Some Basic Truths about Back to Basics.

School in America. It was a place of dirt floors, meager supplies, cold rooms, and tattered textbooks. And yet, for a few, it represented an evanescent moment of enlightenment in a life filled with work, sickness, and early death.

In many towns across the burgeoning nation, these citadels of learning--these one-room schoolhouses--simply did not exist. Damned from the pulpit and repudiated by politicians and parents, the concept of education was at best a marginal idea. While German Americans resented the effect learning had on otherwise hard-working farmers, the Amish militated against advanced schooling on religious grounds. Learning, for perhaps good reason, was considered inimical to citizenship, loyalty, and piety. Governor William Berkeley of Virginia may have best captured the essence of the mood in seventeenth-century America when he wrote: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, for learning hath brought disobedience and heresy into the world."

Much of the same, of course, can be said for schools in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. For the affluent, there were tutors, European schools, or inheritances. For the masses, there was religious inculcation and drafty, seedy schoolrooms, often populated with teachers of dubious character. Statistics during these times paint a lurid portrait of how draconian the era was. According to Otto Bettman's 1975 book, The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible, only 20 percent of the teachers in 1890 had high school diplomas, while "nine children out of six hundred attended school at all in New York's blighted Five Points area."

By the twentieth century, conditions were tolerable if one didn't mind rampant, unapologetic racism and religious dogma. According to English language scholar Arthur Applebee, The McGuffey Readers, which were the popular textbooks of the day, mirrored earlier prominent works in a dedication to Protestant ethics and simplistic notions of truth. In the early twentieth century, when John Dewey stepped to the fore and introduced the precepts of the student-centered progressive era, he was roundly vilified by experts for his betrayal of standards and tradition.

With all of this in mind, one might be a little surprised to hear people talk romantically about the good old days of education, the golden age of schools, or the back-to-basics movement. While such phrases elicit incredible support and the most visceral reactions, one wonders why anyone would want to revert to such an odious time.

Of course, as David Berliner and Bruce Biddle suggest in their extremely interesting 1995 book, The Manufactured Crisis, the impetus to get back to basics and deride present education might have more to do with power and money than sincere concern for educational quality. Indeed, it seems puzzling at best to see the same people who claim to be devoted to school improvement rarely supporting initiatives that would expand and enhance the quality of education. Equally curious is the academically unsupported claim that schools would be much better if they were more like businesses. Are these calls for legitimate change or simply a backdoor attack on an institution that no longer acts as an obedient appendage to religious coalitions and big business?

Fifty years ago, teachers in public schools prayed with their students, despite the clear violation of the First Amendment that it represented. Since the Supreme Court decision to separate state and religion and make prayer truly voluntary, coalitions of religious conservatives--from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority to Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition--have taken an acutely strong and militant stand against public schools. Is it simply a coincidence that the Republican Party--so indebted for political support from droves of born-again voters--has joined these people in calling for a return to "basics," which include prayer in school, creationism in science classes, and the promotion of Christian heritage?

Is the back-to-basics movement, and the vacuous nostalgia it seems to promote, really about improving schools by returning them to a better time or is it about destroying them so that religious conservatives can reclaim the power base they enjoyed generations ago? Before becoming too cynical, consider the following quotation from religious conservative Robert Thoburn in his 1986 book, The Children Trap:

   I imagine every Christian would agree that we need to remove the humanism
   from the public schools. There is only one way to accomplish this: to
   abolish the public schools. We need to get the government out of the
   education business. According to the Bible, education is a parental
   responsibility. It is not the place of the government to be running a
   school system.

For those of us who have long been perplexed by the lure of the back-to-basics movement, Thoburn's words help to crystallize and clarify. Indeed, what better way to subvert and unravel a system than by fabricating problems and conveniently offering your ideology as the solution? What more effective way to undermine an institution than to feign concern while cutting funds and creating villains out of the system's leaders?

Little doubt now remains that it is the Republican Party, working with various Christian conservatives, that aspires to dismantle public education and remake it as a religious institution. Why else would the party espouse a voucher system that drains money from public funds so as to fill the coffers of church-supported schools? For those of you who doubt the duplicitous motives of the back-to-basics movement, ask yourself the following questions: when conservatives speak of school reform, what solutions do they offer? Are they solutions for the present system or proposals to transform it both politically and ideologically?

A second issue involves the zealous support for competition that conservatives have embraced. What is perhaps most telling about these proposals is the total lack of scholarly support accompanying their contentions. Is a business more likely to generate a quality product because of its competition with other companies? Has McDonald's been forced to stop frying hamburgers because of competition with Burger King? Has public outrage over sleazy talk shows resulted in their elimination?

Linguistic research illustrates the efficacy of cooperative learning as an alternative to competition. Children, as they grow and sample their linguistic context, look to other children as partners in literary growth. They see the acquisition of language--whether it is through reading, writing, speaking, or listening--as a quintessentially social, collaborative affair. In these scenarios, other children are not the nemesis but the peer, the correspondent, the source of constructive interaction.

And yet, little is heard from the school critics on the scholarly evidence for competitive schools. Could it be, as Berliner and Biddle suggest, that the real motivation is to pander to big business and the money that could be made from its involvement with schools? Such an argument makes sense. With public schools being impugned at every turn, an opportunity is forged for private profiteers who see a vast treasure chest of potential in the school system. Isn't it a bit curious how little has been written about the failures of the private sector, such as Educational Alternatives Incorporated which failed to either raise test scores or reduce costs in the schools it managed in Baltimore, Maryland?

As one surveys the political terrain, more hidden agendas are unearthed. For many critics, especially conservatives like Thomas Sowell and George Will, the demise of the public school is related to the debate over canonical works, cultural literacy, and the maintenance of our traditional American pantheon. E. D. Hirsch, in particular, seems especially concerned about the loss of a common bank of facts that all share and celebrate. His popular books on what Americans should know at certain chronological times underscore a conservative goal to keep education in the grip of a top-down philosophy that embraces the works of people like them--white, educated, affluent, powerful, male --who supposedly carry in their works a message that is missing in the novels of other cultures and colors.

But then, if one is in power and if one's values are exulted as the standard by which all others should aspire, why would we be surprised to see a campaign to maintain the status quo and hide tawdry little truths about heroes? How often do our students hear the truth, for instance, about Columbus' genocidal adventures in the Americas? Because he was a Christian, his incredible savagery has been trivialized by Pat Robertson and others of his ilk. In his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen chronicles the fabrications that have insulated time-honored heroes from the justified charges of racism, avarice, and exploitation.

How many of us, for example, have heard about the unbridled greed of nineteenth-century robber barons? How important is the labor union's intrepid, lonely, heroic fight for equality to Hirsch, a man who claims to want to fill us with cultural literacy? How many of us ever read in a history book about Helen Keller's devotion to socialism as well as her animus toward capitalistic greed?

In a capitalistic nation, where much of academia is attacked for not promoting business values and religious devotion, the movement to get "back to basics" is simply a ruse, a rising tide of duplicity that threatens to wash over all of us.

Gregory Shafer is a professor of English at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan. He has previously published articles in English Journal, California English, and other academic publications.