The odd malaise of democratic education: Horace Mann, Amy Gutmann and the inordinate influence of business

Abstract

This article is the third of three on “Sources of Authority in Education.” All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of education reform in the US and the business-influenced Global Education Reform Movement. The other two are “Negating Amy Gutmann: Deliberative Democracy, Business Influence and Segmentation Strategies in Education” and “Neoliberalism and Four Spheres of Authority in American Education: Business, Class, Stratification and Intimations of Marketization.” All three are intended to be included together as chapters of my Democratic Education and Markets: Segmentation, Privatization and Sources of Authority in Education Reform. The “Negating Amy Gutmann” article looks primarily at deliberative democracy. The “Neoliberalism and Four Spheres of Authority” article, considers its main theme to be the promise of egalitarian democracy and how figures ‘such as Horace Mann, John Dewey and Gutmann’ have argued it is largely based on the promise of public education. It thus begins with a consideration of what might be called a partial historical materialist analysis – the growth of inequality in the US (and other countries) since the 1970s that correlates with much of the basis for changes in the justifications and substance of education reform. The present article, “The Odd Malaise of Democratic Education and the Inordinate Influence of Business,” continues the argument by offering some historical background and comparisons and ends by considering what happens to the philosophy of education when democracy and capitalism are at odds. It thus starts with recent history, looking at how the content and context of educational policy have changed in the US since Gutmann wrote in the 1980s. Specifically, it concerns itself with the increasing prevalence of twin notions: that our system of education must be reformed because of global competition and that the educational system should emulate the market. The article then goes back a little bit further, to the origins of the common school in the 1600s and Horace Mann’s articulation of the principles behind public education, which are shown to be in stark contrast to Education Reform. The narrative describes how the standards movement, variously, coalesced around George H. W. Bush’s America 2000 and Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000 programs, was reflected in a ‘21st-century schools’ discourse, found programmatic form in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and it’s offspring, Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. All of the preceding were, to a shocking degree, based on misleading and selective statistical analysis and sets goals that are unreachable even in the best of all possible worlds. The article concludes by considering paradigm change in education and its causes; I draw on both Peter Hall’s exposition of social learning 1 and Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony. 2