Back to Basics

Educating the Worker-Citizen, by Joel Spring. Longman, 230 pp. $8.95 (paper).

Reading this latest and most ambitious work yet of the radical education historian Joel Spring is an education in and of itself. Since his own education during the 1960s at the hands of such New Left intellectuals as William Appleman Williams and Ivan Illich, Spring has moved consistently toward pure libertarianism. But Educating the Worker-Citizen is a work of such profundity that it is more likely to move the libertarian movement in Spring’s direction than vice-versa.

Up to now, Spring has limited each of his books to a distinct historical period. Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (1972) dealt with schooling’s role in the rationalization of the labor market which took place during the Progressive era. The Sorting Machine (1976) chronicled the centralization of educational power in the hands of the federal government after 1945, when schools began to be consciously molded to meet the technical and manpower demands of the burgeoning military-industrial complex.

Educating the Worker-Citizen is a work of far greater scope. It is an attempt to synthesize all of Spring’s previous analysis into a full scale critique of the role of the school in the modern world. In this new work, Spring’s analysis is not bound to any single historical era, but rather cuts through to the philosophical, political, social and economic foundations of modern education as a whole.

The first chapter, “Political Theories of Education; Nationalism, Representation and Bureaucracy,” was a revelation to me. Its thesis bears directly on one of the most important historical problems facing the contemporary libertarian movement: the decline of classical liberalism and the betrayal of the American revolution. The significance of this subject should be obvious: if modern libertarians are the inheritors of the classical liberal tradition, and if we expect to improve on its legacy, we must understand what went wrong. This is why the most far-sighted modern libertarians have called attention to the importance of this issue. Murray Rothbard, for example, in his seminal essay “Left and Right”, speaks of “an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism” in the nineteenth century, and Leonard P. Liggio, in his essay “Why the Futile Crusade” pinpoints the crucial role of imperialism and war in undermining the liberal values of the West. But to my mind no one has outlined a convincing theory which accounts fully for the decline of radical liberalism and explains why it was superseded by socialism.

Joel Spring, I am happy to say, brings some fresh insight into this discussion. “The major hindrance to the completion of the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries,” he writes, “has been the rise and expansion of the modern school.” Spring demonstrates that the liberal revolutionaries were never free of the ideology of public schooling, and that the growth of the statist institution called education was therefore not an oversight or an aberration; it stemmed from a fundamental philosophical flaw within eighteenth century liberalism itself—a flaw that paved the way not only for public education, but also for the other plagues of the modern state: nationalism, fascism and communism, and militarism.

What was the great flaw of liberalism? Spring suggests that it was the liberals’ belief that the legislature was an adequate check on state power because it reflected “the will of the people.” The concept of “popular sovereignty” which guided their challenge to the Old Order, Spring argues, was nothing more than an attempt to substitute the potentially totalitarian power of a democratic nation-state for the monarchical state. Instead of proposing to sweep away state power, that is, they sought to make it reflect the “general will.” Modern libertarians, of course, would reject outright any claim that the state can somehow “represent” the “will” of any other collective entity. Thus, popular sovereignty, while liberal to the extent it helped to overthrow the Old Order, was also a collectivist, illiberal artifact. Here, in this mystical claim of collective representation for the democratic state, Spring locates the source of the “inner rot within the vitals of liberalism.”

The idea of popular sovereignty, as the name itself suggests, inevitably leads to a dangerous identification of the people of a country with the nation-state, and thus to the common idea that government is not a separate and distinct caste to be closely guarded and watched suspiciously, but rather the executor of the will of the people. And as Spring shows, the idea of public education grew naturally out of this identification of the people with the state. The public school, after all, was a place where the “general will” could be manufactured and enforced. It is not surprising therefore that men such as Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith, whom we may think of as pure liberals but who were actually flawed, democratic liberals, were also advocates of government involvement in education.

Nor is it surprising that only a few years into America’s lifespan, the contradiction between the pure liberalism of the Bill of Rights and the incipient statism represented by the idea of popular sovereignty began manifesting itself in our national politics. Spring shows how Noah Webster, reflecting (and capitalizing upon) the new country’s patriotic spirit, consciously created a national mythology in his widely-read textbooks, making George Washington and other trappings of the centralized state apparatus into symbols of “Americanism.” This nationalism reached its culmination a few decades later in Horace Mann, who pushed for free and compulsory public school monopolies in order to breed a universal “creed of Republicanism” into the citizenry. So it was that popular sovereignty led directly to nationalism, and nationalism in turn paved the way for compulsory state schooling.

What Jefferson, Webster, and Mann did for the U.S., Jean-Jacques Rousseau did for France and Poland and Johann Fichte did for Germany. Rousseau extended the fallacy of the “general will”—the identification of the individual’s self interest with the state’s—far beyond his American counterparts. Children, said Rousseau, must be trained “never to think of their individual interests except in relation to those of the State as a whole...” They must always be made “conscious of their membership in the Fatherland.” “Public education,” he concluded, “is therefore one of the fundamental requirements of popular government.” Fichte, father of Prussia’s compulsory state school system, was far more blunt: he claimed that with mass public schooling Prussia would have the greatest army the world had ever seen.

This connection linking the democratic nation-state, public education, and militarism is far from accidental; it is a logical consequence of identifying the individual’s interests with those of the state. Even a cursory look into the history and origins of military conscription immediately reveals the connection between the rise of the democratic nation-state and the beginnings of mass conscription—and total war. With conscription and modern warfare, as with political democracy, the ruling assumption is the same: that the people are the state. Even Adam Smith, darling of today’s conservative libertarians and opponent of all other forms of government control, made an exception of education—for military reasons, as Spring shows. The division of labor created by the free market, Smith feared, would make it impossible for the average worker to understand, and thus to defend in wartime, the interests of society as a whole. National education would therefore be necessary to inculcate an understanding of the public interest.

Spring’s historical survey of the idea of collective representation shows just how serious an error the classical liberals made. Because there is obviously no such thing as “the people” or the “general will”—only a multiplicity of individuals each with his or her own will—the democratic revolutionaries were forced to rely upon the device of elected representatives to legitimize democracy. Soon, however, the claim to “represent” something called the “general will” came to exhibit uncontrollable elasticity. Unelected professionals in the education bureaucracy correctly noted that elected politicians really represented only special interests, but then claimed for themselves the mystical power to represent the true will of the people, the students, the society, or whatever other group they found it convenient to think of as having a will of its own. The thoroughly untestable claim of collective representation multiplied right alongside the expanding size of the administrative bureaucracy. Anybody could claim to “represent” anything—and did.

Nineteen-thirties-style fascism and communism were other products of the same mystical claim of collective “representation.” Just as democratic liberals claimed that the state represented the “general will,” so Nikolai Lenin held that the interests of all working people were “represented” by the vanguard Party. Therefore, when the vanguard Party succeeded in seizing state power, the state apparatus would magically become a worker’s state, perfectly representative of all workers’ true interests. And as for Fascism, Spring cites the historian George Mosse, who “argues that what Hitler and Mussolini promised the people was a form of participation in government that was more meaningful than democracy... Fascism, with its extreme emphasis on nationalism, was to give more meaningful expression to the will of the people.”

The people and the state, one and the same—the ultimate legacy of our democratic revolutionaries. How ironic, how chastening, that the classical liberals’ pursuit of a more perfect form of liberty could lead, because of a philosophical flaw, to the most abject forms of slavery ever known to man. And how ironic that it was the schoolhouse where eighteenth and nineteenth century liberals first struck their Faustian bargain with state power.

China. Their similarity is remarkable, and reflects the extent to which the economic functions of state schooling follow much the same logic as its political functions:

The Chinese kindergarten maxim “serve the people” is a form of economic patriotism that is very much like political patriotism. It assumes that because there is collective ownership of the means of production, the [economic] system works for the benefit of all the people....To assume that state ownership results in equal or just economic benefits is much like Rousseau’s argument that the general will represents the best interests of all people.

This is why the classical liberals ultimately lost their debate with the socialists in the nineteenth century. The socialists merely extended the liberals’ claim of collective representation to decision-making in the economic arena. Since liberals accepted the legitimacy of that claim in the political sphere, what grounds did they have to resist it in the economy? They could appeal to liberty and property rights all they liked, but such appeals must have seemed inconsistent with their belief in political democracy. If

The seeds sown in education however, soon began to spread into other areas. As industrialism progressed, the government school — once a relatively isolated outpost of state power—saw its coercive, rationalizing ethic extended into the economy as well as the political system. In connection with this point, Spring explores the educational philosophies of John Dewey in the U.S., Anton Makarenko in the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party in democratic nation-states were legitimate representatives of “the people,” trustworthy guardians of national defense, and capable of defining the “public interest,” then why could they not be trusted to intervene in the economy? Why did they no longer represent “the people” when they redistributed wealth?

The heart of Educating the Worker-Citizen is thus in its brilliant but complex and sometimes unintegrated exploration of education’s role in the modern welfare state — a role determined by the economic and political needs of a centrally managed society. In Spring’s words, the school has become “the supplier of trained human resources neededfor[planned and managed] economic growth.” With the education system linked to the state, people are transformed into “human capital” and free competition for jobs in the marketplace is replaced with a form of administrative rationing by professionals within the school.

The ideological embodiment of this system is the idea of “equality of opportunity.” This ideology is not a smokescreen for “capitalism” as the Left asserts, nor is it a thinly veiled “socialism” as the Right contends. It is a unique and independent statist ideology that guides the thinking of both socialist and welfare-capitalist education systems. The ideology of equality of opportunity offers a sanitized ideal of government as a fair and impartial social arbiter, not a place where people struggle for power and benefits. The picture is one of everyone in society, regardless of background, being plopped onto the same educational conveyor belt, to be sorted into a hierarchical occupational structure by experts and professionals according to their unique abilities. Opportunity equalized by state intervention is considered necessary to a managed society so that each individual “human resource” can make a contribution to the economic hierarchy; equal opportunity is necessary to find the right slot for him. And the free market—the voluntary interaction of individuals without an imposed plan—cannot be trusted to fairly and efficiently conduct this sorting process. Only the technocrats and professionals in charge of the educational bureaucracy can.

In connection with this point, Spring shows that the lowly professional status of teachers is a direct product of the low quality of their professional training. (Departments of Education have always been a joke in academia; indeed, Spring’s own school, the University of Cincinnati, gives its the ignominious name, “Department of Education and Home Economics!”) At the same time, educational administrators are given a more demanding, “scientific” professional training —and their role is defined not as experts in particular academic subjects or the organization of knowledge, but as business managers, experts in the administration and management of organizational structures. Thus administrators become higher-level cogs in the educational machine than teachers, and a worker-manager relationship develops.

Because the ideology of equality of opportunity places the professionals who control education in a central position, Spring follows this observation up with a detailed examination of the education system’s bureaucratic and professional power structure, and the political assumptions which underlie it. And out of this examination a disturbing picture of contemporary society begins to emerge. We begin to see the outlines of an emerging society of status — a rigidly hierarchical, sluggishly bureaucratic world where people’s occupations are not defined by the voluntary cooperation of free individuals pursuing their self-interest but are imposed from above by an increasingly centralized and distant bureaucratic structure.

Throughout the entire book, Spring calls into question, one by one, the claims of the modern school. The schools claim to be more fair and efficient than the market as an arena of economic competition, but Spring shows there is no evidence for this. The schools claim to be an avenue of social mobility, the only means by which the disadvantaged can move up the social and economic ladder. Spring refutes this by showing that mobility depends upon other factors; the schools actually tend to reinforce existing social positions. And in some ways they block social mobility by making advancement dependent upon the accumulation of educational credentials. The professionals who run the schools claim to be servants of “the public interest,” but Spring reveals the underlying self-interest of this claim: equality of education opportunity “serves to justify the right of professionals to govern education, makes the school the central institution for the distribution of human resources, and consequently gives the professional decisionmaker in education a central role in the governance of society.” We see how the ideal of rationed equality leads to ever-greater centralization of power in education; funding and decision-making have increasingly gravitated to the state or national level, further and further from the influence of parents and children.

And in the final blow to the mythology of the welfare state, Spring suggests that even in their economically deprived situation, the poor, due to the regressive tax structure used to finance public schools, might be better off if all taxes were lifted from them and they purchased education directly. By getting education indirectly, by paying taxes and letting the government provide schools, they lose all control and choice that is still available to the wealthy. And they suffer from that loss, in low-quality, often racist schooling. A market in education provides more information to suppliers of education, and more choice (and therefore, control) to consumers of education. Voting, by contrast, is a completely inadequate method of control. One politician might reflect your views on education but not the environment, while another might share your environmental concerns but have different views on education. You may want a school bond issue to pass because you want more money to go to education, but still be dissatisfied with the kind of education your children are getting. How, Spring asks, do you vote in these cases, and how are the elected representatives to interpret your vote? A free market conveys information much more precisely and allows for more diversity.

In his chapter on “The Economics of Schooling,” Spring draws upon free market economists Milton Friedman and E.G. West to demolish the case for government education as a “public good”: the idea, so crucial in the development of public schooling, that the widely dispersed, “public” benefits of education justify tax-supported government school monopolies. He draws upon historical studies to show that private, voluntary schools by themselves educated as great a proportion of the population as public schooling later did, and that such schools often had a better mix of social classes than tuition-free government schools.

But this is only the skeleton of Spring’s argument. In the book, it is backed up with an enormous richness of detailed evidence—so much so, in fact, that it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees in Educating the Worker-Citizen. But throughout, one sees that Spring is attempting to synthesize historical, economic, sociological, and political analysis into a radically new conception of “The Role of the School in the Modern World,” as his final chapter is entitled. Transcending the assumptions and stereotypes of both Left and Right, he rebuilds our understanding of education from the ground up. This is an important project, because, as Spring demonstrates, education is the quintessential institution, the flagship, of the modern welfare state. Education embodies all of its politico-economic assumptions and its bureaucratic structure, and the welfare state can therefore be evaluated in microcosm by examining the performance and practices of the education system.

This pathbreaking analysis is, I think, of profound importance to any libertarian’s attempt to understand (and change) the contemporary nation-state. Too often, our dialogue is molded by a false dichotomy between status quo conservatism and state socialism. This dichotomy is supposed to define the spectrum of available choices. But Spring’s analysis of education suggests that the real choice is between socialist and welfare states on one hand, and a system of natural liberty on the other. Spring notes at one point that:

attempts to achieve equality of opportunity through educational institutions seem to be in as much difficulty in socialist countries as in capitalist countries. A perplexing problem in the Soviet Union has been the link between educational attainment and family background.... It is not a matter of social class which owns the means of production perpetuating its power through the school; it is that the hierarchy of professional and bureaucratic positions transmit their advantages to their children through the school.

In education, the varieties of statist thought—conservative, welfare statist, democratic socialist, and communist—seem to have more in common with each other than with liberty.

Near the end of his book, Spring thus reaches an audacious conclusion: “The next most important step society can take in the interest of social improvement and freedom is to separate school and government by eliminating public systems of education.” If public education is ever eliminated, Joel Spring’s work will have helped to pave the way.

Milton Mueller is the National Director of Students for a Libertarian Society.