their contributions to society, which has meant not only that they be recognized, but also that their experiences, perspectives, and contributions to society and humanity be treated as valid and valuable regarding understanding human experiences.” As a consequence, the curriculum, its content and pedagogical processes, have been the subject of discussion and debate in terms of necessary changes to create curricula that more adequately reflect the breadth of human experiences regarding issues of race and ethnicity, gender, culture, and language. While for the advocates of reform, these things have been signs of necessary and long overdo changes, the critics have responded differently. Conservatives, political and academic, have gone on the offensive to “protect Western civilization from attacks by African-Americans, members of other ethnic, cultural, and linguistic groups as well as women, as well as the political Left.””* Those who have challenged Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, linguicism, as well as class biases have been labeled as the new barbarians, who are promoting special interests that are at odds with the majority. What can we make of this argument when women, for example, account for more than 50 percent of the population and individuals of color, Latinos in particular, are ever increasing their numbers (in some states like California and Florida), representing an emergent majority if not significant parts of the population? 62 Education under the Security State According to scholars such as Pinar, “antiracist and antisexist values should reside as core principles at the heart of education and require commitment to social justices, freedom, and diversity to be enacted in the context of daily institutional life rather than murmured as a litany for a world yet to come.””° Changing the curriculum and how we teach issues of race and gender, in particular, is important for a number of reasons: Being inclusive and addressing difference is not just healthy for a democratic society but it also serves to counteract negative perceptions, images, and stereotypes that perpetuate false ideas and ignorance about others, as well as those that are internalized by individuals and groups about themselves, which are themselves forms of oppression.”” Here, a critical multiculturalism that focuses on race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity, and draws upon multiple perspectives, argues against a modernist Eurocentrism with its scientific epistemology as the only way to make meaning in the world. The ideals that such a perspective promotes are contrary to those avowed and supported by those who see education designed ideally to produce “independent operators who rise above the values of special interests, secure in their objectivity and detachment from biases.”?8 Regarding the centrality of sex and gender in terms of curriculum, knowledge consumption, and knowledge production, Women’s Studies has emerged as a force for change in the academy with implications for the larger society. Feminism has provided a critique of patriarchy and sexism and their impact upon society, beliefs, and practices, and has advocated for change in society as well as its institutions. In higher education, Women’s Studies rests on the premise that knowledge in the traditional academic disciplines is partial, incomplete, and distorted because they have excluded women. Goals have included developing and incorporating knowledge in the curriculum produced by women and about the experiences of women, which presents women as agents of change and producers of knowledge”? and not as passive bystanders and victims in the tableau of history. The matter of language, not only learning modern languages but also maintenance of one’s first tongue that is not English, is also a topic of fierce debate. Regarding the former, certain languages have been privileged over others in the American school curriculum. Initially, the languages of choice were classical—Latin and Greek for the children of aristocrats and elites. Then Romance languages followed and were added to secondary and universitylevel curricula, with recognition of modern languages as important for education, commerce, and careers. The emphasis has always been on learning English—the presence of Latin, Polish, German, and Russian schools in some communities notwithstanding. The focus has rarely been to equip students to learn a language to facilitate their abilities to relate to and work with others within the society, such as Spanish-speaking individuals within the United States. Instead, Spanish has been deemed useful primarily for those majoring in such fields as Romance Languages, literature, or music at the univer- A Matter of Conflicting Interests? 63 sity level. Otherwise, learning Spanish has not been promoted. And those for whom Spanish is their first language should be obliged to learn English if they have any hope of being successful citizens and enjoying the full benefits of citizenship. The intent is not to maintain the first language but to substitute it with Engiish. Hence, resistance to bilingual and bicultural education, which has sought to maintain competence in a first language, facilitates the learning of English and ultimately cultivates competence in both janguages. Race, cultural diversity, gender, and language continue to be the focus of ongoing debates about education—what is worth knowing, what should be included in the curriculum, content, treatment of issues and ideas, and teaching methods. Whether it be people of color and matters of race and ethnicity; women and issues of sex, gender, and sexism; or groups advocating bilingual/ bicultural education, those who support reforms in education and take these issues into account are stigmatized by those who do not share their views and are viewed as pushing particular agendas based upon special interests, wanting special treatment, and wanting things at the expense of others whose needs are more legitimate. Let us briefly examine how these things have played out in recent debates about education. SPECIFICITIES: THE CURRICULUM AS A SITE OF CONTEST The curriculum ...can be extraordinarily revealing about the values a given society or some segment therefore cherishes. As such it bestows power on certain social bodies as opposed to others. The curriculum thus becomes one of those arenas in which various interest groups struggle for dominance and control... reflecting their ideologies, and... expressions of what schools should teach.*? Diverse Interests: Civil Rights, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Multiculturalism, Women’s Studies, and Bilingual Education Struggles regarding racial equality in education, work, and housing by African-Americans (students, their parents, as well as community activists, other groups in solidarity, and members of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) focused on redressing inequality in education, changing a biased curriculum, and improving student achievement. In addition to challenging segregated and inferior schools, blacks also challenged tracking and steering of students into the lower tracks and special education courses, in which they were overrepresented; whereas they were underrepresented in college preparatory, Advanced Placement, gifted and talented, and honors programs.*! Even when black students have 64 Education under the Security State been in the same classes with white students, they often experienced racism and differential treatment regarding teacher expectations that at times has had serious implications for student achievement and disciplinary practices, which have affected black males in particular. During the 1960s, not only inferior schools but also biased and at times blatantly racist curricula came under increased sharp scrutiny with demands for change in terms of course content and materials. History and literature were among the first programs to be examined in terms of their omission and/or limited treatment of the experiences of black people. At the same time that black people made demands that material (particularly history, culture, and the arts) about their contributions be included in the curriculum, they also demanded the creation of Black Studies courses and programs. At the secondary level, this resulted in the creation of courses in Black History /African-American History and Black/African-American Literature, among others. At the university level, student and faculty activism resulted in undergraduate and graduate programs in Black and African-American Studies, drawing upon diverse disciplines and fields, primarily from the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts. These things led to demands to hire more black teachers and college professors. In this regard, in an environment in which resistance—individual as well as institutional—against change was often adamant, affirmative action was invoked as a means of rectifying the situation. This, however, was not without its own discontents. Whites, males in particular, claimed that they suffered from “reverse discrimination” and filed suits regarding college admissions (e.g., the Bakke case). Heated debates about the qualifications of black teachers and professors raged in institutions across the country as attempts to address competing claims—equality, redress for past (as well as ongoing wrongs), and fairness. With issues of merit and qualifications raised in terms of their worthiness to enter the profession, the interests of a “minority” ethnic group were pitted against those of the majority and, as a consequence, when school districts, schools, and colleges and universities acquiesced and began to hire individuals of color, they were accused of caving in to special interest groups. Some attention to the issue of textbooks is warranted here, given the almost singular reliance on them in history and social studies courses. “The teaching of history more than any other discipline is dominated by textbooks.”*? In their study of history textbooks used in schools, Sleeter and Grant found that information and material on different ethnic groups was often missing and, if not missing altogether, quite limited, not only in the scope but also in the amount of space allocated and the number of pages devoted to discussion of relevant topics.*? The result has been not only a Eurocentric curriculum, which privileged the experiences and perspectives of whites, but also one that eclipsed, if not marginalized, the experiences of various ethnic and cultural groups. A Matter of Conflicting Interests? Other scholars have argued that “the absence of African-Americans 65 in many school curricula represents “willful... ignorance and aggression toward Blacks, resulting in student mis-education” with harmful effects for not only black students but also white and other students who are given the impression that the experiences of black people are not important and do not matter.** This also relates to the experiences of other non-European Americans, and messages in the curriculum and courses that “your ancestors have not done much of importance in the past,” from which one can then draw conclusions that “non-European Americans are not important today,”*> with implications that the same will apply in the future. Furthermore, when material is biased with stereotypes and negative characterizations of a group, this “incessant depiction of the group [in question] as lazy, stupid and hypersexual—or ornamental [or exotic] for that matter— alters social reality so that the members of that group are always one down, this is to say, disadvantaged, the bearers of stigma and lower expectations.”*° It reduces such groups to second-class citizenship and hampers their participation in this society. Similarly, other ethnic and cultural groups of color (Latino/Latina, Native American, Asian American) have also experienced discrimination. They have also organized and challenged curricula that either omitted their experiences or presented material in limited and biased ways. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement spearheaded by African-Americans, other ethnic and cultural groups and organizations likewise demanded curricula that were inclusive. They too demanded ethnic studies courses and programs. As a consequence, in high schools, new courses in Asian American, Latino/Latina, and Native American history, among others, were included. And at universities, there are programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in Latino/Latina Studies and Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American and/or Indigenous Studies. As in the case of African-Americans, in addition to challenges to biased and exclusive curricula, groups within various communities of color have organized to demand the hiring of teachers and faculty members in schools and colleges. Here, depending upon the context, affirmative action has been deployed to ensure the hiring of racially diverse faculty. Hiring them has been at odds with hiring practices that in the past have not brought about diver- sity. Here too the specter of “special interests” has loomed, and conflicts— at times fierce—have emerged regarding hiring practices, with predominantly white faculties acting in outright antagonism if not reluctance regarding the entrée of people of color into the ranks. With the advent of what Sleeter and Grant have called single-group studies?”7—one of several strands of multiculturalism they have identified—came changes in high school as well as university curricula, at times manifested in new courses and new programs. As these programs evolved, incorporating 66 Education under the Security State new scholarship and research, these single-group studies courses and programs often became more sophisticated and nuanced. For example, instead of just focusing on one aspect of a group’s experiences, such as race or ethnicity, they would look at the intersections of different dimensions of difference, such as race and gender, race and class, or a more complex combination of these dynamics, as well as issues regarding sexuality, age, language, nationality, religion, and disability. In this way, these various approaches to ethnic studies, with attention not only to a particular group’s experiences but also issues of difference within a given group and interrelationships between groups with either similar or different experiences, has led to the development of an interdisciplinary and multicultural discourse. Although multiculturalism as a discourse has different meanings based upon different ideological assumptions, at the core is an acknowledgement that the United States and other countries are de facto multicultural. Hence, what students learn in school, how individuals are prepared for the world of work, and how corporations do business must necessarily address cultural and ethnic diversity. Among the several strands of multiculturalism, the one that has the most salience for me is Critical Multiculturalism, which not only argues for the recognition of diversity and inclusion in curricula but also provides a “critique of injustice along the axis of white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, class privilege and heterosexism, in pursuit of egalitarianism and the elimination of human suffering.”*® Educators who embrace this framework are encouraged to actively work for social justice, in the classroom, the school, within the profession, as well as in the broader community and society. Inequalities based on sex and gender and the experiences of women have been the focus of work by feminist scholars and activists. Here too, curricular reform has been the outgrowth of organizing for more accurate and inclusive curricula. Women’s Studies is now a full-blown field, having begun much like early approaches to ethnic studies, focusing primarily on sex inequality and the experiences of white, middle-class, Western women at that. Over time, courses and programs that looked at issues of sex and gender have been transformed so that they also consider multiple aspects of women’s identities and the ways in which these things intersect and influence the experiences of women: gender, race/ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, nationality, language, religion, disability, and age, to name a few. Early on, advocates of courses and programs that examined the experiences of women were challenged by others who questioned the academic legitimacy of the enterprise, and new approaches to teaching and learning that they introduced often met staunch resistance, because they critiqued traditional disciplinary content and went against the grain of established fields. For example, consider Gerda Lerner’s typology categorizing five phases in the development of women’s ‘history: (1) recognition that women have a history (in fact, multiple histories); (2) conceptualization of women as a group; (3) affirmation that women A Matter of Conflicting Interests? 67 [scholars] asked new questions about history and compiled new information about women; (4) challenges to the periodization schemes of historians that were centered on the historical experiences of men; and (5) redefinition of the categories and values of androcentric history through consideration of women’s past and present.*? Other disciplines and fields, such as English, Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Art, Music, and Philosophy, have also been transformed by new scholarship and research on women, which has enhanced the curriculum and led to the development of new courses and programs. Language use and issues of literacy have also been controversial issues regarding education in the United States. Bilingual education affirms cultural and language distinctiveness of different cultures. It is also designed to develop in individuals the literacy skills and social capital to be successful in this society, without being at the expense of their own language(s), but rather in addition to them. This approach to language instruction is quite different from the English as a Second Language (ESL) approach, which focuses on the acquisition of a new language and not on the maintenance of the first language. Experience has shown that, where no bilingual education program exists, [Latino/Latina] parents are less likely to approach the school and talk with teachers, that students are neglected by their teachers and tend to drop out, and that little effort is made to teach them English, preferring instead to classify them as slow learners or retarded. Indeed, these and other evils provided the impetus for bilingual education in the first place.*° The goals of bilingual programs, whose aims are to promote literacy in a first language as well as in a second language—in this case English—regarding the United States, are in sharp contrast with current public opinion and individuals and groups who have argued for English only and English as the Official Language policies, which assert that assimilation, hastened by the development of proficiency in English among immigrant groups, is not only “for their own good, but also for the good of the nation.”*! This approach is based upon an either/or dynamic wherein immigrant and resident children and youth have to choose one language over another. If they choose to speak in their mother tongue, then they will have limited opportunity for social mobility in this society because their options for work will be limited; if they choose English, then their lives will be open to a world of possibilities regarding social mobility. Being successful in school will increase their status in society, or so the reasoning goes. However, proponents of bilingualism argue that, while for immigrants, residents, and others for whom English is not their first language, learning English is clearly important, it should not be at “the cost of their own languages (and cultures), but instead in addition to them.”*” Furthermore, research on bilingualism, to date, 68 Education under the Security State “indicates that in both the cognitive and affective domains, maintenance bilingual programs or two-way enrichment programs of longer duration (at least six years) would be far superior to transitional bilingual programs,” which “do not guarantee English mastery and also prevent children from attaining fluency in either their native languages or in English.”49 In spite of these findings, linguistic diversity is still not perceived as a value in this society. Instead, what is important is an attempt to forge a homogenized American identity through a coercive requirement to learn English. And yet, the mere learning of how to speak, read, and write English com- petently is not a panacea for overcoming the structural barriers that face many immigrant and resident students, youth, and adults. One needs to question the assumptions that, if only one learns English well, one would necessarily have a ticket to high paying, high-status jobs, when in reality the employment structure of this economy is based on an increasingly bimodal dynamic, requiring both large numbers of low-paying service sector jobs and increasing numbers of highly skilled, technical workers. Those genuinely interested in the education of children and youth for whom English is not the first language need to continue to look at education and schooling, the curriculum and teaching methods, as well as the opportunity structure of the job market, issues of race, class, and gender as dynamics that affect individuals, groups, and their life choices. Proponents of Linguistic Human Rights argue that “first people need linguistic human rights in order to prevent their linguistic repertoire from either becoming a problem or from causing them problems”** in civil, political, and cultural dimensions of their lives, given that “becoming at least bilingual is in most cases necessary for minorities to exercise other fundamental human rights, including the fulfillment of basic needs.”45 In this context, suppose we considered educating all students in more than one language? What if we advocated that everyone in the United States become bilingual, if not multilingual? Would this not serve individuals and the nation well? This question is posed not for the matter to be resolved, given the debates that would follow; rather, the purpose is to have us think more broadly about the matter of interests, using a framework that would move us beyond seeing others among us as them, and disrupting a we /they framework in looking at educational policies, practices, and reforms. A MATTER OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS? When we consider issues of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, language, and the ways in which these things intersect and impinge upon the lives of individuals and groups, focusing on issues related to education, we can choose to see these as emanating from different interests or we can choose to see them as interrelated and not inherently at cross-purposes—among themselves or in relationship to the broader society and its interests. According to some critics, A Matter of Conflicting Interests? 69 educational reforms of recent years “have been formulated outside of the wider cultural and political concerns for empathy. As the politicians mandate test-driven curricula, they create new forms of educational pathology and social injustice that once again punish those outside of the mainstream”*® and blame them for the conditions in which they find themselves. In my view, if we are to move more fruitfully in the direction of promoting more democratic education, one of the things that would be more serviceable would be to stop engaging in the rhetoric of divide and conquer, or reproducing the notion of irreconcilable differences, when we pay attention to the interests of different population groups and specific issues regarding their experiences in education in the United States. Members of different cultural, ethnic, linguistic groups, and women are constituents of the public and, hence, public education and, as such, its institutions, which have historically catered to the majority and, in the interest of the nation, must find viable ways of incorporating the interests of different groups into the fabric of their mission. A legacy of free public education is derived from beliefs that public schools could serve to achieve the following: development of citizens by inculcating in them a common denominator of nonsectarian and nonpartisan values in terms of the public good for society and its institutions.4” Within this framework, it makes sense to define the interests of different cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups and women as complementary and reaffirmative of values regarding respect for individuals and groups in this society. Public schools are where the majority of children are educated and inculcated with ideals, values, and expectations, as well as ideas about themselves and others. I argue in defense of public education that not only espouses democratic beliefs but also strives to practice them in its daily and lived experiences, incorporating differences in a way that honors diversity beyond the rhetoric of the rainbow. This means promoting social justice and equality, affirming difference, and being inclusive in multiple dimensions: goals, content, pedagogy, staffing, policies, and procedures. In the contemporary United States, some of the most salient challenges in this regard are issues related to race and ethnicity, gender/sex, culture, language, and class. Among the various interests at play are those of the state, the people—aggregate and disaggregated into different population groups—educators, public officials, students, parents, and business. Depending upon the context, the politics may be fluid, reflecting changes in priorities and alliances. Yet race (and ethnicity) continues to matter, given persistent inequality in educational achievement, income, housing, health care, and quality of life. Inequality because of sex, especially in terms of income and representation in different careers and fields, still persists. Literacy in speaking, reading, and writing English also continues as a divide between the haves and the have-nots. When these things intersect and affect the experiences of individuals and groups, the effects are often adverse, 70 Education under the Security State limiting opportunity, stifling development, and limiting one’s power to engage in the political arena and struggle for change. Though public schools are but one of many powerful institutions in society, they have the potential to become agents of change and transformation. Making our public schools places where issues of difference are defined as resources and not problems, where children and youth learn not only about themselves and their own cultures but also about others in respectful and nonstereotypical ways, has the promise of educating the next generations for life and work in a world where the boundaries of we/they can begin to be dissolved. If we are willing to reconsider how we frame issues beyond either/or binaries—the majority versus minorities, men versus women, English speakers and non-English speakers, those who share our religious or spiritual beliefs and those who do not, those who share our particular cultural traditions and those who do not, those who are able and those with disabilities—then perhaps we can begin a process whereby we redefine our interests and create new priorities that work to forge more meaningful ways of addressing individual and collective rights and responsibilities in ways that transcend pitting one against another, negotiating between redressing past wrongs, current inequalities, so that the future can provide greater social justice. Redefining our interests to include those of others with whom we work and live can become a way of political, social, and economic engagement wherein our collective interests include attention to different groups among us and their particular interests. Perhaps, then, our different interests will not necessarily be seen as in conflict, with one of us winning and the other losing. As it now stands, until we redefine how we look at things and use language, we will be locked into a dance of my interests versus yours, with few willing to really listen to and hear the other and work to accommodate multiple interests for fear of losing something. I hope that in the ongoing conversations and debates about education, that when confronted with issues emanating from the experiences of different groups, more of us will challenge a paradigm of thinking that automatically defines our interests in collision with those of others. Yet I fear that the cult of individualism coupled with privileges and a sense of entitlement that have been derived from an unjust system that has discriminated against individuals and groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, sex/gender, and language clouds our vision and impedes our ability to move beyond particularity. Too many of us take inequality for granted, see it as the way that things are (and have been) and thus do not question the structural barriers that others face. This perhaps enables us to turn a deaf ear to the voices of others who remind us that the democratic dream has not become a reality for many. I have mine; we have ours; let them get theirs. ¥ I hope that we will choose not to be mean spirited, self-interested, and without empathy. We can begin to change by changing the way that we rear A Matter of Conflicting Interests? fp our children and how they are educated in schools. We can further advocate an education that develops the whole person; transcends training and technique; values more than test scores and the consumption of facts and information; engenders reflectiveness and critical and creative thinking; and instills a sense of interconnectedness and interdependence with others as well as the environment. This is a tradition that I would hope we would embrace for our children and youth, one that is forward looking and not one looking back nostalgically at some halcyon good old days that were that for just a few. a <s : sv A i 5 “Saliswol ei) THE) th ee a aOR 1 =e es wa aS ain Beg) eal PF | iy eae 64) se Pe] ee | r ®, s Sl 5 hehe Ae ps WSaheiyh |eevaiend «(i co ay: Soars oS meat A init) Sag &~ “a = Pe) es cert re gowns Set Aan oa LP 3a | Baefdas. eS ryt Blt ee Netlee Wyss ee aw ewe ao lage ee Vi Argh, Ceug) Sd @ Ajo i ee ap Coe 34 a a! >is Sap Gwe ir ws alld We) et ae i OL oul has © Sy bd i oll o1s ae » oe wy, OF)" Ch a a é, een J eh Aeon es es Heh VE ay aa nul % et PRR aad Sh a i Leen pres = oe co, ee AAP Sig bag pls an ay ey A ae : he ee on ORs a ee Mindyhs iAaa a ae Rents alae oven oh sie Ria é ¥nes tay) mpi Fhe , : we ipesses og <a ip aon “4 i .2> 30 apyliag Ge odcsl coi m) ally os Maeit 1) am Mpsigrey epi! me Pane‘= her [oa ae (aee> ithe. a. 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Testi Mel} ins CP RR St BRA. pir, weitinw ae i 44 awind Stats Kul) ee 7 SioearetSeisiare c# peiy lee At A 0 wath Sa pry ier Paes “ © os, “mali” gabe See wp em i ; ee ES tale ae be hi ,. ea il < wan —— TT Chi. ity FEA eee ek p 4 -" T iar: it riaHye onlin apeRST j pates she Bote oo . wey re “an ini feme ohnla aan a ae eee af erika) ae a : | 2 hea NL Ae iad _ oy ‘Feat e Dal . . aU, ; a | | — il — Security Measures: Defending Public Education from the Public ony ote OURS ~ aay gee A Nation at Risk— RELOADED: The Security State and the New World Order Davip A. GABBARD Students of political economy share familiarity with Max Weber’s description of the state as exercising a monopoly over the use of violence. To be more precise, Weber actually contended that “the state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory”! (emphasis added). Some of those same students may also be aware that Plato had earlier ascribed another monopoly to the state that holds tremendous relevance for educational policy analysts’ reflections on A Nation at Risk, which “celebrated” its twentieth anniversary in 2003. Writing in The Republic (Book 3), Plato spends considerable time rehashing Socrates’ defense of censorship before he goes on to claim that “we must prize truth.” “Lay persons,” he says, “have no business lying.” Like doctors in charge of the health of the republic, however, the rulers of a just society should recognize that there are times when “lies are useful... as a kind of medicine or remedy. Only the rulers of the city—and no others— may tell lies. And their lies, whether directed to enemies or citizens, will be legitimate only if their purpose is to serve the public interest.”? In addition to the state’s monopoly over violence /force described by Weber, we can see how Plato’s Republic (frequently cited by neoconservatives like former Secretary of Education William Bennett and Alan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind| as one the “Great Books” and an intellectual cornerstone of modern democracies), grants the state a monopoly over lies. As I previously have written, we should consider A Nation at Risk to be the greatest lie that the state has ever produced regarding America’s public 76 Education under the Security State schools. Risk was more than a document.? In the first place, it was the most efficacious educational report ever issued by the federal government, judged in terms of the scope and scale of educational reforms that it engendered over the past twenty years. It was also a well-designed and orchestrated propaganda campaign that actually began eighteen months prior to its release when Secretary of Education Terrel Bell established the National Commission for Excellence in Education (NCEE). If we examine the tactics of the NCEE as they are described by the Commission’s executive director, Milton Goldberg, and senior research associate, James Harvey, and if we even minimally analyze the verbiage used in their descriptions of those tactics, we recognize some rather disturbing patterns in their work. Goldberg and Harvey report that they and the other commissioners conducted their activities leading up the release of their final report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, in “an extraordinarily open manner.” Not only did the Commission assume a high profile throughout the eighteen months leading up to its report, wherein Commission members participated in a public event somewhere in the United States every three weeks, but it also maintained that profile for a considerable time afterward. Goldberg and Harvey admit that this rate of high-profile activity was conducted in order to “create a national audience for the Commission’s work.” They do not report, but we might suspect, that the high profile of their activities was one of the many lessons that they learned after having “examined the methods that other distinguished national panels had used to generate public and governmental reactions.”* Neither do Goldberg and Harvey reveal which “other distinguished national panels” they borrowed their methods from. Elements of their arguments, however, reflect the rhetorical style of those involved in formulating and promulgating the policies contained in National Security Council Memorandum No. 68 (NSC-68), the document that came to define U.S. Cold War doctrine. For example, in listing the more publicly admissible lessons that they gleaned from examining other methods for generating public and governmental reactions (dare we say “proper” reactions?), the commissioners explain that “effective reports concentrated on essential messages, described them in clear and unmistakable prose, and drew the public’s attention to the national consequences of continuing on with business as usual.” This statement bears a startling resemblance to Dean Acheson’s account of the rhetorical maneuvers that he and other “hard-liners” in and around the National Security Council deployed to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” into believing that the Soviets were a military threat to the United States and to world security. Acheson recalls how In the State Department we used to discuss how much time that mythical “average American citizen” put in each day listening, reading, and arguing about the world outside his own country. .. . It seemed to us that ten minutes a day A Nation at Risk—RELOADED Th would be a high average. If this were anywhere near right, points to be under- standable had to be clear. If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise (emphasis added).§ In addition to making their “essential messages” clearer than truth, the members of the NCEE found that other distinguished panels had framed those messages so as to draw “the public’s attention to the national consequences of continuing on with business as usual.” On this matter, they could have taken their cue from a 1980 report that Goldberg and Harvey cite from the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties. The authors of this earlier report had warned that “The continued failure of the schools to perform their traditional role adequately may have disastrous consequences for this nation.”° On the other hand, further evidence could be ushered in to support the conclusion that the methods adopted by the NCEE to generate a public and governmental response were taken from those as- sociated with NSC-68 and the Cold War hysteria used to promote its underlying agenda. For example, the self-congratulatory tone taken by Goldberg and Harvey in reporting their success in generating the desired public and governmental response reaches its crescendo with their claim that “Not since the heady days following the launching of Sputnik I has education been accorded so much attention.”” Given the emergence of the New Right and the resurgence of the traditional Cold War conservative bloc in the Republican Party that led to Reagan’s electoral victory in 1980, it is not surprising that the discourses surrounding A Nation at Risk would reflect the rhetoric of Cold War militarism. This reference to the attention that education received as the result of Sputnik I alludes to the rising Cold War hysteria during the 1950s that blamed professional educators for having failed “national security” interests by allowing the schools to deteriorate into bastions of antiintellectualism—the same essential message delivered in A Nation at Risk. In 1981, Reagan administration officials declared that a new threat to national security had arisen, and alerting the nation to this threat constituted the first “essential message” that Goldberg, Harvey, and other members of the NCEE had to make clearer than truth in the public mind. Though the Soviet menace was still serious enough to elicit mass public concern in the opinions of Reagan’s elite planners, the threat of Soviet world domination was now coupled with the risk of the United States losing its preeminence in world markets. “Competitors throughout the world,” Goldberg and Harvey explain, “are overtaking our once unchallenged lead in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation.”® Although the NCEE attempted to attribute that “once unchallenged lead” to some mythical golden age in the history of American education—the 1950s—even a cursory understanding of WWII and the devastation it wrought on the industrial 78 Education under the Security State infrastructures of Japan and the imperial powers of Europe would enable us to gain a clearer understanding of how the United States acquired its “once unchallenged lead.” “OUR ONCE UNCHALLENGED LEAD” America’s elite planning community, had predicted as early as 1939 that WWII would leave the industrial infrastructures of the colonial powers of Europe in ruin. Anticipating a German victory, members of this elite, business-dominated policy network set out to determine and enunciate to the federal executive “the political, military, territorial and economic requirements of the United States in its potential leadership of the non-German world.”? By July 1941, they had arrived at a conclusion regarding the territorial requirements for their ever-expanding economic interests, which they equated with “national interests.” In July, the scope of those requirements, which they had designated as the “Grand Area,” included “the Western hemisphere, the United Kingdom, the remainder of the British Commonwealth and Empire, the Dutch East Indies, China, and Japan.”!° By the middle of December, however, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor pushed America into the war, the Council on Foreign Relations and the government committed themselves to the defeat of the Axis powers and the formation of “a new world order with international political and economic institutions . . . which would join and integrate all of the earth’s nations under the leadership of the United States”! (emphasis added).!* (Note the dramatic similarities between this statement and the foreign policy strategy outlined in the Project for the New American Century and described in the official national security policy of the current Bush administration.) American entry into the war, then, expanded the territorial vision of the Grand Area as the United States positioned itself to create the world’s first truly global empire—a pax Americana. As Council of Foreign Affairs Director Isaiah Bowman wrote just a week after U.S. entry into war: “The measure of our victory will be the measure of our domination after victory.”!% The question of how that domination could be maintained had yet to be determined. With no small measure of foresight, the American policy-planning community recognized that achieving this level of global hegemony could not be easily secured if presented to the American people and the world in such crass terms. As early as April 1941, the Economic and Financial Group of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that “If war aims are to be stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world, and will be vulnerable to * Nazi counter-promises. . . . The interests of other peoples should be stressed, A Nation at Riskk—RELOADED Jie not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect.”!4 In acknowledgment that the “formulation of a statement of war aims for propaganda purposes” differs “from the formulation of one defining the true national interest,”!° these elite planners committed themselves to developing a war statement that would “cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana.”!° In August 1941, that statement arrived in the form of the Atlantic Charter, which portrayed Britain and the allies, later including the United States, as combatants in a noble struggle to preserve and extend what Roosevelt identified as the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Framed as elements of a more general anti-imperialist commitment in U.S. foreign policy, the spirit of the Four Freedoms carried over into the postwar era with the Truman Doctrine of 1947. While the plans for an expanded Grand Area established the territorial requirements of the pax Americana, the Atlantic Charter and the Truman Doctrine combined to establish the political framework necessary to legitimatize U.S. dominance in the “new world order.” That framework provided an image of the United States as the defender of democracy and of the right of all people to national self-determination. Determining and acquiring the level of military force required to enforce its global hegemony stood as the last requirements that the U.S. foreign policy establishment would have to meet in realizing its vision of the new world order. We must remember that the U.S. policy elite laid its postwar plans under the assumption of a German victory, well before that period we have come to know as the Cold War. They did not anticipate the survival of the Soviet Union. Though the survival of the Soviet Union did partially impede their global designs, the fact that the structures of the Soviet political economy endured Hitler’s invasion proved to be rather fortuitous as far as U.S. interests were concerned. Casting the Soviets as a military threat to the preservation of the Four Freedoms, as a threat to the national sovereignty of countries throughout the world, and as an evil force intent on world domination provided the pretext for maintaining and expanding the war economy to meet the military requirements of pax Americana and the economic requirements of the dominant elements within the American foreign policy establishment. At the end of the war, thousands of SS soldiers and other elements of Hitler’s armies within the Ukraine and Eastern Europe received U.S. support to continue fighting within the Soviet realm. The United States even employed the services of the head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern front, Reinhard Gehlen, to coordinate the efforts of those forces under close CIA supervision. On the home front, traditional conservative elements in the 80 Education under the Security State United States continued to express their fears of the Soviet Union as a political or ideological threat. Recognizing that the Soviets were “by far the weaker force,” George Kennan, director of policy planning in the U.S State Department, argued that “it is not Russian military power that is threatening us, it is Russian political power.”!7 It was under his assumption of the Soviet political threat that Kennan formulated the original U.S. “containment” policy. As conceived under Kennan, “containment” meant conceding those areas occupied by the Red Army during WWII to Soviet domination while protecting the rest of the Grand Area from the political threat, that is, preventing other nations from achieving independence from the global political economy that subordinates the needs of indigenous populations to the demands of U.S. and multinational corporations. As Gaddis points out, however, what we have come to know as containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States. . . . What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations (Gaddis’s emphasis).1® Those internal forces giving primacy to economic considerations in shaping what we have come to know as containment include the right-wing of the foreign policy establishment and the military contractors, agribusiness, and nationally based oil companies whose economic and political clout grew enormously during the economic recovery provided by WWII. In their view, Kennan’s conceptualization of containment, which portrayed the Soviet Union as a political or ideological threat, failed to evoke the necessary sense of crisis or national emergency that could justify the level of military buildup required to either enforce the new world order of 1945 or, in the case of military contractors especially, to ensure their continued long-term profitability. In order to ensure these things, they needed to develop a different portrayal of the Soviet Union and the nature of the threat that it posed to the United States and the world. Working through the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Security Council, these forces developed that alternative vision of the Soviet threat in a secret internal planning document known as NSC-68 (National Security Memorandum No. 68). Written by Paul Nitze, NSC-68 sought to make it perfectly “clear that a substantial and rapid building up of strength in the free world is necessary to support a firm policy intended to check and roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination.”!? Though Acheson and Nitze knew, as did Kennan and others within the foreign policy establishment, that the Soviets did not possess the capacity for “world domination,” facts hold no relevance where matters of elite policy formation are concerned. Following Plato’s advice, the A Nation at Risk—RELOADED 81 pursuit of elite interests under the guise of “national security” or “the national interest” often demands “useful lies” to effect the implementation of appropriate policies for the “common good.” As Jerry W. Sanders explains: While the vision of a Pax Americana constructed on the foundation of militarism was accepted within the foreign policy establishment . . . it was not so extensively held outside those rarefied circles. The wider business community and the wider political community would have to be persuaded of the wisdom of tripling military expenditures, bankrolling Europe’s rearmament, and garrisoning American troops abroad to ensure the success of such an ambitious undertaking.”° NSC-68 was designed to affect that persuasion at the executive level of the federal government. As Dean Acheson would later recall, “the purpose of NSC-68 was to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make a decision but so that the decision could be carried out.”*! Secret internal planning documents, however, do not suffice to affect policy, especially where federal budgets are concerned. And “bludgeoning the mass mind of ‘top government’” only went part way toward that end. Advocates of “rollback” or “containment militarism” would also have to generate a consensus in Congress and a sufficient level of public support in order to transform their secret document into an active policy. Chester Barnard, chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, predicted to other members of the State Defense Policy Review Committee (which conducted the review leading to NSC-68) that, in order to push the increase in military expenditures that rollback strategy demanded (from $13.5 billion to $50 billion) through Congress, “the government is going to need assistance in getting public support.”?? Or as Robert Lovett, an investment banker with strong ties to the foreign policy elite, claimed: “We must have a much vaster propaganda machine to tell our story at home and abroad.” Toward these ends, Barnard recommended the formation of a private citizen’s lobby that could “then translate NSC-68 into public discourse under the guise of extraordinary bipartisan concern transcending ordinary politics to meet the national crisis.” These concerns led to the formation of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a private group drawn together by top officials in the State and Defense Department for the sole purpose of gaining support for the policy recommendations contained in NSC-68 from members of Congress and the general public. Editorials in the Washington Times-Herald described the CPD as “a group of citizens supporting the interventionism of the Truman administration,” charging that the members of CPD were “all prominent internationalists” who were on the Committee for the Marshall Plan and “profited handsomely from the spending under the Marshall aid program.” This account predicted, further, that “they will also profit from spending under the defense Education under the Security State 82 program.”2° Quite prophetically, Senator Robert Taft warned that the militaristic policies advanced by the CPD would create “great deficits and inflation, and bring on ‘the garrison state.’”?° Even in the face of this opposition, the CPD was largely successful in creating an image of the Soviet Union as a military threat with aspirations for global domination, thus legitimating both the maintenance of a huge public subsidy to advanced industry through the military system and the now familiar patterns of U.S. intervention in maintaining its global economic hegemony.?” Waging the Cold War as a pretext for the huge levels of military spending required to maintain its global empire exacted a heavy toll on the domestic economy of the United States. Though space renders a full accounting of those costs prohibitive here, we only need to consider how the demands of the military-industrial complex for federal research and development funding allowed Germany and Japan to become far more competitive in consumer markets. Given the levels of military spending that the Reagan administration was to initiate in the process of renewing Cold War tensions, however, any linkage between the economic hemorrhaging that military spending had inflicted on U.S. society in years past and the recessionary patterns of the 1970s had to be avoided. This understanding provides some context for grasping the second essential message that the NCEE had to make clearer than truth in the public mind. CREATING A DOMESTIC THREAT Just as they had blamed the schools for allowing the nation’s educational standards to deteriorate and allowing the Soviets to beat the United States into space in the 1950s, advocates of containment militarism were now blaming the schools for the increasing inability of the United States to compete in international markets and the concomitant recessionary tendencies of the domestic economy. Once again reflective of the hysterical militarism of the Cold War rhetoricians who inspired the language of this report, the authors of A Nation at Risk complained that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”?8 The prerogatives of business that dominate foreign and domestic policy exclude the possibility that this decline could be related to the Trade Act of 1963 that provided tax subsidies for U.S. firms that relocated or established new production facilities in foreign countries. Also excluded as a contributing factor to the economic plight of American workers, the Maquiladora Agreement that the federal government established with Mexico in 1965 allowed U.S. companies to import materials into Mexico duty-free for further processing or final assembly. These products are then transported back to the U.S., where the company pays only a small tariff on the value added in Mexico (labor, A Nation at Risk—RELOADED 83 materials, and overhead). Since the labor is main cost and is so inexpensive ($.50 an hour), the tariff is minimal.?9 Other implicit, though nonetheless “essential,” messages that the NCEE was to impart to the public included the assertion that, had the schools provided students with better skills and more knowledge, the thousands of industrial jobs that left America between 1965 and 1980 could have been saved. After all, it was owing to the terrible education of those students that American business had to seek refuge among the more highly skilled and trained masses in nations like Mexico, Thailand, and Haiti. Naturally, the questions of wages, safety standards, and environmental regulations, all the product of the meddlesome American public’s interference with the imperatives of business, never entered into the decisions to export U.S. manufacturing plants and jobs overseas. In the final analysis, the “clearer than truth” reality conveyed in A Nation at Risk sought to convince the American public that they, because of their poor job skills, were responsible for the downturn in the American economy, which would only worsen under “the con- tinued failure of the schools to perform their traditional role adequately.”*° Returning to the “extraordinarily open manner” in which the Commission conducted its work, Goldberg and Harvey state that the numerous public events held during the eighteen months leading up to the release of their report afforded the opportunity for “administrators, teachers, parents, and others to . . . discuss their perceptions of the problems and accomplishments of American education.”*! Given that A Nation at Risk delivered the same message contained in both the 1980 report from the President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties and the 1983 report from the National Governors Association’s Task Force on Education for Economic Growth (“Action for Excellence”), we can only conclude that this message was formulated long before the public was actually “consulted.” If that were the case, then the high profile of the NCEE’s work can be seen as an effort to manufacture public consent to the education policies that the Reagan administration sought to enact; namely, returning, education to its “traditional role” of providing adequately processed human capital to advanced industry—all at public expense, of course—maintaining the traditional patterns. All of this conforms to the practices of public diplomacy conducted by the CPD in the early 1950s, the period of time that we commonly associate with the rise of the security state—the start of the Cold War. Once the CPD had accomplished its mission of shifting U.S. foreign policy from “containment” to “rollback,” it disbanded in 1953. Not inconsequentially, many of its original members and some new ones resurrected the CPD during the Reagan era—Paul Nitze, author of NSC-68, included. The presence of these elements undoubtedly affected the formation of the Office for Domestic Diplomacy (OPD) to help initiate the Reagan administration’s second wave 84 Education under the Security State of Cold War hysteria to justify the huge budgetary increase in defense spending that contributed so heavily to our current deficit crisis. Holly Sklar cites a senior U.S. official who described the efforts of the OPD as “a huge psychological operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in denied or enemy territory.”** Demonstrating the general sentiments that elite policymakers hold toward the public (the domestic enemy), the OPD also instructed administration officials “to refuse to appear in public forums with well-versed opponents.”#* While most of the OPD’s activities were geared toward manufacturing jingoist hysteria over the fear of a massive Nicaraguan invasion of the United States and protecting the “Teflon President” from criticism, we should expect that all of Reagan’s cabinet officials were briefed on such strategies and that the NCEE was not excluded from the conversation. Public diplomacy, such as that carried out by the National Commission for Excellence in Education, represents nothing less than an effectively organized and operated propaganda campaign, serving the function of what Walter Lippmann called the “manufacture of consent.”** Writing in the 1920s, Lippmann observed that propaganda had already become “a selfconscious art and a regular organ of popular government” aimed at mobilizing public support for policies established by ruling elites. During the same era, Edward Bernays explained further that “the very essence of the democratic process” is “the freedom to persuade and suggest. ... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. . . . It is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” Thus, as Noam Chomsky comments, “If the freedom to persuade and suggest happens to be concentrated in a few hands [e.g., Goldberg and Harvey] we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society.”*> In retrospect, the NCEE manufactured a sufficient level of consent to allow its educational policy recommendations to be carried forward throughout the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and, now, the Bush II administrations. Reflective of the business class’s contempt for professional educators, who might have funny ideas about education serving aims other than those specified by the school’s “traditional role” (selecting for obedience and conformity), the first Bush administration did not entrust the task of developing an educational policy to carry the nation into the twenty-first century to the Department of Education. Rather, the Bush I team took a more direct route toward casting educational policy to meet the demands of business, charging the U.S Department of Labor with the task of formalizing the NCEE’s recommendations into formal policy and, eventually, federal legislation. Though no educational legislation was passed under Bush, the Labor Department did succeed in creating a sort of vision statement called “America * 2000,” which Bill Clinton and the Democrats embellished and enacted into legislation as the GOALS 2000: Educate America Act. A Nation at Risk—RELOADED 85 THE CLINTON TEAM TAKES CHARGE Lest we should be duped into believing that the other half of the Business Party operates under different imperatives, the Clinton administration’s approach to educational reform did not significantly differ from the approach taken under Reagan and Bush. The rhetoric surrounding GOALS 2000, however, demonstrated less of the nationalist flavor of A Nation at Risk, preferring a more global approach to convincing the American public of their need for these reforms. To begin with, GOALS 2000 shared certain characteristics with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty. In the first place, Clinton inherited all three measures from the Reagan and Bush administrations. Secondly, NAFTA, GATT, and GOALS 2000 each represents an element of a more general pattern of structural adjustment related to the postindustrialization process that is redefining America’s role in the global economy. One of the most important sources for exploring the relations between GOALS 2000 and America’s new role under increased economic globalization is Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. According to Reich, former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, any portrayal of American educational policy as serving the interests of corporate America is imprecise. Such claims assume that corporations still function according to the rules of “economic nationalism,” wherein American workers, American corporations, and the American government participate in a collective unity of purpose. According to Reich, this fragile unity of purpose could only hold the nation together provided that, “in return for prosperity,” American society [accept] the legitimacy and permanence of the American core corporation. Clearly, as Reich relates, U.S. “government officials” accepted these terms, taking “as one of their primary responsibilities the continued profitability of American core corporations.”°° This meant, as Reich admits, that corporate interests dominated the formation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, to include educational policy. During the era of economic nationalism, high-volume, standardized production characterized the strength of the domestic U.S. economy. Under these conditions, Reich explains, contributing to “the continued profitability of America’s core corporations” by “preparing America’s children for gainful employment” was not a “terribly burdensome” responsibility for government officials to meet. “The only prerequisites for most jobs were an ability to comprehend simple oral and written directives and sufficient selfcontrol to implement them.” How such training may have translated into civics and social studies courses, Reich does not comment. Turning briefly to his response to a critic of Clinton’s educational policies, however, we hear Reich argue that the educational goal of “preparing young people for jobs” is “complementary, not contradictory” to the goal of “preparing responsible 86 Education under the Security State citizens with a strong sense of community purpose.”%” Situating his earlier remarks on the responsibility demonstrated by government officials toward maintaining the “continued profitability of American core corporations,” we can easily determine which community’s purpose responsible citizens should have a sense of. The only criticism that Reich directs toward our contemporary schools pertains to their failure to respond appropriately or adequately to the shift in economic realities as America moved from an industrial national economy to a postindustrial society within a global economy. Reich is fond of repeating what has become his standard line for diagnosing the ills of America’s schools: “The problems with our educational system is not that schools changed for the worse, they simply did not change for the better.”#° For Reich, it no longer made sense to speak of an American economy. In the new world order, economic nationalism is dead. There remains but one economy, and it is global. Similarly, Reich contended that the high-volume production core corporation is also a relic of our past; the high-value production transnational corporation has displaced it. The only element in any nation’s economic structure to have retained its national identity is its workforce and this only because of its relative immobility internationally. The point of Reich’s obituary rested in convincing individual Americans that they should no longer perceive their economic fortunes rising and falling together as if they were all in the same big economic boat. Contemporary and future members of the American workforce must recognize that they drift alone, as rugged economic individualists, across the waters of the global economy. Whether they sink or swim depends no longer on the health of the American economy, but solely upon how valuable they can make themselves to the transnational corporations that determine which jobs will wash upon whose shores. The only manner in which they can attract the high-paying jobs that Reich associated with “symbolic-analytic services” is through an improved system of public education. In an open letter to President Clinton appearing in Tikkun magazine, Svi Shapiro lamented “the greatly increased emphasis” that Clinton’s educational policy places “on the notion that public education exists to serve the needs of corporate America, that education ts preeminently about preparing kids for the job market” (original emphasis).*? This, he contended, is an approach to education “without heart or soul, a discourse about education that accepts liberalism’s excision from it of moral and spiritual concerns. It is a language that reduces the education of the young to skills, knowledge, and competencies, one that endorses a disastrously limited view of what it means to nur- ture a new generation for a world in crisis and pain.”?° If our schools are to play a role in healing this blighted world, Shapiro argues, the political leadership in our country must adopt “a different American tradition and language concerning the purpose and meaning of education—one that connects people, especially the young, to the making of a democratic culture.”4! A Nation at Risk—-RELOADED 87 In direct response to Shapiro’s critique, Reich argued that “While corporate America will benefit from the administration’s reforms, the real winners will be the future workers and the current workforce.”42 Given that Reich projected that only 20 percent of the future jobs in the United States will qualify as high-paying, symbolic-analytic positions, the likelihood that future and current workers will actually derive any benefit from the current educational reforms seems rather small. The death knell that Reich sounded for economic nationalism should be regarded as highly ominous. We have already heard this former member of the federal cabinet admit that corporate interests have long dominated U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and that government officials have taken the continued profitability of U.S. core corporations as one of their primary responsibilities. He even provides some insights into the lengths that those officials were willing to go in preserving and expanding corporate profits. He cites, for example, the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 that returned the Shah to power and restored U.S. control of Iranian oil. He also cites the land reform initiated in Guatemala under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman that “confiscated” the plantations of the United Fruit Company as having prompted a similar response from the U.S. government on behalf of the interests of American core corporations. What he does not tell us is that what Mossadegh and Guzman, as well as Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Daniel Ortega, and others recognized as “official enemies” in U.S. doctrine, share in common is having committed the crime of economic nationalism. As State Department officials explained in 1945, “The philosophy of the New Nationalism embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” Advocates of economic nationalism, they continue, “are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”4% It could be added that economic nationalism might also advocate the participation of a country’s people in determining the direction that such development takes. The U.S. government’s position has, of course, been opposed to this brand of radical thought, believing that U.S. investors should be the first beneficiaries as well as the planners of development wherever, whenever, and however they decide it should occur. Trickledown effects of U.S. investments that might actually benefit the masses, at home or abroad, have always been regarded as an incident, not an end, of American policy. Further expectations are regarded as heretical to standard doctrine. It is interesting that Reich should undertake to convince Americans that economic nationalism is now a relic of our own past. Given the extent to which elite U.S. planners have held economic nationalism to be anathema with regard to other nations within their domain, we could read Reich’s book as an official declaration of the third-worldization of the United States, 88 Education under the Security State wherein the United States is regarded as one among many colonies of a new state structure that transcends national borders. “In the Financial Times, BBC economics correspondent James Morgan describes a ‘de facto world government’ that is taking shape: the IMF, World Bank, G-7, GATT, and other structures designed to serve the interests of TNCs, banks, and investment firms in a ‘new imperial age?” *lt hassbeem noted that such de facto governing institutions are immune from popular influence or even popular awareness. Even before NAFTA was signed into law, its architects demonstrated the usual contempt for democracy. The Labor Advisory Committee (LAC), based in the unions and established under the Trade Act of 1974, is legally bound to advise and inform the executive branch of government before any trade agreement is made. In the case of NAFTA, the LAC was informed that its report on the Agreement was due to President Bush I on September 9, though the Committee was not provided a copy of the document until September 8. When the LAC finally did release its report, it reached some frightening conclusions regarding the likely consequences of NAFTA and called for the agreement to be renegotiated. Most important, they noted, “‘NAFTA will have the effect of prohibiting democratically elected bodies at [federal, state, and local] levels of government from enacting measures deemed inconsistent with the provisions of the agreement,’ including measures on the environment, workers’ rights, health and safety, .ete.”4 In an important book dealing with the antidemocratic and environmentally dangerous tendencies within the new wave of free trade agreements, Tim Lang and Colin Hines point out that in the case of the Canada-USA Free Trade Agreement, the prototype for NAFTA, “government subsidies to encourage energy efficiency and [natural resource] conservation,” for example, “are given no immunity from trade challenge.” Among the many cases that they cite to support their concerns is that of British Columbia, which was forced to “abandon reforestation programs when it was challenged by the U.S. forestry industry as an unfair subsidy, and hence contrary to free trade.”*° In a similar case, Mexico brought a case before GATT decrying the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972) as an unfair trade barrier when it was used to embargo imports of Mexican and Venezuelan yellow fin tuna because of the damage to dolphin populations incurred as the result of those nations’ fishing methods. GATT ruled in favor of Mexico; Americans will just have to live with their impotency to affect policy where it threatens the prerogatives of trade. Numerous other cases can be cited to justify concern that under the im- % peratives of “free trade” “it is a violation of natural liberty and even science to deceive people into thinking that they have some rights beyond what they can gain by selling their labor power,”*’ a point that returns us to Reich’s response to Shapiro that the educational goal of “preparing young people A Nation at Risk—RELOADED 89 for jobs” is “complementary, not contradictory” to the goal of “preparing responsible citizens with a strong sense of community purpose.” At first glance, there would appear to be a contradiction in Reich’s promotion of an educational mission that would develop “responsible citizens with a strong sense of community purpose” and his support of “investor rights” agreements such as NAFTA and GATT that would effectively supersede any national policy decision affected through citizen initiative if that decision threatened the prerogatives of free trade. The contradiction is removed, however, when we realize that Reich’s definition of a “responsible citizen” differs from our own and after we question just which community’s purpose these responsible citizens are to have a sense of. In the case of elected officials, it is quite easy for us to determine how Reich perceives their roles as responsible citizens. As cited previously, Reich readily admits that, under the old economic order, government officials took “as one of their primary responsibilities the continued profitability of America’s core corporations.” With no evidence to support a conclusion that these responsible citizens have undergone any kind of religious conversion since the time those corporations became transnational, we can logically discern from Reich’s analysis that it is the transnational corporate community’s purposes that government officials, including federally commissioned educational reformers and other responsible citizens, should now sense, protect, and extend. 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WAYNE Ross The current accountability strategies of school reform rely heavily on measuring outcomes, especially student achievement, and attaching consequences, cither positive or negative, to various levels of performance. These accountability strategies affect everyone and every aspect of schools and schooling at local, regional, national, and international levels. In most states and across the United States, outcome-based bureaucratic accountalility prevails. This form of accountability holds teachers and schools accountable to state education authorities for producing improvements in student learning outcomes. Such an accountability strategy focuses teachers, administrators, schools, parents, and students on specific forms of limited knowledge and skills. Government agencies create guides for common content and standards that are manifest in performance on mandated student tests. | Since A Nation at Risk was published in the early 1980s, the emphasis in K-12 school reform has been the development of a world-class school system that can be directly linked to increased international economic production and prominence. In other words, corporate interests that have been promulgated by the business community have driven school reform efforts. There are many contexts in which this special interest is manifest, although one of the most prominent has been the four National Education Summits, controlled and dominated by corporate CEOs and governors. In this environment of corporate influence in school reform, many interventions are promoted. Some examples are school choice plans (voucher OD Education under the Security State systems, charter schools), comprehensive school designs based on business principles (such as economies of scale, standardization, cost efficiency, production line strategies), management of schools by noneducators, back to basics curricula, teacher merit pay, and strong systems of accountability. These interventions reflect what Michael Apple describes as “conservative modernization” in his analysis of the politically right agenda for school reform.' In this chapter, we will look specifically at the increased and increasing emphasis on accountability in schools, which has become the means of enforcement and control used by states and businesses. This is so because those who declare that schools ought to be a certain way cannot themselves make schools be that way. States and corporations can only demand that others remake schools, and the authority to carry out this mission is delegated, although not the authority to decide on the mission. The delegation takes the form of uniform outcome measures of productivity, for example, scores on standardized tests or graduation rates, which provide evidence that the authority delegated to teachers or professors is being properly exercised. We will explore this hegemony of accountability, its origins, meanings, and consequences, as it has developed in K-12 education. THE MEANING OF ACCOUNTABILITY Accountability is a means of interaction in hierarchical, often bureaucratic systems, between those who have power and those who do not. Accountability is “a state of being in which persons are obligated to answer to others”? (emphasis added). Complex hierarchical systems do not permit those in power to be everywhere and do everything at the same time to achieve what they consider to be desirable outcomes. Consequently, authority must be delegated to others, which disperses power to lower levels of the hierarchical system. Those who receive this authority do not receive it in full, however. Power flows through them, but not from them. For example, the authority of accountable persons is limited to establishing the means by which the ends of power shall be achieved. Specifically, accountability is an economic means of interaction. When power is delegated and dispersed to those within a hierarchical system, there is an expected return from the investment of that power in others. Those to whom power has been delegated are obligated to answer or render an account of the degree of success in accomplishing the outcomes desired by those in power. Because of the diffuse nature of many hierarchical systems, accountability depends on both surveillance and self-regulation. The power of surveillance is born out in part by the spectacle that may result from accounting by those to whom power has been delegated. In other words, the powerful in small numbers are surveying the performance of many (through means such as standardized tests), which in turn become spectacles observed by the many (as in when school test scores are reported on the front page The Hegemony of Accountability 93 of the newspaper).* Self-regulation, that is, the faithful exercise of delegated authority, is in part based on surveillance and the concomitant possibility of spectacle, but also on the perception of the legitimacy of those delegating power. This perceived legitimacy is key to the hegemony of accountability. Hegemony is based on a projection by a dominant group (such as governments and corporate leaders) of their own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it (such as school administrators, teachers, students, parents) accept it as “common sense” or “natural.”4 These groups subordinated in the hegemony of accountability thus live their subordination, and this subordination is sustained through everyday discourse and practice, as well as in the popular media. Within systems of accountability, delegates of power must answer to some higher authority, but the identity of this authority is obfuscated when the interests of the public (for example, “the American people”) are used to obscure the special interests of the few. Additionally, the obfuscation of the identity of those in power and its purpose (i.e., being in the greater good) also serves to convince the many of the value of the interests of the few. The implication is that teachers, administrators, and public schools are accountable to the public, but the higher authority is more specifically the interests of the capitalist state, an inextricable conglomeration of business and government interests. THE MANIFESTATION IN K-12 SCHOOLS OF ACCOUNTABILITY Historically, forces external to schools have controlled them. For example, the Sputnik era brought massive curricular reforms, such as Man a Course of Study (MACOS), Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), and others, and even accountability schemes such as the spelling tests proposed by Joseph Rice in Boston early in the 1900s to rid schools of headmasters were considered to be undesirable. Still, the power of accountability in K-12 schools increased dramatically in the early 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk. That report linked American educational performance to the decline in the “once unchallenged preeminence [of the United States] in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation.” Whether this is really true is debatable, but the report created a powerful rhetoric from which the current accountability movement derives. The era of big curriculum reform lacked any wit’gspread and sustained change on schools, in large part because local cond#.ons mitigated efforts to create standardized content, pedagogy, and classroom processes. The curriculum reform era has been replaced by a standards-based reform era focusing primarily on outcomes, a basic utilitarian approach that focuses more on ends (e.g., test scores) than means, but that affects both. Much of the Education under the Security State 94 impetus and continued support for standards-based educational reform comes not from educators, educational researchers, or the public, but rather from corporate business. In fact, a main current in the history of education in the United States is the effort of corporate leaders and their allies in government to shape public education to the ends of business. The four National Education Summits held since 1989 have been key events in the rise of the accountability movement in schools and intensified efforts to transform schools to meet the corporate expectations. The National Education Summits In 1989, President George H. W. Bush called the nation’s governors together for the first National Education Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia. They set goals and developed ways to measure progress, but were stymied by resistance to federal interference in local school decisions. Seven years later, governors and top corporate leaders met at IBM’s conference center in Palisades, New York, and developed an approach for states to accomplish what had eluded participants in the first summit, namely, defining what should be taught in local schools and enforcing curriculum standardization through state--mandated tests—what is called the “standards movement.” The most recent summits (in 1999 and 2001) have aimed at consolidating “gains” that have been made in the corporate/state regulation of knowledge in public schools, including the successful adoption of a national testing plan, which was President George W. Bush’s top domestic priority when he took office in 2001. The 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESEA) is the most dramatic change in the federal role in local education since the early 1960s. Ironically, the Republican Party, which has argued for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, is now responsible for the greatest federal involvement in local schools. This business- government alliance has, however, encountered public resistance to its agenda. At the 1999 Summit, Public Agenda—a public opinion research organization—reported to participants that the movement to raise standards in public schools strikes a responsive chord with the public, but also warned that the issue of standards is not immune to the “normal controversies and complications that accompany any large-scale policy change.” What is noteworthy about their report, Standards and Accountability: Where the Public Stands, is its straightforward description of the agenda that must be pursued if the economic and political elite is to maintain legitimacy— and respond to opposition—as they define the curriculum and pedagogy of public schools. The number one task according to Public Agenda is effective propaganda, or as they put it: Experts and decision-makers often must concentrate on the labyrinth of details needed to make a policy work in real life. But to sustain change . . . that touches The Hegemony of Accountability 95 people’s families and daily lives, leaders need to take time periodically to restate the basic rationale, to remind people of the beliefs and values that underlie reform. When the going gets a bit rough, people need to be reminded of why we’re here. It is important to note that the “we” in this case refers to the summiteers and other opinion makers like Public Agenda and Education Week, the trade weekly that is an ardent proponent of the standards movement and which collaborated with Public Agenda on its survey of public opinion regarding the standards movement. Although the authors of Standards and Accountability: Where the Public Stands make much of the “established and remarkably stable” support for standards-based educational reform in the United States, they are mindful of “pitfalls that could derail or unsettle support.” First, the report warns that standards advocates should expect unhappiness when the rubber hits the road and students are retained in grade or denied diplomas. Pointing to the dramatic shift in public support for managed health care as people experienced drive-by surgery and denial of treatment options, Public Agenda warns standards advocates that delivering test score increases must be accompanied by the “appearance of fairness” in managing the reform effort. Now that thousands of students are being forced to repeat a grade or denied a diploma, it is likely that the mere appearance of fairness will not be enough to stave off opposition to standards and the high-stakes tests that accompany them. Parents and teachers are the two groups most likely to derail the standards train. The Public Agenda report—in a somewhat quixotic claim—declares that parents are insignificant players in the standards movement. Although parents generally support standards-based reform, Public Agenda says, “most are not especially well-informed or vigilant consumers, even concerning their own child’s progress.” This claim conflicts with reports that the oncesporadic resistance to standards-based educational reforms is blossoming into a broader rebellion. For example, as a result of parent protests, Los Angeles school officials recently backed off a plan to end “social promotions,” and in Massachusetts, officials were forced to redefine cut scores on state tests that otherwise would have prevented as many as 83 percent of Latino and 80 percent of African-American students from receiving high school diplomas. Although Public Agenda—and perhaps the corporate leadership of the movement—considers parents to be little or no threat to standards-based educational reform, politicians appear more sensitive to the growing antistandards, antitesting pressures. Test boycotts and other forms of resistance have moved the governors of Michigan and California to offer students money (“scholarships” of up to $2,500) for taking or scoring well on statemandated tests. Indiana politicians are bracing for an enormous backlash against the state graduation test, which threatens to keep 50 percent of the Education under the Security State 96 seniors in urban districts and a quarter of seniors statewide from graduating this year. Teachers are the most significant potential pitfall to the standards movement, according to the Public Agenda report. Although many school administrators and the top leaders of the teacher unions are solidly on the standards bandwagon, rank-and-file teachers’ pivotal role is rightly acknowledged: If teachers believe that standards policies are important and well thought out, they can sustain and nourish parental support. If teachers are convinced that standards policies are unfair or destructive, they can undercut parental support with extraordinary speed. . . . District directives are often ridiculed or resented, and experienced teachers have already been through waves of reform, which in their minds produced very little of value. Public Agenda’s research strongly suggests that bringing the nation’s teacher corps firmly inside the movement to raise standards could be the most pivotal challenge of all. Following the lead of Public Agenda, the top agenda item at the summit was teaching, in particular, devising ways in which teacher preparation and pay can be tied directly to the standardized curriculum and tests developed by states. The influence of dissenting voices, other than parents and teachers, was evident during the most recent summit when Kurt Landgraf, CEO of ETS, issued a press release that was a direct attack on Fairtest, a group advocating fairness in testing and also aHEpeEias a demonstration at the summit in Palisades, New York. In the end, the National Education Sdnimiss are yet another portrait of power relations in neoliberal democracy. It represents our hierarchical society, where citizens are made to be passive spectators, disconnected from one another and alienated from their own desires, learning, and work. The spectacle of standards, test scores, and summits obscures the role of parents, teachers, and students in decision making in public education. This spectacle expresses what society can do, but this expression also communicates what is permitted with regard to teaching and learning, and limits what is possible. The Liberal-Conservative Alliance The National Education Summits and the standards-based educational reforms they have nurtured should be understood both within the context of neoliberalism and coalescing of historically liberal and conservative political and economic principles. A hallmark of the standardization movement is its remarkable capacity to unite seemingly disparate individuals and interests around the “necessity” of national and/or state educational standards— the standardization imperative. Ostensibly strange bedfellows, including for The Hegemony of Accountability D7 instance E. D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, Gary Nash, Bill Clinton, Edward Kennedy, both President Bushes, IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner, the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA), forty-nine state departments of education, and nearly all governors (Democratic and Republican), they join to support standardsbased reform and its concomitant “need” to implement systems of mandated, high-stakes testing. Somehow, these “divergent” educational leaders manage to pull together around standards-based reform as the medium for “real” public school improvement. In the past several years, the Education Excellence Partnership, which includes the AFT, NEA, The Business Roundtable, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Alliance of Business, Achieve Inc., National Governor’s Association, and the U.S. Department of Education, has sponsored over fifty full-page advertisements in The New York Times promoting the standards agenda and, in particular, the use of high-stakes tests as means to both “motivate achievement” and retain children in grade. (We should note that the use of tests in these ways contradicts what we know from a large body of educational research, which tells us that high-stakes testing reduces students’ motivation to learn, and grade retention damages children’s chances to succeed educationally. ) Education policy is being crafted in a milieu distinguished by the prostandards consensus among an array of both liberal and conservative players and exemplifies how elites manufacture crises (e.g., the widespread failure of public education) and consent (e.g., the way to save public education is through standardized schooling driven by high-stakes tests). Accordingly, the commitments of the political-pedagogical right—public school privatization, the reduction of national financial support for public education, the promotion of U.S. global corporate hegemony, “creationism,” sociocultural homogenization around a few dominant “moral” themes, anti-immigration, the assault on organized labor, school prayer, and so on—blend with those of the left—equality, expanded democracy, economic opportunity, social justice, diversity, and so on—to create a clever though fundamentally confusing admixture of multiple contradictions and inconsistencies. At its core, the pro-standards consensus can be characterized by its commitment to a relatively few defining principles. Advocates argue first that standards-based reform is necessary vis-a-vis school improvement because the current educational “crisis” is rooted in the inability or unwillingness of “failing” schools to offer the same “high quality” programs provided by more “successful” schools. Because the identified purposes, selected content, teachers, and modes of evaluation must be better in some (usually wealthy and majority white) schools than in others (usually less wealthy and majority Latino/Latina and African-American), the implications are unmistakable. Elite educational leaders and policymakers are saying that “other” schools can indeed improve, but only to the extent that they become more like “our” 98 Education under the Security State schools, hence, the one-sided standardization imperative and the subsequent normalization of whiteness, wealth, and exclusionary forms of knowledge. In short, the standardization alliance argues, in most cases without any evidence, that (1) today’s students do not “know enough” (no matter how “knowing enough” is defined); (2) curriculum and assessment standards will lead to higher achievement (although arguably many students achieve highly now—they just do so differently or in ways not easily quantified); (3) national and state standards are crucial in terms of successful USA-corporateglobal economic competition; (4) standards-based reform should occur with federal guidance yet be implemented under local control (thus keeping both big government liberals and New Federalist conservatives happy); and (5) “higher” standards/standardization will promote equal educational, thus economic and political, opportunity. Some Specific Effects on Schools and Schooling The National Education Summits and the standards-based reform movement as a whole are quintessential examples of how neoliberal democracy works to thwart meaningful participation of the many by allowing the few to speak for all. The objective appearance of standards-based reforms, which aim to reform schools by focusing on test scores, conceals (partially) the fact that these reforms are the result of the deepening economic inequality and racial segregation that are typically coupled with authoritarianism. For example, in Chicago, public schools have been militarized—six schools have been turned into military academies and over 7,000 students in 41 schools are in Junior ROTC—and teachers have been given scripted lessons, keyed to tests, to guide their instruction. In a dramatic shift away from local control, urban schools systems are being taken over by states. In Detroit, a Democratic mayor and Republican governor disbanded the elected school board and appointed a new board—whose members represent corporate interests and of whom only one is a city resident. In December 2001, another partnership between a Democratic mayor and Republican governor resulted in a state take-over of the 200,000-student Philadelphia school system with the intention of giving Edison Schools, Inc., the largest for-profit manager of public schools in the United States, a six-year, $101 million contract to become a district consultant and run forty-five of the city’s schools. The primary justification for the seizure or closing of schools and/or the imposition of standardized curriculum has been poor test scores and high dropout rates. But standardized test scores are less a reflection of ability or achievement than measures of parental income. Bolon’s study of student scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System demonstrates a very strong positive correlation between student test scores and average community income.® He concludes, “Once community income was included in models, other factors—including percentages of students in disadvantaged The Hegemony of Accountability 99 populations, percentages receiving special education, percentages eligible for free or reduced price lunch, percentages with limited English proficiency, school sizes, school spending levels, and property values—all failed to associate substantial additional variance.” Analysis of student scores on the Ohio Proficiency Test also illustrates this finding.” Other recent data show that someone taking the SAT can expect to score an extra thirty test points for every $10,000 in parental yearly income. Dropout rates are directly related to poverty, and none of the powers demanding the school seizure or standardization is prepared to address the question of poverty. The standards-based education reform movement and its dependence on standardized testing is not only good for business, but also good business. While we have argued that a sociopolitical agenda (of mixed perspectives) drives these reforms in education, they also present the opportunity for much enhanced profit-making in textbooks, educational materials, and test sales and increased stock values. These are corporate business interests intertwined with government officials in no less significant ways than other aspects of public life, such as energy or the environment. There are three major textbook/standardized testing companies in the United States (McGraw-Hill, Harcourt, and Houghton Mifflin), and all will see sales and profits skyrocket as the new ESEA is implemented. George W. Bush’s entanglement with Enron is rivaled by his entanglement with McGraw-Hill, one based on several generations of mutual support between a family of politicians and a family of publishers. Even not-for-profit organizations such as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) have ousted their academic CEO (Nancy Cole), replaced her with a marketing executive (Kurt Landgraf), and created a forprofit subsidiary, ETS K-12 Works, which will sell tests and testing services to elementary and secondary schools. CONCLUSION Standards-based reform is an effort on the part of some external, although not necessarily official, body to define and establish a holistic system of pedagogical purpose (like Goals 2000), content selection (like state curriculum standards), teaching methodology (like the promotion of phonics), and assessment (like state-mandated tests). These intents combine such that (1) the various components of classroom practice are interrelated and mutually reinforcing to the extent they coalesce around the others and are perceived as inextricable, and (2) performance is completely subsumed by the assessment component, which serves as the indicator of relative success or failure. These external bodies are often official entities, such as governmental agencies (the federal government and its newly passed Elementary and Secondary Education Act) or professional associations (the National Council for the Teachers of Mathematics and its Standards for Mathematics) or unions (the American Federation of Teachers and its support for the ESEA). These 100 Education under the Security State bodies can also be unofficial, such as the Business Roundtable and other special-interest groups. The formal status of these external bodies is irrelevant. What matters is that they have power and authority, not necessarily direct means of control, of schools and schooling. Herein lies the necessity for accountability, and from the singularity of perspective that advantages the political-corporate interests rises hegemony. Accountability, as we described at the beginning of this chapter, is about authority—who has it, who does not, and how it is exercised. We have described the ways in which authority is manifest and has become centered in demands by business and political alliances for standardization of processes, outcomes, and the measurement and reporting on these in elementary and secondary education. The hegemony of accountability derives from the use of standardization to promote the interests of corporate-political elites, although often under the guise of the public good. asin gl Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States: How State and Federal Government Education Policies Perpetuate Inequality Davip W. HursH AND CAMILLE ANNE MARTINA Over the last decade, education in the United States has undergone the largest transformation within its history. In New York, policymakers have created standards for all the subject areas and have instituted standardized tests in a variety of subject areas and grade levels. High school students take standardized exams at the culmination of most courses but must pass the exams in five subject areas to graduate from high school. Data from New York indicate that this testing and accountability system has resulted in increased inequality. Similarly, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act extends governmental intervention into education by “steering from a distance.”! Previous to NCLB, elementary and secondary school education policies were the responsibility of the state and local governments. However, with NCLB, the federal government determines which subject areas take precedence, limits the ways in which they may be taught, and designates what reform options are available to schools and districts that fail to improve sufficiently their test scores. NCLB extends testing and accountability to all states. The United States, like many countries, is transforming its educational system within the context of the changing global economic system. Internationally, education increasingly focuses on those subjects and dispositions that increase citizens’ economic productivity. Susan Robertson describes the changing mandate as requiring “educational systems, through creating appropriately skilled and entrepreneurial citizens and workers able to generate new and added economic values, will enable nations to be responsive to 102 Education under the Security State changing conditions within the international marketplace.”* In the United States, policymakers have initiated accountability systems in which standardized tests are used to determine whether students are to graduate or be promoted from one grade to another and to evaluate schools and school districts. Further, the federal government and some states are transforming education into a market system through charter (publicly funded, privately governed) schools, vouchers (public funding that students can use for private school tuition) and school choice (permitting students to choose between schools within and across school districts). Jill Blackmore describes these changes as shifting “from the liberal to the vocational, from education’s intrinsic value to its instrumental value, and from qualitative to quantitative measures of success.”* Schools are decreasingly concerned with developing thoughtful informed citizens and more concerned with raising test scores and preparing economically productive employees. In this chapter, we will undertake a critical policy analysis in which we place educational reform within the context of the social structure and examine its implications for social inequality. In particular, we situate our analysis within the rise of increased global economic competition and neoliberal policies in which the government seeks to retain legitimacy by instituting reforms to improve education while reducing education funding as part of the overall plan to reduce governmental expenditures on social services and, if possible, to privatize them. As evidence, we will draw primarily on the federal government’s implementation of NCLB and New York State’s new testing and graduation requirements. : Over the last decade, education in the United States has undergone the largest transformation within its history. While the federal government pro- vides less than 10 percent of public school funding, it has intervened to an unprecedented degree, through NCLB, in elementary and secondary education.* Before the passage of NCLB, elementary and secondary school education policies were the responsibility of the state and local governments. However, with NCLB, the federal government has determined which subject areas take precedence, limits the ways in which they may be taught, and designates what reform options are available to schools and districts that fail to improve sufficiently their aggregated test scores. The federal government now requires standardized testing in math and reading (and later science), which are to be used to determine whether schools or districts are making “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). Students in schools that are designated as failing for two consecutive years (and in some states this is 90 percent of the schools) are given the option of enrolling in a successful school in their district or, if there are no successful schools in their district, in another district. NCLB, along with charter schools and voucher systems, introduces * markets into education, therefore introducing a market system into public education. Although previous to NCLB, some states® were using standard- Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 103 ized tests to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable, NCLB extends testing and accountability to all states. One state that had already initiated a system of testing and accountability is New York. The State Education Department (SED) and the Board of Regents have created standards for all the subject areas and have instituted standardized tests in a variety of subject areas and grade levels. Elementary students are required to take standardized tests in grades four, five, six, and eight.° High school students take standardized Regents exams at the culmination of most courses but must pass the exams in five subject areas in order to earn a high school diploma.” Because these exams are used to compare teachers, students, schools, and school districts, and passing the exams is required for high school graduation, these have become high-stakes exams. A variety of data indicates that the emphasis on testing and accountability has not resulted in improved education. Numerous reports reveal that the emphasis on raising test scores is leading to students being pushed out of schools so that their low or failing score will not harm the school’s passing rate or aggregate score.® In New York, the new requirements have resulted in an increased dropout rate, especially for students of color, students for whom English is a second language, students living in poverty, and students with disabilities.? Elementary teachers report that they are pressured to spend more time preparing students for the tests given at their own or subsequent grade levels and less time teaching those subject areas not tested. For example, fourth-grade teachers are pressured to prepare students not only to do well on the English Language Arts exam, the first standardized exam given to elementary students, but also to prepare fourth graders for the social studies exam given in the fall of fifth grade. The pressure placed on fourth-grade schoolteachers is causing many of them to request transfers to other grades or to resign from teaching.!° Furthermore, secondary school teachers report that they devote increased time to teach- ing toward the test.!? One group of students, in particular, has been harmed by the standardized testing requirements. Previous to this year, many English as a Second Language (ESL) students excelled in their courses and were accepted by a university but did not graduate because they could pass all but their English Regents exam. This year the ESL students face an additional problem. Because the ESL exam, an exam that they must pass to be waived from ESL courses, was made significantly more difficult, few have been able to pass the exam, even though they could pass the English Regents exam required for graduation. Although no statewide figures are available, schools reported that less than 10 percent of students passed the ESL test, essentially relegating them to less academic courses.!* Students of color, living in poverty, and for whom English is a second language are facing more, not fewer, education barriers. The exams are exacerbating, not lessening, inequality. 104 Education under the Security State High-stakes testing and accountability has had a negative effect on teachers and students by narrowing the curriculum and increasing the number of students dropping out and teachers leaving schools. How is it, then, that the tests have received such widespread support and are only recently receiving public resistance and critical commentary? In order to answer that question, we need to place the rise of high-stakes tests and accountability systems within the context of the changing economic, political, and cultural policies of the last three decades.!? In particular, we will situate schooling within the demise of Keynesian and the rise of neoliberal policies, the denigration of collective social responsibility and the rise of individualism, and the implementation of systems of auditing and accountability. Beginning in the 1970s, neoliberal policies began replacing Keynesian policies in North American, Europe, and much of the rest of the world. Post— World War II Keynesian economic policies focused on providing a stable and growing economy through government intervention in the economic cycle and support of social services such as education, health, and welfare. In contrast, neoliberal policies focus on reducing tax revenues and, consequently, social spending. The federal government, particularly under the current Bush administration, has vastly increased military spending and reduced corporate and individual taxes, creating a budget deficit that forces social service cuts.!4 As the federal government has shifted social spending to states, states, which also compete with one another to reduce taxes and thus create a “favorable business climate,” spend the least that is politically feasible on social ser- vices.15 In order to reduce resistance to cuts in social services, neoliberal governments have attempted to retain legitimacy by shifting social responsibility from society to the individual and by using auditing and accounting procedures to improve education efficiency. Conservative leaders in both the United States and England have embarked on an ideological crusade to shift social responsibility from the community to the individual, thereby transforming the relationship between the individual and society. Margaret Thatcher portrayed this ideology most succinctly when she stated, “There is no such thing as society. . . There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”'© Thatcher’s statement shifts responsibility for success or failure entirely onto the individual and family. Thatcher, Gillborn, and Youdell note, “perfectly encapsulated an ideological drive that reduced everything to individualized relationships between providers and consumers, and understood inequality variously as a sign of personal/ community deficit or part of the necessary spur to achievement in a meritocracy.”!” By reducing success to individual merit, schooling becomes one more consumer choice where one benefits by choosing wisely. Consequently, Neoltberalism and Schooling in the United States 105 both England’s and the U.S.’s educational policies increasingly focus on developing educational markets in which schools compete for students and families. In England, each school’s students’ aggregated performance on a variety of exams is published yearly in what are commonly referred to as “league tables.” Gillborn and Youdell state that “according to the rhetoric of the market place, the tables are meant to provide ‘objective’ indicators of quality so that consumers can discriminate between the competing institutions.”'* Similarly, in the United States, NCLB legislation requires that states post the test results for each school and identify schools as either achieving or failing to achieve “adequate yearly progress,” (AYP) with students given the option to leave failing for passing schools. (However, given the high percentage ot schools designated as failing in a district and state, the number of openings for students is a small percentage of the students eligible to transfer.) While collective responsibility is denigrated and education is reduced to a system where everyone competes for the best schools, government must still be seen as supporting education. As neoliberal governments reduce social welfare expenditures, they must be careful to retain the legitimacy of the economic system and policies. While inequality is exacerbated and funding for education is reduced, neoliberal governments must develop strategies that legitimate its policymaking.!? Therefore, governments need to appear to be concerned with and supporting education even as they reduce funding. Further, because neoliberals have condemned previous liberal governments for their intervention into the everyday lives of citizens—either through welfare programs or regulations, neoliberals must implement these reforms without direct intervention. Consequently, governments in many countries have resolved this dilemma by “steering at a distance.””? Rather than enacting coercive or prescriptive control, governments replace constraints with incentives. Auditing and accountability replace intervention, therefore lessening resistance. “Prescription is replaced by ex post accountability based on quality or outcome assessments. Coercion is replaced by self-steering—the appearance of autonomy. Opposition or resistance is side-stepped, dis- placed.”?! : Lastly, neoliberal governments must adopt discourses that convince the public of the necessity of these retorms. They therefore embed their educational policies within a discourse of fairness and objectivity. As we will show, in the United States, the state and federal governments claim that the reforms will result in improved education for all. Further, NCLB’s assessment of AYP is intended to “give them [parents and communities] objective data” through standardized testing.?* In England, the “league tables” are meant to provide “objective indicators” of quality. In the remainder of this chapter, we will first briefly describe the shift from Keynesian to neoliberal economic policies and demonstrate that the state, in order to retain legitimacy while reducing social services such as education, 106 Education under the Security State implements educational policies that indirectly control education “from a distance,” which they justify as improving education for all and providing objective assessments. We will then critique the policy claims of promoting fairness and objectivity and argue that, in fact, the outcomes are the opposite of the claims. THE RISE OF NEOLIBERALISM AND EDUCATION’S ROLE IN DEVELOPING PRODUCTIVE WORKERS AND LEGITIMATING THE GOVERNMENT Neoliberalism arose as a corporate and political response to the Keynesian accommodation that existed to different degrees in Europe and North America after World War II. In contrast to the years preceding the war, an unusual level of agreement between corporations and workers marked the first two decades after the war. During this period, workers consented to capital’s right not only to control the workplace but also to allow capitalist control of investment and growth, primarily through the growth of multinational corporations. In exchange, workers, women, and people of color struggled for and were able to extend their personal and political rights for education, housing, health, workplace safety, and to vote.?* This same period was marked by unusually rapid and stable economic growth, fueled in large part because of the growing wages of workers. However, while workers were earning and spending more, businesses’ net rate of profit fell by more than 50 percent between 1965 and 1974.74 Profits fell primarily because cost pressures from labor could not be passed on to consumers in the increasingly competitive and open world economy.”° In order to restore higher rates of profit, the United States and other developed countries implemented monetarist and neoliberal policies”® that would support corporations over workers. In the United States, monetarist policies restored the power of capital by inducing a recession to deflate wage demands, escalate the scarcity of jobs, and reverse the growth of social spending. Such policies were instituted with the intent of reducing the living standards of all but wealthy Americans. In 1979, Paul Volcker, Federal Reserve Board chairman, provided the following rationale for the recession: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline. I don’t think you can escape that.”?7 Such monetarist policies were soon linked with neoliberal policies that emphasize “the deregulation of the economy, trade liberalization, the dismantling of the public sector [such as education, health, and social welfare], and the predominance of the financial sector of the economy over production and commerce.”?8 In particular, the consequences for education are simi“lar to that for all public goods and services. Tabb writes that neoliberalism stresses Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 107 the privatization of the public provision of goods and services—moving their provision from the public sector to the private—along with deregulating how private producers can behave, giving greater scope to the single-minded pursuit of profit and showing significantly less regard for the need to limit social costs or for redistribution based on nonmarket criteria. The aim of neoliberalism is to put into question all collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market.?? Efforts to privatize public services, then, are occurring worldwide, partly in response to the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund requirement that national governments develop economic policies that emphasize economic growth and property rights over social welfare and personal rights. In some countries, such a Chile, social security, health care, higher education and, to some extent, elementary and secondary education have been highly privatized.°° Such global changes led Stephen Gill to conclude that “[t]he social settlements and forms of state created after World War II have been transformed and in some respects destroyed.”*! Efforts to dismantle the public sector have significant implications for educational policy. While some policymakers may desire to reduce funding for education, education remains significant as a means of developing productive workers and legitimizing current inequalities. As Roger Dale notes, government policies need to support continued economic expansion while “providing a basis for legitimation of the system as a whole.”°? INCREASING EDUCATIONAL REIFYING INEQUALITY? OPPORTUNITY OR A system of standards, high-stakes testing, and accountability has been implemented partly because it draws on continuing frustrations over public schools. Progressives have criticized schools for reproducing inequality through tracking working-class students and students of color into academically inferior courses and unequal funding.*? Conservatives have criticized schools for their lack of standards and rigor and economic inefficiency.*4 Critics continually point out that the United States spends more per student than other countries but is not highly ranked when its academic results are compared with other countries. For example, Secretary of Education Paige recently used the newly released Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development report “Education at a Glance” to note, “[T ]his report documents how little we receive in return for our national investment. This report also reminds us that we are battling two achievement gaps. One is between those being served well by our system and those being left behind. The other is between the U.S. and many of our higher achieving friends around the world. By closing the first gap, we will also close the second.”** 108 Education under the Security State Consequently, U.S. policymakers at the state and federal levels have called for reforms, such as standards, standardized testing, and accountability, as a way to improve educational efficiency and ensure that all students learn. Secretary of Education Paige describes NCLB as striving “to provide every boy and girl in America with a high quality of education—regardless of his or her income, ability or background.”*° In this section, we will examine the official claims that testing and accountability are improving education and argue that the evidence shows that the quality of schooling for most students is declining. The first rationale—that these reforms are necessary to ensure that all students learn—is reflected in policy statements at the state and federal levels. In New York, the state’s educational policymakers, including the past Chancellor Carl Hayden and present Commissioner of Education Richard Mills, justify the testing and accountability regime on the grounds that standards and standardized testing are the only way to ensure that all students, including students of color and those living in poverty, have an opportunity to learn. They argue that it is these same students who, because of the end of industrialization and the rise of globalization, can no longer be permitted to fail. All students must succeed educationally to ensure that the individual and the nation succeed economically. They also point out, as progressives have, that our educational system has better served those students who are already advantaged. In New York State, the Regents exams originated in the mid-1800s, as both a college entrance exam and as one means of standardizing the curriculum.*” However, over the last century, the New York State educational system evolved into a two-track system, with Regents exams and curricula for collegebound students and non-Regents courses for non—college bound students, with the latter courses dominated by working-class students and students of color. In order, ostensibly, to reduce the disparity between working-class and middle-class students, the State Education Department eliminated the nonRegents or local diplomas. Students can only be in the Regents track, and if they fail to earn a Regents diploma, which requires passing the five Regents exams, they cannot receive a high school degree. Carl Hayden, the New York Chancellor of Education from 1996 to 2002, draws on the discourse of fair- ness to justify this development: The requirement that every child be brought to a Regents level ofperformance is revolutionary. It is a powerful lever for education equity. It is changing for the better the life prospects of millions of young people, particularly poor and minority children who in the past would have been relegated to a low standards path. Too often, these children emerged from school without the skills and knowledge needed for success in an increasingly complex economy.*8 Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 109 Similarly, the federal government has promoted NCLB as improving the education for all children. Secretary of Education Rod Paige recently argued that NCLB is especially important for African-American students. We have an educational emergency in the United States of America. Nationally, blacks score lower on reading and math tests than their white peers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We need to collectively focus our attention on the problem. . . . We have to make sure that every single child gets our best attention. We also need to help African-American parents understand how this historic new education law can specifically help them and their children.*° The second rationale—that we can improve education efficiency through standards and standardized testing—is also reflected at both the state and federal levels. In New York State, proponents of standards and standardized testing argued that the curriculum standards have been objectively determined and that standardized tests provide a valid and reliable means of assessing student learning. Such objective methods are required, they state, because teachers and administrators cannot be trusted to assess student learning objectively and accurately. Therefore, teacher-generated assessment protocols and instruments are dismissed, within this discourse, as subjective and unreliable. However, testing proponents ignore that the standardized tests assess only a small percentage of the state’s standards and have questionable validity and reliability. Testing proponents imply that to adopt other means of assessment results automatically in a lowering of standards, as can be seen in Chancellor Hayden’s response to the possibility of retaining performance assessment: There is an even greater danger. The least rigorous, the least valid, the least reliable approved alternative [assessment] is then available to any school. Which schools will be first in the race to the lowest common denominator? Those having the most trouble bringing all children to a Regents level of performance. Those keen to reacquire the low standard option lost when the RCT [Regents Competency Test for those in the non-Regents track] and the local diploma were abolished. Those that never believed that all children can reach high standards. Were this to occur, it is all too apparent that poor and minority children would disproportionately bear the burden of diminished expectations.*° Similarly, NCLB claims that the standards have been objectively determined, that standardized tests provide a valid and reliable means of assessing student learning, and this approach improves on teacher-generated assessments. The Parents’ Guide to No Child Left Behind informs parents that NCLB “will give them objective data” through standardized testing.*! Further, objective data from tests are necessary because, in the past, “[m any parents have chil- dren who are getting straight A’s, but find out too late that their child is 110 Education under the Security State not prepared for college. That’s just one reason why NCLB give parents objective data about how their children are doing.”*” Teachers, they imply, have not rigorously enforced standards nor accurately assessed students, therefore covering up their own and their students’ failures. Further, test scores will be useful to parents because “[p]arents will know how well learning is occurring in their child’s class. They will know information on how their child is progressing compared to other children.”** Because teachers, NCLB claims, have relied too often on their own as- sessments, test scores will also benefit teachers. NCLB “provides teachers with independent information about each child’s strengths and weaknesses. With this knowledge, teachers can craft lessons to make sure each student meets or exceeds the standards.”** Moreover, not only have teachers relied on subjective assessments, they have relied on “education fads,” “bad ideas,” and “untested curricula.” Therefore, NCLB “puts a special focus on doing what works,” as demonstrated by “scientifically based research” using the “medical model.”*° However, we can question whether the tests increase fairness or are objective. What have been the consequences of eliminating the non-Regents track and diploma on the quality of courses and student graduation rates? Do students’ test scores on the Regents exams lead us to believe that the assessments are more objective than teacher evaluations? Although the stated goal of eliminating the non-Regents track and diploma was to bring “every child . . . to a Regents level of performance” (emphasis in original),*° the reality has been somewhat different. First, the Regents courses and some of the standardized exams have been made easier so as to reduce the number of students dropping out who would otherwise not pass the courses required for graduation. This has led to a lowering rather than a raising of standards. Second, many of the students who have typically been in the Regents courses have opted for enrolling in Honors and Advanced Placement courses (courses that are sometimes accepted as course credit by universities) and International Baccalaureate Program as a way of maintaining academic distinction from the average students. Therefore, the two-track system has been maintained with former non-Regents students enrolling in the easier Regents courses, and former Regents students enrolling in Honors and other advanced courses. Students are still receiving unequal opportunities to learn. Although some of the Regents courses and exams have been made easier, some students are failing to pass all five of the exams required for graduation and dropping out of school. Students for whom English is a second language have difficulties with the English exam, and students with disabilities are having difficulties with all the exams. Further, as we will explain, some of the exams are constructed so poorly that many students fail them. Sixty- three percent of high school students failed the recent Math A exam (the Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 111 math exam most students take to meet the Regents requirements).4” Consequently, in New York, the gap in performance between the advantaged white, middle-class students and disadvantaged working-class students and students of color has increased, as has the dropout rate for students in the poorer urban schools. In 2001, students for whom English is a second language left school at a 12 percent higher rate than the previous year.4* This year, because of the increased difficulty of the ESL exam, as stated earlier, students for whom English is a second language are more rather than Jess likely to be retained in ESL and relegated to less academic courses. The passing rates on the ESL exam are only a small fraction of what they have been in the past.?? Further, we should ask whether the effort placed on improving schools though testing and accountability is intended to cover up inequalities in funding between school districts and the increasing poverty rate, which negatively affect student learning. Currently, New York State’s schools are the most segregated and the second most unequally funded in the United States. Because of the current economic slowdown, the state’s urban schools have received significant reductions in revenue. In the 2001-2002 school year, the New York City public schools received $1 billion less than the previous year.°” New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, recently (June 26, 2003) “ordered reform of the entire statewide funding formula to ensure that all schools have sufficient resources to give their students the opportunity to meet the Regents Learning Standards.”°! The remedy was ordered in part because the Court observed “tens of thousands of students placed on overcrowded classrooms, taught by unqualified teachers, and provided with inadequate facilities and equipment. The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”°* The Court rules that the state cannot require students to achieve certain standards with providing the means to do so. The most recent census report reveals that the percentage of children living in poverty has increased for the second straight year.°* Further, “the gap between the rich and the poor more than doubled from 1979 to 2000,” which is the “greatest economic disparity between the rich and the poor of any year since 1979, the year the budget office began collecting this data” and probably since 1929.°4 Although the United States may spend the most per student (while it spends a smaller percentage of its gross domestic product than many countries), the inequalities in family income and high rates of child poverty are likely to explain the discrepancy between education spending and academic results. Not only might a system of high-stakes exams and accountability lead to a higher student failure rate and not remedy the underlying causes of academic failure, standardized exams may provide less, not more, accurate information about student learning. We have already suggested through the 112 Education under the Security State sharp increase in the failure rate for the Math A and ESL exams that questions can be raised regarding the exams’ construction, objectivity, validity, and reliability, Such inconsistency between exams not only spells trouble for the claims of New York’s education policymakers that the exams provide evaluations that can be used to improve students’ education, but also negatively impacts NCLB, which relies on state exams to measure AYP. Therefore, if New York’s exams fail as assessment measures for the state, they also fail as measures for the federal government. SMOKE AND MIRRORS: PROVIDING OBJECTIVE EVALUATION OR MANIPULATING ACHIEVEMENT DATA? First, the average score on various exams varies so greatly that passing or failing an exam tells us little about the student's learning. As stated earlier, students in New York are currently required to pass tive Regents exams (one each in English, math, and science and two in social studies) to earn a high school diploma. The degree of difficulty for these exams has varied, critics argue, depending on whether the State Education Department (SED) wants to increase the graduation rate and therefore makes the exam easier or wants to appear rigorous and tough and therefore makes the exam more difficult. Exam passing rates can be increased or decreased simply by adjusting the cut score. Such manipulation can turn a low percentage of correct answers into a pass and a high percentage of correct answers into a failure. For example, in the recent “Living environments” exam, the science exam most often used to satisfy the Regents science requirement, students needed to answer only, 39 percent of the questions correctly to earn a passing grade of 55 percent. Conversely, the exams for the advanced, nonrequired courses, such as physics and chemistry, have been made more difficult. Thirty-nine percent of students failed the most recent physics exam*S in order, cntics charge, to make Regents testing appear more rigorous. Moreover, for no apparent reason other than incompetence, the most recent (June 2003) Regents Math A exam (also the one students are most likely to take to meet the Regents requirement) was so poorly constructed that the test scores had to be discarded. Only 37 percent of the students passed statewide.** At Rochester’s Wilson Magnet High School, a school ranked 49th in the nation by Newsweek, all 300 students who took the exam failed. A panel convened by the SED to examine the test concluded that the test poorly matched the standards teachers were directed to address in their courses and that early field tests indicated that there would be a high Ail- ure rate. NCLB’s claim that standardized testing provides the objective assessment that teachers have lacked does not stand up to scrutiny. The best predictor of students’ future academic success continues to be that result: ing from teacher-constructed assessments. Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 113 Second, it is unlikely to be the case that, as NCLB claims, the exams will provide “independent information about each child’s strengths and weak- nesses.”°” either teachers or parents. In New York State, teachers are not even permitted to sce the test questions for the exams given in grades four through eight. Teachers do receive their students’ test scores but not how they did on each question. Further, while NCLB claims that it will “give parents objective data about how their children are doing,”** parents are not provided with their child’s test score except on the high school Regents exams, a score that was already available to them. Third, the determination of whether a school is making AYP tells us little about whether a school is succeeding. Not only can we question the test scores on which the determination is made, but the determination of success or failure may have little to do with whether the school is improving. Schools and districts are to measure whether students are learning through standardized tests with the scores indicating whether the student is or is not achieving proficiency in subject area standards. Students’ aggregated scores need to improve each year, and all students are required to achieve proficiency by the year 2014. In the United States, state education commissioners set, with the approval of the federal Department of Education, what counts as proficiency in each subject area and the minimal level of improvement schools and districts must achieve each year to attain “adequate yearly progress.” Each school and district is required to both aggregate student test scores and disaggregate test results “into groups of students who are economically disadvantaged, from racial and ethnic minority groups, have disabilities or have limited English proficiency.”*? The aggregated and disaggregated test scores must all demonstrate adequate yearly progress for the school to be labeled successful. Because states develop their own tests and determine what counts as proficiency and the minimal standard or rate of improvement schools must achieve in order to demonstrate that they are making AYP, states’ results can vary greatly. For example, contrary to a commonsense interpretation of AYP, in New York, schools are not evaluated based on whether their test scores are improving but whether their aggregated and disaggregated test scores exceed a minimum yearly threshold that gradually increases over the next decade. Consequently, a school is considered to be passing as long as its scores exceed the threshold, even if its scores fall. Similarly, schools that begin with initially low test scores may be considered failing even tfthey significantly increase their test scores, as long as those scores remain below the threshold. Therefore, achieving AYP has nothing to do with whether a school’s test scores rise or fall, only whether its scores tor that year exceed or fail to meet the minimum threshold. Because test scores strongly correlate to a student’s family income, a school’s score is likely to reflect its students’ average family income, not teaching practices or curriculum. Consequently, the largest percentage of failing 114 Education under the Security State schools in New York is found in urban and poor school districts. Almost all (83 percent) of the failing schools are located in the big five urban districts: NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Yonkers. To NCLB’s testing requirements that schools demonstrate improvement for all disaggregated groups of students on all the tests, Florida added the further draconian stipulation that no school that has been assigned a grade of a D or an F (per the annual rating of A through F) could meet AYP requirements. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of Florida’s public schools were designated as failing to meet AYP, and 100 percent of dis- tricts failed. In New York State, where urban schools with rising scores are likely to be “failing” to make AYP and suburban schools with falling scores are likely to be “succeeding” to make AYP, urban teachers working hard at improving their schools and demonstrating success are likely to be discouraged, if not defeated. In Florida, with 100 percent of the districts failing, we might conclude that this is meant as a condemnation of the public school system. Historically, U.S. public schools have not served well students who are not white or middle to upper class. Schools in wealthier communities typically receive substantially more funding to educate students than schools in poorer urban (i.e., nonwhite) and rural communities. Students in urban schools are much more likely to be in overcrowded classrooms with inadequate supplies and unprepared teachers. Consequently, in most urban districts, fewer than half the students graduate from high school. Further, even when students from different backgrounds are in the same school, the school is likely to track wealthier students into more challenging and advanced courses. However, the educational reforms of the last decade focus not on improving the classroom conditions but increasing teacher and classroom accountability through standardized testing and increasing competition between schools through school choice (charters, vouchers, and, in NCLB, transfer- ring students from “failing” to “passing” schools). Such efforts, we have argued, are a consequence of globalization and the dominant neoliberal policies in which education is to prepare skilled workers able to generate economic value. Further, education is not only required to further economic productivity but to be economically efficient. Schools must do more with less. State and federal governments have succeeded in adopting these reforms because they situate them within the discourses of objectivity and fairness. Moreover, they have not directly intervened into the lives of teachers and students but “steer at a distance.”°! By giving educators the appearance of autonomy, resistance from teachers, parents, and students has been reduced. Neoliberalism and Schooling in the United States 115 Education systems in the United States and elsewhere are being transformed without widespread public debate. Yet, as we have shown, the system of testing and accountability is even less objective and fair than the present system. It is crucial that questions be raised about the future of schooling for all citizens. $e)i ai: coe = 7 =) yea? sia eee noe nid ve = sah sain wih WE + AB Sal = apa — ete ns bate : } Pe < ees pier - lets = r] é uf 7 tend até < pute. 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FRANKLIN The decade of the 1970s onward has seen important changes in large U.S. cities and their schools that call for a rethinking and recalibration of our understanding of how such schools are governed and, more broadly, how they interact with other sectors, including other elements of the state and civil society. Within these cities, there have been major demographic changes that have resulted in the movement of whites, including substantial numbers of the white middle class, to the suburbs and beyond. At the same time, these cities also experienced the growth of minority populations, largely AfricanAmericans but also Latinos and Asians, that are, on balance, less well edu- cated, less gainfully employed, and less economically well-off than the whites whom they replaced. The most complete instance of this change has been the emergence of the black-led city where African-Americans not only constitute the majority of the population but also control the city’s political apparatus, including the schools. In other cases, this change has been less extensive. Blacks or other minorities may or may not represent the majority of the city’s total population, but they often constitute a majority or close to a majority of the school-age population. And they may or may not dominate th