Amy Gutmann: Democratic Education. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. With 1999 epilogue.
Before her elevation to the presidency of Princeton University, Amy Gutmann established a reputation as a theorist of democracy, not exactly a political philosopher—one who offers an account of the variety of political regimes—but as a defender and explicator of one type of regime. As such, she argued that modern democracies should be understood theoretically and reformed practically along quasi-Aristotelian lines. Aristotle defines politics as a form of reciprocity, as ruling and being ruled in turn. He defines democracy as majority rule, a bad regime in which the many who are poor rule without restraint over the few who are rich. To prevent this, and equally to prevent the opposite one-way, self-interested rule of the few who are rich over the many who are poor, Aristotle famously advocates a ‘mixed regime,’ one whose ruling institutions require the many and the few to negotiate with one another in order to get laws enacted. The American Constitution, with its separation of powers, and its checks and balances, isn’t quite the same thing, it operates on the same principle of reciprocal ruling and being ruled.
While the American Founders established a regime of democratic and commercial republicanism upon the moral basis of natural right, Gutmann rejected this orientation, and indeed any ‘foundationalist’ understanding of the American regime, as too easily disputable, given the vastly increased and variegated population of the latter-day United States. Americans no longer share a moral consensus upon which to found their regime, she argued. Therefore, the best way to proceed is through a regime of “deliberative democracy,” “reciprocity among free and equal individuals” whereby “citizens and their representatives offer one another morally defensible reasons for mutually binding laws in an ongoing process of mutual justification.” Unlike Aristotle and the Founders, Gutmann didn’t propose institutional barriers to tyranny. What will save the deliberative-democratic regime from majority tyranny is precisely its deliberativeness. Citizens need to argue things out before the bar of reason.
Hence the need for education, indeed for political education, and hence Democratic Education. Education typically aims at strengthening students’ capacity for reasoning. Political education could do that, or it could descend to the level of propaganda in the pejorative sense of the word, instilling irrational sentiments favored by the rulers. How can the rulers themselves—in a democracy, the majority—themselves be brought willingly to the bar of reason? That is where “deliberative democracy” comes in.
“The central question in political education” is “How should citizens be educated, and by whom?” That is “Who should have authority to shape the education of future citizens?” The “art of governing” and the “art of education” either reinforce one another or contradict one another. Gutmann is especially concerned with the political movement toward more parental control of education, as such control, taken too far, might undermine not only democracy but political life itself by allowing the political community to fall back into its constituent parts, the families that compose the nation. Such “civic minimalism” might not inculcate the habits of deliberation needed for citizenship, as education “sets the stage for democratic politics.” Because it does, democratic regimes need a theory of education consonant with the regime, lest their educational policies become impossible to assess. But that regime poses the risk of tyrannical majority rule if it eschews reasoning. Under a regime of “deliberative democracy,” citizens will, as it were, continue their education, learning about a variety of educational policies as they debate them with one another. “We can publicly debate educational problems in a way much more likely to increase our understanding of education and each other than if we were to leave the management of schools, as Kant suggests, ‘to depend entirely upon the judgment of the most enlightened experts'”—that is, upon a sort of aristocracy.
More radically, Gutmann charges that any “foundationalist” account a political regime, whether divine right, natural right, ‘utility,’ or ‘history,’ is “profoundly apolitical” because they all depend upon some pre-political insight into the character of human nature and of politics. The fact that Aristotle, the author of the definition of the definition of politics she uses, propounds a moral and political philosophy founded upon natural right, and that the American Founders, who made rather a point of government by consent of the governed, did the same, doesn’t faze her, since she argues that no one can get consent to any such foundation under modern conditions. “Only in a society in which all other citizens agreed with me would my moral ideal simply translate into a political ideal.” This being the case, only citizens’ deliberations are left to settle “what the moral boundaries of authority are.” In so doing, democracy must be “liberal” democracy in the sense that no rational way of thinking, “however unpopular,” and no minority, however despised by the majority, may be excluded from the deliberative process. A “democratic society must be constrained not to legislate policies that render democracy repressive or discriminatory.” Within those limitations, education rightly understood “include[s] every social influence that makes us who we are.”
Against the American Founders, but also against all “foundationalists,” including Marxists, “deliberative democracy” enjoys “an important advantage”: with it, “one can arrive at a democratic theory of education without first defending a conception of human nature upon which theories of education are typically constructed.” Such attempts, Gutmann claims, depend upon a “fallacy,” the fallacy “of relying on deductions from axioms of human nature,” when “most of the politically significant features of human character are products of our education.” “If education is what gives us our distinctive character”—that is, if education is what makes us human—then “we cannot determine the purposes of education by invoking an a priori theory of human nature.” That is, education derives from the political regime under which we live; the political regime under which we live typically determines how we are educated and, by so doing, critically inflects our sense of what human nature is. Our “self-evident” truths are self-evident only to those so educated.
This will not do. If, as Gutmann herself admits, “education may aim to perfect human nature by developing its potentialities, to deflect it into serving socially useful purposes, or to defeat it by repressing those inclinations that are socially destructive,” this begs the question of whether some regimes do this better than others and, if so, which regimes those are. That is the question of political philosophy, and it suggests the need to ascend from the realm of opinion. Gutmann hopes that the process of democratic debate will supply, if not an ascent, as sort of progress via the process of rational sorting-out of coherent from incoherent opinions. Her commitment to reason implies an unspoken “foundationalism”: that human beings are rational and political animals. Her political commitment to democracy implies that ‘the many’ can vindicate that claim, if they can be educated to deliberate together.
Toward that end, she outlines three forms of the modern state—not regimes, an issue she treats as settled, but states, that is, political communities understood in terms of their size and their degree of centralization. The first she calls “the family state,” by which she means a state in which political authority is tightly centralized, as it is in a small family. The family state “claims exclusive educational authority as a means of establishing a harmony…between individual and social good based on knowledge,” as seen in the ‘regime in speech’ designed by Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato’s Republic. Socrates justifies this authority that “all states that claim less than absolute authority over the education of children will…degenerate out of internal disharmony” because there will always be a ‘disconnect’ between the good as conceived by individuals for themselves and the good of the political community as a whole.
Gutmann sees that Socrates’ idea of justice cannot be transferred into practice, although she stops short of acknowledging that Plato and his Socrates know that as well as she does. She also sees that the education in this purely ‘theoretical’ regime extends only to the guardian class, not to the philosophers or to the artisans, and therefore lacks comprehensiveness. She rightly observes that “part of Platonic wisdom is not to assume away the problems of founding a family state, but to recognize that the process of creating a social agreement on the good comes at a very high price, and to wonder whether the price is worth paying.” Predictably, she objects to what she calls Plato’s failure to recognize that “our good is relative to our education and the choices we are capable of making for ourselves, our children, and our communities.” That is, poor Plato doesn’t see that our moral principles are ‘socially constructed.’ There is no room in her doctrine for the philosophic ascent from the cave, at least insofar as we contemplate moral opinions.
“As long as we differ not just in our opinions but in our moral convictions about the good life”—she doesn’t clearly define the distinction between “opinions” and “convictions”—the “state’s educational role cannot be defined as realizing the good life, objectively defined, for each of its citizens.” That would depend upon how capacious an objectively defined good life for each citizen might be; for example, even in Plato’s city in speech, there are three distinct classes of people, each of which pursues a good or goods relative to their own capacities. In the American republic, at no time has the good life been identified as anything narrower than living secure in one’s unalienable rights and respecting those rights in others. Nor did the Americans’ natural-rights orientation stop Publius from expecting, as Gutmann does, that politics in a representative government tends to “refine and enlarge the public views.” All of that, on supposedly unattainable ‘foundationalist’ grounds.
For the sake of the argument, however, we can surely stipulate that a modern state should not be as tightly organized as an ancient polis, and that attempts to do so have resulted in tyranny, sometimes called ‘totalitarianism’ in an attempt to convey exactly this point. One rival to this is what Gutmann calls not the “family state” but “the state of families.” This means placing education in the hands of parents instead of the state, and among its distinguished defenders are Thomas Aquinas and John Locke. Gutmann denies that parents can “be counted upon to equip their children with the intellectual skills necessary for rational deliberation,” although it seems that that would depend upon the parents in question—their own character, the amount of time they have available to devote to teaching. It is more likely that some would, some wouldn’t. More tellingly, she observes that children are members of both their families and their political communities, and that there is moral and civic value in bringing them into a wider range of associations and of opinions than a household can furnish. “Children are not more the property of their parents than they are the property of the state,” which gives the political community a moral interest in their education. She judges the “assumption” that parents “have a natural right” to exclusive authority over their children as “unfounded”; nor does the state have such authority. [1]
Gutmann calls the third form of the modern state “the state of individuals” or liberalism. Liberalism mixes and attempts to balance the first two forms while aiming at a morally neutral education for children. John Stuart Mill, for example, proposed public education for “the poorer classes of children” and public exams for those privately educated, with fines imposed on parents whose children fail. The exams themselves would be “confined to facts and positive science exclusively,” leaving moral education to the parents and private schoolmasters. Gutmann quite sensibly finds this approach implausible, since “even the most liberal states are bound to subvert the neutrality principle: they will try, quite understandably, to teach children to appreciate the basic (but disputed) values and the dominant (but controversial) cultural prejudices that hold their society together.” The policy of establishing a class of professional educators, persons “unconstrained by parental or political authority,” in practice would only slant their lessons toward their own ‘values,’ likely including ‘professionalism.’ Liberals who argue that “neither parents nor the state may shape the character of children on the grounds that they can distinguish between better and worse moral character, yet they may shape children’s character for the sake of cultural coherence, or in order to maximize their future freedom of choice” merely achieve logical incoherence, inasmuch as “cultural coherence” and “freedom of choice” themselves require fostering a certain sort of character in children.
Very well then. “We disagree over the relative value of freedom and virtue, the nature of the good life, and the elements of moral character.” Yet we also intend to sustain “the practices and authorities to which we, acting collectively as a society, have consciously agreed”—that is, we have given our consent to living in a regime together. That regime is a democratic republic. It will therefore be both necessary and proper to cultivate in children “the kind of character conducive to democratic sovereignty.” Children should be educated with a view to sustaining that regime. Gutmann has already defined a particular kind of democracy that she advocates, namely, “deliberative democracy.” Education in her democracy must cultivate deliberation, reasoned discourse among citizens. Deliberative democracy will establish shared authority over education among parents, citizens generally, and professional educators—really a sort of ‘mixed regime,’ to stay with Aristotelian categories.
This will be an education in “civic virtue,” consisting of moral freedom and of “participation in the good of [students’] family and the politics of their society”—animated by the natural love of one’s own—yet also with the capacity for “critical deliberation” about the good. The authority of citizens (of the regime and of the state) will therefore have two principal limitations, limitations founded, respectively, upon the characteristic democratic principles of freedom and equality. These are non-repression (no use of education “to stifle rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society”) and non-discrimination (“all educable children must be educated”). Such a “democratic education is not neutral among conceptions of the good life, nor does its defense depend on a claim to neutrality,” supporting as it does “choice among those ways of life that are compatible with [the] conscious social reproduction” of the regime of democracy itself, democracy’s continuation over the generations.
On the level of “primary education,” by which Gutmann means elementary and high school education, she rejects the admonition of Noah Webster, based upon the natural-rights republican principles of the American Founding, that schools should reject teachers of “low-bred, drunken, immoral character.” “Citizens of a republic,” she intones, “must be free to disagree over what constitutes low-bred and immoral character,” although evidently not drunkenness or its ill effects on students taught by drunks, and on drunken students. She goes so far as to claim that “Webster’s prescription would require the establishment of an educational dictatorship.” It is rather more likely that it would require the establishment of democratically elected school boards charged with deliberating on the moral standards in question; if that is democratic despotism, we may need more of it. “How many, if any, thoroughly moral men and women have lived in even the best republics?” she asks, rhetorically. Well, “thoroughly” is an imposing word. We are all sinners in the hands of an angry God, are we not? But vulgarity, drunkenness, and immorality are not so difficult to ascertain. What Gutmann wants to avoid are standards of vulgarity and immorality that exist outside her favored regime of deliberative democracy. At the early grades of primary schooling, “precept and reasoning” won’t ‘take’ on students; education “must be by discipline and example,” as Webster was saying, but the discipline and example will derive from her regime, not from regimes like the City of God or the City in Speech, from divine or natural law.
“Quite apart from its political function, children will eventually need the capacity for rational deliberation to make hard choices in situations where habits and authorities do not supply clear or consistent guidance.” Such an education will teach children “to behave in accordance with authority”—the commands issued, and the examples set by parents and teachers—and, as they mature, “to think critically about authority.” This education will also “learn how to live a good life in the nonmoral sense by teaching them knowledge and appreciation” of such matters as literature, science, history, and sports—Mill’s supposedly ‘neutral’ topics. “Fortunately, the same education that helps children live a non-morally good life often aids in the development of good moral character”; the study of science and mathematics teaches logic; the study of literature teaches “interpretative skills”; literature and history teach “the understanding of differing ways of life”; and physical education can teach sportsmanship. All of these capacities contribute directly or indirectly to the practice of deliberation in democracy.
Gutmann wisely opposes the then-fashionable ‘values clarification’ approach to teaching morality. “The problem with values clarification is not that it is value-laden, but that is laden with the wrong values,” teaching “every moral opinion as equally worthy.” This encourages children in the false subjectivism that ‘I have my opinion and you have yours and who’s to say who’s right?’—a claim hardly conducive either to deliberation or to democracy, one that fails to “take the demands of democratic justice seriously,” one “too indiscriminate for even the most ardent democrat to embrace.” [2] Such “moral autonomy” cannot perpetuate any regime, even a democracy. A democracy will need to teach what Tocqueville calls the art of association, what Gutmann calls “the morality of association,” that is, “the willingness and ability to contribute and to claim one’s fair share in cooperative associations.” The democratic virtues can be taught, by bringing children of several religious and ethnic backgrounds “together from an early age in the same classrooms,” by “bringing all educable children up to a high minimum standard of learning,” by teaching American history “as lessons in the practice (sometimes successful, sometimes not) of political virtue, lessons that require students to develop and to exercise intellectually disciplined judgment.” Educators don’t know how to teach “the whole of virtue”—not all virtue can be taught in a classroom setting—but they can foster the virtues needed for citizens in a democracy. And, since democratic citizens have for the most part already consented to the regime of democracy, they can agree upon the principles needed for shared citizenship in that regime much more readily than they can agree upon religious or philosophic moral principles. The way in which such citizens will arrive at consensus on specific policies, the way of deliberative democracy, itself “has educational value” for parents and educators alike.
Parents, citizens, educators: “Which democratic community should determine what school policies” Who along with democratic communities should share control over what happens in public schools?” And should students themselves have any say in “shaping their own schooling”? Although Gutmann doesn’t treat ruling institutions formally, she does bring them in implicitly by considering relations among families, school boards, and professional teachers and school administrators. How shall this mixed-regime ‘democracy’ be mixed, with respect to rule over education?
To answer these questions, Gutmann imagines a school district as if it were a polis or a New England town. Such a political community will seek to perpetuate “shared beliefs and practices particular to this city-state” (such as speaking English and celebrating Thanksgiving) along with opinions and practices “essential to any democratic society.” The distinctive beliefs and practices can be maintained effectively by citizen-democratic rule over the schools. But Gutmann doubts that the second, universal set of practices, “which follow from the principles of non-repression and nondiscrimination and constrain democracy in its own name,” are likely to be upheld adequately by elected officials. That is, she doesn’t want elected school boards “to control what is taught within the classroom,” preferring to leave that to “the educational authority of teachers.” Teachers, she says, must not be forced “to profess doctrines inimical to their intellectual standards.” Indeed not, but why can they not be removed from their positions by democratically elected school boards in consultation with parents and administrators they hire? And if the answer is ‘tenure,’ then why should teachers told to teach doctrines inimical to their intellectual standards, quite likely including their ideological standards, not move to some more welcoming school district, or go into some other business altogether?
To this, Gutmann replies that in a large modern nation-state, citizens beyond the local community should have their own rightful and (always within limits) authoritative say in what is taught. Congress, for example, should be able to enact legislation upholding general educational standards those elected representatives deem needed to sustain the American regime. True, “federal and state control must not be all-encompassing, otherwise local democratic control over schools is rendered meaningless”; such extreme educational centralization would ignore “the more particular collective preference of face-to-face communities,” which large modern states cannot be. Gutmann endorses not only a democratic regime but a federal state. “At all levels of government, citizens have a legitimate interest in teaching children a civic culture; democratic politics is the proper means for shaping that culture; and primary schools are the proper institutions for teaching it.” Simple majoritarianism in democratic regimes of the sort Aristotle deplores in the Politics brings “political repression.” Federalism contributes to the refinement and enlargement of the public views in education as in other aspects of democratic life. [3]
But this avoids the question. What about the teachers? They are not democratically elected representatives of anyone. They constitute a sort of aristocracy within the democracy, a group that makes Gutmannian democracy an actual ‘mixed regime.’ She suggests “a division of labor between popular authority and expertise: democratic governments perpetuating a common culture, teachers cultivating the capacity for critical reflection on that culture,” shedding “critical light on a democratically created culture,” “uphold[ing] the principle of non-repression by cultivating the capacity for democratic deliberation.” It isn’t clear how this would be enforced, however: how teacher-ruled critical reflection or deliberation in the classroom would remain democratic. Why would teachers not seek to subvert democracy as Gutmann defines that regime? Why would they not seek to reinforce and extend their own authority by exerting influence upon the souls of their students? “Teachers must be sufficiently connected to their communities to understand the commitments that their students bring to school, and sufficiently detached to cultivate among their students the critical distance necessary to reconsider commitments in the face of conflicting ones.” Nice work, if you can find many people willing to do it.
As for student “participation” in school governance, Gutmann has little more than a cursory reference to the practices of John Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, a school Dewey ran for seven years at the turn of the last century. Even “the youngest students were given the daily responsibility of collectively distributing and carrying out important tasks,” although I for one would worry more about what the older students might get themselves up to do. This “embryonic democratic society” elicited “a commitment to learning and cultivated the prototypically democratic virtues among its students,” but “not because it treated them as the political or intellectual equals of its teachers,” one is relieved to learn. After all, “were students ready for citizenship, compulsory schooling—along with many other educational practices that deny students the same rights as citizens—would be unjustifiable.”
To give readers a better notion of what she means by limiting democratic authority with professional expertise, Gutmann looks at three policies that generate controversy in and around schools. They are books, civics, and sex.
On books, democratic majorities “may be acting within the range of legitimate discretion” in banning certain books from school libraries and school curricula; children are not yet fully citizens, and the right to free speech, extended to reading materials, does not extend to them as fully as it does to adults. As for the right of librarians and teachers to select books, Gutmann recommends “restructuring the process of textbook selection” by opening it to “citizen participation”; such participation, involving deliberation, would “open citizens to the merits of unpopular points of view.” “Restructuring the process rather than constraining its outcomes is likely to have the additional unintended advantage of furthering the education of adults, while they further the education of children”—adults that will include teachers, librarians, and administrators as well as ‘ordinary citizens.’
On civics, including the civics of the City of God seen in the controversy of teaching creationism as an alternative to evolutionism in public schools, Gutmann is more restrictive. In answer to the question, “Is it within the legitimate authority of a democratic community to insist that biology teachers give the theory of divine creation balanced treatment with the theory of evolution in their classrooms,” she answers with a firm ‘no.’ Biology is biology, not Bible study; as a science, biology has “standards of evidence and verification” that do not include Scriptural interpretation. Creationism “is believable only on the basis of a sectarian religious faith”; teaching it “is as out of place in a biology classroom as is teaching the Lord’s Prayer.” Science is secular, and to pretend otherwise is to violate the principle of non-repression, to inhibit scientific teaching and inquiry.
This does not mean that schools must “sacrifice a common moral education,” since moral principles do not necessarily depend upon divine revelation to win conviction. “Public schools can avoid even indirect repression and still foster what one might call a democratic civil religion: a set of secular beliefs, habits, and ways of thinking that support democratic deliberation and are compatible with a wide variety of religious commitments.” Here, she can endorse Noah Webster’s stance: that “every child in America should be acquainted with his own country,” taught to “lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor.” She still does not accept Webster’s natural-rights foundation for such knowledge and esteem, but she has no complaints about a reasoned patriotism, a love of one’s own open to criticism of one’s own with a view to improving it. The standard for improvement, however, for her remains citizen deliberation—dialectical reasoning among citizens, not ‘a priori’ principles held to be self-evident. She continues to champion the democratic regime instead of defending any one ‘ontological’ justification for that regime.
As for “sex education,” she denies schools the authority to impose it, as it “would be unwise…to lead parents to flee the public schools.” Rather, schools should offer parents the option of exempting their students from taking “such courses and rely upon the informal teachings of friends to educate those adolescents who are not themselves committed to their parents’ point of view.” After all, “one of the few things most of us have learned from experience is that adolescents learn more about sex form their friends than from their parents or teachers.”
What if conservative or, for that matter, any dissenting parents move to withdraw their students from public schools, anyway? And what if they choose to place them in schools for morally bad reasons? For example, some Christian fundamentalists (Gutmann unfortunately fails to say “some” or “a minority of”) claim that their schools should include no black students because, according to their absurd reading of Scripture, such racial discrimination is divinely ordained. Since “Christian fundamentalists are not just members of a church” but “citizens of our society,” a society that opposes racial discrimination in schools and elsewhere, and since “to exclude anyone from an education on racial grounds constitutes an injustice by our common standards,” state legislatures may require schools operated by such persons to integrate. However, “because the requirements of racial nondiscrimination and religious non-repression conflict in this case,” legislatures are not morally required to do so, by the standards of deliberative democracy. The problem with Gutmann’s argument is that non-white students are not being excluded from “an education” by private, religious schools, however bogus their rationale for doing so may be. They are being excluded from an education at a particular set of schools; a legislature might very well cut off public funding or other direct public support of such schools, but unless a school violates the natural or legal rights of persons actually ‘in’ the school—students, staff—it is hard to see any warrant to require them to integrate, at least on the grounds of “deliberative democracy.”
More generally, “If its main purpose is to develop democratic character, how should primary schooling be distributed?” Put another way, in terms of democracy, what is “equal educational opportunity”? Such matters as school funding and busing students to schools outside their neighborhoods for purposes of racial integration arise under framework. One answer has been “maximization”—devoting “as many resources to primary schooling as necessary, and distribut[ing] those resources, along with children themselves, in such a way as to maximize the life chances of all its future citizens.” Given the human tendency to define ‘I need’ as ‘I want,’ under this policy “the state could spend an endless amount on education to increase the life chances of children.” “Yet its resources are limited,” and it ‘needs’ to spend money on other things, as well.
A policy of “equalization” would require the state “to distribute educational resources so that the life chances of the least advantaged child are raised as far as possible toward those of the most advantaged.” Gutmann judges this feasible, if the inequalities ameliorated are limited to those which “deprive children of educational attainment adequate to participate in the political processes.” Otherwise, (for example) a school that spent extra money on a science program would be required to spend an equal amount of extra money on programs in all other parts of its curriculum, thereby running into the “maximization” dilemma.
“Meritocracy” is a third policy some schools implement—programs for ‘gifted and talented’ students, for example. This amounts to the reverse of “equalization,” and presents the mirror-image problem. Now, it isn’t that school districts will be financially overburdened with an array of ‘special’ programs but that “children with relatively few natural abilities and little inclination to learn” will receive the least resources and attention. Gutmann considers meritocratic policies acceptable only if schools allocate resources “above the threshold level.”
How to determine the “threshold level”? She offers two principles to guide educators. The “democratic authorization principle” grants to democratic institutions such as state legislatures “determine the priority of education relative to other social goods,” thus avoiding the dilemma of “maximization.” The “democratic threshold principle,” already stated, specifies “that inequalities in the distribution of educational goods can be justified if, but only if, they do not deprive any child of the ability to participate effectively in the democratic process.” Democratic institutions “still retain the discretionary authority to decide how much more education to provide above the threshold established by the second principle.”
In terms of financing the democratic threshold principle commits Gutmann to a substantial centralization of authority, inasmuch as local school districts do not enjoy equal available revenues. “More spending entails more taxing, and the tax base of local governments depends heavily on the location of businesses and affluent household, who can relocate—and often threaten to relocate—if school taxes become significantly higher than in other districts.” She judges that “the more practical—and democratically defensible—alternative is to make educational funding the primary responsibilities of states or the federal government.” Given the relative affluence of some U.S. states over others, this really means that the federal government would become the primary funders of schools, unless the Constitution were amended to permit the federal government to require richer states to send a portion of their tax revenues to poorer states. Given the obvious fact that funding always comes ‘with strings attached,’ and given the equally obvious fact that Congressional laws usually leave the details, in which the Devil lurks, to the federal bureaucracy, what centralization of school funding in the name of democracy would really mean is equalization under oligarchy. Gutmann sees this (how could she not?), conceding that “education may be best controlled and distributed locally.” Her compromise between democratic politics and egalitarian distribution of revenue by oligarchs is to limit federal funding and its oversight to “helping disadvantaged children reach the threshold.”
With respect to racial integration, she begins by remarking that “the perpetuation of any form of prejudice is a serious problem in a democracy because it blocks the development of mutual respect among citizens, but more serious still is the perpetuation of prejudice against an already disadvantaged minority,” such as American blacks. At the same time, she concedes that many desegregation policies, such as busing, do little to assuage racial prejudice. As a result, democratic institutions are likely to resist those policies, leaving their implementation to judges who, “by virtue of their greater insulation from popular pressure, are in a better practical position than legislators to enact desegregation.” The fact that this in effect makes judges legislators doesn’t seem to concern her; she likes separation of powers so long as one separated power can take over the constitutional function of another, as needed.
In summary: “the content of education should be reoriented toward teaching students the skills of democratic deliberation”; financing elementary and high schools should be centralized within the states; financing the education for the education of disadvantaged, including handicapped, children should be federalized. With that, she turns to considering higher education.
By the time a student reaches college or university, he should have learned “basic democratic virtues, such as toleration, truth-telling, and a predisposition to nonviolence” (it isn’t clear if she means pacifism or simply a disinclination to settle disputes with one’s fists or, nowadays, other weapons). “If adolescents have not developed these character traits by the time they reach college, is probably too late for professors to inculcate them,” she prudently observes. The university’s “primary democratic purpose” is the purpose Tocqueville proposed for aristocracies: “protection against the threat of democratic tyranny.” Universities can do this by serving as “sanctuaries of non-repression” wherein scholars’ academic freedom remains secure and the ‘academies’ themselves enjoy substantial freedom “against state regulation of educational policies.” Whereas the German universities, otherwise the models for many post-Civil War American universities, “were generally self-governing bodies of scholars who made administrative decisions either collegially or through democratically elected administrators, American universities (with few exceptions) are administrated by lay governing boards and administrators chosen by those boards.” In the American setting, academic freedom has meant freedom of professors from administrative authority. This has “made it easy for faculty to overlook their stake in defending their universities against state regulation, to overlook “freedom of the academy.” If, and only if, “taken together,” will these two kinds of freedom “help prevent a subtle but invidious form of majority tyranny”—regulation by state legislatures—without “substituting a less subtle and worse form of tyranny—that of the minority,” the school administrators—in its place.
As a matter of fact, by granting degrees needed to qualify for certain kinds of work, universities “serve as gatekeepers to many of the most valuable social offices, particularly in the professions.” That is, universities set the standards for other ‘aristocratic’ classes within the democratic regime. By what standards should universities proceed in this role? Gutmann questions the utility of utilitarian standards. “As long as they must look for measurable and commensurable values, universities that try to maximize the social value added of their students must take their signals from the job market.” There are indeed agencies that gather and publicize statistics on the earning power of each American college and university over a lifetime. But “if employers are racist or anti-Semitic, so will universities be in the guise of maximizing social utility.” At the same time, she wants to avoid the opposite view, whereby the university aspires to “the ideal of a community united solely by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,” which “may have made more sense where it first flourished,” in the slaveholding Athenian polis, where hard physical labor was imposed upon everyone but free men. This would exclude most citizens in America’s business-is-business commercial republic from universities; so many of us work for a living, even if we are not slaves.
As before, Gutmann’s deliberative democracy hearkens to the example of Aristotle’s mixed regime. “Is there, then, an ideal university community by democratic standards? Yes and no. To the extent that there is an ideal community, it is one whose members are dedicated to free scholarly inquiry and who share authority in a complex pattern that draws on the particular interests and competencies of administrators, faculty, students, and trustees.” Her term for this mixed regime is “principled pluralism,” which is clever of her.
How shall access to this mixed regime serving an aristocratic function within the deliberative democracy be distributed? What are the relevant standards for the admission of its temporary class of citizens, the students? Academic ability is the most obvious criterion, but the university should also seek “people who will use their knowledge to serve society well,” and that requires such moral virtues as “honestly, reliability, leadership, and a capacity to work well with others.” Character is harder to measure than test scores, but far from impossible, as she nicely puts it, “to discern.” That’s why admissions committees conduct interviews. Nonacademic qualifications for prospective students are licit, so long as they are “publicly defensible” by the standards of deliberative democracy, “related to the purposes to which the university is publicly dedicated,” and “related to associational purposes that are themselves consistent with the academic purposes that define a university as such”—that capacity to work well with others.
When addressing the question of admissions standards in recent decades, the issue of racial quotas and of “affirmative action” inevitably appear. Universities have long favored what amounts to affirmative action, if not quotas, on behalf of alumni children, athletes, and other non-academic categories. Why not affirmative action on behalf of racial minorities, too, especially if they have been excluded in the past, or if they still face obstacles to academic achievement in primary schools, obstacles such as poverty, ‘systemic racism,’ and so forth? Over time, she assures her readers, “as our society becomes more egalitarian and the experience of being black becomes less relevant to the educational and social purposes of universities, the case that members of admissions committees make for preferring black applicants over more academically qualified white applicants will become weaker.” She wants to keep all such policies within the universities operating under the principle of “freedom of the academy” from federal and state legislative command. Legislatures might demand that universities undertake to contribute to “reparations” for past slavery and present racism, but “universities are not the appropriate, or the most effective, agents of reparations.” She does rather like racial quotas in medical schools, since the less qualified M.D.s tend to go into the less lucrative, but more needed, field of general practice, and the medical schools have oversupplied American society with specialists. For this reason, while med schools should “avoid admitting black applicants whose academic qualifications” don’t make it likely that they will “do satisfactory work,” they “would still be free to prefer black applicants who are academically qualified over white applicants who are academically more qualified.”
In her 1999 Epilogue, Gutmann addresses multiculturalism, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism. Multiculturalism calls for toleration but more, “public recognition of cultural differences.” “To teach United States history largely without reference to the experiences of Native Americans, African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans…constitutes an intellectual failure to recognize the contributions of many different cultures—and the contributions of individuals who identify with those cultures—to United States history.” While doubtless true, to leave it at that would be to commit the intellectual failure of supposing that United States history, crucially inflected by the character of the regime founded in 1776, has been primarily the work of white men—for better and for worse, but mostly for better, as will be seen if one follows the Gutmann’s own recommendation to study other regimes and states in other countries. And indeed, Gutmann herself insists that “a multicultural history should not imply—let alone claim—that competing cultural beliefs and practices are equally valuable.” Being committed to deliberative democracy, she is no cultural relativist. “The actual practice of a relatively peaceful democratic politics, with all its flaws…tends to be more conducive to cultivating mutual respect than does the actual practice of world politics.”
To this she adds some entirely sensible cautionary paragraphs about any multiculturalism that attempts cosmopolitanism. Schooling lasts for a couple of decades, at most. That is “too short a timeframe in which to teach everything.” And to focus on “domestic history and politics” enables us to become citizens who pursue “justice, not only within but also beyond [our] country’s borders.” A moderate “republican patriotism”—the love of our country but also the love of its decent regime—can dampen the fires of nationalism.
It is in Gutmann’s ‘politics of recognition’ that the difficulties inherent in her eschewal of natural right show themselves. Deliberative democratic education takes nourishment from “a commitment to equal respect for persons,” for their “equal dignity and civic equality.” But a commitment is an act of will, not of reason. What makes human beings respectable? What gives them their dignity? If not nature or God, or both, what? When she writes that even “republican patriotism does not full respect the basic liberty of persons,” what is this if not a tacit admission that she needs something like a theory of natural right that endows persons with a moral claim to such a “basic liberty”?
In her “deliberative democracy,” Gutmann has constituted a sort of egalitarian Burkeanism, a Burkeanism of the ‘Left.’ As such, it surely towers above the current educational fevers, which are egalitarian without being either deliberative or democratic. Whether it can suffice to lower those fevers remains to be tested.
Notes
- Accordingly, Gutmann dislikes the ‘voucher’ system, whereby parents dissatisfied with the local public schools are permitted to use tax monies to pay for private education. She prefers to improve public schools. That would be a very good thing, although it is also a long-range thing, and parents cannot be expected to wait for public schools to improve during the decade-and-a-half it takes to bring a child through primary schooling. The competition might even spur bad schools to become better.
- See Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey: Our Culture ‘Left’ or ‘Right.’ Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.
- A variation of federalism might even be applied within schools themselves in order to counter bureaucratic sclerosis in the larger public schools. Gutmann endorses a policy outlined by Ernest Boyer, who would “organize large schools into several smaller ‘schools-within-a-school,'” a structure which would bring administrators closer to the teachers and students they minister to. This, she hopes, would “prevent educational bureaucracies from destroying professional autonomy while creating the potential for more local participation in the making of school policy.”
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