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WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE SCHOOLEdgar Z. Friedenberg aa Dalhousie UniversityPublished online: 09 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Edgar Z. Friedenberg (1975) WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE SCHOOL, The Review of Education, 1:1, 17-24,DOI: 10.1080/0098559750010104

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FRIEDENBERG: Why Don't We Do It In The School! / 17

thing envisioned in the conventional wisdom," and he advocates that "toturn such potential into realities is the function of the whole society aswell as of the whole school" (Hippie, p. 212). (This, as Robert Hutchinsreminded us in The Learning Society (New York, 1968), was the ideal ofthe Greek Paidea—a culture whose institutions were dedicated to learningand fulfillment of the human potentiality, with the core of the curriculumbeing "the Search for the Divine Center.") Thus Wilhelms urges a curricu-lum in which criteria of purpose replace criteria of content. "Two purpos-es seem to me to stand out as so imperative in our crisis that I am willingto sacrifice to them whatever must be sacrificed of cherished academicembellishments: To go straight to the great social problems of our day,and equip each young person to help solve them and take our society to anew ground. To go straight to the full potentiation of each young person,helping him as much as we can in his own personal becoming. All the restis ancillary" (Hippie, p. 228).

Hippie, Allen, Broudy^ Frymeier, and Havighurst strike similar notes.And so in spite of the foreseen frustrations, disruptions, and despairs of atransition period, we end on an upbeat note. The future of education in-volves the future as curriculum, with parallel emphases dn the actualiza-tion of individual potentialities and on the creation of the humane society.There is a time of troubles just ahead, and there is also an exhilaratingchallenge; realism is to see both clearly.

WHY DON'T WE DO ITIN THE SCHOOL!

Edgar Z. FriedenbergDalhousie University.

Charles A. Tesconi, Jr., and Emanuel Hurwitz, Jr., eds. Education forWhom? The Question of Equal Educational Opportunity. New York:Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974. be + 230 pp. Bibliography. $4.95 (paper).

Andrew T. Kopan and Herbert J. Walberg, eds. Rethinking EducationalEquality. Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 1974. xvi +162 pp. Charts and bibliography. $9.25.

Both these books are informative and useful; astonishingly useful in afield one might have supposed tilled to exhaustion in recent years. Thereis not much new information in either of them, but "equality in educa-tion" is a topic that continues to afford opportunities for more extendedanalysis as the social context in which it is examined changes. Like the

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life of Napoleon or the means by which people become president of theUnited States, the meaning of what one knows changes long after there isno more to be learned.

"Equality in education" reached its peak ideological intensity fortyyears ago in the work of people such as George S. Counts, William HeardKilpatrick, and Robert J. Havighurst—who contributes to RethinkingEducational Equality a critique of Jencks' et al. on Inequality (New York,1972)—and its most plangent juridical triumph twenty years ago inBrown v. Topeka Board of Education. Two major social trends continueto infuse a stream of new life into discussions of this topic. The first ofthese, with which both books under review are concerned, has been arecent loss of faith in the appropriateness of the school as an instrumentfor achieving equality of economic opportunity. This growing skepticismabout the role of the school has both contemporary and historical sources.It is rooted in the findings of scholars like Jencks et al. that schooling con-tributes comparatively little to statistically observable variance in subse-quent economic achievement; and of revisionist historians such as MichaelKatz, Clarence Karier, and Joel Spring that during the late nineteenth cen-tury when the schools were presumably establishing themselves in theirtraditional role as the "immigrant's friend," they were in fact functioningto meet the needs of industry by training the poor to serve as an industrialproletariat. Early defenders of the vision of a public school system such asHorace Mann would have seen no contradiction in this and no embarrass-ment in the revisionists' findings: this was economic opportunity. And thethrongs of immigrants who continued to arrive until cut off by restrictivelegislation designed to protect the economic opportunity of the nativelabor force from the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretchedrefuse of Europe, Asia, and the Rio Grande's teeming shores, apparentlyagreed, or at least accepted this rather patronizing designation of them-selves inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Today, however, inview of the drastic decline of the WASP, we are inclined to see such mattersdifferently, at some expense to the charisma of the public schools as in-strument of democratic polity.

The second trend has been the development of a certain strain in theconcept of equality itself. As suggested by the title of another recent workin this field, The New Assault on Equality (New York, 1974), edited byAlan Gartner, Frank Riessman, and Colin Greer, there has recentlyappeared a body of work that those concerned with the maintenance andexpansion of equality of educational opportunity interpret as an attackupon it; though its authors—men like Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein,and Christopher Jencks—deny any such intent, and Jencks has establishedcredentials as a social progressive. This trend is less clearly reflected inthe works under review. Education for Whom? does, indeed, include alucid and very helpful essay by Jencks and Mary Jo Bane, coauthors ofInequality, in which the principal and by now familiar arguments and

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FRIEDENBERG: Why Don't We Do It In The School! / 19

conclusions of that work are summarized. But since Jencks has never, infact, raised a finger against equality, this essay does little to illustrate whatthe sense of strain is about, and neither book considers the possibility thatequality of opportunity itself is a public issue debatable in terms morecomplex than the continuing struggle of the forces of progress and enlight-enment against reaction and intrenched privilege. Yet, as the course of hu-man events grinds on and produces the stuff of history, equality of oppor-tunity does come into question along with every other position once heldsacred, and the problems it raises cannot be dismissed by cries of "assault!"In their appropriate time and place there may well have been booksentitled "The New Assault on Monarchy" or "The Principle of Empire" or"The Hegemony of the Established Church," all once generally acceptedas largely unquestioned goods and defended against attacks, real or pre-sumed, with a vigor sometimes fatal to their putative assailants.

Books published in 1974 devoted to "The Question of Equal Educa-tional Opportunity" (the subtitle of Education for Whom?) ought, I think,to deal with this as a real question of ends as well as means. Neither ofthese does in any depth, though the last chapter of Education for Whom?does include an introductory sentence asserting, "Now, however, we turnfrom what is to opinions on what should be." None of the opinions cited,however, represents what middle-class whites, and blacks, seem to betrying to tell us scholars by moving to the suburbs; and they, too, arecitizens—not just a social problem. The closest any contributer to eitherof these books comes to acknowledging that the issue exists is a section ofthis same chapter, William T. Blackstone's "Human Rights, Equality, andEducation," that concludes an abstract and rather tortuous argument byasserting that "some persons, finding undesirable the kind of society madepossible by the wholesale endorsement of human rights and equality,would be unconvinced by this type of argument. That is the weakness ofany pragmatic argument, but it may well be all we have." It isn't, ofcourse. We have also the means, and the obligation, to reexamine the ethi-cal premises of our society from time to time in the light of the institu-tions generated by these premises. No contributor to either of these booksdoes this.

Of the two, Education for Whom? seems to me the more satisfactorybook, because it is so clear and explicit about what it is meant to be,and it succeeds admirably in its purpose. It is a college textbook; about athird is introductory material prepared by its editors, while the rest con-sists of selected readings—thirteen of them, grouped into two chapterscalled, not very informatively, "Perspectives on Equal Educational Oppor-tunity" and "The Continuing Quest for Equality: Projections of a Recur-ring Controversy." As these rather banal chapter headings indicate, theintellectual framework of the book is quite undistinguished, and the read-ing selections are, for the most part, competent but not strikingly original.

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The names one might expect to find represented, such as Thomas Greenand James Coleman, are there; so, to the book's credit, is Samuel Bowles,whose radical critique leads him to much the same conclusion as Colemanand Bane and Jencks—the school itself has very little to do with subse-quent economic opportunity. Bowles is, however, clearer as to the reasonfor this: the school, and the life-style experienced in it, are epiphenomenaof the social class it is designed to serve but are not effective determinantsof future economic status. Squalid schools are associated with poverty,but as common effects of the same cause: the highly effective operationof the existing social-class system.

The peculiar merit of textbooks does not lie in their originality, how-ever, but rather in their cogency and effectiveness as sources from whichwell-organized information may be retrieved. Education for Whom? rankshigh on these virtues. Its cogency and its freedom from egalitarian cantare established by the observation on page two of the introduction that

the school as a social institution, then, is the dependent variable in the school-so-ciety relationship. We have the kinds of schools we do because, for good or bad,these are the kinds of schools "society" wants. Nowhere, perhaps, is this relation-ship more vividly apparent today than in the area of equality and equal opportunityin education.

This statement establishes a genuine, if elementary, sociological perspec-tive that the editors maintain throughout the book. Its special value as asourcebook stems from the clarity, detail, and historical perspective withwhich it presents the significant court decisions bearing on equality ofeducational opportunity. The most familiar of these deal with access-usually by blacks—to de facto or de jure segregated schools; and detailedand lucid accounts of this litigation are to be found in the pages of Educa-tion for Whom? Also discussed in some detail is Plessy v. Ferguson, whichhad nothing to do with schooling at all (Homer Plessy sued in 1895 to en-join a Louisiana judge from hearing a case against him for refusing to obeya law segregating railway passengers in separate coaches), but which estab-lished the "separate but equal" doctrine on which segregation rested untilthe Topeka Board of Education lost to Brown. The book is equally help;ful in summarizing and discussing the more recent cases, which have raisedFourteenth Amendment issues about the bases of school finance and inwhich, as it happens, Hispano-Americans rather than blacks have beenplaintiffs: successfully, in.the case of Serrano v. Priest, in which a Califor-nia Supreme Court,declared that the grossly inequitable distribution ofresources between school districts made support of education based onproperty taxation inequitable; unsuccessfully in the case of Rodriguez v.San Antonio Independent School District, in which the U. S. SupremeCourt reversed the U. S. Court for the Western District of Texas, whichhad found for Rodriguez on grounds similar to those argued in Serrano.

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The Court, in its 5-4 decision, did not take issue with the grounds estab-lished in Serrano, but noted that the U. S. Constitution does not mentioneducation, reserving it implicitly to the several states, and concluded thatit is not, therefore, a "fundamental right" entitled to protection underthe Fourteenth Amendment.

A document of special interest included in Education for Whom? andnot all that easily available elsewhere is a statement entitled "SchoolSegregation: Its True Nature," which was prepared by the Congress ofRacial Equality as a brief in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board ofEducation. This landmark case, which the U. S. Supreme Court found forthe plaintiff, established in 1971 that utterly unbalanced schools couldnot be maintained within a single school district and that busing must beused if necessary to insure that no school consisted of pupils of a singlerace in a district whose population included substantial proportions ofblacks and whites. It galvanized the Nixon Administration into the effortsthat have reduced school segregation to its present state and seem to havefrightened the increasingly conservative court into the recent decision in-volving the Detroit schools, which forbids the compulsory transfer of pu-pils from one municipal district to another and affirms of the city limitthat "the bus stops here." The CORE document would appear to supportthe cause of segregation, not as good in itself, but as largely irrelevant tothe plight of black children in schools run by whites. It isn't, as the COREbrief points out, exactly like dropping into Woolworth's for a cup ofcoffee, CORE'S argument is for local control according to what it calls"Natural Community Districts." That is what they are working toward inSouth Africa, of course; and it remains a dispiriting vision as long as thesuperstructure is controlled by a single race and is able to make the poli-cies that determine and limit the scope of local decision making. "Impli-citly and explicitly, students are taught that Western culture is a male-oriented, white-based enterprise," one of the contributors to RethinkingEducational Equality complains (p. 50). It is, though, and has been so far,anyway. At least the schools deserve credit for having managed to conveyone fundamental truth, however distasteful it may be. Just how distaste-ful it is, in fact, and to whom, is not an issue explored in Education forWhom?

Neither, and rather curiously, is the nature and value of education it-self. All the wrangling, bitterness, and litigation so cooly and clearly re-corded here might have concerned the unknown contents of the prover-bial black box. There is nothing in the book to suggest why anyoneshould regard education as precious or want to go to school. Indeed, thereis nothing to suggest that anyone does so regard it; only that they arestruggling bitterly to make sure they or their children get their fair shareof it. They don't know, and don't care, what the contents of the box are.As the editors of Education for Whom? rather sadly note in the prefaceto their book:

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Herbert Spencer once asked, "What knowledge is of most worth?" Generallytranslated as "Education for What?," this query was a crucial one for educatorslong before Spencer wrote. It is just as crucial today . . . . "Education for Whom?,"as it were, has come to supersede Spencer's question. . . . Of course, answers to"Education for Whom?" may overlap with answers to "Education for What?" Buta people as pragmatic as Americans finds the latter inquiry too obtuse, too spec-ulative, too close to the metaphysical. The former query is more compelling(p. vii).

Perhaps, but it isn't really a mark of impracticality to ask why you'redoing what you're doing. The word "pragmatic" seems imprecise whenapplied to a people who have made what Americans have made of therichest treasure and one of the noblest political visions ever found.

Rethinking Educational Equality is a book entirely of readings, though itscoeditor, Herbert Walberg, is coauthor of one of them. The papers includ-ed are of generally high quality. Each is an essay on some rather complexaspect of the problem of educational equality, and all but one is scholarlyin the sense of presenting a useful organization of ideas and selected dataand citations that make the essay a helpful introduction to anyone wish-ing to pursue the matter further. The exception is a brief polemic by R.Freeman Butts entitled "The Public School: Assaults on a Great Idea,"reprinted from The Nation, April 30, 1973. (If I were a black concernedabout inequality of education, I would be even more concerned about mycurrent champions' preoccupation with themselves as victims of assault.Bigger Thomas, in Richard Wright's classic Native Son, had a friend likethat.) The best raise interesting and disturbing questions about the issuesthey deal with, which should surely stimulate further inquiry—though notnecessarily along the lines their authors would most favor.

The editors of Rethinking Educational Equality take a great deal forgranted. Their approach, and that of their authors, to the problems theydiscuss might be called postevangelistic; they are not preaching to the con-verted but discussing the terrain and the structure of the opposition asthey gather, cohorts gleaming, to repel assault and advance the cause ofeducational equality. The title of their book seems to me a little mislead-ing; if these authors are rethinking educational equality, it is only in thesense that the Board of Exxon continually rethinks profits. They wantmore next year, and the year after that. There is little or no considerationof the other social costs involved, such as the increased impersonality ofschools that serve increasingly heterogeneous groups of students; or themore abstract costs, such as inflation, of constantly rising levels of expec-tations. The members of the Board of Exxon must by now have at leasta reluctant comprehension of the meaning of the term "excess profits."The idea that there might be, even in theory, a concept like "excess edu-cational equality" has apparently not occurred to anyone in the course ofthe rethinking reflected in this volume.

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FRIEDENBERG: Why Don't We Do It In The School! / 23

The issues involved in "educational equality" provide an unparalleledopportunity for conceptual and ideological ambiguity. The phrase can refersimply to the constitutional obligation of the state to provide equally costlyand sophisticated facilities for all its pupils; or it may refer to the further re-quirement of a differentiated response to differences in cognitive style thatreflect differences in ethnicity or social class so that these differences shallbe prevented from becoming a disadvantage. In practice, of course, it is verydifficult to get prior acknowledgement that such differences in fact exist,since this acknowledgement is interpreted by the unWASPlike as an attri-bution of inferiority. Nevertheless, it is impossible to adapt instruction tocompensate the disadvantaged unless one admits that the disadvantagedare, or have become, different in some disadvantageous way. It is possibleto extend the concept of "educational equality" yet a step further and de-clare that the redress of previous educational disadvantage now requires"reverse discrimination." All these interpretations of "educational equal-ity" seem to me perfectly reasonable, and the one to be emphasized de-pends, presumably, on the value-choices of the educator concerned andhis clientele.

But the contributors to Rethinking Educational Equality often performa little ideological twist that in orienting them toward equality leaves themin a very peculiar posture toward education. Thus, in the first substantivepaper in the book, Herbert Walberg and Mark Bargen's "Equality: Opera-tional Definitions and Empirical Tests," an excellent, lucid, and empirically-based study of the relation of school expenditures to various measures ofachievement in Chicago, the authors reach the following conclusion:

Do the Chicago schools provide educational equality? The answers are complexand depend on one's concept of equality. If equality means racial integration, theanswer is no. If it means equal expenditure, the answer is yes. If it means equalexpenditure, the answer is yes. If it means equal resources and reading achieve-ment, the answer is no. As we have shown, white schools in the outlying areas ofthe city have high achievement levels, large classes, and more experienced, well-educated teachers. In minority schools in the central area and the western andsouthern sectors, the achievement and school resource pattern is reversed: large per-centages of students enter first grade unready for school and, confirming reanalysisof the Coleman data, remain behind in later grades. Thus the Chicago schools, likeothers in the nation, do not appear to overcome family origins (p. 24).

But how, and by whom, did the concept of "educational equality"come to mean overcoming family origins, rather than merely compensat-ing for their possible deficiencies? These authors are singing "We shallovercome" with a vengeance! In the next chapter, Henry M. Levin's"Equal Educational Opportunity and the Distribution of Educational Ex-penditures," the whole matter becomes much more explicit. Levin con-cludes that "a much greater portion of investment for equalizing the op-portunity for the disadvantaged must take the non-instructional route,"

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and he suggests "a full range of medical and dental services" and that "therole of the schools in providing adequate nutrition should be explored."He notes that "alternatives to the private provision of shelter are difficultto suggest. Clearly study space and room for other activities might be pro-vided for students from substandard and overcrowded housing," and"more attention must be devoted to alternative instructional approaches ifthe efficacy of instructional expenditures is to rise."

Now this is surely a rather curious interpretation of educational equal-ity, if only because of the curious transposition of values implied. Surelyany society, to the degree that it is committed to equality at all, will grantthat it should endeavor to provide decent nutrition for its children-adults,too; medical and dental services for the poor as well as the well-to-do; andhousing in which it is possible to read a book should the occasion arise (itdoes not very often, even in middle-class American homes). But the reasonis that these are basic human needs; not, primarily, that they equalize op-portunity to succeed in school. As one reflects on comments like these,and also on the criticism directed against Coleman and more recently andstrongly against Jencks—who have been stigmatized as adversaries of thedisadvantaged for finding that the schools don't do them much good, eventhough Jencks explicitly advocates the direct pursuit of greater equalityby taxation and other fiscal and political means—one cannot avoid the con-clusion that the real offense of these men and their works is not then-putative unconcern for social justice but the fact that their research, nowfrequently confirmed, implies that the public school system is not the in-strument by which social justice may effectively be sought. Indeed, asimple-minded egalitarian might even conclude, as he rethought education-al equality, that a good place to turn for some of the funding needed toprovide the disadvantaged with the food, clothing, shelter, and self-esteemthey need might be the fifty-billion-dollar annual budget of some socialinstitution that contributes little to their welfare. If any such institutioncan be found.

A STRANGE CONFESSION

Arthur PearlUniversity of California, Santa Cruz.

Carl Bereiter. Must We Educate? Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,1973. ix + 146 pp. Index. $6.95 (cloth), $2.45 (paper).

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