... in its historical commitment to state and local control of education, America has in fact embraced a set of civilizational commitments. Those commitments have historically been reflected in the belief that education—like many things, including civic voluntarism, military self-defense, and self-government itself—is best achieved locally, with the first-hand, immediate, and direct commitment of time, energy, and treasure by local people in their local communities. This practice was born of an explicit rejection of centralized and distant authority attempting to rule from afar in ways that took no cognizance of local circumstance and sought to replace the will of the people in their particular places with the will of a distant sovereign. The American “system” of education, for much of its history, consisted of local governance of educational institutions, high-levels of voluntarism by parents and members of local communities, and a rich diversity of public and private institutions that aimed to offer to families the kind of education that each saw fit for their children. This “patchwork” reflected at once a trust and belief in the good judgment of republican citizens over their lives and destinies—and those of their children—and a corresponding mistrust of distant authorities as at the least unfamiliar with local circumstance, and at worst liable to be tempted by their position as dominant power to abuse that position and to act despotically. We have not only been willing to bear some local variety for the sake of avoiding tyranny; as the French author Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his penetrating work Democracy in America, based on his observations of American democracy in the 1830s, he viewed local self-governance in townships as the “schools of democracy,” the place where people practiced and exercised their citizenship—not simply because there was no one in the capital to do it but because it was at the very heart of republican self-government that a free people govern themselves in every respect, including the fundamental practice of education of their children. theamericanconservative/common-core-and-the-american-republic/
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 01:38:47 +0000
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