As a focus for a people's struggle to work out its personal commitments and its common strivings, the field of education holds a special place. Its concern is with the people's most passionately held treasure, namely, its children. It is a field in which common effort is required in the realization of the people's most deeply held values and their most concrete goals. All converge here: past and future, value and realization, person and community--and hence all our efforts both private and public.

In approaching this topic, it is important to avoid falling into a dichotomy which itself reflects the dilemma into which the Western world had fallen by the beginning of the last century. In that dichotomy `private' is taken simply as a code word for an untrammeled individualism or liberalism, while public bespeaks any impersonal common structure. This has been the context, if not the cause, of the polarization which has paralyzed our societies in this century.

Hence, it is important that reactions against overemphasis upon the public not simply accept the premises of this polarization, and thereby find themselves with no place to go but an equal overemphasis upon the `private'. Past experience teaches us that in time this will lead back to the public, and hence to the private, etc., in a bitter and destructive dialectic. We need instead to understand something of the historical context of the educational horizons in which we live and work, to learn from our experience the deeper causes of success in this effort, and then proceed to search out new and more adequate ways to conceptualize the project of education for the future.

In this light I would like to look then at two main points: first, the historical background of this issue with special reference to North America and the original Anglo-Saxon heritage of its institutions; second, the recent studies on the effectiveness of private, specifically Catholic, schools. The conclusion will draw one implication of these studies for national educational polity.

HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE PUBLIC DIMENSIONS

OF EDUCATION IN THE U.S.

The history of this issue goes back, of course, to Plato and his Republic, which remains the classic work on education and the life of the polis. The human search as a whole, that is, the search for the good life, is dependent upon the quality of the society which, in turn, depends upon its leadership. Good leadership, however, depends upon the education of the leaders which must reflect the dimensions of the soul and the corresponding dimensions of knowledge. Society then depends upon education, and from Plato onward this mode of understanding and responding to the general issue had been central to the community of efforts in the West.

The roots of the tension between private and public were there also in Plato, for: (a) if the levels of knowledge as described in the simile of the line and the allegory of the cave were attained sequentially and only some of the populace were to be trained to the highest level, namely, that of wisdom; and (b) if that wisdom is needed to direct the broad spectrum of such formative dimensions of life as law, athletics, drama and architecture, then (c) the few wise persons must rule all those areas of one's life. In this realm of the philosopher king the private is lost; all must be public. Indeed, a mother is to look upon her child only in terms of the state.¹

The sharper edges of his abstract model were modified by Plato himself, while the influence of Aristotle and of Christianity would do much to bring forward the significance of the concrete and then of the personal, if not the private. In modern times especially in the Anglo-Saxon cultural areas we experience an opposite tide first radicalizing the individual and then flowing from the private to the public. Thus, in the 15th century, nominalism converted the notion of the personal to the much more radically individualistic notion of `private', which, in turn, generated a new and more radical evolution of `public' in a move so pervasive as to redefine the metaphysical, epistemological and psychological horizons of Europe and North America. Concretely, with a view to affirming the freedom of the divine will, even vis-a-vis the divine intellect, nominalism affirmed that all resulted from absolute, unique and unrelated acts of the divine will. There was then no common nature for humans, or indeed for any beings: each was simply single. There is no basis in reality for universal terms or statements: each instance was simply unique. Nor was there any inner basis for community: the task of all social arrangements was simply to defend the nuclear, unknowable and unrelated center that was the single self. All then was private: the public would be its servant.

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition this orientation built politically upon the Magna Carta. In the United States, due to its revolutionary history this was reinforced by a deep collective rejection of an insensitive and remote political authority. To this has corresponded the effort to delimit the rights of any subsequent central government in order to guard watchfully against its intrusion into local or private life. Particularly in education in the U.S., this has been reflected in the basic and pervasive principle that education at the primary and secondary levels was to be under the control of elected local school boards. Until after World War II higher education too was massively a private affair.

Even today this remains true in many basic ways. The accreditation of colleges and universities, and hence the public recognition of their degrees, is carried out, not by the government, but by regional accrediting associations formed and managed entirely by the institutions themselves. College entrance exams are the work of an entirely independent entity. Professional academic associations are formed simply by the determination of their members, with no governmental registration or even legal incorporation, unless this latter is sought for financial reasons. The publication of textbooks is carried out by private companies--though adoption of these by public schools can be financially decisive.

In this there is, of course, a crucial public interest. In a democracy, where the direction of public affairs is ultimately the responsibility of its citizens, the broad development of their understanding is crucial. This was noted by Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the nation: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."² Thus, he proposed a system of schooling for Virginia which would assure for everyone the right to basic education and provide the more capable with advanced schooling.

The goals Jefferson stated for primary and higher education are as follows:

I. Primary Education.

To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business;

To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing;

To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties;

To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either;

To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment;

And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.

II. Secondary Education.

To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend;

To expound the principles and structure of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another;

To harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufacturing and commerce, and by well informed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry;

To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order;

To enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life;

And, generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves.

Jefferson considered the schools themselves, however, to be but one part of the educational effort. The school was to provide skills and basic learning, but he saw education to be much broader and located it more in the general life of the people--in public libraries, lecture series and societies for farmers, for trades people and for artisans.

During the first decades of the 19th century a great fervor swept the country with a sense that the nation had a biblically inspired religious mission to establish a new dawn of freedom under God and that, broadly understood, the education of the citizen was an essential part thereof. Central to this movement, was the figure of Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Educational Society, who focused upon the development of a public educational system. This idea was forcefully argued and spread gradually from the Northeast. It took some time to develop throughout the country and to extend to secondary education, and more recently even to higher levels. Primary and secondary public education obtained solid financial footing upon judicial recognition of property taxes as a legal source for their funding. From that time forward the development of a school board and school system became a major public concern for each city and town, while the standards or quality of the local school systems was the responsibility of the individual states. The school system then was public, but in a restricted sense, first because it was local in direction, and second because though this system was one of common schools, it was only one of the many formative influences in the molding of the citizenry, which was shaped even more by family, church, neighborhood and craft.

In this century John Dewey took a decisive step to expand the ambit of the public school system. With William James and others he had moved from the philosophical idealism which previously had characterized the North American mind and its educational establishment to a new empiricism and pragmatism. The idealist worldview and value system which had been the heart and mind--the driving inspiration and integrating vision--of education in the United States now made little sense to them. They had little choice but to become educational reformers.³ Dewey may have read the situation too superficially, considering it to have been the industrial revolution and urbanization which undermined the cultural values of the people. In fact, the nation was facing the need also in the early part of this century to assimilate large numbers of immigrants coming from southern and eastern European countries. These were less related to the cultures of the earlier English and German settlers, and their religious cultures were relatively untouched by the new pragmatism and empiricism. Dewey looked to education, understood precisely in terms of schools, for an answer to the resulting problems of socialization and democratization--indeed, to resolve pretty much all problems in business, politics, social harmony, industry, and agriculture.

This had two major implications for the shift from private to public. First, through Dewey, both in educational theory and in curriculum planning, the school became the substitute for the informal education of the home, neighborhood and workplace. Indeed, in his Democracy and Education, Dewey began with early chapters on the education of the whole person, but by the middle of the work he had moved on to speaking of the school as the whole of education. His hope that all could be solved by education became so predominant in the American psyche that Lawrence Cremins in his Horace Mann Lecture of 1965 noted: "In other countries, when there is a profound social problem there is an uprising; in the United States, we organize a course!"⁴

As a result and secondly, though the original principle according to which education was a local responsibility was retained, the burgeoning size and bureaucratization of the schools diminished their personal character so that the persons engaged were no longer known and responded to. The public interest in education had insidiously transformed education into a largely public affair.

L. Cremins notes a disturbing and not unrelated development of the first half of this century which accompanied the development of mass communications. With the increasing concentration of people in urban centers, the vast increase in literacy and newspaper readership, and the development of films and radio, the stage was set for a new meaning of `public' for the education of the people. This was pioneered at the direction of Hitler by Goebbels' Ministry for Popular Education which he described as bringing "cinema, radio, new educational institutions, art, culture and propaganda" under one administration "to serve the purpose of building the intellectual-spiritual foundation of our power and of capturing not only the apparatus of the state but the people as a whole."⁵

Could Jefferson's sense of education as a key to freedom be transformed into a means for its suppression? Perhaps, but in fact, Dewey's basic orientation was quite the contrary. Just as the Greek emphasis upon the polis and the public ceded gradually to a more personal and thus communitary Christian vision, Dewey would attempt to fashion a vision that through being more communitary would be more personal and free. In Democracy and Education he noted that:

A Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a form of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact . . . secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial.⁶

The key to this is described by him as "growth," that is, the "constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of new purposes and new responses."⁷ The goal of education then is to form not functionaries of society or of the state, but human beings who continue to take account of new experience, redefine their purposes accordingly and, in turn, modify their actions.⁸

The school system is public, but its purpose is to form individuals who can work together in a democracy. The emphasis then is not upon previously created insight or values; what is important is not the content of a science or the traditions of a people. The direction, as Margaret Mead noted, is not the vertical handing down from teacher to student of what in principle is past or even ancient; it is the lateral transmission or sharing of what is being experienced or discovered.⁹ Lawrence Cremins put it thus:

In the formal education system, we might abandon utilitarian trivia in favor of those experiences that place a premium on learning how to learn, so that students could go on learning even after they had left the schools. Outside the formal system, we might nurture those standards of taste and judgment that would lead the public to demand more numerous and extensive oases amidst the wastelands of commercial areas and entertainment. And in the society at large, we might some day come to demand of all our institutions that they exert a continuing educative influence on individuals. It is such policies, I think, that are patently implied when we commit ourselves to the worth and dignity of every human being.

In the last analysis, there is no more human view of education than as growth in understanding, sensibility, and character, and no more noble view of democracy than as the dedication of society to the lifelong education of all its members.¹⁰

HISTORICAL ROLE OF THE PRIVATE

IN U.S. EDUCATION

1. The history of education in the United States, as in many other countries, began from what today would be called private religious schools, though they have always provided a service to the community. Whether an Indian Pandit or a Christian apostle, the religious person has the sense that there is wisdom and understanding which goes beyond common sense and animal survival, that this has been received, unfolded and evolved in a community through time, that each person as such has the capacity and destiny to inspire his or her life with this truth and to transform thereby his or her community, and thus that there is a great and ultimately important educational project at the heart of every human life.

This is carried out in an integrated and holistic manner in the continuing cycle of the Christian liturgical year with its readings, preaching and ritual in which the person comes to live Christ. At this level of spiritual meaning, education and life are not two, but one. It could be expected then that the founding of public school systems would come long after religious schools, that the public schools would be notably religious in their character and values. As the United States was a vastly Protestant country in its beginnings, its schools were strongly Protestant in their vision. (It is interesting to note that at one point the famous McGuffey Reader was revised in order to correct it for an anti-Catholic bias.)

What would happen when larger numbers of non-Protestant immigrants began to arrive? Predictably, they would begin to develop a set of schools in which their own most deeply held vision and sense of life could be shared with their children and integrated into the formation of their new-world view and evolving social attitudes. Further, if the public school system was largely Protestant, then it would be the Catholics who would organize this alternate system.

A few small efforts were made to accommodate this development--Catholic schools were funded by New York for a short period in the early 1800s and a few Catholic public schools were developed in the Midwest. Very broad efforts, however, were made to deny any public funding to Catholic schools, and laws were enacted in the various states to exclude any such funding. (It would be interesting to investigate the reasons for the strikingly different policy of Britain and Canada).

Hence, the Third Council of Baltimore devoted 50 percent of its time to the school issue and made strong policy decisions: e.g., that each parish was to have begun its own school within two years and that every Catholic child was to be in a Catholic School. However, this broad goal proved infeasible, for education was simply too vast and increasingly costly an undertaking to be carried out without financing from public resources, which would not be forthcoming.

This public decision was made formally by court decisions proceeding to apply ever more stringently a supposed "wall of separation between Church and State." In this, however, the court seemed ultimately to be mirroring and implementing the growing secularization of life in our times. This led to a fairly consistent series of decisions against any form of public assistance to, or participation in, Catholic schools. Thus, for example, within the last ten years a promising initiative according to which remedial instruction would be provided by public school departments to children on the premises of Catholic schools was initiated by the legislature but overturned in the courts. As a result, any such instruction must be provided either in public buildings or in public vans parked outside Catholic Schools--neither of which is truly feasible for reasons of scheduling and/or costs.

This financial restriction combined with changing demographics which: (a) lowered the size of the family, (b) moved many Catholic families to the suburbs--and hence away from the Catholic schools built earlier and in urban areas--, and (c) notably reduced the number of Sisters whose teaching in these schools on a largely volunteer basis had made them financially feasible. This combination resulted in a notable lowering of the Catholic school population in the last two decades.

Correspondingly, at first in response to Catholic protests against Protestant religious content, a secularizing attitude in public life has eliminated the religious dimension of the content of public education and resulted in an educational environment of textbooks, instruction and ritual which, though not intentionally anti-religious, has been to a large degree intentionally godless. Many feel this to be disastrous when it comes to the development of a child's vision. A view of the world which is systematically without a religious dimension forms a person insensitive to religion; effectively it removes religion from the next generation. For this reason Fundamentalist churches have begun to take up the responsibility of educating their children in so-called "Christian Schools. "As a result, despite the decline in Catholic parochial schools, the number of students in private religious schools has remained fairly constant, moving to a near equivalency in the number of Catholic and Protestant school children. See Figures 1 and 2.

2. Perhaps more interesting for our purposes in this regard are the recent sociological studies on how private schools work. These studies have made it possible to determine in a controlled manner the reason for the success of these schools, particularly parochial schools, which have been very successful! Despite their limited finances these schools are more integrated, have lower drop-out rates, better test scores in some fields, higher growth rates, higher college entrance rates and higher success rates in college. Some would attribute this to an ability to select their students, but the results remain when controlled for family background, etc. Indeed, these schools are uniquely effective in slum areas. Hence, at the present time the original mission of the common school (see below) is being better fulfilled in the private religious schools than in the public schools.

The field of private education had not previously been the subject of much research. In the last ten years this has changed due to a convergence of liberal interest in how these schools achieve their results among disadvantaged and high risk students, with conservative interest in how a value system works in an educational environment.

A major source of information was the 1980 study, "The High School and Beyond" which covered sophomores (30,000) and seniors (28,000) from 1000 schools, 84 of which were Catholic. To this have been added follow-up studies in 1982, 1984 and 1986, to provide a national longitudinal data base.

This data was analyzed in 1981 by James Coleman, Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore in High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared. Even controlling for differences in family background, their study showed that Catholic schools provided a more orderly environment, and that their students had higher attendance rates, took more rigorous subjects, did more homework, and progressed faster. These findings were confirmed by Andrew Greeley in his Catholic High Schools and Minority Students in 1981.

In 1987 Coleman and Hoffer carried their earlier studies further in Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities with the help of the longitudinal data which had become available in the years since their 1981 study. Their premise is that the determining factor is the social organization of the schools along with the related communities and families. Where these are functional and well-integrated the parents know their children's friends and the parents of these friends; the teachers also

know the parents. In this situation the school can complement the family in the process of socialization, and concurrence in values contributes to achievement both by teachers and students.

Central to Coleman's work is the notion of "social capital," the network between persons that facilitates productive activity; for the school this is the relations between parents, teachers and students just described. Social capital can be found both in the family and in the community. In the former it could be lacking due to either structural deficiency as when one member of the family is absent, or due to functional deficiency as when communication is poor between family members. In a community social capital is had when parents of the children in a class know each other and share common values.

In this framework, Coleman and Hoffer were able to locate the source of the social capital of Catholic schools in the deeper bonds of their religious community. In this, Catholic schools have a distinct advantage over public and other private schools. The latter act for parents who do not form a community among themselves. The public schools often cannot act as agents of the community because their students come from a variety of unrelated neighborhoods (especially due to busing); nor can they act as agents of the family due to the prevalence of broken homes, confused values and educational goals.

Coleman and Hoffer explain also the success of Catholic schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. A child from a home with low social capital can supplement this with social capital from the religious community which sponsors the school. Thus, a child from a single parent family is no more liable to drop out than is a child of a two parent family; in contrast, in a public school such a child would be twice as likely to drop out.

Studies by the National Catholic Educational Association have confirmed the findings of Greeley and Coleman and clarified further the distinctly religious roots of the social capital of parochial schools, determining that in Catholic schools religiousness and parental involvement were important indicators of success. Social class was also an indicator, but to a much lesser degree than in public schools.

THE SCHOOLS--PRIVATE: PUBLIC:: PERSON: COMMUNITY

Throughout the long debate on public and private in schooling there has been a continuing thread, namely, the notion of the common school. It has been held high as a democratic and egalitarian ideal, and it has been brought down in forceful blows upon those who would fail to conform, whether for religious, racial or language reasons.

For Dewey it was the essential meeting place to share different experiences and learn new things. For others it became increasingly bland, value-free, and then godless in a `least common denominator approach' to pluralism.

Perhaps today we have the possibility of new approaches. The developing sensibility to cultures, their uniqueness and their indispensable contributions to human life may make it possible to look afresh at the issue.

To do that, however, it will be necessary to overcome the deep and typical dilemma of our century, namely, that between individualism and communalism. The former leaves one so centered upon oneself that the other can be looked upon only in a utilitarian perspective as a source of one's own betterment; the former is so centered upon the common that there is no real room for the unique, the free and the creative.

The studies cited above on the success of Catholic schools point to something of the deepest importance, namely, that the roots for mediating private and public education are religious. This foundation in the infinite and the absolute leaves full range for all, while uniting, inspiring and moving each; it provide the basis for inalienable personal freedom and dignity, while relating this essentially to others in community. The resulting open notion of person in relation to community, and vice versa, constitutes an essentially improved step beyond individualism and communalism, beyond the closed notion of the `private' and the impersonal realm of the `public'. It makes possible creative progress in our times on the issue of public and private in education.

For this to have its effect in these times of ever more technically structured time it has been necessary to evolve a more adequate philosophical understanding of the person, integrating the roots of objective human dignity with the creative subjectivity of our times; an integrated theory of psychological development with room not only for justice but for the concrete dimensions of love, gender differences and story-telling; a social dimension capable of integrating critical analysis with constructive harmony; and a pedagogical theory that understands the school as a place of moral growth related to the community. This research has been carried out under the auspices of the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy by a set of coordinated teams of philosophers, psychologists, moral scientists and educators from north and south America. This is being extended through additional volumes or moral education--Asian and other traditions. Much has been done; much remains to be done in mining, modernizing and mobilizing the resources of our multiple traditions for the basic task of every society, the education of its children.¹¹

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. Plato, Republic, 460.

2. Thomas Jefferson to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Putnam, 1892-1899), X, 4.

3. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon, 1957).

4. Lawrence A. Cremins, The Genius of American Education (Horace Mann Lecture, 1965; Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965).

5, Edward Y. Hartshorne, Jr., The German Universities and National Socialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), pp. 29-31.

6. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. 101.

7. Ibid. p. 206.

8. Ibid. pp. 60-62.

9. Margaret Mead, "Thinking Ahead: Why is Education Obsolete?" Harvard Business Review (1958), 23-30.

10. Cremins, pp. 36-37.

11. Philosophical Foundation of Moral Education and Character Development; Psychological Foundation of moral Education and Character Development: An Integrated Theory of Moral Development; and Character Development in Schools and Beyond, all: (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1992).