November 13, 2006
Schools and Historical Change Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST An article in the November 10 New York Times on Brooklyn’s James Madison High School made me think a bit about the history I grew up with and its effect on my political imagination. James Madison High School is defined by the Times as “a rarity,” in that three of its alumni are now sitting U.S. Senators: Bernard Sanders of Vermont, Charles Schumer of New York, and Norm Coleman of Minnesota. Neatly enough, the first is an independent, the second a Democrat, the third a Republican. It turns out that James Madison’s alumni also include three Nobel laureates, the third being Dr. Roger D. Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. His father, an alumnus of another Brooklyn public school, Abraham Lincoln High School, shared a Nobel in medicine in 1959, and it turns out that Abraham Lincoln High School also has three Nobel laureates among its alumni. James Madison also graduated a sitting Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
When reading this article, I thought of a fact I had learned when teaching at Cambridge some years ago. I was renting a house from a mathematician at Trinity College there and discovered to my amusement that the graduates of Trinity College included more Nobel laureates than did the population of France. But Trinity is an elite institution, which in addition to state support possesses an endowment of approximately 700 million pounds and insures its main college buildings for a similar sum. You can attend James Madison High School by the simple expedient of moving to a not-very-pricey neighborhood.
How does this fact resonate with American politics and American history? I remember an argument with a younger English friend, expensively educated at St. Paul’s, London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He thought my belief in the potential excellence of state schools absurd, a mark of American eccentricity, specifically New York City eccentricity, an absurdity that seemed to be fading with Americans who were closer to his age than to mine. In England, everyone know that in secondary school, anyway, you got the education you paid for, and he thought that younger Americans shared this belief, as did Americans who were not middle-aged children of people who had grown up in Depression-era New York. I think he overstated his case, but he did have a case: I have few friends whose children now attend public schools in New York City, or anywhere. My colleagues scrimp, on relatively meager pay, to send their children to private schools, because they cannot afford to buy homes in the handful of suburbs with top-notch public schools.
In my parents’ day, the public schools were good enough to prepare people for life in a meritocracy, most people knew it, and a majority of the electorate voted for a party pledged to expand state services. The memory of the state’s ability to provide good education along with other effective services has faded, and in part as a result of this, the Republican party has dominated political life. But people’s attitudes are complicated. Polls show that most people are willing to pay higher taxes for better schools, but at the same time differently phrased polling questions indicate that most people prefer lower taxes to an expanded public sector. One way to reconcile those results is to note that the second question does not state that people will get better (or even usable) services in return for more taxes, and outcome they may tend to doubt. That first polling question, which frames the issue as if-then, cuts through public pessimism.
The past was not a golden age, and it is at least possible that public schools were better when they were staffed by extremely capable women denied the chance to work in many other places, and that nursing care in public hospitals was once better for the same reason. If so, good public schools —a crucial ingredient of one vision of a just political order—depended on a linked injustice. But even if that is true, one of the historical experiences we ought to think about is whether people have had an experience of the state that persuaded them of its effectiveness, or whether they’ve had experiences that persuaded them of its inevitable ineffectiveness. The generation now disappearing saw the state appear to liquidate the Great Depression and win the Second World War, and that generation attended pretty good public high schools, which radically expanded their intake in the first decades of the last century. A majority of them not unnaturally voted Democrat for many decades. People who came of age after the 1960s have seen the erosion of the state’s apparent ability to provide desirable public goods—and began to form a Republican majority.
I do not foresee a durable Democratic majority if people don’t regain their belief in the efficacy of state action. Given this fact, I am a bit surprised to see a fair number of people on the left at best indifferent to, and in some cases very cheery about, the prospect of a conspicuous failure of the American state in Iraq. The perceived failures of the American state, in Indochina and in its own cities, were more or less simultaneous, and the rise of a Republican majority followed that double failure. It is possible that a renewed sense of American impotence abroad will be accompanied by a burst of confidence in its abilities at home. Possible, but not, I think, wholly likely.
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