Why do we do school?

The complicated and sometimes contradictory purposes for public education

In 2016, Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) conducted its annual poll of the public’s attitude toward school. Guess what, there was no clear consensus among respondents on the purpose of education. Weird!

Fewer than half of Americans (45%) viewed the main goal of public education as preparing students academically; the rest of poll responses were split between the importance of focusing on preparing students for work (25%) or preparing them to be good citizens (26%).

It’s not surprising that we have fierce debates about whether or not public schools in the United States are “good” or “successful.” We don’t even agree on what they’re for, which makes determining whether or not they’re successful pretty difficult.

Historically, we’ve had a number of reasons/rationales put forward to justify the need/importance for public schooling. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

Schools are essential because they improve students’ moral character.

From the early days of Puritans and the founding of Harvard (whose original motto was “Truth for Christ and the Church”) to the earliest childhood primers in the form of hornbooks (early children’s readers mounted on wooden panels full of Christian teachings alongside the alphabet and syllables), schooling in what was to become the United States was viewed as essential to developing children's moral character.

In the 19th century, when public schooling became more widely available, the importance of schooling for moral character meant more education for more children. Common schools gave girls, the children of the poor, and the children of immigrants increased access to public schools. The thinking of many school reformers at the time was that moral education was essential for girls, because they were future mothers and would need to raise their children “right.” Moral education was also deemed essential for children of the poor and children of immigrants, because adults in poverty and adult immigrants were often viewed by reformers as responsible for their poor economic circumstances due to weaknesses in their own personal, moral character. Schooling would ostensibly overcome these moral “failings” in the parents of poor, immigrant, and nonwhite children as well as “Americanize” them. Reformers’ assumptions about the moral character of people not viewed as white extended to indigenous North Americans, leading to the horrific history of US boarding schools forcibly removing indigenous children from their families and communities in order to “save” them.

In spite of the First Amendment’s establishment clause (forbidding the establishment of state-sponsored religion), up until the 1960s and the Schempp decision it was still common practice to teach moral values through religious texts in US schools in the 20th century. Public school boards argued that using such texts was allowable because the teaching of good morals should be a secular goal of public school. (Today this purpose for public education would most often be referred to as “moral education” or “character education” and would not be likely to explicitly use religious texts as the basis for the curriculum in public schools.)

Schools are essential because they protect and promote democracy.

The founders of the United States of America often expressed concern that the democratic republic that they had created was forever in danger of disappearing. For them, the surest way to avert such a catastrophe was by imparting wisdom and knowledge to citizens of a democratic society so that they could preserve and protect it. As Jefferson noted in his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, those who are entrusted with power tend to revert to tyranny. The best way to prevent this from happening, Jefferson argued, is with an educated citizenry. (It’s important to note, of course, that who Jefferson considered worthy of “citizenship” was extremely limited in scope at the time [cough-propertied-white-males-cough].)

In the 19th century, John Dewey echoed the call for education’s critical role in preserving democracy, claiming in The Middle Works that “democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” (Interestingly, Dewey’s concept of democracy in education could be considered somewhat at odds with the assumptions of those who favored public education as a place to inculcate common moral values. Dewey believed that, in order to promote and protect democracy, education should cultivate students who were reflective and thoughtful individuals who had the freedom to choose what they wanted to study, as opposed to being students with a common “canon” of moral teachings to master.)

Schools are essential because they provide equality of opportunity.

In the 19th century, Horace Mann, often referred to as the founder of the common schools movement, made the case for universal schooling based on the notion that schools could provide students with unequal resources the opportunity to achieve equal outcomes. As Mann famously argued in Education and Social Inequity, “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

The notion of equality of opportunity underpinned the Brown v Board of Education case for desegregating public schools: “We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” It was also central to the the Lau v. Nichols decision that required public schools to have affirmative programs and plans in place for students still learning English, with the court noting that “Under…state-imposed standards there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.”

For some school reformers in the early 19th century, this equality of opportunity extended to notions of schooling as preparation for the work force. The rationale was that an educated populace would have more opportunities for gainful employment in an increasingly industrialized society. This purpose continued in public education into the 20th century, with vocational education classes in the first half of the century and in such 21st century offerings as career and technical education (CTE) programs, among others.

Schools are essential because they put students on their best path for individual success based on their innate ability.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This one isn’t usually stated explicitly, but it is implicit in some assumptions we make about schools.

There are several historic and current examples of this implicit purpose for public education in the US. For example, in the “school as work force preparation” world, the notion of opportunity is sometimes presented as an equalizer, as in Horace Mann’s vision for common schools. In others, however, it is presented as an essential sorting mechanism, based on students’ innate ability.

At its worst, this view presumes a fixed capacity or aptitude in individual students, resulting in segregating or “tracking” of students based on their presumed ability to succeed. This presumed ability historically has led to racially segregated schools or tracks within schools, first for black students in the Civil War era and later in the 19th century and beyond to immigrants. It has historically been cloaked in science, using intelligence tests to sort students into ability groups that coincidentally coincided with eugenicists’ presuppositions about race and intelligence. (See, for example, Carl Brigham and the origins of the SAT.)

Sometimes this notion of fixed capacity and sorting is more subtle. in the Reagan Administration’s 1983 “A Nation At Risk” report, for example, the American public was warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity” and that if we allow equity in schools to take precedence it might “lead to a generalized accommodation to mediocrity in our society.” The report essentially holds equality of educational opportunity and excellence in educational outcomes as diametrically opposed possibilities.

The notions of equality of opportunity and schools-as-sorting-mechanisms were almost comically jammed together in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a reauthorization of President Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act that required, for example, that English language learners and students with disabilities in schools perform at sufficiently high levels on standardized achievement tests or else their schools would face sanctions, in spite of the fact that both of these categories are essentially defined by students’ performance on standardized achievement tests in the first place. English language learners are typically identified by a home language survey and by their subsequent performance on an English language arts test; the plurality of students with disabilities are identified by a pattern of strengths and weaknesses on both cognitive and achievement tests. This is sort of like giving a height test to short people; the only people identified in the category didn’t measure up on the same measure being used to demonstrate school progress.

Whew, Sheba, that was a lot. What now?

All of that was a lot of words to say: we don’t at all have a common understanding of what public education is supposed to accomplish in the first place. This makes it pretty difficult to determine whether or not we are doing a good job at whatever it is we are supposed to be doing, or what we need to do to improve.

What do you think the primary purpose of public education is, or ought to be? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and/or let me know what I missed in this article. I look forward to hearing from you!