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"America…is a nation of
individuals and individualism," states an article posted by The
Objectivist Center shortly after 9/11. In
respect to the dignity and worth of each human life and to the ideal of equal
opportunity, this affirmation of individualism as the American creed bears a
certain truth. Yet this sentiment also
misses other, and perhaps larger, truths.
My new book, The "American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of
the American Identity argues instead that images of family, home, and
religiously-grounded community have been stronger, and more compelling aspects
of the American creed. Time and again
during the 20th Century, Americans successfully responded to great
crises and challenges--mass immigration, war, economic depression, the rise of
Communism, global responsibility--by turning to family, home, and faith as the
wellsprings of national identity and unity.
These, not individualism, I argue, form the "American
Way."
Stated differently, my book can be read as a history
of the last 100 American years viewed through a social conservative lens. Often, the result is surprising. It turns out, for example, that for a good
share of the 20th Century, the Democrats--rather than the
Republicans--could be fairly labelled the pro-family party. One broad truth also becomes clear: the
pro-life and pro-family movements are not products of just the last several
decades. Since 1900, prominent
Americans have identified new challenges posed to marriage, family, home, and
infant life by the modern world and they have crafted cultural and political
strategies to protect these primary and necessary institutions.
This morning, I will summarize my argument by
telling you the story of two characters found in the book: They, and the others described in its pages,
were the architects of a 20th Century family- and faith-centered
American Way. I will also explore how
the themes of my book might play out in the making of educational policy,
specifically calling for viewing "education as homecoming."
FIRST, THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Mr. Roosevelt can be fairly labelled the first
openly pro-life and pro-family President, attributes that his
biographers--including most recently Edmund Morris--completely ignore. U.S. President from 1901 until 1909,
Roosevelt clearly identified the "foes"--his word--of the American
family. The practice of "willful
sterility in marriage"--or birth control and abortion--was "a capital
sin" against civilization, he said, a practice that meant national
death. He held liberal
reinterpretations of Christian teaching on family and sexuality in particular
contempt. Before an audience of liberal
Protestant theologians in 1911, for example, he blasted sympathies toward birth
control and stressed the linkage between family creation and Americanism:
If you do not believe in your own [people] enough to
[bear larger families], then you are not good Americans and you are not
patriots, and…I for one shall not mourn your extinction; and in such event
I shall welcome the advent of a new race that will take your place, because you
will have shown that you are not fit to cumber the ground.
Mr. Roosevelt condemned as fools those
"professional feminists" who labelled wives and mothers at home as
"parasite" women. The
home-keeping mother is not a parasite on society; he countered. "She is society." Roosevelt also pointed to easy divorce as a
foe of the family, calling it "a bane to any nation, a curse
to society, a menace to the home, an incitement to married unhappiness,
and to immorality." The
"multiplication of divorces" in America, he concluded, meant that
"some principle of evil [was] at work."
Of greater importance, Theodore Roosevelt crafted a
positive philosophy of family life. He
regularly emphasized the centrality of the child-rich family to American
existence, as the cell of American society: "[I]t is in the life of
the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the nation
rests….The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its
borders." In this manner, the
family was the essential wellspring of American citizenship. Roosevelt's words again:
In all the world there is no better and healthier
home life, no finer factory of individual character, nothing more
representative of what is best and most characteristic in American life
than that which exists in the higher type of family; and this higher type of
family is to be found everywhere among us.
Mr. Roosevelt also painted a remarkably fresh and
compelling portrait of marriage. The
good marriage, he argued, was a full partnership, in which "each
partner is honor bound to think of the rights of the other as well as of his or
her own." On the emotional and
spiritual side, he said that a true marriage would be "a partnership of
the soul, the spirit and the mind, no less than of the body."
On the practical and
material side, Roosevelt believed in early marriage, as a counter to
temptations toward immorality. More
profoundly, he believed that the successful marriage, "the partnership of
happiness," must also be a "partnership of work." "Our aim," he wrote "must be
the healthy economic interdependence of the sexes." Attempts to craft the "economic independence"
of the sexes would create "a false identity of economic function" and
result in national ruin.
Accordingly, Roosevelt called for public policies
that would encourage young couples to marry and--if possible--to bear at least
four children, and hopefully more.
"Motherhood should be protected" from immersion into industry,
he wrote. Income and inheritance taxes
"should be immensely heavier on the childless and on the families
with one or two children, while an equally heavy discrimination should lie in
favor of the family with over three children." For example, Roosevelt suggested that the couple should receive
an income tax exemption of $500 (current value about $10,000) for each of their
first two children, and $1,000 (current value about $20,000!) for each
subsequent child. Roosevelt also argued
that government pay scales should give preference to the parents of larger
families: " In all public
offices…the lowest salaries should be paid the man or woman with no children,
or only one or two children, and a marked discrimination made in favor of the
man or woman with a family of over three children." I wonder what the American Federation of
State, County, and Municipal Employees or the NEA would think about that idea
today?
MY SEOND CHARACTER IS JULIA LATHROP
Miss Lathrop was the first woman to head a Federal
government agency. In 1912, President
William Howard Taft--a Republican--appointed her as Chief of the new U.S.
Children's Bureau. The following year
his successor, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, reappointed Lathrop to the post, as did
Wilson's successor in 1921, Republican Warren G. Harding.
The daughter of a Republican Congressman from
Northern Illinois, Miss Lathrop began her work in the 1880's at Hull House in
Chicago. The work of Hull House is
often misunderstood. Like other
"settlement houses," Hull House aimed at encouraging and easing the
assimilation of new immigrants into American life. Between 1880 and 1914, an average of one million new immigrants
arrived each year. Relative to existing
population, this immigration flow occurred at nearly three times the
current rate. Many observers worried
that the rise of "hyphenated" cultures--such as German-American or
Italian-American--threatened the nation's cultural coherence and unity.
Lathrop concluded that the immigration problem was,
in fact, a problem of homes.
"Americanization"--meaning assimilation and unity--could best
be secured by focusing on a common motherhood, using images of marriage,
children, and home to represent the "American Way of Life." Along with fellow activists such as Florence
Kelley, Grace Abbott, Mary Anderson, Molly Dewson, Frances Perkins, and
Josephine Baker. Lathrop forged a
worldview sometimes called "social feminism," but better labelled
"maternalism." As described
by historian Gwendolyn Mink, maternalism offered a new vision of
citizenship, built on "one motherhood from diversely situated
women….The[se] reformers believed that all women shared the maternalist
vocation and therefore all women controlled the future of the
Republic." Hull House, for
example, featured a Labor Museum for children to reveal "the charm of
women's [traditional] tasks"--"the milking, the gardening, the
marketing"--which "are such direct expressions of the solicitude and
affection at the basis of all human life."
More broadly, Miss Lathrop and her maternalist
allies sought to restore healthy families among all Americans. Speaking in 1915 to the graduates of Vassar
College, she called on university women to create "a single center of
training for research in the problems of the family" in order to give the
woman in the home "the status of a profession" and to "elevate
into a national system, strong, free, elastic, the cult of the American
family." Central to maternalist
thinking was the concept of a family wage.
Pointing to research showing that as the father's average income
doubled, the infant mortality rate was more than halved, Julia Lathrop
concluded that "a decent income, self-respectingly earned by the father,
is the beginning of wisdom, the only fair division of labor between the
father and the mother of young children, and the strongest safeguard against a
high infant mortality rate."
At the Children's Bureau, Miss Lathrop held that
"the first and simplest duty of women is to safeguard the lives of mothers
and babies." Condemning birth
control and abortion, her goal was to encourage maternity through better health
care for all mothers before, during, and after pregnancy. She called the campaign "Baby
Saving." The Bureau published
books on Prenatal Care and Infant Care, distributing 1.5
million free copies of the latter by 1925.
It encouraged the formation of Little Mothers Leagues; by 1915, the
Bureau counted over 50,000 member girls--mostly immigrant children--in 44
cities. The Bureau relentlessly
promoted breast feeding and discouraged early weaning and infant formula
use. In 1916, it crafted a
"National Baby Week." Over
4,200 communities took part through lectures, baby-care seminars, and
parades. "Best Mother
Contests" tested mothers' knowledge.
Orators celebrated motherhood as a vital vocation. "[M]others with infants in arms paraded
down Main Street to the applause of flag waving townspeople." At the Bureau's request, Congress declared
1918 to be "The Year of the Child."
Its campaign to promote good mothering and reduce infant mortality
involved an amazing 11 million women.
Miss Lathrop's greatest policy achievement, though,
was probably passage of The Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921. In 1918, maternal deaths in child birth
still numbered 23,000 in the U.S., up from 16,000 two years earlier. And the infant mortality rate that
year still stood at 100 deaths per 1000 live births, about twice the level
found in Western Europe. Sheppard-Tower
would provide funds for state-level programs of instruction in maternal and
infant hygiene, prenatal child-health clinics, and visiting nurses for pregnant
and new mothers. In Miss Lathrop's
words, Sheppard-Tower encouraged "the Americanization of the
family." It "is not to get
the Government to do things for the family," she said. "It is to create a family that can do
things for itself."
The law appears to have
worked. Infant deaths due to
gastrointestinal diseases--the ones most preventable by education--fell 45
percent by 1928. Sheppard-Towner was
notably and successfully pro-life and pro-family.
THE FIRST FEDERAL
INTERVENTION
So how did these
same "maternalist" themes--and the image of America that they
contained of family and community--play out in public policy regarding education? As Theodore Roosevelt had noted, American
family life did show at that time many signs of increasing disorder. Between 1890 and 1920, the number of
divorced Americans rose three-fold.
Meanwhile, the U.S. birthrate fell by about a third. There were new idea systems leveling attacks
on the natural family: equity feminism which assaulted the mother-at-home; neo-Malthusianism,
which linked poverty to fertility, condemned large families, and urged the
universal adoption of birth control; and cultural relativism, which held
that it was impossible to find common cultural values or a shared “way of life”
in the teeming diversity of immigrant America.
As noted before,
the maternalists saw a common celebration of the traditional home and family as
the way to build national unity. As
Frances Kellor, director of Americanization Work for the Federal Bureau of
Education, argued: "If we start with the family and work upward, we get a
sound city that will stand the strain of any crisis because its weakest links
are strong….Approached from the neighborhood and family and met squarely, the
problem of Americanization can be solved adequately.” Training in homemaking, she said, should be the
"fulcrum" of Americanization.
Meanwhile,
Liberty Hyde Bailey, the influential Dean of the College of Agriculture at
Cornell University, argued that family renewal required the revitalization of
rural life. Remember that at this time
Americans still saw themselves as first and foremost a farming people. Dean Bailey argued that, given the low urban
birthrates, “the farm home [is also a] preservator of morals." And yet, Bailey continued, “while the home
is the center or pivot of our civilization, it is the last thing to be taught
in schools.” Looking to the cities, the
prominent labor activist Florence Kelley agreed: “The schools may truthfully be
said actively to divert the little girls from homelife…[offering] wretched
preparation for home making.”
Two major
Federal policy actions followed. The
Smith-Lever Act of 1914 created the Extension program of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, charged with teaching modern farming techniques to men and boys
and homemaking and housekeeping to women and girls. The Smith-Hughes Act came three years later. Representing the first Federal program
providing direct aid to elementary and secondary schools, Smith-Hughes
granted money for teacher training and salaries in the fields of agriculture,
the industrial arts, and homemaking.
Clearly, the
model for family renewal embodied in these federal measures was the
breadwinning husband and father operating a small farm or shop or earning a
“family wage” in the city and married to a full-time, “home-making” wife and
mother. The spirit of this Federal
experiment in family renewal was best captured by two songs found in the
Extension Service's 4-H Songbook of 1928.
For boys
“The Plowing Song”:
A growing day in a waking field
And a furrow straight and long
A golden sun and a lifting breeze,
And we follow with a song.
Sons of the soil are we,
Lads of the field and flock.
Turning our sods, asking no odds;
Where is a life so free?
Sons of the soil are we,
Men of the coming years;
Facing the dawn, brain ruling brawn.
Lords of our lands we’ll be!
And for the girls, the song
“Dreaming” (here, the
third verse):
My home must have its mother,
May I grow sweet and wise;
My home must have its father,
With honor in his eyes;
My home must have its children,
God grant the parents grace –
To keep our home through all the years,
A kindly, happy place.
Again, this was
federally-engineered education in 1928, a far-cry, say, from the sexually
egalitarian spirit of today’s Title IX. Indeed, it almost seems to rise
out of an alternate moral universe. In
the 1920's, Federal education policy, put the home--the family--and the small
community which sheltered homes at the center of education theory and practice. And this family-building experiment worked,
at least for a time. Small-scale family
agriculture was not saved, but the ethos of homemaking survived, with a strong
influence on the generation coming of age in the 1940’s. With Federal backing, there was a vast
increase in the number of home economics teachers. Homemaking classes for the girls in food preparation, sewing, and
home management grew universal, in rural and city districts alike. In 1945, the Future Homemakers of America
(FHA) organized and this high-school club soon claimed over 600,000
members. Home Economics joined
Elementary Education as the most popular major for young women in college. And there were surely results; the marriage
boom of the 1940’s and 1950’s and the better known Baby Boom reflected--and at
some level may have been stimulated by--this home-building educational work,
actively encouraged by Uncle Sam.
But the renewed American
family did not last. While many factors
were involved in this failure, one certainly was the political and intellectual
collapse of the home economics discipline and of the “homemaker/breadwinner”
family model that it sustained. Amendments
in 1963--a critical year in so many ways!--to the old Smith-Hughes Act reduced
funding for homemaking and family-life education and required, for the
first time, that home ec teachers train their students for
gainful employment outside the home.
Indeed, the spread of feminist ideology soon shook home economics
to its core, a shock reflected in the very name of the discipline. By 1970, five new labels for the relevant
school department were in use; by 1990, over seventy-five. These new names included "human
ecology,” “human development” “consumer sciences,” “contemporary living,” and
“life studies.” The only word that
never appeared among these innovations was “home,” a concept now fraught with
embarrassment. Congress mercifully
killed the Smith-Hughes Act in 1997, its animating spirit long since gone.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: BACK TO THE
ROOTS
Public education eagerly and
easily returned to its more natural stance hostile to the family. Title IX of The Education Amendments of 1972
prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in all programs receiving federal
funds, driving a final nail in the coffin of the sexual division of labor that
had undergirded the renewed American family.
School consolidation speeded up: there were only 17,995 school districts
left by 1990, a decline of 85 percent since 1932. This loss of local control was complemented by a centralization
of power in groups such as the National Education Association, institutions
with a special animus toward the family model so recently celebrated. By the early 1980's, the NEA vigorously
attacked "materials that promote sex stereotypes" such as
non-employed mothers and breadwinning fathers and affirmed the right of school
children "to live in an environment of freely available information, knowledge,
and wisdom about sexuality."
"Multiculturalism" must serve as the vehicle for national
unity. More recent resolutions condemn
"homophobia," celebrate "reproductive freedom" and
"family planning" in the schools, welcome "diverse sexual
orientation," and urge the positive portrayal "of the roles and
contributions of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people throughout history."
Coming from a
different angle, The Kentucky poet and essayist Wendell Berry points to the
strange values of modern education:
According to the new norm, the child's destiny is
not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them….The schools are no longer
oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired,
but to the career, which is to say the future of the child….He or she is
educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing
to do with place or community….It is no wonder that, under these circumstances,
'educators' tend to look upon parents as bad influences and wish to take the
children away from home as soon as possible.
And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an
encumbrance at home, where there is no useful work for them to do, and are glad
enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future.
These are the symptoms of a
pervasive homelessness, one vastly broader in scope than the
"homeless problem" normally discussed in the media and one deserving
our close attention. Social analyst
Bryce Christensen describes home as "a place sanctified by the abiding
ties of wedlock, parenthood, and family obligation; a place demanding sacrifice
and devotion but promising loving care and warm acceptance," a place
anchored in turn in a specific geographic location. And nature educator Wes
Jackson asks whether schools ought now be offering a new major in "homecoming."
TRUE HOMECOMING
Can we recover
the best aspects of the maternalist vision of education: respect for family,
community, and neighborhood? What might contemporary American education
for "home building" and "homecoming" look like?
The first principle is that
all true and lasting efforts must flow upward from the primal or natural social
units: families; villages; neighborhoods; faith communities. An effective long term "education in
homecoming" cannot be imposed from the top, down. This was the mistake of the Smith-Hughes
Act.
Similarly, "national
unity" will not be won by the imposition from above of a new cultural
ideology of "multiculturalism" or some narrow, nativist
"Americanism." For the whole
of the last century, the effective unifying metaphors of "the American Way
of life" have come instead from the discovery of common affection for
marriage, family, and place: affections that transcend religious and ethnic
divisions; and affections that also grow from the family home as the cell of
society.
Allow me to illustrate this
big idea with a little story. Several
years ago, I participated in a debate over children's issues on Wisconsin
Public Radio, and at one point noted something positive about homeschooling. Another panelist, a professor of Social Work
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, responded sternly. Given all the new immigrants coming to
America, she said, only the public schools could craft a necessary
degree of public unity. "It was
the values found in the McGuffey Readers that unified this
nation," she concluded. With the
gleam of the successful trapper in my eye, I responded: "If you can show
me one public schoolroom in Wisconsin where the McGuffey Readers are
used today, I will concede your point.
But I know that you cannot. For
you see, the state of Wisconsin's education regulations specifically ban
the McGuffey Readers from use, because of their moralistic content. However, I could show you dozens, even
hundreds, of homeschool classrooms in Wisconsin where McGuffey is alive, well,
and in use." Unlike the state
schools, you see, these homes were--and are--still building respect for a
unifying public morality.
Indeed, the most obvious
path toward education as homecoming lies in these home schools. Here we find families engaged in a
fundamental revolution, recovering a vital family function lost
to the aggressive state a century-and-a-half earlier. With over two-million children now involved, homeschool families
are reinventing American education.
The direct effects are becoming well known, and are broadly
impressive. According to a recent University
of Maryland study, by grade eight the median scores of homeschoolers are almost four grade equivalents above those of their peers in public and
private schools. The domination
of national spelling and geography bees by homeschoolers in recent years
testifies as well to the ability of family-centered education to motivate
extraordinary individual accomplishment.
Relative to homecoming,
though, the more important traits of homeschooling may be the social and
familial. Simply put, home education
empowers "homemaking" families.
According to one recent survey, over 97 percent of homeschool
students had parents who were married, compared to a 60 percent figure
nationwide. Sixty-two percent of
homeschooling families had three-or-more children, compared to a mere 20 percent
of the nationwide sample. Meanwhile, 77
percent of homeschooling mothers did not work at all for pay, compared
to only 30 percent nationwide. These
are clearly home-building women and child rich families.
How might public policy
encourage home education? Home schooling
is now legal, with varying degrees of regulation, in all fifty states. The model statute may be Alaska's, where the
state's Compulsory Education Law simply and fully exempts from coverage any
child who "is being educated in the child's home by a parent or legal
guardian." This freedom precludes all
registration, reporting, or curricular requirements. In Illinois, homeschoolers can claim an Education Tax Credit of
20 percent on educational expenses, up to $250 per student. Reflecting the same principle, tax-free
Federal education savings accounts and proposed education tax credits should be
made larger still and available for all learning expenses, not just tuition.
Private and religious
schools can also be centers for education as homecoming. The key here is deep parental involvement in
the operation of the schools. The best
ones are those built on a clear--and usually religious--moral vision and on the
work, sacrifice, and treasure of parents and students. While acknowledging the potential of universal
state vouchers to advance "school choice," I am still wary of them
for two reasons. First, the potential
for regulatory intrusion by state authorities here is real. Relative to the goal of
"homecoming," this could take the form of anti-family gender-role
engineering (perhaps under the broad spirit of Title IX) that would undermine
effective "homebuilding."
Second, the availability of vouchers would lessen--perhaps
dramatically--the spirit of family sacrifice and the personal parental
involvement which animate the best independent schools.
Instead, I would urge the
steady expansion of general child-sensitive tax measures, such as the personal
exemption and the child tax credit on the federal income tax. As a minimum, the existing child exemption
and the child tax credit should each be doubled; to encourage real homecoming, they
should then be doubled again, to the levels that Theodore Roosevelt recommend. To give "choice" to families with
relatively little income and tax liability, the expanded child tax credit could
be made fully refundable.
This focus on
tax benefits would prevent regulatory intrusion and spare independent schools
from the loss of their peculiar and
--I believe--necessary energy.
What then about the public
schools, which still embrace the great majority of American children? Here, I craft a still greater dream and
return to a recommendation I first made twenty years ago: We should move
toward a "radical deconsolidation of the public system, down
even to the single-school level," which would weaken "bureaucratic
and union strangleholds on the schools and so return them to [real] community
control, where parental and neighborhood moral judgements could again play a
role." This goal or process would
rest on the finding, phrased in Bill Kauffman's words, that "every promise
of the consolidationists is, at best, an exaggeration, at worst, a lie." Not efficiency, nor improved outcomes, nor
greater social equity have been gained.
Moving beyond "charter schools," this deconsolidationist
approach would come full circle and reground tax-supported schools in their
places, their neighborhoods. Each
school would have its own elected governing board, and its own tax levy. Where the economic circumstances of a school
district were inadequate, a state education board could make a supplemental
grant out of general revenues. High
school districts could draw students from several independent primary
districts.
Most importantly, these
neighborhood, village, or township schools would be "open." Like a community college, they would offer
their learning and extracurricular opportunities to all students in the
district, but would compel none.
Some families might choose a complete school day; others just a science
or math class; still others, only choir or the soccer team. The local school would have a strong incentive
to serve the neighborhood and its inhabitants, rather than to force them
along a one-curriculum-fits-all path.
Once again, school boards could be expected to reflect and respect
neighborhood values and sensibilities.
The school should become the focus and pride of the neighborhood,
village, or township, so helping to unite all people--public schoolers, private
schoolers, home schoolers, and the childless alike-- with their special place
on earth. In all these ways, parental
autonomy would be reconciled with the claims of local culture and
community. And by building on
strengthened families and neighborhoods, we would be crafting the greater
strength of the nation.
These are, I believe, the
ways of achieving a true homecoming for 21st Century schools,
families, and children in America. |
