Education and the American Political Tradition
Teach Self-Control for a Society with Ordered Liberty
[This post continues my series on the essays in Educating for Virtue, edited by Joseph Baldacchino. You can find previous posts in the series here and here.]
Whereas the first two essays in Educating for Virtue had a focus on the humanities’ value in helping one live a fully human life, the third essay, Paul Gottfried’s “Education and the American Political Tradition,” shifts the discussion to what an an American curriculum should contain to foster and maintain our sense of national identity. Gottfried frames the issue this way:
Virtually everyone who ventures an opinion about education in America agrees that high among its goals is the preparation of students for citizenship. Particularly in a self-governing polity such as ours, it is crucial that the rising generations be made ready and able to participate in society in ways that will contribute most effectively to the common good. For this to happen, the educational experience must optimally be such as to awaken the student a sense of membership in a community that transcends his own narrow interests: a community defined by its national experience and tradition. What is the nature of the specifically American experience? And what are the requisites of knowledge, imagination, and character that are most conducive to constructive participation in it?
My own recollection of public debates over education reform in the past few decades is that they are focused on students’ low levels of technical proficiency. Only a minority of students can read at grade level. Our students test poorly in math compared to students from all the other industrialized countries. High school graduates can’t express their thoughts coherently in writing or identify within a half-century the dates of the American Civil War.
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Gottfried approaches the problem of American education at a higher level, asking what portions of the curriculum are going to help our students be good Americans, or alternatively, what will help them participate effectively and responsibly in American public life. And of course today there is no consensus on this question.
When this volume was published in 1988, disagreements over what it means to be a good American were percolating, particularly on the campuses of elite universities, but the broader society enjoyed a common understanding of what responsible citizenship meant. The story imparted to the rising generation went something like this: America was founded by British people on the principles of liberty, constitutional government, and equality before the law. These principles were unevenly applied at first, but over time they were extended to just about all its citizens. American freedom led to economic prosperity and technological progress. A meritocracy allowed, in principle, anyone of ability to rise to great heights in business, the military, politics, or anywhere else. America is the land of opportunity for all its citizens, and it makes generous allowance for noncitizens to embark upon the path toward citizenship.
This narrative, naturally, papers over some features of American history and society, such as the extent to which elites have succeeded in structuring society to benefit themselves and their children. However, it is more true than false, and it succeeded to a large extent to promote solidarity among citizens.
Since the publication of Educating for Virtue, a different story has come to dominate American education in most schools. According to this narrative, America was founded by and for white men on the bases of racism, sexism, and white supremacy, and every significant event in its history ought to be interpreted as a power struggle between the forces trying to extend and entrench those “ideals” and the forces seeking to overcome them. White men have been pressured into strategic withdrawals on several occasions, but they still control all the major levers of power in society and continue to use them to dominate everyone else. This dominance is not nearly as overt as it was two centuries ago, but careful analysis of social structures and power relations reveals its persistence. Therefore, the struggle for liberation is ongoing, and young people of goodwill must be enlisted into it.
A corollary of this narrative is that because it maintains the focus on white men as the locus of oppression in the world, the shortcomings of non-European societies are ignored. Thus a majority of young Americans today believe demonstrably false things, such as that American Indians lived in peace and harmony with nature and each other before Columbus showed up, or that Europeans introduced slavery to African society.
Whatever the merits of or elements of truth in this newer narrative, it should seem obvious that it is not likely to foster solidarity among American citizens. This observation is borne out in survey data that tells us our country is extremely polarized and that young people in general are not patriotic at all. In fact, they tend to have a negative view of America and blame it for many, if not most, of the world’s problems.
All of this was still germinating when Gottfried wrote this essay, but his discussion is still worthwhile. Like some other contributors to the volume, he puts Irving Babbitt forward as a critic whose thought is relevant to current issues: “Rereading Democracy and Leadership for the first time in twenty years, I was struck by Babbitt’s observations on American government and contemporary criticism of the bureaucratic state, redistribution of earnings, and sentimental approaches to social problems.”
Unexpectedly, Gottfried zeroes in on Babbitt’s critique of Woodrow Wilson and the ethic of public service he promoted. “Public service” is a lofty concept that few today would question, but Babbitt viewed it with deep suspicion. As Gottfried explains,
This ethic [of public service] was basic to the educational and administrative programs that American Progressives sought to enact in the early twentieth century. John Dewey and the founders of teachers’ colleges considered public service-oriented education essential for a self-improving democracy. Democratic and Republican Progressives who built federal and state bureaucracies appealed to the idea of service as the sheet-anchor of sound government. Babbitt, by contrast, attacked this ideal as inconsistent with the political culture implicit in the Constitution. He cited the opening lines of Book Eight of Aristotle’s Politics to underline the problematic nature of Americans’ adopting a public-service educational ideal. Aristotle had taught that each form of government had its appropriate habits of mind; the founders of a city had therefore the duty to plan for a public education that the values associated with the regime. The better ingrained was the corresponding habit of mind, the more firmly in place was the government.
The American government of ordered liberty, Babbitt maintained, could not afford to teach an ethic of public service that really concealed the will to power. Those who glorified public service were striving to control others—while claiming allegiance to an abstract public. Administrators and educators spoke of service when they actually meant power. They used the tropes of democracy and fairness to conceal their plans for broad social reconstruction, in short, for a hidden agenda that satisfied their vanity.
True education in America—that reflected the character of the regime—would aim at teaching self-control, not self-deception about one’s imperial practices.
One could fault Babbitt for being uncharitable to his contemporaries, but the fact is that America became a major imperial power in the 20th century, and that the ethic of public service facilitated the staffing of the bureaucracy on which empires depend. And this is not just a reference to the State Department, but also to all the agencies that have come to act in an increasingly imperialistic way over the fifty states and thousands of localities inside the U.S.
Gottfried cites Babbitt’s pupil Stuart Sherman and his way of drawing a distinction between the traditional Anglo-American disposition and the German habit of mind that had been growing in influence since the mid-19th century:
German: inner freedom, external (government) control
American: inner restraint, external freedom
Babbitt and Sherman traced this American habit to the Puritans, and they certainly were not alone in noting it. (Alexis de Tocqueville called attention to it as well in his comments on the influence of Christianity on Americans in Democracy in America.) Babbitt feared that the erosion of the Puritan ethic would lead Americans to indulge in their “base passions,” in particular the desire to control others.
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T.S. Eliot criticized Babbitt’s efforts to retrieve Puritanism for cultural reasons without embracing its theology fully. However, Gottfried argues that Babbitt actually “understood the need for a rooted religion as the basis of American culture and government” better than his former student. Unlike Eliot, who abandoned his ancestral faith, culture, and country to become an Anglican monarchist in England, Babbitt fought to reform his own tradition. “The recovery of American virtue might be aided by searching among the treasures of other civilizations, but it had to draw its sustaining power, he believed, from sources closer to home.”
Is the American tradition too far gone to recover? I think the jury is still out. The hour is late, but reform efforts stressing traditional virtues, such as the classical education movement, are well established and gaining strength.