Short Route to Chaos

Conscience, Community, and the Re-Constitution of American Schooling
Stephen Arons
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1997)
As Goals 2000 and the broader agenda of national standards gain increasing power over the purpose, content, and methods of schooling, we urgently need to consider the cultural and political consequences of a centralized, standardized education. In Short Route to Chaos, Stephen Arons, a legal scholar who has carefully studied the political and constitutional battles over schooling in the twentieth century, provides an indispensable basis for this much-needed critique. In this thorough, original reflection on the role of public education in a modern democracy, Arons demonstrates that political control of curriculum and teaching inevitably leads to social conflict, the erosion of diversity and community, and the destruction of individual rights of conscience. He argues that education, like religion, represents the ?sphere of intellect and spirit? that must be protected from majority rule.
Arons observes the plain fact that American society contains a wide diversity of cultural heritages and worldviews, religious and ethnic identities, and other communities of belief. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, Arons argues that this diversity is the very strength of American democracy, and that genuine common social purposes can only arise through voluntary cooperation and compromise. He asserts that freedom of conscience ? individuals? and families? right to associate in communities of meaning of their choice ? is vital for maintaining a democratic society; he specifically addresses the often-voiced fear that American culture will be ?balkanized? unless it enforces, through schooling, a common worldview: ?Compulsory assimilation may seem an effective route to community cohesion,? he writes, ?but history makes it clear that [as Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson put it in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943)] ?compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.?? Arons cites the increasingly fierce and frequent battles between the ?Education Empire? and the Christian right over control of textbooks, school boards, and local and state policy to demonstrate that public schooling no longer unites us as a society, but divides us bitterly.
As a civil libertarian, Arons argues that Christian fundamentalism, a culture ?which provides strength and spiritual guidance for millions of deeply religious Americans,? should not have to submit to an ?official knowledge? that is clearly antithetical to its beliefs; however, neither does this group have the right to impose its worldview on other communities. Arons calls for a public education funded by government in order to truly equalize educational opportunity, but controlled entirely by self-selected communities. To most defenders of public schooling as we now know it, this proposal may resemble the standard right-wing call for vouchers, but a reading of Arons?s powerful book makes it clear that his ?re-constitution of American schooling? is a thoughtful democratic response to the destruction of community in our present society ? a destruction accelerated by the ?culture wars? over public schooling.

source: https://great-ideas.org