In the nineteenth-century, politician Horace Mann embarked on a mission to reform public education in the United States. His vision was to initiate a “common school” revival wherein students would be provided with instruction not only on the “three R’s” [reading, writing, and arithmetic], but also and most importantly on non-sectarian moral formation. Mann’s hope was to make local improvements universal triumphs and to nurture and nourish the better angels of human nature through early childhood education. He believed the latter was absolutely essential for the health and prosperity of America’s democracy and warned that “…if we are derelict in our duty, in this matter, our children, in their turn, will suffer. If we permit the vulture’s eggs to be incubated and hatched, it will then be too late to take care of the lambs.” Since Mann’s crusade, the public school system in the United States has proliferated to the point where there are nearly one hundred-thousand schools educating over fifty-million students every day. However, Mann’s vision for a holistic “common school” has sadly fallen away. While demands for a universal, equal, and now equitable education system have not waned, the United States is now more diverse and ideologically sectarian than Mann could have ever imagined, making his idealization of a common moral education seem woefully out of date. In this paper, I will first argue that increasing ideological pluralism does in fact preclude the instantiation of a common moral landscape within America’s public school system; however, I will conclude by acknowledging that perhaps Horace Mann was correct about the need for shared moral formation within education, and assess whether now, almost two hundred years out, it is, in fact, too late to take care of the lambs.

Despite the increasing ideological polarization taking place in the United States, the notion that education, whether public, private, or otherwise, is an essential component of a functioning society is largely uncontested. This belief goes all the way back to antiquity, featuring prominently in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, wherein he writes that early training in a person’s life makes “all the difference in the world.” More recently and more admonitorily, Dr. Mortimer Adler cautioned that “Those who are not trained to enjoy society can only despoil its institutions and corrupt themselves.” In either case, few are angling for a Lord of The Flies scenario where children are simply loosed and run wild and free, ushering in an age of anarchy. Most everyone can agree and grasp that that would be a bad thing. However, problems arise when we have to pin down what exactly goes into training, that is, educating, the future generations of our society because that requires consensus on what things we ought to teach, and while we may have rough agreement on what is bad (such as anarchy), agreement on what is good seems to be moving evermore out of reach.

In his 1910 book What’s Wrong with The World, G.K. Chesterton describes this problem as the “medical mistake,” writing, “…the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease.”  Since Chesterton’s writing, the problem has only increased, trickling down from the political and cultural movers and shakers of the day to encompass almost every member of America’s polity. John Courtney Murray put it best in his 1960 book We Hold These Truths when he said,

“The fact today is not simply that we hold different views but that we have become different types of men with different styles of interior life. We are therefore uneasy in one another’s presence. We are not, in fact, present to one another at all. We are absent from one another. That is, I am not transparent to the other, nor he to me; our mutual experience is that of an opaqueness.” 

This absence and felt “opaqueness” has led to a fair bit of nervousness in the realm of public policy, especially with respect to education, because while most everyone can agree that education is necessary, so too can they see that it can be an instrument, even a weapon, of indoctrination.

Just recently, Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet wrote an article in the Arizona Law Review taking homeschooling to task for that very reason, calling it “an essentially unregulated regime” and arguing that “A very large proportion of homeschooling parents are ideologically committed to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.” Regardless of whether or not Bartholet’s claim is accurate, it is representative of a particular demographic (i.e. high-brow academics). However, her critique is one which cuts both ways, and the public school system has long been charged with exercising its own form of ideological tyranny. In the early twentieth-century, Princeton Scholar J. Gresham Machen, wrote, “Such a tyranny [public school], supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword permitted thought at least to be free.” Interestingly, both Bartholet and Machen appeal to the need for freedom of thought in their criticisms of homeschool and public school, respectively, and both would likely agree that indoctrination is generally a bad thing. However, that would ostensibly only apply inasmuch as they disagreed with who was doing the indoctrinating. 

This is the heart of the issue because Murray and Chesterton are inescapably correct. We have become different kinds of men, and what one calls a cure, the other calls a plague. What one calls education, the other calls indoctrination, and at this juncture, it seems wholly unlikely that broad consensus will ever be reclaimed. The assumptive Judeo-Christian worldview that Horace Mann operated under no longer exists, and as such, a “…deliberate effort to create in the entire youth of a nation common attitudes, loyalties, and values, and to do so under the central direction of the state” would be seen as frighteningly theocratic to roughly half the country’s population and utterly Orwellian to the rest. In either case, the formal instantiation of moral formation in public education is something that a majority of Americans will no longer accept. The time for a “common school” kind of morality has passed, and the question that must now be answered is what can be done with what’s left?

In his 1943 work The Abolition of Man, Oxford Professor C.S. Lewis writes,

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is not infallible protection against a soft head.”

It is sad but true that in the present day, soft heads and hard hearts abound in debates around the form and function of education in the United States. Admittedly, this is true of pretty much every public policy issue currently at play, but if Lewis is to be believed, educators are, at least in part, to blame. Instead of inculcating just sentiments we have been taught to give ourselves over to just sentiment, and as a result of our feelings-driven politics, common sense and mutual respect have been all but gobbled up by the lesser angels of our nature. “We are not friends, but enemies” is the unspoken (though, occasionally voiced) refrain, and without a significant sea change, America’s education system and political discourse will likely only further decay. In this respect, Mann’s assessment of the dangers posed by education absent a common moral framework unfortunately obtains.

That being said, while it is undeniably the case that the growth of multiculturalism and ideological diversity no longer permit sweeping standards of morality to be put in place, something new has been gained: an opportunity to claim what Lewis might call a kind of “mere morality” where the inherent dignity of every human being is affirmed as a valuable and indelible thing. With that as a guiding principle, schools might again be a place where students are meant to grow and learn instead of serving as ideological battlegrounds for talking heads to engage in mutually destructive slash and burn. In fact, having worked with an amazing group of third graders over the last year, I can say with confidence that those kids are already doing this, and for that reason alone, I am exceedingly optimistic. With soft hearts and hardy heads, whenever given half the chance, those eight and nine-year-olds were almost always willing to give one another the dignity of difference. So while I have to admit that in modern-day America, Mann’s dream of a common moral education can no longer stand, I would just say that there is every reason to hope that despite our differences, we may not be enemies, but friends, once again. That is, of course, as long as we are willing to take a lesson and learn a thing or two from the lambs.

Issues in Education. Spring 2020. Grade Earned: A.