You’ve heard the news by now: The College Board revised its framework for the Advanced Placement US History course. Recently in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger crowed that this reversal proved that conservatives could influence national education policy. Unfortunately, Henninger makes the same mistake as every other pundit out there. He seems to think that conservatives at some point in the past lost their influence over national education policy. It just ain’t so.
Franklin’s in, “neo-Marxism’s” out.
For those of you who were napping, a quick reminder: Under pressure—significant pressure—from conservative thinkers and lawmakers, the College Board agreed to revise these standards for its AP US History course. Conservative thinkers had complained that the old framework put too much emphasis on
such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange, and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideas and political institutions. . .
Henninger argues that, with the conservative revision, the new framework is “about as balanced as one could hope for.” More interesting for our purposes, he argues that this conservative victory is “an important political event.” He thinks it “marks an important turn in the American culture wars. . . .” To Henninger, this conservative victory is a new thing, a change in the ways American culture and politics work. Until now, Henninger intones, conservative ideas about proper education were
being rolled completely off the table by institutions—‘Washington,’ the courts, a College Board—over which [conservatives] had no apparent control.
Until now, Henninger tells us, conservatives had not been able to influence national education policy. Only “neo-Marxist” experts decided on what vulnerable young minds would learn.
Balderdash.
Perhaps Henninger’s problem is his limited range. To be fair, he only says that this has been the case since 1992. As SAGLRROILYBYGTH are well aware, America’s educational culture wars have a vital history that stretches back across the twentieth century. Henninger ignores it at his peril.
As I argue and detail in my recent book, since the 1920s conservative activists have been able, time and time again, to derail, defang, and water down progressive curricula and textbooks.
But here’s the real kicker: We can’t really single out Henninger for short-sightedness. For almost a century now, both progressive and conservative intellectuals and activists have assumed that conservatives had been kicked out of the conversation.
You read that right. Ever since the 1920s, conservative and progressive reformers alike have committed the same sort of Henningerism. They have assumed in the face of historical fact that “The Schools” had been taken over by progressive ideas and curricula.
To cite just one example of this trend, consider the case of progressive textbook impresario Harold Rugg. Rugg was a progressive’s progressive, committed to pushing the nation in leftist directions by seizing control of its public schools.
In the 1930s, it looked as if he had succeeded. Millions of schoolchildren read his tendentious textbooks. At the end of the decade, however, conservative activists in the American Legion and elsewhere organized to block such progressive “subversion.”
They succeeded. Just like today’s College Board, school administrators and textbook publishers in the 1930s fled in horror from the potential controversy over Rugg’s books. Sales plummeted. Schools hid them away. School boards thought about burning them.
Seems like any right-thinking observer would conclude that conservative activists could exert significant control over the national curriculum, right?
In fact, Rugg himself concluded that the progressives had won, that a shiny progressive victory was just around the next corner. As he wrote in his 1941 memoir, progressive schooling
has already begun to shake the old and inadequate out of our educational system and to lead to the building of a new school to implement democracy. Nothing save a major cultural catastrophe can now stop its progressive advance. It was utterly inevitable that workers in education would find the vast library of documented data produced on the other frontiers and use it in the systematic reconstruction of the schools.
You might think that conservative activists would dispute Rugg’s rosy left-wing prediction. But they didn’t. Instead, conservatives at the time performed their own odd Henningerisms. One of the leaders of the anti-Rugg fight, Alfred Falk of the Advertising Federation of America, warned a friend that left-wing educational thinking had taken over schools years before, all part of a “deliberate plan worked up by a well-defined group of left-wingers and educators, collaborating for a number of years on this huge project of reconstructing our society.”
We could multiply these examples of Henningerism endlessly. Time and time again, long before 1992, conservatives have concluded incorrectly that they had been kicked out of the schools. And progressives gleefully agreed.
It brings us to our interesting question: Why do conservatives and progressives agree—in the face of vast reams of historical evidence to the contrary—that conservatives are have been locked out of national education policy-making?
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