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At the end of the Middle Ages, the homicide rate in the Western world is estimated to have been between 20 and 100 per 100,000 people per year. Over the course of the subsequent centuries, this rate gradually dropped to one per 100,000 by the beginning of the twentieth century. This trend continued through the first half of the twentieth century, paralleled by similar decreases in other forms of crime, but reversed beginning in the 1960s, only to begin declining again in the 1990s (Tonry, 2014). Numerous explanations have been offered for the general multicentury decline, and these will not be taken up here. Our focus, rather, will be on the reversal of the trend which began in the 1960s.
In 1965, the scientist Clair Patterson, famous for having made the most accurate calculation up to that point in history of the age of the Earth, published “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” which argued that humans were being exposed to enormous quantities of lead—which he knew to be a toxic chemical—as a result of its being used as an additive in various products, including gasoline. Lead is toxic to humans because the body mistakes it for calcium, resulting in interference with many of the body’s processes. Patterson discovered that lead levels found in modern humans were anywhere from 700-1200 times higher in modern humans than in pre-industrial humans (as measured in ancient Peruvian skeletons, Ericson et al., 1979). Patterson received severe pushback from the lead additive industry and from other scientists (some of whose research was funded by the industry), resulting in his being blacklisted from research opportunities (Reilly, 2017). But due in part to Patterson’s relentless efforts, the use of lead as an additive was gradually phased out, though it wasn’t until July of 2021 that Algeria used the final reserves (Domonoske, 2021).
Lead exposure in children can cause developmental delays or permanent intellectual disability. This lead some to consider whether there might be a causal relationship between the use of lead additives and the increase in crime rates beginning in the 1960s. Certainly, crime is a complex phenomenon which can never be reduced to a single cause, but is it possible that lead exposure was present and significant among all other causes during that period? A research survey conducted by the Brookings Institute in 2017 concluded that this was indeed the case (Doleac, 2017), and today I’ll be looking at what this says about the nature of America’s educational infrastructure, how this relates to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, what we might then guess about the near future, and what I think should be done about it. The short version is that this situation presents us with numerous contradictions which cannot be reconciled when any trust is vested in public education. And while I’ll be talking here about the specifics of American public education, these same principles apply always and everywhere.
The notion that the general public should have a general education is a modern one. In ancient Mesopotamia, education in writing had been reserved for the ruling class, the wealthy elite, the religious elite, and a class of scribes (Thomason, 2005), and similar situations remained the norm throughout most of history. As we’ll continue to see in this essay, the elite have reasons for minimizing the transmission of knowledge. In the archaic era, for the average person, what one needed to know consisted largely of skills that were acquired through family tradition and apprenticeships. In terms of propositional knowledge, there simply wasn’t much that the average person needed to know to function as a member of society.
That situation has changed substantially in the modern area, and I see two factors as being responsible: one is the political necessity of modern republican government that the citizens be educated so that they are able to effectively self-govern, and the other is the economic necessity that the citizens be educated so that they be able to navigate an enormously complex and technical economic environment. The former of those two factors—the political one—was a matter of central concern to many of the founding fathers. James Madison, for example, once remarked that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy” (quoted in Black, 2020, p. 54). Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, commenting on his line from the Declaration of Independence that governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed,” wrote that such consent is only possible given a sufficiently robust education (ibid., pp. 56-57).
We may view these two pressures—the political and the economic—naively or realistically. Naively, the modern situation warrants a robust education system emphasizing strong critical and creative thinking skills so that people may effectively self-govern and effect technical and economic progress for the good of all. Realistically, there are other considerations which largely nullify the naive ones. America is not a direct democracy but rather a representative democratic republic: we do not self-govern directly but rather elect representatives who ostensibly represent our interests. We vest power in these representatives, and it is in their interests both that they be allowed to do what they will with their power and that the public trust them with this power. These two things in combination incentivize the establishment of an electorate lacking strong critical thinking skills. This was well known to the Black populace of the antebellum and Reconstruction South, who, as law professor Derek W. Black writes in his 2020 book Schoolhouse Burning, saw education as being a central matter to their liberation and escape from oppression (pp. 71-72). This was also well known to the white slaveowners of the antebellum period and to the anti-Reconstruction racists who fought to perpetuate the conditions of slavery in the absence of the institution itself, in part through legal frameworks designed to prevent Black people from accessing education (ibid., ch. 6; Hunter, 1997). Textbooks framing slavery as having been beneficial to those enslaved were used in Alabama public schools into the 1970s (Morris, 2020).
It would be incredibly naïve to think that a state willing to use education as a tool of racist oppression would not also do so for reasons unrelated (at least superficially) to race. It is, for example, in the interests of the owners of capital that people not be aware that they are being exploited for their labor due to their lack of control over the means of production. Virtuous government representatives would work to counter this, but with a sufficiently ignorant populace, they can collaborate with industry to keep labor in servitude. But modern industry still requires a certain degree of knowledge and technical skill on the part of labor, as well as a tolerance for dull, repetitive, and often completely pointless work, and this requires a similarly dull, repetitive, and often completely pointless education emphasizing factual knowledge and technical procedure over critical and creative thinking.
If we were to evaluate the present American education system according to the naïve interpretation, we would say that it is failing miserably. If, however, we evaluate it according to the realist interpretation, we find that we could hardly imagine a system more effective at accomplishing its true goals. At least, that’s the case when the general situation is a nominal one. The lead poisoning crisis of the 20th century introduced pressures which revealed the underlying structural cracks in the education-industrial complex, and the present COVID-19 pandemic is doing the same and will continue to have rippling effects for decades to come.
Given the function of this education system as an integral component of the American political and economic systems, we can consider what happens to those whom the system rejects. If one is unwilling or unable to comply with the standards and norms enforced by the system, they are rejected by the total economic apparatus of American society. Most American jobs require that the applicant have either a high school diploma or a certification of equivalent training, which one can get by passing certain standardized tests. Absent these certifications, one’s prospects in American society are limited. One who is, as a result of lead exposure, more prone to criminal behavior, would likely turn in that direction as a means to the money necessary for food and shelter, but we can imagine one rejected by the system for other reasons doing the same if no alternatives were available.
The ongoing pandemic has substantially disrupted education systems worldwide. Many children spent the better part of a year meeting with their classes virtually using online meeting platforms. Continuing my work as a math tutor during this time, I also met with my students virtually, and found it exponentially more difficult than teaching in person. A good teacher can hold students’ attention just with their physical presence; over the internet, this is impossible. The students learned little from me and I could tell they were getting less than that from their classes. Once in-person classes resumed, students frequently missed weeks of classes due to infection by the virus, whose possible long-term cognitive effects are still being studied. Many older students have told me about feelings of demoralization and depression. To them, it is now perfectly evident that the education system through which they are being forced does not value their lives or their humanity; only their labor. Parents, stuck at home with no means of escape from their children, became frustrated, depressed, and demoralized as well, leading to strained home situations which further exacerbated students’ emotional and educational difficulties.
It seems likely that, over the next several decades, the economic state apparatus will reject an unprecedented number of people who are unable to meet its demands as a result of the various disruptions created by the COVID-19 pandemic (and those in addition to the fact that toxic lead exposure is still a problem in poorer communities, such as in Flint, Michigan). The general effect of this on society will depend on the state reaction to this crisis, so we must ask what the state’s obligations are in that regard.
Opposition to any welfare-state efforts to mitigate the effects of this crisis will likely come from the right-libertarian camp, which argues against anything beyond a minimal security state on the basis of the non-aggression principle, which states that it is wrong to use or threaten force against another except as a matter of defense. Thus, the state, under this argument, has no role except the protection of individuals from harm and deprivation of or harm to their private property, as anything beyond that require that the state exert its will over the people on the basis of its capacity for force.
My main concern with libertarianism is not so much that the arguments are fundamentally flawed, though certainly plenty of bad arguments for libertarianism have been put forth over the years, but that libertarians typically fail to think these arguments through to their necessary conclusions.
Suppose we agree with the early founders of libertarian thought, such as John Locke, that the state is a dangerous thing because of its tendency to grow and appropriate power for itself, and so that it must be strictly limited, but also that it is necessary for purposes of security, and so that it cannot be eliminated entirely. These principles can be found in classic works of libertarian thought, such as Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (in which they are predicated on the principle of natural law, which was central to the foundation of the United States), and also in more modern works, such as The Libertarian Mind by David Boaz (2015), which I’ve found to be the most widely-recommended book on the subject of libertarian philosophy.
Were one to ask a libertarian whether the state has a role in ensuring that the people are well-educated or properly fed, the answer will invariably be that this is not the role of the state but of individuals within civil society and of the private sector. The state exists, they will say, to protect people from the use of force by malicious individuals or foreign states. “Governments should exist to protect rights,” Boaz says, “to protect us from others who might use force against us. For most libertarians, that means police to prevent crime and arrest criminals, courts to settle disputes and punish wrongdoers, and national defense against external threats” (2015, ch. 1).
Very well. Now, suppose that there occurs a catastrophic market failure and that millions of Americans are at risk of starvation. Or suppose that there is a failure of the education system, such as I’ve discussed here, and that millions have been rejected by the economic state apparatus and are now unemployed and risk starvation because of this. The libertarian will argue that, regardless of how tragic this may be, this wrong cannot be ameliorated by the additional wrong of the state appropriating the wealth of businesses or private citizens, which would be necessary for the state to feed the starving multitude. It’s a very Kantian argument, one consistent with the central libertarian principles and not necessarily presented out of simple callousness. Rather, the argument is predicated on the basic wrongness of taking what belongs to others without their permission, even if what is taken is used to effect some greater good. Many strong, reasonable arguments can be put forth that this principle is both wise and morally just.
But for the starving, whether or not they’re starving justly is of little or no concern. The assumption on the part of the libertarian argument seems to be that they’ll just find somewhere out of the way to lay down and die, but the reality is that starvation has a potent psychological effect. As one starves, the body’s need for food gradually overwhelms all of the body’s other drives and instincts, including moral inhibitions. A person without food for a sufficient period of time will not refrain from stealing or killing if doing so means that they will be able to eat. Whether they would be morally justified in stealing or killing in order to survive is simply beside the point: regardless of moral arguments for or against such behavior, that is how people will behave under such conditions, and the historical records of the Russian famine of 1921-1922 and other historical famines attest to this.
And so, given sufficient numbers, starvation indirectly creates a substantial security risk which, according to the libertarian argument, the state must answer. If we are agreed that the only just role of the state is security, then we are agreed that the state must do something about the security threat generated by mass starvation. In Boaz’s presentation of libertarianism, the proper state response to crime is “police to prevent crime and arrest criminals” and “courts to… punish wrongdoers,” but the massive increase in crime created by mass starvation will require a comparably massive police state. Such a police state would be expensive, unavoidably oppressive even to law-abiding citizens, and would address the crime situation largely ex post facto, capturing and punishing criminals after they had committed crimes and largely unable to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place without the additional presence of a totalitarian surveillance state.
None of this seems in keeping with libertarian ideals, values, or principles. The alternative, then, is to prevent such a situation from arising in the first place by assigning to the state responsibilities which indirectly support its central security objective. We may agree (not that I actually do) that the “first line of defense” in terms of providing people with food, shelter, and education should be the free market, but we’re forced unavoidably to the conclusion that the state must provide those things should all else fail.
Healthy libertarianism thus necessarily leads to a model of distributive justice more in keeping with the ideals of socialism. Ideally, though, we would have a system of education more in keeping with our naïve assumptions from earlier, one which fosters a well-educated polis with strong critical and creative thinking skills. But there’s a reason I labeled such assumptions as naïve: as we’ve seen, there are myriad forces working against this, so it won’t happen on its own. In fact, as I’ll argue presently, it cannot happen on its own. This is apparent when we examine the cultural frame within which the educational curriculum is presented.
American multiculturalism poses a significant and intractable challenge to the education system. There is simply not enough room in the curriculum to include everything that is of value to every culture which might conceivably be represented in the student body. There are two possible approaches to this. The first is to follow the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1994) and recognize that, while all cultures have worth and are worthy of recognition and respect, they cannot be all equally valued because value judgements are a part of culture. There is then necessarily a dominant culture which must ultimately be made the focus of the curriculum and upon whose values the curriculum must be based.
The other approach would be to attempt to neutralize and deculturalize the curriculum entirely, to detach facts from the contexts of their discovery so as to present what humanity knows in a universal and culturally-neutral way, and to avoid value judgements or any points of cultural controversy. This being the approach actually implemented by the system, American public education has become very much like the music one is likely to hear played over the intercom at supermarkets: bland and inoffensive, drained of meaning and cultural value, just another tool of the economic state apparatus, a kind of mental Novocain, a weak numbing agent against the alienation of the marketplace and against the presence of any real difference or alterity within society.
One might rightly raise some concerns with the first approach, the recognition and endorsement by the curriculum of a dominant culture. The thing is, it is the very nature of that approach which allows for those concerns to be raised in the first place. The reality is that a dominant cultural viewpoint will be present in the curriculum regardless of whether it is acknowledged; that’s the necessary consequence of the designers of the curricula being raised within a particular culture themselves. Attempting to make that viewpoint invisible only serves to remove the context in which that viewpoint can be challenged. It gives the socially-constructed world of a particular culture the appearance of a universal objectivity—“just the way things are”—which precludes its being challenged in any way. The values of the dominant culture are thereby assumed universal, erasing the very fact that different cultures have different values, which effects the erasure of the cultures themselves.
Why is it that almost all of the world’s theocratic states are part of the Islamic world? Our two approaches to education answer this question in two different ways. The answer of the first approach is to say that the West and the Islamic world have different cultural values owing, in part, to their different histories. These values can then be evaluated, compared, and contrasted. But the second approach creates the appearance that all of the cultures of the world have equal access to universal human values (in fact, only culturally-neutered versions of the values of the West), and if a people then fails to establish these values in their political institutions, then there must be something wrong with the people. Similarly, countercultural and protest movements are, under the dominant culture narrative, critiques of that culture, which is what they are intended to be in the first place. But under the neutral narrative, such movements appear irrational and unreasonable, not values contra values which can then be considered on their relative merits but rather a protest against the natural order of things, against value itself.
Scientific empiricism is part of a particular cultural tradition, young earth creationism part of another. The claims of the latter cannot be evaluated according to the values of the former; if young earth creationists accepted those values, they would not hold to those claims in the first place. Are we to hold them beside each other as equals on a neutral playing field, as if they had equal merit? They do not have equal merit, and I say this from a cultural standpoint which values knowledge gained through empirical methods over claims to knowledge predicated on religious tradition. “Ah!” one protests, “but the primacy of technical rationality within your culture is exactly what has lead to the rationalization of education that you’re complaining about in the first place!”
Yes, I agree with that, and that criticism, as well as my assent to it, are predicated on my having acknowledged my cultural standpoint in the first place. Absent that, neither of us has any ground to stand on. I’d have to say that I believe in the old earth hypothesis, and others believe in the young earth hypothesis, and that’s simply all there is to it. The problem that the criticism was addressing is still fully present but is now invisible.
For the purposes of state-run education, this means that the state must make a clear and decisive stand against the beliefs of a substantial sector of the electorate (probably about 10% in the U.S. [Rosenau, 2013], keeping in mind the additional consideration that they’re not evenly distributed across the country). And while I’m sure my audience largely supports public education taking this particular stand, there are other stands it might make that my audience would rightly be very uncomfortable with or indignant at. Remember that the government has been entirely willing to take an educational stand against Black liberation, and they’ve done so not by simply stating outright what they truly believe (which would be preferable, though still abhorrent), but by making equivocating claims—the equivalent of President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” quip regarding anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville and the literal neo-Nazis they were protesting against—which disguise that the state is taking any particular stand at all.
My conclusion from this argument is that public education should openly claim and promote a cultural standpoint, as this is better than the alternative of having such a standpoint anyway but rendering it invisible, but it would be unacceptable for me to leave it at that. This conclusion merely shines a spotlight on the underlying issue. There’s simply no way around it: the state cannot be relied on to educate its people out of its own beneficence. Even if we put aside the fundamental conflicts of interest that public education presents, it remains the case that the state must educate from a particular cultural standpoint, which is problematic, or else render such a standpoint invisible, which is worse.
And at the state level, governments are indeed choosing the latter option. Oklahoma House Bill 1775, which passed last year as emergency legislation, prohibits institutions of public education from teaching about the ways in which racism exists structurally in American society. The cultural standpoint of the state—that institutions of American racism have been extinguished; that, beyond these institutions, racism has only ever been a problem with regards to individual people who are racist; and that a legal and political structure built over several centuries almost exclusively by white racists is itself entirely neutral—is not explicitly being taught in Oklahoma schools. As I said, that would actually be the preferable situation. That is their standpoint, after all, and I’d rather they just get it out in the open. But rather than having the courage of their convictions and expressly teaching what it is they actually believe, they just make it illegal for anyone to teach the opposite.
This standpoint is visible as well in Florida House Bill 1557, which was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis the day I had originally planned to record this episode. The bill is officially titled “Parental Rights in Education.” Supporters of the bill (such as DeSantis) refer to it as the “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” while opponents have referred to it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Full discussion of this bill warrants an episode in itself. For our purposes today, there are two aspects of the bill to which I’ll draw your attention. The first is the degree to which the actual text of the bill is void of any content of determinate meaning. It’s as vague as it is short. Section 1 reads
In accordance with the rights of parents enumerated in [state statutes] 1002.20 and 1014.04, adopt procedures for notifying a student’s parent if there is a change in the student’s services or monitoring related to the student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being and the school’s ability to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for the student.
Parental Rights in Education, 2022
State statute 1002.20 includes general provisions for public education, and on a quick read I didn’t find anything unusual or surprising. State statute 1014.04 specifically enumerates the rights of parents in the upbringing of their children, and includes “[t]he right to direct the education and care of his or her minor child” and “[t]he right to direct the upbringing and the moral or religious training of his or her minor child” (Chapter 1014 – 2021 Florida Statutes – The Florida Senate, n.d.). I don’t know how that language compares to similar statutes in other states.
Section 3 of HB 1557 states: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards” (Parental Rights in Education, 2022). “Sexual orientation” and “gender identity”—notoriously difficult terms to define even among feminists and gender theorists—are given no definition whatsoever in the bill, either implicit or explicit. Given the vague language of the bill, who’s to say that even just mentioning that gay people exist isn’t age inappropriate? Given the political demographics of Florida, I’m guessing that many Florida parents believe exactly that.
“But that’s completely unreasonable!” you might say. “Obviously just mentioning the existence of gay people isn’t age inappropriate, so that should still be fine in the classroom under this law regardless of what parents think.” Ah, but remember the language of state statute 1014.04, “[t]he right [of the parent] to direct the upbringing and the moral or religious training of his or her minor child.” And all of this comes together in HB 1557 section 7(b), which allows parents to bring legal action against a school district if they raise concerns to the district about their children’s education which they feel the district has not properly addressed.
The total message presented by this legislation is then: “There are certain things you can’t teach in Florida public schools. We’re not going to tell you what those things are exactly, but they can’t conflict with the parent’s right to direct their children’s moral and religious upbringing, and if you do teach them, the parents can sue.” Obviously the state’s intention here is LGBTQ erasure, but again, rather than just coming out and saying that, they’re making it dangerous to teach the basic fact that gay, trans, and queer people exist.
What is necessary, then—and what has always been necessary historically—is that the people fight for their education. If the state fails to present its cultural standpoint, that standpoint must be exposed. If the state presents its cultural standpoint, that standpoint must be challenged.
Furthermore, it is unacceptable that acceptance into the economic state apparatus, which provides for all human needs and for which no alternative exists to provide for those needs, be predicated upon procedural compliance with a technical and ideological indoctrination. Let’s turn back to James Madison, who seemed entirely prescient in his prediction of the tragic farce that American society would become in the absence of robust education, and who wrote that “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge… is the only guardian of true liberty” (2013). Suppose we went back and time and informed him that the system he envisioned for educating the sovereign electorate of the nation he founded had been neutered of its meaning, made a collection of technical and procedural requirements to which one must adhere under penalty of impoverishment or starvation. Remarkably, Madison is valorized by the very institution he would have repudiated; any institution of learning worthy of his comments on the subjects would not speak so highly of him in the first place and likely would be setting students out into the streets to tear down the statues of this slave-owner. There’s the contradiction I’d see taught in the classroom: that the proper legacy of the founding fathers’ highest aspirations for this nation is at the same time their own disgrace. Carry the thought of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton through to their conclusions and they’d have their own statues torn down. Sic semper tyrannis.
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Works Cited or Referenced
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Chapter 1002 Section 20—2018 Florida Statutes—The Florida Senate. (n.d.). Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2018/1002.20
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