Supplement for Fourth Class:
Copyright © 2023 Bruce W. Hauptli
I. Questions From Last Time.
II. Chapter Three: Dimensions of
Democratic Participation:
71-75
Levels of Democratic Control:
75 In
anything but a tiny city-state, community control over schools cannot be
identified with local control because there are several democratic communities
that have a legitimate role to play in determining school policy.
For the same reason, federal and state control must not be
all-encompassing, otherwise local democratic control over schools is rendered
meaningless. Local public schools
play a legitimate role in reflecting and responding to the more particular
collective preferences of face-to-face communities, a purpose that few other
political institutions can serve as effectively in our society.
75-79
Democratic Professionalism:
76 At all
levels of American government, political control over schools is challenged—and
often shared—by other authorities: parents and parent-teacher associations,
teachers and teacher’ unions, accrediting agencies, private foundations, civic
groups and lobbying organizations….Although all these groups help shape what
happens in American schools, the challenge posed by teachers and teachers’
unions is by far the most significant in upholding the principle of
nonrepression against democratic authority.
77-79 She
discusses authority and professionalism in the professions of medicine,
law, and teaching:
77 too much
autonomy leads to “the insolence of office.”
Too little autonomy, on the other hand, leads to what one might call
“the ossification of office,” from which, by almost all accounts, the
teaching profession in the United States.
79 Far more
than doctors or lawyers, teachers make compromises in their professional
standards for causes that are often entirely beyond their personal control: too
many students, too little preparation time for teaching, too much administrative
work, too little money to support their families.
Some of these causes, however, may be within the collective power of
teachers—organized by professional teachers’ unions—to change.
79-88
Teachers’ Unions:
79 Such
unions can “…create the conditions teachers under which teachers can cultivate
the capacity among students for critical reflection on democratic culture.”
80 Such
unions should have sufficient authority to combat ossification of office, but no
so much as to engender insolence of office.
80-81 Such
unions were begun to ensure teachers have sufficient control over their work,
and multiplied as they secured better rates of pay.
81 Merit
pay is an important way of mitigating ossification.
But, she adds: “democratic education depends not only upon attracting
intellectually talented people with a sense of professional mission to teaching,
but also on cultivating and sustaining that sense during their career as
teachers.”
82-84 While
teacher pay is important to teachers’ unions (as it is to both boards and
teachers) professionalism is even more important, and one reason that teachers’
unions came into being:
82 Although
a school board may establish curriculum, it must not dictate how teachers choose
to teach the established curriculum, as long as they do not discriminate against
students or repress reasonable points of view.
Although a school board may control the textbooks teachers use, it may
not establish how teachers use the textbooks within the same principled
constraints). If teachers are
not permitted sufficient intellectual authority, they can not successfully teach
students to be intellectually independent.
Of course too much autonomy is as problematic as too little.
82-84 She
discusses the move toward teacher tenure for primary and secondary school
teachers contending systems of impartial review are key.
Fostering professionalism is important both in the classroom and in
the larger school context, and good schools can retain teachers by treating
them as professionals. .
And she goes on to point out differences between primary and secondary
school teachers and college or university professors:
84
“Teachers’ unions are ideally an interim solution to the problem of professional
ossification, but the interim is likely to last a long time given the obstacles
now standing in the way of teachers gaining a greater role in shaping school
policy.”
84-88 She
identifies state, federal, and large school district regulations and
requirements as obstacles which perpetuate the role of teachers’ unions.
88-94
Democracy Within Schools:
88 While
the professionalism of teachers can safeguard against repression and
discrimination, a truly democratic education requires that the students also be
allowed to play a role in their education.
But
89 Students
who are predisposed neither to participation nor to learning present the greater
challenge to a democratic conception of teaching because their negative attitude
toward schooling can readily reinforce a purely disciplinary method of teaching:
teachers assert their authority, first to produce order, and then to funnel a
body of knowledge into students.”
89-93 But
highly committed and professional teachers can adopt participatory strategies
which can reach such students:
92-93
Although we lack enough evidence to say how much internal democracy [within
schools] is necessary to cultivate participatory virtues among students, the low
levels of political participation in our society and the high levels of
autocracy within most schools point to the conclusion that the cultivation of
participatory virtues should become more prominent among the purposes of primary
schooling, especially as children mature intellectually and emotionally, and
become more capable of engaging in free and equal discussion with teachers and
their peers.
93 She
cites Dewey’s Lab School as an exemplar here.
94
However, she contends, a democrat school cannot be a democracy.
The role of such schools is to
prepare future citizens for democratic citizenship.
Were they fully ready for citizenship, being students in school would no
longer be appropriate.
III. Chapter Four:
The Limits of Democratic Authority:
95 The democratic purposes of primary
schooling constrain as well as empower democratic communities, but not in the
name of parental choice, liberal autonomy, or conservative virtue.
The principles nonrepression and nondiscrimination limit democratic
authority in the name of democracy itself.
A society is undemocratic—it cannot engage in conscious social
reproduction—if it restricts rational deliberation or includes some educable
citizens from an adequate education.
Nonrepression and nondiscrimination are therefore intrinsic to the ideal
of a democratic society, as parental choice, liberal autonomy, and conservative
virtue are not.
95-96 We value democracy not primarily
as a pure process that defines what is just, nor as a perfect process that
guarantees justice (defined by some nonprocedural standard).
Rather because it is the best way by which we can discover what a
community value for itself and its children.
97 First, the Chapter will examine
three pairs of policies which raise the
problem of repression in public schools: banning and approving books,
teaching creationism and civics, and sex education and sexist education.
It then goes on to discuss private schools, separating moral from
religious education, restraining the limits that might be placed on educational.
Banning and Approving Books:
99-101 She discuss how book banning is
generally repressive, and any policies or decisions to engage in such bans must
be the result of deliberative democratic procedures.
Similarly, with textbook control situations!
101 The most effective means of
avoiding direct repression may therefore be indirect: to restructure the process
by which democratic decisions are made rather than to constrain decisions after
they have been made. Restructuring
the process rather than constraining its outcomes is likely to have the
additional unintended advantage of furthering the education of adults, while
they further the education of children.
Teaching Creationism and Civics:
102 The religions that reject evolution
as a valid scientific theory also reject the secular standards of reasoning that
make evolution clearly superior as a theory to creationism.
Only by putting religious faith above reason can someone believe that the
entire fossil record….
103
The case for teaching secular but not
religious standards of reasoning does not rest on the claim that secular
standards are neutral among all religious beliefs.
The case rests instead on the claim that secular standards constitute a
better basis upon which to build a common education for citizenship than any set
of sectarian religious beliefs—better because secular standards are both a fairer
and a firmer basis for peacefully reconciling our differences.
Sex Education and Sexist Education:
Gutmann first talks about sex education
(107-111), and then goes on to discuss sexist education (111-115).
108 Teaching about sex is…not the same
as teaching sex, just as teaching about religion is not the same as teaching
religion. The most ardent advocate
of the separation of church and state could consistently admit a course of
comparative religion in the public-school curriculum.
The distinction between teaching sex and teaching about sex is
considerably harder….
110 She considers sex education with a
provision of exempting students who (or whose parents) are opposed.
111 Gutmann uses “sexist education”
“…to characterize a specific set of educational practices: those that serve,
often unintentionally, to restrict the quality or quantity of democratic
education received by girls (or women) relative to that received by boys (or
men).”
Note that here she refers to
“educational practices” where at other times it is “education,” “educational
theories.”
112-115 She discusses statistics in the
hiring of primary vs. secondary
teachers, and statistics regarding administrators and the apparent
discriminatory practices.
115 The educational rationale for
breaking sex stereotyping implicates not only the authority structure but also
the curriculum of schools. Because
most discussions of sexism in education concentrate on the curriculum, I have
focused on the authority structure.
Breaking sex stereotypes in the curriculum is equally important but simpler to
justify. It should be obvious that no
democratic principle prevents teachers from paying more attention to women in
history and literature from adopting gender-neutral language.
The practical obstacles that stand in the way of curricular reform make
it even more important that we discover as many principled ways as possible to
overcome sex bias in schooling.
Private Schools:
115 In this section she addresses the
question “is access to private schools a necessary or desirable limit on
democratic control over primary Education?”
The question of private schooling leads, naturally, to a discussion of
whether dissenting parents should be able to exempt their children from some
elements of the public schooling.
116 Only in a state of families is it
natural to assume that parents have an exclusive right to control the education
of their children regardless of democratic will.
117 She argues that while sometimes
private schools can siphon off wealthier students from public schools, more than
two-thirds of private students attend catholic schools, and so “…a better
alternative to prohibiting private schools would be to devise a system of
primary schooling that accommodates private religious schools on the condition
that they, like public schools, teach the common set of democratic values.”
117-120 This accommodation can be
broadened but where a religion espouses racial discrimination or repression a
line is be crossed: “because the requirements of racial nondiscrimination and
religious nonrepression conflict is this case, democratic principle
permit but do not
require legislatures to constrain
fundamentalist along with all other schools to racial nondiscrimination.”
Dissent within Public Schools:
122 Public schools would more
effectively teach democratic values…if they were willing to exempt some children
from practices to which their parents object as long as those practices do not
require public schools to be discriminatory or repressive…By such selective
accommodation, schools may be able to teach both the moral value and the
principled limits of democratic dissent without elevating conscientious refusal
into a constitutional right of children or of parents acting on their children’s
behalf.
123 By respecting conscientious dissent
within these principled limits, public schools can offer a valuable lesson in
democratic toleration, and also obtain the allegiance of some dissenting
minorities. Private schools provide
the option for exiting for intense dissenters as well as an incentive for public
schools to become more tolerant of internal dissent even when they are not
legally obligated to do so.
Separating Moral from Religious
Education and Limiting
Limits:
I’m skipping her discussions here.
Midcoast Senior College Website
Email: hauptli@fiu.edu
Last revised on 03/20/23