Civic education reconsidered

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by James W. Ceaser, Patrick J. McGuinn

Besides the goal of promoting an industrious, skilled, and educated populace, the common-school movement sought to achieve two slightly different, though overlapping, objectives of civic education. One was to provide a vast and sprawling nation, which included a substantial and growing immigrant population, with a common cultural foundation and a common attachment to the nation's principles. Education would serve as an instrument to build the nation and to "Americanize" the populace, in particular its non-native elements. The other objective was to inhibit the formation or perpetuation of traditions that resisted this Americanization, such as instruction in non-English languages or the teaching of doctrines indifferent to, or subversive of, the system's basic principles. Although a few such antidemocratic institutions may have existed, these hardly were significant enough to pose a major problem.

To the extent that serious problems arose, they were often of the common-school movement's own making. The attempt to enshrine the common school as the sole legitimate purveyor of the American civic idea had the effect of creating its own resistance. For those who believed that a fully religious education in their own faith was needed, and for those (mostly Catholic) who argued that submitting to readings from a Protestant version of the Bible was not really neutral, the "common-school" ideal proved unacceptable. Intended to unify, it proved divisive; and, in what amounted to a self-created spiral of conflict, the resistance of some to the public school orthodoxy was taken by others as proof of their anti-American inclinations.

However defensible, even laudable, the goal of Americanization may have been, the common-school movement crossed a fateful threshold when it sought to make the public school the self-proclaimed sole carrier of the civic idea. This error was compounded when some states (such as Oregon) passed laws banning private education, an exercise of authority that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Pierce v. The Society of Sisters (1925). While the Pierce decision placed limits on how far the common-school movement could utilize the state's coercive power, it did not - and could not - limit efforts to use the "public" status for the symbolic purpose of seeking ownership of the civic idea.

Return of the faithful

The Catholic Church, with responsibility for administering the largest nongovernment school system, had the greatest stake in challenging the common school's pretensions. Prior to the widespread acceptance of the common school, Catholics had argued that education should be state-funded but run by "private" institutions - which, in practice, included mainly the different religious groups. In this view, the school should be an extension of the family, not a creation of the state. A diverse group of schools under private control did not mean that civic education would be ignored but that it would take place inside of, and in accord with, the traditions of each institution and its understanding of America. The civic idea would grow up from these different institutions, rather than be defined by the state.