An economy of all people, by all people, and for all people

"An economy built on equal rights and freedoms for all people" is now seen by many (including those pushing The 1619 Project in schools) as a form of white supremacy, Greg Forster writes.

The way kids are learning about Thanksgiving is changing

"Oklahoma schools teach native history in Thanksgiving," The Oklahoman reports. And Brian McNicoll has a helpful article here. In short, Douglas Wilson writes, "the tumultuous history of Thanksgiving has left the door open for many postmodern wielders of corrosive acids to step in with their view that Thanksgiving really ought to be renamed something like Genocide Awareness Day."

But as is the fashion of debunkers, our modern naysayers often cannot be troubled with understanding what actually happened throughout our actual history, and so they resort to the simple expedient of putting a different film into the retrospective projector. … Anybody who talks about the settling of North America as though it were a cohesive group called “white people” doing the settling and a group of indigenous flower children being displaced by the disembarking whites is someone who probably ought to stay out of the conversation. ...

The inhabitants of North America when Columbus landed were divided into many tribes, multiple tribes, and these tribes had different languages, customs, histories, and characteristics. Quite a number of these tribes were mortal enemies, one to another. And to make the whole situation even more festive, the newcomers were also divided into different tribes, and they had different languages, customs, histories and characteristics. A number of these tribes were mortal enemies, one to another.

White tribes would war with each other, like the French and English did. Red tribes would war with each other, like the Comanche and Apache. Red tribes would go to war with white tribes, like the Wampanoag in King Philip’s War, with the Mohawk fighting on the side of the English. And white tribes would grievously mistreat oppress red tribes, as happened to the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek and Cherokee), culminating in the Trail of Tears. And I use white and red above, not as my categories, but rather as a way of illustrating that when you zoom out that far, such that those are the two identifying characteristics that you see, then by that point you understand almost nothing.

In short, Wilson writes, "because envy is a wasting disease, a wasting disease that seeks to deck itself out in the language of virtue, it blurs all historical distinction, and talks a great deal about social justice. We, on the other hand, like to talk about a little thing we call justice justice."

For structural pluralism in education

"We need not pine for an era when a generic, superficial Protestantism was taken for granted by most Americans," writes Boston University professor emeritus Charles Glenn ("Can We Stop Fighting Over Schools?").

In the contemporary American scene, despite the cultural hegemony of an intolerant secularism, the social elements for constructing vigorous alternative institutions and communities are by no means lacking. Indeed, they have been stimulated by the collapse of the post-war “Judeo-Christian” cultural dominance. The challenge is to give principled policy support to this rich pluralism of convictions.

Here we could usefully look to the example of the Netherlands. In the nineteenth century, Dutch society was roiled by decades-long conflicts over schools. Protestants and Catholics vigorously resisted the efforts of liberal elites to impose a common set of beliefs through the schools operated by local government. The solution that brought a permanent “pacification” to these conflicts was the adoption of structural pluralism in education (and in other sectors of social and cultural life) that permitted educators to provide schooling based on a variety of worldviews and gave parents the right to choose among those schools without financial penalty. Today, about 70 percent of Dutch children attend schools that are not operated by government. Academic outcomes are strong, and education is not a focal point of political conflict. ...

Most other nations with advanced levels of universal schooling provide public support to faith-based schools with no evident harm to their social fabric and with considerably less conflict over schooling than occurs in the United States. Surely the time has come for a similar American “pacification,” through adoption of principled pluralism as the fundamental and equitable structure of our education system.

‘The public school is not as American as apple pie’

Harvard professor Paul E. Peterson reminds us:

For the entire colonial period and well into the first decades of the nineteenth century, schooling was the responsibility of churches, private tutors, and fee-paid, itinerant schoolmasters like Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. The hodgepodge worked pretty well. In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville reported to his French readers that the American people “appear to be the most enlightened community in the world.”

It's time for the Blaine Amendment to go

"For the sake of freedom, peace, and unity," writes Neal McCluskey, "it is time for Blaine to go." Oklahoma's largest newspaper agrees.

School choice: A declaration of independence

Contrary to the historical mythology of the education establishment, Thomas Jefferson’s proposals for education bear no resemblance to the government school monopoly we know today, Greg Forster writes in the July issue of Perspective. Indeed, he says, "government control over the minds of the young would have been seen by the founding generation as intolerable tyranny. ... The road back to self-government and the principles of the Declaration runs through educational choice."

'Letting education and religion overlap'

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Robert Maranto and Dirk C. Van Raemdonck say expanding vouchers to include parochial schools is a good idea.

The shame of Blaine comes sweeping down the plain

"Hostility to aid to pervasively sectarian schools has a shameful pedigree," Justice Clarence Thomas once noted.

In light of today's ruling in Oklahoma County District Court that Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship funds cannot be used to send special-needs children to sectarian schools, it's worth taking a closer look at that pedigree. In his book Standing for Christ in a Modern Babylon (Crossway, 2003), historian and journalist Marvin Olasky does just that:

Public (that is, government-funded, nonchurch) schooling caught on in the 1840s and thereafter, after the nation’s founders were gone. Many schools were not so much non-sectarian as antisectarian, and anti one faith in particular, Catholicism. Catholics, perceiving the public schools as devoted to teaching Protestantism, worked to set up their own institutions and asked that some of their tax money be used to defray expenses. The response was ugly: Opposition among Protestants to the growing number of Catholic immigrants, largely from Ireland, and concern that children going to Catholic schools would grow up to oppose American liberty led to riots in the 1840s and 1850s. One Philadelphia riot in 1844 resulted in thirteen deaths and the burning down of a Catholic church.

Some writers wanted to stop all immigration, but others looked to public schools to save America. An article in The Massachussetts Teacher in 1851 stated that children of immigrants “must be taught as our own children are taught. We say must be, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. ... The children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.” The Wisconsin Teachers’ Association declared in 1865 that “children are the property of the state.”

Ironically, the public schools weren’t doing much to teach Protestantism. The intellectual leader of the public school movement was Horace Mann, a Unitarian who pushed for largely secularized public schools and overcame opposition from Protestants by assuring them that daily readings from the King James Bible and generic moral instruction could continue. He succeeded largely because of bigotry and over the objections of theologians such as R. L. Dabney (the Stonewall Jackson aide), who explained that teaching a person how to use a saw could be done in a value-neutral way, but “dexterity in an art is not education. The latter nurtures a soul, the other only drills a sense-organ or muscle; the one has a mechanical end, the other a moral.”

Nevertheless, bigotry was so rampant that some Protestants were content to try teaching in a religion-less way as long as Catholics would be hard-pressed to maintain their own school system. President Ulysses S. Grant, who called Catholicism a center of “superstition, ambition and ignorance,” proposed in 1875 a Constitutional amendment that would require states to establish government-funded schools, forbid those schools to teach any religious tenets, and prohibit any government funds from going to religious schools. James Blaine, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, introduced the amendment the following week, and it became known as the Blaine Amendment.

The amendment was instantly controversial. Vermont Senator Justin Morrill wrote, “The Catholics will rave, but I suppose there is not one who ever voted for free-men, free-schools, or the Republican party in war or peace.” It easily passed the House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate, and Blaine lost out in his attempt to become president in 1884. Nevertheless, thirty-seven states during the late 1800s and early 1900s inserted into their state constitutions versions of the Blaine Amendment, sometimes under duress. Congress often required Western territories seeking admission to the Union to have the amendments in their state constitutions. Ironically but biblically (the book of Proverbs notes that “he who digs a pit falls into it”), those amendments are now a major barrier to school choice across the country and to any government funds going to Christian schools.

Arizona’s supreme court recently called that state’s Blaine Amendment “a clear manifestation of ... bigotry” and did not let it sideline a tax credit law that furthers school choice. In 2000 Justice Clarence Thomas attacked the Blaine Amendment by name, noting, “Hostility to aid to pervasively sectarian schools has a shameful pedigree that we do not hesitate to disavow.” He emphasized that “this doctrine, born of bigotry, should be buried now.” If journalists had covered this story, they would have been able to attack accurately the evangelical arrogance of the past, find out today who is willing to have a level playing field for all religions, and see who is pushing for supremacy for his particular worldview.

Public education vs. the Fourth of July

Some thoughts here.

Today's history lesson

In the current issue of The Cato Journal, Neal McCluskey takes aim at "the factually dubious assertion that education -- especially government-run education -- has always been understood as essential to the survival of a free, American republic."

From the early colonial period well into the 19th century -- when the nation was formed and its foundational principles established -- there was little "public schooling," as we would define it today, with no states having compulsory schooling laws and education primarily conducted in private or voluntary community settings. Moreover, most early Americans simply did not envision a major government role in education, nor did they see schooling as critical to a free society. Indeed, in his lifetime Jefferson never got even the rudimentary public schooling system he wanted for Virginia because too few Virginians supported it.

This is not to say that the education that occurred -- and there was much of it -- did not teach children a common, American culture. Look no further than sales of the famous, intentionally "American" spellers of Noah Webster. By 1829, 20 million copies of the spellers were in circulation, though the entire population of the United States was less than 13 million. And they were ubiquitous because people freely bought them.

Happy birthday ...

... to one of the all-time-great homeschooled students.

Are public schools hazardous to public education?

Andrew J. Coulson thinks so.

Acton fellow discusses school choice

Acton Institute research fellow Dr. Kevin Schmiesing discusses school choice and the history of public education in this country.

Homeschoolers hail their alma mater

Recently a Tulsa housing authority tried to deny a family its constitutional right to homeschool. The family lawyered up and the housing authority backed down.

Whenever I read a story like that -- or a Los Angeles Times profile of an Oklahoma homeschool mom who is a bestselling author and one of the 100 most influential bloggers in the world -- I can't help but be thankful for ... Oklahoma Democrats.

To explain. One morning in 2001 I was sitting at the kitchen table having Raisin Bran with my eight-year-old son, Lincoln. Reading the sports page, he noticed the headline "Stoops visits alma mater." I asked him if he knew what an alma mater was. He didn't, so I explained it's where a person went to school. I reminded the towheaded third-grader that just a week earlier in Latin class he had learned that mater means mother. And since alma means nourishing, then alma mater means nourishing mother.

"You know what's funny?" the little homeschooler remarked. "In my case, it literally is true."

Indeed it is. And there are thousands of other young Oklahomans whose alma mater is their alma mater.

According to Article 13, Section 4 of the Oklahoma Constitution, "the Legislature shall provide for the compulsory attendance at some public or other school, unless other means of education are provided, of all the children in the State who are sound in mind and body, between the ages of eight and sixteen years, for at least three months in each year" (emphasis added). According to a legal analysis published by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), "Oklahoma is the only state with a constitutional provision guaranteeing the right to home school." And for that we can thank -- you guessed it -- Oklahoma Democrats.

More than a century ago, during the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention, delegate J. S. Buchanan, a Democrat from Norman, suggested that the "other means of education" language be added. Delegate J. A. Baker from Wewoka, another Democrat, agreed: "I think Mr. Buchanan has suggested a solution. A man's own experience sometimes will teach him. I have two little fellows that are not attending a public school because it is too far for them to walk and their mother makes them study four hours a day."

"People ought to be allowed to use their own discretion as to how to educate their children," he argued.

The motion to add the "other means of education" language was seconded by none other than convention president Alfalfa Bill Murray, another Democrat. (Would that today's Oklahoma Democrats were as friendly to homeschooling as their forebears.)

The words alma mater are sometimes applied to the Roman goddess Ceres, the goddess of bounty and agriculture. And though homeschooling moms do nourish their youngsters with food (when Lincoln was six he told his mom, "You're such a good cook you could get a job at Denny's!"), they also nourish them with instruction.

The psalmist compares children to olive plants. And as Bible commentator Matthew Henry observed, nourishing parents love to see their little ones "straight and green, sucking in the sap of their good education."

Horace Mann, homeschool dad

"We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them," said President-elect Barack Obama, shortly before throwing up his hands and walking away from the D.C. public schools last month. This presumably wasn't too difficult for Obama, in that he already had experience in throwing up his hands and walking away from the Chicago public schools.

Of course Mr. Obama, a father of two, is merely the latest in a long line of public figures who champion public schools ... for other people's children. But until reading a new book by education professor Milton Gaither, I had no idea this grand tradition stretches all the way back to Horace Mann himself.

That's right, Horace Mann, generally regarded as the father of America's current public school system, was a homeschooler. "Ironically," Gaither writes, "some of the very people pushing so strongly for common schools that would raise the masses up ... were tutoring their own children at home out of a fear that these very masses would corrupt their own kids. One such individual was Horace Mann himself, whose wife Mary taught their three children at home even as he stumped the country preaching the common school. Mann's biographer Jonathan Messerli captures the irony well:

From a hundred platforms, Mann had lectured that the need for better schools was predicated upon the assumption that parents could no longer be entrusted to perform their traditional roles in moral training and that a more systematic approach with the public school was necessary. Now as a father, he fell back on the educational responsibilities of the family, hoping to make the fireside achieve for his own son what he wanted the schools to accomplish for others.

Giving thanks for Pilgrim homeschoolers

Perhaps you've heard the argument that Christian parents should send their children to a nonreligious school in order to be "salt and light" there.

The Pilgrims didn't see it that way. I'm reading a fascinating new book, Homeschool: An American History, by education professor Milton Gaither. Neither hagiographic nor hostile, this is a serious, scholarly history of home education -- the only one I'm aware of -- covering the period from 1600 to the present. Gaither writes:

Generations of Americans have learned in elementary school of the Mayflower, Squanto, Thanksgiving, and the other tropes that make up the romance of Plymouth Colony, but it has not often been noted that one of the driving motivations behind the endeavor was the education of children.

When the first Protestant separatists left Scrooby, England, in search of religious toleration in Amsterdam, Gaither explains, "the cosmopolitan air and Dutch culture were a bit of a shock to the Scrooby people, so much so that they feared for their children's futures." They resettled in the smaller, more rural town of Leyden, but still, as William Bradford wrote,

many of their children, by these occasions and the great licentiousness of youth in that country, and the manifold temptations of the place, were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and departing from their parents. Some became soldiers, others took upon them far voyages by sea, and others some worse courses tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.

Thus, Gaither writes, "throughout their sojourn in Holland, the Scrooby families taught their children at home rather than send them to schools where they would learn Dutch grammar and manners." Eventually these Pilgrims set sail for the New World, and "for the first forty years of Plymouth Colony's existence there was no school at all. ... Most learning occurred in the home, as mothers and fathers passed down values, manners, literacy, and vocational skills to their offspring."

The Pilgrims were doubtless aware of the dangers of keeping company with fools. I can't help but wonder if they also thought of Elimelech, who left Judah with his wife and two sons and went to live among the heathens in Moab. His sons, of course, ended up disobeying God by marrying Moabite women who worshiped false gods. As Matthew Henry commented,

Little did Elimelech think, when he went to sojourn in Moab, that ever his sons would thus join in affinity with Moabites. But those that bring young people into bad acquaintance, and take them out of the way of public ordinances, though they may think them well-principled and armed against temptation, know not what they do, nor what will be the end thereof.

Home free in Oklahoma

In the current issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly, I point out that Oklahoma is perhaps the best state in the nation in which to homeschool.