Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we are beginning the second in a three-part series of episodes that in one way or another is about the current controversy over education in the United States. And today, we explicitly want to talk about public education. What it is, what it has been, and what the controversies that are going on today say about the state of education now, and what they suggest about broader ideals and goals and agendas that people might have in mind as they’re advancing various ideas or asserting various ideas from one side or another. And we’ve seen a lot of discussion certainly, and it appears to be on an upswing at the moment, of books that should be banned, we talked about that last week, of installing cameras in classrooms so that parents and others can see what’s being said, of giving parents more power to object to or confirm what actually is being taught in classrooms.

Public education is very much up for debate. And as we’re going to be talking today about, Heather, you and I, in a sense, it has always been controversial because it has always been recognized as being important, as being significant, and as being politically significant and shaping of what people understand the United States to be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I confess I’m sitting here thinking about teachers and what a hard time this is to teach with the pandemic, and with the sudden being on the front lines of a cultural and a political battleground for which they are not equipped and not trained, and they’re bearing the brunt of so much right now. Also, I think probably as a teacher, and I suspect you would say the same thing, I’d love to indoctrinate my students, but basically just getting them to do the homework is almost above my pay grade. But anyway, the obvious place it seems to me to start is who cares. I mean, where does the idea of public education come from? And I’m coming from a place, by the way, where I early on learned… Let’s see if you know this. In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Do you know what that is?

Joanne Freeman:

I have heard it before, but I do not know what it is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s one of the colonial hornbooks, one of the Puritan hornbooks, the books that were literally… There was a sheet of paper, I think, and it was covered with a very thin layer of horn, so you could see through it. And the letter A, you were supposed to learn letter A from “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” I never saw the page for B, but I did see the page for A when I was a kid, and I thought it was totally cool. But why did your founder guys decide that we needed to have public education?

Joanne Freeman:

So from the very beginning, from even before the Constitution is in effect, even during the revolution when people were thinking about a political revolution, which in some ways was going to have a social component, they assumed that there was going to have to be some kind of an educational revolution as well. Because in whatever government was going to take effect… And what Americans certainly knew is that they did not want to be part of a monarchy anymore. In a monarchy, education, certainly for the citizenry, had a limited significance. But in any kind of a government with a democratic base, so in a republic, a democratic republic, any kind of government where the people or public opinion rules, it means that the public really needs to be educated so that they can understand what the government should or shouldn’t be doing, what threats and risks and dangers to the government may look like, so that they understand their rights and their power.

So education becomes kind of a political tool that’s really essential for a small-R republican citizen to have in their tool belt. And so for that reason, at a very early point, you get a variety of different founding folk, in letters to each other, in letters to observers from overseas, saying again and again and again, “What’s important right now is education. We need to really think about education, because without the proper education, our entire experiment is going to fail.” So for example, John Adams always has a way… He kind of has these punchy statements in which if you’re looking for someone to say something that just bangs the nail on the head and says what you want someone to say, it’s usually John Adams. So he offers in 1785, writing to a colleague in England… He says why he thinks education is so particularly important in the new American nation.

He says that, “The people,” the American people, “must unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power. The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves. They must be taught to reverence themselves instead of adoring their servants, their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” So in his mind, public education is vitally important because the people need to understand they are the source of power, and they need to recognize the significance of their role, and they need to be prepared to carry out that role. So that’s saying it pretty plainly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This strikes me as such an incredibly important point, because there is fundamentally, it seems to me, at the heart of democracy a real question: How do you move a group of people in a productive direction? And you really can’t do it unless you have education. The idea of education being linked to our democracy from the very start makes utter sense. If you’re in a monarchy and you’re just going to have to do what you’re told, then you don’t really need an education, except perhaps to the degree that you need it to do whatever employment you have to do, or to worship in whatever way you’re being instructed to worship.

But if you have to come up with the ideas yourself, then you better have a pretty good idea of how the world works, and the way you get that is through education. And not necessarily in education based in great thoughts or great principles, but in literally how things work, how governmental systems work, but also how calculus works, for example. I know is a very big thing by the 1840s, because you couldn’t run a railroad line unless you had somebody who understood math. So that becomes… In order to function, in order to be part of this upwardly and quickly moving society, you had to have access to mathematics.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, the basics. I mean, there’s a reason why reading and writing and arithmetic, the three Rs… Those all are in and of themselves vitally important in just making your way in the world. And that’s certainly from the very beginning. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this some today. There’s always been an ongoing debate about what education is for, and whether it should be… In this early period, they’re thinking about the citizenship component of it and what people need to know, but over time, there’s debate, as there remains today, about whether education should be about some form of training, or should it be looking ahead to college, or should it be giving people a sense of humanity and the humanities, or should it be about civic education, or should it be about bringing diverse peoples together. I mean, we can talk a lot about the many different things that an education can and should do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. So I can’t even believe I’m doing this, but I would guess that your founder folk… Which, by the way, always makes me think of, I don’t know, a whole bunch of little frogs sitting around a pond like little froggy folk. But your founder folk are emphasizing primarily the idea of education as the way to learn how to be a citizen. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I have a feeling that there’s some guy in Virginia who’s probably-

Joanne Freeman:

I knew that as soon as I thought about the expression on your face. You were like-

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I hate to do it, but doesn’t he think about this stuff a lot?

Joanne Freeman:

He does.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s kind of like the biggest frog sitting around the pond, isn’t he?

Joanne Freeman:

He’s the biggest frog of all, yes. And I can’t believe I just said that, so thank you, Heather, for leading me into saying that Thomas Jefferson is the biggest frog around the pond. But no, he thought about this a lot. He did. And in part because to him, he was always someone who favored more localized control rather than broad national or federal control. And education was one of those things that could operate on a local level, could bring people together locally, could get them to foster a sense of community in addition to a sense of their rights as a citizen, and more important than that, enable them as citizens to recognize threats. So he actually, in a very direct way, says something right along the lines of what you’re suggesting in 1786.

He says, “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code…” So Virginia is at this point processing what it does or doesn’t want to do about a whole bunch of things, including education. He says, “I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.” And as Jefferson, he’s a person who loves to devise these plans and systems and pyramids and schemes, so he spends huge chunks of his life coming up with a variety of different bills and plans to put into effect in Virginia who should be educated, when they should be educated, how the system should work, breaking Virginia down into little wards. And in each ward, there’d be a school. He was very focused not just on education, but on actually pragmatically putting it into effect.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whom does Mr. Jefferson exclude from this concept?

Joanne Freeman:

Ah. Well, so Jefferson certainly is largely thinking of initially White men, White boys. He makes it clear that he’s being kind of radical in his thinking, because he thinks not just wealthy White boys, but every White boy should be entitled to a certain amount of education. In his case, I think he says three years of education everyone should get. And then to use his rather interesting way of putting it, after those three years, then we can rake through the rubbage and find the kids, the poorer kids, who then deserve to be lifted up and get a better education

Heather Cox Richardson:

Rake through the rubbage.

Joanne Freeman:

That is indeed what he said, rubbish. Rake through rubbish.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Rake through the rubbish.

Joanne Freeman:

Which gives you all sides of Jefferson there, in one statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it also says a lot about the political system, and it says a lot about who’s welcome in it, and it says a lot about the fact that his vision of education does seem to be tied to suffrage or to voting in the sense that we’re supposed to let all the White guys do it, and maybe not so much the others. Except of course, to some degree, people of color and girls were educated so that they would be able to read their Bibles. And they would be sure not to be led astray by Satan, because they weren’t able to read the Bible well enough.

Joanne Freeman:

The new republic, though, changes things for White girls as well, whereas normally you’re right. It would’ve been assumed that men are the ones who really need to be educated. We need to worry about the education of boys. In a republic, given that the citizenry is so important and that you have to have the right kind of citizen to have a republic that survives since the public has the power, women suddenly became very politically important as educators, because they were the ones raising future republican citizens. So women’s education actually, in the founding era, becomes much more important to many people as well, because it’s seen as being a vital part of the creation of citizens. There’s a particular historian who created this idea which she dubbed republican motherhood. And again, republican small R, not the party. But the idea being that as a good republican, your job is to create and educate your kids so that they will grow into their role and duties as a citizen.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In part so that they don’t continue to claim the rights of a full citizen. You can be a republican mother, rather than being a full citizen on your own hook. But the reason that I was curious about that was because I think it really matters that after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, when Nat Turner, who is an enslaved Black American in Virginia… He leads about 70 of his neighbors, who are both enslaved and free African Americans. He leads them in a rebellion in order to try and wake up his White neighbors to the brutality of slave holding and to the dangers that it might prevent for their own safety.

After he does that, he and his people travel home to home, and they end up killing about 60 of the White men, women, and children encounter. The reaction on the part of Virginia is to pass a series of laws. First of all, their first reaction is an enormous backlash that kills at least 200 Black Virginians, but then they begin to pass laws making it a crime to educate an enslaved American. So after 1830, the laws of the American south really differentiate based on racial grounds over who can get an education, which if you take at the next step, is a fight over who actually gets to be a citizen, who actually gets to have the tools to be a citizen.

Joanne Freeman:

No, absolutely. And if you look at census record to see who is or isn’t getting educated in various periods, if you look in the period just before the Civil War, you see that generally speaking, let’s say 1850, about 56% of all White children between the ages of 5 and 19 were being schooled. In the entirety of the south, 2% of Black children between 5 and 19 were being schooled.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Was your first statistic in the south, or was it the country in general?

Joanne Freeman:

No, the country in general.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because also, the northern schools are much more active than the southern schools, are they not?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes, yes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Certainly in what they teach.

Joanne Freeman:

And in teaching Black children as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I know that the teaching of arithmetic is a really big deal in the north and much less so in the south because of that whole railroad issue. And that’s going to make a huge difference during the Civil War, because the southern Confederates don’t really know how to use artillery very well, because they don’t have the mathematical background of so many of the northerners, and they don’t have the same engineering background either. Which I just find absolutely fascinating, that so much comes down to “Did you do your math homework” in that war.

Joanne Freeman:

That just seems like a handy thing to be able to toss off at your kids at some point. Look what happens when you don’t do your math.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Your math, that’s right. But that’s actually one of the things that by the time that you get to the 1850s, that Lincoln is pushing really hard for, the idea of making sure that there is universal education for young men. I mean, he’s not really talking about women at that time, but he’s saying that the way that you preserve democracy is to make sure that everybody can have an education. And this is, he says, how you make sure that you keep a democracy healthy. He says that, “An educated community,” and this is a quote from him, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” And this obviously was a big part of the push of the Republicans during the Civil War, was to establish public colleges. But even with the idea of establishing public schools, as soon as the war was over in 1866, the Republican Party does try to set up public schools throughout the American south and the border states for both Black children and White children based on illiteracy rates.

And that’s one of the pieces of the expanded Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866 that virtually nobody even knows was in there. Because when Andrew Johnson, who’s the president of the time, vetoes that bill, it gets stripped out of the re-passed bill, and so we lose in 1866 that moment when we might have had universal education in the south and in the border states. And to me, that’s one of those great lost opportunities in American history, and Johnson does it very deliberately. He uses the language in his veto message. He says, “Well, we don’t want to have the federal government taking over these state duties,” but he’s also doing it because he knows how enormously popular education is. And if the Republican Party does in fact provide education for children in the south and in the border states, the Democrats like him will never get elected again.

And we lose that moment, that vision, that early democratic vision of a country that values education based on its ability to pull people behind democracy and to evaluate facts and to make good decisions. We get this very different period coming out of the Civil War than we had, I think, up to it, in part because of that really unfortunate veto.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s interesting, because it’s the flip side in the 1780s when the new United States is sort of laying groundwork for things like new states. One of the things that the country does on a federal level is pass ordinances that basically say if you want to be a new state, you to agree to set aside a portion of land to support a public school. So that’s written into the idea. If you want to be a state, you basically are going to have to do something to suggest and promote and create public schooling. So there you have the government weighing in at this early period to set that in motion, and now you’re showing next period in time when the federal government comes out of the Civil War and is making a bunch of new assertions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and one of the things that you can see after 1870 is an extraordinary growth of public high schools in the country, in part because of what you’re saying, and in part, I think, because the nature of education changes in that period, although there is still very much a strand of being a good citizen. And I think we should probably break down what that means in the late 19th century, and who is affected by it. There is also increasingly the sense in that post-war period of organization, and of new professions, and of the idea of higher education, and the idea of sort of bars to entry to law school, for example, or medical school, or the teaching profession, or all the different ways in which it appears you need an education after 1870.

There’s also, it seems, an increasing sense that an education is partly for a set of skills that are going to get you a job. It’s not just about, “You need to be a good citizen.” In order to survive in this industrial post-Civil War world, you need to have a set of skills. And it’s a really interesting moment when you suddenly have high schools mattering for whether or not you can become a typist, or can become any one of the new pink-collar or white-collar jobs that are suddenly thick on the ground after the Civil War.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in a sense, giving students the tools and the rights to make themselves in a way, to create lives for themselves.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, but it changes, don’t you think, what it means to be a citizen when all of a sudden you need to have that education not because you’re going to go think great thoughts around the frog pond, but because you need… I’m trying to turn this into a little metaphor about a hoppy frog too. But you need a set of skills in order to participate in that new industrial economy. So one of the amazing statistics is that in 1870, there were only 500 public high schools in the United States, and there were only about 50,000 people enrolled in them. By 1900, there were 6,000 public high schools in the nation, and the nation’s illiteracy rate was cut in half during that same period. Really dramatically changing demographic in that 30-year period.

Joanne Freeman:

And expectations attached to that. If that is changing that dramatically, there’s going to be a comparable assumption about what it is normal and proper for young people to be, and how educated they should be. So that kind of change suggests there’s a dramatic change in really what is the norm and what is expected and what you’re supposed to be doing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think the students also developed their own culture in a way that they did not have before that. There’s much more of a sense of a youth culture developing in that period. There’s more money, there’s more leisure time, and there’s more a sense that that’s a stage that people go through, the stage at which you’re in education. And when you and I were talking about this, one of the things that I thought was absolutely fascinating was thinking about when we get grades in schools, instead of simply learning your material and being sufficient to being able to read or being able to figure to whatever you need to. And we discovered that we get grading, the idea of actually giving people grades on how they perform in school, during the late 19th, early 20th century, when we have teachers saying, “Well, this is how well you did versus how somebody else did.” And from the very beginning, it’s really clear that those are very subjective, the grades that people get.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting in comparison is in schools, and particularly colleges, in early America, when you listed, for example, a particular class of students, the freshman class or the sophomore class, you didn’t list them alphabetically, you listed them according to their social ranking. That was how you ranked students, was as to who they were. That was how students were ordered and listed. Now that said, you had valedictorians and people who did really well, and had the honor during graduation of standing up and giving a speech. So I’m not saying that performance didn’t matter, but I am saying that in sorting through students, their social status, their ranking played a big role, and that’s something that is not subjective in a sense at all. What you’re talking about in that way is highly subjective, but it allows at least for the possibility of merit. For more Cafe history content, check out Time Machine, a weekly column by our editorial producer David Kurlander, inspired by each Now & Then episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You can receive the Time Machine articles through the free Cafe Brief email. Sign up at cafe.com/brief.

Joanne Freeman:

So we’ve talked about how in some ways, education prepares students to be good citizens. We’re talking about another thing that education could do is prepare people to have jobs, to make livings for themselves, or to make something of themselves. There’s another component we really haven’t spoken about yet, and that is education as a way to make Americans American, as a reforming tool, as a way of particularly dealing with people who enter America, like immigrants, and in one way or another using education as a way to foster or shape or encourage or discourage immigrants. And that’s certainly throughout American history also something that some people have used education to do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s also interesting, the degree to which on the one hand reformers, which quite literally are reforming people… On the one hand they’re doing so because they’re trying to encourage them to assimilate and to be part of this dynamic society. On the other hand, they’re stripping from them a great deal of who they are.

Joanne Freeman:

And in that sense, sort of forging an American culture by stripping some diversity away.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of my favorite stories about this is Anzia Yezierska, who’s a phenomenal novelist who was born in the Russian-Polish village [Płońsk 00:24:51], which is near Warsaw, between 1880 and 1885. And she came to the US with her family in the early 1890s. They had that now stereotypical immigrant experience, where they lived in a cramped tenement apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And she went to elementary school for just two years before she had to go to work and work in domestic jobs and in factory jobs, and she was so determined to receive a higher education that she actually invented a high school background for her to be able to enter into Columbia University. And she went to the teacher’s college on a scholarship from 1901 to 1905, and then she went on to teach school for herself. She believed that education was that incredibly important.

And by 1913, she has begun writing fiction and goes on to write in 1925 the Bread Givers, which is a really moving novel about an immigrant daughter struggling against her father to define what it means to be a Jewish woman in her era. And she writes a poem in 1923 where she discusses what it means to understand that you’re a smart woman and yet have no outlet for doing anything about that, for learning. She says, “Here I was with so much richness in me, but my mind was not wanted without the language. And my body, unskilled, untrained, was not even wanted in the factory. Only one of two chances was left open to me: the kitchen, or minding babies.” And I love that, because it’s so much like so many of the people from that time, including Zitkala-Sa, who was a Yankton Dakota, who is, again, an enormously, enormously talented young woman. She’s born in 1876.

And she is sent to a reservation boarding school, which on the one hand, as I say, treats her incredibly cruelly. She gets her hair cut. And Zitkala-Sa is an incredibly talented musician and writer. And she’s very aware as she gets older that the very pain that she endured at that boarding school, the things that were taken away from her to make her able to assimilate, were the same things that gave her the words to articulate her individuality. So the duality of those two women, of Yezierska and of Zitkala-Sa, who both recognized the incredible importance for their voices of an education. And yet, that that ability was bought at a price. I just find it such a wonderful image of what education meant for those in the late 19th century who might otherwise not have had an education in, again, the founding period, for example, or perhaps would’ve had a very different education by the time we get into the late 20th century.

Joanne Freeman:

Both of those stories are quite moving, because both of those women, education became a doorway. So it became kind of a goal that would enable them to go beyond where they thought they could go, and then the tool that they used to go there. So it opened a door, and then enabled them to walk through it. And the fact that those two women had that kind of motivation and the push to push themselves in that direction on their own is really remarkable. A third woman that sort of fits into that same period is Jane Adams, who is from a very different circumstance, but also in that same moment is looking at education and trying to envision what it can do that isn’t necessarily being done yet. And for her, what I love about among the many things that Jane Adams does…

So she’s born in 1860 in a farming town. Unlike these other stories, she graduates from a seminary, a female seminary. She’s the valedictorian of this small class, a class of 17. She ultimately decides to go into social work, and she helps to create Hull House in Chicago, which is supposed to be providing a bunch of different kinds of services to the impoverished people of Chicago. So a kindergarten, and a daycare for working mothers, English language classes, and job training, and other such things. But one of the things that she pinpoints as being important and which, again, is something you don’t necessarily expect but in its own way is moving, is that she thinks all of those things are vitally important in the role of education, but so is play. She highlights the fact that it’s important for children to understand their ability to play, and the fact that play is a part of life, that education needs art and play as part of the human experience.

And I like her wording, too. She says, “This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up the sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected streams.” So she’s talking about how the spirit of play is there. You can either understand that it’s there and incorporate it into the process of teaching students how to have a life, or you can not include it, in which case it’s going to find a way out anyway, but you’ll be sorry at the ways in which it does. The fact that that is one of the avenues that she takes in understanding the importance of education, it’s not one that you would expect, but it’s a really striking one.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is. And honestly… I mean, we didn’t actually plan this, but it’s a very good segue into what happens after World War II. Because of course after World War II, with the explosion of the population with the baby boom, and with the GI Bill bringing so many people into the… Especially White men, but into the middle class, there is this sense that education is for everybody, and education is in fact going to do that. Not simply train people for a job, for the sort of gray job of the 1920s that shows up in so many novels of the period, but rather, people are going to be able to have this wonderful new moment in a new world where everybody has an education and manages to participate in a global move towards self-determination.

That whole image of education as being to create citizens changes really dramatically after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, when a number of White parents and White lawmakers launched what they call massive resistance to integration. They closed public schools in some places, and in other places, they take funds away from integrated public schools and redistribute that money through grants to segregated private schools that become known as segregation academies.

Joanne Freeman:

So by 1969, at least 300,000 White students out of 7,400,000 attended segregated private schools in 11 southern states. A low estimated combined enrollment in organized or expanded private schools in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, along with North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia increased roughly 2,000% from 25,000 in 1966 to approximately 535,000 by 1972 in response to desegregation. Those are massive numbers of these segregated schools coming about in response to this effort by parents.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And don’t you feel like it’s a story that we don’t tell as much as we ought to?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I mean, I think a lot of people have heard of segregation academies, but when you actually see the numbers…

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a reminder and an echo of what we’re seeing now. I mean, no historian would say that what we’re seeing now in the realm of education or public education is unique, or is the first time that this has happened. What we’re talking about in this episode are all of the ways in which in the past education has been seen as important, as vital, as shaping ways of creating Americans. And now we’re talking about ways of excluding or cornering Americans, or pushing them in one direction, and other Americans in another direction. But you’re right that until you focus on numbers and on where the effort and energy is coming from, it really does highlight what’s going on now in a different way. We hear a lot of talk of giving parents power, but what we’re looking at here is parents exerting that power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But I want to ask you about that, because if the founders wanted to think about using education in such a way that it created citizens, and in the late 19th century we get this attempt sort of to create citizens, but also, or maybe and also, to create good workers, this period since 1955, when the meaning of public school changes so dramatically, what’s that about? Is it about constructing citizens any longer? It doesn’t feel like it is. It feels like it’s about protecting a worldview.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. I was about to say… I was not going to put it as concretely, but I think you’re right. It does not feel as though it’s about creating citizens at all. It’s about channeling people along a certain path that they should be channeled along. No longer about citizen, but about the social order, maybe.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Channeling people along the lines that they should be channeled along. What do you mean by that?

Joanne Freeman:

People get an education to be… It directs you into being the sort of job-holding responsible person, depending on who you are and where you fit in society. It sets you up to be the right sort of person doing the right sort of thing in the sort of way, so that society feels organized and controlled. It’s not about you necessarily being vigilant and looking out for rights, it’s about you being part of an orderly society.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m jumping to the idea of some people not being allowed to have, or not being welcomed to have, the kind of education that would enable them to take leadership positions in it. And I’m reminded of the fact that after working so hard for so long to get people to vote or to get people registered to vote in the 1960s, Bob Moses went back to his original roots of teaching and became a fervent teacher of mathematics, saying that in order to have equality in society, children of color had to have access to really good mathematical instruction. Which I know a lot of people thought was odd, but it certainly seems to make sense now in this discussion.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. No, it absolutely does. It’s equipping people with tools so that they will be able to do things and will understand their right and ability to do them. That is more directed at the individuals, you’re right, than at some larger idea of being good citizens. It’s about enabling children of different sorts to fulfill themselves.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what do you think is behind today’s laws? The attempt to really, in the last six months or so, insert parental oversight? And it’s not like parents were ever excluded from public schools at all. So what do you think’s behind this attempt to sort of suggest that somehow parents need to call all the shots about… And a certain group of parents, by the way. It’s not a majority, by any stretch of the imagination.

Joanne Freeman:

One thing that strikes me again and again in this particular moment is as you just suggested, it’s not that parents never had a right to weigh in before. There were channels for them to do that. There are systems. There are actually meetings, school board meetings. There are all kinds of ways in which if a parent didn’t like what was going on in a classroom, there were formal channels that they could take to object, to weigh in. It’s not as though they were silenced and kept out of the conversation. What we’re seeing now, along the lines of what we’re seeing in so many other ways, is a rejection of the normal channels and normal institutional ways of dealing with these things, which are kind of systematized and aren’t necessarily always fair, but aren’t necessarily partisan.

And this feels to me like an attempt, as with so many other things, to bypass the way things are normally done and assert a kind of power and immediacy and a demand for action now that isn’t systematized, that isn’t regulated in any way, that has to do with what people want now, and the way that they feel threatened now, and their right to do something aggressive, in their mind defensive, but assertive to take a stand right now and demand what they want right now. There’s an immediacy to this political moment in so many ways, and now it’s becoming true in education as well, in which there’s a sense, and I think at the moment this is particularly true on the right, that there’s this cultural danger that’s going to envelop everything.

And in schools, as in everywhere else, there needs to be an immediate way to short circuit any other sort of systematized way of approaching this, that you can just interject directly, parachute into the center of this, and make a demand and get what you want. We’re kind of in a moment of get what you want, and a lessening of actual accountability for those kinds of demands.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Are you saying that you see this as a moment in which the schools are under an assault largely because of what they represent as part of a system, rather than as schools themselves?

Joanne Freeman:

No, I’m saying there are systems in place that would allow parents to object, that would… All of the things that people are screaming about now, I want… There are bills being passed saying parents have a right. Well, they have that right. It’s not as though parents have been prevented from speaking up. What these bills are saying is they’re pulling right out into the center this idea that it’s parents that are at the center of this, that they can make demands, that whatever channels are in place that in the past people might have used to make these kinds of objections, they’re not enough. They’re not enabling people to take the kind of hard, firm, immediate stand that some people, at the moment on the right, think is necessary. And schools, because there are children, because they’re so essential, they are places that just that kind of intensity and immediacy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You just said something really important though, and that, I think, is when you said this is about the parents more than it is about the schools or the children. And that to me is really interesting, because as I look at it, I think what I see is a moment that looks rather like after 1831, and the idea of saying, “Oh, doggies, we’re not going to let those people get an education any longer.” I don’t think that’s a hill I’d be willing to die on yet, because I haven’t thought it through all the way, but I do think that there’s something very different going on right now, and it’s not the idea of the creation of citizenship or even the creation of people who know how to get a job. It feels like this is a very different moment in which schools are under attack perhaps, as you say, because of the parents, not so much because of the children.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I think that’s true. And I think people who have been responding to this moment in a variety of different ways in the press have sort of been semi laughing at the fact that books are being banned, as though kids aren’t going to be able to get their hands on those books online or in some other way, as if banning a book will prevent children from seeing them. I don’t think that the bans are about the children. I think it’s about what the schools represent and what they’re supposed to be doing and what parents want them to do, and the degree to which parents feel they have the power to make those kinds of demands and get what they want. I think that’s what this is all about.

Joanne Freeman:

But for all of the reasons that we talked about in today’s episode, and all of the ways in which on so many levels schools shape Americans and the schools shape America, this becomes a crucial, critical conversation that even if it is on some level just about parents, it can never be just about parents. It’s about creating Americans. It’s about how people understand their rights.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But so schools as my microcosms for society.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And it’s microcosms of certain people claiming that they have the right to take control of what is or isn’t within that society. And they don’t like some of what’s there, and so they have the right to rule it out. And if they’re not heard, then they’ll go to school board meetings and scream it out. It’s about making demands of this moment by parents and adults who feel that they need to seize control of how America is being conceived on a sweeping level, and schools become an important place where that happens. But that’s what it’s about. It’s about the demand. It’s not about the actual kids at all, I don’t think. And as you just said, I am processing this as we sit here and talk to each other, but there are so many ways in which it does not seem to be about the children at all.