Conscience and Community

     The recent intensification of the school wars has been especially disheartening because schooling is one of the few face-to-face, participatory institutions in the society available to create the compromises of behavior and belief necessary to sustain community life. Schooling is a crucible out of which community cohesion may be formed and strengthened, or melted down and made useless. When voluntary compromise and reorientation come out of these struggles, community cohesion is strengthened, as is the quality of education taking place within that community. But sometimes an individual's conscience or a minority's deeply held beliefs prevent compromise. If such dissenters are nevertheless forced to accept the majority's will, polarization increases, community cohesion is weakened, and another round of the zero-sum conflict predicted by the Supreme Court becomes inevitable. The difference between the two contradictory outcomes is determined by the conditions under which schools operate and are governed.'
     The importance of public schooling as an arena for generating a spirit of community essential in an individualist democracy has been powerfully stated by Benjamin Barber in An Aristocracy of Everyone:

     While society can cajole and hint and guide and suggest, the greater part of what transpires in the minds and hearts of the young is beyond it. This makes formal schooling, however inadequate, our sole public resource: the only place where, as a collective, self-conscious public pursuing common goods, we try to shape our children to live in a democratic world. Can we afford to privatize the only public institutions we possess?

     We do need these public institutions to serve these public purposes. We need them desperately. But suppose that public schooling has been structured and governed in a way that makes attaining these public purposes harder rather than easier, and that Goals 2000 exaggerates this problem still further. Suppose that Barber's goal of pursuing the common good is the right one, especially in a culturally diverse and pluralistic society; but suppose that our national experience tells us that we cannot attain the common good unless we deny government at every level the power to use public schooling to manipulate private conscience.
     Suppose further that unless everyone is guaranteed freedom of choice in regard to the most fundamental aspects of schooling, the pubic school will continue to be more a source of conflict than a means to create community. And suppose that real community building must be voluntary-that coercion yields only conformity, disaffection, or at its most extreme, rebellion. Would we not then have to revise Barber's question so that it became, "Can we afford to politicize the truly private aspects of education-to give governments control over the development of spirit and intellect-if we expect to preserve the only public institutions we possess?"
     The vast inequalities that characterize American public education further aggravate the difficulty of preserving common schools as the primary public institutions available for enhancing the sense of community. By failing to end inequality of educational opportunity, we have victimized the large number of children who live in poverty as well as the current racial and ethnic minorities who, within two generations, will constitute a majority of Americans.
     To make matters worse, the current structure of schooling-which will be still further centralized as Goals 2000 takes hold in the states virtually limits the constitutionally protected right of school choice to the relatively affluent. Public schooling thus undermines and ignores the voluntary nature of community-building and leaves in place for most Americans only the corrosive effect that coercion has on the willingness of a diverse people to make the difficult compromises necessary to build a common life.
     So although we may wish to use public schooling to define and sustain community, we may actually be creating a system of schools so overloaded with unnecessary conflict that it weakens both community and education. What the school wars tell us is that somehow we have been transforming a vital instrument for creating cohesion into a source of division and hostility; that there is something built into the structure of public schooling that undermines one of its most important functions.
     The apparently endless school wars are also disheartening because among their most prominent casualties has been freedom of conscience in education-the individual liberty to follow an internal moral compass in setting a course for a meaningful and fulfilling life. As so many of the conflicts over the content of public schools demonstrate, a school system dominated by political majorities, operated by governmental bureaucracies, and vastly unequal in resources and in freedom of choice, cannot help being hostile to individual conscience.
     The politicization of schooling that America has experienced pushes conscience to the margin. It teaches students, teachers, and communities the corrosive lesson that obedience to power is more important than being true to oneself. It demands that any family committed to acting on conscience for one child's schooling convince the majority of an entire school district to apply the same beliefs to all children. In the school wars tolerance is the exception, conformity is the rule, and conscience is usually dismissed as an administrative inconvenience, an attempt at polarizing the school, or a luxury unnecessary in the lives of common persons.
     A school conflict may begin as an act of individual conscience, but it often becomes an ideological crusade. As a result, simple-minded slogans of intolerance and distrust make reasoned discourse difficult and threaten to crowd out the reflection and self-knowledge on which the survival of individual conscience depends. As these ideological battles heat up, some combatants in the school wars-sensing the ease with which public schooling can be politicized-exploit claims of conscience in an attempt to make whole school systems over in their own image. Others, realizing that it is power blocs and not individuals who are accommodated, join the crusade out of self-defense.
     Ironically, families who insist on acting on their own deep beliefs in matters of schooling are frequently belittled, resisted as self-centered trouble makers, or dismissed as ideologically driven power grabbers. Attempts by teachers or students to deal with issues of character and conscience in school are often cut down in a crossfire of competing demands, if they are not first drowned in a sea of vague platitudes. Almost everyone understands the message implicit in a politically manipulated, bureaucratically operated, and grossly unequal system of schools-that most dissenters have no escape from the majority, and that private conscience is out of place in public schooling. Under Goals 2000, the cycle of turning individual acts of conscience into unnecessary, destructive, full-scale, ideological school wars will be magnified and extended.
     Conscience may seem a mysterious, indefinable, and overly broad term to use in connection with school conflict. After all, conscience has been referred to as the rule of divine power, as an innate and universal sense of right and wrong, and as the foundation of upright character in the individual. It has been understood as inherited from culture, derived from individual experience, or produced when the idiosyncratic morals of individual parents are internalized in the superegos of their children. In a world characterized at once by cultural relativism and moral absolutism, there have been arguments about whether conscience is subjective, universal, or culturally specific, about whether conscience is necessarily related to religious belief or can be an integral part of the lives of non-religious persons and secular societies. As institutions-including schooling-become more impersonal, bureaucratic, and inflexible, the contest between power and conscience has included disagreement over whether conscience is the ultimate expression of selfishness, the motive for selfless sacrifice, or an invitation to anarchy.
     This book makes no attempt to sort out and discriminate among different understandings of conscience., It does note, however, that much of what happens in school touches upon the development and expression of conscience, that many people involved in school conflicts see their concerns as rooted in conscience, and that in schooling freedom of conscience, however defined, is an American birthright. This book suggests that in public schooling as in other realms of life, Thomas More's prescription holds true. Conscience is that small but vital part of the self that ought to remain beyond the reach of any government.
     In spite of all the debates, disagreements, and struggles that have surrounded the exercise of conscience, the centrality of conscience to the structure of a democratic society is also undeniable: democracy in America is based upon deeply held beliefs about the role of individual conscience in a system of self-government. The freedom of individual intellect and spirit at the core of conscience is central to achieving a just consent of the governed. it is the cornerstone of a political system based on popular sovereignty. it secures the sanctity of the individual person against the power of the state. It is the most reliable protection against majority rule becoming a tyranny of the majority. And it is an essential condition for sustaining community life in a constitutional democracy.
     Repetitive and usually unnecessary conflict over issues of conscience in schooling has weakened public education and threatens to destroy it altogether. If public education is to be preserved, the level of conflict over conscience must be reduced; and what conflict remains must take place under conditions designed to foster compromise and resolution rather than divisiveness and ideological warfare. if public education is to be worthy of being preserved, neither our ability to redefine and maintain our diverse communities, nor our commitment to preserve the freedom of conscience essential to meaningful individual lives in these communities, can be sacrificed on the altar of government-driven educational reform.

     A central purpose of this book is to expose the dissonance between the principles of constitutional democracy and the structure of American schooling. This dissonance has been evident and increasingly destructive under the regime of local control. It will be made still more destructive under Goals 2000, which, by trivializing conscience and undermining community, sets the nation on a short route to chaos.
     I conclude that another path and a different destination for school reform must be found. This destination-more appropriate for a pluralistic society-recognizes that the most valuable education is based upon goals generated not by governments, but by individual learners and teachers and by the families and communities of which they are a part. This alternative path is already partly mapped out. its signposts are the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy which inform our most valued liberties and protect the process of democratic self-government from excessive concentrations of power.
     The early tone of this book may seem harsh, as befits a wake-up call for what a friend and colleague has called the "moral general audience." But in the end this is a search for common ground and common sense-. It is undertaken with respect for those whose personal and professional labor is aimed at improving schooling at any level. But it is also undertaken with an understanding of how deeply schooling conflicts have polarized an already divided, troubled, and angry public. it tries to take into account how many voices are calling for abandoning a national commitment to children, for giving up on the ideal of universal public education, and for ignoring the long-term needs of a democracy based on the equal moral worth of all persons.
     The usefulness of trying to identify common ground lies only in its potential for redirecting the public debate over schooling. There is no prepackaged school reform program or trendy political platform here. There is, however, a suggestion that the common sense of a diverse nation is still capable of creating an education system that benefits all Americans,
     In writing this book I have tried to keep in mind President George Washington's admonition that "the basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and alter their constitutions of government." I take it that this right extends to the constitution of public schooling, an institution on which we annually spend in excess of a quarter of a trillion dollars. it is therefore my intention to suggest how the American people themselves-not limited by the current views of their political representatives, education experts, and constitutional courts, and quite apart from "politics as usual"-may achieve a reconstitution 10 of schooling adequate to strengthen both conscience and community in public education.
     Chapter 1, "Education Headline News," sketches several of the local, state, and national conflicts over public schooling that grabbed headlines during 1993 and 1994, while Congress was considering and adopting Goals 2000, That was a time when the lessons taught by repetitive school conflicts should have had an impact on policymakers. The brief retelling of these stories is meant to anchor the reader in the complex mix of issues of conscience and community that fuels the school wars. I do not draw specific lessons from specific stories, but rather try to find, later in the book, more general understandings of the nature and significance of the many school conflicts that have bedeviled public schooling historically and that are likely to increase as Goals 2000 takes hold in the states.
     The headlines and the substance of these stories paint an unpleasant picture, one that is unflattering to most of the combatants as well as to the school structure that seems to make such continuing conflict inevitable. This is part of the message-that ideological and politicized conflict over the content of schooling brings out the worst in us, just as it undermines our most fundamental freedoms and one of our most important institutions.
     But this is not a complete picture. Most of the individual families teachers, and other educators involved in school conflicts come to them with the best intentions and the most sincerely held beliefs. They seek to educate the children in their charge and to play by the rules of public schools. Yet they and their goals are transformed, distorted, and made destructive by school systems that require majority approval for the exercise of individual freedoms.
     A family's heritage, hopes, and expectations as well as its most basic beliefs and most tentative explorations are inevitably affected by the socialization process that takes place in every school. It has been said that "education in its fullest sense is inescapably a moral enterprise." II And so it is. Every parent and every teacher knows by heart that there is more to schooling than multiplication tables, social studies homework, standardized science tests, and the acquisition of job skills. There is child rearing, with all the intensely personal issues of belief that inform it. When these matters of individual conscience and moral concern become the involuntary stuff of government-centered politics, the results can be catastrophic.
     There are, then, two accurate and interrelated pictures that can be painted of school conflict. One, seen from the inside, shows dissenting families, hard-working teachers, and individual schools struggling honorably and well to preserve or create their own vision of "the moral enterprise" of schooling. A second sees the conflicts from the outside and shows how even the most honorable purposes can be twisted, exploited, and turned into cannon fodder for school wars whose aims have more to do with political power and cultural sway than with quality education and individual aspirations.
     I have written elsewhere, and I hope empathically, about the inside view of school conflict. In Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling, I sought to display school conflict as seen by dissenting families, by home schoolers, teachers, religious and independent schools, and minority communities. I spent many hours with these people and came to view them as representing the best hope for reinvigorating individual liberty and community responsibility in education. I still believe that to be true. The evidence still supports that belief. But I also believe that the evidence for an unflattering, unpleasant, outside view of school conflict-and of its broad social destructiveness-is real. It is that view on which I focus here.
     There is therefore something to offend almost everyone in chapter 1. Those who populated Compelling Belief are still present, but in the background, their deepest educational concerns overwhelmed by the increasing politicization of schooling. In the foreground are the many organizations and self-styled leaders who have been exploiting school conflict and the weaknesses in school structure. There are also the reluctant servants of a hidebound establishment protecting the status quo for its own purposes, and the prolif crating experts and policy wonks whose good intentions help pave the road to chaos.
     Chapter 2, "School Wars: The Education Empire Strikes Back," focuses on two of the most powerful combatants in the school wars, the Education Empire and the Christian Right. It attempts to show some of the forces and self-interest that led to the adoption of Goals 2000, and some of the conflict and opportunism that have been unleashed by this re-constitution of American schooling. Chapter 2 completes the picture of American schooling's undermining itself and tearing communities apart in an attempt to use the power of government to establish an official knowledge and an official morality for all children. It is an ugly and painful picture of what our public schools are becoming. But it is one we ignore at our own peril.
     Chapter 3 introduces the content and structure of the Goals 2000 legislation, the ultimate escalation of the school wars. The detail of how this legislation is structured is provided in spite of the fact that the law may be further amended or even repealed. This is done for three reasons: First, Goals 2000 is in place and has already yielded a Set of proposed national content standards, numerous organizations with a stake in establishing these standards, and the agreement of at least forty-six of fifty states to participate in the Goals 2000 re-constitution of schooling. There is enormous momentum here.
     Second, Goals 2000 is a model, a template for each state's school reform efforts. It is a well-developed example of how governments at any level can gain, and are gaining, control of virtually every aspect of education without regard to individual learners, teachers, families, and communities. Were the federal law to be repealed tomorrow, so much has already been committed to this comprehensive, government-centered model of schooling that the repeal would have very little effect in the states.
     Third, Goals 2000 is the result, as well as the cause, of a fundamental shift in thinking about the nature of schooling in the United States. To understand the consequences of increasing the power of government over the education of individuals, the details of the current form of this wrongheaded thinking need to be understood. Goals 2000 stands for something more destructive than it is by itself. To understand the underlying problem it is necessary to analyze its latest legislative manifestation.
     Chapter 4, "Renouncing Our Constitutional Heritage," uses basic principles of constitutional democracy in the United States to analyze Goals 2000. These broad principles are evoked by discussing one of the Supreme Court's most significant and eloquent school decisions, West Virginia v. Barnette. The intent is not to suggest that Goals 2000 violates the Constitution or to make a lawyer's argument that litigation could be used to correct any of the statute's myriad flaws. But Barnette is a powerful and concise constitutional discussion of the relationship among public schooling, private conscience, and the importance of community cohesion. Retelling that story helps to make constitutional thinking, as it applies to schooling at least, accessible to everyone. And using law in this way helps author as well as reader to adhere to the old adage, "law is too important to be left to lawyers."
     Chapter 5, "The Legacy of Local Control," also uses the stories of major Supreme Court cases to help make constitutional principles a part of the public discourse about schooling. And like chapter 4, chapter 5 does not offer a discussion of the niceties of current constitutional law or suggest that new legal theories or more enlightened court decisions could make public schooling consistent with the principles of constitutional democracy. Quite the contrary. By the end of chapter 5 it begins to appear that the Constitution as presently written is incapable of dealing effectively with the problems of conscience and community inherent in a school system run by governments at any level.
     The most vocal and well-organized opposition to Goals 2000 has thus far come from the advocates of local control of schooling. But it is local control that has given us our current moribund public school system. Far from being a constructive alternative to Goals 2000, local control of schooling has been responsible for the some of the worst failures of public schooling-from racial segregation and massive resource inequalities to restrictions on the freedom of inquiry, the professionalism of teachers, and the liberty of families.
     The debate between local control and Goals 2000, then, is like an argument about whether it is better to stand on the frying pan or in the fire. One alternative may be marginally better than the other, but both are unbearable for the same reason. To escape this pointless debate and pursue a more productive approach, it is necessary to understand what Goals 2000 and local control have in common. Chapter 5 suggests that although Goals 2000 intensifies many of the problems and conflicts in public schooling, it makes no sense whatsoever to respond to Goals 2000 by urging a return to local control.
     Chapter 6, "Conscience and Community," argues that the freedom of individual conscience and the importance of building cohesive communities are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. Conventional wisdom and conventional politics have made these two principles into opponents, as if we could have one but not the other. But the dichotomy is artificial; and we must have both, or we shall have neither. Alexis de Tocqueville's extraordinary book, Democracy in America, provides guidance in reaching this conclusion.
     The mutual dependence of conscience and community is a reality in schooling as it is elsewhere. Once this principle is considered, it becomes possible to imagine conditions under which schooling could enhance both conscience and community. Chapter 6 discusses these conditions along with their origin in the principles of constitutional democracy.
     In Chapter 7, the simultaneous pursuit of conscience and community becomes the basis for conceiving a "Re-Constitution of American Schooling" to replace that adopted in Goals 2000, it is argued that ordinary citizens have the ability and the right to seize this constitutional moment in American education; that it is an opportunity to secure, equally and for everyone, both the freedom of conscience and the benefits of community in public education; that it is still possible to save public education from public schooling.