There is no such thing as a values-neutral school, so here are the values you can teach?
Embrace pluralism instead of control - before control is all that is left
In early 2020, before the pandemic hit, I was touring a public high school in a suburban/rural part of North Carolina. It was doing some interesting things – teaching STEM through applied activities like construction, kids collaborating on video documentaries as part of a semester-long history course, etc.
What also stood out to me were some of the Turning Point USA-branded posters on some of the walls. One said, “socialism sucks.” Another depicted Ronald Reagan in the style of the iconic Obama “Hope” poster. Another said, “Free Markets, Free People.”
If you’ve toured enough schools in enough parts of the country, this wouldn’t be that surprising. Schools named after Cesar Chavez tend to have a different feel than schools that teach the Great Books. A public school in San Francisco is likely to have a much different vibe than a public school in rural Georgia.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Schools tend to be reflections of their community as much as the pedagogic approach they use. Whether we want to accept that is another story.
In her book, Pluralism and American Public Education, Johns Hopkins University’s Ashley Berner argues that the idea of a values-neutral school is nonsensical: a “school’s atmosphere and priorities, its traditions, the management of student discipline, the curriculum and how it is taught, the way adults relate to one another— all of these guide students’ experience with the world.”
If the idea of a values-neutral school is impossible, what should we do for families in the community who want something else? What happens if a school’s approach begins to conflict with the community’s cultural majority?
The ideal approach is to embrace pluralism. Empower educators to create unique learning environments that families freely choose to join, or not join. In this world there is no coercion - everyone is there because they want to be. You do this by funding families, which gives them the agency to enroll in the options that best meet their needs, values, and interests.
As Berner notes in her book:
If education inevitably involves basic questions of human nature, meaning, and destiny, then why should one view be privileged above another? Why should progressive and traditionalist educators compete for hegemony, or secular and religious perspectives not coexist and cooperate? In a liberal democracy such as ours, why should there not be room for many different pedagogical approaches and school structures?
But we can go further. If we fund families instead of institutions, we can expand pluralism to include all the individual offerings in the community. In this world, a high school student could attend a traditional school for most of the day, take a course in bioethics at a local college in the afternoon, and pay for a course to become a certified commercial drone pilot to study coastal erosion or document the effects of a forest fire.
This is the way to have an education directed by values, and it’s the approach I prefer.
Unfortunately, today’s solution du jour is to exploit our country’s poorly designed, industrial model of education to enact views on all children. It’s all about control, and both sides are guilty of it: mobilize enough political or bureaucratic capital to impose your views or squelch the views of others. Proponents on both sides feel like they’re in a righteous war of good vs. evil where the goal is to dominate – not accommodate – the views of others.
This is happening today in statehouses across the country, with efforts to limit what books, ideas, and even words can be discussed in classrooms. And it’s been happening for decades on things like religious expression in schools, statewide dictates on school discipline, and other efforts that use the gears and levers of a top-down school system to realize certain ends.
We’ve seen this before. Public schools were largely Protestant between 1880-1960. That era was rife with conflicts between the Protestant majority and Catholics, Jews, atheists, and other communities (not to mention the obvious racial conflicts and injustices). It was a time that saw Catholic students expelled for refusing to read from the King James Bible, mobs destroying the home of a bishop who argued for funding pluralism, and scaremonger-fueled riots that resulted in Catholic churches burned and militias called to quell the violence.
These conflicts led to 38 states passing “Blaine amendments” that prohibited tax dollars from supporting Catholic (“sectarian”) schools – further cementing Protestantism in public schools. Not willing to enroll their children in schools that did not teach their values, many Catholics and Jews formed their own private schools.
But power dynamics change. When the Supreme Court effectively secularized public schools in the 1960s, it was Protestants who started to feel the changing values in schools. This has led to decades-long battles over school prayer, religiously affiliated school clubs, and the growth of private evangelical schools that continue today. Look no further than the ongoing Supreme Court case examining a public school employee’s right pray at school events.
The laws you’re passing today will be used against you tomorrow.
The better solution is choice for families and autonomy for educators.
To be even more explicit for the people in the back, here are some of the types of schools I would support in a pluralistic education system:
Schools that teach from the Great Books and schools that do not.
Schools that teach the 1619 Project and schools that do not.
Schools that are religious and schools that are not.
Schools that are full-time and schools that are part-time.
Do I have opinions on different types of schools and approaches? Sure. Do I want to fund families so they can choose whichever one they want? Yes. Do I want to use government to prevent any of them from being an option? No.
You can respect a system that allows the options to flourish without supporting all the options themselves.
Now of course, many of the proponents of the command-and-control approach – particularly on the Right – will say things like, “I also believe in moving to pluralism, but we have to focus on making the public school fit our values until we get there.”
Yes, and you’ll cast the ring into the fire just as soon as you use its power against your enemies.
Attempting to create values-neutral schools is a pipedream. What can, cannot, and must be taught in schools shouldn’t be dependent on an election. Instead, take your energy and put it towards efforts to create a pluralistic system that is based on the principles of mutual benefit, noncoercion, and individuality.
