Reply to
The History of Education Quarterly's
Review of Market Education

by Andrew J. Coulson, January, 2000

The HEQ review appeared in vol. 39, no. 4,
and was written by Catherine Lugg

     Ms. Lugg's review of _Market Education_ is engaging, and her use of metaphor and hyperbole is effective on an emotional level. The reference to "magic mushroom sauce" is especially colorful. But rhetoric is not reason and metaphor is not evidence. In support of her sweeping condemnation of the book, she objects to just two of its 1,100 citations and takes issue with a single aspect of just one of the dozen historical case studies presented. Even if all three of these objections were valid they would amount to nit-picking rather than to the "egregious" and "systemic" flaws she claims them to be. As it happens, however, both of the sources that displease her are corroborated by primary evidence, and her charge against the case study is misguided.

     The first source to which Lugg objects is a harsh critique of the National Education Association by a Christian publishing house. For Lugg, whose current field of interest is the critical study of religious conservative education reformers, the publisher's name alone is apparently enough to dismiss the source as worthless. But a good historian is not one who ignores controversial sources, he is one who treats them with appropriate caution and uses them only to the extent that they can be substantiated by primary or reliable secondary sources. In keeping with that practice, I cited the book in question for a single verifiable statement of fact: that, during the mid 1930s, the NEA's Department of Superintendence drifted away from what are normally considered educational issues and became preoccupied with political and economic ones, such as the merits of central planning and collective ownership of the means of production. Here are a few quotes from the 13th annual report of the Department of Superintendence:

The earlier individualism of the competitive, laissez-faire system simply does not fit the corporate, closely integrated society of the power [read "mechanized"] economy. Until many of these hang-over ideas and ideals are cleared away we shall continue to be crippled in our attempts to create the necessary new social procedures and accompanying institutions (Childs, 1935, p. 121).

The time has come when our social philosophy must be made to correspond to the world in which we now live. This involves among other things the frank acceptance of the collective economy (Childs, 1935, p.122).

Community services such as health, education,... travel, and recreation could be indefinitely expanded to the advantage of all.... The state is the only agency which can adequately support and administer these services for the community as a whole (Childs, 1935, 130).

New methods of distributing social income will have to be devised…. Neither can the device of "free" competition in the open market be exclusively trusted to fix the remuneration of the individual (Childs, 1935, p. 131).

From the standpoint of magnitude of operations and numbers employed, many of our large privately owned corporations are, in fact, public undertakings. To place these huge enterprises under public ownership, thereby restoring ownership and control of the tools to those who actually work with them, need in no way lessen the amount of private initiative and personal liberty (Childs, 1935, p. 132).

It is no longer a question of economic planning and control versus free competition and private enterprise under laissez faire. For better or worse laissez faire is dead (Childs, 1935, p. 133).

The overwhelming bulk of the 1935 issue of the D.O.S.'s report is dedicated to similar discussions, and they are also prevalent in the 1937 and (to a lesser extent) 1936 issues. The anti-NEA source I cited was thus correct in its statements regarding the Department of Superintendence, and I gave it the citation credit it was due. Had I not consulted this controversial secondary source, I would not have thought to look at the Department's reports, and my research would have been the poorer for it.

As it happens, though, Lugg's discomfiture did cause me to notice an error in my citation of this material: I mistranscribed the last word of the Department's name as "Superintendents" rather than "Superintendence." I have notified the publisher of the error and expect it to be corrected in subsequent editions.

The second source to which Lugg objects is a book by Christopher Klicka, head of the Home Schooling Legal Defense Fund, a vigorous defender of home schooling and vociferous critic of the public school system. Mr. Klicka is also a conservative Christian. Once again, Ms. Lugg would have us ignore this source. She dismisses it not simply as useless, but implies that its use contaminates _Market Education_ with its purportedly noxious and hallucinogenic properties (see her reference to "magic mushroom sauce").

With whatever respect is due to Ms. Lugg, I do not like mushrooms, magic or otherwise, and I avoid including such fungi in my scholarly work as uniformly as I avoid including them in my diet. I do not cite works, any works, with wild abandon, but rather treat them with care and skepticism. The Klicka book is referenced in _Market Education_ because it was my initial source for a few simple, relevant, and verifiable facts. In particular, it drew my attention to the NEA's resolution on home schooling, and to a 1991 Michigan appellate court ruling--Clonalara v. State Board of Education, (496 N.W. 2d 66). It was correct in its presentation of these facts, as readers may confirm for themselves. The latest (and relatively unchanged) version of the relevant NEA resolution is available on the internet, and the Michigan ruling is equally a matter of public record.

But for Ms. Lugg, the use to which a source is put, the manner in which it is treated, and its verifiability in primary material do not seem to matter. For her, the name of the author or the publisher seems enough to judge its use. If historiographers were to adopt her methodology tomorrow, I'm sure our productivity would increase dramatically. Imagine how quickly our work could be put together if all we had to do was look at the publisher's or the author's name and then jerk our knees to the unreflective opinion of our choice? I suggest however, that producing heaping quantities of nonsense is not so valuable as producing a more modest amount of sense, and so I intend to stick to my own rather more meticulous and time-consuming practices.

In the other of Ms. Lugg's principal jibes, she objects to my decision not to discuss the role of private slave tutors in the education of 5th and early 4th century BCE Athens. Indeed, she rises to self-professed indignation at this purportedly grave omission when stating that one of my sources mentions these tutors. Here is what that source, Henri-Irenee Marrou (1965, p. 79-80) has to say on the matter over the period in question:

Mais ce mepris, la violence meme avec laquelle il s'exprime nous attestent que la chose [l'education scholaire] existait, que, par une technique educative appropriee, un nombre croissant de parvenus faisaient initier leurs fils aux techniques qui d'abord avaient ete le privilege, jalousement garde, des seules familles bien nees, des Eupatrides.

Pour une telle education, qui interessait un nombre toujours plus grand d'enfants, l'enseignement personnel d'un gouverneur ou d'un amant ne pouvait plus suffire. Une formation collective etait inevitable, et c'est, j'imagine, la pression de cette necessite sociale qui a fait naitre l'institution de l'ecole. L'education particuliere ne disparaitra pas du coup. mais une fois cree, l'education collective ne tarde pas a devenir la plus normalement repandue.

Which translates to

But these misgivings, even the violence with which they were expressed, attest that the thing [schooling] existed, that, by a suitable pedagogical approach, a growing number of the common people were initiating their sons in the disciplines that had formerly been the jealously guarded privilege of the few families of noble birth, the Eupatrides.

For this kind of education, which attracted an ever growing number of children, the personal instruction of a tutor or lover could no longer suffice. A communal preparation was inevitable, and it is, I imagine, the pressure of this social necessity that gave birth to the institution of schooling. One-on-one instruction did not vanish in an instant.... but once created, communal [school] education wasted no time in becoming the norm.

Personal tutors did exist in classical Athens but they were always restricted to a small segment of the citizenry, in contrast to the more widely enjoyed schooling that arose in the 5th century BCE. Their role, furthermore, declined still further in significance as the 5th century wore on and gave way to the 4th. Ms. Lugg's implication to the contrary is incorrect. And to forestall any objection to my omission of a discussion of Greek Love, this was practiced equally in Sparta and Athens, the two contemporary societies contrasted in this section, and is unlikely to have had a differential effect on them.

Upon her mistaken understanding of classical Athenian education, and upon little else, Ms. Lugg proffers a charge of presentism. Like most historiographers, my judgements are affected by the period in which I live. Like some, I make no effort to disguise this fact and openly share my judgements with the reader. I condemn, for instance, the slavery and widespread sexism of classical Athens, despite the fact that both of these failings were virtually universal to ancient societies. While I make no pretense of perfect objectivity, I do present the context of the periods and places I cover with breadth and deliberation. Consider this one example from the summation of the section on Athens (Coulson, 1999, p. 49):

Of course, Athenian social and political life was plagued at times by many of the same flaws that confront us today and that we have battled against in our own recent past: slavery, sexism, and belligerent foreign policy among them. But their ideals and the success with which they approached those ideals are truly astonishing when we remember that they were building their society virtually from scratch, whereas we have had two and a half thousand years of good and bad examples to learn from. It is hard to establish how much of their achievement can be attributed to their approach to schooling, but we can say this: Athenian parents had complete discretion over the content and manner of their children's education, and these children went on to create a culture responsible for some of the greatest advances in art, science, and human liberty in history.

Included in Ms. Lugg's expansive definition of presentism is the supposedly fallacious idea that the past can shed light on contemporary policy questions. Her blanket condemnation of this idea is unsubtle, unreflective, and unsupported. A cautious and systematic approach is required, of course, and I adopted such a strategy in the writing of _Market Education_. My approach was not to make direct comparisons between obviously very different times and places, but to look for consistent patterns that are exhibited across them. In this way, the diversity of the periods studied becomes a positive asset: any system of educational governance that consistently produced good (or bad) results across widely varying social and economic settings may have something very interesting to teach us. I consider results to be good when they are viewed as such by both the people of the time and place in question, as well as by the public of today. Establishing a rough idea of the public's goals at various points in history, or even today, is not trivial, but neither is it impossible. To this cross-national and pan-historical distillation process I add comparison studies of contemporary cultures (e.g. Athens and Sparta) and longitudinal studies of transitions between different educational systems (e.g. Rome, Islam, the United States).

Having spent five years in the research of this book I am convinced of the soundness and usefulness of this approach. Naturally, some may differ in their appraisals, and I am happy to debate my methods and their implementation with anyone who cares to offer an intelligent and informed commentary. I am still waiting.

Remarkably, Lugg is not content to restrict her splenetic remarks to the book she was charged to review, but feels the need to pile calumny on the character of its author. The extent to which Lugg believes herself privy to my authorial intent would cause fits among the most moderate deconstructionist. Based on nothing in particular, Lugg decides that I had a pre-existing agenda to destroy public schooling and sought out only those historical and modern examples which would support my supposed jihad. This presumptuousness would be outrageous even if it were not patently contradicted by the book's Table of Contents. Given that it is, it reaches into the realm of the surreal.

Consider some of the periods given the greatest attention in _Market Education_: 19th century England, 19th and 20th century United States, and late 20th century Japan. These are the very same periods to which apologists for state schooling draw attention! Japan is said to be a model of central educational planning, and state schools are supposed to have brought literacy and learning to the otherwise unlettered, uneducated masses in the UK and the US. I don't ignore these beliefs, I confront them and confute them with precisely the sort of hard evidence of which Ms. Lugg's review is so entirely devoid.

This having been the second amateurish and ham-handed "academic" review of _Market Education_, I am beginning to wonder if someone has dropped agent orange on the groves of academe. Is there no one capable of producing an intelligent and well-informed critique of _Market Education_, or even of producing a slip-shod critique that is at least free of childish sneering? Is academia bereft of competent scholars interested in broad-based international and historical studies of school governance structures? I don't doubt that I've made a few errors along the way, but I shan't discover them if my critics confine themselves to producing unthinking spitballs instead of reasoned reviews.

Andrew J. Coulson
Senior Research Associate, The Social Philosophy and Policy Center (BGSU)
Editor, http://www.schoolchoices.org/

References:

Childs, John L. "A Preface to a New American Philosophy of Education," in _Social Change and Education_, the 13th Yearbook of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association. Washington, D.C.: NEA, 1935.

Coulson, Andrew. _Market Education: The Unknown History_. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999.

Marrou, H. I. _Histoire De L'Education Dans L'Antiquite_. Paris: Editions Du Seuil, 1965.

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