Near the end of her terrific new book, Agustina Paglayan notes that Donald Trump responded to the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations by convening a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.” Republican state legislators took up his call, passing measures that barred instruction about racism and other “divisive concepts.” To Paglayan, a political scientist, these actions reflect a broader trend: whenever elites are threatened by mass protest, they turn to public education to shore up their own power. In authoritarian regimes, schools teach unquestioned fealty to the state; in democracies, they teach us to channel dissent through voting, not violence. But their purpose remains the same as it ever was: to ensure that citizens obey their rulers.
But aren’t some mass protests simply illegitimate, not because they undermine rulers but rather the rules we all need to live alongside each other?
by Agustina S. Paglayan
Princeton University Press, 2024, $32; 384 pages
I’m thinking of the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, of course, and the larger effort by Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Paglayan is right: the founders of modern school systems feared popular revolt, and they imagined education as a defense against it. But they also worried about the rise of tyrants, who would destroy the rule of law and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. To Paglayan, all disorder is created equal; she doesn’t distinguish between protest on behalf of democracy and protest that seeks to undermine it. Yet surely they’re different phenomena, with different implications for education.
Like Paglayan, I think schools should teach young people to question their government instead of awarding it automatic allegiance. But unless our citizens agree to a set of ground rules for conducting that inquiry, we can’t have inquiry—or democracy—at all. Despite everything that has happened in America to erode democratic norms, Paglayan doesn’t seem worried about them.
Nor does she make it clear who qualifies as an “elite” pulling the strings of education, or how we know what is motivating them. Trump cast his Make America Great Again movement in anti-elitist terms, promising to free the country from courts, newspapers, and academics who had allegedly imposed a decadent cultural order on the virtuous masses. Contrary to Paglayan’s claim, his 1776 Commission was a direct response not to the BLM protests but to the 1619 Project, an effort by the New York Times—and the decidedly left-wing authors it enlisted—to root American history in racism and Native American removal rather than in freedom and liberty. Likewise, the state legislators who banned “divisive concepts”—and, in several states, the 1619 Project itself—thought they were reclaiming public education from elites who had captured it. I think they radically misrepresented what happens in American schools—which are hardly the cauldrons of wokeism that many Republicans imagine—and I detest their restrictive measures, which threaten to muzzle precisely the conversations our students need. Perhaps Paglayan would reply that supporters of these laws believed their own power was endangered, which is all that matters. But it’s still hard for me to see these legislators as imperiled elites, especially when their rhetoric explicitly challenged elites—and when the peril they invoked was mostly illusory.
That said, Paglayan’s book is a tour de force. It takes a lot of work—and even more courage—to challenge the dominant theories in your field, especially as a junior scholar. That’s precisely what Paglayan has done. Analyzing an astonishing array of sources from Europe and the Americas, notably enrollment statistics and legislative minutes, Paglayan shows that state school systems typically arose in the wake of civil conflict. Most other scholars have linked public schools to the rise of democracy, or to the industrial revolution, or to military campaigns between different nations. But the vast majority of school systems predated democratization and industrialization, as Paglayan shows, and they more commonly flourished to suppress dissent at home than to rally people against a foreign enemy. That’s why they assumed such a stark moral tone, promising to “discipline” and “civilize” the unruly masses. The primary goal of public education was never to teach “skills,” which—to Paglayan—helps explain why schools have such a poor track record in improving literacy and numeracy, especially in the developing world. The purpose of state schools was to school people into obeying the state, not to make them into independently minded people who might question it.
Why would the masses willingly patronize an institution designed to control them? True, many working-class families in Europe and the Americas resisted public schools and placed their children in the workforce instead. But others embraced education as a route to individual mobility and even to social justice. As Paglayan correctly notes, the founders of the common school system in the United States argued that education would prevent “vice” by “dangerous” people, especially African Americans and the poor. But she doesn’t mention that many of these same people eagerly embraced schools because they believed education would improve their own circumstances and create a more equitable and humane society for all. Many of the great American social justice warriors—think Frederick Douglass, Eugene V. Debs, or Jane Addams—were also tireless advocates for public schools. Were they simply seduced by the siren song of education, which could never deliver on its promises?
